Chapter 9 · Chapter 9

The physician came out of the room at first light and did not look at any of us. He set his bowl on the sill, poured the water over his hands into the drain, and dried them on the cloth he kept for that alone. Then he went back inside and came out again with the seal in his palm.

It was smaller than I had supposed. All my life it had been a weight at the bottom of a page and a thing my grandfather took out of a drawer and put back, and now it lay in the physician's hand like a date stone.

He did not offer it to my father. He stood in the middle of the courtyard and waited, and my father went out to the lane himself and brought back the two eldest of the family, and stood aside for them at the step. The physician put the seal into the older man's hand with both of his own and bowed over it.

Nobody spoke. Abu Jaafar's name was said twice, quietly, the way a name is said when the man it belongs to is still in the next room and everyone is deciding whether to go on pretending.

My father's face did not change. That was how I learned that a face not changing is also something a man does in front of other men.

Then the cloths.

Two men from the quarter carried the black cloth up the ladder and hung it over the street door so that it hung straight down and hid the brass. They hung more of it over the shutters of the upper room and left the shutters shut behind it.

Inside, the women who had come in from the lane took the loom and covered it, frame and beam and the half-finished band of silk, and they swept the courtyard, and the broom made its dry sound, and the ash went into the hearth with everything else.

The elder with the seal asked for the key to the chest. My father brought it and put it in his hand without being asked twice. The chest held the accounts of the shop, the deeds of the two houses, the papers of the silk, a bundle of letters from Malaga tied with cord. The elder said these would be read at the notary's, and my father said they would, and the seal went into the elder's sleeve and the key with it.

Nobody asked about the floor.

I stood at the edge of the courtyard with my back against the pillar and watched them not ask, and watched my father watch them not ask, and understood that the boards under the floor were now a thing the whole house was carrying in silence, the way a woman carries a tray through a crowded room.

All day people came. They came in, and stood, and said the two words, and went out, and the cloth at the door moved and settled each time. Food arrived in covered dishes and was set down in the passage and not eaten.

In the afternoon the physician returned for his bowl and stood a moment looking at the covered loom, and said to my father, low, "He said the boards. Twice. Once when he could still see me and once when he could not." My father said nothing, and the physician took his bowl and went.

At dusk my father did not light the lamp in the passage, and we sat in the dark that was not quite dark. The lane outside was loud with the ordinary evening, a cart, a dog, a woman calling a child in from the water steps.

When the house was quiet I went into the inner room.

They had taken him out of it in the morning and the bed was stripped and the straw gone, and the room smelled of the wash they had used and under that of him. I knelt and put my hand flat on the boards and counted to the third from the wall, the one that lifts at the end where the nail was drawn, and I did not lift it. There was no need. I knew what it weighed and how it came up and the sound it made going back down.

I sat on the floor instead and said the page. All of it, in the voice I used when he was testing me, and I got as far as the account of the two brothers and the well, and I put the stress on the wrong word.

I stopped.

The room waited. Nobody corrected me. Outside, a shutter was pulled to somewhere across the lane, and the cart went by, and the water went down the drain in the courtyard with its small patient noise.

I began the page again from the beginning, and this time I was careful, and I said it to the boards, and when I came to the end I said the last line twice, once for him and once to be sure I had it, and then I put both my hands flat on the wood and sat there a while with my forehead down on my hands, which is not a thing anyone had taught me to do and which I have never done since in front of another person.

When I came out, my father was standing in the courtyard in the dark with the ladder against the wall and the black cloth at the door hanging down past his shoulder. He did not ask where I had been. He said, "Tomorrow the notary reads the papers, and the seal is not mine."

"It was never yours," I said.

He looked at me a long moment.

"No," he said. "It was his. And he left it in a room full of men who were waiting for him to die, and not one of them has asked me what is under my own floor."

The ladder creaked as he took it down. He set it against the wall and stood with his hand on it and said, "They will ask. Not tomorrow. When their grief has gone off them and their arithmetic has come back."

Then he told me to go in and sleep, and I went, and I did not sleep, and I said the page again in the dark with the door of the inner room open across the courtyard and the black cloth over the shutters keeping out the whole street.