Chapter Thirteen

New Julfa, Isfahan — 1661

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The scaffolding around the Holy Savior's rebuilt sanctuary had been up for six years by the time Shushan finally did the thing she had been circling, without quite admitting it to herself, since roughly the same year the scaffolding first went up — which struck her, turning the thought over on the walk from her own door to the cathedral's south wall on a spring morning she suspected, correctly, would be one of her last capable of the walk at all, as exactly the kind of coincidence her grandfather would have called providence and her cousin Manuk, wherever the last five decades had actually carried him, would have called simply what happens when an old woman finally runs out of reasons to keep putting something off.

She was sixty-seven, and had spent fifty-six of those years at this particular work — first as a girl of eleven pressed into service as her mother's own hands grew heavy with grief and the ordinary demands of raising the rest of the household, then, for the better part of four decades now, as the ledger's sole keeper in her own right, ever since her mother's hands had finally stopped being steady enough to hold a pen at all and had passed the last of the silence that went with it to her daughter on a winter evening neither of them had spoken about since. She had recorded, in that half-century, three plagues, one flood, two changes of Shah, the slow accumulating wealth of a merchant quarter that had arrived with nothing and built itself, brick by careful brick, into something the rest of Isfahan had stopped being able to safely ignore — and underneath all of it, in the specific coded hand she had spent fifty-six years refining into something no casual reader could follow without a key that existed nowhere but inside her own skull, the ordinary quiet business of keeping a family's oldest inheritance exactly as invisible as her grandfather had always insisted it needed to remain.

She had also recorded, in the ledger's earliest pages, the summer her mother saved two children in a river and her cousin Manuk walked away from everyone he'd ever known rather than keep living inside the silence that followed it. She had recorded it faithfully, in detail, in her own careful eleven-year-old's hand grown up around the memory the way a tree grows around a fence post — and she had watched, across fifty-six years of raising her own children and burying most of the people who'd stood in that courtyard the night Manuk asked his question, exactly what that faithful record had cost every single generation that read it afterward.

Her own daughter had read it at fourteen and refused to speak to her grandfather's memory for three years. Her granddaughter Yeva, sharper and angrier than either of them, had read it at sixteen and asked Shushan, with a directness that had taken her breath, whether the family had ever once considered that Manuk had simply been right, and that everyone who'd stayed had spent four generations building an elaborate tradition out of a single act of cowardice dressed up as wisdom. Shushan had not had an answer for her that night that didn't feel, saying it aloud, like her grandfather's own voice using her mouth to speak.

She had watched the same wound open in nearly the same shape in every generation since — not always the same argument, not always aimed at the same ancestors, but always, underneath whatever specific form it took, the same unhealed question the courtyard had never actually settled, only postponed, passed hand to hand along with the ledger itself like a second inheritance nobody had ever agreed to accept. She had come to believe, slowly, across decades she was no longer certain she'd spent wisely, that the record itself was doing something considerably crueler than simply preserving history. It was handing every child in this family, at the exact age they were most capable of being wounded by it, a permanent, textual proof that their own ancestors had let people they loved drown rather than risk what saving them might cost — and calling that inheritance, rather than what she had slowly come to believe it actually was: a grief with no expiration, renewed every generation whether the current bearer had done anything at all to deserve carrying it.

She did not believe, walking toward the cathedral's south wall with the ledger wrapped against her body the way her own mother had once carried something considerably more sacred, that she was correcting her grandfather's error. She believed, with the specific clear-eyed exhaustion of a woman near the end of a long life spent weighing the same argument from every possible angle, that she was choosing a different mercy than the one he'd chosen — not concealing the object, which she had never once considered abandoning, but concealing the wound, so that whichever of her descendants eventually inherited the keeping might at least be spared inheriting the specific, textual proof of exactly how much that keeping had already cost.

The mason working the scaffolding that morning was a Julfa man three generations removed from the crossing himself, and owed Shushan's family enough small kindnesses across enough small years that he did not ask, when she came to him with a request that made no obvious sense for a woman of her age and standing, what she actually intended by it — only where, and how deep, and whether she required the stone reset before nightfall.

She had already done the cutting the evening before, alone, by lamplight, with a blade she'd kept for exactly this purpose without admitting to herself, until her hand was actually moving, that she had been keeping it for this purpose at all — close against the spine, careful, the specific unhurried precision of a woman who had spent fifty-six years learning exactly how a book was built so that she might, on this one occasion, take it apart without damaging anything around the wound. Four leaves. The courtyard. Manuk's question. Her mother's answer. Her grandfather's fear, and his verdict, and the specific shape of the silence that had followed all three of them down fifty-six years and at least three generations of children who had never asked to inherit any of it.

She did not burn them. She had considered it, in the small hours before dawn, and had set the thought aside for reasons she was not entirely certain she could have defended to Manuk himself, had he been alive to ask her: that destroying the record felt, even now, like a second version of the same violence her grandfather had committed in the courtyard — deciding, alone, permanently, on behalf of children not yet born, that a truth was too dangerous to survive in any form at all. She was not her grandfather. She would not make his choice a second time, dressed in new clothes. She would simply make it harder to make by accident, and easier to make on purpose, by someone who wanted the truth badly enough to go looking for it rather than have it handed to them, unasked, at the exact age it would wound them most.

The mason set the four folded leaves into the cavity she indicated, wrapped in the same oiled cloth she had once wrapped a rather more sacred object in, decades before he was born, and reset the stone above them with the specific unhurried care of a man laying the last course of a wall he expected to outlive every person currently living, and did not ask her, afterward, why an old woman's eyes had gone wet watching him do it, because a mason who had worked this cathedral for six years had learned, by now, that grief in New Julfa rarely announced its reasons and never needed to.

She gave Yeva the ledger three weeks later, on an evening she chose deliberately for its ordinariness, and did not tell her granddaughter what the fourth gathering's missing leaves had once contained, or where four hundred years of grief now sat quietly sealed behind stone in a wall the girl would likely pass a hundred times in her own life without once suspecting what it held.

"There will be a gap in the early pages," Shushan said, which was as close to the whole truth as she permitted herself. "A place where the stitching runs but the story doesn't. If you ever find yourself wanting badly enough to know what filled it, you will have to want it considerably more than casual curiosity, because I have made certain casual curiosity will not find it for you. That is not cruelty, Yeva. That is the only mercy I had left to give, after fifty-six years of watching this family's oldest wound reopen itself in every child clever enough to go looking for where it started."

Yeva took the ledger the way Shushan had once taken it herself — with both hands, and a gravity that made her look, for just a moment, considerably older than sixteen — and did not ask the question Shushan could see forming behind her eyes, which was itself, Shushan understood, watching her granddaughter's face settle into the same careful stillness three generations of women before her had worn at exactly this moment, the whole of what the family's particular inheritance had always actually required: not silence freely given, but silence chosen, over and over, by people who had never once been permitted to see what they were choosing to be silent about.