Chapter 11 · Chapter 11

The door lies flat in the sand where it fell, and the grey comes in where it used to stand.

He has not moved. All night he sat with his back against the tent pole and his hands loose on his knees, and he did not cross the rug once. Near the middle of the night he said my name, quietly, the way a man sets something down where it can be picked up again later, and then he said nothing else at all.

I am awake before the women come for water. I step over the fallen door and I do not look at it. The camp is not awake enough yet to have decided what it thinks of me. That will come at the well. It always comes at the well.

The well lies past the last of the fires, where the ground dips and the water sits dark and cold under the lid of stone. By the time I get there the first jars are already filled and the younger women are standing in a loose line with their shawls pulled close against the morning, and every one of them looks at me and then looks away, and then looks again.

He comes down the path with two buckets in each hand.

They are the heavy ones, the thick leather ones the men use for the animals, and he carries four of them and the water does not break over the rims. He sets them on the stone lip without a sound. Then he takes the rope and goes back to the well and hauls, hand over hand, and his shoulders do not hurry, and the rope does not jump.

Behind me a woman says, low, to her sister, that he has not spoken to a soul since he came up out of the wadi, and her sister says that a man who does not talk is a man with something to keep, and the first one says that a man who does not talk is a man with nothing to say.

He hears them. He does not lift his head.

My cousin is standing with the young men at the picket line, and he has been watching since I came down the path, and now he says, loud enough for the trough to carry it: "The Egyptian has a strong back. Tell me, does he have a house?"

I keep my eyes on the water. My hands are in it to the wrist and it is so cold it hurts.

Shimon sets the rope down. He does not turn all the way round, only enough, and his voice is flat and unhurried and it reaches every woman at that trough.

"Ask her mother what she is holding."

Nobody answers him. My cousin looks at the ground, and then at the men beside him, and then at the ground again, and the line at the well closes up the way water closes.

He fills the last bucket and takes up two in each hand and goes back up the path, and he does not pass close to me, and he does not look at me, and every fire in this camp sees that he did not.

My mother comes down last, when the trough is nearly empty. She has the folded cloth in her hand. She stands beside me and looks at the water and folds it again, smaller than it needs to be, and puts it away inside her sleeve, and says nothing to me at all.

So that is what she is holding. Now the camp knows it too, and the knowing has cost him nothing and given him nothing, and he did it in front of them anyway.

I lift my jar to my shoulder. The water in it is cold through the cloth and my hands are steady, and that is the whole of what I let them see.