Chapter 5 · Chapter 5

I did not answer the word. I opened the folder that had been resting against my knee since I sat down, took out the paper, and laid it on the low wooden table between us, turning it so the signature faced him.

He did not look at it. He looked at me.

"Read it," I said. "Or have one of your clerks read it aloud in the morning. I would rather you had it from the paper than from the hall."

Saad came back to the carpet and lowered himself onto the cushion opposite, one knee up, unhurried, the way he sat when he had decided the room would last a long while. The attendant came in from the doorway with the dallah, and Saad turned his finjan once between two fingers without lifting his eyes, and the pouring stopped. The man went back to the wall and became part of it.

Then he took up the page.

He read it twice. The second time he read only the one paragraph that mattered, and I watched him find the sentence I had made the lawyer put plainly, without ornament, because a sentence with ornament in it can be argued with: that I release, without condition and without payment, every share entered under my name in the Buqami register, and that I will not come back for it later under another name or through another hand.

His thumb moved once along the edge of the seal. That was all.

"This is not proof," he said at last.

"I know what it is."

"It is a page."

"It is a page that costs me something," I said. "That is more than the hall has offered you all week."

He set it down and squared it against the table's edge with two fingers, exactly, the way he squared a ledger. The lamp threw the shadow of his hand across the notary's stamp and held it there.

"You believe I asked for this."

"I believe you asked for proof and were handed a story instead. So I brought the only thing in this house I can put down and cannot pick back up. The parcels. Whatever the register says is mine, it is not mine now."

"And what am I to do with it?"

"Nothing. Keep it. File it. Burn it in the courtyard." I kept my voice level, because a level voice is the only kind this majlis hears. "But when the sight of me leaving with a man is carried through this hall again tomorrow, no one will be able to say I was holding on to a share while I argued about my name."

Somewhere beyond the wall a car door shut, and the courtyard did not change.

"Your uncle is in the small room by the gate," he said. "He has been sitting there since the coffee was still fresh."

"He is not a party to this."

"No. He is a witness to it. That is worse for him."

He said it without heat, which was how his displeasure always arrived — cold, correct, and pointed at the nearest true thing. I had learned years ago not to answer that tone with volume.

"You have taken a great deal of trouble," he said, "to make yourself poor in public."

"I have taken a great deal of trouble to be believed."

"Believed." He turned the word over as though it were a coin he suspected. "You mistake me. I have never doubted the parcels. Not for one hour."

"Then say what you doubt."

He looked at the paper again, and in that pause I understood, with the particular coldness of being right too early, that the release had not moved him one finger's width toward anything. It had only taken away from him the easy suspicion that I had come back to Riyadh for land.

He pushed the page back across the table with one finger. Not far. Only far enough that it lay between his cushion and mine, belonging to neither of us.

"It stays where it is," he said. "Tomorrow, the same hour. You will sit here, and it will still be on this table, and you will not touch it."

"And then?"

"Then we will see what the hall does with a woman who has nothing left to be accused of." He rose, and the attendant came away from the wall at once. "Kalas."

The word ended the room. I gathered my folder, empty now, and he waited until I had covered my face and reached the threshold before he spoke again, to the paper rather than to me.

"Proof," he said quietly. "You still do not know what I was asking for."

The door of the majlis was drawn shut behind me, and I heard him lift the finjan and set it down untasted.