Part Three — The Trial Proposed · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Seventeen
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 21
The gate was locked, and Delnaz unlocked it.
Leah noticed the key before she noticed anything else. It was a large iron key on a cord. Delnaz turned it in the lock with a small stiff movement of the wrist, as one handles an instrument one seldom uses. The green door swung inward on a courtyard with a peepal tree in it. It was ten o'clock exactly. Beside her, Karam stood with his hands folded in front of him, as he had stood at a hundred doors, and said nothing.
"My grandfather will take you into the room," Delnaz said. "Not the sitting room. The room itself." She looked at neither of them. "He has not done it for a stranger before."
"We are grateful," said Karam.
"You should not be grateful. You should be wary." She said it without a smile, and Leah liked her a great deal. "Come."
The room was smaller than she had pictured. She had pictured, she realized, from one letter and her own sleepless imagination, a room like the Beirut library or a minor archive in Leiden: high shelves, a gallery, a ladder. This was twelve paces by five. It had a table and two chairs and four cabinets of letters, and a lamp that was lit although it was daylight. A single narrow window gave on the east. At the north end, in the shadow, stood a fifth cabinet, smaller than the rest, of a wood so dark that it seemed to absorb the lamp.
Leah did not look at it for long. She looked at the table, where Framroze sat with a box before him and his hands flat on its lid, and she felt the draught.
It was only a draught. It came from the north end of the room, along the floor, cool against her ankles, though the window was shut and the door behind them closed. An old house breathes. She had stood in a hundred such rooms. She noted it, as she noted everything, and put it with the rest, and sat when she was bidden.
"I told you that I would tell you what we do," said Framroze. "I have been thinking since yesterday how to begin, and I find that I cannot begin with what we do. I must begin with why."
He spoke slowly, with long pauses, in the formal English he had learned from books and from an exacting father and had never found a reason to relax. He consulted no notes. There were none. Delnaz sat on his left, with a pencil and a pad that she did not use.
"You have told us that your family keeps a record," he said. "A ledger, and a discipline, and a sentence that you were told never to say aloud. And that the thing the record describes was, in your family's time, lost."
"We believe it's gone," Leah said. "It was in a mountain, and the mountain fell."
"We believe a great many things." He folded his hands. "Mine kept the other. It has been kept in this house for as long as the house has stood and in other houses before that. The earliest of our writing is three hundred years old. The earliest of our telling is older than I can say. I was taught, as my father was taught, that we do not know how old. I was taught that I was not to pretend we did."
He paused.
"There was a question, in the early days. It was asked in a courtyard, the story says, by a young man who wished to put the thing on before an army. He was prevented. He died. His sister carried it away. For three hundred years the question was carried with it. Then when, if not now. And my ancestors, on a beach, in a bad year, watched a king send a bowl of milk."
"Delnaz told us," said Leah. "The bowl."
"Then you know that we did not answer him with a weapon. We answered him with a practice." Framroze turned his hands over. "I will give it to you as it is written. When two persons hold a legitimate claim against what the house keeps, and cannot both be satisfied, and both are willing to be seen as they are, the house shall not judge between them in private. It shall offer them the trial, openly, before witnesses who understand what they are about to see. One of the two shall be of the house, and shall be the keeper of the record. And it shall abide by what is seen."
"By what is seen," Leah said.
"The garment does not judge. You will know that, from your own tradition. It answers the one who wears it, in the sight of whoever is there, and it answers honestly, and it does not ask whether the honesty is welcome. A trial is only a way of letting two people be answered at once, in a room, with others watching, so that neither can say afterward that the house was partial." He looked at the cabinet. "It has been asked for once in writing. In the time of the third hand. A man named Vakil asked, and was answered. I do not wish to speak of what followed. You may read it, if my granddaughter permits, when the hour is fitting."
"And before that?"
"The telling says that at Sanjan it was tried twice, in small matters. It does not say what was seen." He almost smiled. "I take that to mean that it was not remarkable."
Karam, who had not spoken, leaned slightly forward.
"Who may ask?" he said.
"Anyone with a claim."
"What is a claim?"
It was an excellent question, and Leah saw Delnaz look up from her pad at the man, with new attention. Framroze inclined his head.
"That is exactly what I have been turning over since yesterday. The doctrine says legitimate. It does not say what makes one so. Those who wrote it lived at a time when they supposed the matter would be obvious." He spread one hand. "I think a claim is the standing of someone who holds a garment, or has held one, or is held to one. A person who has put one on. A line that has kept one. Someone to whom the thing is not a story."
"We hold a record," said Leah.
"You hold a record of a charge you do not have. That is a claim of a kind. A light one." He said it without unkindness. "I do not say that you could not ask. I say only that, if you did, the house would have to consider what it was being asked."
"We're not asking," Leah said. "I want to be clear. We came to tell you what we know. That's all. I don't think my family has the standing to ask for anything, and I wouldn't want it if we did."
"Then you have done what the doctrine has seen, I think, rarely." Framroze looked at her with his old strong eyes. "A visit without a claim. We shall see who comes with one."
The box on the table was of plain dark wood, scuffed at the corners, with a brass clasp. It was the first of nine, he said. He opened it himself, with the slowness of one who has done it a thousand times and still does it as if for the first.
Inside lay a single leaf of vellum, much handled, folded once. He lifted it out with two fingers and laid it on a cloth in front of Delnaz.
"My granddaughter will read it. She reads better than I do now. The hand is the first hand, and the language is old Gujarati, mixed with older words, and I do not trust my eyes."
Delnaz drew the pad aside. She put on a pair of narrow glasses, and bent over the leaf, and read in a low, even voice, translating as she went. It was the voice, Leah thought, in which she must have read it a thousand times to herself, and never once aloud.
"These are the words of the first keeping, as they were told to me by my mother, who had them from hers. We know only the name of the first mother. She was Ashira, who carried it out of the land of Shinar at the word of her grandfather, whom some call Shem. We do not say what he was. We say that she was sixteen."
Leah did not move.
Shem. She felt the name go through her. She knew the name. He was one of the sons of Noah. It stood in the ninth chapter of Genesis, in a verse she could have recited at three in the morning, where two brothers took a garment and laid it on both their shoulders and walked backward to cover their father. A garment. A single word. Simlah. She had read it for twenty years as a simple piece of drapery. Now it lay in her mind like a sentence turned over.
"Go on," she said, in a voice she did not entirely recognize.
"We say that she was told: it is not to be hidden. It is not to be put on. She was told what it was made of, and that the telling could not be sworn. Those who come after are to say it as it was said. It was made from the Lie's leaving, as its brother was. Two coverings from one casting. They will know each other."
Delnaz stopped. The lamp ticked. Nobody spoke.
"That is the first leaf," Framroze said, at last. "It is the whole of the first leaf. The rest of the chronicle is what came after."
Leah found that she had her hand pressed flat against her mouth. She took it away.
"The Lie," she said. "You say the Lie. Your word. Not serpent. Not Deceiver."
"We say druj. It is an old word. It means the Lie, the Opposite, that which stands against the truth." Framroze said it slowly. "We do not use it lightly. It is not the name of a beast. It is a name for what refuses to be what it is. I should not know how to say serpent in the sense you mean. I know only that the first leaf says leaving. Whatever the Lie left, when it went out of the first garden, was taken up and turned. That is what my mother taught me. I cannot swear to it. The leaf says that also, in its way. The telling cannot be sworn."
"Tell them," Delnaz said quietly. She was looking at Leah. "Tell my grandfather what you have."
"I haven't—" Leah stopped. She felt Karam beside her go still. She understood that if she said it she would be putting four traditions on a table in front of a family who had not asked for them, and could never take the words back. It was what she and Ani had promised each other. Both families on a page. It was also what she had spent her adult life learning not to do.
She said it.
"There's a text," she said. "A paraphrase of the Torah, into Aramaic. It's late, perhaps seventh century, perhaps earlier, and nobody knows who wrote it. It's called Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. When it comes to Genesis three, to the verse where God makes garments for Adam and his wife, it doesn't say skins. It says garments of glory. And it says they were made from the skin the serpent had cast off." She drew breath. "That's a rabbinic tradition. It's an interpretation. It's not proof of anything. It's what some people believed, a long time ago, about a verse that bothered them."
Framroze did not move. Delnaz had taken off her glasses.
"There's a second," Leah said. "In the ledger my friend's family keeps, there's a margin. It's old, older than the ledger. It says that when the Deceiver had done his work in the garden, he left his old skin behind, as a serpent leaves what it has outgrown, and that the Merciful made of that leaving a covering for the ones he had ruined. And on the last page of a copy made four hundred years ago, in a different hand, a woman wrote: Do not forget what it is made from. It is the enemy's leaving, turned by God into the first mercy."
"The enemy's leaving," Framroze said.
"Yes."
"And the first leaf says, the Lie's leaving."
"Yes."
"Four hands."
"Four traditions," Leah said. "I want to be exact about that word. They could be one, drifting. A story can walk a long way and change its clothes. Armenian monks and Persian priests and Aramaic rabbis have been talking to each other for two thousand years, whether they knew it or not. I can't tell you they're independent. I don't think anyone ever could." She heard her own voice rise and brought it down. "But I'll tell you the part I can't get past. It isn't the skin. I've known about the skin for years. It's the other half of your sentence. As its brother was."
"Two coverings," said Delnaz.
"From one casting." Leah turned toward her. "In Genesis it says kotnot. Plural. Coats. Garments. Everyone has always read it as the plural of a general word, a translator's habit, a language reaching for more than one. And in the Aramaic it says the garments were made of the skin. A single skin. One shedding." She laid her hand flat on the table. "And my family's page says there were two, made separately, each entire, each without a seam. And yours says two coverings from one casting. Two garments, from one skin. I've been reading that verse for twenty years, and no one ever asked the obvious question. Why would an enemy leave one skin, and why would God make two garments of it, and why would they be sent apart?"
"Because the one skin was enough for two," said Karam, quietly.
Leah looked at him.
"I am an importer of produce," he said. "I know about cutting one cloth for two buyers. It is not a mystery. It is only that nobody, in four hundred years, had put the two halves of the bolt in the same room."
Nobody spoke for some time. A fly had got into the room and was walking on the window glass. Somewhere out in the courtyard Roshan was sweeping, with a sound like a small animal in dry leaves.
"I wish to say one thing," Leah said at last, "so that I have said it, and nobody can say afterward that I didn't. This is a tradition. It's four traditions, perhaps, or one. It is not evidence that the thing is what it says it is. It's the opposite of that. If you wanted a reason to doubt the whole structure, you could not do better than four stories that agree. People tell the same story when they've heard the same story."
"That is what a scholar says," Framroze said.
"It's what I am."
"I say it also." He smiled at her, for the first time that morning, a slow, large, old smile. "I have been a priest for sixty years and I have never once said to a person that I was sure. It is not what we are for. We are not a house that has kept a certainty. We are a house that has kept a charge. Delnaz will tell you the word."
"Amanat," said Delnaz. "What is held for another."
"That is all that I know," Framroze said. "That it is not mine. That it was given to be held, by someone I cannot name, for a reason that I cannot swear to, and that the only honest answer to the question of what it is, is to say so. I have said it to nobody in sixty years. I find that it is a great relief to say it to you."
He put his hands on the table. They shook, slightly, and he looked at them with a faint surprise, as at the hands of an old acquaintance.
"Now. I will tell you what I think we must do."
He told them. It was brief, and Leah, listening, understood that it was the thing he had been turning over since the afternoon before, and that he had decided it in the night. If there was a man in Udvada, and if he wanted what Leah said he wanted, then he would not come to the gate to take. He would come to ask. Such men did. The doctrine was built on the premise that they would, because whoever has come near it once cannot easily rest. And when he asked, the house would be obliged to answer him.
"You are saying he may come to the gate," Karam said.
"I am saying that if he is what you fear, then I think he is already deciding how." Framroze looked at the north end of the room, at the dark cabinet. "I think that when he comes, we must not be afraid. I do not say that we need not be wary. I say that fear is the one thing the doctrine cannot use."
"And if he comes armed?"
"Then he will come armed to a house that has been answering such men for a thousand years." The old man's voice was gentle. "I am eighty-one, Mr. Yonan. I have not the knees to run. I shall stand at the gate."
Delnaz had gone white. She said nothing. Leah, glancing at her, saw her hand lay the pencil down on the pad as gently as if it might break.
It was past noon when they rose. At the door Leah turned back once, because she could not help it, and looked down the length of the room at the cabinet in its shadow. It stood where it had stood, a dark upright shape against the plaster. The draught had not changed. It came along the floor, cool, steady, from the north end, over the matting and her ankles and out under the closed door, as water goes out under a sill.
She went out into the courtyard and the light.