Chapter Seven

New Julfa, Isfahan — Summer, 1605

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By the time the mulberry trees along the new quarter's central avenue had gone from bare to fully leafed — the first full season anyone in the resettled community had lived through in the houses the Shah's grants had allowed them to build, brick by careful brick, on the raw ground south of the river he'd moved his capital's silk trade specifically to control — Shushan had stopped expecting her family to speak of the crossing at all. It had become, in the eight months since, the largest silence in a household that otherwise talked constantly, about everything: prices, looms, which of the new churches would finish its dome first, whether the Shah's promises of protected trade would outlast his own lifetime. The crossing sat underneath all of it, unspoken, the way a held breath sits underneath ordinary conversation, and Shushan had learned, at eleven going on twelve, to recognize the specific quality of a room where everyone present was very carefully not saying the same thing.

Manuk broke the silence himself, on an evening in the new house's largest room, in front of eleven adults and considerably more children than anyone had thought to send to bed in time.

He was Shushan's mother's younger cousin, not much past thirty, and he had not spoken more than a dozen words to any of them since the crossing — a silence Shushan had assumed, along with everyone else, was simply grief doing what grief did to a man who had watched his wife and infant son go under the same current that had taken Boghos the weaver and four others from their street, and had not come up on the other side the way Shushan and her mother had.

"I want to ask something," Manuk said, standing near the room's single lamp, his voice pitched low but carrying the particular flatness of a man who had rehearsed the words enough times that rehearsal had worn all the emotion off them, leaving only the shape. "And I want an honest answer, not the answer this family has apparently decided, without ever once voting on it in front of me, that we are all required to give."

Shushan's grandfather did not move from his seat near the hearth, but something in his stillness changed, the specific readying stillness of a man who has been waiting eight months for a conversation he'd hoped, without much real belief, might never actually come.

"Ask it," he said.

"You had it," Manuk said, and did not need to say what it was, because every adult in the room went very still in the same instant, the specific stillness of a family discovering that a silence they'd each privately assumed was theirs alone to carry had in fact been carried, just as heavily, by everyone else in the room the entire time. "In the water. You had it, and it did what our mothers always told us it could do, when it wanted to, and I am asking you plainly, in front of everyone here, whether anyone in this family so much as considered, in that river, that it might have done the same for Nazeli. For my son. For anyone at all beyond the two children standing closest to the person holding it."

Nobody answered him for a long moment. Shushan's mother, sitting near the wall with her hands folded in the specific stillness Shushan had learned meant she was holding something back by main force, finally spoke, her voice barely above the lamp's own quiet hiss.

"There was no considering, Manuk. There was a current, and my daughter under it, and half a second in which my body did something my mind had no part in deciding. I did not choose Shushan over Nazeli." She stopped, and Shushan understood, watching her, that this was the closest her mother had come, in eight months, to saying any of this out loud to anyone. "I did not choose anyone. If I could have reached further, I would have. I have asked myself every night since whether that's true, or whether it's simply the version of the truth a mother can survive believing, and I no longer know the honest answer, Manuk, and I am not certain I ever will."

"That is the whole of my point." Manuk turned, slowly, to take in the rest of the room — the aunts, the uncles, Shushan's grandfather still unmoving by the hearth. "None of us gets to choose, in a river, in half a second, who a miracle reaches and who it doesn't. That is exactly why it cannot be left to rivers. It cannot be left to half-seconds and who happens to be standing closest. If what we carry can do what it did in that water — truly do it, not luck, not a mother's strength, I have made my peace with what I believe I watched happen — then keeping it wrapped in wool in the bottom of a chest for the next four hundred years, waiting for another accident of proximity to decide who lives, is not caution. It is a choice. It is choosing, every single day we keep it hidden, that the next family standing in the next river gets nothing at all, the way mine got nothing, unless they happen to be born close enough to whoever's carrying it."

"And what would you have us do instead." Shushan's grandfather's voice, when it finally came, was quieter than Shushan had ever heard it, quieter even than the riverbank. "Carry it into every flood, every siege, every burning street in Persia, and use it each time, until the entire world knows exactly what this family holds and exactly where to come looking for it? We would not survive a single generation past that decision, Manuk. Not one. And every family that has ever sheltered this thing before us understood the same arithmetic and made the same choice, going back further than anyone currently living can account for — because the alternative to concealment was never restraint. It was extinction, ours and the object's both, the first time a king or a caliph or a patriarch with an army decided a miracle was worth burning a city to acquire."

"Then we disagree about which kind of dying is worse." Manuk said it simply, without heat, which Shushan understood, even at eleven, was somehow more devastating than if he'd shouted it. "You are afraid of the family disappearing. I have already watched my family disappear, into a river, while the thing that might have stopped it stayed wrapped in wool two arms' length away, because the wrapping was the more important tradition to protect. I do not say that to wound you, Grandfather. I say it because I do not believe I can go on living in a house where everyone has agreed, without me, that the wrapping was worth what it cost."

He left within the week — not alone; three cousins went with him, a fourth family's worth of children Shushan would grow up hearing about only in fragments, in the specific careful way a family spoke of relatives who had chosen a different truth than the one everyone else had settled on. He took no part of the object itself, and Shushan understood, watching him go, young as she was, that this had never actually been the argument — that Manuk was not leaving to steal a miracle for himself, but to carry, somewhere it might do a stranger some good, the one thing he could actually take with him: the conviction that hiding a fire from a burning house because you were afraid of who might come asking for it was not wisdom, whatever else it might also be.

Shushan's grandfather did not stop him. He stood in the doorway of the new house as Manuk's small procession moved off down the mulberry avenue toward the caravan road, and said nothing at all, and Shushan, watching her grandfather's face in the particular unguarded way children watch adults who have forgotten, for a moment, that they are being watched, understood that he was not angry. He was simply, finally, afraid — not of Manuk, and not even of what Manuk might do with a conviction and no object to carry it, but of the specific, permanent knowledge that his own family, the one thing he had spent eight months believing he was protecting by staying silent, had just proven itself capable of splitting exactly the way he'd always feared a discovered secret would split it, except that the discovery had come from inside the wrapping instead of from outside it.

That night, lying awake beside her mother in the new house's unfamiliar quiet, Shushan understood something she would not have language for until she was considerably older, and would not act on for another sixty years: that her grandfather had won the argument in the room and lost it everywhere else that mattered, and that a family could survive being wrong together for four centuries, but could not survive, even once, being right in two directions at the same time.