Chapter 5 · Chapter 5

The tray comes back along the carpet for the bag, and this time it does not stop at my knee.

The attendant at the door lifts the bag over my hands and carries it at the height of men's shoulders, so the hall can see, and sets it down in front of the Sadr where the light from the high window lies flat on the carpet.

The vial comes out first.

Crystal, no longer than the last joint of a thumb, flat-cut stopper, one shoulder of the glass gone dark where the oil has stood against it for years. Taif rose. The hall leans without moving.

It travels down the carpet hand to hand and past the last row, to the elder women of the house, who have sat near the door since the first pot of the morning, and whom nobody has asked anything.

The eldest of them works the stopper loose with her thumb.

Rose comes into the room. Sharp at the front, nearly a medicine, then sweet, then everywhere at once. Somebody turns the Mabkhara; a hand draws the smoke up to a collar, and the two smells stand in the hall together and neither of them gives way.

Then the handkerchief. Linen, folded square, pressed into three creases gone soft with carrying, and in the corner, in gold thread, two letters.

"That is an M," the eldest of them says.

"It is an L," I say.

"The thread is gone at the loop."

"The thread is gone. It is still an L."

She turns the cloth over and holds it up to the window. She is not a cruel woman. That is the difficulty with her. She holds things to the light because that is what she was made for, and the light is honest, and the cloth is not.

"Rose oil," she says, "in the bag of a woman who came into this hall with no husband in it."

"Rose oil in the bag of a woman who buys her own things," I say.

"Taif rose."

"Taif rose. Last spring. From a shop I will not name to this hall, with money that has my name on it and nobody else's."

"A woman does not buy Taif rose for herself."

"This one did. Shall I tell the hall what I paid for it?"

One of the younger men laughs, once, and stops himself, and the room takes it badly. The eldest of them folds the cloth back into its three creases, taking her time with the corners.

"There is a man in this city," she says, "whose name begins with the letter you say it is not. He has been generous with rose oil before. The hall is entitled to ask."

"The hall may ask," I say. "Bring him. If he stands up on this carpet and says the oil is his, I will put the bottle in his hand and go home."

The carpet is long. It runs the whole length of the majlis, past the Sadr, past the last row, all the way to the door, and there is not a man standing on it.

The cousin at the Sadr looks down at his own Finjan on the floor beside him, gone cold, and does not pick it up.

Then Marzouq.

He has not spoken since the pour. He takes the vial off the tray himself, works the stopper out with two fingers, and touches the glass to the inside of his wrist. One drop. He sets the stopper back and sets the vial down where it was, and the small click of it is the loudest thing the morning has produced.

"Taif," he says. "The hall has spent an hour on a stopper and a square of cloth. When it has finished, somebody will tell me what it has decided, and who decided it, and I will hear that in a smaller room."

The eldest of them does not look away from him. "She is not your charge, Marzouq."

"No," he says.

He lets that stand long enough to be a whole answer, then goes on in the same flat voice, no warmer, no louder.

"She answered twice. She will answer a third time if the hall wants it, and the answer will not change, and the morning will be shorter for it. Take the cloth out of the window, Sayyidati. The light is not a witness."

She takes the cloth out of the window.

It goes back on the tray, and the tray is carried down the carpet and set at my knee, not in my hand. That is the shape the apology takes in this house. I let it sit there a moment so that the hall can watch it sit there, and then I take the vial first and the cloth second, and put them both in the inner pocket where they live, and press the flap down.

The tray is empty. The bag is not.

My hand goes past the lining to the bottom, and the paper is still folded the way I folded it before the drive, and nobody in this hall has yet thought to ask me about the one thing in it that carries no name at all.