Part Four — The Trial · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 33
Framroze called a pause, and Nassiri found that he had been given a doorway.
It was the door at the end of the passage, a plain wooden one standing half open on the sitting room, and somebody had set a stool beside it. He could not tell who. It had been left for him, as one leaves a chair for a guest who has traveled a long way and must not be asked to sit among strangers until he has had a minute to himself. He went to it. He stayed on his feet.
He stood with one hand on the frame and the room at his back.
It was warm in the passage, and quieter. The old walls took the sound of the lane and gave it back as a murmur, a long way off. From behind him, through the open door, came the small noises of eleven people re-arranging themselves on cushions: a cough, a whispered question, the soft complaint of an old man's knee. And over all of it, in the air, thick enough to taste, lay the green scent. It had not lessened. It had settled, as dust settles, into every plank and corner, and he breathed it now with the whole of his chest, as one breathes after coming up from deep water.
He had not known that it could smell like that.
For thirty-four months it had smelled of him. He saw that now. He had lived so long inside the cloth's warmth that the faint cut-stem greenness had become the smell of his own skin, like the smell of a house one has lived in, and he had stopped noticing. Here, in a room where the other half lay shining on a table, it was a different smell altogether. It was larger than he had understood. It had a field in it. It had a morning.
His hands were warm. He looked at them. They were steady, and they were warm to the wrist, as if they had been held for a long time in someone else's.
Through the door at the end of the passage, in the sitting room beyond, the second door stood open on the courtyard. He could see a slice of it: the peepal, the sun on the whitewash, a woman's back going past with a covered dish. He could see the green door of the gate, standing wide. And beyond it, in the lane, a part of the crowd, the white and the saffron and the ordinary brown, standing in the sun in a silence he had not heard from a crowd in his life.
The road behind him was clear.
He saw it as he had seen every road in his career, whole, in an instant. A passage, a room, a courtyard, a gate. A lane that ran east, past a wall, to the foot of the town, where a green car would be standing with its engine off and its door unlocked. Nobody in the house would stop him. He knew that as he knew his own name. They had told him so, in the first hour, in the gateway, and he had believed them, and it was the only thing in the whole morning that he had not wished to be true.
You may go. We shall not follow.
He could be at the car in four minutes.
"You can go, you know," said a voice at his elbow.
It was the old man from the sandalwood stall.
Dinshaw had come down the passage without a sound. He was a small, thin, bald man in a clean white cap, with a face like a walnut and a pair of shrewd tired eyes. He stood a pace away with his hands tucked into his sleeves, looking not at Nassiri but at the courtyard through the far door, with the air of a man making conversation.
"Nobody here will stop you," he said in English. "I would not. I do not think that Framroze would. It is not a prison, this. It is only a room."
"I know that."
"I thought that you knew." The old man nodded slowly. "I have kept a stall at the foot of the sanctuary wall for fifty-one years. My father kept it before me. I have watched, in that time, perhaps ten thousand people come to the edge of the cleared ground, where the board says they must stop." He turned his head. "I will tell you what I have learned. Nearly all of them stop. It is a small matter. Nobody makes them. The wall is not high. They stop because the board is polite, and because someone has asked, and because they would, on the whole, rather be people who stop."
"I stopped because I was told to."
"That is how everyone begins." Dinshaw's walnut face creased. "I do not say more than that. I do not know what you carry. I do not wish to. I know that you came to the gate when you said you would, in daylight, with your hands where I could see them. I have sold sandalwood to a great many men who did not do that."
Nassiri said nothing.
"I will say one thing more, and then I shall go and sit down, because my knees are not what they were." The old man lowered his voice. "Framroze told me, when he asked me to come, that I was a great scoundrel who had never once in my life been wrong about a stranger. It is a large lie. I have been wrong about a number of them." He smiled. "But not about the ones who stayed."
He turned and went back down the passage, slowly, with one hand on the wall. At the door he paused, and looked round, and lifted two fingers in a short salute, and went in.
Nassiri stood a moment longer with his hand on the frame.
He had not heard the other man come.
A week before he would have said that this was impossible. He had spent his life listening for the step behind. But he was standing in a warm green passage, thinking about an old man's walnut face. When he turned his head, Karam Yonan was already there, perhaps four paces off, with his hands folded in front of him and his dark coat buttoned to the neck.
They had not spoken in eighteen months.
They had met in a lane, once, at an old woman's gate. He remembered a tall man sitting in the wet with his arm in a handkerchief, who said, in a formal voice, I would like to find out. He remembered a pistol taken from a glove box, and a priest who had given it back. He remembered a kitchen that smelled of tea and quince.
Karam looked older than he remembered. He was gray at the temples, and thinner, with a tired, exact face, long schooled in caution about small things. He came no closer. He stood where he was, and Nassiri understood that he was waiting to be told whether he might.
"Mr. Yonan."
"Colonel." Karam inclined his head. "I do not wish to intrude. I have been watching you from across the room for some minutes, and I thought that I should speak, and then I shall go."
"Say it."
"You will need both hands." He spoke slowly, as he did everything. "For what comes. I have not been told what it is. I know only that when someone is about to hold what he has carried for a long time, he will wish to have nothing else in his hands. And you are wearing a shirt, and a jacket, and a belt, and you are standing in a doorway." He paused. "I wished to ask whether you would permit me to hold your coat."
Nassiri looked at him for some time.
"Why would you do that?"
It was not an unkind question. He wished, quite simply, to know. He had been looking at faces for thirty years for the thing that lay under what they said, and he looked at Karam's now, in the lamplit passage, and could not find it. There was no calculation in it. There was no performance of courage, or forgiveness, or any of the other things that people put on to be seen putting on. There was only the same patient, level attention that he had seen at the gate of an old woman's house, and had not understood.
"Because there is no one else standing near you," said Karam, "who is not afraid of you. I find, this morning, that I am not." A faint wryness touched the long face. "I am surprised. I had expected to be."
The words did not seem to have come from anywhere in particular. They arrived in the passage and stayed there, quite plainly, like an object set down on a table.
"I tried to do you a harm," Nassiri said.
"Yes."
"I would have done it."
"I think that you would have. And I think that you did not, at the end, and that you have wondered about it since." Karam held out both hands, palms up, as one offers to take a coat. "I am not offering you forgiveness, Colonel. I do not have it to give. It is not mine. I am offering to hold your coat."
It was so small a gesture. Nassiri found that he could not speak.
He took off the jacket. He folded it once over his forearm, as he had folded jackets since he was nineteen, and held it out. Karam took it in both hands, with a small grave inclination of the head, and stepped back. He held it against his chest as one holds a sleeping animal.
"Thank you."
"It is a coat," said Karam.
He returned to the room.
They had arranged it while he was gone. The two lamps at the corners had been trimmed. The cushions had been drawn into a rough half circle along three walls, and the witnesses sat on them, or stood, in a hush so complete that he heard the lamp flames. The table stood in the middle of the floor, with the second covering lying on it, shining softly, as a lamp shines through a closed hand. At the north end, the old man stood beside his granddaughter, and the door of the cabinet stood open behind them, and the dark inside it was no longer dark.
Delnaz had not touched the cloth again. She stood with her narrow hands folded, and she was not looking at him. It was a courtesy, he realized. She was not watching him cross the floor. She was giving him, with great exactness, the privacy of an uncrossed space.
He stopped in the middle of the room.
He unbuttoned the shirt.
He had done it a hundred times in thirty-four months, in bathrooms and in lay-bys and in the dark. He had never done it in front of anyone. His fingers were not quite steady. He undid the first button, and the second, and the third, and the shirt fell open, and the light came out.
It came out like water through a broken dam. It was not painful. It was not even bright. It was simply there, all at once, in a quantity that the cotton had been holding back, a pale, soft, living radiance that rose from the whole of his chest and lit the room to the corners. He saw the faces turn toward him. He saw Roshan, at the door, put a hand over her eyes, and Ani bend her head. He saw the old priest from Navsari begin, softly, a prayer.
It lay against his skin as it had lain for thirty-four months, flat and folded and weightless, and he saw it, for the first time, in a light that was not his own.
Lozenges, he thought.
He had never looked. He had washed it in a bucket in the dark, and put it on in the dark, and told himself that it was a fine weave, a mercy of the cloth, a kind of silk. He had not seen, because he had not wished to see, that the surface was patterned. Row on row, the small close overlapping scales ran down it from the collar to the hem, each lying a little over the next, each holding its own point of white. They were exactly the size of a fingernail. They had been against his skin for nearly three years, and he had felt them, every night, and not known.
His mouth was dry. He found that his hand had gone, of its own accord, to the edge of the cloth at his throat.
There was a place, at the collar, where it had been mended. He had never noticed that either. It was a fine stitch, almost invisible, made by someone a long time ago with great patience. He looked at it with a strange, dull astonishment, as one looks at a stranger's handwriting in a letter meant for oneself.
Someone held this, he thought. Someone sat with a needle and held this, and was tender of it, and did not know me.
He drew a breath. It shook.
He lifted it away.
It came off his body, and the cold came after it, abrupt and total, to the bone, the cold of a winter he had not been in. He stood in the lamplit room with his shirt hanging open and his arms bare to the shoulders, in front of eleven people, shaking. He made no effort to hide it. It seemed to him that hiding it would have been a lie.
He held it in both hands.
It was lighter than air. It lay across his palms without any weight at all. As he lifted it, the light went out from it in a pale full circle and met the light on the table. The line of brightness that had hung between them in the air thickened and gathered and went from a thread to a rope. It did not frighten him. He looked at it. He looked across the lit floor at the second cloth, and the woman who stood beside it, and the old man, and the eleven faces turned toward him in the glow, wet and wondering and afraid.
He had not shown this to another living person in thirty-four months.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. He stood in the center of the room with his first covering held out before him in both hands, bare-chested, gray-faced, shivering. What he felt was not shame. It was so plain and so large that he had no word for it. He had carried a long way what he had thought was a weapon, and he found, in a room full of strangers, that it was a question.
"Colonel," said Framroze.
His voice was quiet. It came from the other end of the room, across the lit boards, and it did not tremble.
"Thank you. I know what that cost."
Nassiri could not answer. Karam stood by the door with the pale jacket against his chest, and gave a small nod. It was only a nod, the kind given when one has been asked to hold a coat.
Across the lit floor, Delnaz lifted her eyes.
"I held mine once at nine years old," she said. Her voice was low and carried to him without effort. "It weighed nothing. I thought that I had done it wrong. Colonel, what does yours weigh?"
He looked down at the cloth in his hands.
"Nothing," he said.
"Yes." She nodded, once. "I thought that it would."
It was the whole of the exchange. It was not an absolution, or a bargain, or a warning. It was two people comparing a measurement, across a room, in the light of the thing being measured, and he found that it steadied him more than anything that anyone had said to him in three years.
"Now," said Framroze, "before either of you does more, the witnesses must be bound."