Withies

by Alexei Borovoy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The agreement was written on the twelfth of March 1925, in the back room of Kuzma Gerasimov's tea house at Bogolyubovo, in a school exercise book with a green cover and a multiplication table printed on the back. The ink was Gerasimov's, and it was bad. It had stood all winter on the cold sill and been watered whenever it thickened, and the letters went brown as they dried.

Matvei Ilyich Zubov held the pen. He had once, as a boy, copied documents for a solicitor in Moscow, and had never been allowed to forget it, so that in any company of rafters he was the man who wrote things down. He did not pretend to dislike it. He sat with his elbows wide and the exercise book squared to the edge of the table, and the ten other men stood or sat around him, smoking, in their felt boots, with the stove ticking and the window running.

"The trust has its contract," Matvei said. "We signed it in Vladimir on Tuesday. That is the trust's paper. It says how much timber, by what day, at what price, delivered where. It does not say one word about us."

"It says we're liable," said Gavrila Sotnikov.

"It says the artel is liable. Jointly. If one man drowns or runs, the other ten answer for his share of the work. That is the trust's law. Now we will write ours."

There was some laughter at that, because Matvei had a way of saying law as though it were a thing you could hold in your hand and weigh, like a sack of oats, and the men liked to hear him do it. But they were not laughing at him, and when he began to read out the clauses as he wrote them they stopped.

There were nine. The shares were equal, with a share and a half for the two men on the sweeps, because the sweeps broke backs. The cook was chosen by lot each week, and no man drew twice running. Drink came out of the common money only on the evening a raft was tied up. The elder was Matvei, by acclamation. Any man could call a meeting on the raft at any hour, and the meeting could unmake the elder. Disputes were settled by all eleven, and the majority bound them. Fines went into the common money, not into any man's pocket. Fedya Lapshin, who was nineteen and had the best arms on the river, asked for a clause that no one should be made to sing, and that was written in too, as the eighth, and everyone was pleased with it.

The ninth Matvei wrote slowly.

Whoever leaves the raft before the mouth of the Oka, for any cause except death or a broken limb, forfeits his whole share to the artel. The artel answers for his work to the trust.

"That's hard," said old Prokhor, who could not read and took his clauses by ear.

"It's what the trust's paper does to all of us," said Matvei, "if one goes. I have only put it where it belongs. On the man who goes."

Prokhor considered this, nodded, and when the book came round to him he blacked his thumb on the lamp glass and pressed it under his name, which Matvei had written for him. The others signed or made their crosses. Fedya signed with a flourish that went off the line and into the multiplication table on the back.

Afterwards they drank Gerasimov's tea with jam in it, and some of them drank other things, and Matvei sat apart for a while turning the pages of the exercise book back and forth. He had written documents before, for wages, under other men's names. He had never written one that was his own, and the pages had a weight in his hands that the trust's stamped paper had not had. It was the first law he had ever made, and the first he had ever been glad to obey.

---

The ice went out in the second week of April, and the Klyazma rose over the water meadows below Vladimir until the willows stood in it to their waists and the villages along the bank looked as if they had been set down on the flood in baskets. The timber had been cut over the winter in the forest beyond Sudogda and sledged to the landing stage. It was pine, mostly, and some spruce, and the men lashed it into rafts on the shore in the last frosts, eight logs to a section, the sections coupled one behind another into a train nearly a hundred and fifty paces long.

They bound it with withies. Matvei would not have wire. Wire rusts, wire cuts the hand, wire costs money; but a withy you cut yourself from the young birch or the willow, twist over a fire until the fibres part and turn and it will go round a log like a rope, and drive home with a wedge. A good withy holds through the spring flood. By the end of the summer it has dried and gone brittle and a single blow of the axe will open it. This is what it is for. A raft is not a house. It is held together exactly as long as it has to be, by a binding made to be cut.

On the third section they built a hut of bark slabs, and in front of it a hearth: a box of planks filled with clay and river sand, where the cook kept a fire under the iron pot all day. At the bow and the stern they hung the sweeps, two great oars of shaved pine, each as long as three men lying head to foot. Fedya Lapshin had the bow sweep. Gavrila had the stern. Everyone else had poles, and the river.

They went down past Vladimir on the twenty-eighth of April with the cathedral domes behind them in the rain, and Matvei stood on the hut roof with the exercise book inside his coat, against his chest, where he could feel its corners.

The river in flood is not a road. It is a power that has consented, for a few weeks, to carry what is put on it, and does so with an indifference that men who work on it learn to love. It sets the raft against a bank, and you pole off. It brings a drowned cow down past you, its legs in the air, turning slowly. It finds a sunk barge left from the war and lays your bow section across it, and you stand on the logs with the water coming up through the gaps over your boots while Fedya at the bow sweep and Gavrila at the stern bend the whole train like a bow-string until it slides off with a groan you feel in your teeth. It is cold in the morning, so cold that the poles freeze to your mittens, and by noon the resin is running out of the logs in the sun and the men are working in their shirts and the mosquitoes come up off the flooded meadows in clouds. You eat millet kasha with sunflower oil, and salt fish, and bread that goes green at the edges by the second week. At night you tie up to a tree if there is a tree, and if there is not, you go on in the dark with a lantern at the bow and a man calling the depth with a pole.

Twice they called a meeting on the raft. Once over the cook, a Mstyora man named Ignat Belyaev, who had drawn the lot two weeks running by an honest accident and asked to be let off the rule and given the pot for good, because he liked it and the others did not. Eight voted yes and three voted no, and the three ate his kasha afterwards with no visible suffering. Once over Prokhor, who had let the common tobacco get wet; he was fined forty kopecks into the common money, and paid it, and was proud to have been fined under a law he had put his thumb to.

Matvei wrote both meetings into the exercise book. He was beginning to see what the trust had never understood and the solicitor in Moscow had never understood, though both had lived by paper: that a law is not words, it is a habit of men's minds, and the words come after, like a man writing down a road he has already walked.

---

Below Kovrov the Klyazma widens, and the flood begins to go out of it, and there are sandbanks where there were none a week before. On the evening of the fourteenth of May the artel tied up at the head of a long bar under a stand of black poplars, with a village on the high bank, and a church, and a bell going.

Fedya Lapshin came aft to the hearth with his boots in his hand, the laces knotted together, and stood there until Matvei looked up.

"I'm going," he said.

Ignat stopped stirring. Two or three of the men at the edge of the firelight turned their heads.

"Going where?"

"Up there." Fedya jerked his chin at the bank. "Then home, I suppose. Or not. I don't know."

"Is your mother ill?"

"No."

"Has someone in the village sent for you?"

"I don't know anyone in the village."

Matvei waited. It was his gift as an elder that he could wait, and men generally filled the silence for him with their reasons. Fedya did not fill it. He stood with his boots swinging from his hand, a big fair boy with a peeling nose and blisters on his palms that had healed into horn, and he looked not at Matvei but at the river going past the raft, brown, quick, with foam on it from somewhere upstream.

"I don't want to go to the Oka," he said at last. "That's all. I wanted to, in March. Now I don't."

Gavrila Sotnikov had come forward from the stern while he spoke. He was a short man, very broad, with a beard trimmed square, who had floated timber on this river for twenty years and had never yet left a raft before the river's mouth. He stood beside Matvei.

"Read it to him," Gavrila said.

"He knows what it says."

"Read it."

So Matvei took the exercise book out of his coat and opened it at the first page, where the bad ink had gone brown, and by the light of the hearth he read the ninth clause aloud. Every man on the raft had come aft by then. Prokhor had his hat off, as if in church.

"I heard it in March," Fedya said.

"You signed it in March," said Gavrila.

"I signed it in March. This is May."

There was a sound from the men that was not quite a laugh.

"You'll get nothing," Gavrila said. "Not one kopeck for a month's work. Do you understand that? And we'll carry your share to the trust between us, every pole of it. That's what you've signed."

"I know."

"Then you're a fool."

"Maybe." Fedya shifted his boots to the other hand. "I'm still going."

Gavrila turned to Matvei. "Call the meeting," he said. "Clause five. Any man can call it. I'm calling it."

---

It is one thing to make a law in the back room of a tea house in March, with the stove ticking and the whole river ahead of you, and another to sit in judgment under it on a sandbar in May, with the mosquitoes at your neck and a boy standing in front of you in his stockinged feet. The first is an act of creation. It is the freest thing a man can do: to say, with others whom he has chosen and who have chosen him, this is how we will live. The second is the moment when the creation turns and looks at its maker, and asks him whether he meant it.

They held the meeting on the hut section, sitting on the logs. Ignat banked the fire. Gavrila spoke first and spoke well. He said that every man there had a mother and a reason, and if any man could walk off a raft because he did not want to go on, there would be no rafts on any river in Russia, there would be timber rotting on every landing stage from here to Archangel. He said that the clause was hard but it was theirs; that it was not the trust that had written it and not the government and not the priest, but they themselves, eleven men, and if they would not keep their own word then whose word would they keep? He said that the boy should forfeit his share, and further that he should be held on the raft until Gorokhovets, where they would need every arm for the sandbars, and let go there, and not before.

"Held how?" said Matvei.

"How you hold a man," said Gavrila. "There's rope."

Some of the men looked at the deck. Some of them looked at Fedya, who was sitting a little apart on the edge of the logs with his feet in the water.

Then the others spoke, or some of them did. A man named Larion said the boy had been the best of them at the bow sweep and he did not like to see him go, but the clause was the clause. Prokhor said he had put his thumb to it. Ignat said nothing at all and stirred the ashes.

When they voted, eight hands went up for the forfeit. On the rope, three, and Gavrila made four. That was not a majority, and he took it badly, and said so.

Fedya did not vote. Matvei did not vote. Afterwards he could not have said, if anyone had asked him, whether this was because the elder should not vote or because he did not know how he would have voted. Nobody asked.

---

The forfeiture stood. It was the law, made freely, and freely voted on, and Matvei, who had written it, could not find in himself any argument against it that did not also undo the eight other clauses and the meetings and the fines and everything the exercise book was. If a man may break a free agreement when he likes, the agreement was never an agreement. It was only a mood. And yet he sat by the banked fire after the others had gone into the hut or rolled themselves in their coats on the logs, with the book open on his knee, and he saw that if a man may not break it, then he has made himself, in March, the master of himself in May: a small cold state of one, sitting on its own chest.

He thought of the solicitor in Moscow, who used to say, as he sanded the documents Matvei had copied, Paper is patient. It had seemed a wise thing to say at the time.

The boy was asleep at the bow, curled up beside his sweep. Gavrila was not asleep. He was sitting by the hut door with his back against the bark, and Fedya's boots were beside him, on the logs, where he had put them.

Matvei closed the exercise book and went forward. He sat down on his heels in front of Gavrila.

"Give me the boots."

"So he can run in the night?"

"So he can walk in the morning. As a man walks. Up the bank, by daylight, with everyone watching."

Gavrila did not move. "You wrote it, Matvei Ilyich. You read it out to us in Gerasimov's back room in that voice of yours as if you were reading the Gospel. We put our thumbs to it. Now he doesn't feel like it, and you'll tear the page out."

"I'm not tearing anything out."

"Then what?"

Matvei did not answer for some time. Downstream a fish turned over in the dark with a sound like a slapped hand.

"The forfeit stands," he said. "He goes without his share. That is ours, and we voted it, and I'll keep it. But there's no clause in there that says we tie a man to a log. I didn't write one. Nobody asked me to. If you want one, call another meeting and we'll write it. In daylight. And then the book says what it says, and every man reads it and knows."

"And if it carries?"

"Then I'll read it out," said Matvei. "And then I'll leave the raft."

Gavrila looked at him for a long moment. Then he picked up the boots by their knotted laces and held them out, and Matvei took them, and neither man said anything else that night.

---

In the morning there was mist on the river, thick as wool, so that the far bank did not exist and the near one existed only as a smell of wet earth and the bell starting up again in the village. Fedya sat on the logs and pulled his boots on. Ignat gave him bread and a twist of salt without being asked and without looking at Gavrila. Nobody gave him money. Matvei had thought in the night of paying him out of his own pocket, and had turned the thought over until he saw it for what it was: a way of keeping the law and breaking it at the same time, and feeling clean. He had a chervonets in his coat. He left it there.

The boy stood up and looked round at them, at the hut and the hearth and the two great sweeps, and for a moment it seemed he might say something. He did not. He jumped from the bow section to the sand, sank to the ankle, pulled free, and went up the bar towards the bank with his coat over his shoulder. Halfway up he stopped and bent down and pulled off both boots again, and tied their laces together, and hung them round his neck, and went on barefoot, which was how anyone who had any sense walked on that sand. The mist took him at the top of the bank. They heard a dog in the village begin to bark and then stop.

Matvei took the exercise book out of his coat. On the clean page after Prokhor's wet tobacco he wrote: Fourteenth to fifteenth of May. Below Kovrov. F. Lapshin left the raft at his own wish. Forfeit voted, eight. Held on the raft, voted against. He looked at that for a while. Then, underneath, he wrote the number 10, and above the number, crossed out, 11, so that anyone who opened the book afterwards would see both.

"Who takes the bow sweep?" said Larion.

Gavrila had already gone aft to the stern sweep and laid his hands on it. He was looking down the river into the mist, not at anyone.

"I'll take it," said Matvei.

He put the book inside his coat, against his chest, and went forward over the logs, stepping on the withies where they bound section to section, feeling them give a little under his weight as they had not given in April. The bow sweep was wet with mist and still warm, very faintly, where the boy had slept against it. Matvei set his feet. The men on the bar cast off the lines from the poplars, and the current took the head of the raft and began to swing it out, slowly, enormously, into the river, and he leaned his whole weight on the sweep to hold her straight.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Alexiō Borovoiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alexei Borovoy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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