Chapter 4 · Untitled Chapter

The Al-Harbi man came at the third hour, when the courtyard had gone white with the afternoon and the hall had not yet been swept for visitors.

He was not the clerk the message had promised. The message had named a clerk of the registry. This man came in a fresh white thobe with the collar closed to the throat, and two men of the family walked behind him as far as the carpet's edge, where they left their sandals and stood.

Faisal was already at the Sadr. He did not rise, and no one expected him to; the hall had arranged itself around that cushion before the coffee came in.

Abu Fahad let the visitor stand one breath longer than courtesy required, then lifted two fingers toward the cushion on the far side of the room.

The visitor measured the distance before he crossed it. Everyone in the hall measured it with him.

The steward came with the dallah and poured high, and the finjan filled less than halfway. The first cup went to the Sadr. Faisal took it in his right hand, held it a moment without drinking, and lifted two fingers of that same hand.

The steward turned and carried the second cup to me.

The Al-Harbi man watched it pass in front of him and said nothing. He had been given a seat. He had not been given the order of the coffee, and the order of the coffee was older than any notice.

"You may read," Abu Fahad said.

The visitor drew a folded sheet from his thobe, not the sealed paper on the tray. He opened it with both hands and read.

"Notice of registry, four one seven, nine two, six."

He read it again, the whole line, the same care in every digit, so that no one in the hall could later claim the number had been misheard. Then he lowered the sheet but did not fold it.

"The family requires an accounting of the settlement entered in her name," he said. "In this hall. Before witnesses. Before the notice is opened."

"The settlement," I said, "is entered where it was entered. It has not moved, and it has not been amended."

"An accounting is not an amendment."

"Then it can be made in the room where the entry was signed, by the hand that signed it."

The visitor ran his thumb along the fold of the sheet, smoothing it, the way a man smooths a thing he intends to use again later.

"The notice is filed against the name," he said. "A name that submits an accounting has been checked and can be defended. A name that refuses has something the registry has not seen."

I thanked him for the reading. I said I had rarely heard a number handled with such care, and that the family was fortunate in a man who could pronounce it twice without stumbling. The hall did not laugh. But one of the men at the carpet's edge looked down at his own sandals, and that was enough.

"Sayyidati," the visitor said, using the word as a lid rather than a courtesy, "the notice will be opened."

"Tonight?" I asked.

"That is not for me to say."

"Then it was not for you to read to me a second time."

Behind me a servant's sleeve brushed the doorframe, and stopped, and stayed stopped. The bakhoor had burned down to the last of its smoke. I could smell it going thin and dry, oud turning to wood.

Faisal set the finjan down. The brass made one small sound on the tray, and after that the hall was not quiet. It was held.

"It is in her name," he said. "That is the whole of the registry. The rest of it is a man reading aloud."

The visitor inclined his head, which was not agreement. It was the courtesy a man pays before he carries a thing back to the people who sent him.

"Abu Fahad," he said, "the family will ask again."

"When?" Abu Fahad said.

"Inshallah," Faisal said, "when she answers it."

He said it the way he said the price of a thing he had already bought.

The visitor folded his sheet at last and put it away. He rose, and the two men at the carpet's edge came forward to their sandals. Nobody walked him past the second arch. The steward went to the door after them and closed it with both hands, unhurried, so the hall could hear how little hurry there was in it.

The sealed paper lay where it had lain all afternoon, on the brass tray between the silver pots, the dates at the cup's edge still untouched.

Nobody moved to lift it. Not the steward, not Abu Fahad, and certainly not me.

A number spoken twice in a hall is not a secret by nightfall. By evening the Al-Harbi men would have it from three directions, and each version would arrive with a small addition, and the additions would be the point. But the settlement stood where it stood, entered in my name and unamended, and the hall had heard its keeper say so at the Sadr.

That was the accounting I was prepared to give. I gave it by leaving the paper closed.