Chapter 5 · Chapter 5

They moved the sitting to the long room off the courtyard, the one with the carpet that has no worn path across it, and I understood that the family had stopped treating this as a conversation and started treating it as a record.

I came in last, which was its own sentence, and I had my abaya closed and the tarha pinned the way it stays through a long morning, and I sat in the corner by the shutter where the light comes through the mashrabiya in blades and lies on the carpet in a ladder. The ledger went down at my knee inside its cloth, where everyone could see it and nobody could ask for it.

The steward came with the dallah and poured high, from a height that would scald a careless hand, and the finjans took less than half. He began at the sadr and worked around. When he reached me I took mine with my right hand and said nothing. The coffee was cardamom-heavy and too hot. A dish of dates went after him and came back with three gone from it.

Nawaf sat across from me.