Part One — The Other Line · Adam's Robe Book 3
Chapter Four
Beirut, Lebanon — Day 5
The book sat on the second shelf where he had left it, and Karam laid two fingers on it before he did anything else that morning.
He had done so every morning for eleven years. It was wrapped in undyed linen, folded in thirds and then in half, and tied with a cord. He never untied it. He touched the bundle for the length of one breath, as another man checks that a door is locked, and then he took his hand away and went to see about the eggs. His grandmother had made him do it the first week, standing beside her in this same room. Before the coffee, she had said, or you will begin to do it after, and then you will begin to do it when you remember.
From the kitchen came the sound of a negotiation.
"It is not that I dislike the gray one," Rita was saying. She said it at the volume of a ten-year-old whose case is self-evident and under-appreciated. "It makes me look like I am still in primary school. I am not still in primary school. I would like my sweater to reflect that."
"You have four months left of primary school," Karam said. He stood at the stove with his back to her and watched the eggs. They had reached the point where looking away for longer than a sentence became a risk. "The sweater is not lying to anyone."
"The sweater is premature."
"Papa." Elie sat at the end of the table with a colander on his head and a spoon in each fist. He was eight, and he had no interest in sweaters. "The submarine needs a periscope. Do we have a periscope?"
"We have a colander."
"It is on my head."
"Then it is already in use."
Elie considered this and nodded, with the grave courtesy of a man conceding a point in a treaty. He went on with his breakfast and with the narration, at full volume, of a dream in which a submarine ran on falafel oil and was pursued by a lemon.
There was a knock, and the door opened before Karam could reach it. Madame Salwa put her head round the frame. She lived on the floor below, she was sixty-eight, and she had been feeding these children three evenings a week since their mother left. She carried a bundle of flatbread wrapped in a dish towel. She held it out and told him in Arabic that the generator had woken her at four and she had decided to bake out of spite.
"Spite is good for bread," Karam said. He took it. "Thank you."
"The little one's collar is crooked." She was gone again before he could answer, and her slippers could be heard slapping down the stairs.
Rita wore the gray sweater. She wore it as she wore any loss she had privately decided not to escalate, visibly, correctly, and with a face that made plain that the surrender was strategic.
He walked them to school, as he did most mornings, the four blocks along a street that was gray at this hour and smelled of diesel and bread. A generator throbbed on every balcony. The pharmacy at the corner had put plywood over its window in the first year of the war and glass back in the second, and the glass was already scratched. At the coffee cart a man was pouring for a queue of taxi drivers. He did not look up as Karam passed. Karam had once looked at him every morning for a month, wondering whether he was the same man, and had stopped one day without deciding to.
The war had not ended. It had done what wars do to the cities beside them. It had become a fixture, like the generators. At night, if the wind was from the south, there was a sound like a door closing far away, and the children slept through it. Karam did not. But he no longer checked the street for danger as the first act of the day, and he noticed that without gratitude.
Elie broke into a run at the sight of the school gate, abandoning the lemon mid-chase. Rita walked on beside her father. She had been quiet for most of a month. It was not a sullen quiet, and Karam had learned to treat it as a sign of work in progress.
"Baba."
She kept her eyes on the pavement. She spoke in the level tone of a child who has rehearsed the first sentence and is still deciding how far to go into the second.
"You told me there is a secret in the book, and that I'd be told when I was old enough."
"I did."
"That was fifteen months ago. I counted." She walked a few paces. "I have been thinking about it, and I don't think old enough means anything. It's not a number. If you'd said when you're twelve, I'd know to wait until I was twelve. If you'd said when I decide, I'd know it was you. But you said old enough, and that's what people say when they haven't decided which it is."
Karam kept walking. He kept his face where it had been, and was thankful for the practice. Eleven years of fatherhood and rather fewer of the other discipline had taught him one rule. With a question of this kind, never let the face answer before the mouth has decided.
"That is well argued," he said.
"I'm going to be a lawyer."
"I had supposed so." He slowed. "What is the question?"
"I'm not asking what it is." She said it quickly, as if she had been afraid he would think otherwise. "I decided not to ask that. I'm asking whether it's a number or a person, so I can stop wondering which one to wait for."
They had reached the corner by the school. There was a bench under a jacaranda tree, and a boy was throwing a ball against the wall. Karam stopped. After a moment he sat down on the bench. A conversation of this kind should not be had standing. Rita sat next to him with her bag between her feet and her chin lifted, ready to be argued with.
"It is a person," he said.
"Who?"
"Whoever keeps the book. Until now, that has been me." He looked at the boy and the ball. "My grandmother kept it before me. She decided when I was ready, and she decided badly, in the sense that she waited until she was nearly dying. I do not wish to do the same. But I have also seen what it costs to tell a child too soon."
"Seen where?"
"In the book." He let her have that. It was true, and it was the smallest true thing he could find.
Rita took it in. She did not ask what a child had paid. She had her mother's habit, when she was most interested, of becoming still.
"So you decide."
"I decide. And I had decided on a number." He turned his hands over on his knees. "Two months ago I told a friend that I thought sixteen. I do not remember having arrived at it. It is the age my grandmother would have chosen, and I think I took it from her without examining it. I find, this morning, that I am less sure of it than I was. I would like you to hear that from me."
"Sixteen is six years."
"Yes."
"I'll be an adult practically." She scowled at the pavement and then, to his surprise, laughed, a short startled sound. "That's so long. By then I'll have figured it out myself."
"You may. I would rather you did not have to."
She was quiet a while. A bell rang inside the school. The boy with the ball caught it, and looked toward the sound, and went in.
"Can I ask you a question every year?" Rita said. "On my birthday. Not the big question. One question. And you have to tell me the truth, even if you can't tell me all of it."
Karam did not answer at once. It was the sort of bargain his grandmother would have refused on principle, and he knew it. A child who is promised one true answer a year will spend the year composing the question, and a year is long enough to compose an excellent one.
But he had been alone with the shelf for eleven years. He had sat in a courtyard in Isfahan and under a fig tree in Chennai and had learned, from people who were not his family and then were, that a weight does not lessen by being carried in silence. He thought about the book made of paper. A secret could be burned. It could also be read.
"One question," he said. "On your birthday. I will tell you the truth, and I will tell you when I cannot tell you all of it. I will not lie to you and I will not pretend there is nothing behind the door."
"Pinky promise?"
"I do not know what that is."
She showed him. It involved hooking the smallest finger of each hand together and shaking, with great solemnity. He did it badly. She corrected his grip and made him do it again.
"Good," she said, and picked up her bag. "I have a test. Don't be sad."
"I am not sad."
"You have the face."
She went through the gate without looking back, which he understood was a courtesy. He watched until the gray sweater was lost among the others. It was a long moment before he found that he was still sitting on the bench with his little finger crooked in the air, as if he had signed a contract.
He walked home slowly by the long way, past the bakery and the shuttered tailor and the building with the green door that had been a school once. His phone rang as he reached the stairwell. It was Leah's name on the screen. In Los Angeles it was ten at night, and she would have stayed up for this.
"I have news and I would like to give it to you before I lose my nerve," she said. "Are you somewhere you can sit?"
"I am on my own stairs." He sat on the third step. "Say it."
"Margaret Lin wrote back. I wasn't going to get the author's name, I knew that, but I thought she might at least tell me a little. She won't. The journal's policy is to forward a reviewer's source-verification question to the author and let the author decide whether to answer." Leah breathed out. "Which means the author now knows a reviewer has asked about her source."
"Her."
"I think it's a her. I've no evidence." She said it in the rueful voice she used when she had caught herself at a habit. "The prose. The caution. I could be wrong."
"You are seldom wrong about prose."
"I'm wrong about everything else." There was a pause. "Karam, I can't sit on this any longer. If the author answers, she'll answer in her own time, and whoever she is, she's already been somewhere I couldn't follow. I think I have to tell Katz."
He had known she would say it. He found that he was not surprised and was, a little, relieved.
"Yes," he said. "You have to."
"I know. I hate it."
"You are afraid of what he will do with it."
"I'm afraid of what he'll be obliged to do with it. He's got a desk now. He's got a committee that wants a reason for the desk." She laughed without much humor. "He'll be good about it. He'll be gentle. And then a name will go into a file, and the file will go to someone who doesn't know what any of it means."
"Then you will ask him to be gentle, and he will be gentle." Karam pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose. "If he moves, Leah, I may be asked to go."
"I know."
"Then I must make arrangements for the children." He said it aloud to hear how it sounded. "Madame Salwa will keep them for a week. She is excellent. But a week is not a month, and I do not think it will be a week."
"You'd ask Nadia."
He had not said the name. He had not said it in his own mind, if he was honest, all that morning.
"I would ask Nadia," he said.
"Would she come?"
"I do not know. She would ask what the book is."
"What would you say?"
"That it is a book." He looked at the stairwell wall, at the line of plaster where the stair had been mended after a shell had come through the roof two streets away, and he heard in his own voice the tone he used for deliveries that were going to be late. "It is the truth. I have found that the truth, put plainly, protects a great many people from the rest of it."
Leah did not answer at once. He could hear her office behind her, the soft hum of a vent.
"I'm calling him tomorrow night," she said. "It'll be morning in Tel Aviv. He'll have his tea."
"Tell him I send my regards."
"I'll tell him you're not coming unless he asks nicely."
"That is also true," Karam said, and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling. He ended the call.
He sat on the stair a while longer. Above him a door opened and closed and a child laughed and was hushed. He went up to the apartment and stood in the doorway of his room, and did not go in. The bundle sat on its shelf in the gray light, exactly where he had left it.
He had touched it at six. He found that he wanted to touch it again. He did not, and the wanting stayed with him through the morning as an arithmetic that would not close.
The warehouse stood in the produce district behind the port road, a long concrete shed with a loading dock and a scale. He reached it by nine. Georges, his foreman, met him on the dock with a clipboard and the face of a man at a funeral.
"The oranges," Georges said.
Two containers of Egyptian oranges had been sitting at the port for nine days. The shipping line blamed the exclusion zone, and the port blamed the line. The insurer had written, in a letter of great courtesy, that spoilage in a declared maritime area was not covered. Karam read it standing on the dock with the diesel fumes of a waiting truck in his face.
"The juice factory will take them at a third," Georges said.
"Sell them."
"You have not asked the price."
"I do not need to ask. It will be a third." He signed. The pen skipped on the damp paper, and he went over the line again. "Tell the factory I will want the invoice before the week is out, and that I will not be told it is lost."
He went into the office, which was a glass box on the dock with a calendar from a tire company, and shut the door. The scale ticked outside as the first pallet came onto it. He took out his phone and opened a message to Nadia. It was the plainest message he could make. I may need to travel for work. Perhaps a month. He looked at it. He added a third line, Could you come? and looked at that for some time, and took it out.
It was not true, in any case. It was not work.
Madame Salwa would keep the children for a week. She would keep them for two, and then she would begin to say, with great gentleness, that she was an old woman. He knew exactly how the conversation would go because he had had it in his head every night since Leah first called. He had a daughter who would ask him one question a year. He had a son who wished to put a periscope on a colander. He had a book on a shelf and a woman in another hemisphere who had left that book and everything that stood near it, and had never once, in five years, asked him what it was.
He did not send the message. He put the phone on the invoice and listened to the scale count the pallets.