Part Three — The Trial Proposed · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Twenty-One
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 24
The slow train from the south came into the halt at eleven, forty minutes late, and Leah saw Vartan before she saw anyone else.
He was leaning out of a carriage door with one hand on the rail, in a pale suit that had been slept in, with a laptop bag on his shoulder. He wore the expression of a man betrayed by a railway. He saw her on the platform and raised the other hand in a gesture of such exhausted triumph that she laughed aloud. Behind him, stepping down with a leather folder against her chest, came Ani.
They had not met in the flesh for more than a year. Leah had thought, in the guesthouse that morning, about how to stand. She had thought about whether to say I'm sorry first, and in what voice. She need not have bothered. Ani put the folder down on the platform, took two steps, and put both arms round her, and held on.
"You went," Ani said into her shoulder.
"I did."
"I told you to wait."
"You did."
"I would have gone." She stood back and took Leah by both elbows. She looked as she always looked, small and square and warm, with her hair pushed back and a pencil behind one ear. But she had gray under the eyes, from sitting up with a sum. "I want you to know that. I needed someone to say wait, and I needed to be the one who said it, because it was the right thing to say. And I knew while I was saying it that I'd have walked through the door the minute I got the message. I've been furious with myself for four days. I'd decided that if you hadn't gone, I'd have had to."
"That's the most Ani thing I've ever heard."
"Thank you." Ani picked up the folder. "Where's Karam? Is he angry?"
"He's at the guesthouse. He's making tea. He says he's not angry, and he's been stirring the same glass for ten minutes."
"That's angry."
"He'd say it was concern."
Vartan had come down the steps behind them with the laptop bag banging against his hip. He looked about him at the single platform and the crooked sign, and at the line of low whitewashed houses beyond the track. An old man in a white cap sat on a bench in the sun, reading a newspaper folded to the size of a handkerchief.
"I want to say one thing before we begin," he said. "I have traveled two thousand kilometers in two days to attend a religious hearing in a town that has one road. It is the best train I've ever been on. I have never been so grateful to anyone for anything as I am to the man who sold me a banana at the last stop." He bowed to the platform at large. "Leah. You look terrible. I love you. Where is the tea?"
Cho was in the guesthouse courtyard, under the neem tree, with a glass of tea and her feet on an upturned bucket.
Leah saw her from the door, and stopped, and Ani, behind her, stopped also.
She wore the navy coat Leah remembered. She had not, apparently, slept. She sat in the dappled shade, still. She had been awake for a day and a half and had learned to make that look like rest. She looked up. She had a plain square face, and the dark steady eyes that had once watched Leah open a folder.
"Erin," Leah said.
"Leah."
They looked at each other. It was absurd, she thought. She had not expected to see this woman again outside a room that did not exist. She had certainly not expected to find her under a neem tree in Gujarat with her feet on a bucket.
"I'm on leave," Cho said. "Before you ask. I took three weeks. It's on the form."
"Whose form?"
"Mine." She swung her feet down and stood. She was not tall. She shook Leah's hand once, briskly, as she had on the first day, and then, without warning, took her by the shoulder and held it for a second longer than the handshake required. "You look like hell."
"People keep telling me."
"They're right." She nodded to Ani and Vartan, who were standing in the doorway with the faces of two people attempting not to ask questions. "I'll introduce myself in a minute. First I want to say what I'm here for, so nobody wonders. I'm not here for my people and I'm not here for Livnat's. I'm here because Ronen asked me, and he asked me by not asking, which is how he does it. I can watch a lane. I'm good at it. I'm going to sit at the end of this one and I'm going to tell you if anybody comes who doesn't belong. That's it. That's the job."
"Who might come?" Ani said.
Cho looked at her for a moment, and Leah saw her weigh it.
"Livnat's holding her team till the day after the hearing," she said. "That's solid. Katz bought it. Past that I can't tell you anything, and I'd ask you not to ask. I won't lie to you. I'll just not answer." She put her glass down on the bucket. "If I'd known what I'm going to find out in the next nine days, I'd have taken longer leave."
Nobody said anything. A sparrow came down on the rim of the bucket and looked at them all, and went away.
"There's one other thing," Cho said. "The house. It's got a gate and a wall and an old man. It hasn't got a back way. There's a lane on the east that runs to the sea, and I think that's the one that matters. I'd like to see it before dark."
"I will take you," Karam said.
He had come out of the kitchen behind them with a tray, formal and silent and gray in the face. He set the tray on the table. He looked at Ani, and then, for a long moment, at Leah, and she saw that he was not angry, and that it had cost him more than anger would have. He inclined his head to her. It was a gesture of such grave courtesy that she nearly wept.
"I stirred it too long," he said. "I am sorry. Please. Sit."
They went to the green door at four.
Delnaz opened it herself. She had been waiting, Leah thought. She stood in the opening with the iron key on its cord against her breast. Her glance went from face to face, Ani with her folder, Vartan with his bag, Karam, herself, with the exactness that had unnerved Leah in the first hour. It stopped on Ani.
"Ms. Manukian."
"Dr. Panthaki." Ani put out her hand. She had left the folder behind. "I'm not a doctor. I'm Ani. I've come because you asked us."
It was the first of the sentences, and she said it without a flourish, in the plain warm voice that Leah had known for a year and a half. Delnaz took the hand. She held it a moment, with her head slightly on one side.
"I read your letter in the room," she said. "I did not expect it to be signed."
"We all signed it."
"Yes. That was why." The ghost of a smile touched the corner of her mouth. "My aunt will give you tea. I have told her that she is to be gracious. It may take several attempts."
They sat, in the sitting room, on the cushions, in the lamplight. Framroze received them in his white, and welcomed each in turn, with the same slow courtesy. Roshan poured. She poured tea for Ani with the hot milk and the sugar, in the old white cups. She set it down with a small, hard click, and looked at her niece with an expression of graciousness under protest, meant to be thanked.
"We have brought nothing to show you," Ani said, "but ourselves."
It was the second sentence. Leah saw Vartan, beside her, press his lips together. He was looking at the floor.
"We came because you asked us," Ani said. "We have brought nothing to show you but ourselves. And we would like you to tell us when to stop."
Framroze looked at her for a long time.
"That is a better sentence than any I have received in sixty years of priesthood," he said at last. "I shall put it in the chronicle, if my granddaughter will allow me."
"I'd be honored," Ani said, and Leah realized that she meant it, and that the old man could tell.
"There is one more," Vartan said, quietly.
He had put his shoes by the door. He sat now with his hands loosely on his knees, like a defendant who has decided to plead guilty and not yet told the judge. He looked up. He looked, first, not at the old man but at Delnaz.
"My aunt told me to say this, Dr. Panthaki, and I'd like to be clear that I would have said it anyway. She asked what I wanted from you. And I'm going to tell you, as I told her."
He told it. The message from the camp, rice for two days. The compliance officer who had slept well. The ten minutes. He told it flatly, without self-mockery, with only the faintest roughness in his voice, and when he had finished he sat looking at his hands.
"I am telling you," he said, "because it's what the people who came here before us would have wanted. Not all of them. Some. It's what the family I belong to wanted for four hundred years and learned to be ashamed of. I'd rather you knew."
Delnaz did not answer at once. She had put her cup down. She sat with her narrow hands folded in her lap, regarding him with an expression that Leah could not read.
"Ten minutes with a compliance officer," she said.
"Yes."
"I have had the same wish about the municipal drainage authority for years." She said it with perfect gravity. "I have never been able to find a moral objection to it."
There was a silence. Roshan, at the door, made a sound like a kettle beginning to boil and put one hand over her mouth. Vartan began, slowly, to laugh. Ani laughed. Framroze, shaking his head, said, "I am going to be ill." For a moment the whole room shook with it in the lamplight, a tide of relief so complete that Leah had to put her cup down.
"Thank you," Delnaz said, when it had passed. She wiped her eyes with one finger. "I think that is the first thing in this house in three years that has been said aloud which was also true."
They worked out the protocol in the next two hours.
It was Leah who had thought hardest about it, and who had been dreading it. She had spent the previous evening at the guesthouse table with a legal pad and a pencil, listing what could go wrong, until Karam took the pad from her and put a glass of tea in her hand. The danger did not need listing. It needed a rule.
"I want to say what I believe the safeguard is," she said, when the tea had been cleared. She sat forward, on the edge of her cushion, with her hands on her knees. "Not what I hope. What I believe. Because I've spent a long time in a family that thought the safeguard was secrecy, and I watched it nearly kill us."
"Go on," said Framroze.
"The safeguard is witnesses." She heard her own voice steady. "Not hiding. Not guards, not a locked door. The reason this has stayed safe in your house for a thousand years, and in Karam's for four hundred, isn't that nobody knew. It's that the few who knew were always in a room together. Your family has a saying that it keeps, Dr. Panthaki. You read it to me last night. No one wears this alone, in secret. It's not a rule about the garment. It's a rule about us."
"Witnesses," said Framroze slowly.
"How many?"
"The doctrine says those who understand what they are about to see." His beard moved. "In the old tellings, eleven. I have thought that it should be eleven."
"Then I want more."
He looked at her.
"I want eleven in the room, as the doctrine says. And I want the town to know that an event is happening at this house on that day. Not what. Not that it's a trial, or a garment, or any of it. Only that the house has asked its neighbors to be present, and that the gate will be open." She drew breath. "I think that anyone who comes to take it by force will find that harder if three hundred people have been told to expect a gathering. I think that whoever's behind Nassiri, and whoever's behind the man in the blue shirt, will find it harder to arrive at a house that has invited the street."
There was a pause. In the corner, Roshan had stopped pouring.
"The town knows already," Delnaz said. "They watch the street."
"Then let them watch from the inside."
Framroze turned the idea over, with the precise slowness with which he turned everything. Leah waited. She did not look at Ani, or Karam, or the clock on the wall.
"It is not the custom," the old man said.
"No."
"It would make a private matter public."
"It would make a witnessed matter witnessed." She heard how that sounded and kept going. "I know that it's not the doctrine as it was written. But I think the doctrine was written by someone who had just watched a king answer a fleet with a bowl of milk. I think she understood that an act done where everyone can see it is safer than an act done where no one can. I think she'd have wanted the street."
Delnaz had gone still. She was looking at the floor.
"Gulnar," she said. "She wrote that the practice must be offered in front of witnesses who could destroy you for offering it. She did not say they must be few."
"No," said Framroze. "She did not."
He sat for a time with his hands folded. Outside, a bell had begun to ring, slowly, in the sanctuary, and the lamp ticked, and somewhere in the house a door closed gently.
"We shall invite the town," he said, at last. "Not to the room. To the gate. The room is eleven. The gate is whoever will come." He looked at Roshan. "You will see to it, Roshan, in your own way. You will say that the house is holding an assembly, and that it would be an honor."
"I shall say it is a prayer meeting," Roshan said. She looked, Leah thought, as if she had been asked to break the law and had decided, with a sort of grim happiness, that she was glad. "People will bring food. They always bring food."
"Then it is settled." Framroze unfolded his hands. "Ms. Manukian. Dr. Sarkisian. Mr. Yonan, Mr. Manukian. You will stand in the room with the others. And your friend who sits at the end of the lane" — he inclined his head, with the faintest edge of humor — "may stand wherever she is most useful."
"She'll like that," Ani said.
"I should hope so. She has not slept in two days."
In the days that followed, the house began to fill.
It happened quietly. A priest arrived from Navsari, a stout cheerful man with a bag of sweets, who was shown into the front room and did not come out for an hour. A cousin came from Bombay by the early train. Two aunts, whom nobody had mentioned, turned up with a tiffin of lentils and a determination to rearrange the kitchen. The pilgrim houses along the road, which had stood half empty for a year, began to open their shutters one by one, as though an old obligation had been remembered. Roshan went from door to door in a gray sari with a list. The sweet shop in the square put out a sign that said Assembly at the Panthaki house, all welcome, and nobody asked what for.
Ani and Vartan took a room at the guesthouse. Vartan spent most of each day at the widow's kitchen table with his laptop and a battery pack, moving small amounts of money through accounts that looked dull, and cursing, in Armenian, the sanctions guidance of two continents. A second transfer was flagged within the week. He solved it, with a fourth account and a letter from a bank in Yerevan, and announced it to the room with the quiet pride of a general who had won a small war. Ani sat across from him with a pencil, working out sums on the back of a menu.
Karam walked. Each morning at six he walked the whole town by a different route. He came back with news of the baker and the school and the three stray dogs that had begun, for reasons he could not explain, to follow him.
Cho sat at the end of the east lane with a folding stool she had bought in the market and a book she did not read. She came back at dusk with a report that said the same thing each time. Nothing. A boy on a scooter, same one. He goes round the end twice and leaves.
"He doesn't come nearer," she said one evening, over rice. "I don't think he's meant to. I think he's meant to be seen."
"By whom?"
"By us." She spooned dal. "Somebody wants us to know there's a watcher. I don't like that. Anyone who wants to be seen has got a second man you can't."
Katz called every evening. He called at ten, which was half past six in Tel Aviv, and he said the number first, as other men say good evening. Nine. Eight. Seven. He said nothing else. He had no need to. Leah would stand at the guesthouse window with the phone at her ear, and listen to him breathe, and watch the sun go down over the roofs of a town that had put out a sign.
On the last of those evenings he said, Six, and then, after a pause, in a different voice, "Leah. Tell Erin. The Director's aide has booked seven seats to Mumbai for the morning after. They are in the name of an agricultural delegation."
"Seven."
"Yes."
She put the phone down. Through the window the lamps were coming on, one by one, along the road to the sanctuary, and in the dark above the roofs the first stars were showing. She counted, as she had counted at nine years old the days to a birthday. She counted what she knew, which was six, and what she did not, which was everything else.