Chapter 12 · Chapter 12

The third workshop was the last one, and it had always been the smallest of the three. Two tables under the north windows now, one lamp, one man. He had been with my grandfather nineteen years and could no longer follow a ruled line without lifting the sheet to the light, and he knew it, and stayed anyway, and I let him, because a room that has been emptied once should not be emptied twice.

So when word came up that a copyist had come down from Málaga looking for work, I did not ask what he wanted. I asked what he could do.

He came on a Tuesday, in the morning, while the lane was still in shadow and the courtyard had not yet given up its cold. He was twenty-eight years old. I was twenty-three. I had kept the house and the drawers of it since the spring my grandfather died, and I had learned that a man's age tells you less than the state of his cuffs.

His coat was good and had been mended twice in the same place. He carried his own reeds, wrapped in a strip of leather, which told me more than the man who recommended him had.

He stopped at the threshold and put his hand to his chest and bowed, and I answered him from three paces off, and neither of us came closer. The old copyist stood in the workshop door with his arms folded, which was correct, and which he enjoyed.

"Saad," he said.

"Saleema," I said. "My grandfather's house. I keep the workshop and the accounts. You would answer to me."

He did not smile at that, and did not frown either. He looked past me at the windows, and at how far the light came down the wall, and I understood that he was measuring whether a man could work a full day in that room in November. It was the first sensible thing anyone had done in that courtyard in a year.

"Show me a page," he said.

I brought him the ledger. Not all of it. The last eleven leaves, the ones that were business and not the other thing.

He read standing, one hand behind his back. He had ink in the grain of his right forefinger and a callus on the middle one where a pen rests and nowhere else, and the skin of his left wrist was scarred in a way that fire makes and knives do not. Málaga had fallen. He did not say so, and I did not ask, and that was the beginning of an understanding between us that lasted longer than either of us expected.

He turned the leaves. He came back to one of them. He put his finger in the margin.

"These two columns do not agree."

"No."

"Did you make the second one?"

"I did."

He nodded once, and closed the ledger, and did not ask me why, and did not hand me a ladder to climb in front of him. Most men, finding a woman's error, will hold the ladder and then stand at the bottom of it to watch.

"You write a good hand," he said. "The numbers are true. The two columns are the fault of the man who sells you paper, not of the hand that wrote them."

"He has not brought his number yet."

"He will bring it when it suits him, and it will not be the number he promised."

"No."

"Then we will count it in front of him, and he will watch us count, and that will be the end of it."

We. He had been in the house a quarter of an hour.

I gave him the north table and the second lamp and the rate, which was low, and he took it without a word, which was its own kind of comment.

The old copyist said my name in front of him, once, the way it is said in this house — plainly, and early, so that when the square says it, it will be a name already spoken here by people who know how to say it. Saad repeated it correctly and went back to the page. That was all. It should have been enough. It was enough.

By afternoon the house had a new sound in it. A pen, working. Not fast. Steady, the way a man writes who expects to be at it until dark and then again tomorrow. It came down through the floor into the room where I sat with the accounts, and I found I had stopped reading, and was listening to it the way one listens for weather.

At dusk I barred the shutters and put the lids back on and did not open the third drawer. A man who does not bring a number is waiting for you to name one first.

I went up. The pen was still going. I lay in the dark with a stranger writing beneath me in my grandfather's room, and I understood that I had let the last room of the house out of my hands and into his, and that this was either a protection or the first line of a bill, and that I would not know which until the number came.

I slept. I counted.