Chapter 2 · Chapter 2

At noon he came, and he stopped where the shade of the tent ended and did not step past it. He carried the sheikh's board under his arm and the reed in his hand, remaining in the open light.

My mother sat at the back of the tent with the folded cloth in her lap. She had not put it down since the night before. She did not put it down now.

"There is an account to be written before the words," he said. "Aber wants it in a hand that is not mine."

"Mine is not a scribe's hand."

"It is clean. I have seen it once."

"Once," I said.

"Once is enough for a hand."

He set the board upon the threshold stone, half in shade and half in sun, and sat back on his heels on the mat outside. He had come the long way round, past the men's fire, so that all would see he had approached a tent flap in full daylight and not under the cover of night.

I knelt inside the flap, my headcloth securely tied and my cloak wrapped about me, and took up the reed.

"Begin at the paint," he said.

So I wrote. This is what he gave me, and I did not round a single corner of it.

The lane at the end of the canal had filled before the light failed. Nobody knocked and nobody brought word; the only sound was of many people carrying their belongings badly. A bundle shifting. A pot set down and abandoned. A woman calling one name twice and receiving no answer.

Zechariah's house had been painted that spring, blue over the lintel and a band of ochre beneath it. He had made his son hold the pot of ochre while he worked, cursing the flies and the price of the blue pigment. The door stood open. No lamp was lit behind it.

His mother had been kneading. The dough was still rising in the trough, so she gathered the cloth with the dough inside it and pressed the whole weight of it against her chest. That was what she saved. It was the only thing she took that was not of flesh and blood.

Shimon carried the water jar, the mat, and his father's second pair of sandals.

At the corner, the elder of the lane sat in his doorway with his staff laid across his knees, speaking to no one, and no one questioned him, nor did those who hurried past look twice upon his face.

Past the last dwelling the ground dissolved into reeds, and the water of the canal ran waist-high, warm and moving faster than it appeared.

Zechariah halted in the midst of it and unwrapped a bundle from oiled cloth: deeds, tallies, what the family owned and what was owed them, the names of the dead, and the terms of an old grievance with the people of the neighboring settlement. He placed it into his son's hands beneath the dark surface.

His son took it, because he was still a boy, and it was his father's hands that had commanded it.

Then his father spoke a single command. I bid him repeat it word for word, and he did.

"If I go down, you do not stop for me."

"And?"

"And nothing. He did not say it twice, and he did not say it with softness."

He looked back once from the far bank, toward the paint. It remained the only mark in the lane retaining the color it had worn that morning.

After that came reeds taller than a grown man, and mud that seized a sandal before yielding it back, and salt hardening dry upon the lips before the middle of the night. A heron rose above them without alarm. The rustle of the reeds was louder than the passage of the people.

At dawn they stood in water to the knee, and the sky turned the exact color of that ochre band.

"What did your mother do at dawn?" I asked him.

"She counted us. Nine, twice over. Then she placed the dough upon a stone and covered it, for it had begun to rise, and she sat beside it without a word until the sun had mounted the sky."

"And the crossing?"

"The crossing is for another night."

"Aber will ask."

"Then Aber may ask it another night." He rose to his feet. Old salt clung dry and white to the strap of his sandal, left unscraped. "At sunset," he said, "the words."

Then he departed, leaving the board warm from the sun upon the threshold stone.

My mother had not stirred. Without lifting her eyes, she said: "He grants you the road and holds back the water. A man who does that has told you nothing yet." Then she added: "Your cousin's mother will hear that he sat before our flap at noon. She will count the hour long before she weighs the reason."

I copied the account in a clean hand. I altered not a word. When the sun slipped from the threshold stone, I turned the board over and recorded whose testimony it was, and beneath it set my own name, small, where none would think to look.