The inspection hut stood on the old strip, beside a triple marker. It was home to a man whom the official list called the keeper of markers and the wagoners called more simply: Yevstigney-with-the-Half-Bottle.
The party halted at the hut for a day's rest while they checked the old reference points. An office convoy passing eastwards brought Prokop a gift: a little canvas bag of rusks and a note written in charcoal, in a large, barely literate hand: "For the schoolmaster's son. Don't waste away out there. Sekleta." Prokop tucked the note inside his shirt beside his father's list and shared the rusks with the party.
There was almost nothing in the keeper's hut: a sleeping platform, a table and a bottle on the shelf. By the door hung an old horsehair brush, mended many times. Constant use had worn its handle pale and smooth. Such brushes were used to sweep snow and ice from the markers so that the blaze marks remained visible. The keeper was supposed to ride the strip once a month, but the worn handle made it clear that Yevstigney visited the old markers far more often.
Yevstigney himself proved tall, thin and prematurely grey. His hands shook in the mornings and grew steadier towards evening. He took the party's old journals carefully and leafed through them for a long time until he suddenly stopped.
He had stopped at the sheet for Burn.
"Mine," he said.
"Your hand," Kapiton confirmed. "Survey of the twenty-second year, southern strip."
"Mine," Yevstigney repeated, and his hands began to shake as they did not shake in the morning.
That evening Prokop went to him alone. He set the rusks on the table and a bottle he had bought from the wagoners. Yevstigney looked in turn at the gifts and at Prokop. His eyes remained clear despite the weariness and the drink.
"Come to ask questions."
"I have."
"About Burn."
"About Burn."
Yevstigney poured a drink but did not take it. He held the cup between his palms, warming it.
"Eighteen households," he said. "A school with a bell. The schoolmaster even came out to us on the cutting, asked us to stay the night: warm house, he said, and books. I did not go. Eight days left until inspection, what use were books to me?" Yevstigney stared into the cup. "I remember, lad. Do not think I have forgotten. Every night for twenty years I have remembered him standing on the cutting, waving his hand. Inviting to stay the night the man who has already erased him, only neither of them knows it yet."
"Why didn't you go?"
"The deadline."
Yevstigney said the word as one might name a disease.
"Eight days until inspection, another twenty versts to the end of the strip, and the bog had thawed to mud. Go to Burn: two days there, two days back, sheet not submitted, no bonus, party spends the winter without pay. Do not go: sheet submitted on time, everyone fed."
"And you wrote: burn."
"No," Yevstigney said. "I wrote nothing. I left it blank, thought we would finish the survey in spring. But the register office does not accept blanks. They sent the sheet back with the word ready for me: here, enter this, locality, burn, small bog, waste ground. The word had already been written, lad. By someone else's hand, on a separate slip of paper. All I had to do was copy it. I did not invent it. I simply did not cross it out."
Prokop sat motionless.
"Whose slip of paper?"
"A clerk's. From Mezhentsev's office. They were attached to the register then, suggesting ready-made phrases so the surveyors could write faster. They had a word for every kind of land." Yevstigney smiled crookedly. "Convenient. You did not lie yourself, you merely failed to cross it out. That is how half the empire was written, lad: no one lies, no one crosses anything out."
He drank.
"Kapiton told me you asked about standing surety for a blank," he said suddenly. "About the one man in a hundred years."
"Kapiton did not finish the story."
"Kapiton is kind, so he did not finish it. I am not." Yevstigney poured another drink. "His name was Luka Mernik. I carried chain for him when I was a boy, as you do now. On the northern survey he left a blank: a lake country where a clan went for the summer. He did not want it distributed. He stood surety with his name: beyond the blank, he said, there were no hunting grounds or routes he had failed to record."
"Did he lie?"
"He lied. There was a route there. He knew it and was hiding it. Three years later, the office men gathered statements and bought a witness. Luka was stripped of his licence, his name in the guild and everything he had earned. Until his death he walked among other men's markers, brushing the snow from them. I sold my chain to pay for his funeral."
Yevstigney looked past Prokop at the wall where old boards bearing blaze marks hung.
"Mark this, lad: it was not the blank that ruined him, but the lie he covered with his name. Stand surety with your name, and anyone may come and check. The truth will survive such a test. A lie will not."
He raised his cup without offering a toast.
"I drink so that I will not stand surety."
Prokop walked back from the hut in the dark. The word that had erased Burn had been written in advance; a tired man had merely failed to cross it out. And standing surety for a blank was safe only for a man with nothing to hide. Luka Mernik had lied under his own name and lost everything.
A chill ran down Prokop's back, and not from the frost.
Prokop could not afford such a test. In his past lay the business with the spice cake, which he had told no one about.
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