Chapter 1 · Chapter 1

The mint came up with its root whole, and I knocked the soil off against the rim of the basket before I let it drop. In my grandfather's house the morning always began this way — water on the tiles, the shutters pushed half open, the smell of the lower garden rising over the wall like something let in on purpose.

"The books are counted?" Hasan asked from the doorway, his sandals in his hand so he would not track the wet.

"Forty-one." I did not look up. "The torn one is under the second shelf, wrapped in linen. Grandfather says nobody touches it. The stitching would break."

He came in and set the sandals down and said my name. Saleema. Low, the way we said it inside these walls and never in the square. It stayed in the room after he stopped speaking, and I understood that he had already been told something and was deciding how to hand it to me.

"Say it plainly," I said.

"Later." He turned to go and nearly walked into the man coming up the steps.

Saad came in with a bundle tied in oiled cloth and ink on his thumb. Malaga still lived in the way he took a room — looked at the corners first, then the people. He set the bundle on the table between us and did not untie it.

"From the shop," he said. "It should not stay there."

I put my hand flat on the cloth. Beneath it, the shape of a spine. Aisha's voice came down from the upper room, asking whether the water had boiled, and behind her the courtyard door swung on its hinge.

Saad's sleeve was close enough that the weave of it showed.

The man who came through the doorway carried a writing board under one arm and a book under the other, and had to turn his shoulder to get past the lemon tree. I knew him by his ink. The quarter's scribe writes the leases, the dowries, the quarrels over the water channel, and he does not climb up to a house before the second hour.

"Abu Jaafar," he said, to the tiles, because my grandfather had not come down yet.

"He is coming." I moved the basket off the step. "Sit there, where the wall keeps the sun off."

He sat, and laid the board across his knees, and set the book on the board, and did not open it. Saad had not moved from the table. His bundle sat where he had put it and the ink on his thumb had dried into a small black leaf.

Then my grandfather came down, and the courtyard changed its weather. He took the stairs one at a time with his hand on the rail, his cloak over his shoulders though the morning was already warm, and nobody spoke until he had reached the last step and looked at the book on the board.

"The register," he said.

"All of it," the scribe said. "This time they want the houses entire. Not the head of the house alone. Every name that sleeps under the roof."

"Every name that sleeps under the roof." My grandfather said it back slowly, and it was not a question, and he did not sit down.

Hasan came and stood at my shoulder. Above us Aisha had come out onto the gallery with her sleeves pushed up, and Maryama behind her, and Aisha set her hands on the rail the way the women of this house stand when they intend to hear everything and be asked nothing, and Maryama set hers the same, being too young to know what she was copying.

"Then write," my grandfather said. "And write it correctly the first time."

The scribe opened the book. The spine cracked, one sound for breaking and mending both. He uncapped his ink and took up the reed, and my grandfather gave him the names himself, slowly, in the order he wanted them, which was not the order of the house but the order of the family, the old way. The house of Abu Jaafar.

Aisha, widow of his eldest son, who keeps the keys and the measures and the girl who has no mother. Hasan, his son. Maryama and Ali, her children, who sleep where she sleeps. Saleema, daughter of his son who was not there to say it for himself.

He said my father's name and the scribe wrote it, and it went into the book with the rest of us although he had been dead eleven years, because my grandfather did not intend the square to be able to count this house and find a gap in it.

"Saleema," the scribe said, and looked up. "Year of birth."

My grandfather told him. I did not correct him. He was two years wrong, and he had been two years wrong at every writing, and I had long ago decided that it was his to be wrong about.

Then he asked about the articles, and the scribe, who could write and talk at the same time, which is a thing only scribes can do, kept writing.

"They are reading them in the Zacatin," he said. "Since Thursday. A man stands on a stool and reads, and the crowd repeats the end of each line back to him like a school." He dipped. "What is settled is settled. What is not settled is being argued over by men who own nothing and will lose nothing."

"And the books?" my grandfather said.

The reed stopped.

"That is not in the articles," the scribe said carefully.

"That is what I asked." My grandfather's voice had gone flat as a table. "The articles are for the city. The city is for the square. I am asking what happens to the books."

"I am one man with a board," the scribe said. "I write what I am told to write and I am paid in flour. Do not ask me about what is not written."

Then he was ashamed of it, I think, because he bent his head and wrote two lines very fast and said, "But there are men collecting. That much is true. Not for the articles. For themselves." He blotted. "Ask in the square. Or do not ask in the square. It is the same answer, and only one of them costs you less."

Nobody laughed.

Saad put two fingers on his bundle and turned it a little, so the tied end faced my grandfather. "The shop shut on Tuesday," he said. "The man who rented the back room left in the night and took what fitted in a cart. He left this, and the key in the door, and I have not been to Malaga in six years and I do not intend to go now."

"What is it?" my grandfather said.

"A book." Saad untied one knot and stopped. "Not mine. Not his either, by the hand. I would rather it was not on a shelf with a window over it."

My grandfather looked at it for a while. Then he said, "It does not stay in the shop and it does not stay in this courtyard past the hour. Hasan."

"I have it," Hasan said.

The scribe closed the register and turned it around on the board and pushed the ink to the edge with his thumb, and my grandfather signed. He signed slowly and did not lift the reed between the first letter and the last, and when he had finished he straightened and read the whole page back to himself with his mouth a little open, the way a man reads a thing he has been made to sign and means to remember word for word.

"Abu Jaafar," the scribe said, when he had waited long enough. "The flour."

"Aisha."

She was already coming down. She had the measure ready and did not have to be told twice, and she gave it at the door with both hands and did not ask him anything, which was her way of telling him what she thought of him. He went out and the door swung and did not catch.

My grandfather stood in the middle of his own courtyard with the pen still in his hand. Two books had been in it that morning. One of them had gone into the street in a bag, and the other was going under the floor.

"Only one of them can be shown," he said, to no one, and went back up the stairs.

Hasan took the lamp and the bundle both, and went down the stair beneath the house. I stayed at the top with my hand on the rail and listened to the light go away under the floor and come back up again, and when he came out he was alone and empty-handed and his face had nothing on it at all.

I went back for my basket. The mint had wilted in the heat and I did not care.

Forty-one, I said, to no one, and it was the only number in that courtyard that morning I could have sworn to.