Chapter 9 · Chapter 9

I carried the paper myself.

He had asked for that and nothing else, and it was the smallest of his instructions, and still the folder knocked against my ribs the whole way up the drive — board and oilcloth, tied with the flat archive cord that does not slip, thirty-one leaves inside dated across five months in a hand that leaned left.

No cousin carried it. No clerk carried it. The man at the outer door bowed and stepped back, and I went through with the shaila still over my head and the folder under my arm as though it were a deed of the company and not a woman's handwriting.

The majlis doors were already shut when I came in. The room had been swept, and the Mabkhara stood in the corner where the smoke travels along the carpet instead of into a man's face, and the Oud sat in the air the way it sits in a room that has been closed all afternoon. Turki was at the Sadr. His uncle had taken the seat nearest the door — Ammi, grey at the temples, his stick laid across his knee —