Chapter 11 · Untitled Chapter

The private wing’s door was mahogany and heavy enough that it never needed to be slammed. Bandar took the handle, drew it to, and let the weight settle into the frame. The latch dropped with a small, hard sound, and that small sound cut the majlis off.

Not all at once. First the laughing stopped reaching me—the man on the third cushion who had been laughing at something that would not be funny by morning. Then the clatter of the finjans. Then the low argument by the screen about who had said what at the gate, and whose word had started it. All of it still going on, on the far side of an inch of wood, only no longer mine to answer for.

He kept his hand flat against the timber and did not step away from it.

The wing was cooler than the hall. Someone had carried a burner through an hour earlier, and the oud was still suspended in the air, the corridor lamp turned down low the way it always was once the guests had finished their gahwa and been fed. Farther along, the inner door stood shut. He had not gone near it yet.

I knew where the paper was without looking. Beside the old telephone, on the low table, unsigned, exactly where he had set it down while the hall was still full of men who wanted my hand to move.

"The gate has been waiting since the afternoon," I said.

"It can wait through the night."

"That is not what it was told."

"It is what it will be told."

He said it without heat, which was the tone the majlis never learned to read in him. The quieter he went, the less floor there was left to stand on.

Beyond the door, Ammi was still on the majlis side of it. He had come as far as the threshold twice that evening and had not been asked past it either time, and he was not an elder who needed to be told a thing twice in front of witnesses.

"At dawn they will open that door," I said, "and put the pen in my hand, and my fingers will do it, and by the next night nobody will remember whose idea it was. Only that it was done."

"They will open the door," he said. "The pen is a separate matter."

I stood there in my Abaya with my hands folded beneath the dark crepe, the way I had been standing since the afternoon, and I did not reach for the tarha at my hair, though there was no one left in that corridor to see it either way. Ahead of me the inner door. Behind me the hall. The paper between the two, and not one person in that house in any hurry to be the first to move toward it.