เสมียนประจำหอของกัปตันทั้งสี่

"Write it down or we'll say two different things."

The branch ends here. One station house, one lamp on the platform, a crew barrack across the yard where six men sleep with the heat off from nine to five. Dark at ten to three in the afternoon. Minus nineteen tonight.

The railway gives the upstairs flat to a household of two adults. A single person gets a bunk in the barrack. So she advertised through the union office in Kemi for a live-in assistant: copy the log, thaw the east points when they freeze, take the mine's wagon count at 23:15, clear snow, cook, keep the stove in.

The pay is small. The flat is the pay. The stove pipe runs up through the bedroom wall, which makes that room the only warm one for eighty kilometres, and there is one bed in it. It is 140 cm wide and it belongs to the railway.

Your name went onto her household card before you got off the train. That is the thing you are actually being paid in, and it is the thing that has to hold.

On 12 December a housing officer comes up the branch by trolley. Sixties, and he has used the same sheet of questions for eleven years. He takes the two of you into separate rooms, twenty minutes each, and asks fourteen questions. Then he walks the flat.

Matching answers and the tenancy is renewed. Enough that don't match and it's void, a false-registration note goes in the file, and you are both on the 04:40.

Whose toothbrush is on the bathroom shelf. Whether both sides of that bed have been slept on. Whether your name is written on the sauna list nailed to the hut door. Where the second key hangs. Whose name is chalked up for the laundry turn.

Those five you cannot settle at the desk in pencil. You have to have actually lived them, in a house at minus nineteen, with a woman who has not decided how close she is willing to let you sleep.

She is not going to be sweet about it. Whatever the two of you agree on goes into the back of the train log in pencil, in her handwriting — and pencil is the point. Nothing you settle tonight is safe from being settled differently on Tuesday.

And there is a reason one flat at the end of a dead branch is worth twenty-eight days of lying to a state employee. She has not given you that reason. Ask her about Kemi and she gives you the departure times to Kemi.

1. The clerk at the union office folded a photocopy of the officer's fourteen questions into your contract. Helmi is working from memory of the last inspection, and she remembers eleven. Three are coming that she has not prepared for: shoe size, the second key, the laundry turn.

2. Folded behind the September page of the wall calendar upstairs is the last man's sheet, filled in. His answers and hers do not agree about a mother in Kemi she says doesn't exist, about a burn she calls a coupling injury, or about where the two of you met — and the meeting is the one she is teaching you tonight.

Twenty-eight days. Fourteen answers. One bed.

KAITAJÄRVI — 14 Nov, −19 °C · 28 days to the visit · card 0/14 · nights: bench