Chapter 9 · Untitled Chapter

They were still standing when the door at the end of the majlis opened.

Six of them, in from the corridor together, and not one of them had been shown to a chair, and not one of them had asked for one. Standing is a kind of argument. My father's brother had put himself at the middle of the floor with his hands behind his back, and the others had arranged themselves around him the way men arrange themselves around a thing they have already agreed on among themselves.

I stayed where I was, at the low end, where the courtyard light gives out, my hands folded inside the black of my Abaya, and I looked at the carpet between their shoes and mine and let them stand.

Then Saud Al-Dosari came in.

He did not lift his voice. He never does. He came through that door in a white thobe creased hard at the shoulder, and the room did what it always does when he enters it, which is nothing at all. The talking stopped. The attendant's hand stopped over the dallah.