Part Four — The Trial · Adam's Robe Book 3
Epilogue
Los Angeles, California — Eight months later
The journal came in a brown envelope, on a morning when the vent over her door was ticking like a clock, and Leah did not open it until she had finished her coffee.
It was a thin paper volume with a gray cover. She knew what it held. She had written the reader's report herself, in the third week after she came home, and had signed it with her name, which was against the custom. The source is unusual and cannot be verified by the reader. I have, however, had occasion to examine the family that holds it, and I believe it to be what the author says it is. I recommend publication without reservation. Margaret Lin had telephoned from Toronto when she read it. She had said, in her stately voice, that in thirty years of editing she had never received a referee's report that vouched for a source in the first person, and that she was going to allow it.
The article was on page nineteen. It was the one she had read nine months ago in the closet, with the grille breathing on her. A Sassanid inventory, a provincial treasury, a line item. A garment, whole, without division. Nothing in it had changed. The footnote on the next page was where it had always been, glossing a Middle Persian word as of one weaving, with no joining in it.
The author's name was printed at the head in plain type. Delnaz Panthaki, independent scholar, Udvada. Beneath it, in the acknowledgments, where a black bar had once stood, was a short paragraph.
I am grateful to the keepers of the household's records, who asked not to be named, and who have since agreed that I might name them. They are the families of Chennai and Beirut and my own, and the memory of Framroze Panthaki, who kept the key.
She read it through. Then she shut the journal and set it, with some care, on the corner of the desk, as one sets down a cup that is too full.
Katz called on the half hour, as he did every week. It was half past six in Tel Aviv, and he said so.
"I have testified," he said. "I am telling you at the beginning, because I think that you have been waiting."
"I have."
"It took four hours. I gave it in order, without adjectives, and the Director's counsel interrupted a dozen times." A small pause. "At the end Rina Dayan closed her folder and looked at me for some time. She said that it was the first report she had read in nineteen years that had not tried to improve itself. She said nothing of what the committee would do. They did it this week."
"What did they do?"
"They accepted the Director's resignation. She had offered it, I understand, on the morning after the plane. They declined to accept it for some months, in order to be seen to deliberate. They accepted it this week." The old voice did not change. "She wrote to me. A single sheet. I will not read it to you. It said that she had been asked to account for what she had not intended, and that she had found, on trying to do so, that the accounting was easier than the intending."
Leah looked out at the wall of drainpipes.
"I am retired," said Katz. "I am told that it is a title. I have a room with a window, and a rug, and a kettle, and I give lectures to the young on the subject of why a lead should not be put in a folder before it has been understood. Erin Cho has sent me a postcard from a place called Dayton. It says only, counting." He cleared his throat. "I do not know what else a man of my age could ask."
"And the Colonel?"
There was a silence. It was a long one, and she waited.
"He opened it in the third week," said Katz. "The box. He told me nothing of what he did. I came into the room, and it was on the table, and it was open, and he was sitting with his hands on either side of it as one sits with someone ill. I went away. I came back an hour later and he had closed it." He paused. "The pencils are still in it. He has not used them. I think that he does not intend to."
"Is he all right?"
"I do not know that the word applies." Katz's voice was gentle. "He is living in a house with a garden, under a name, in a place that I will not tell you. He is writing. He writes to Miss Panthaki on the first of every month. She answers every second. I have not read them. I am told by those whose duty it is that they are short."
"Short."
"Two or three lines. A man in a house, and a woman in a room, each saying that they are still there." The small sound again. "I have been an officer for fifty years and I find that I should not like to improve it."
Karam rang that night, at the hour when it was the morning in Beirut and a child was being got ready for school.
She could hear it, behind him: the refrigerator, and a pan, and a boy's voice explaining at length that a periscope did not require a colander. There was a woman's voice, lower, answering him. It was not a voice that she had heard in the apartment before. It spoke English, in short sentences, and it laughed.
"Nadia has been here three weeks," Karam said. He said it with a care that was the ghost of his old formality. "She is going back to Montréal at the end of the month. She has a position. We have not decided what the sentence is."
"Is there one?"
"There is a draft." She heard the faint, unwilling humor. "I wrote to her, a month ago, while she was in the next room. It begins, I was not a good husband in the time that I had, and I should like to ask whether there is more time. I have not yet given it to her. It is on the shelf, beside the book. I touch it, in the mornings, with two fingers."
"Karam."
"I know."
"It's a good sentence."
"It is an honest one," said Karam. "I am told that it is not the same. I intend to find out." He cleared his throat. "Rita wishes to speak."
There was a scuffle, and a click, and a different breathing, close to the phone.
"Hi, Leah. It's Rita. I've got news."
"Go ahead."
"I asked Baba a question. It wasn't the birthday one. It's too early for that. I asked him if I could read the book when I'm sixteen, and he said yes. He said he'd tell me what was in it, and he'd show me where it was, and that it would be mine to decide what to do with it." The voice was quick and level. "I said okay. Is that what you did? When you were my age? Did somebody tell you?"
"No," said Leah. She thought. "Nobody told me. I found it out in pieces, in other people's handwriting, and it took me years. I think that's why I'd rather somebody told you."
"That sounds hard."
"It was. It got easier when I stopped doing it alone."
There was a pause. "Okay," said Rita. "I'm going to write that down. I've got a pen." The voice dropped. "It writes in three colors. Don't tell Elie. He thinks it's a submarine."
The letter from Udvada had come that afternoon. It lay under the journal on the corner of the desk, in a plain white envelope, with her name on it in an upright hand that was Delnaz's own.
She opened it last.
It was two pages. It was dated, as everything from that house was dated now, by the day and the hour and the names of those who had been present, and it began without greeting.
The cabinet was opened on the first evening of the new reckoning, in the presence of the keepers of both houses and eleven witnesses, as we agreed. It was not to see anything. It was to air the linen. My aunt insisted. She said that cloth which is not looked at goes stale, and that she had not kept a house for twenty-two years to be told by a relic what to do.
They were as you saw them. Folded, side by side. Karam laid two fingers on the edge of the shelf. Ani counted. I read the page aloud from the chronicle, the one about the bowl, because it seemed to me that somebody should. Nothing was shown. Nothing shone. The room smelled of sandalwood and old cotton. We signed the log, thirteen of us, in ink. It is the dullest page that either family has ever produced, and I am more proud of it than of anything that I have written.
I thought that you would wish to know that it was dull.
Leah smiled. She turned the page.
I will tell you three small things, and then I shall stop.
The dog with the torn ear sleeps on the step of the green door. Nobody has been able to find where it came from. My aunt feeds it. She says that it is not a dog, it is an inspection. She puts out a saucer of milk at dusk and says nothing about it, which is her highest form of approval.
Dinshaw's stall has been busy. He tells me that a number of people who come to the edge of the cleared ground, where the board is, have lately taken to standing there for a long time. He says that he does not know what they are waiting for. He sells them sandalwood anyway.
And I answer the Colonel every second month. I do not know what I am writing. I know that it is the only correspondence of my life that I have never revised.
My grandfather said that it was only a morning. I have been thinking, in the room, about the morning after. I do not think that it was a victory. I think that it was the first day of an undertaking whose name I do not know, and that my family has been preparing for it for longer than the language has had a word. I do not feel ready. I have been told that nobody does.
My aunt has asked me to tell you that she has forgiven you for the telephone. She has asked me to add that she is not yet ready to say so herself, and that you are to take it as said.
I hope that you are well. I hope that you are writing the other things, the ones that you do not publish. I hope that someone is sitting beside you when you do.
Delnaz
She read it twice, and put it down.
It was dark when she let herself out of the closet. The corridor was empty, but for a light under one door. Peter Haldane's radio was going behind it, low, and as she passed he opened it a hand's width and put out his long gentle head, with a mug.
"You have the look," he said.
"What look?"
"Of someone who has been reading a letter." He tilted his head. "Good news?"
"It was dull."
"Ah. Dull is underrated." He looked at her a moment longer than the remark needed. "My door is still a door, you know."
"I know, Peter. I'll tell you. Not tonight. Someday."
"I am a patient man," said Peter, and went in.
She walked on. Down the stairwell a newsreader said the word that she had stopped hearing, and a number, and talks. The war went on. It would go on, she thought, as it had gone on before she knew any of this, and as it would go on after. The garments were in a cabinet in a house on the coast, with two locks and a dog on the step. They had not ended it. They had not been asked to.
She had been the one who decided. That was what she thought about, on the walk to the car, under the lamps of the car park, with the journal in her bag. She had said open the gate. She had said let the town in. She had been right, and an old man had been shot on his own step anyway, in front of four hundred witnesses, with a stick across his knees. She could not tell whether the street had saved the house or only the cabinet, or whether there had been any difference between them. She doubted that she was meant to know. She thought that it was what a witness was, in the end: the person who is in the place where it happens, who sees what happens, and who is not permitted to make it come out better.
At home she did not turn on the television. She sat at the kitchen table in the lamplight with a glass of water and took out of her bag an index card.
She had written it that morning, at the desk, in her small neat hand. She had written it in Hebrew first, and then in English, and then she had stopped.
וַיַּעַשׂ יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים לְאָדָם וּלְאִשְׁתּוֹ כָּתְנוֹת עוֹר וַיַּלְבִּשֵׁם.
And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them.
It was the whole of the sentence, in the third chapter of Genesis, at the end of a short and terrible story. The Maker, having sent two people out of a garden, stoops and does the one plain act the text records. He sews. He fits. He clothes them.
She had read it for twenty years as a general plural, a habit of the language. Coats. She read it now as she would have read a line in a ledger. Two. She said nothing of what she believed. She could not say. It was a tradition, and four traditions, and a room, and a smell of a garden in a lane, and a rope of light. It was not proof. It never would be. She had said so aloud to a priest in a shuttered room, and she would say it to anyone who asked.
But the sentence was short, and it said what it said, and it did not explain itself.
She propped the card against the lamp. It stood there in the light, one verse in two languages. After a time she took out the folded translation from the drawer, the one she had made in the weeks after she came home from Isfahan, soft at the creases from two years of handling. Not the same one divided between them, but two, made separately, each entire, each without a seam. She laid it flat beside the card.
Then she sat, in her kitchen, in the small gold circle of the lamp, with the two sheets of paper side by side in front of her, and the sea of the city murmuring beyond the glass.
The kettle clicked off. Somewhere below, a car door shut, and a dog barked once and was answered. She thought of an old man in a cane chair, looking up at a tree. She thought that it had been a lovely evening.
There was no one else in the room. She was not, she found, alone in it.