Chapter 10 · Chapter 10

The notary came while the courtyard was still blue, and he brought a box and two men with him and set the box on the rim of the fountain, and would not sit until Hasan had sat.

I carried the lamp for them, because the lamp was the only thing in that house I was permitted to carry. From the gallery I could see all of it — the box, the papers, the hands. Maryama stood at the far end with Aisha, and Aisha had her palm flat on the railing, which is what she did instead of speaking. Ali sat on the step below me with his knees drawn up, pretending to be part of the wall.

The notary read. First the house: the courtyard, the four rooms above, the stable, the well. Then the shop at the edge of the square, with its shutters and its shelves. Then the land on the hillside, and the olives on it, and the water that came to it on the fourth day.

Then a sum owed to a man in the lower lane, which he read twice, the second time more slowly. Every item he read, he touched with one finger, as though the paper were a door and he was counting the panels.

"His seal is on this," the notary said. "And his seal is a dead man's seal. What the dead have sealed must be sealed again by the living, or the quarter will not know whom to ask."

Then he called us, one by one, and set each name down as it was given. Hasan, standing. Maryama, who said hers clearly and then put her hands behind her back. Aisha. Ali, who said his too loudly and then looked at the floor.

And then me, and my name came out of me at the size of a fly, and the notary said, "Again," not breathlessly, and I said it again, and it went onto the paper in a shorter line than the others, because I am the youngest and there is less of me to write.

Five names under my grandfather's, which was at the top of the page in the old hand. The page held the house whole. The notary said that a house broken into five would be five houses, and not one of them would stand, so it would be held together, and the five of us would answer for it together, and the men of the quarter would remember that we had answered.

I did not understand that sentence until the afternoon.

The elders came at the noon hour, when the courtyard is a bowl of light and no one can be seen standing in it without being seen by the whole lane. Three of them: the elder of the upper lane, the man who keeps the key of the oil press, and one more who said nothing at all and looked at everything.

They sat where my grandfather's friends had sat, and it was strange to see those cushions occupied and to know the arithmetic of it — that they were there because he was not.

The notary read the list again from the beginning. When he came to the end of it, the elder of the upper lane put his cup down.

"He kept a shop of books," he said.

"He did," said Hasan.

"A man does not die out of a shop of books and leave a list with no books on it."

Hasan took a paper from the box and turned it and held it out. "The stock went in the spring. There is the receipt, and there is the buyer's mark."

The elder looked at the receipt a long while. Then he looked at Hasan, and Hasan looked back at him, and neither of them moved, and the water went on falling into the basin the way it had fallen all morning. It was the elder who looked away first, but he spoke last, and both of those are worth something, and I have kept the count of it ever since.

"The quarter will hold you to the list," the elder said. "The list, and not the shop."

"Then the quarter holds me to a short list," said Hasan.

After that they went up the hill.

I went too, because Aisha said a lamp was needed and I was the lamp. The path climbs behind the house in three turns and then runs flat along the wall to where the ground has been cut back for the graves, and the whole of the valley opens on the left — the red walls across it, the long ridge, the river down in its green line.

My grandfather used to say a man should be buried where his family can see him from their own roof, and then he would laugh and say it was cheaper than a monument.

The mason had the stone ready and the mortar already mixed in a shallow wooden trough, and he set the stone at the head and cut the name into the plaster while it was still soft, and the letters filled with white dust as he cut them. When he was done he stepped back and gave the trowel to the elder of the upper lane.

That is how a tomb is closed here, and I had not known it until I watched it. Not by the family. Each of the elders put his hand flat on the mortar at the head of the stone, one after another, three hands, and pressed, and the mason smoothed what they had pressed. The seal on my grandfather's grave belongs to the quarter. It is not ours. Hasan said it aloud, quietly, to no one: "The seal is not mine."

And I stood there with the lamp I did not need in the daylight, and I thought about the other seal, the one on the paper in the box, and how it was not Hasan's either, and how a house could stand on a page for forty years and then need five living people to hold it up.

Coming down, the elders ahead of us, Ali threw a stone into the gully and the sound came back twice. Maryama took my hand without saying anything. Her hand was cold, which it never is.

At the door of the house the elder of the upper lane stopped and turned around and looked up at the wall of it, all the way to the shutters, and at the black cloth over the shutters, and he said, "Your grandfather kept his accounts in his head and his books in his chest, and he was careful with both."

"He was careful," Hasan said.

"Be careful," the elder said, and went down the lane with the other two, and the three of them did not speak to each other until they turned the corner.

That night I carried the lamp up and did not need it. The ladder hung on its two nails in the passage where the ladder hangs. The door of the inner room stood open across the courtyard.

Through the black cloth the street was a sound and not a sight — a cart, a voice, a door farther off — and I lay in the dark and said the page over to myself from the top, and this time I did not stumble at the long word, and I thought: I am in the paper now. I have a line.

It is smaller than the others and it is mine, and I know where the rest of it is kept, and I know now what the men of this quarter do with a hand they are asked to trust.

I did not sleep. I was not afraid. I was counting.