Chapter 7 · Untitled Chapter

The registry came in under a man's arm, held flat against his side the way a document is carried when it is meant to be seen before it is read.

He set it on the low table at the head of the majlis, and the man at the sadr opened it with two fingers, and the room arranged itself. Shoes had come off at the edge of the carpet; the row of them by the threshold was the only untidy thing in the hall. The burner had been fed again. The smoke went up in a thin seam of oud and leaned toward the door.

He read the date first, then the line beneath it, then my name.

I kept my hands folded in the black folds of my abaya across my knees and looked at the weave of the carpet between my feet. I did not look at the paper, because a woman who watches her own line being read is a woman asking for it to be read gently.

"The line is not disputed," the old man said. "The holding of it is."

A man near the window said the holding should be struck.