Part Four — The Trial · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Thirty-One
Udvada, Gujarat, India — Day 35
They carried him in the old way, on the second morning, and Leah was not permitted to watch and did not ask.
She stood at the green door with the rest of the town and saw the white bier go out through the gate on the shoulders of six men. Roshan walked beside it in white, with her braid down and her face washed of everything. Delnaz walked behind, alone, with the iron key on its cord against her breast. Nobody spoke. The lane was full from wall to wall. When the bier had passed, the people closed in behind it as water closes over a stone, and followed it east, toward the sea, and the lane was quiet.
She went back into the courtyard and sat down at the cane table under the peepal. She had a legal pad, and two pencils, and a glass of water that Mrs. Daruwalla had set at her elbow without a word. She uncapped nothing. She looked at the pad.
Write it down. As it was. Do not improve it.
She had spent her adult life putting things down as they were. She knew the discipline well. It meant no adjectives that you could not defend. It meant giving the source with the claim, and the doubt with the source. It meant writing a witness reported and not it happened, and a pale light was observed and not a miracle. She had been taught it by a man at a long table in a basement room, and had taught it since to nobody.
She wrote, at the top of the page, the place, and the hour, and the names of the twelve who had been bound.
Then she stopped.
She had no way of writing the rest.
Cho found her there at ten, with the page still nearly blank.
She came in through the gate with a leather bag over her shoulder, in the navy coat, and stood on the stones for a moment looking at the peepal and the cane chairs and the dark place on the step. Then she crossed to the table and sat down across from Leah without being asked, and put the bag on the ground.
"I'm flying out at two," she said. "Mumbai, then Frankfurt, then home. I've written it. I wrote it last night, in the guesthouse, and I've sent it." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I thought you'd want to know what I put."
"I'd like to."
"It's three pages. I did it the way I was trained. Who, what, where, in order, no adjectives." She took out a sheet and read it flat, with the flat voice she used for the dangerous parts. "A religious gathering of approximately four hundred persons took place at a private residence in Udvada, Gujarat. At approximately 1830 local time a group of twenty armed men, accompanied by a uniformed police inspector carrying a notice of doubtful validity, attempted to enter the residence. The head of the household, an elderly priest, declined admission. He was shot and killed by one of the group. The group withdrew. A former Iranian officer, present at the gathering, surrendered himself voluntarily to a foreign official who was also present, and was taken from the scene." She lowered the paper. "Then there's a paragraph on the Pakistani liaison channel. I named the Brigadier, and the cutout in Mumbai, and the plates on the cars. I named the inspector. I said that the whole of it was done by contract and paid for through a channel that I could trace for the Brigadier's last three payments."
"That's all?"
"That's all that I saw."
"You didn't write about the room."
"Nobody asked me about the room." Cho's mouth moved. "I wasn't in it. I'm a witness of the street. If somebody asks me what I think was in the room, I'll tell them. I'll say I stood in a lane and smelled a garden, and watched a dozen street dogs lie down in a line, and saw the biggest crowd I ever saw in my life not run away from a gun." She shrugged. "They won't believe it. It's the best cover there is."
Leah laughed. It surprised her.
"I've got a feeling," said Cho, "that Washington's going to read three pages about a dead priest and a Pakistani brigadier and a state-sponsored contractor operation in a friendly country, and conclude that there's a large embarrassment, and that it isn't ours." She picked up the bag. "I've been wrong about Washington before. But I don't think I'm wrong about this."
"What happens to the Brigadier?"
"Ronen can tell you. He'll be on the phone to you before I'm at the airport." She stood. For a moment she looked at Leah, a short square woman in a navy coat, with tired dark eyes, and her face eased. "I'll say one thing and then I'm going. I've worked for a lot of people who thought the whole point of knowing was to be the one who knew. I'd forgotten there was another way to do it. I wanted to say thanks."
"For what?"
"For letting me count."
She held out her hand. Leah took it. It was brief and hard and exact.
"There's a bag," Cho said, at the gate, over her shoulder. "In the guesthouse by the station. The Colonel's. Mrs. Daruwalla's been holding it. She says there's an object in it that I ought to see to." She stopped. "I'd like Delnaz to decide what."
The bag was a canvas holdall, gray, a good deal worn. Mrs. Daruwalla had set it on the table in her front room, between a vase of marigolds and a photograph of her late husband, and when Leah came in with Delnaz she was standing behind it with her arms folded, like someone guarding a door.
"I have not opened it," she said. "I would not. I only know that it is heavy in one place."
Delnaz unzipped it.
There was little. Two shirts, folded. A razor. A bar of soap in a twist of paper. A notebook, black, small, with the corners worn through. A pair of socks, one of which had a hard square weight at its toe.
She took it out. She unrolled the sock. It was a flat tin box, about the length of her hand, with a rocket on the lid and the paint chipped away at the corners where a child's thumbs had worked it open.
Nobody spoke. In the next room, a clock ticked.
"He has not opened it in three and a half years," said Delnaz, quietly.
She did not open it now. She held it in both hands, and Leah, watching her, saw her do what she had done in a shuttered room with a pale cloth: stand quite still, and wait for the weight. Then she turned, and set it down gently in Leah's hands.
"You will be at the airport with Miss Cho," she said. "It is a long way. I would not ask, but I think that it should go with someone who was in the room." She drew a breath. "It should go to him. Wherever he is. I do not think that anyone has the right to keep it from him. He may open it. He may not. It is his to decide. But it should be there, on the table, when he decides."
"I'll make sure."
"I know that you will." Delnaz looked at the box a moment longer. "Eleven," she said. "All of them sharpened."
She turned to the notebook, then. She took it from the bag, the small black one with the worn corners, and turned to the back, and Leah saw the pencil lines, a short column in a small block hand. Soltani. Ghorbani. Two lines, and a third. Amir. Eleven.
She read it standing, with the small black book open on her palm. She turned it over once, as one turns over what one has no right to keep, and closed it, and put it back in the bag.
"That is his," she said.
"Yes," said Leah.
"It should go with the box."
"I'll take both."
"Thank you." Delnaz zipped the bag. She stood a moment with her hand flat on the gray canvas. "He wrote down the names of the ones he hurt. I think that is a more honest thing than most people do."
"Mrs. Daruwalla," she said, turning. "Thank you for holding it."
"It was nothing," said the widow, and burst into tears.
Katz called at noon.
She took it on the roof of the guesthouse, standing at the parapet where Karam laid two fingers each morning, with the box in her bag at her feet and the sea a pale line to the east. It was half past eight in Tel Aviv. She could hear the traffic in the street below his window.
"I am going to tell you in order," said Katz. "It is a habit. I do not apologize for it."
"Please."
"First. The Director has returned. She came back on a morning flight with the Colonel. The tall man was not with her. The Valsad police took him from the sea road at dawn, with the inspector and the inspector's clerk, who had asked to speak. She went to her office and closed the door. At nine she telephoned me." There was a pause. "She did not raise her voice. She said that she had made an error of judgment that would have to be accounted for, and that she wished the account to be made in a particular way. She wished that I should not testify to Rina Dayan's committee. She said that it would be better for everyone if I submitted my resignation by the end of the week, with full honors, and said nothing."
"What did you say?"
"I said no." He said it quite mildly. "I said that I had a letter, and a chronology, and a cable from an American officer, and that I intended to go before the committee on the day it sat and tell it as it was. I said that I would do it in the open, without adjectives. I said that I did not think that she would be able to prevent me." A small sound. "She said that she would think about it. I believe that she is thinking. I believe that she has found the limits of what a person may do in front of four hundred people with rice."
Leah closed her eyes. The sun was warm on her eyelids.
"Second. The Brigadier. Miss Cho's cable reached the American desk at three this morning. By six it had gone to a man in Islamabad whom I have known for thirty years, and by nine he had been on the telephone to me." Katz paused. "I am told that a brigadier of a certain service is to be recalled for consultations. I am told that these consultations are expected to be long. I am told that men who have been recalled in this fashion are generally found, within a year, at a post with a small number of telephones."
"That's all?"
"It is a great deal. It is the end of him." Katz's voice did not change. "There is a card in my pocket, Leah. You have seen it. It has had his name on it since the night a man called Doron died in a wadi, and I have carried it for almost three years. I have taken it out this morning. I have looked at it. I telephoned a tire shop in Haifa."
She waited.
"I said to Yair, it is not when. I said, it will not be when. It will not be, ever." He took a slow breath. "I said that someone who has stood in a lane with four hundred witnesses, and sat for hours in a chair listening, may be permitted to change a plan he has had for a long while. I said that I would rather the Brigadier lived to be asked, by a great many people, in a great many rooms, what he had done. I said that this was the better revenge. I do not know that it is. I know that it is the one that I can bear."
"What did Yair say?"
"He was silent for a time." Katz's voice moved. "Then he said, I am glad. I did not want to."
Leah put her hand over her mouth.
"I have burned the card," said Katz. "It took some time. It is a stiff card. I did it over the sink." A long pause. "Third. The Colonel."
She looked out at the sea.
"He is with us. He is in a room, with a table and two chairs, in a building you would not wish to visit. He has asked for nothing. He has been courteous, and exact, and he has told us a great deal. The Director sat with him for four hours. At the end of it she came out and said to me that she had never in her life been so thoroughly informed by someone who so thoroughly did not wish to be thanked." The small sound again. "He asked one question. He asked whether a woman called Delnaz Panthaki was well. I said that I had not been told otherwise."
"I've got a parcel for him."
"I know. Erin telephoned." He hesitated. "Leah. I should like it to be your hand that gives it. I do not think that he will mind who. I think that he will wish it to be someone who was there."
"I'll bring it myself."
"Thank you." A pause. "That is all that I have. I shall stay on the telephone, if you like."
"Ronen."
"Yes."
"I'm putting you in my pocket," said Leah.
He laughed. It was a thin, tired, genuine laugh, and she had not heard it in two years.
The cabinet was settled that evening.
It was not done in ceremony. Delnaz called Karam and Ani and Roshan into the room, and Dinshaw stood by the door, who had come with a bundle of sandalwood and been told that he might stay. The cabinet stood open at the north end of the room in the low gold light of the lamps. On its dark shelf the two coverings lay side by side in their linen, cream and cream, where Nassiri had laid them. Nobody had touched them since.
The room was quiet. The draught had gone. Leah noticed it only when she stood in the place where it had always been and felt nothing on her ankles. It was an old house, with an old cabinet, and a pair of folded cloths. It was a room that had done what it was for.
"I wish to say what is to be done," said Delnaz.
She stood in front of the cabinet in her plain dark dress with the key on its cord against her breast. She looked ten years older than she had a week before, and quite different. It was not that she was calmer. She seemed to have come to a place in herself where the questions that she had carried for fourteen years had been put down, one by one, like parcels.
"My grandfather held the key for sixty years. I have it now. I do not think that it should be mine alone." She lifted her eyes to Karam. "Mr. Yonan. You have kept a book for eleven years. Ms. Manukian, your family has kept an inheritance of words for four hundred. I should like the cabinet to have a second lock, and a second key. I should like that key to be held by the house at Chennai and the house at Beirut, in turn, a year each. And I should like the rule to be this." She paused. "That the cabinet is not opened except in the presence of the keepers of both houses, and at least eleven witnesses, and that what is seen at every opening is written down by someone who was there, and signed by both."
"Eleven," said Ani, softly.
"It is the number that the telling remembers."
Karam bowed. It was the old, grave, courteous bow. "We are honored," he said. "We shall keep it faithfully. I would add a clause, if I may. That the book I keep, and the chronicle you keep, be copied each into the other's house. So that neither of us is the only place where the sentence is."
"Yes," said Delnaz. "That is better. I should like that."
"It is a witness log," said Ani. She had her pencil behind her ear. "That's what it is. I'm sorry. I can't help it. Both families sign. Dated. In ink. I'll draw up the form."
"You will bring it tomorrow," said Delnaz, with the faintest touch of dryness, "and my aunt will find three things wrong with it."
"I would count on four," said Roshan, from the door.
It was the first time that she had spoken in two days. It was said in her old brisk voice, with her braid pinned up again in a tight coil and her eyes red. Delnaz looked at her. She crossed the room, and for a moment the two women stood facing each other in the lamplight. Then Roshan unfolded her arms, and Delnaz, without a word, put her own around her, and held on.
Leah looked away. She looked at the cabinet. On its dark shelf the two folded cloths lay quietly side by side, in the light of three lamps, as they had lain for the whole of the long day.
She wrote it that night at the cane table in the courtyard, under the peepal, by lamplight, with the town gone quiet round her and the stars thick overhead.
It took her until two. She wrote it as she had been taught. She gave the source with the claim, and the doubt with the source. She wrote that a pale light had been observed, by twelve persons, from a given hour, and that she could offer no explanation for it. She wrote that a scent, resembling a garden after rain, had been reported by approximately four hundred persons in the lane, and that she was one of them. She wrote what each of the two principals had said, as nearly as she could recall, and what had been shown. She set down that a priest of eighty-one years had been killed at his own gate by a man in the pay of a state, and that he had died, in her hearing, saying that it was a lovely evening.
She did not write that it was a miracle. She did not write that it was not.
She read it through, once, slowly, from the top.
It was not improved. That was the thing that she noticed. In all her years of putting things down she had never once finished a document without a faint wish to make it a little better, a little tidier, a little more likely to be believed. She looked at this one and found that the wish was gone. It was plain. It said what had happened, in order, and stopped. If it was a record of the most extraordinary day of her life, then it did not look like one.
She thought: he would have liked it.
She signed it. Then, below her name, in the space that she had left, she wrote, in a smaller hand, a line that she had not planned to write.
I was asked to write this as it was. I have tried. If I have failed, the error is mine, and it is the error of someone who was there and could not look away.
She put down the pencil.
Above her, in the dark, the peepal moved in a small wind off the sea, and the leaves made their dry whispering sound. Somewhere in the house a clock struck. In the room behind her, in a cabinet of black wood with two locks, two folded cloths lay side by side on a shelf. They had come together after more years than anyone could count, in a room in a town on a coast, with a ring of strangers round them, and they had been taken up and worn and put down again.
She was too tired to know what she felt. She sat for a long time with her hands in her lap.
It was only a morning, he had said. It was only the morning after.
She would, she thought, be ready for it.