The wing offers shelter with demanding daily upkeep. Confirmations and corrections do not pass through its walls, but flour must be carried nine hundred meters. Children receive two hours of schooling without a register; other families have left over schooling. An unpaid doctor visits twice a month, while replacement pipe fittings are no longer made. Two people eventually answer the plumber's invitation to learn. The visitors bring a real hardship offer, not an answer to every practical need.
Sixty-eight people are counted at the fire. During the vote, thirty-one stand by the gate and thirty-seven at the wall. Together these groups account for all sixty-eight. Their positions are given, but the text never labels which side favors admission. At noon the gate opens. It does not identify the openers or announce a winning motion, so the opening cannot simply be presented as a majority result.
Other numbers measure other things. Someone has counted thirty-one occasions of counting; this is separate from the thirty-one people by the gate. The visitors register nineteen households before dark, not nineteen individuals to subtract from sixty-eight. The wall's old number remains after a chalked count is rubbed away. Later, a child needs its meaning explained. A count has become something people must remember how to read.