Chapter 2 · Untitled Chapter

The screen has three hundred and eleven openings, and I have counted them more than once, because a woman who watches for a living should know the instrument she watches through. Thirty-one across, ten down, and one at the lower right corner that the carpenter cut a half-finger wider than the others.

Through that one I see the whole east wall. Through the rest I see the majlis in slices, and I have learned to build the room back out of slices the way other women build a dish out of what is left in the kitchen.

Tonight the room fills by rank as it always does, and the rank is not written anywhere, which is exactly how everyone in it can read it.

The steward comes first, because the steward always comes first. He is a small, unhurried man with a Kunya the men use and a name the maids use, and he carries the Dallah as if it were a sleeping animal he has carried a thousand times. He sets it on the low table left of the Sadr, tests the heat of it against the back of his wrist, and steps away. Only then do the servers come in, three of them, and one of them is new.

I know he is new by his hands. A server who has done this for years holds the tray low and lets the cups sit in their own places, and his face does nothing at all. This one holds the tray high and checks it with his eyes, and his thumb keeps finding the rim of the nearest Finjan, as if he could count by touching.

The first cup goes to the Sadr. It always goes to the Sadr, and the Sadr is an old man with a heavy ring and a way of taking the cup with his right hand while his left stays on his knee, though I have never once seen him drink. He holds it. He holds it the way old men hold a thing they have decided to keep warm for someone.

The second cup goes to the Uncle. The third to the Cousin, and I will come back to the Cousin, because the Cousin is the reason I have three hundred and eleven openings to look through and nothing else to do with my evenings.

The new server tilts the Dallah from too high and pours too fast, and the cup fills over the half. I see the steward's chin move a quarter of an inch. I see the Sadr's eyebrow go up and come down.

The new server does not see either, but he sees something in the air, because his shoulders change, and from that moment on he pours from lower and slower, and no one says a word to him about it all night. That is how the room teaches. Nothing is written and nothing is spoken and a man learns to pour.

The cups move counter-clockwise, which is not the direction of anything I could name, only the direction this room decided on before I was born. Each man takes with his right. Each man holds the cup until the second round, at which point he shakes it once, gently, or says Bas, and the server leans in and takes it back.

A man who wants more does not ask. He tips the empty cup forward and holds it out, and the leaning-in happens. I have watched eleven months of men and I have never heard one of them say more coffee.

There are dates at the edge of every cup. Medjool, dark and soft, three to a saucer, and most of them go back out the way they came in, because the dates are a courtesy and not a hunger.

The Bakhoor comes after the second round. The Mabkhara is carried in by the youngest of the three servers and taken first to the Sadr, and the old man gathers the smoke to his chest with one hand, unhurried, and the smell gets into the room and stays there like a guest who will not take the hint.

Oud, and under it something sweeter that I have never been able to name and have decided not to look up, because a thing I look up I stop seeing.

The shoes are already off at the carpet. Every man who crossed the threshold took them off and left them in the same line, toes out, and not one of them has put a sole toward another man all evening. This is not a rule anyone announced. It is simply what happens in a house where a man might be asked to remember who he sat beside.

Now the Cousin.

He is forty and he dresses like thirty and he arrives every night at the same minute, which tells me he lives close and tells me nothing else. He talks about money without saying numbers.

He laughs a half-beat before the joke lands, so that the men around him laugh with him instead of at him, and it works, and it has worked for as long as I have been up here. I gave him the name Cousin in my second week because he used the word about a man who was not his cousin, and the word fit him better than it fit the man.

Halfway through the third round the Cousin leans toward the Sadr and says a name into the space between them. I do not hear it. I hear the shape of it, two syllables and a family, and I see the Sadr's hand close on his cup, and I see the steward, at the far end of the room, stop moving.

Then it is over. The Cousin sits back. Somebody asks about the heat. The cups go round again.

But the east corner stays the way it has stayed for eleven months, and this is the thing I have never been able to put down in the book and close.

There is a place in the east corner where no one sits. Not a seat that is fought over and lost; a place that the room has quietly agreed not to use.

Tonight the steward goes to it himself, the way he does every night, and pours a cup and sets it down and puts three dates beside it, and then he straightens and moves on as though he had done nothing at all. No one looks at it. No one reaches for it.

And at the end of the night, when the room empties by rank rather than by clock, the Uncle before the Cousin and the Cousin before the men who have nothing left to stay for, that cup goes out on the tray full, and the dates go out with it, and the steward carries them past me and does not look up at the screen.

Eleven months. Never once drunk.

I write it down in the book I keep, which is a small thing with a cracked spine, and I write down the order of the cups and the name I did not hear, and the quarter-inch movement of a steward's chin, and the fact that the new server learned to pour in a single evening without being taught.

Then I close it and put it in the place I put it, which is not a hiding place, because a thing hidden can be found. It is a nowhere place. I have been careful for eleven months and careful has kept me in a gallery with a good view.

Below me the last of them goes out. The Oud and the Gahwa keep the air a while after that, and the steward folds the cloth over the Dallah and the lamps are turned down one by one and the east corner sits in the dark with nobody in it.

Nothing has gone wrong. I say it to myself the way I have said it every night, and tonight I notice that I say it before I have finished counting the openings, which is not how I used to say it.

A woman holds a cup with a hairline in it carefully, and not because it is heavy. She holds it carefully because she has begun to wonder which night the heat will reach it.