Chapter 2 · Chapter 2

By nine the majlis is full again, and this time Ammi has chosen his witnesses with care.

Not the neighbors. Not the men who came last night out of curiosity and stayed for the coffee. These are men with weight in the room: two of the Al-Falih cousins who have never in their lives said a sentence longer than a price, a thin man from the chamber of commerce who holds his pen the way other men hold a ring, and, at the far end near the door, someone I do not know, pretending to read his phone while he listens to everything.

The bag sits on the carpet in front of me. Nobody has touched it since last night. Every item is back where it was, and the small brass buckle on the inner pocket is still closed.

"Undo it," Ammi says. "In front of these men. So it is formally cleared and we are finished with it."

I keep my hands where they are. "It was emptied and repacked in this hall in front of everyone. You saw the lining. You saw the receipts."

"That was the bag," he says. "The pocket is another thing. The pocket was never opened."

The pen man writes something down. He writes it before I answer, which tells me the answer has already been decided and I am only here to make it look like a conversation.

"Sayyidati," he says, pleasant as water, "if it is nothing, then it is nothing. Open it and we all go home."

That is how it is done in this city. Not with a raised voice. With courtesy sharpened until it will cut, and a pen moving quietly at the edge of the carpet.

I look at the brass buckle. It is a small thing, older than the bag, put on by a woman in a shop who told me it would outlive the leather. My thumb knows the catch.

"If my hand is not trusted," I say, "then let one of these men put his own hand in it. Let him pull out what he finds and hold it up and read it aloud. That is what you want. Say it in those words and I will sit down and let him."

Silence. The cousins look at the carpet. The pen stops.

Because they know what that would be. A man's hand in a woman's bag, in a hall of witnesses, and every man present understanding exactly what has been said about her name by the end of it.

Ammi's jaw works once. He is not a cruel man. He is a man who wants a thing settled, and settling it has always, in his mind, cost her something.

"Nobody's hand but mine," I say, and I say it without heat, which is worse for him. "That is the only clearing this house gets."

I lift the bag onto my knees and find the catch, and the buckle gives with the small, clean click it has always made. I open the pocket flat.

Inside is a folded paper. Nothing else.

I take it out and unfold it myself and lay it on the carpet where the pen man can read it without leaning.

A receipt. The shop on Tahlia Street. The date is four years old and the amount is the price of the bag, paid in full, and the name at the top is in my own handwriting, because I bought it myself and I wrote it myself and I have never once needed a man to sign for anything I carry.

"Lulwa Al-Sulaim keeps her own receipts," I say.

Somebody at the back of the hall makes a sound that is almost a laugh and turns it into a cough.

Ammi looks at the paper a long time. He has what he asked for and none of what he wanted, and both of us know it, and now the hall knows it too, and there is no version of this morning in which he can say so out loud.

"Clear it," he says at last. "Write that it is cleared."

The pen man writes.

The far door opens and one of the house men comes in with the dallah, and the room rearranges itself the way rooms do at the smell of gahwa. The finjan goes to the Sadr first. Then to the cousins. Then to the pen man, who takes his with his left hand out of habit and corrects it too late.

Marzouq comes in while the pouring is still going on. I did not see him arrive and I do not look up to watch him cross the carpet, but the room tells me anyway, the way a room always tells you.

He sits. He does not greet me. He does not look at the bag, or at the paper, or at Ammi.

When the servant reaches him he turns the finjan once between his fingers, and the pourer stops, and the hall takes that as the signal it is, and the pouring ends everywhere at once.

Then a second cup is filled, and set down — not at the Sadr, not with the cousins — on the carpet at the edge of my Abaya, where no one else in this hall has been offered anything all morning.

I pick it up with my right hand.

He does not look at me. That is the courtesy of this house, and I take it, and I do not say a word about it, and neither does he.

By evening the number will have more than one name on it. Somebody in this hall is already deciding to be helpful. Somebody always is, when a number has no name and the men who could end the talk have chosen to sit and drink instead.

Let them.

I have my own hand, and my own name, and one receipt already laid flat on the carpet for the whole hall to read.

I am still deciding which of them I will show next.