Part Two — The Eastern Route · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Fifteen
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 20
Ani's answer to the message that Leah sent from the guesthouse two evenings earlier had been four lines long, and Leah had read it so many times that she could have recited it in her sleep.
I hear you. I've already cut the truck run to the bone and burned a favor to do it. Six days is the best I can do. Please don't go to the house alone. I know what I'm asking. Wait.
She had waited. She had waited through the whole of the next day in a room above a widow's kitchen on the east side of Udvada. The ceiling fan stuttered. The window looked on a wall of bougainvillea. She had answered mail. She had read the same four pages of a Sassanid grammar she had no use for. She had walked to the station and back, and to the tea stall and back. She had stood for twenty minutes in a lane looking at nothing at all. Karam sat in the room with a notebook and wrote, in his small slanting hand, what she supposed was a long letter to his daughter.
And Ani was right. That was the trouble. Leah had never in her life been so sure that she was being asked to do the correct thing, or so unwilling to do it.
"We are not going to the house," Karam said, on the second morning, without looking up.
"I know."
"You have been standing at that window for ten minutes."
"I'm measuring the light."
"You are measuring the distance to the second lane." He closed the notebook. "It is nine hundred meters. I have walked it. I walked it at six this morning, before the heat, and I walked it by a different way home so that nobody would think I was counting."
"You walked to her house?"
"I walked to the end of the lane, and I looked at the green door, and I came back." He folded his hands on the cover. "I did not stop. I did not knock. I did not speak to the woman with the broom, who saw me and was displeased. An old man in white stood in the open door. He looked at me as one looks at a person one has been expecting, and inclined his head, and I, without knowing why, bowed. Then I came away. I wished to know how far it was, so that I should not spend the day wondering."
She laughed in spite of herself. "How far is it?"
"Nine hundred meters." He looked at her with his grave, tired courtesy. "Sit down, Leah. Please. We promised her."
She sat. She put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands and breathed out for a long while.
She had rehearsed the first three sentences in the bath, and on the walk to the station, and in a doorway while the widow's grandson tried to sell her a clay horse. They were Ani's sentences, and Vartan's, written in a drafty office in Chennai on a legal pad. We have come because you asked us. We have brought nothing to show you but ourselves. Tell us when to stop. She had said them aloud in the empty room until they stopped sounding like a speech, and then until they stopped sounding like words.
She did not pray. But in the dark before the second dawn, lying on a narrow bed with the fan stuttering over her head, she found that she was saying them in her mind as one speaks under the breath at a threshold. She did not mind.
Katz's message had come in the night, and she had not shown it to Karam until the morning.
Nassiri's papers cleared Mumbai without delay. Zohar has him on a slow train north two days ago. I have said to Livnat that he is a scholar and a ghost and will do nothing in a town of three thousand but look. She wishes to send a team to a place she calls "observation." I have told her that if she sends it she will lose the one thing we have, which is that he does not yet know we are here. She has agreed to wait. I do not know for how long. I would not trust it past tomorrow.
Karam had read it twice, in the formal way, and said, "So she has heard of Udvada."
"She's heard of a town. That's all she's got."
"For now." He had set the phone down with great care. "Leah. If Livnat sends a team, and the team arrives on the day that Delnaz's family opens its gate to us, then what we have built, the honest letter, the clerk who was paid and apologized to, will mean nothing. They will see a family that came to them with a state at its back."
"I know."
"I think that is the thing you cannot say to Ani, because she would say it to Vartan, and he would say it to Zabel, and by evening the whole trust would be afraid." He had paused. "I am not afraid. I wish to be clear. I am only certain that we must be, as the saying is, the first honest thing she sees."
It was Karam's genius that he could say such sentences without sounding as if he were making a speech. He said them the way he read a bill of lading.
They walked in the afternoon, because sitting in a room refreshing an inbox had proved, within twenty minutes, a great deal worse than moving.
Udvada had the texture of a town that had spent centuries being exactly what it was without needing to explain itself to people passing through. The lanes were swept. Behind every veranda rail an old man sat in a chair, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, reading a newspaper folded to the size of a handkerchief. Women in saris with a narrow white border went by with baskets, and boys with school bags, and from behind a high wall came the thin cry of a child reciting what was clearly not a nursery rhyme.
At the center of the town the sanctuary stood in its walled compound, as quiet as a closed book.
"That's the Iranshah," Leah said, low, as they came within sight of the outer wall. She kept to the far side of the road, as she had read one was meant to do. "One of the oldest sacred fires in the world that's still being tended. Over a thousand years, by tradition. They say it was carried here from Sanjan, after the first landing, and kept by one family of priests and then another. We can't go in."
"Because we are not of the faith."
"Because it isn't built for us. It isn't hostile. It's like the ledger, Karam. It was never built to be read by anyone standing outside it."
An old man tended a stall at the foot of the wall, selling sandalwood in bundles tied with thread to those who were permitted to carry it in. He was thin and bald and wore a white cap, and he watched the two strangers come to the edge of the cleared ground and stop. He nodded, once. He had watched ten thousand visitors halt where they should and go no further, and this was the courtesy he gave each. Leah nodded back. She felt a gratitude she had not expected, for a boundary that asked nothing of her but the small discipline of keeping it.
Karam stood a long time looking at the wall. She had seen him do it at the edge of half a dozen sacred places in nearly three years. It was not a tourist's curiosity. He knew exactly what it cost a family to keep a charge faithfully for a long time, and he looked as if he were counting it.
"Mine kept a book in linen," he said at last, "and a discipline that nobody outside the house was meant to see. Theirs kept a fire burning for a thousand years without once letting it go out." He watched the light go gold on the plaster. "I think I understand a part of why she waited fourteen years. It is not caution for its own sake. It is the labor of tending what is not allowed to fail, for longer than any one person's patience should be asked to last."
"You could write a book."
"I have a daughter who would correct the grammar." He almost smiled. "I would rather be useful."
They stood on in the quiet that had grown up between them over nearly three years of exactly this kind of vigil. A bell rang somewhere beyond the wall, slowly. A priest in white went by along the inside of the compound, a tall figure glimpsed between two pillars, and was gone.
"You are not from here," the old man at the stall said.
He said it without unkindness. His English was precise and a little formal, learned from books and a long life of visitors. Leah turned.
"No," she said. "We're waiting for someone."
"Everyone waits in Udvada. It is good practice." He tied off a bundle of sandalwood with a length of thread and set it on the cloth. "No one is from here, you know. We are all from somewhere that was taken from us. That is why we keep the fire. It is a way of saying, we are still the same people. We have not gone out."
Karam had come a step nearer. "How long have you kept this stall?"
"My father kept it. And his father. We do not sell to those who go in. Those who go in have their own." He looked at the two of them, at the plain gray scarf that Leah had not yet put on and the canvas bag at Karam's shoulder, and an old tension in his face eased. "But I think that you are going to a house. For a house one brings a small gift. Not for the fire. For the people."
He held out the bundle. It smelled of warm resin and dust and, faintly, of rain.
"How much?" said Karam.
"For a house, nothing. For a stranger who stops where he should, nothing." He put it into Karam's hands. "Go well."
Her phone buzzed against her palm.
It was not Ani, and it was not Katz. It was an address she did not recognize, and the message was short enough that she read it in the single breath it took Karam to see her face change.
My grandfather asks that you come tonight, not tomorrow. He says a family that has kept this door shut longer than anyone can count does not mean to let someone else decide, by arriving first, how it is opened. If you can be at the green door at seven, he will receive you. D.P.
She showed him the screen. He read it, and then stood quite still. She saw his shoulders settle, and understood that whatever came next, they were no longer two families reaching toward each other across an ocean of correspondence.
They were about to stand in the same room.
"Ani told us to wait for her," Karam said.
"Ani also told us she couldn't be here for four more days."
"She did."
Leah was already turning toward the guesthouse. The composure that she had practiced for nearly three years gave way, for the length of one unguarded breath, to the plain fear of a scholar about to test in person what she had only ever read in handwriting. "Karam, I don't think we get to choose the moment. I think the family at the other end of this door has chosen it for us. And I think the right answer is not to make her wait a minute longer than she's already waited."
"We promised Ani."
"We promised to wait for a family. This family has just asked us to come." She stopped in the lane. "If Livnat sends a team and Nassiri's in the square and we've sat in a room being polite for four more days, there's no one left to be polite to. I'm sorry. I know it's what Ani asked. I'd have asked it myself."
He did not argue. He looked at her for a long moment with his tired, exact face, and then he nodded, once, and she saw that it cost him.
"Then we go," he said. "Together. And we say nothing in that room that Ani could not have heard."
She typed the message on the way back, walking fast, with the phone held close.
Delnaz's grandfather is asking us tonight, not tomorrow. We're going. I'm sorry. Get here as fast as you can. Whatever happens in that room, we won't say a word about what your family is or isn't owed until you're standing in it with us.
She sent it without waiting for a reply. In the doorway of the guesthouse she stopped and looked at the two bags on the floor. In one lay the dark red scarf with the border of small gold flowers, which Karam had bought for her in a bazaar and which she had not yet had occasion to wear. She put it aside. In its place she took out a plain gray one, the most sober thing she owned, and held it in both hands for a moment. Then she began to change.
Karam called Katz from the doorway while she dressed. His voice was pitched low and steady, the register in which she knew he made a plan sound calmer than it was.
"We are going in an hour," she heard him say. "No. Alone. Ani cannot be here for four days. I know. I know, Ronen." A pause. "If there is anything you can do from Tel Aviv in the next sixty minutes that does not involve a team, now would be the time. She has asked us to come tonight. We will not keep a man's grandfather waiting after he has told us, in so many words, that he will not let anyone else's timeline decide how his family opens this door."
She heard him end the call. She came to the doorway, dressed now, her own hands steady, and he turned and looked at her with the quiet resolve she had come to rely on more than she probably should have.
"Whatever is behind the gate," he said, "we are not walking toward it alone."
"No," said Leah. "We're not."
Karam carried the sandalwood in the crook of his arm, wrapped in a fold of his coat, as one carries bread. At the corner of the lane Leah looked back once at the guesthouse window, at the dark room and the stuttering fan and the narrow bed where she had said three sentences to nobody. Then they went out into the lane together. It was twenty to seven, and the light lay long and gold on the whitewashed walls, and somewhere in the town a bell was ringing, slowly, for no reason that either of them could name.