Chapter 12 · Chapter 12

The camels come up the wadi before the sun is off the ridge, and the camp comes out to watch them, because there is nothing else to do and because every one of us can see what they are: two, both fattened, the humps standing high, the halters new rope. My cousin walks in front of them in his father's cloak with his hands empty, which is how a man walks when what he means to give is already walking behind him.

He does not come to our tent. He goes to Sheikh Aber's and stands at the rope and calls, and the sheikh comes out with his hands still in his sleeves, and looks at the beasts and not at the man.

They walk the two of them once around the open ground so the camp can count them. Then my cousin puts his palm flat on the first one's shoulder and begins at the beginning. The year the wells went bitter. The night the two fathers sat, and where each man was sitting, and who carried the words out of the tent afterwards.

He says the number that was agreed then, and he says it is not that number now, it is two and better. He says his house never broke it. He says it twice, once to the sheikh and once to the men behind him.

Nobody answers him. My mother is at my shoulder with her hand inside her sleeve on the folded cloth, and she has not moved since the first camel cleared the ridge.

The sheikh lets the quiet stand long past the point where it is only quiet. Then he asks my cousin whether those words were said over a woman who could answer for herself, or over a child small enough to be carried, and my cousin says the words were said, and words do not age.

"No," the sheikh says. "They do not age. And camels do not fatten for nothing. Stand by them."

Then he says my name, once, in the flat voice he uses for the men, and I come out of the shade and stand on the bare ground in front of all of them, and I keep my hands at my sides where they can be seen.

I was small enough to be carried. I say that first, because it is what I know and it is not a thing to be ashamed of. Then I say: name the witnesses. Read me the words. If the words are mine, I will hear them from the mouth that spoke them, and not from the mouth that wants them.

Somebody at the back laughs, one note, and stops.

The sheikh looks at me the way he looks at a boundary stone, to see whether it has moved. He says that a contract said in front of men is read in front of men, or it is no contract at all, and that this will be done in his tent on the day after the next, and that a man certain of his words will not mind the wait.

My cousin's jaw works. He says he has waited eighteen years. He says it to the sheikh.

"Then two days more will not kill you," the sheikh says, and goes back in.

The Egyptian stands at the edge of the men and does not come forward and does not look at me, and this not-looking is not the one at the well. He turns his head once, a hand's width, to see whether the sheikh's rope has been tied off, and it has, and that is the whole of what he does.

My mother takes the cloth out of her sleeve on the walk back and carries it open in her hand where anyone can see it, and neither of us says one word about the two fat camels standing in the sun with no one to lead them home.