Chapter 15 · Chapter 15

He moved the lamp instead of himself. Set it back down on the side table a hand's width to the left, so the light went past me into the corridor and left my face in the ordinary dark of a house at night, and then he said the first thing in an hour that was not an argument.

"You walk in front."

"Because you are being gallant."

"Because that hall has spent four hours deciding what you are. Let it watch you leave."

The Oud was still in the wool at my collar. I took my shoes from the row at the majlis door and put them on, one and then the other, and I did it slowly, and men who had voted on my name watched me fasten a strap. The carpet gave way to stone. The stone was cold through the sole. Somewhere past the inner wall a door closed, and it was not our door, and I noted that too, because I had begun to note everything.

My Ammi was standing at the turn of the corridor with two of the elders behind him, wearing the expression of a man who had practised the sentence on the