Chapter 2 · Untitled Chapter

They sent for me on the fourth day, at the hour when the house is loudest with coffee and quietest with talk.

I came in through the women's corridor with the abaya closed at the throat and the shaila where it belonged, and at the edge of the carpet, where the pattern stops being flowers and becomes long straight lines, I stepped out of my shoes and left them there and went on in my stockings. A woman who walks to the middle of that room has already agreed to something, and I had not agreed to anything.

The majlis was full. Twenty men, not fifty — but the twenty who are listened to when they clear their throat. The windows were shut against the afternoon. The bakhoor had been round twice and the oud in it was too strong, which is how you know somebody wanted the room to be serious.

The notice was not on the carpet. Someone had lifted it off the grey wool and set it flat on the low brass table, squared to the edge as if it were a tray, and the stamp on it was still whole.

Abu Fahad's hand lay on the brass with the fingers spread, the way a man's hand rests when he has just finished arranging something.

"Layla," he said. "The wax."

He said it gently. It is always done gently. The sentence is wrapped before it is handed to you, so that later you cannot say you were shouted at.

One of the younger men shifted along the carpet to open a place at the edge of it. I did not take the place. Sitting is a different sentence from standing, and I had not yet decided which one I was serving.

I looked at the seal instead. Red, my name under it in a hand that had taken its time, in ink that had been allowed to dry before the envelope was closed. Somebody had been careful with me. I did not find that comforting.

"If I break it," I said, "who reads it?"

"Whoever is in the room." Abu Fahad turned his finjan a quarter turn on the brass. "That is how it is done."

"That is how it is done with a paper addressed to a room. This one was addressed to me."

At the far end of the pattern a man shifted his weight and the wool made a sound. A cup went round and came back untouched. The air over the brass table had the flat taste it gets before something is decided.

"Nothing in this room is against you," Abu Fahad said.

"Then it will keep."

I watched that land. The elders looked at the table and not at one another, which is how elders look when the answer they rehearsed for has not arrived.

He tried the other door, the one with the furniture behind it. "There are arrangements made for you in this family. Arrangements can be unmade. The house, the car, the card in your wallet, the name on the deed — all of it is a decision that was taken in a room like this one, and can be taken again."

"Unmake them," I said. "Read the list out loud, so the men at the back hear it too. The paper will still need my hand."

Someone at the sadr said my name in the warning voice, the one that is meant to be kindness. I let it go past me. I have been spoken to in that voice since I was nineteen and it has never once been kindness.

"If I break the wax here," I said, "the reading belongs to this room. This room keeps records. It goes into a book, and the book is not mine, and after that nothing on that page is mine either — not the date, not the reason, not one word of what I said when I heard it. If I break it in my own rooms, all of it stays mine. I am not going to give away the only thing on that table that I own."

Abu Fahad sat back. He is not a stupid man; that is the difficulty with him. He had heard the arithmetic and he was now doing it again in his own favour.

The dallah came in on its tray.

The servant went to Abu Fahad first, and poured from the height so the coffee broke and settled, and the finjan was not filled past half, and Abu Fahad took it with his right hand, and the dates sat at the rim of the tray where they always sit. Then round the ring, right to left, in the order the room had agreed on without ever agreeing on it.

Faisal Al-Mutairi had put himself at the far end of the pattern. Past me. Near the door, where the youngest men sit and the coffee arrives last. A man of his standing would have been given a place at the sadr without asking.

So the cup reached me before it reached him.

It cost him nothing. It told the room everything. He drank last, and shook the finjan once, and the servant stopped pouring, and not one word had been said that anyone could repeat afterward and be sure of.

Abu Fahad read that too. He reads rooms better than he reads papers.

"Tomorrow, then," he said.

"Tomorrow the wax will be as it is tonight."

I went out the way I came, and at the edge of the carpet I stepped back into my shoes, and it was while I was doing that — one hand on the wall, one foot lifted, no dignity in it at all — that his voice came from behind me, unhurried, flat, at exactly the volume that carries.

"Sayyidati."

Not a compliment. A rank, set down on the floor of a room full of men who had just been told what the coffee order had already told them. I did not turn round. Turning round would have made it a scene, and he had not made it one.

Behind me the stamp sat on the brass in the last of the light, doing the only thing I had asked of it all afternoon.

Hana was in the far room, arguing with someone about a crayon. She had the whole of her argument worked out and she was winning it on volume alone, and when I came in and sat down on the floor beside her she stopped and looked at my hands.

"Why are your hands cold?"

"The majlis was cold," I said.

It was not.

She went back to the crayon. I sat there on the carpet in my abaya with my shoes off again and my back against the wall, and I thought about the fourth day, and the wax, and the fact that Abu Fahad had said tomorrow twice in one afternoon without ever once saying what he would do if tomorrow went the way today had gone.

That is the thing about a notice that stays sealed. It keeps its value. Every day I did not open it, it was worth more than it had been the day before, and every man in that majlis knew it, and the only one who could spend it was me.