Chapter 6 · Chapter 6

On the eleventh day of the thirty, the bailiffs came up the hill to the shop.

I was on the roof with a basket of mint, stripping the leaves into the sun, and I heard the mules before I saw the men — a mule going uphill on cobbles complains the whole way.

Then the cart came round into the lane, and the lane is narrow, and the cart took the corner in two attempts, and the second attempt scraped the whitewash off the house of the old woman who sold chickpeas. She stood in her doorway and said nothing at all, which was worse than shouting.

Four men. Two in the corregidor's colors. One with a rope over his shoulder, as if he had been told there would be something to tie. One with a board strapped to his forearm, and a boy behind him carrying the ink.

I came down the stairs so fast I took the skin off my shin on the third step and did not feel it until that night.

My grandfather stood in the doorway of the shop with his hands at his sides. Hasan was there before me, standing the way he had begun standing since the spring, back straight, chin up, a small copy of a man — and I wanted to shake him and I wanted to stand beside him, and I did the second thing.

The notary read from his board. He read the titles the way a man reads an inventory of grain, flat, in order, and each title came out of him with no more weight than the one before it. My grandfather listened to all of them, to the last, and did not correct a single one. When the notary reached the end he said, 'And the remainder, by weight, unlisted.' My grandfather said, 'The remainder is the remainder.'

That is what he said. I have carried it a long way.

Then the rope came off the shoulder.

I want to say here what they took, because in our house we counted. I counted the quires in the wet winters, when the damp gets into the paper and every gathering has to be turned and aired. I knew that shop the way you know a person's breath.

They took the bound ones first, the codices, and laid them in the cart on their spines, which is the wrong way, and my grandfather's jaw moved once and then was still. They took the chest of unbound gatherings.

They took the drawer with the thread and the awls and the bone folder, which are not books at all, and the notary wrote them down as instruments.

Someone had brought the cloth from the square, folded, and set it on the cart, and a bailiff used it to wipe the dust off his hands.

A man stepped back and put his heel through a gathering that had slid off the tail of the cart, and the paper tore with a sound like a small bird taken. My grandfather did not move. The notary looked away — not at my grandfather, not at the cart, but at the lane, as though he were measuring it.

Then my grandfather took the ring of keys off his belt and held it out. The notary had to tuck his board under one arm to take it, and you could see the keys were heavier than the board.

Ali had come out and was holding the hem of my skirt in his fist, and Aisha said his name once from the door, in the low voice she used when she meant it, and he let go.

The cart started down. At the corner the near wheel dropped into the gutter and the load shifted and a bailiff put his shoulder to it, and a boy from the lane rolled a stone under the wheel and was thanked by nobody. Three journeys, that day. The cart came back twice.

I was on my knees in the dust picking up what had spilled when the man with the rope came past. He had a rope and nothing to tie, and he stood over me a moment. I had a torn page in my hand. I did not hide it. There was no use in hiding it, and I was eleven days into a lesson about what can be kept.

He looked at the paper, and then at the cart, and then he made a decision — I watched him make it — that he had not seen it. He walked on down the hill behind the others.

I have thought about that man all my life. Men are not one thing, and it is a hard thing to learn when you are small and would prefer them to be.

The page was rue. What it is for. When to take it. When not to. My grandfather's hand, small and upright, the letters leaning the way a man leans into wind.

I knew some of the words and not the ones that mattered, and I understood, standing in the lane with the dust settling on my arms, that I was holding the only copy of that page in the world, because the rest of it was in a cart on its way to a square that had already covered the books with a cloth once and would do the next thing after covering them.

That night he sat in the room behind the shut door with the lamp between us and said a number — how many, in all, from the shop. I have never been able to make myself believe the number he said. It was too even. He was a man who would round a thing down so that no one else would have to carry the remainder.

So I did the arithmetic myself, on my fingers, in the dark, and I got as far as the bound ones and the chest and could go no further, and I put the page flat under the lamp and read it until the flame went low.

I had no ink that was mine. A page with a number on it can be read by anyone who picks it up. So I did the other thing he had taught me, the thing I had been doing for eleven days.

I learned the whole of it before the lamp went out. In the morning I could say it from the first word to the last, and I have never written it down.