Short story · 3 min read · Set in Ostmark ·
The Man Who Keeps Two Calendars
A timekeeper on the Ostmark trams runs a civil calendar and a works calendar, and one day a year they disagree.
Rubin Pell keeps two calendars, and it is on his own time and from his own pocket, and the tram depot on the Ostmark side knows all about it and says nothing, which is the usual arrangement in this district. The first calendar is the civil one: twelve months, the ordinary feasts, the grey paper with the tide tables at the back. The second is the works calendar, kept by the depot since before the Misprint, and it is in the second that he does his arithmetic.
For most of the year the two agree. They share every day except one.
The difference is a day in the eleventh month, which the works calendar carries whole and the civil calendar does not. The works calendar calls the day by a number, not a name, and gives it to the relief men as a swap day, and nothing more than that is ever printed against it. Pell has checked every printed source he can get a hand on — the timetables, the parish books, the depot's own history, which is kept in three folders and is largely photographs of men with tag numbers on their coats — and the day appears in none of them by name. It appears only as a swap, always taken, never refused, and every year by somebody.
His habit is a small one and he makes no mystery of it. On the day in question, when the civil calendar has gone on to the next date and the works calendar has not, Pell keeps both books open on the kitchen table, side by side, and marks the swap day off in the works calendar only. He does not figure out why the two disagree. That is not his trade; his trade is the running of trams on time, and on the swap day the trams run early — he has the conductor's sheets to prove it, twelve years of them, all filed — and no inspector has ever asked him why he posts the early figures without complaint.
What he will say, and says plainly, because a man keeping two calendars has a right to be plain, is that the day is shorter on one side and longer on the other, and that this is a matter for the books and not for him. On the civil side the day runs ordinary, and he has spent it working, as anyone would. On the works side the day runs to its own length, and what gets done on the works side that day is done by numbers he does not look at too hard.
The one thing he has never brought himself to check, and he knows he will check it eventually, because he checked every other printed source there is, is the depot's lost-and-found register for the swap day. The register is kept at the chest by the upright, and its previous years are in the trunk room, bound, and the trunk room is warm in the way of rooms that are kept for a reason.
Every year he decides not to, and files his figures, and locks his desk, and takes his inspected tram off the line at the right minute, and goes home with both calendars in his bag. And every year, at the bottom of the bag, the works calendar is warm when he takes it out, and the civil calendar is not.
The question he keeps for the kitchen table, where the two books sit open through that one night a year: if the depot has been carrying that day since before the Misprint, whole, unrefused, and by somebody every year — whose name has been against the swap, years back, before the folder numbers began?