Part Three — The Trial Proposed · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Twenty-Two
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 28
The three dogs were waiting at the corner when Karam came out at six, as they had waited every morning for a week.
He could not have said where they had come from. They were thin and yellow-gray and entirely unremarkable, one with a torn ear, one with a limp, one so small that it seemed to have been assembled from the leavings of the others. They had attached themselves to him on the second morning of his walks, at a distance of about ten paces, and had not once come closer. They never begged and never growled at the boys who ran past. They simply followed, and when he stopped they sat down in the road, in a row, and looked at a spot a little beyond his left shoulder, with an air of having been instructed to wait there.
He had mentioned it to Leah. She had said that it was probably the bread. He had been carrying a piece of flatbread in his coat for three days, in case, and the dogs had never once looked at his pocket.
"It is a coincidence," he told them this morning, in Arabic, because it seemed the more respectful language. "Strays follow people. It is what strays do."
The dog with the torn ear regarded him, without comment, and lay down.
He took the long way, by the baker's, and the school where a boy in a white cap was sweeping the yard, and the stationer's, which opened late. He stopped there. It was a narrow shop with a glass counter, run by a woman of seventy in a gray cardigan. It sold school exercise books and ink and postage stamps and, in a case by the till, a small number of pens.
He had been looking at one of them for a week.
It was a brass pen, thick, with a barrel of black enamel and a clip in the shape of a small leaf. It wrote, according to the card, in three colors, which a lever on the side selected. The woman said that it was the most reliable pen she had ever sold, and that she had no idea why she still stocked it, because nobody under fifty had asked for one in a decade.
"I will take it," Karam said.
"For a lawyer?"
"For a lawyer. She is ten. Tonight she is eleven."
"Ah." The woman wrapped it in tissue paper with the economy of long practice at wrapping things for daughters. "She will want to know why her father bought her a pen in India."
"She will want to know," he said, "a great many facts."
The call went through at a quarter past nine, on the roof of the guesthouse, under a sky that was clear and dark and thickly set with stars.
He had chosen the roof for its privacy. It was a flat concrete terrace with a low parapet, a water tank, a line of washing, and a broken chair that nobody ever sat in. Below, the lamps of the town went off along the road toward the sanctuary. Somewhere to the east, if he stood at the right corner, there was a smell of the sea. Leah was in the room downstairs with Ani, working through a list of names for the gate. Cho was at the end of the east lane. Vartan, he knew, was at the kitchen table, being funny at the widow, who had begun to laugh at him in spite of her principles.
It was a quarter to six in Beirut. Karam dialed the number of his own kitchen.
It rang four times. Then there was a click, and a voice said, in English, with a flatness that had not yet decided what tone to take, "Hello, Karam."
He had known that she would be there. He had known it for nine days, since the message from Salwa, in her slow ceremonious Arabic. The ten days she had promised were ending, she said, and she was an old woman, and someone else had telephoned. He had known it all along. That had not helped.
"Nadia," he said.
"Don't thank me. I'll know if you're about to."
"I was not."
"You were. You breathed in." She gave a short, unamused breath. "I came ten days ago. I got Salwa's call and I looked at the clock, and I looked at the calendar, and I thought, I'll go for ten days and see. It's been ten days. Rita's got me doing her sweater campaign. She's lost the argument and she knows it's temporary. Elie's wearing a colander."
"It is his helmet."
"I know what it is." A pause. In the pause he heard, quite distinctly, the kitchen: the hum of the refrigerator, a pan on the stove, the thin high song of a child who was not supposed to be singing. It was the sound of his own home with another person in it, and it struck him so hard that he put his free hand flat against the parapet. "You haven't asked me what the book is. I know you better than you think."
"I did not ask you to come."
"No. Salwa did." The flat voice softened a little, and hardened again. "I didn't come for the book, Karam. I'd like that understood. I came because a woman of sixty-eight telephoned me in Montréal at seven in the morning and said, in front of God, that she could not go on lying to your children about when you were coming back. I did not know what the lie was. I came."
"Thank you."
"I told you."
"I know. I am sorry. I could not stop."
He heard her laugh. It was not much of a laugh. It was the exhausted one that he had loved in another life, and it undid him a little.
"She's here," Nadia said. "She's been standing next to me since you rang, pretending to look for a cup. It's her birthday, in case you've forgotten."
"I have not forgotten."
"I know you haven't. I bought the cake." The phone moved. "Here."
"Baba."
She was a good deal closer to the phone than she needed to be. He could hear her breathing. In his mind, with the clarity of long habit, he saw her in the gray sweater, in the kitchen, with her chin raised, ready to be argued with.
"Happy birthday, Rita."
"I'm eleven."
"You are eleven."
"It doesn't feel any different. I thought it might." There was a pause, and the sound of an object being shifted. "Mama got me a book on constitutional law. It's for adults. I'm reading the second chapter. Elie wants you to know that he's bought you a present and he won't say what, and it has to do with a submarine."
"I shall be afraid."
"You should be." She said it with enormous satisfaction. "Baba. I've got my question."
"I thought that you might."
"I've had it for a long time. I almost asked it a week ago, and I said I'd wait till today, because that was the deal. One question. And you tell me the truth, even if you can't tell me all of it."
"Yes."
"And you tell me when you can't."
"I will tell you when I cannot tell you all of it. I will not lie to you. And I will not pretend that there is nothing behind the door." He had said it on a bench, under a jacaranda, with his little finger crooked in the air. He said it again now, in the dark on a roof in a country he had never expected to see, and found that his voice did not shake. "Ask."
There was a silence. In it he heard the refrigerator, and the pan, and under them, so softly that he was never sure afterward that he had heard it, a woman at the other end of the kitchen going still.
"Is the secret the reason Mama left?" Rita said.
He held still.
It was a small voice. It was not the voice of the lawyer. It was the voice of a child who had carried a question for six years, since before she could say it, and had found, at last, the exact number of words it needed. Behind him the town lay under its lamps, and the water tank ticked as it cooled. The three dogs had come, he found, up the stairs. They lay in a row at the edge of the roof with their chins on their paws.
I will not lie to you.
"Yes," Karam said. "It is part of the reason."
"Part."
"I am going to tell you what is true, and then I am going to tell you what I cannot say. Please listen to the whole of it." He drew a breath. "The book is a part of the reason. It was in the house. There was a matter in it that I could not tell your mother, because I was told, as a young man, that I could not tell anyone. I kept it from her for years, and she knew that I was keeping it, and it stood between us like a wall that neither of us was permitted to name. That is true."
"That's the part."
"That is a part. It is not all of it, and it is not the largest part." He closed his eyes. "Your mother left for reasons of her own. Some of them were mine. I was not a good husband in the time that I had. I was cautious, and quiet, and I kept my own counsel, and I mistook that for a kind of strength. She asked me for years to let her in, and I could not, and in the end she went. I will not say more than that. The rest is hers to tell, and she may tell you when you are older, and she may not, and it will be her right."
"So the secret wasn't why."
"The secret was one of the walls. It was not the reason that she left. She left because of what the wall did to us." He heard himself, and was astonished at how steady it was. "I cannot tell you all of it. I have told you what I am able to tell. I am sorry. I should have said it to you before."
The line was quiet for a long time.
"Okay," Rita said at last.
"Okay?"
"Okay." The word was thin and clear. "That's a good answer. It's true. I can tell it's true because you said it was a part and not the whole, and a liar would've said it was the whole one way or the other." She took a quick breath. "Thank you."
"You are welcome."
"I'm going to ask a harder one next year."
"I expect that you will."
"I don't mean to be mean."
"You are not being mean. You are being a lawyer." He opened his eyes. The stars stood over the town, clear and close. "Rita. It is not time for the other thing. Not yet. Sixteen. Perhaps sooner. I am less sure of the number than I was. But not yet."
"I know." A pause. "I'm not asking."
"I know that you are not."
"I just wanted to say that I could wait, Baba. I'd like it if you knew that. It's not that I can't."
He found that he could not answer. He sat down, heavily, on the broken chair, which held, and put his hand over his eyes.
"There is a pen," he said, when he could. "I bought you a pen. It writes in three colors. A woman in a shop said it was the most reliable pen she had ever sold."
"Three colors."
"A lever on the side. Black, blue, and a sort of red."
"That is the best thing I've ever heard." Her voice had a rush in it now, a child's again, high and fast and happy. "Can I use the red for corrections? Mama says that's what red's for. I'm going to mark Elie's spelling. Baba, can you stay on? Mama wants a word."
"Habibti—"
But there was a click, and a shuffle, and then another voice, lower, and close.
"He's telling the truth," Nadia said. She sounded as though she was speaking to the ceiling rather than to him. "I want you to know I heard that. I didn't think you could do it. I thought you'd go round it. You never could say a sentence that began with I was not a good husband."
"I had not said it before."
"No." A pause. "I'm not going to make a scene of it. It's her birthday. But thank you. For not going round."
"Nadia."
"What."
"When I come home—" He stopped. He could not find the end of the sentence. It had come out of him whole, and he could feel it standing in the air between two kitchens, and he had no notion what he would put after it.
"Come home first," said Nadia. It was not unkind. "Then we'll see what the sentence is."
He sat on the roof a long while after she had gone.
The dogs had not moved. The smallest one, he saw, had crept closer in the dark and lay with its nose almost against his shoe. He left it alone. It seemed to him that touching it would be a trespass. After a time the stairwell door opened, and Leah came up, quietly, in her gray scarf, with two glasses of tea.
She said nothing. She put one glass on the parapet beside him and sat down on the concrete with her back against the water tank and the other glass in both hands. They drank in the dark.
"Did she ask?" Leah said at last.
"She asked the question that I should have answered five years ago." He turned the glass. "I answered it. It was not the question that I feared. I had prepared for the other. I had thought it would be about the book."
"What was it?"
"Whether the secret was why her mother left."
Leah did not speak for a time.
"What did you say?"
"That it was part. And that it was not the largest." He looked at his hands. "I told her that I was not a good husband. I had never said it aloud. I find, now that I have, that it does not weigh what I thought. It weighs a great deal less than the not-saying."
"That sounds like Delnaz."
He turned his head.
"What she said to us in the first hour," said Leah. "That she'd found a family that kept the same charge and came to the opposite conclusion. And that she didn't know what to do with the fact that we'd been taught concealment and were still alive." She drank. "I think that she's only half right. I think that we are alive because somebody in each of our families, at some point, failed at concealment. Lianna told you. You told me. And now you've told Rita."
"I told her one answer."
"That's all anyone's ever told anyone." She put her glass down. "It's what a witness is, Karam. It's one person saying this is true, to another, in a room."
He thought about it. Below them, in the road, somebody was singing in Gujarati, a thin, wavering tune, and a door shut on it. The three dogs raised their heads together and looked toward the sound, and settled again.
Karam stood. He put his tea down on the parapet, beside Leah's, and laid two fingers on the cool rough edge of the concrete. He held them there for the length of one breath. He had done it every morning for eleven years, before the coffee, to a shelf in Beirut. He had not done it since the day he left. He had missed it, and had not known that he missed it, and had thought it a weakness.
It was not a weakness. He took his hand away.
"Come," he said. "It is late, and we have a house to fill."
They went down, and the dogs came after, ten paces behind, in a row.