Chapter 7 · Chapter 7

They lit it at the hour when the market women put out the first bread, so that afterward no one could say the fire had been lit in secret.

By the time I came down through the Water Gate with my basket on my arm, the smoke had caught the wind and was rising over the silk market in a straight column, the way smoke rises only when it carries nothing but paper. It smelled of nothing. That was what I had not expected.

I had thought it would smell of something—rosin, glue, the fat of the vellum, some ghost of the hands that had smoothed it. It smelled only the way an oil lamp smells when it is nearly burned out.

The square was full and cheerful. That was the part I would have recorded, if I were writing: not the fire, but the cheerfulness. Men had brought their sons. A woman near the fountain was selling roasted chickpeas from an apron cloth, doing good trade, because a crowd is always a crowd. Two boys were throwing crusts into the embers to watch them turn black.

They had built the pyre as one builds a threshing floor—flat, and wider than it was tall, so that it would burn evenly from corner to corner and not collapse to spoil the spectacle. The bundles were stacked and lashed with cord that had been soaked, so the binding would not part first. Someone had planned it carefully. Someone had sat in an office with ink and measured the hours.

I knew the bindings. That was the whole of it. I stood four ranks back and read the pile the way I read the shelves in the study. There was the brown calf of the physician's Dioscorides, the one marked with water stains shaped like a coastline.

There were six of the astronomical tables from the madrasa, still fastened in their cypress boards.

There was a chest of loose quires, unbound, and I could tell from the margin of the topmost sheet that the hand was Ishaq's, who wrote a round, heavy letter and pressed too hard, and who had copied manuscripts for my grandfather for eleven years and shared our bread on Fridays.

The crier read the proclamation. He read it badly, stumbling over the legal phrases, and the crowd laughed at him—kindly, the way people laugh at a porter given too heavy a sack.

Then they thrust the torches in.

It caught faster than I had anticipated. Paper does not burn like olive wood; it yields like something relieved to be spent. The heat came off it in a sudden, flat wall, and the crowd stepped back one pace together, and then surged forward again. I did not step back at all, and that was how I found myself standing at the front row with my basket, solitary, my face washed orange and my lips parted.

A clerk from the wool merchants stood beside me and looked twice at my face. He was a young man with the soft, pink ears of someone who had never gone cold in winter.

'You are weeping,' he said. It was not pity. It was merely the pleasure of noticing a flaw.

'It is the smoke,' I said.

'To be sure, the smoke,' he agreed, and then, unable to leave the matter alone: 'From which house?'

There it hung. In a square of two thousand souls, one idle clerk with a soft ear, ready to turn my lineage over in his palm like a disputed bolt of weave to find where it frayed.

I did not answer him. I want that understood clearly, because whatever else followed belongs to someone else: I did not answer him. My grandfather lay dying in the upper chamber on the hill, my cousin Hasan was too young to stand in that square, and I held only a basket of wild thyme on my arm and had no guardian to speak for me.

Then Saad spoke.

He had come up on my left without the scrape of a shoe on the cobbles, the way he always walks, and he did not lay a finger upon me—not on my sleeve, nor on the reed rim of my basket.

He stood precisely where an elder of the quarter stands when he intends to be recognized, and he said, in that even, carrying tone an honest merchant uses across the stalls: 'She is Saleema, of the house of Abu Ja'far, in the Albaicin. If you have an inquiry concerning her, lay it before me and I will answer it here in the open street. If you have none, return to your wool.'

He spoke my name. In that open square, while the crier's voice still droned against the masonry, he gave my name aloud where any man might weigh it, named the household that shields me, and made it sound as indisputable as stone.

The clerk looked into Saad's face and decided, without hesitation, that he had no question to ask.

Saad lifted the basket from my arm. Only that. He offered no touch, did not draw me away from the glare of the pyre, and spoke no further word to me. He held the reed handle at his side like a man who had walked down from the quarter to purchase herbs, and he stood beside me watching the flames. After a long silence, without turning his head toward mine, he murmured: 'Which ones?'

'The tables,' I replied.

'I recognized the tables. What else?'

'The Dioscorides. The brown calf.'

'It is gone,' he said.

'Yes.'

We watched the boards buckle. There is nothing to be done at a burning. That is the deliberate cruelty of the spectacle: they do not bid you act, they only compel you to witness, and the witnessing is the penalty—a penalty you cannot bring yourself to abandon, because turning away would be a betrayal.

At the far corner of the stack, where the quires had been bound against the post and the flames had not yet reached, a loose sheet had slipped free and lay flat, face up in the cinders. I could read the header from where I stood.

So I read it. I stood in the heat, the smoke stinging my eyes, and read the ink line by line without wavering. When the fire crawled along the hemp and consumed the margin, I already had the words within me.

The crowd began to drift apart as the blaze subsided into red ash. Saad returned the basket to my arm just as he had taken it, without ceremony or unseemly haste. He walked half a pace behind my shoulder up through the Water Gate, remaining silent until the lane narrowed between the lime-washed walls, leaving the smell of scorched vellum behind us until only the bruised thyme in the basket rose in the cool air.

'How many?' he asked then.

I named the number I had tallied across the first three tiers of the heap. Saad said nothing until we had walked another hundred paces up the stone steps.

'Round it down,' he said quietly. 'When they ask you in the quarter, round it down. Do not repeat the exact count you gave me. A precise count implies an inventory, and an inventory means a record exists that can be hunted.'

'I understand,' I answered.

My grandfather was awake when I reached the house. He had been listening through the shutters all morning, for sound carries sharply up the hillside, and he had made Hasan set the lattices ajar so that he might hear the square clearly, heedless of the grief it brought him.

'Well?' he asked.

I set the basket by the lintel. I did not mention the Dioscorides, nor the astronomical tables, nor the clerk's insolence, nor Saad's intervention in the street. A dying patriarch has a claim to peace within his walls.

'Only paper,' I said.

He lay still for a time, watching the rafters. Then he said: 'Recite the page.'

I sat on the tiles beside his chest, for there was no low stool that would bring me close enough to his pillow, and I recited the sheet to him from the opening phrase to the final seal. He stayed me twice to hear a sentence repeated, and the second time he smiled toward the ceiling as a craftsman smiles at fine tooling from another man's bench.

'Good,' he said. 'Now write none of it down. Not even for my sake.'

The shutters remained open. Down in the square, the bailiffs were raking the embers into heaps. The mountain wind shifted, carrying a thin drift of ash up the hill until fine grey flakes settled like withered petals upon the sill. My grandmother would have someone sweep the stone at daybreak, and the sweepings would mingle with the hearth dust, and no one within the Albaicin save the three of us would know what had been laid to rest.

I sat with him until his breathing deepened into sleep. Then I went down into the courtyard under the unlit sky and recited the entire page once more to the stone wall, so that the knowledge would endure in two places instead of one.