Chapter 17 · Chapter 17

They sent for me last, and I let the slight stand, standing in the doorway of the main hall with my hands folded while the notary set out his reed pen and his inkwell and then arranged them a second time, as men do when they want the room to watch them.

The hall had been washed for it.

The plaster above the niche was still dark at the edges where the water had gone in, the wool hanging was drawn back from the window so the light came flat and honest across the tiles, and a copper tray waited on the low table with bread broken into pieces, a dish of green olives, honey still in the comb, and a clay jar beaded with cold.

The men sat on the far side of the tray, with the two oldest men of the quarter set among them to hear and say nothing. The women sat on the near side, near the door, and Maryama had left a space at her hip that was mine, and I did not take it until I was told to.

Hasan spoke first, because he was my brother and a house without a father in it must put somebody's mouth in front of its own. He said it plainly, without ornament. A man had gone to the notary and had said there were books in our house that no one was permitted to read, and that a woman in our house read them, and wrote in them, and taught from them.

The man was in the room. He stood by the arch with his cap in his hands, and he did not look at me, which I noted, and he did not look at the tray, which I noted also.

"Which books," the notary said.

"The books beneath the house."

"You have seen them."

"I have heard of them."

"From whom."

He named a name. The name belonged to a man who had bought bread from us for eleven years and had never once been let past the first room.

Then Saad came in.

He had come up from the shop, and he stopped at the threshold and gave the room its greeting before he crossed it, and then he poured—and the first cup he poured he set at the edge of the tray on the side where the women sat, before he poured for the notary, before my brother, before any man in that hall. It took no longer than the pouring takes. Nobody failed to see it.

He said my name once, in full, with my father's name upon it, and then he sat down on the far side and put his hands on his knees and left the room to its business.

The notary turned a leaf. "There is a proposal in this house."

"There is," Hasan said.

It came out slowly, as such things do, in pieces small enough for every man present to put his hand on. Saad kept the bookshop. He had no house yet but the two rooms above the shop, and he said so himself, before anyone could say it for him.

He named what he would settle and named it in figures, and named the day the figures would be counted out, and he did not look at me once while he did it, which I understood and did not thank him for.

The man by the arch found his voice then. A man from Malaga with two rooms. A family that came down from the coast with nothing but a cart. What name was there in that, for a house that had held its ground in this quarter for four generations?

The pen stopped.

The notary looked at me. "The daughter of the house is here. She may speak to the proposal."

I had been standing the length of a whole cup and had not once shifted my weight.

"Two things before I answer," I said, and I kept my voice quiet, because a loud voice in that hall would have been a courtesy to the man by the arch and I had no courtesy to spare him.

"The first is the register. Every leaf in it carries a date. Under every date is the place it was written. Under every place is my name in full, and where a recipe came from another hand I have named that hand, and where it was mine alone I have said so.

A copy of the whole was delivered into the notary's own hand by my brother before the morning bell. Let the date on the last leaf be read aloud, if the room will permit it."

The notary read it. Somebody near the window let out a breath.

"The second is the witness," I said. "Five houses are named in that register as having asked for a leaf and received one. Our house is the fifth. The man by the arch is not among the five, his name is written on no leaf, and he cannot read the leaves he calls forbidden. A man who has read nothing cannot witness to what is inside."

Nobody answered. The notary turned the copy back to its first page and went through it with his finger, and then he closed it and looked up and said, "He is not in it."

"Then he will stand outside the arch," I said, "while the rest is decided."

And he did. He took his cap and went out under the arch and stood in the passage with his back to us, and the notary wrote a line in the margin and blew on it.

Then the terms, and here I was not quiet. The manuscripts stay under the house. They are named in the writing, leaf by leaf, and they are mine—not the house's, not my brother's, not any man's who comes after him. The sadaq comes into my hand and not into my brother's, and it is mine to keep or spend or leave in the chest until it rots.

And my name is written in the contract in full, with my father's name upon it, and not shortened to the daughter of the house, because a thing written short can be shortened again later by a man with a different pen.

The reed went over the paper and made its small dry sound.

"Do you consent?" he said.

"I consent," I said. "Write the number of leaves beside my name. Sixty-two, and no more, and if a sixty-third is ever found beneath that house I will answer for it myself, in this hall."

Then Saad spoke, for the first time since the greeting, and he spoke four sentences and sat back. The books stay where they are. The count stands at sixty-two while he has breath to count. No man goes down to the lower room on his word or on his errand. And that door is hers to open, and he will not ask her for it in front of any man.

That last was said to the notary and written down, and it was the only sentence of the whole morning that made the room uneasy, and I understood him, and I did not look at the inner door at the back of the hall.

The tray went round again. I took one olive with my right hand and ate it and answered nothing more, and the pen went on making its small dry sound, which is the sound of a thing being decided whether anyone in the room likes it or not.