Chapter 8 · Chapter 8

By morning the ash had not settled.

It came up the hill the way the mountain wind always came, without hurry, and it did not darken the light so much as dull it. Grey at the rim of the basin. Grey in the joints of the paving. Grey in the fine hairs of the fig leaves, so that the tree looked older than it was.

I put one finger into the dust along the sill and my finger came away the colour of a dead moth, and I did not wipe it on my skirt. I wiped it under the lip of the sill, where the broom never went.

The cook came out into the courtyard, looked up at the sky once, and went back in without saying anything. After that I heard cloth being taken down and shaken, and the lids going onto the jars, and the two women from the kitchen speaking low in the passage where they thought their voices would not carry.

Nobody had told me to be quiet. That was how I knew.

On the roof next door a woman was beating a mat against her parapet. She stopped when she saw who was standing below, and put the mat over her arm, and went in.

Then the door at the top of the steps opened.

Abu Jaafar had not come out of his room since the square. He came out now in his cloak with the collar closed and his cap set straight, as if he were going down to the shop, as if there were still a shop to go down to. He took the two steps into the courtyard slowly, one hand flat against the wall.

In all the years I had been alive I had never seen my grandfather hold a wall.

I opened my mouth and said nothing, because he did not like to be called back from a thing he was looking at.

He stopped at the basin and looked down into the water, which had gone grey at the rim, and he saw that. Then he raised his head and looked out past the parapet, over the flat roofs, toward the square.

The heaps were still giving up their smoke. Thin now, bent east by the wind, going up and turning over and coming down again, on the tiles, on the white walls, on the washing that someone had forgotten to bring in. Slowly. In no hurry at all. The way snow would come, if snow ever came here.

"Thorough," he said, in the flat voice he used for prices. "They were always thorough."

His hand went out for a wall that was not there. It found nothing. He went down.

He did not cry out. His palm struck the paving once, flat, and the ash lifted around it in a small slow cloud and settled along his sleeve, and then he was still.

I do not remember deciding to move. I was beside him with both hands on his shoulder, calling a name I had been told a hundred times not to call out into the air, and the cook's cry brought the house down on us.

Four of them carried him. His feet dragged on the third step and someone stopped to lift them.

I took the clay cup from the shelf and stood in the doorway holding it with both hands, and nobody took it from me, and nobody drank.

They laid him in his own room, where the bench was, where the awl and the thread and the pot of paste still stood in the order he kept them, waiting for boards that would not come now. My father came in with his sleeves still rolled and his hands grey to the wrist, and knelt, and said one word. My mother Maryama stood at the foot of the bed with a cloth in her hand and did not use it.

A physician was sent for. While we waited, the house made the small sounds a house makes when everyone in it is listening.

His eyes opened at the hour when the light goes long and gold and lies down on the floor. He looked at the ceiling, and then at my father, and said, "The boards under the floor."

"Still under the floor," my father said.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

He closed his eyes, and his mouth moved once more, and my father bent close to hear it and did not tell us what it was.

At dusk I brought the stool to the head of the bed and recited the page to him, the whole of it, in the voice I used when he was testing me. Outside, someone swept the courtyard, and the broom made its dry sound, and the ash went into the hearth with everything else.

He did not open his eyes. His hand moved under the blanket, one finger, keeping the place.

He did not once correct me. He always corrected me.