Chapter 4 · Untitled Chapter

My uncle did not go out with the others.

They left by degrees — the two men from the gate first, then the cousin who had come to be seen and not to speak, then the one who had brought his own pen and set it down on the carpet on purpose, so that someone would have to stoop and pick it up. The tray went around once more and came back with nothing on it. In the corner the mabkhara went on smoking, and the Oud in it had burned down to the last of the wood.

My uncle stayed one cushion off the sadr, where he had been sitting since the middle of the afternoon, and his cup was still full.

"Say it to my face," he said. "Not to theirs. To mine. You were the one who said it, in this room, four years ago, and the paper asks you for nothing but your name under what you already said."

I did not stand. My abaya was still on my shoulders and my tarha was still pinned where I had set it that morning, and I kept my seat with my hands in my lap, because standing is how a woman agrees to be asked.

"The paper does not ask me to repeat it," I said. "It asks me to agree it came from my own wish. Those are two different sentences, Ammi, and the man who wrote it knows they are two different sentences."

"Your name is on the page."

"My name is on the gate, and on the ledger, and on the letter they sent to the school. It has never once needed my hand to get there."

He set his fingers against the rim of his cup and did not lift it. He had the patience of a man who has been obeyed for forty years and expects to go on being obeyed after he has left the room.

"You stood here," he said, "and you said the family had no claim on you. Every man in this city heard it. That is the denunciation. The paper is only a page of it."

"I said the family had no claim on what it never gave me. You have written that down the other way. If you want a woman to put her name to your memory of her mouth, Ammi, then say plainly that you want a woman to lie, and I will tell you plainly that I will not be the one."

He looked at me a long moment. I let him. There was nothing in my face that he could take to the gate and use.

"The gate opens when you sign," he said, "Inshallah. Not one day before. You are not a girl who can sit out four more years."

"No," I said. "I am not a girl at all. That is the part the page keeps forgetting, and the part I will keep saying until somebody writes it down properly."

Bandar had not sat down again all this while. He came away from the window, took up the dallah, and poured high and slow into a finjan — not a third full, the way it should be — and set it on the cloth in front of me before he set anything anywhere else. My uncle's cup was full. There was nothing to pour into it.

I took mine with my right hand and held it and did not drink.

Bandar went to the sadr, and sat, and said one word. "Kalas, Ammi."

It was not loud. It ended the room the way a hand ends a page.

My uncle rose. Bandar rose with him, and walked him out himself, and at the door my uncle turned and looked past him at me, seated, still in my black abaya, with the cup in my hand and the paper on the carpet where the pen had been laid crosswise on it.

"Then you will sit there," he said, "a long time."

"I have sat here longer," I told him, "for less."

The door shut. The gate beyond it stayed open, and no one in this city came through it, and I heard the car pull away and the guard's chair scrape as he sat back down.

Bandar came in and stood over the paper a moment, then crouched and set the pen straight again, and then, thinking better of it, set it crosswise once more at a finger's width.

"He believes he is protecting the gate," he said.

"He is protecting the seat next to the sadr."

"Yes." He straightened. "And a man defending a cushion will say anything in a hall, which is why the answer is not going to be given in this room."

I looked up at him. My cup had gone cold in my hand and I had not noticed until then.

"Where, then?"

"Wherever they put you in front of all of them again," he said. "And you will be sitting down when you say it."

He had not signed it. He had not moved it off the carpet. He had only made sure the pen lay the wrong way round, so that every man who came back through that gate would have to pick it up in front of me and put it down again the way he wanted it — and that, in this house, was worth more than a signature.

Outside, the street went quiet the way Riyadh goes quiet at that hour, one car at a time, and I stayed where I was, because I had told my uncle I would.