Chapter 13 · Chapter 13

They posted it at the hour when the quarter goes down to the fountain with its jars, so that nobody could say afterward that they had not seen it.

Two men did the posting. One carried the paper and the pot of paste. The other carried a hammer he had no use for. A third stood a little apart with his hands behind his back and watched the street instead of the door, and it is the third man you count. A man who watches the street has already decided what he will do when the street objects.

I read it over the shoulders of two women who could not read it, and then I read it again, slower, because the first time I had gone too fast to be fair to it.

By order. Within the term of one month, every soul of the parish, of whatever estate or condition, to present themselves at the registry and be entered: name, age, trade, house, and the name of the father.

Every householder to present his household entire — sons, daughters, servants, journeymen, and any who lodge under the roof and eat at the table. And the household that failed to present itself, the house to be assessed, and the assessors to be housed and fed at the cost of the household so assessed. Payment within the week.

There is the hook under the bread. Not the register. The price of refusing the register.

A young man with a good voice read it out to the crowd, and read it wrong twice. He gave the term as three months where the paper gave one, and he gave the penalty as a fine in silver where the paper gave a house. The street preferred his version. It was cheaper.

I let him finish. Then I said, One month. And it is not a fine.

He turned and saw who had spoken, and his face did the thing faces do when a small hope is taken away politely.

Read the last line again, I said. Aloud.

He read it. The street heard it the second time and went quiet in the way a street goes quiet, not with fear but with arithmetic. Every man there began, in his own head, to count his roof.

I went on to the fountain and filled the jar and did not hurry, because hurrying would have been a kind of speaking. Behind me a woman said that the granddaughter of Abu Ja'far would be first on the list, her house being the largest, and that she would want to see how a house like that was entered.

I set the jar down and turned around and said, with the water still running off my wrist, that I would be entered in the order the paper gave, which was by street and not by size, and that she might ask the notary to read her the third line as well, since he had been so generous with the first.

Her friend laughed. It cost me nothing and it bought the morning. That is all a name is, in a quarter like this: something you spend small so that no one thinks it can be had whole.

At home Maryama had already heard. She hears everything; the plaster carries, and the roof next door is a woman who keeps a fire on all day and talks across it.

She said the word register the way one says a word in another language, carefully, without trusting it.

I put the jar down and took the copper pot off the fire before it went over, and I said the paper says what it says and we will do what the paper says and nothing more than the paper says, and that the danger was never the register. The danger was the men who come to assess a house that has been left off it.

Aisha said, then we go on the first day.

We go on the first day, I said. Early, before the queue, before the clerk has learned his own hand. And we give him nothing he has not asked for.

Ali, who is eleven and has opinions, said that we should give a false age. I said that we would not, because a false line is a line someone can pull.

Hasan came in from the yard at noon with dust on his sleeves and read the paper four times, and then he said the thing I had been waiting for since the fountain, which is that a household is not only blood. It is everyone under the roof. And there is a man under our roof who was not born in this parish and who writes for a living, and the paper has a column for trade.

The room got very quiet, the way it does when everyone has already had the same thought and has been waiting to see who would be blamed for saying it first.

The pen had stopped below us. It had stopped some while ago. I had not noticed when.

So I did what I do. I put the accounts on the table and opened the ledger at a clean page and ruled it myself, four columns, and began the list of the house in the order the paper asked: name, age, trade, house. I wrote the house first, because the house had to stand at the head of it and the house was mine to write.

Under it I wrote Maryama. Aisha. Ali. Hasan. Myself, with my age, which is twenty-three, in a hand I made deliberately plain, because a plain hand is the hand of a woman with nothing to hide, and a woman with nothing to hide is the last woman anyone searches.

Then I sat with the pen up and the last line blank, and the ink dried on the nib, and I did not write a name I had not been given a number for. A man who does not bring a number is waiting for you to name one first. I had learned that much from watching him work, and I had learned it under my own floor.

The light went off the wall. Maryama put the lamps on. Somewhere below the pen began again, steady, not fast, and I understood that he had heard every word we said through the joists and had chosen to go on writing rather than come up and be discussed.

I went to the stair and stood at the top of it and said, without raising my voice, that he would need his age, and where he was born, and what he called his trade, because the clerk would ask it in his own words and not ours, and there would be no second chance at the answer.

The pen stopped. Then a chair.

He came to the foot of the stair and looked up at me with the lamp between us, and said, Málaga. Twenty-eight. Scribe. And then, after a moment, that the fourth column was wrong.

I said the fourth column was the house and the house was correct.

He said the fourth column was the house, and that a scribe who lodges is not a householder, and that if I entered him as one there would be two households under one roof and the assessors would be within their rights to come and look at both.

I stood there and did not thank him, because thanking a man in front of your family is a way of putting him outside it. I went back to the table and drew a line through what I had not yet written and ruled a fifth column, and put him in it under the word lodger, and set down Málaga, twenty-eight, scribe, in the plainest hand I own.

Thirty days, Hasan said, when I had finished. That is all the paper gives.

No, I said. That is all they think it gives.

I closed the ledger and did not put it back in the drawer. I left it out, open, on the table where the whole house could read it, because a list that everyone has seen cannot later be improved by anyone who has not seen it. And then I went up, and lay in the dark, and counted — not the days. The names.

Counting them the way one counts coin before a market, to be certain of what one is carrying in, and to be certain that none of it can be taken out of one's hand by a man with a paste pot and a hammer he does not need.