Chapter 10 · Untitled Chapter

The wall was cold the whole length of my palm, and colder at the wrist where the Abaya had slipped back off it. I left my hand there longer than I needed to. A wall that was cold was a wall that had not moved, and by that hour I was no longer certain of much else.

Behind me the latch had finished turning. The corridor of the private wing ran away from the door with its lamps low and the carpet worn pale down the middle where the family had walked it for thirty years, and at the far end a tray had been left from the afternoon — a brass dallah, one finjan, three dates on a small plate that nobody had eaten.

Bandar did not come near me at once. He walked to the end of the corridor, considered the tray, and came back and stood a pace off, at the edge of the light, with his hands at his sides. The oud from the hall was still on him. It had come in with us and had nowhere to go.

"You can open it again," he said. "You know where the handle is."

"I know where the handle is."

"Then say what you want done and I will do it."

That was the trouble with him. Four years, and he had never once made a choice easy by making it first. In the hall he had said the danger, if it was anywhere, was still in the hall, in the voice he kept for people who wasted his morning, and then he had stood in the doorway with one hand on the door and let me walk past him under my own feet.

I took my hand off the wall.

"The paper is on the wrong side of that door," I said.

"It is."

"With the telephone."

"Beside it. Not on it."

I laughed, once, with no warmth in it at all. "That is the whole of your defence? That the paper is not lying on the telephone?"

"That is the whole of it," he said. "For tonight. Tomorrow there will be better."

He picked up the dallah and poured, high, and stopped at less than half, and held the finjan out. I took it with my right hand because that is how I was raised, and the heat of it went up through my fingers and made me aware of every other part of me that was cold.

"They will be at the gate before the sun," I said.

"They will be at the gate before the sun whether you sleep or not."

"Ammi will be at the gate."

"Yes."

"And what will he be holding?"

"A pen," Bandar said. "He will be holding a pen, and he will hold it out, and everyone standing behind him will be watching your hand and not his."

I turned the finjan a quarter turn and set it down on the ledge. The Gahwa had not cooled. Nothing in that house cooled at the speed I wanted it to.

"In the hall," I said, "they are calling it a settlement. A settlement is a thing two sides agree to. What they have written is a confession with a space left for my name, and they have made it sound like forgiveness because forgiveness costs them nothing."

"Noura," he said. Just that. He did not say it kindly.

"Do not."

"I am not going to sign it for you."

"I did not ask you to."

"I know," he said. "I am telling you so that you will stop waiting for it."

That was the second time in one evening a man had taken something out of my hands before I had decided to give it, and the first had been reasonable and this one was not, and I could not tell him so without admitting which way I had already leaned.

The lamp at the far end of the corridor ticked. Somewhere above us a door closed on the upper floor, soft, the way the house closed its doors when it did not want to be heard doing it, and then the silence came back down and sat with us. He did not sit down. Neither did I.

We stood in that corridor like two people waiting for a verdict from a room that had already emptied, and the wall behind me stayed cold through the Abaya, and it was, I understood by then, the only place in the house where I could think at full length.

"They will ask me at dawn," I said. "They will put the pen in my hand and my hand will be the one that does it, and afterwards no one will remember whose idea it was."

"They will put the pen in your hand," he said. "What your hand does after that is not a thing they are able to arrange."

He picked up the little plate of dates, looked at it, and set it back down untouched, which in that house was as close as anyone came to saying a thing out loud.

On the far side of the door the majlis was still going, cushion by cushion, someone laughing at a remark that was not funny and would not be funny by morning. The light lay flat under the door and did not move. The paper stayed where he had put it, beside the old telephone, unsigned, and neither of us reached for the handle to change that.