Chapter 3 · Chapter 3

The ledger came before the coffee did, and in my father's house that is already an argument.

It arrived wrapped in dark cloth, carried up from the gate by a clerk from the council's office who would not sit and would not set his bag down on the carpet. My father had it placed on the low table and left it there, and called for the pot. He does not open another man's paper while a man is standing in front of him. The clerk understood the courtesy for what it was and stood anyway.

The Gahwa went round from the silver Dallah, high, into Finjans filled less than halfway. I took mine with my right hand and set it down with a date at the rim and did not drink. The clerk drank his in one swallow, too fast, the way a man drinks when he has been told to wait and has decided not to.

Then my father said, "Ya'teek al-afiyah," to the boy with the pot. To the clerk he said nothing at all. The manager closed the doors of the majlis, and the room became a room where paper could be read.

The cloth came off. Four pages, ruled, in a hand trained to be unreadable and paid to be clear.

The first page said that the matter of Talal Al-Zahrani's branch was closed to further asking. It said the hall had heard, and the hall had found, and no paper from that house was to be received again. It said the finding stood whatever the branch produced, because a branch that had been answered once does not get to answer twice.

I read it the way I read everything that comes into that room, which is slowly, and out of order, and twice.

The second page was the list. Four households of standing, with what each still held in that branch's hand. Ours was third, not second, and I noticed the correction the way I notice a wrong date in a deed: not because it changes the sum, because it means the man who wrote it was working from memory.

Two contracts and one guarantee. Eight hundred thousand on the guarantee, undrawn, standing open like a door nobody had bothered to shut.

My father read the third page. Then he pushed the whole thing across the table to me, because for six years I have read what he signs before he signs it, and because a man who is going to do a thing he does not like would rather have a witness inside his own house than a stranger brought in from outside.

"Read the column," he said.

I read the column. The figures were right. That was the first thing that troubled me, and I sat with it a moment before I understood why.

The fourth page was ruled for the reason and empty.

"There is nothing here, Yuba," I said.

"There is nothing there because the reason is written where it belongs. In the hall."

"Then the letter we send will say what the hall said, and nothing a man could be held to."

My father looked at me the way he looks at a contract that has been drafted by someone clever and careless. "We are not sending a letter to be held to. We are sending a letter that ends a connection. The ending is the whole of it."

"A letter that gives no ground can be handed back."

"Then it will be handed back," he said, "to a man who has nothing left to hand it back with."

There was no heat in it. My father has never once raised his voice in that room, and he did not raise it now, and the coldness was worse than shouting, because it had already decided and was only waiting for the rest of us to arrive at the same place.

He turned to the manager and gave the instructions in order, without notes. Letters to the three other households before evening, naming our withdrawal and no reason. The guarantee called, in writing, with a copy of the ledger's page attached.

Nothing of ours left standing in that branch's hand by the end of the week, not a contract, not a line of credit, not a name on a list. The manager repeated it back from the beginning, all four parts, and my father let him finish before he nodded.

"Inshallah," my father said. The room understood it was a date and not a hope.

The withdrawal was set in front of him. He signed at the edge of it, in the small space they leave at the margin for a man who does not want his name in the middle of a thing.

Then he pushed it to me, and I signed under the witness line, and I wrote my name out in full, all of it, the way a name is written when it is going to be read by people who would prefer it shorter.

"I will need the ledger until evening, Yuba," I said. "The guarantee has a schedule attached, and the schedule is not copied."

He considered it. He is not a man who hands over paper, and he is not a man who refuses a thing that has a reason attached to it, and mine had one, and he could see the whole of it. He nodded once.

The mabkhara came round as the majlis emptied, thick with the scent of Oud. I turned it toward myself and drew the smoke up into the hem of my abaya with my hand, and the warmth stayed in the cloth when I went out.

In my room I copied the schedule, the four pages, the figures, the wrong place in the list where our name sat. It took the better part of an hour and my handwriting is not as good as the clerk's, and when I was done I put the copy where the copy belongs, in the file my father will read before he signs.

The last page I did not copy. I put the original in the drawer that no one else in that house opens, four ruled lines and nothing written on them.

A page with no reason on it is not evidence of anything. I kept it anyway.