The Good Mayor

The Good MayorIn the year blank, when a-k was governor of the province of R, Good Tibo Krovic had been mayor of the town of Dot for almost twenty years.

These days, not many people visit Dot. Not many people have a reason to sail so far north into the Baltic, particularly not into the shallow seas at the mouth of the River Ampersand. There are so many little islands offshore, some of them appearing only at low tide, some of them, from time to time, coalescing with their neighbours with the capriciousness of an Italian government, that the cartographers of four nations long ago abandoned any attempt to map the place. Catherine the Great sent a team of surveyors who commandeered the house of the harbour master of Dot and lived there seven years, mapping and remapping and mapping again before they finally left in disgust.

"C'est n'est pas une mer, c'est un potage," the Chief Surveyor memorably remarked, although nobody in Dot understood him. Unlike the Russian nobility, the people of Dot did not express themselves in French. Neither did they speak Russian. For, despite the claims of the Empress Catherine, the people of Dot did not count themselves as Russian. Not at that time. At that time, the men of Dot--if anyone had cared to ask them--might have spoken of themselves as Finns or Swedes. Perhaps, at some other time, they might have nodded to far-off Denmark or even Prussia. Some few might have called themselves Poles or Letts but, for the most part, they would have stood proudly as men of Dot.

Count Gromyko shook the mud of the place from his feet and sailed home for St. Petersburg, where he confidently expected a new position as Her Imperial Majesty's chief horse wincher. But, that very night, his ship struck an uncharted island which had impolitely emerged from the seas around Dot and he sank like a stone, taking with him seven years' worth of maps.

The admirals of the Empress Catherine were left with a blank space on their charts which they were far too civilised to mark "Here be Dragyns" so, instead, they wrote, "Shallow waters and foul grounds, dangerous to navigation" and left it at that. And, in later years, as the borders of many different countries shifted around Dot, like the unreliable banks of the River Ampersand, it suited their governments to say no more about it.

But the men of Dot needed no maps to navigate the islands which protect their little harbour. They found their way through the archipelago by smell. They guided themselves by the colour of the sea or the patterns of the waves or the rhythm of the current or the position of this eddy or that piece of slack water or the shape of the breakers where two tides crossed. The men of Dot sailed confidently out of their harbour seven centuries ago, taking skins and dried fish to the ports of the Hanseatic League, and they sailed home yesterday with cigarettes and vodka that nobody else need know anything about.

And, like them, when Good Tibo Krovic went to work in the mayor's office each morning, he navigated confidently. He picked up his paper from the front door, walked down the blue-tiled path, through his neat little garden to the collapsing ghost of a gate where a brass bell hung from the branches of a birch tree with a chain ending in a broken wooden handle, green with algae.

On the street, Tibo turned left. He bought a bag of mints from the kiosk on the corner, crossed the road and waited by the tram stop. On sunny days, Mayor Krovic read the paper while he waited for the tram. On rainy days, he stood under his umbrella and sheltered his paper inside his...