Thirty Silences
A Novel
after “The Green Earth”
A Word Before We Begin
Dear reader, allow me to keep you a moment on the threshold, the way a host holds back a guest who has never visited before. Not to bar your way in, but to say: take your time. The house is not as tidy as you think.
On the pages that follow I will tell you about a man who, for fifty-eight years, was convinced that he did not lie. At the start you will not like this story, because you will like its hero. At the end you will not like it either, because you will know why you liked him. And if halfway through you feel something pressing on your chest, do not put the book down. It is not discomfort with the tale. It is your conscience stirring in a room you locked long ago.
From childhood we are told that the liar is wicked and the honest man good, and that the world is divided between them like a cake among children. But after a long life of watching people, I have found few liars in the sense we were taught. What I found hurts more: millions of kind-hearted people who never in their lives say a single false word, and yet let injustice pass by them the way a train passes a station where it does not stop.
These people are the heroes of this novel. And they are, as you will see, us.
I will walk beside you. Sometimes I will stand next to you and whisper what the characters did not say; sometimes I will interrupt the story and ask you a question to which only you have the answer. Forgive my chatter in advance. For a narrator who stays completely silent is, perhaps, when you look closely, one of the Thirty.
N. B.
Part One: The Envelope
Chapter One
“The Man Who Does Not Lie”
The First Day
At half past five in the morning Adam stood alone in the kitchen, pouring hot water over the tea leaves, slowly, like a man performing a ritual without knowing it is one. He watched the color travel through the glass, from clear to gold, from gold to that warm red that recalls a small sunset behind glass.
It was the only moment of his day that no one shared. And it was also the only one in which his memory brushed past a door he never opened. Then it slowed a little, like a passer-by in front of an abandoned house, and moved on.
Let me tell you something about this man before you meet him. You have a right to know with whom you will spend the coming weeks. He is fifty-eight, for twenty-eight years the chief accountant, and in the whole neighborhood no one has ever caught him in a lie, not even the small ones we trade daily like greetings: “I’m fine.” “I don’t remember that.” “I was just about to call you.” That is why they call him “the man who does not lie.”
Adam had heard that phrase hundreds of times, and each time he smiled the same smile, calm and certain, the smile of someone who never asks himself since when he has worn it. I warn you at once: beware of smiles that never ask since when they have existed.
Samira came in, tying up her hair.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Like a man with nothing to hide.”
She laughed. She had laughed every morning for twenty-five years, as if the sentence were a new joke, as if couples who live together long enough silently agree never to tire of their small, friendly untruths. But this was not an untruth. It was faith. And that made it more dangerous.
Then Yusuf came in, dragging his school bag behind him from one shoulder. Fourteen years old, his eyes on no one as he entered a room, as if apologizing in advance for being in the world.
“Yusuf,” said Samira, “your teacher called yesterday.”
“Whoever lies today in a small matter lies tomorrow in a large one,” said Adam.
“I didn’t lie, Papa.”
“You didn’t tell the truth. That is very close to a lie.”
“But…”
“I don’t ask that you be flawless. I ask that you be clear.”
Yusuf lowered his head. “I’ll tell her today.” “Good,” Adam answered. And Samira smiled with an old pride that had not changed since her wedding day.
Did you notice what Adam just did? He weighed his son on a scale he himself has never stepped onto. And that, my friend, is the most common of all weights among people: virtue we sell to others by the wholesale, and for ourselves we keep the item marked “exception.”
Samira did not notice that the cup in front of her husband had moved a few centimeters, for no reason, and then stood still. Yusuf did not notice. Only Adam saw. He thought briefly: Am I really this man? Then he drank his tea and told himself the question did not deserve a whole morning.
That, dear reader, is how the great questions are buried: not with violence, but with gentle postponement.
At the front door Abu Majid stood with his neighbor Azzam, and their voices rose like the smoke of two neighboring stoves.
“Good morning, Adam! You come at the right time. This man claims he built the wall on his own land.”
“And he built it on mine,” said Azzam.
“How many meters?” asked Adam.
“At least one.”
“Half,” said Abu Majid hastily. Then he lowered his eyes. “All right… maybe thirty centimeters.”
“And you, Azzam?”
“I… haven’t measured. But I know.”
“Then you are not quarreling over the truth,” said Adam, “but over who looks to be in the right.”
He suggested bringing in an engineer to measure, and that everyone accept what the tape said. The two fell silent, and Abu Majid said to his neighbor, relieved: “You see? That is why we come to him. The man of the neighborhood does not lie.”
“Don’t say that,” said Adam.
“Why?”
“Because the nickname is heavier than the one who bears it.”
Abu Majid laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. No one noticed that, in a fleeting moment, Adam had said the most honest sentence of that morning.
At the other end of the street Ru’a passed by, Abu Majid’s granddaughter, with her school bag. A girl of seventeen who slows down beside every conversation, as if collecting words in her bag to examine them later. “Good morning, Uncle Adam,” she said. And looked at him a moment longer than was proper, and walked on.
At the bend by the Great Mosque the old man sat in his place on the pavement, his clothes in tatters, his back against the wall. He held out his hand without lifting his head, and Adam laid a few coins in his palm, as every morning for nine years.
I want to linger over this familiar scene, for it is the most dangerous of the whole novel. Nine years, every morning. One gives, one takes, and neither has ever asked the other his name. We call it “alms” and afterward feel pleasantly light, like someone who has settled a bill. And we do not ask: Have we bought, with copper coins, the right not to look into a face? Alms that do not ask for a name are perhaps the noblest form of indifference.
“God give you, my son.”
“And provide for you.”
Adam turned to leave.
“I once knew a man called Fakhri,” said the old man.
Adam’s feet stopped. For thirty years he had not heard that name aloud.
“What did you say?”
“I say the days pass, and no one asks the names of those who hold out their hands.”
“Which Fakhri?”
“The one at Hajji Tawfiq’s company. God rest him.”
Adam stepped back two paces and crouched in front of him.
“Did you ever work at Modern Trade?”
At last the old man raised his eyes. They were pale, honey-brown, and something lay in them that did not belong to a beggar’s eyes.
“We all worked there once, my son. One way or another.”
“What is your name?”
“What do you want with my name?”
“I want to know whom you are speaking of.”
“I speak of no one. I only remember.”
Then he lowered his head again and muttered something about cold and hunger, as if a small door had opened for a moment and closed again. Adam stood up and went to work, faster than he was used to. On the way he turned around just once. The old man was counting the coins in his hand, one after another, with the precision of a man who knows how much he has taken, and put them into a small pouch.
A common name, Adam told himself, nothing more. But his hand did not stop trembling until he arrived.
Adam always reached the Modern Trade company a quarter of an hour before everyone else, a habit he had not changed in twenty-eight years. In the entrance hall Umm Saad, the cleaning woman, was mopping the floor.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, Umm Saad. How is your son?”
“Thank God. He passed his exam.”
“I’m glad.”
“All thanks to your prayers.”
“I did not pray.”
“Yes, you did. I know it.”
He smiled. He thought of his kindness as something free, something that costs nothing.
At the elevator Wassim caught up with him, an accountant of about thirty, his folder open: “I have a small discrepancy in the cash reconciliation, five piasters. I suggest we post it under ‘Miscellaneous’ and close the page.”
“And what does the discrepancy say?”
“It says there is a mistake somewhere.”
“Then we do not close.”
“But it’s five piasters!”
“I don’t care about the five piasters. What matters to me is that they know where to hide.”
“That’s philosophy.”
“That’s bookkeeping. Find the error. And if you can’t find it, say: I did not find it. But do not say: There is none.”
Wassim sighed: “If everyone were like you, sir…” “…everyone would be late,” said Adam. They laughed.
Consider that last sentence with me for a moment: “Do not say: There is none.” A deep wisdom that Adam speaks about numbers without knowing it will be held up to him in a few weeks. How cruel to discover that the wisdoms we scatter among others were deferred letters to ourselves.
At the reception desk stood Karim, the personnel director, in a pressed shirt, his face resolute: “The Hajji is in a bad mood today. He didn’t sleep last night, his driver says. He’ll call you soon, about the accounts, I think.” He signaled it with his head, like someone who delivers mail and then washes his hands.
At half past eight Samir came in, twenty-six, pale, his hands in his pockets so that no one would see them. “Hajji Tawfiq wants to see you at once, with the books of the last three months. There is a deficit in the accounts. I don’t know how large. But the entries are all mine.”
“Calm down,” said Adam. “Look at me.”
Hajji Tawfiq’s office looked like a small battlefield, the papers scattered like fallen soldiers. The Hajji himself was seventy-two, heavy, leaning on a cane he did not always need, and the smell of his tobacco hung in the room as it had for years. Karim stood beside him.
“A deficit, for three months, again and again. Small amounts, but regular. Forty-three thousand. And all the faulty entries carry Samir’s name.”
“Has the board seen it?”
“I haven’t told them. The buyers come on Wednesday, and I don’t want them to hear the word ‘deficit.’ You are to examine it quietly.”
“That doesn’t look like us.”
“Not like me either,” said the Hajji, “but it looks like this week.”
Samir looked at Adam the way a drowning man looks at a rope: “I swear I have not touched a single piaster that wasn’t mine.”
“No one is accusing you of theft,” said Karim. “But I say the matter must be closed today: provisional suspension, then an investigation. A perfectly normal procedure.”
“Normal for you,” said Samir in a hoarse voice.
How often have you heard that sentence, dear reader? “A normal procedure.” People invented it to turn injustice into routine, so the perpetrator can sleep calmly, because he only did what everyone does. Personal injustice frightens its author; institutional injustice sleeps in the same bed with him without waking him.
Adam turned to the Hajji: “Give me until evening.”
“What for?”
“Because a man suspended unjustly does not come back the same.”
The Hajji and Karim exchanged a brief glance. “Until evening,” said the Hajji. “But you are responsible. You are the only one I believe when he says the numbers are innocent.” He said it without a smile, then coughed for a long time, pressed a handkerchief to his mouth, and did not take his eyes off Adam.
“Numbers don’t lie,” said Adam.
“No,” said the Hajji. “But they don’t say everything either.”
Adam went out and felt that the last sentence had not been addressed to the numbers.
He shut the door of his office, which rarely happened, opened the books on the screen, and began to compare one figure with another. A small sum here, a small sum there, none worth more than a dinner at a restaurant, yet all in a fixed pattern. Then he stopped. Something about the shape of it was very old; not the figures themselves, but the way they were arranged, as if a practiced hand knew where to put an error so that it would not be seen.
He stepped to the window and drew a long breath, and time carried him back without asking permission.
He was twenty-eight, a junior clerk under Fakhri, the chief accountant and brother of Hajji Tawfiq. That evening he had stayed late to finish a report and had thought everyone had gone. But the door of the cash room stood half open, and through the gap he saw Fakhri change a figure in a ledger, then tear up a receipt and put it in his pocket.
The sound of his shoes on the wooden floor gave him away. Fakhri turned around. He did not grow angry. He smiled the smile of a man accustomed to reading in young faces which of them is suited to become a silent partner.
“You’re late tonight, Adam.”
“I… was finishing the report.”
“Good.”
The next day he called him into his office and said: “You are young and ambitious, and you have a future here.” Then he opened his drawer, took out a sum of money, and laid it before him without ceremony: “A reward for your diligence.”
Adam looked at the money for a long time and felt something like nausea.
“I haven’t earned it, sir.”
“Yes, you have. You know you have.”
And now I ask you a question to which I do not want an answer yet, only once you have finished the book: if you had been in Adam’s place, a young man of twenty-eight, poor, ambitious, and an older man lays money on the desk in front of you, without a single word connecting it to what you saw… what would you have done?
Consider: Fakhri did not speak one word that tied the money to the theft. And that is exactly what allowed Adam, over the years, to tell himself he had not been bought but rewarded. The most skillful corrupters never say: “I am bribing you.” They say: “You have earned it.” Then your conscience has nothing left to object to except a nausea without a name.
Adam stretched out his hand and took the money.
Around noon his phone rang.
“Where are you?” asked Samira. “You haven’t answered my message.”
“At the office. A long day.”
“Yusuf called from school. He says he told the teacher everything, and she wasn’t angry. And he says he really did not break the window.”
Adam was silent.
“Who was it, then?”
“A boy called Rami. He was threatened that if he talked… So Yusuf said he’d take the blame, so no one else would be dragged in.”
Samira laughed briefly, pride and worry in it: “That’s just like you.”
“No,” said Adam.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be a little late tonight.”
He ended the call and kept staring at the phone. His son had nearly taken another’s guilt upon himself to protect a boy, and he himself, in the prime of his years, had protected himself.
He went out into the street to get some air, without knowing what he was looking for in it. At the Great Mosque he saw a small crowd: a man carrying another on his shoulders, tattered clothes hanging between his arms, a torn shoe, a head hanging down. He recognized the coat before he recognized the face.
“What happened?”
“He collapsed suddenly,” said the man carrying him. “I’m taking him to the clinic in the old town.”
“Shall I help?”
“No, no. You go on. He’s a beggar, nobody knows him.”
Adam looked at the drooping face. Blue lips, cold sweat on the forehead. Something pulled him to go with the two, and he took two steps. Then his phone rang: Karim. Where are you? The Hajji is asking for you.
“I’m coming.”
He watched the two move away. And he said to himself the sentence that a hundred thousand people in his place would have said: Someone is already there to carry him. It doesn’t have to be me.
He went back to the office. And did not know, as he stepped through the glass door, why he was ashamed of precisely that sentence.
I will tell you why he was ashamed. Because “Someone is already there to carry him” is the deadliest moral sentence in the history of humankind. With it we shut hospital doors on the collapsed, with it we walk past an accident counting on someone else to call for help. It is a sentence spoken not by the wicked but by the busy good; that is why no court withstands it.
During the break he found Samir alone in the canteen in front of a sandwich he had not touched. Adam sat down opposite him.
“Eat. Hunger doesn’t help the numbers.”
“If they suspend me, I won’t tell my mother. She is ill, and she doesn’t know I pay for her medicine from this salary.”
“No one is suspending you.”
The young man looked at him with shy gratitude: “Mr. Adam, may I tell you something? Last night I passed the company late, and there was a light on in the Hajji’s office. At two in the morning.”
“The Hajji often sits up late. Perhaps he was ill.”
“Perhaps.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” said Adam.
“Why?”
“Because half a truth in the mouth of a frightened man becomes an accusation.”
Samir nodded. And Adam, as he spoke, did not understand why he felt he was warning himself too.
In the corridor Karim blocked his way: “I don’t like that a file is closed so quickly. Numbers sometimes end when someone wants them to end. The new program was installed by the Hajji himself, and he asked the installation firm to work on it alone last night.”
“And why are you telling me?”
Karim smiled a formal smile: “Because you are an honest man. And I wanted to know what you would do with information when you don’t know what it means.”
“I’ll write it in the file.”
“Don’t. Because when a man like you writes something down, people believe it.”
He left. Adam stayed standing in the corridor, not knowing what weighed more: what Karim had said, or the strange relief he felt when told not to write it down.
In the elevator he met Muaz al-Kassim, a board member, sixty-five, in an elegant black suit and wool coat, a man who smiles before he speaks. “I heard what you did for the young man. You protected him from injustice.”
“I protected the numbers.”
“That is more beautiful. And one small thing: the archive will be closed soon, the third warehouse is to be demolished, as you know. You needn’t go down more often than necessary. The damp is bad for the chest.”
The door opened. Adam stepped out with the feeling that he had been told the same sentence twice in one day, from two different mouths, in the same tone.
He returned to the screen and worked for hours, until the yellow light of afternoon fell on the papers. Then he saw it. The errors all followed the pattern of the automatic import in the new program: entries repeated when the system read the same files again, and came out with amounts too small. No human hand in it. Except that, and this troubled him as he noted it, they were too orderly for a software error. A software error is chaotic. This error was polite.
He pushed the thought far from him and went down with the file to Samir’s office.
“The error lies in the program. An entry is read twice, and the amount is lost. I’ll show the Hajji with the figures.”
Samir looked at him for a long time, then bent over the desk, laid his head between his arms, and his shoulders shook: “I will never forget this.”
“Forget nothing,” said Adam. “Only learn not to go into the Hajji’s room and say: ‘I swear I haven’t touched a single piaster.'”
“Why?”
“Because one who swears before he is asked looks as though he is hiding something.”
Samir laughed and wept at once.
In the Hajji’s office there was dense smoke. Adam laid out the figures, the Hajji listened without interrupting, and Karim studied the ceiling.
“The deficit exists only on paper,” said Adam. “The import will be corrected tomorrow. And Samir is completely innocent.”
The Hajji closed his eyes for a moment, as if relieved of a weight he had never admitted: “Thank you, Adam.”
“The normal procedure is then presumably no longer necessary,” said Karim, in the tone of a man losing a card.
“I was sure you would say that.”
“You were not sure,” said the Hajji sharply. “Leave, Karim.”
The Hajji and Adam remained alone, smoke and silence between them.
“In a few weeks,” the Hajji said suddenly, “it will be thirty years since my brother’s death. Do you remember him?”
“He was an orderly man.”
“Yes. He was always orderly.”
He looked at his extinguished cigarette and did not light it. Then he said: “The buyers want the title deed for the third warehouse; on Wednesday they sign. The old warehouse at the harbor that they want to tear down. The board has decided. I had no opinion on it.” He said it in a strange tone. “And the deed lies in the archive, in the cellar, in the boxes of the year you started here.”
Adam looked at him: “Do you remember which year I started?”
“I remember everything, Adam. That is what tires me.”
Then he waved his hand as if the conversation were over.
At the archive door the guard closed his notebook: “The archive closes at six, sir.” Adam said the Hajji had sent him down. The guard opened the door with a heavy key: “No one has gone down for years except the cleaner. And that door at the end of the cellar has long been walled up; it leads to the old harbor warehouse. It was sealed in the old Hajji’s time, and no one ever opened it again. And don’t stay long. The damp down there is bad for the chest.”
The cellar was cold and damp, and smelled of old paper. The single bulb trembled at the end of the corridor, cardboard boxes stood on the shelves like works of art nobody visits. He walked between the long shelves. On each box a date, on each date dust. Whole years passed before his eyes, in which he had been a young man, then a man, then the one he was now. And behind him water dripped from an old pipe, drop after drop, as if someone were counting.
He found the box, dusty, heavier than expected, and on the lid the year in the handwriting of a dead clerk. Files about rents and warehouses that smelled sour. He ran his fingers through the sheets until he found an old payroll, yellow at the edges, with the names of the employees of that year. On the fifth line he saw his own name:
“Adam al-Khatib. Clerk.”
And beside it, in pencil, in small writing, a note he had never known he would see:
“Extraordinary reward.”
The amount was not there, and he did not need it. He put the sheet back as if it were hot. And remembered Fakhri’s funeral. He had been twenty-eight and had stood in the second row, among men he did not know, and after the burial a man of forty-two had come up to him, with red eyes.
“You’re Adam? I am Tawfiq, Fakhri’s brother. He mentioned you. He told me you were a sensible man… and that you don’t talk much.”
“I try.”
“That is what I like about you.”
Then he pressed his hand with a strength beyond what was proper, and left. And Adam had not understood then why that handshake had stayed in his palm until evening.
While searching he noticed another smell, faint but fresh. Tobacco. He told himself: Perhaps the guard has just walked by. And between the files a small yellow envelope fell out, without number or stamp, listed in no register. On it, in a handwriting he did not know: “Certificate – confidential.”
He picked it up. The paper weighed more in his hand than its size allowed. He opened it with a hand that was no longer steady: an official sheet, folded twice, in fine script and with a signature he knew like his own name. Fakhri’s signature. And a date: one week after that night on which he had seen what he had seen.
He read:
“I, the undersigned, chief accountant, attest that the clerk Adam, an employee of this company, has knowledge of the incident concerning the cash, and that he has agreed of his own free will to disclose it to no one.”
Below, further lines, then the date, then the name. He had agreed to nothing, not with his voice. In that week he had not said a single word. But Fakhri had evidently been careful to certify his silence; not out of fear of Adam, but as security for him and against him at once.
Pause here with me a moment, dear reader. Do you grasp what Fakhri did? He turned silence into a contract. And a contract, as you know, does not need the signature of both sides to bind them; it is enough that one side accepts with its hand what was placed in it. So in a dark cellar a man of fifty-eight discovered that his oldest bargain had not been with the devil but with an orderly man who knew how to calculate.
The paper sank slowly onto his knee. And he heard, somewhere far above, a faint sound: the creak of a door.
“Who is there?” he called.
Nothing answered him but the echo of his voice in the corridor. He turned the sheet over without knowing why. On the back was a single number, in blue ink, in a slanting, weary hand:
21.
When he touched it with his thumb, a blue trace stayed on his skin. He stared at his finger. The ink was not yet dry.
And in the cold air of the cellar hung the smell of tobacco, as if its owner had left the place only a few minutes before.
Chapter Two
“Your Father’s Eyes”
The First Day
The clinic lay in a narrow alley behind the old market: a green wooden door, a faded sign, a waiting room that held no more than eight chairs. No one there asked a sick person about his wallet before asking about his pain, and so the alley filled every morning before the door was unlocked.
Maryam arrived at half past seven, as always before everyone else. Thirty years old, slight, with calm eyes, her hair in a plain clip. Her colleagues said she was like a mother to every patient who came in. They did not suspect that she possessed nothing of motherhood but the name and the white coat.
At nine an old woman entered, leaning on a cane.
“The tablets have run out, my child. The ones for blood pressure. They tell me the price has changed. And I have nothing with me now. I’ll come back next week.”
“Don’t come next week. Your blood pressure doesn’t know weeks.”
Maryam took from her own purse what the box cost and laid it in the woman’s hand.
“I can’t accept that.”
“It is a duty, not a gift.”
The woman went out, smiling and weeping at once. Dr. Hisham came from the next room, a cup of coffee in his hand: “The third time this week. I’m keeping count of how much you pay out of your own pocket. The boss will call us to account.”
“Then let him call me to account.”
“Maryam, everyone here likes you, but I know nothing about you. You treat everyone and tell no one anything. Don’t you have a family?”
“I have a mother.”
“And siblings?”
She hesitated a little with the answer. Then she said: “No.”
Hisham shook his head and left. She had not lied entirely. But she had not said that she had a brother, Bilal, with whom she had not spoken for three years and whose number she knew by heart.
Maryam would call this “half a truth.” I call it “the polite lie”: the one that does not demand that you say what is not, but contents itself with withholding what is. I mention it not to judge her. Which of us has never been asked about a brother, a father, an old friend and calmly said “No,” knowing that this “No” was the longest wall he ever built?
Toward noon the door was thrust open with force. A broad-shouldered man, drenched in sweat, came in with another on his back: “Help me! He collapsed at the mosque!”
Everyone ran over. The old man was laid first on the floor, then on the nearest cot: thin, his clothes in tatters, one shoe torn, his lips blue.
“Who is he?” asked Maryam.
“I don’t know. A beggar. I found him on the pavement.”
“A homeless man,” said Hisham indifferently from the door. “Put him in the corridor and someone call the ambulance.”
Maryam looked at him: “Every human being deserves the same care.”
“The ambulance needs an hour.”
“Then we’ll look after him for an hour. Hisham, get up and bring me the blood-pressure cuff.”
He got up. She measured the pressure: too low. She measured the sugar: barely detectable. Drip, oxygen. Dehydration, hunger, and his lungs hurt him too. When she turned to thank the man who had brought him, he had already gone out, quickly, like someone who does not want to be bound to what has happened.
Look at the one who ran for the door. He is not wicked. He carried a man a long way on his back, which is more than hundreds did who walked past before him. But he drew the line at the threshold, for beyond the threshold questions begin, and after the questions responsibility begins. How many carry the wounded and then flee from their own names!
She worked on him for more than an hour: changed the drip twice, covered him, wiped the sweat from his forehead. When she unbuttoned his old coat so he could breathe more easily, a small sheet of paper fell to the floor. She did not notice; the corridor was noisy and someone was calling her name. She picked it up with a paper tissue and put both together in the pocket of her coat.
At three he began to rave: “The door… the iron door… I took nothing… by God, I took nothing… the warehouse… the third…”
She wiped his forehead with a damp cloth: “You are in the clinic. No one will harm you.”
He opened pale, honey-brown eyes and stared at the ceiling: “Who are you?”
“A doctor. I am Maryam.”
She took his hand, cold, rough, full of cracks. He said: “God have mercy on you, my child. You are like…” Then he fell silent. And after some minutes, between sleep and waking, he said, barely audible: “Fakhri did not deserve to get away like that.”
Her hand froze.
“Who is Fakhri?”
“Fakhri… and all of us… kept silent…”
“Do you know someone called Mansur?”
He suddenly flung his eyes open. And for the first time he really saw her. He looked at her for a long time, his lips trembling.
“How do you know that name?”
“He was my father.”
He closed his eyes, and a small tear slid down his temple between the wrinkles.
“Why are you crying?”
“It’s nothing. The illness.”
“You said my father’s name. Together with the name Fakhri.”
He was silent. After a moment he said, in the voice of a man walking over ice: “You have his eyes.”
“Whose eyes?”
“Those of a man I knew.”
“My mother always says I have my father’s eyes.”
“Perhaps.”
“Where did you see him? What do you know about him?”
“And what do you know?”
“That he was a guard at the Modern Trade company. That he was accused of a theft he did not commit. And that he died when I was seven. No one ever told me more.”
The man lowered his gaze: “Perhaps others know more than I do. Ask for Adam. At the Modern Trade company. Accountant. He was there.”
“And how do I find him?”
“You will find him. He is a man who does not lie.”
And he smiled a small, bitter smile, as if he had made a joke at which only he laughed. When she asked: Who are you?, he had already closed his eyes, drawn a deep breath, and fallen asleep.
Did you see how the first sentence of this novel, “a man who does not lie,” stepped into this room, from the mouth of an old man under a drip? Here it is no praise. It is a sting. It is spoken in the tone in which one says: “the one who saw everything and said nothing.” Keep this in mind: every epithet bestowed on a person carries in its shadow another, which no one names.
At four Hisham came to change the drip and lifted the man’s coat from the chair to move it away from the heater. From the inner pocket a small bundle of cloth fell, and a clink of metal scattered. Coins, hundreds of small coins, arranged in little paper bags, each with a number in a weary hand.
“A beggar who saves,” said Hisham with a smile.
“Look at the numbers. They follow one another. Each bag a day. And all the days lie close together, as if someone gave him the same amount every morning.”
“Perhaps a shopkeeper.”
“Or a man with a habit.”
She put the bag back into the bundle and the bundle into the pocket: “Tell no one. It is his money. And perhaps it is all he has.”
Hisham looked at her: “You’re strange today.”
“Perhaps.”
When the clinic closed, the ambulance had not come. They carried the man to a cot in the side room and left a weak lamp burning beside him. Maryam said she would stay a little longer to look after him. Hisham said as he slipped into his coat: “You treat him as though he belonged to your family. That won’t do, Maryam.” She did not answer. She stayed alone with the tube, the drip, and the sound of breathing. On a slip of paper she wrote: “Adam – Modern Trade – accountant.” Then she put it in her pocket.
On her way home she passed Dania’s atelier, a small studio on the first floor with fabrics, scissors, and steam from the iron. Dania had been her friend since university, a freelance designer who prided herself on letting no one dictate a decision to her.
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
“An old man came to the clinic today. He said my father’s name. And Fakhri, the name Bilal keeps repeating.”
“Bilal again? Listen, I’m not saying: Don’t. I’m saying I’m afraid for you. You’re a woman of your strength and don’t have to run after people who never valued you.”
“Bilal didn’t abandon me. I abandoned him.”
“That’s exactly what they tell you so you’ll come back. The family. The ones who want you to carry a guilt you didn’t commit.”
Maryam gently withdrew her hand: “I won’t call him. I only wanted to tell you.” Then she paused at the door: “Dania, if I did call him, would you say no?”
Dania smiled a sad, beautiful smile: “I’d say: Do what’s good for you. But I’d be afraid.”
“That’s the reason,” said Maryam softly. “The one that made me wait three years.”
And she went down the stairs.
On the way her phone rang: her mother. “Have you eaten? Have you spoken to your brother?” “No, Mama, and I won’t. He chose to live in his delusions instead of helping us when we needed him.” “It wasn’t like that.” “Yes, it was.” “Come on Friday. I’ll cook what you like.” “I can’t. I have work.” “I have something to do on Friday too,” said the mother, and in her voice was something Maryam did not understand. And she ended the call quickly.
In her apartment she switched on the small lamp and sat on the floor in front of an old cupboard. She brought out a small cardboard box on which her mother had written: “Mansur’s things.” A faded business card. A letter of dismissal accusing him of embezzling a sum, with a signature she did not know. And a small black-and-white photograph of a man in front of a warehouse, a hesitant smile on his face.
She studied the photo for a long time. The eyes were honey-brown. Many people have honey-brown eyes, she told herself. But her heart did not believe it.
She remembered an evening ten years ago: Bilal, excited, a notebook full of notes in his hand: “Maryam, I’m certain Father was innocent. There’s a man named Fakhri who was at the same company.”
“Stop this nonsense. Father is dead, Bilal. Leave him in his grave.”
Bilal had left then in heavy silence. And she had not hated him because he was wrong, but because she feared he might be right.
That, my friend, is the most honest sentence of this chapter: she hated her brother because she feared he might be right. Rarely do we hate the one who lies to us; we hate the one who tells us what we are not ready to hear. If one day you find in your heart a dark hatred of a person who has done you no harm, ask yourself calmly: What did he once tell me that I knew to be true?
She picked up her phone. His number had been in her memory for three years without her ever asking why. She pressed. It rang once. Twice.
“Hello?” A cautious voice, almost a whisper.
She opened her mouth and found not a single word.
“Who is this?”
“Bilal.”
“Maryam? I don’t believe it. Three years. Why now?”
“Because today an old man came to the clinic and said the name Fakhri. Then he told me to ask for Adam, accountant at Modern Trade.”
Bilal held his breath for a moment: “Adam al-Khatib? I know him. He is in the books I’ve collected. A junior clerk who was there that year. I’ve been looking for his address for a year.”
“Why didn’t you tell me anything?”
“Because you didn’t listen.”
A heavy silence settled over the line.
“I was wrong,” she said at last.
“I don’t want to hear that now. If I hear it today I’ll cry, and I want to stay able to think. Tomorrow I’m going to the radio station. There is a morning show hosted by a woman named Rana, who confronts people live. I’ll tell her everything.”
“Is that wise?”
“I don’t know. But I’m tired of wisdom.”
They ended the call, and neither said “Goodbye.” Maryam stayed sitting on the floor, her father’s things around her.
Then she took off the white coat to hang it up, and something fell onto the carpet: the slip with the name, a paper tissue, and with them a sheet folded twice that was not hers. She picked it up. It was a photograph. A very old photograph with worn edges: a sleeping newborn in a white cloth. And on the back, in a handwriting she knew like her own hand:
“Maryam, two weeks.”
Her mother’s writing.
She froze. She stared at the writing, then at the photo, then at her father’s box standing open on the floor. Her mother had no photograph of her as an infant. She had said so often: “Everything was lost when we moved away.” And this photograph had been in the pocket of an old beggar, on the curb by the Great Mosque.
With trembling hands she reached for her phone.
“Mama? Today an old man came to the clinic. He had a photo of me as a baby on him. And on the back is your handwriting.”
Her mother did not answer.
“Mama, answer me.”
“Where is he now?”
Chapter Three
“The Truth First”
The Second Day
At twenty past six in the morning the red light above the studio door came on. Rana sat down at the microphone, adjusted her headphones, and drew a short breath. Her voice was known in the city before her face was: sharp as a metal bell, indulgent toward no one.
“Good morning, city. I am Rana, and this is ‘The Truth First.'”
Mahir, the producer, raised a finger in the control room: “On air.”
“Today the complaints line is open. Please.”
“Good morning, Ms. Rana. I’m an employee of a government office, and my salary hasn’t come for four months.”
“And what have you done?”
“I’ve waited.”
“Have you filed an official complaint?”
“No. I was afraid of my boss’s reaction.”
“Fear doesn’t feed your children,” said Rana sharply. “Give me the name of the office and the complaint number. I’ll look into it.”
“I can’t…”
“Then don’t blame me if your salary stays away another four months. Thank you for calling.”
She ended the call and felt the slight satisfaction that accompanied her every time she said what no one else dared to say. And she did not ask herself: Does everyone have the luxury of boldness that she had, an independent woman for whom losing a job did not mean a person’s hunger?
I want to stay with Rana a little, for I like her and fear her at once. Courage that does not know the price of courage in others slowly turns into showmanship. How easily one says “Speak the truth!”, knowing that one’s own tongue is protected by the roof over one’s head, by a salary, and by an audience. But whoever has been waiting four months for his pay lives in another world, a world in which every “no” costs a meal for his children.
In the control room Mahir said to his intern Omar: “Don’t learn that tone from her. It works for her, but for you they’d say you’re insolent.” Omar laughed. He was twenty-three, in his last year of media studies, and wrote on the cover of his notebook: “The true journalist knows only the truth.”
At ten past seven a new line lit up.
“We have a caller. His name is Bilal.”
“Good morning.”
The voice of a tired man, but calm, who chose his words with care.
“I want to tell an old story about my father. It is thirty years old. My father was wrongly accused of stealing at a company called ‘Modern Trade.’ He was a warehouse guard. They dismissed him, and his life was lost.”
“Every accused person says he didn’t steal.”
“I don’t say it because he is my father. I say it because there are people who saw. I can’t name names on the radio.”
“Excellent,” said Rana. “At least you know the rules. And why now?”
“Because all these years I was alone. Even my sister wouldn’t listen to me. Yesterday she suddenly called.”
Rana felt a professional excitement at once, like a man who sees light at the end of a tunnel.
“And what do you want from me?”
“I want my father’s voice to be heard.”
Rana was silent a moment. That sentence had not figured in her calculation.
“Sir, if you name a name now, you can be sued for defamation. I’d be afraid in your place. I learned that the hard way. Next week I will devote a whole show to you. Bring everything you have, and don’t name anyone before I have verified it.”
Mahir looked at her through the glass and raised an eyebrow. This caution was unusual for Rana. He knew that an old, never-told story stood behind it.
During the coffee break he followed her onto the balcony: “You didn’t ask him anything. You didn’t argue. Normally you drop the caller in the third minute. You’re thinking of Said.”
“No.”
“Rana, eight years ago…”
“No.”
“I was sitting in the control room, and you know I said nothing to you then.”
“And I’ll never forget that. Because you kept silent too.”
He looked at her for a long time: “Perhaps.”
“I won’t repeat it.”
“I don’t know whether you can.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and drank her coffee in one gulp, as if wanting to burn her tongue on purpose.
At nine the show was over. Omar stepped into the corridor, his phone vibrating in his pocket.
“I heard your show this morning,” said a young woman’s voice. “I heard the name of my father’s company.”
Omar’s eyes widened. He knew that Lama was Hajji Tawfiq’s daughter, and he had known for a year that she was the only person with whom he did not feel like his father’s son.
“No one was named.”
“The company was named. My father was exhausted last night and asked me not to disturb him. When I came into his room he was sitting there writing with a blue pen, and when he saw me he hid the sheet. He looked like someone writing a will.”
“Don’t worry. It’s an old story that has nothing to do with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he said honestly. She laughed weakly: “I thought you’d say yes.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“If Rana gives you the story, tell me before you do anything.”
“Lama, I love you.”
“And I’m afraid,” she said and hung up.
At ten Mahir called him into Rana’s office. She sat behind her desk, an open notebook before her.
“Omar, I need a file from you on the Modern Trade company: its history, its owners, its old employees, and any news of the dismissal of a warehouse guard named Mansur thirty years ago. And speak to no one outside this room. Do you have something to tell me? Something about the company?”
Omar stood a moment. It was his chance to tell her that his girlfriend was the owner’s daughter, and an inner voice whispered: Tell her now, or this lie will only grow.
“Nothing,” he said.
He went out, his hand on the door handle cold. It had not been an open lie, but he knew it was the first secret that would in the end break someone.
Here I want to whisper a small law to you that I discovered while watching people: the great lie does not begin as a great lie. It begins with a “nothing,” said in a moment of confusion, then it needs a second “nothing” to protect it, then a third. And the astonishing thing is that no one notices when this ladder has grown so high; each rung seems small as we step onto it, and all of them seem dizzyingly high when we look back.
Omar sat down in the small archive room and opened the computer. “Modern Trade. Founded forty years ago. Founder and owner: Hajji Abdurrahim. The two sons: Fakhri and Tawfiq.” Fakhri died after a few years, and Tawfiq inherited the company. In the archive of a local newspaper he found a small, forgotten notice: “Warehouse guard dismissed for embezzlement. His name: Mansur.” Three lines on an inside page, no photo, no comment. And at the bottom of the list of today’s board members: “Hajji Tawfiq. And his daughter Lama, honorary member.”
He stared at the screen and hastily closed the page, as if someone stood behind him. When Mahir asked: “Did you find something?”, he said: “A small notice about the guard. Just that.” He copied it and sent it to Rana, and the line about the board he did not copy. In the corridor he wrote Lama a message: “Don’t worry. I mentioned nothing.” Then he deleted it before sending.
At midday she had a visitor: a young man in his late twenties in neat clothes and with a tense face.
“Do you remember the name Said?”
She felt a cold confusion.
“A building contractor. He worked on state housing projects. Eight years ago you accused him on the radio of using substandard material. I am his son, my name is Mu’tazz.”
“I did not accuse him. A caller said…”
“And you passed on the name in full.”
“Yes. I did.”
“My father died two years ago, in debt and broken. All he said to us in his last days was: ‘I did nothing.’ And you said a single sentence at the end of a show: ‘It seems the information was not correct.'”
“That’s how it was.”
“I bet you’ll say now that you only passed on the information. Everyone says that.”
She opened her mouth with the same sentence she had heard from dozens of accused guests over the years. And closed it again.
“I don’t want a belated apology,” said Mu’tazz. “I want you to do this time what you didn’t do for my father: Verify before you open your mouth on the radio.”
“I will.”
“I believe you, not because I trust you, but because you have one last chance.” Then he added as he turned: “Candor without verification is not courage. It is negligence.”
Keep that sentence: “Candor without verification is not courage, it is negligence.” A man of twenty-eight who has read no philosophy in his life says it, but he has paid for it with his father’s flesh. And I put it here, in the middle of the novel, like a nail in a wall; whatever hasty judgments you hang on it in the coming weeks, come back and look at it.
Rana sat motionless, then opened a new notebook. She wrote in a tired hand: “Case Modern Trade. Involved: Bilal (complainant), old witnesses, names not yet determined.” And beneath, with a hand that still trembled: “Rule: No name before three-fold verification.”
At nine in the evening the show had a short segment called “The Open Line,” a half hour in which listeners call without a topic. Rana sat tired behind the microphone and felt that a whole day had not been enough. A woman called and said she had listened to the show for ten years and had always thought Rana harder than necessary, but today she had felt that she had changed. Rana smiled against her will.
“We have one more call. Please.”
“Good evening.”
A different voice: a man with a quiet voice, unlike any of the morning’s callers, with an unnatural calm.
“I wanted to tell you something about this morning’s case. The yellow envelope that Adam found yesterday.”
Rana froze. In the control room Mahir suddenly raised his head.
“Which envelope?”
“It is not the only one. There are others. And each envelope lies with a different person.”
“Who are you?”
“Only someone who knows that time is running out. Twenty-one days, Ms. Rana. Then everything collapses. Ask about Adam. And ask about the iron door.”
“Who is Adam?”
“He knows. Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
The line went dead. Rana held the microphone in her hand, and the red light was still burning. Five full seconds of silence on air, which had not happened on her show for years. At last she said, in a less sharp voice: “Forgive us, we’ll be right back.” And she cut the broadcast.
She ran into the control room: “From what number did the call come?” “Withheld.” “Did you record the call?” “Of course.” While they listened to the tape, Mahir said quietly: “Rana, did you say the word ‘envelope’ on the radio today?”
“No.”
“And Bilal? Or any caller?”
“None.”
He looked at her: “Then how did he know?”
She did not answer. She stared at the notebook in front of her, in which she had written only two words about the case that morning. Nothing about an envelope was in it. And no one had spoken that word on air.
Chapter Four
“The Ninth”
The Third Day
Huda’s law office was on the second floor of an old building near the courthouse: a narrow staircase, a heavy wooden door, a brass sign she had not yet replaced: “Saad al-Din & Partners, Attorneys at Law.” The lawyer Saad al-Din had died two months ago and had left her the practice, with everything in it, and everything he had not said in his lifetime. Every morning on the stairs she told herself: Next week I’ll change the sign. And did not.
She sat down behind his large desk and still felt like a guest. On the wall hung his picture: a gaunt man, sharp eyes, glasses with fine frames. She remembered an evening ten years ago, she was twenty-four, a trainee who had lost a small case over a trifle.
“Doctor, why do we take cases where injustice is obvious, and without a fee?”
“Because that is what distinguishes us. What distinguishes us is that we do not lie. A lawyer never lies, Huda.”
“But he doesn’t say everything?”
He smiled: “Well put. That is the whole profession: knowing what to say and what to withhold.”
“And who decides that?”
“Conscience.”
“And if conscience errs?”
“Then it’s called experience.”
She had laughed then. Now she remembered her laughter, and it no longer resembled the laughter of any human being.
I pause here to say something about this dead teacher, who will be more present in this novel than many of the living. The most dangerous teachers are not those who teach you what is false, but those who, with an enchanting smile, teach you half the truth. And the most dangerous sentences in human language are those that can be read in two ways: “Knowing what to say and what to withhold.” It serves as the motto of wisdom and the motto of cowardice; the difference lies not in the sentence, but in the one who speaks it, and why.
On her desk stood a small recorder. She had recorded yesterday’s show, without clear reason. She pressed the button: Rana’s sharp voice, then Bilal’s tired voice, and at the end that calm, strange voice: “Twenty-one days, Ms. Rana. Then everything collapses.” She stopped the recording. She told herself: a man who knows the law. Then: or a man to whom someone told it. And she wrote on a slip: “Who knows the statute of limitations, knows the envelope, and doesn’t show himself?” Beneath it: “Who benefits?” The second question she crossed out, for she knew that its answer was too old to be written down.
At half past eight the bell rang. A man of thirty-four came in, lean, alert eyes, over his arm a bulging leather bag. It was Bilal. He laid the bag on the table and opened it: notebooks, hundreds of sheets, yellowed newspaper clippings, copies of letters, tables in small script.
“All this?”
“Thirty years. I’ve been collecting since I was fourteen. Because my mother wouldn’t talk and I didn’t want to forget.”
Huda leafed through slowly, then said: “Thirty years ago, about on this day, your father’s employment was terminated. From that date the limitation period runs. Thirty years after the act, criminal prosecution lapses, and with it the claim to compensation. Even if the crime were proven, no one would be held liable.”
“And how much time is left?”
She looked at the calendar: “Today is the third day. Nineteen days remain.”
“And what remains after that?”
“The name. And that does not lapse.”
Now we have come to the knot you are to ponder until the last page. The law, that noble invention, decrees that a crime dies after a set time, and its argument is reasonable: A society cannot put the past on trial forever, the witnesses die, the evidence rots. Yet this same nobility carries a trap in its belly: that the perpetrator may live in peace for thirty years and peace becomes an acquired right. That the victim lies buried for thirty years and being buried becomes fate. Who, then, decides when injustice ends? And who said that pain lapses like a debt?
“Why did you call me?” asked Bilal.
“Because I heard your father’s name on the radio, then the name of the company. And because there is a box in the cellar. I inherited it with the practice and never opened it, for on it is written: ‘To be opened only if someone asks about Mansur.'”
Bilal froze.
“Impossible.”
“I came this morning and told myself: Perhaps I misread. I did not misread. Whoever wrote it was my teacher Saad al-Din.”
“Did he know?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Do you trust me?”
“No,” she said. “And you don’t trust me either. You came with a whole bag and didn’t tell me how you collected these names.”
“I searched. And I had a source. I don’t know his real name. We write to each other by post. For two years he has been sending me what he finds. He said he hates injustice.”
“And you believed him?”
“I had no one else to believe.”
Huda looked at him with something like pity: “Whoever helps you for nothing wants something from you, Bilal. And the first thing one does who approaches a story is to ask: Who benefits?”
“I do. I am the one who wants to know.”
“A beautiful answer, and not an answer.”
The cellar of the law office was narrow, without windows, smelling of paper, ink, and old breath. Huda led him to the farthest corner; there, under a rusty shelf, stood a small ash-gray box, tied with a cord. On the lid, in slanting script: “Private deposit. Fakhri. To be opened only if someone asks about Mansur.”
Bilal stood before it and did not move. “Your hand is trembling,” said Huda. “I don’t know how to open it.” “With a knife.” “I mean how I find out what’s inside.” “No one knows that. That is the point of a box.”
She cut the cord and lifted the lid, and the smell rose of paper that had lain folded for decades. On top a single sheet, folded twice. She unfolded it carefully and read quietly:
“To whoever opens this box. If you are reading these lines, it means someone has asked about Mansur and that the time has come. I leave you the names of eight people, each of whom knows a small part. None of them knows the whole picture. And the picture will only be complete when they sit together.”
And beneath, in blue ink: “Salim. Amna. Iyad. Nabil. Adil. Bashir. Munir. Ramis.”
“Eight,” said Bilal. “I don’t know any of them.”
“And Adam is not among them, though the unknown caller said: ‘Ask about Adam.’ So there is someone who knows more than the Eight. And Fakhri says they do not know the picture entirely… and he himself doesn’t either.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he had known it, he would have written it down.”
She turned the sheet toward the light. Below the eighth line, in faded ink, a ninth, empty line, and after it a short sentence: “And the Ninth is the one who opens this box.”
She read it twice. Then from the bottom of the box a small envelope fell, sealed with tape, on it in a hand she knew better than any other in the world: “Receipt.” And her hand began to tremble. It was Saad al-Din’s handwriting, slanting like a sword, unmistakable.
“I received this box from the late Fakhri and noted his wish that it be opened only if someone asks about Mansur. I advised the depositor to keep silent. And I do not believe this advice was a mistake.”
Below, the lawyer’s signature and a date: thirty years ago.
She read the sentence once, twice, a third time: “I advised the depositor to keep silent.”
“Huda? What is this?”
“A receipt. It says that my teacher, the man who taught me that a lawyer never lies, knew everything. And kept silent.”
Then she said, the sheet still in her hand: “Then I am the Ninth. Whoever opens the box becomes a witness. And I opened it.”
Bilal looked at her, in his eyes something like an apology, as if he had put her in this position. “I’m sorry.” “Don’t apologize. You did nothing. You only asked.”
She put the sheet back in the box and closed it. He asked: “What will you do?” She said: “I will go out of here and call each of these Eight.” “And if they refuse?” “That is the question of the fourth day.”
She climbed the stairs ahead of him, her shoulders taut like a woman who has just discovered that the ground beneath her feet never belonged to her.
Dear reader, now we have nine people, and soon there will be thirty. I ask you not to look hastily among them for the wicked one; from this page on I leave you alone with a heavier riddle: How can a whole group of good people be responsible for a crime that none of them committed alone?
Chapter Five
“In the Right Place”
The Second to Fourth Day
At a quarter past ten that night Ru’a stood at the street corner opposite the radio station: a girl of seventeen, her bag over one shoulder, her phone glowing in her hand. She had told her parents she was at her friend Nur’s, and she was not at Nur’s. She did not know exactly why she had come; only that a curiosity burned in her chest, of the kind that makes a person walk toward a light at the end of the street.
The side door of the station opened, and a man stepped out. She recognized him at once: Uncle Adam, her grandfather’s neighbor, who teaches the boys of the neighborhood not to lie. He walked with uncertain steps, his hair disheveled, his face wet. He was crying. A man of fifty-eight was crying in the street and did not wipe away his tears.
Behind him the receptionist ran out of the building, a sheet of paper in her hand: “Mr. Adam! You dropped this!” He stopped and looked at the sheet as at a snake. With a trembling voice he said: “That is not mine.” “But it fell out of your pocket…” “It is not mine.” And he went on.
Ru’a lifted her phone and pressed the shutter, too late. She caught only his back, vanishing at the end of the street.
In the station building Hind, the receptionist, stood at her desk, the folded sheet between her fingers. Her colleague asked: “What is that?” “A sheet a man lost. He was crying. He said it wasn’t his.” “Then throw it away.” “I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because he wouldn’t have run like that if it weren’t his.” She opened the bottom drawer, laid the sheet under the visitors’ book and closed it: “I’ll keep it a day or two.” “And if someone asks for it?” “Then I’ll know it’s his.”
And now, my friend, let me show you how a scandal is made. It is not made in the dark, not in the rooms of conspirators; it arises in the schoolyard, between two lessons, with perfectly innocent hands. I will tell you the steps one after another, so that you learn to recognize the trap when you yourself are one of its links.
The next morning Ru’a whispered to her friend Nur in the schoolyard: “I saw something strange yesterday. Uncle Adam came out of the station crying. A sheet fell from him, and he said it wasn’t his.” Nur said: “Maybe something private. Don’t tell anyone.” “I won’t.”
First step: the incident. Ru’a had seen a crying man. Nothing more.
An hour later Nur stood with Shadi, Ru’a’s cousin, in the corner of the cafeteria: “You won’t believe it. Ru’a saw Adam al-Khatib come out of the station crying.” “And did he run away?” “I don’t know. She says he walked fast.” “Then he ran away.” “She didn’t say that.” “You said he walked fast and cried. That means he fled. And what was he doing at the station? Whoever comes out of a station crying has confessed something.” “Confessed what?” “What he did.” “And who says he did something?” “Nobody cries like that for no reason.”
Nur stared at him: “You’re adding something.” “I’m analyzing,” said Shadi proudly.
Second step: the interpretation. The human being cannot bear the emptiness of meaning, so he fills it with the nearest dark explanation. And the dark explanation shines brighter than the gray truth.
In a small café at the gate nineteen-year-old Fadi was pouring tea for a guest. He heard Shadi and Nur at the next table: “And after he had confessed, he came out crying.” “Who says he confessed?” asked Fadi. “Everyone says so.” “Who is ‘everyone’?” “Everyone.” “I know him. He doesn’t look like that kind of man.” “People aren’t what we think.” “But you didn’t ask what happened. You just decided.” “Each of us has his version,” said Shadi and turned his face away. Fadi set the pot down on the table harder than he meant to: “A version that sometimes kills.” “Nobody is going to kill anybody.” “Wait and see.”
In a room where Sara sat with her friend Samar, Sara scrolled on her phone. Twenty-two, forty thousand followers on an account called “Eye of the Neighborhood,” proud of posting only what she had seen or heard. She said: “Shadi told me that Adam al-Khatib, the accountant everybody knows, came out of the station crying after he had confessed.”
“Confessed what?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Then don’t post it.”
“I won’t say he confessed. I’ll say: ‘What is the story of the crying man?'”
“Sara, those aren’t questions. Those are accusations in disguise. People don’t read questions, they read the name.”
“I won’t name the name.”
“And how are people supposed to know, then?”
“They’ll know.”
Samar looked at her. She was a photographer and carried a small camera everywhere and photographed the streets at night for her final project. She said: “I was on that street last night. I took photos and didn’t pay attention to what’s in them. I haven’t uploaded them yet.” “Upload them and send them to me tomorrow.” “Sara, and if he’s innocent?” “An innocent person loses nothing through a question.” “Sometimes he loses everything.” “You’re exaggerating.”
And Sara wrote, smiling: “Supposed integrity. What is the story of a man everyone knows as one who doesn’t lie, and whom one sees at night coming out of a strange place, crying, fleeing? We accuse no one. We only ask.” And she posted. In the next ten minutes forty-nine comments came, by the twentieth minute there were over a hundred. The first comments had no names, then came the ones with names.
Third step: “We’re only asking.” How sacred this sentence is to one who wants to throw a stone and keep his hand clean! The accusing question is more insidious than the open accusation; the accusation can be denied, the question cannot, for it was not stated. Our digital society has discovered that the fastest way to kill a person is not to kill him yourself, but to put a question mark above his head and leave the room.
In class Yusuf sat in his last-row seat when Rami leaned toward him: “I heard something about your father. They say he was at the station. And that he… came out crying.” “My father doesn’t cry.” “That’s what I said.” “Who told you?” “Everyone.” Yusuf looked at the seats around him, and some heads turned toward him and quickly turned away. He felt something heavy settle on his chest. “I’ll ask my father.” “Don’t. If it’s true, he won’t tell you.” “My father doesn’t lie.” “Fine.” And in Rami’s voice there was nothing that would have convinced anyone, he of all people, who had broken the school window and had not yet confessed it.
On the third morning Adam stopped at the bend by the Great Mosque. The pavement was empty. For the first time in nine years no one sat by the wall. He looked at the pale spot on the ground where the old man had sat, then at the passers-by. Some looked at him and turned away, a woman whispered something to another as he passed. He thought he was imagining it. Then he saw a man pull out his phone and film him from a distance while pretending to make a call. Adam pressed his bag with his hand, the yellow envelope inside. He had carried it everywhere for two days and did not know where to put it down. He told himself: Soon I’ll know from where they watch. Then more quietly: And they will know it too.
In Adam’s house Samira was washing dishes when the doorbell rang. She opened: Umm Majid, the neighbor’s wife, with a strange smile: “I’m just dropping by to see how you are. I heard Adam is exhausted.” “Exhausted?” “I don’t know. People talk.” “About what?” “About nothing. About nothing, by God.”
She stepped back two paces and then went into her house. Samira closed the door and stood a moment with her hand on the handle. She saw herself in the mirror: the face of a woman of about fifty who knows that when neighbors say “nothing” in this way, it means something. She went back to the kitchen, turned on the tap and let the water run for a long time over a plate on which nothing was left.
That night Ru’a sat on her bed looking at her phone. She felt a slight guilt whose source she did not know; she had told Nur something, and now it was something else. Then she saw in her inbox a message from a number she did not know, received at a quarter past nine on the previous night, which she had not noticed because the phone was on silent:
“Ten fifteen, at the side door of the station. You will understand why.”
She read it twice, and her heart began to tremble. No one had known she would go. She herself had not known until half past nine. And while she stared at the screen, the phone vibrated in her hand: a new message from the same number.
“Thank you for being in the right place.”
Chapter Six
“The Access Log”
The Fourth Day
At eleven at night Samira sat on the edge of the bed, her back to the door. Adam entered the room in silence.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I’m waiting for you.”
“Has something happened?”
“You tell me. Where were you on Tuesday evening?”
“At the office.”
“Until half past ten? Umm Majid was here today. She said nothing. And that is what she said. And there is a post on the internet about a man everyone knows as one who doesn’t lie, whom people saw coming out of the radio station crying.”
Adam closed his eyes. He sat down on the chair opposite.
“I was at the station. I wanted to tell a woman named Rana something. I don’t know how to begin.”
“Begin with the first word.”
“When I was twenty-eight…”
She raised her hand: “No. Don’t tell me a story. Tell me the sentence you are afraid of.”
He looked at her for a long time. Then he said: “I saw a man falsify books. And he gave me money. And I took it. And I kept silent.”
Samira did not move, and long seconds passed.
“When?”
“Thirty years ago.”
“Five years before we married. The money we were able to marry with?”
“Part of it.”
She lowered her head. In her face was neither anger nor astonishment; it was something like an old weariness that had finally found a place to sit.
“I knew,” she said. “I knew the reward was larger than it should have been.”
“And you said nothing.”
“Neither did you. Because I loved you. And because I was afraid to ask, and you would have answered.”
“You should have asked.”
“And you should have told.”
Each stayed in his place. And between them was, for the first time in twenty-five years, something one could not see.
I beg you not to judge Samira too quickly. She said the deepest thing a woman in a quiet house can say: “I was afraid to ask, and you would have answered.” In every house there is at least one question that has not been asked for twenty years because no one wants to hear the answer. And the couples we call “united” are often those who have agreed never to open that drawer. Is there such a drawer in your house? Do not answer me; answer yourself, at night, when you sleep alone.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Adam.
“You know. But you want me to say it: that you tell the truth to the one it concerns. To the man who paid the price of your silence.”
“I don’t even know who he is.”
“Then find out.”
She took the prayer shawl from her shoulders, folded it calmly and laid it on the chair: “I will not judge you tonight. But I will not tell you that everything is fine.” And she put out the lamp.
In the morning Yusuf sat in front of his plate and did not eat. He looked at his father: “Is it true that you cried in front of the station?”
A short silence. Adam said: “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered something.”
“Something bad? Did you make a mistake?”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wasn’t ready.”
Yusuf lowered his eyes: “You told me not to lie.” “And I did not lie.” “But you didn’t say it.” “And for that I am calling myself to account.”
The boy raised his head. In his eyes was something new: not disappointment, but the seriousness of a small man weighing his father for the first time. “Will you say it now?” “I will say it.” “To whom?” “To the one I owe it to.” “And when?” “Soon.” “How soon?” “I don’t know,” said Adam in a voice he himself did not know. “But it is closer than I thought.”
At eight he arrived at the company. In the entrance hall glances followed him. No one said anything, but the receptionist lowered her voice when she saw him, and two men from sales walked by whispering. At his office door Samir was waiting: “Mr. Adam, I want to show you something. But inside.”
They went in, and Samir closed the door. “I haven’t slept. Because of what I told you yesterday about the light in the Hajji’s office. I haven’t told anyone, but I looked at the system’s access log. I’m responsible for the data backup and have read rights.”
He turned his computer screen toward Adam: a long file of small lines, dates, times, and user names. He pointed to a pale line:
“02:13. Login: H. Tawfiq. Device: main office. Operation: automatic batch import.”
“02:14. Entry of postings: 17 postings. Status: completed.”
“02:16. Logout.”
“That is not an automatic import,” said Samir. “An automatic import doesn’t need anyone to log in with his personal account; it runs alone under the account ‘System.’ This is someone who sat down at a desk and entered the postings by hand and then called them ‘automatic import’ so that everything looks normal. At a quarter past two in the night. From the Hajji’s account.”
Adam was silent. Then he said slowly: “It could be anyone. The Hajji doesn’t know his password by heart, the secretary writes it down for him on a slip. And Karim. And Muaz. And whoever enters the office.”
“But why does someone work at that hour? And why does he accuse me?”
Adam stood at the window. He knew the question better than he knew the answer. Why does a man enter his office in the middle of the night and plant small errors that are too orderly, and then draw the chief accountant into examining the figures? Then into the archive? Then into a cellar with an envelope that is in no register? The error was no error. And suddenly it seemed to him that he had not found the envelope, but that someone had led him to it.
“What should I do with this information?”
“Nothing. Tell no one, and don’t copy the log. And stay close to me.”
The door suddenly opened, and Karim came in: “Ah, you are here. Mr. Adam, the Hajji wants to see you after noon. And he asks you to stay away from the archive until further notice. The board has decided to close it because of the demolition. And what about the deed?” “We’ll take care of it.” “I found it yesterday.” “Give it to me.” “I don’t have it with me. It’s lying in its box.” The two men exchanged a long look. Then Karim turned to Samir: “And why is this computer open to the logs?” “He checked the backup copy at my request,” said Adam. “No one asks for anything without permission.” “And I ask for your permission now, Karim, after having done it.”
Karim smiled a small, formal smile: “You are persistent.” “No. I am only a man who does not lie.” “Precisely for that reason I fear you.”
He went out and quietly closed the door. In the silence that followed Samir said: “Do you think the Hajji…?” “I think nothing. I know that the time is a quarter past two.” And Adam looked at the last line on the screen: “02:14. Account: H. Tawfiq.” And in his head, for no reason, stood another number.
21.
Part Two: The Witnesses
Chapter Seven
“The Mother Who Buried a Living Man”
The Fifth Day
The next morning the bed in the clinic’s side room was empty. The sheet neatly folded, the drip on its stand closed with a piece of gauze. Maryam stood before it, the coffee cup in her hand, and her heart sank step by step.
“When did he leave?”
“Before dawn,” said Hisham, yawning. “He opened the door himself and said to the guard: Thank you. Then he went.”
“Went? He could barely stand yesterday.”
“Perhaps he was stronger than he looked.”
“Or more afraid than he looked.”
Hisham looked at her: “What does a homeless man have to be afraid of? You talked with him a long time. What did he say?”
“He gave me a name. I can’t say it.”
Hisham smiled wearily: “You don’t say it either.”
Maryam wrote to Bilal only on the fifth day: “This afternoon. At Mama’s. Will you come?” The answer came within seconds: “I’ll be there before you.”
At half past three Bilal stood in front of the old house, his hands in his pockets. She saw him from afar. He had grown older, or she had forgotten: a thinner face, first gray at the temples, an ironed shirt, as if preparing for an appointment.
“You’re late.”
“I’m not late. You came early.”
“I didn’t want to stand alone in the street. So I stood alone in the street.”
She laughed against her will, then her laughter trembled and became something else. And without a word Bilal stepped closer and opened his arms. She stood a moment. Then she stepped in, as if returning to a place she had left yesterday.
“I’m sorry,” he said into her ear. “I pressed you. I wanted you to believe by force what I believe.”
“And I was afraid you might be right.”
“Am I right?”
“I don’t know.”
They let go. Bilal quickly wiped his face with his sleeve so she wouldn’t see. Maryam took the small photograph from the pocket of her coat and handed it to him. For a long time he studied it: “That is my mother’s handwriting. How did the photo come to him?” “We’ll ask.”
I wish, dear reader, that you would remember this moment on the stairs. A brother and a sister, after three years of silence, climb to their mother’s apartment, and each step leads them back into their childhood. There are moments in life when we feel that time does not run forward but turns around itself, and that the child we were still sits on the third step, waiting to understand why the grown-ups quarrel.
The mother opened after the second ring: Aisha, sixty, in an old house dress, her hair under a white scarf, her eyes without sleep for days. The apartment was small and clean and smelled of light incense. On the kitchen table stood a large bowl covered with a cloth, a plate of bread, and a bottle of water.
“Are you expecting a guest?” asked Maryam. “No.” “For whom is the food, then?” “For no one.” “Mama.” “What does the food matter to you?”
Bilal and Maryam sat down opposite her. Maryam laid the photograph on the table. The mother did not touch it. She looked at it as one looks at an old wound that one knows will never heal.
“Where did you get that?”
“It was in the coat of an old man who came to the clinic.”
“Which man?”
“Don’t play with us,” said Bilal quietly. “You know which man. On the phone you said to Maryam: ‘Where is he now?’ Who is he?”
The mother closed her eyes. A minute passed, and a drop fell from the tap into the basin, very loud.
“Do you say it,” said Maryam calmly, “or shall I?”
“What do you want to say?”
“That he is my father.”
The mother raised her head. In her eyes there was no denial; it was something worse: a strange relief.
“Yes. He is your father.”
Bilal sat motionless. “But he is dead.” “I told you he was dead.” “And is he?” “No.” “Where is he, then?” “I don’t know. I knew. Then I lost him. This morning.”
At four they were still sitting there, and the mother had been silent a little, then she spoke.
“Thirty years ago I was pregnant with Maryam. Your father was in the warehouse when he saw something. He said he had seen someone open the safe at night. In the morning he went to the accountant Fakhri and told him, because he considered him an honest man. And Fakhri did nothing. Two weeks later a man from the company came and said money was missing from the warehouse and the guard was responsible. He had nothing with which to defend himself. They took his statement, and they had him sign a sheet he hadn’t read properly. Then came a man called Khalid.”
Bilal gasped: “Khalid? I heard that name from my source.”
“He was a quiet man who never raised his voice. He sat on this chair here and drank tea with us. And he said to your father: Mr. Mansur, you are a sensible man, and you have a pregnant wife. Your staying in this neighborhood will not be pleasant.”
“He threatened you?”
“He did not say a word of threat. And I understood everything.”
Now it is time to tell you something about “the threat that says no word of threat.” It is an old, perfected art that the most skillful people practice in every age: He raises no voice, he raises no hand, he leaves no trace one could present to a judge. He drinks tea with you and asks after the children and then says a sentence about “calm.” And you understand the unsaid better than the said. True tyranny needs no pistol; it is enough for it to know the name of your little daughter.
“And two weeks after Maryam’s birth he disappeared. He left at night. He said to me: I’m going so they won’t do anything to you. And he asked me to tell no one anything. And this photo I gave him before he left. I said: Take something of her with you. And I waited seven years. Then a lawyer named Ziad came to me, he said he represented ‘my interest,’ and the law allows a missing person to be declared dead after seven years, and that this was in our interest. For the settlement applied only to a widow. A large sum, if I renounced every claim and never spoke about the case.”
“And you agreed?”
“I agreed.”
Bilal suddenly stood up and sat down again.
“Why?”
“Because I was a widow on paper and a mother of two children in reality. And because no one offered me anything else.”
“And where did the money go?”
The mother looked at Maryam: “Into the university. Your studies. Everything.”
Maryam sank back in her chair. “You always said it was a scholarship.” “I said that.” “Mama.” “Your father dreamed of seeing his daughter as a doctor. I don’t know how to explain to you that I found no other path to his dream.”
Maryam put her hand over her mouth. She stood up, went to the window and stayed there, her back to them. She said: “Every patient I’ve treated… every medicine I paid for out of my own pocket… all resting on a price called…”
“Don’t say that.”
“Yes.”
“I protected you,” said the mother.
“No,” said Bilal in a dry voice. “You protected yourself. You were silent for thirty years and cashed in.”
“And what would you have wanted from me? That I refuse and let you starve?”
“I would have wanted you to tell me. I would have known that he’s not dead!”
“And would that have changed anything?” “It would have changed everything.” “Your father asked me to say nothing.”
They fell silent.
“He asked you?” asked Maryam from the window.
“When I visited him. Every Friday. For nine years. By the Great Mosque. He sits on the pavement.”
“The beggar?” asked Bilal, stunned. “My father?”
“For nine years I have passed him every Friday and given him food. He did not want to live in my house. He said: If the children find out, they will ask. And whoever doesn’t know is not asked. This morning I went with the food and did not find him. And the Friday before he coughed a lot. I told him: Go to a doctor. He said: Doctors ask for the name.”
Maryam slowly let herself sink to the floor, her back against the wall. She remembered the man whose hand she had held days ago, the cracked hand, the honey-brown eyes, and how he had looked at her as if wanting to learn her face by heart. She said: “And I walk past there? And didn’t see him?” “Perhaps you saw him and didn’t recognize him.” “Why the Great Mosque of all places? Why didn’t he sit somewhere else?”
The mother looked at the table, at the bowl covered with a cloth. And said:
“Because that is the way Adam walks every morning.”
Chapter Eight
“The Last Page”
The Sixth Day
The neighborhood’s public library stood in a small house behind the old school: dark wooden shelves, the smell of yellowed paper, two tables at which no one sat. At a small desk by the entrance sat Salma, for nineteen years the librarian. Forty-one, in a quiet gray dress, with fine glasses, and on her desk a cat named “Page” slept.
Since the second day she had been listening quietly to the radio. When she heard the name “Mansur,” the pen fell from her hand. In the evening she called the station and left her number with a man named Bilal. And at six on the sixth day three people entered the library after closing time: Bilal, Huda and Adam, whom they had met at the door. Salma locked the door, and they sat around the small table.
“You called the station,” said Huda. “Why now?”
“Because for thirty years I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me about Mansur. A man told me, before he died. Fakhri.”
Huda sat down carefully: “Tell us from the beginning.”
“I was eleven. My father was Fakhri’s driver. One day, shortly before he fell ill, he called me to his car. He sat in the back seat and handed me a yellow envelope. He said: Salma, you are a reliable girl. Keep this envelope, don’t open it, and give it to no one, unless someone comes and asks you about Mansur.”
“And who is Mansur? Did you ask?”
“No. I was a child, and I was a little afraid of him.”
“And did anyone ask?”
“No. Thirty years. In a small wooden box in our old house, then I took it with me to every house I lived in, and finally into this library.”
She took from the drawer of her desk a wooden box the size of a palm and opened it: a pale yellow envelope, slightly swollen with time, the edges closed with an old ribbon that was still intact. She said: “I have not opened it. Not once.”
“Why not?”
She looked at the sleeping cat: “I was afraid. And as I grew up, the fear became something else. I told myself loyalty to a dead man was more important than the curiosity of the living, and I keep a promise.” Then she said in a dry voice: “I called my cowardice loyalty.”
This sentence alone deserves to be hung above the door of every school, every university and every house of mourning. “I called my cowardice loyalty.” How often we wrap our fear in noble names! We call cowardice “wisdom,” compliance “forbearance,” sloth “trust in God,” silence about injustice “covering the faults of others.” If each of us were to stand before the mirror and say to it in honesty what Salma said, half of the world’s moral institutions would collapse.
“And are you ready now?” asked Huda.
“I called.”
“Open the envelope.”
“No. Its owner is the one for whom it was written.” “Then Bilal. He is his son.”
Salma looked at him and saw him tremble: “Take it.” He stretched out his hand, and the envelope in his palm was heavier than anything he had ever carried. He opened it carefully and drew out three folded sheets, written in even script with black ink. He said: “I can’t read.” Huda took the sheets and read:
“To Mansur. I write to you, and I know you will never read this letter, because I will not dare to send it. But I write it so that it remains. You stole nothing, and I know it. You told me you had seen a man open the safe at night, and I believed you. And that was the worst thing I did, for I believed you and then betrayed you. They told me you would have to bear what had happened, and I falsified the books with my own hand. And I destroyed a receipt that would have proved your innocence. I did not do it out of greed. I did it because I was afraid and because the one who ordered it was closer to me than I was to myself. I do not ask that you forgive me. I ask only that your name be returned to you. And I have left in a safe place what proves everything I say.”
And on the second sheet: “And I know that there are men in this city who have kept silent after me. Some took money, some took an excuse. None of them knows the whole picture. I have written their names down in another place, perhaps one of them will speak when he sees that another has spoken.”
She turned the third sheet over and froze. Bilal asked: “What?” She said: “The third ends in the middle of a sentence.”
“And I do not conceal from you that what I took from the safe did not belong to me. And that the one who took it did not…”
Then the ink fell steeply downward, and the sheet ended. At the bottom the page number: 3. “These are three pages. Where is the fourth?” “There is no fourth,” said Salma, “it was not in the envelope.”
“Look,” said Bilal. “There is a small line in the margin of the third sheet, in finer, hastier writing:
‘The last page you will find with the one who does not know its worth.'”
“With the one who does not know its worth?” whispered Bilal. “Someone. A man, a woman, a child.” “Or a gardener.” “Why a gardener?” “I don’t know,” said Bilal. “It came into my mind.”
At that moment there was a knock at the library door. Three times, calm. They looked at one another. Salma whispered: “I haven’t ordered anyone.” And she opened. On the threshold stood a tall man of thirty-eight, in an old leather jacket, a notebook in his hand.
“Good evening. I am Nader, freelance journalist. I have written about corruption cases in the city. I heard the radio show. And I saw you go in here. I wanted to be here before the others.”
He entered without permission. He threw a quick glance at the table and saw the sheets, the envelope and the box. “Ah,” he said. “That is it.” “Don’t touch it,” said Huda sharply. “This is a public case.” “This is my father’s case,” said Bilal. “And the case of the whole city. The truth belongs to no one.” “It belongs to the one who paid the price of its absence.” Nader smiled: “You still think the story is your story. The story grows. If it is not published now, someone else will take it over.”
I pause here to introduce this newcomer to you. Nader is neither wicked nor a hero, he is what people call “the conscience of the city”: one who carries the truth in his hand like a torch and with it first illuminates his own face. And he says a perfectly correct sentence: The truth belongs to no one. But he forgets that truth also has relatives, who burn more on it than the one who writes about it in a newspaper.
“To whom does it belong, then?”
“To the one who may decide,” said Salma in a voice that no one had known she possessed. She stood up, took the sheets and arranged them with firm hands: “This letter is for none of you. It is for Mansur.”
“Mansur is dead,” said Nader. “He is not dead,” said Bilal. “What?” “Nothing,” said Huda quickly.
Nader stared at them one after another: “You know more than you say.” “So do you,” said Huda. “You know that it is three sheets. Because you looked at their numbers before you looked at anything else.” Nader laughed briefly: “You are sharp.” “Then let us agree: What is in this room does not leave it before we know where the last page is.” And she pointed to the small line in the margin. Nader read it. And for a moment his face showed something he did not want to show: not curiosity, but hunger.
“With the one who does not know its worth,” he said softly. Then he raised his eyes: “And I know where to begin.”
Chapter Nine
“A Gift on the Threshold”
The Seventh Day
Salim’s house lay at the edge of the neighborhood, small, surrounded by an overgrown garden with an ancient lemon tree. The man sat on the porch in a wicker chair, a closed book in his hands in which he was not reading. Seventy-one, with neat white hair and a voice that still carried the sound of the teacher who once filled the classrooms. On his left wrist an old gold watch that he never took off.
At ten in the morning four visitors came: Bilal, Huda, Nader and behind them Salma. Salim said to Huda: “You called me yesterday and said my name was on a list. Eight names, and I am the first?” “You are the first in the order.” “Then sit down.”
He set the book aside. Bilal asked him to tell what he knew about Fakhri. He said: “And why do you think I know something?” “Because your name is on a list he wrote with his own hand.” “Perhaps because I was his teacher. I was the teacher of half the young men of this city.” “But it was you who recommended him to the old Hajji.” Salim lowered his head: “Yes. I recommended him. He was clever and loved numbers.” “And what lies between his joining the company and his death?” “Nothing.”
Nader said, turning to Huda: “May I ask?” “Nader.” “I only want to speed things up.” “No one interrogates a man like this in his own house.” “Let him ask,” said Salim calmly.
Nader straightened in his seat: “What kind of watch is that?” “A watch.” “Gold? Where did you get it?” “A gift from Fakhri. Thirty years ago.” “On what occasion?” “None.” “Then what did he give it to you for?” “Out of gratitude, he said. To his teacher.” “What kind of gratitude is presented two weeks after the accusation of an innocent guard?”
Salim did not answer. Nader said in a calm voice that grew sharper the quieter it became: “Teacher, you knew Fakhri since he was a boy. He came to you with a gold watch and told you something, and you kept silent. Why did you accept it?”
“Because it was beautiful.”
“And did you need a watch?”
“No.”
“Why, then?”
Salim clasped his wrist with the other hand and pressed: “Because I knew there was something wrong with the matter.” “And what did you do?” “Nothing. Because I taught people’s children that truth is a virtue, and was unable to confront the one I loved.” “And did he deserve your love?” “No. But a person sometimes loves the image he has made of someone more than the person.”
What a sentence! If I wanted to write a theory of friendship, loyalty and blind love, I would need no more than this. How many people do we love who are in truth absent? What we love in them is the statue we have chiseled in ourselves, and we defend it wildly as soon as someone approaches the original. That explains why we forgive those near us what we do not forgive strangers, and why we sometimes betray the truth in the name of loyalty to a person who from the beginning was not as we painted him.
“And Mansur’s wife? Did she come to you?”
“She came after a week. She sat where you are sitting.” He pointed to Salma. “She asked me to speak with Fakhri and testify for her husband. I am a man whose word counts in the neighborhood. Had I said something, people would have listened. I told her: I don’t know. And I knew. She said: Teacher, you taught us to tell the truth. And I told her: One does not always tell the truth.”
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing. She thanked me and left.”
He lowered his head. And broke down. He did not weep loudly, it was something like an old splintering: a man of seventy-one shattering before young people who seek truth. He said: “I do not deserve to be called a teacher. For thirty years I teach children that truth sets us free, and I cannot look at my watch.”
He took off the watch and laid it on the table: “Take it.” “We don’t want it,” said Huda. “We want you to testify.” “Before whom?” “You will tell the truth.” “And will you forgive me?” he said to Bilal. “I don’t know.” “Frankly.” “I learned that from you.” And the teacher smiled a bitter smile.
At eleven an old woman of sixty-five came, in a long brown dress, with a cloth bag, accompanied by a man of forty-four with tired eyes and an even older woman leaning on a cane. Salim said: “This is Amna, Mansur’s old neighbor, this is her son Rashid and his mother Najwa. I called them; I know that each of them has a part.”
Amna said in a heavy voice: “I don’t know much. But a boy told me something. Rashid.” Rashid looked at his mother, a small woman, her eyes closed, gripping the cane with both hands: “Mama, you tell it.” “No. Because you were a child.” “I was fourteen.”
Rashid breathed: “My mother cleaned the company’s offices at night. One night she took me along, because my father was away. While she cleaned the second floor, I crept into the cash room. I saw a man sitting behind the table, a book in front of him, he wrote and erased, then tore off a small sheet and put it in his pocket. Fakhri. I ran to my mother and told her what I had seen. She said: Tell no one.”
“Why?”
“Because we would lose our jobs.”
Najwa drew a trembling breath: “I had three sons and a sick husband. The salary was all we had.” “I know, Mama.” “Why do you bring it up again, then?” “Because the man they accused had no one who spoke for him.” Najwa opened moist eyes: “I was not wicked.” “No,” said Rashid. “You were afraid.” “Does that forgive?” “I don’t know. But it explains.”
She stretched out her hand and took his. And so, without speech and without formal confession, the silence of thirty years shattered in a house full of morning light and the scent of lemon.
Do not condemn Najwa. I know that some of you want to ask her: Did you not think of the innocent man? But I ask you a different question: How many poor people in this world are supposed to be brave at a price the rich do not pay? Our beautiful morality is applied to the poor by the same measure as to the well-to-do, as if both had the same luxury. So know, before you judge, how much the word “no” costs in a house with three children and a sick husband.
At sunset Salim returned alone to his house. The others had gone. He stood at the door, the key in his hand, and looked at his overgrown garden, and for the first time in years he felt his chest was lighter. As he stretched out his hand to the lock, he saw something on the threshold: a small box, wrapped in gray paper and tied with a red thread.
He froze. He knew the paper. He knew it as a man knows a face from the past: gray paper with fine lines, a red thread with a single knot. He had seen it once before. Thirty years ago.
He bent down slowly and picked it up. Inside lay a small folded slip. He opened it. In beautiful script, as if from a machine:
“Your life and what remains of it. And that is the price of your peace.”
His fingers trembled. There was no one in the street. He pulled out his phone and looked for Huda’s number.
“Teacher?” “A gift has come to me. The same gift. The same wrapping. The same thread.” “When?” “A few minutes ago.” “Don’t open it. Don’t touch it. For whoever buys silence,” said Huda slowly, “is still working.”
Chapter Ten
“Half the Truth”
The Eighth Day
Iyad lived in two adjoining rooms at the edge of the old harbor, in a quarter that only those who know the address walk through. He was sixty-eight and had been for over thirty years a guard of the Modern Trade company, until he was sent into retirement eight years ago. His body was still broad, but his back had bent, and his hands trembled when he held the teacup.
At nine in the morning there was a knock. “Who is it?” “I am Khalid.” His hand froze on the bolt. “Open up, Abu al-Fadl. I’ve come to see how you are.”
He opened slowly. On the threshold stood a man of fifty-five, elegant, with a calm face, in a gray jacket and shiny shoes, in his hand a bag of fruit and a box of sweets. Khalid sat down on the only chair and surveyed the room with a knowing eye, like one who counts things he will never buy.
“Hajji Tawfiq is asking after you. He values men like you, who spent their lives in the service of the company.”
“He did not value me when they dismissed me.”
“That was an administrative decision.”
“And today it is a moral one?”
Khalid smiled: “You are still sharp.” “And you still bring fruit when you want something.” “No. I bring it when I am worried about someone. The city is talking these days, and there are people poking around in old things, and perhaps one will come to you. It is none of your business. And that is what you should tell whoever asks you.” “The truth is my business.” “No. The truth needs someone to protect you when you say it. And you are alone, Abu al-Fadl. And no one protects a lonely man in such a neighborhood.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not at all. It is advice.”
“The advice that reached me thirty years ago came in an envelope.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
He set the bag of fruit on the table and stood up: “I know that the nights here are long and the light sparse, and that a person can hear things he doesn’t like.” “And perhaps see them too.” “And perhaps see them too. Take care of yourself.” And he left.
That is the other side of advice, dear reader: advice that wears a silk glove. And note that Khalid is no monster; he is a man who brings fruit and asks after your health and speaks of the sparse light in a tone of genuine concern. And that makes him more dangerous than the murderers in films. The most terrible forms of cruelty are those that do not feel themselves to be cruelty, because they speak in the language of care.
At three in the afternoon there was a knock again. This time Iyad looked through the crack: Huda, the lawyer, and with her the teacher Salim. He opened. They came in and sat on the only bed, and neither reached for the bag of fruit. Salim said: “Abu al-Fadl, I have known you for forty years, and I have come to ask you to tell the truth about what you saw on the night when Mansur was accused.” Iyad closed his eyes: “I knew they would come. Those who ask.” “And why did you not go to them?” “Because I am a coward,” he said simply.
Huda drew out a notebook and a pen: “I will write, and you tell.” “I was on watch that night, at the entrance to the third warehouse, the night a week before Mansur’s dismissal. I saw Fakhri enter the warehouse after midnight and come out an hour later, and he was carrying a yellow envelope. He put it in the safe and locked it. And he said to me: Iyad, if anyone asks you, I was not here. And I said: Yes, sir.” “And did he give you something?” He hesitated. “Yes. A sum. It was a lot.” “From Fakhri?” “It came from a man in the company.” “From Fakhri?” “From a man in the company.”
Huda raised her eyes from the notebook: “Is it another man? Why do you hesitate?” “Because I don’t want to say more. Because I’m afraid.” “Of Khalid?” “Of everything.”
Salim looked at Huda: “He is not saying everything.” “I know.” “I know that look. I have seen it in the mirror.” Then he turned to Iyad: “Abu al-Fadl, is this the whole truth?” “It is half the truth.” “And will the other half kill you?” “No. But it will kill them.” “Whom?” “Those who love me.”
Neither of them understood. Iyad said: “It doesn’t matter. Write what I said.” She wrote and read it aloud to him. And he signed with a heavy, weary hand, as if chiseling his name into stone. Huda said: “Thank you.” “Don’t thank me. I have done nothing yet.” And as she took the sheet and gave it to Salim to keep, she said: “I’ll put it in my office’s safe tomorrow.” “Tonight would be better,” said Iyad. “I don’t know. That is how I feel.”
Pause at the expression “half the truth.” It is not only Iyad’s expression; it is the expression of the whole story. Mostly we do not lie, we say the half that does not harm us, and the other half we keep in a box we call “the circumstances” or “privacy” or “protecting our loved ones.” And the most dangerous thing about this second half is that it is mostly true: Iyad truly fears for those he loves. The excuse is not invented; it is the finest garment in which cowardice can dress.
At eleven at night Khalid sat in his car, twenty meters from Iyad’s house. He had switched off the lights, turned off the engine, and was watching. No one had told him to, but he had come. Because that morning he had seen something in Iyad’s eyes that he had not seen for thirty years: the absence of fear. And that was more dangerous than any fear. He told himself: I will guard him tonight. Nothing more. And in his chest something writhed, as if he were lying to himself.
At midnight a white car appeared at the end of the street and put out its lights before stopping. Three men got out, their faces covered. Khalid froze. These were not his men. He knew it at once. He had sent no one and given no one an order. The three went swiftly into Iyad’s house, as if they knew where the door was. And Khalid heard wood splinter and a man scream and then be stifled. He grasped the door handle. He opened the door a crack. Then he closed it. He grasped the handle again. And in those long seconds he saw everything: he saw the envelope of thirty years ago, he saw Mansur’s face, he saw himself as a young man knocking at a door and saying in a calm voice: Your staying will not be pleasant.
And he stayed in his seat.
After ten minutes the three men came out: one carried a sheet, another an old notebook. They got into the car and vanished. When Khalid was sure they were far away, he got out and entered the house. Iyad lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, bleeding from the mouth, his eyes open.
“Abu al-Fadl! I’ll call the ambulance.”
Iyad seized his wrist with astonishing strength: “You.” “It wasn’t me.” “You waited. You were in the car.” “I swear.” “Go. Before they come back.”
Khalid looked at the face that others had beaten in his place. Then he left. In the street he dialed a number: “Hello?” said Huda in a voice thick with sleep. “I am Khalid. Head of security. Iyad is in his house. He has been beaten. Call the ambulance.” “Who did it?” “It wasn’t me,” said Khalid, and his voice shook as it never did otherwise. “But I know who did it. I don’t know. That is what frightens me. Those were not my men.”
And he hung up. He stood on the dark pavement, his hand tight around the phone. And he felt for the first time in thirty years that a hand lay over his hand and moved him while he believed he was moving others.
Chapter Eleven
“The Smudged Letter”
The Ninth Day
The goldsmiths’ market in the old quarter was narrow as a throat, the glass fronts crowded together, and yellow lights shone above them even in broad daylight. Nader walked slowly between the shops, his hand in the pocket of his leather jacket. He had slept only two hours, and in his head stood a single line: “You will find it with the one who does not know its worth.”
He stopped in front of a small shop on which was written: “Abu Salim, Jeweler, since 1962.” “Good morning. I would like to ask about someone.” The goldsmith raised his brows. He was seventy, with thick glasses and small tools on the table: “Questions are expensive, my son.” “I will pay.” “What do you offer?” “A cup of coffee.” “That will do.”
“About twenty-five years ago a man came to you with some old gold pieces. He didn’t know their value and sold them to you cheaply. And you forget no one.”
“Who says that?”
“People.”
“People like to talk.”
“And you love memory.”
The goldsmith looked at him and finally said: “It was a gardener. His name was Jamal. At the Green Earth, at the edge of town. An old garden that had belonged to a rich man. Fakhri, if memory doesn’t fail me. He sold me two small gold pieces in animal shape and said he had found them in an old chest in the hut. And he had a gold ring on him, with two letters engraved in it. That he did not sell. He said he wore it as a blessing.”
Nader’s face brightened. He laid down a small banknote and left. In the shop Abu Salim stayed behind, watching his receding back and thinking that he had said more than he should, and that it was not the first time.
The way to the Green Earth was a dirt road between crumbling stone walls. The closer Nader came, the more the air changed: moisture, the smell of wet soil, glossy green leaves hanging over the walls. Around the garden the land was parched, the cracks yellow. But here stood lemon and fig trees and small apple trees, rows of tomatoes and mint. He said softly to himself: How can a single piece of earth turn green in the middle of the drought?
In the middle of the garden a man was bending over the soil: sixty-two, a broad back, a sweat-soaked shirt and a straw hat.
“Are you Jamal? I am Nader. How long have you been in this garden?”
“Thirty years.”
“And whom does it belong to?”
“God.”
“And after God?”
“I tend it. It is a trust.”
“For whom?”
“For whoever asks for it.”
Nader looked at his right hand. A heavy gold ring on the middle finger, with two raised letters. “This ring is beautiful.” “A blessing. I found it in the hut twenty-five years ago.” “‘F. R.’ That is the engraving of a name.” “I can’t read. I learned as a child and then forgot.” “Then you also don’t know what was on the papers that were with it.”
Jamal froze. “What papers? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am a man of contentment. Contentment is a treasure that never dwindles. I demand nothing from anyone, and I take nothing that doesn’t belong to me.”
“But you took the ring. And sold the gold. And didn’t ask whom it belongs to. Then you were not content. One who wears a ring that is not his, lives in a garden that is not his, and preaches contentment, resembles one who begs a blessing for money he hasn’t earned.”
I confess something about Nader: I love his mind and fear his means. He said a true, hard sentence, but he said it threateningly. And that is the difference between the truth that frees and the truth that extorts. The sentence “Contentment is a treasure that never dwindles” is no lie in Jamal’s mouth, but it can be a curtain; and the poor man’s curtain may be finer and more dignified than the rich man’s, but it remains a curtain. And I care that you do not believe folk wisdom is always wisdom; sometimes it is small tricks with which people fall asleep.
Jamal’s face turned red: “Who are you, to call me to account?” “I am not calling you to account. I only know that the police will ask the same questions when they learn that you took a dead man’s belongings.” “Are you threatening me?” “I am offering you a choice: Show me the papers.” “And if I don’t show them to you?” “Then I will be forced to something else.”
Jamal looked at him for a long time. In his eyes was an old fear and something resembling relief. He said: “Wait here.”
He led him to a small wooden hut at the end of the garden: farm tools, seed sacks, a rusty sickle. In the back corner he lifted a board from the floor and exposed a small hole at the bottom of which stood a wooden box the size of a shoebox, with faded carvings. He opened it: on the bottom lay two folded sheets, wrapped with a fine thread. He handed them to Nader: “I understood nothing of it. But I did not throw them away. I felt they were heavy. Heavy like things entrusted.”
Nader opened the first. It was written in the same hand he had seen in the letter: beautiful, even, in black ink. But the sheet had been damp at the edges, and the ink had run in the last lines. He read softly:
“The fourth page. I. A man took it whose fear I know better than he does himself. I kept silent about him because I wanted to protect him, and that I do not forgive myself. And if you want to know who he is, his name is:”
And after it a smudged word. Damp, run ink like a black stain on the paper, of which only a single letter at the beginning remained: “T.” And after it some dots that could not be read. “The rest is lost,” said Jamal. “The roof has leaked for years.”
And on the other side a small line: “And if you do not find the answer here, look at the warehouse from which everything began.”
Nader contemplated the letter for a long time. “T.” And he remembered an old file in his archive: Tamer al-Husaini, finance director of Modern Trade thirty years ago, who left the company some months after the case and is today a member of the city council, of whom it is rumored that he owns half the harbor. Yes. That was he. “How could I not think of it?” he said softly.
“Do you know who it is?” “I believe so. A big man.” “And what will you do?” “I will publish.” “Don’t rush,” said Jamal. “For it is only a single letter.” “The letter suffices.” “It does not suffice.” “You don’t understand these things.” “I told you I can’t read. And that is why you don’t know the worth of what you carry.”
Nader folded the sheet carefully and put it in his inside pocket: “This stays with me.” The second sheet, a damp receipt of which only the company’s stamp was legible, he gave to hand to Huda. And he said: “And this,” he pointed to the first, “I tell no one before I am sure. For I do not want anyone to err about the direction.” “And you?” “I do not err.”
He stepped out into the soft green light of the garden and walked between the lemon trees and smiled and repeated within himself the name he had begun. He did not look back at Jamal, who remained standing at the door and stared at his back and said, in a voice no one heard: He who knows the worth of a thing forgets to examine to whom it belongs.
Keep this last sentence in mind, for it is the key to the coming chapters. And I say it to you in another form, perhaps closer to your conscience: The most dangerous moments of a person are those in which he believes he has found the answer. The perplexed seeker asks, the hasty certain man judges. And Nader, who knows how to write about the mistakes of others, is about to commit a mistake of the same kind, because his mind has hurried ahead to the result before his feet have arrived.
Chapter Twelve
“The Margin of the Notebook”
The Tenth Day
Munir’s antiquarian bookshop lay in a narrow alley behind the market mosque: shelves up to the ceiling, books piling on the floor, in the middle a wooden table with a small tea kettle and a pipe that was never lit. Seventy, lean, in an ironed linen shirt, with eyes that seemed to read what they looked at.
Huda came in, and with her Bilal, and they sat on two wooden chairs. Munir said: “You called yesterday and said my name was on a list. I didn’t want to be on any list.” “No one wanted to.” “But here I am. Because I am a neighbor, that alone concerns me. What does not concern me, I do not open.” “But you did open.” “I opened and closed again.”
He brought out a small wooden box from under the table and placed it in front of them: “Thirty years ago I bought a box of old notebooks from the estate of a company. They were disposing of their archive and offered me everything at paper price. I am a man of books. Paper is my bread.” He opened the box: a brown leather volume, the edges worn, on the cover a pale stamp: “Modern Trade. Third Warehouse.”
“Why did you keep it?”
“Because it was different. The other notebooks were orderly and correct. This one has many deletions. And an expression that repeats: ‘Final settlement.'”
He leafed through the pages with a finger that knew how to handle old paper. On the page a row of figures, then a line in black ink: “Final settlement. Third warehouse.” And beside it figures from which someone had erased the previous ones.
“And you asked no one? And kept your mouth shut for thirty years?”
“Notebooks do nothing.”
“They do something when someone needs them,” said Huda. “And that is why I came. But not before an accountant has read it.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door.
Adam came in. He stopped on the threshold, in his usual gray jacket, the bag in his hand. Nothing about him resembled the man the neighborhood knew: the face yellow, the eyes reddened, the back slightly bent like one who carries something one cannot see. Huda said: “Welcome, Mr. Adam.” Then she pointed to the man beside her: “Bilal. Mansur’s son.”
Adam froze. The silence in the shop was dense, as if the books themselves were listening.
“I am Adam al-Khatib,” he said softly. “I was a junior clerk at the company. I did not know Mansur had a son.”
“He did not know you exist.”
“May I sit?”
He sat down. He laid the bag on his knees and opened it slowly. He drew out the yellow envelope and laid it on the table, in the midst of them: “I found it nine days ago in the cellar of the company. A certificate. In Fakhri’s hand.” Bilal took the sheet and read: “I, the undersigned, chief accountant, attest that the clerk Adam… has agreed of his own free will to disclose it to no one.” He read it twice. “Is that true?” “Half. I saw Fakhri falsify a book. And I took money. And I kept silent.” “But you did not agree in words.” “I said nothing.” “Then it was no agreement.” “It was silence.” “And is that a difference?” “No,” said Adam. “It is no difference.”
Bilal raised his eyes from the sheet. His face was uncannily calm: “I have been trying for years to hate you. And when I saw you now, I found nothing I could hate.” “You should have found something. For it is I who let him get away with it.” “And did you think they would have believed you if you had spoken? And that my father would have been saved?” “I don’t know.” “That is the worst of it,” said Bilal calmly. “That no one knows.”
Bilal has laid his finger on the deepest wound of this novel: “That no one knows.” We want moral stories to be unambiguous: Had Adam spoken, justice would have won, and his silence would be a clear crime. But life is crueler: Perhaps the silence was a crime, and perhaps the word would have been crushed without changing anything. In both cases the question hangs between the living and the dead: What if? And this “what if” is the harshest prison in which he lives who chose silence.
Then Adam pointed to the back of the certificate. Bilal turned the sheet over, and there stood the number 21 in slanting blue script, now dried. “It is the same number the unknown caller named on the radio.” “And who wrote it?” “I don’t know. I found it written, and the ink was not dry.” “Who knows the time,” said Huda, “and who knows the envelope, and who knows that Adam will go down into the cellar.” “I asked myself that too. I found a log showing that someone went into the system at a quarter past two at night with the Hajji’s account. But I did not find the envelope. Someone led me to it.” “We will come back to that later,” said Huda. “Now the notebook.”
Munir pushed the notebook toward Adam. He took it with both hands, studied the cover, and then opened it. “This is the book of the third warehouse. The inventory account.” He leafed with the speed of an old accountant, let his eyes glide over the columns without reading, smelling in them only the smell of the error. “Here. This is an orderly deletion. The original figures were larger. They were converted into a ‘settlement.’ That means someone wanted to hide a deficit by turning it into an internal posting.” “And Mansur?” “The guard does not write in these books.” “How was he accused, then?” “Because the ‘settlement’ is attributed to the warehouse and the warehouse was under his watch.” “And where is the proof that it wasn’t him?” “Here.”
Adam pointed to the margin of the page. And froze.
On the right margin, beside every line with “Final settlement,” stood two small letters in blue pen: “A. Kh.” He looked at them, then turned the page: “A. Kh.” Another page: “A. Kh.” And each time the same two letters, with the same slant and the same trembling dot between them.
“Mr. Adam?” said Huda. “What do you see?” “I see…”
He stopped. His hand trembled. And suddenly, without warning, an old morning returned to him. A week after the night in the cash room he had stepped into Fakhri’s office. A folded sheet on the table and instructions in Fakhri’s hand: “Adam, post these entries in the book of the third warehouse. Routine. Put your initials beside each line as usual.” And he had sat down then as a young man, proud of the trust, and posted. Line by line he wrote “Final settlement” and put his initials beside it. He did not ask. He connected nothing. He was twenty-eight, and he had taken money a week before. And since that morning he had erased it all from his head. Thirty years.
“I,” he said in a barely audible voice.
“You what?”
“I wrote this. The postings. All of them. This is my handwriting.”
He looked at Huda, then at Bilal, then at the notebook in his hand. “I was not only a witness.” “You wrote the settlement?”
“I wrote the lie with my own hand,” said Adam.
Here, dear reader, in this one sentence, the deception collapses that you too built for twelve chapters. You loved Adam because he is “the man who does not lie,” then you saw him suffer and loved him even more and told yourself: He is only a weak witness. And now the man discovers, and you with him, that he was not the weak witness but the hand that wrote. Fakhri used him exactly the way we use others: with a sum of money, a friendly sentence, and a notebook held out to him as if it were routine. And do you still love him? Do not answer quickly. For the honest answer to this question is in truth the answer to another: Do you love yourself?
Part Three: The Noise
Chapter Thirteen
“A Stone at the Window”
The Eleventh Day
At eleven at night Wail sat in front of two screens in a small room full of computer cables and empty takeout boxes. Twenty-six, in a black shirt, on his shelf a mug bearing the words: “Truth Knows No Age.” He had founded his channel three years ago under the name “Vigilant,” and he had three hundred thousand subscribers who saw in him the conscience of the neighborhood. And Wail believed that more than he admitted.
“Are you ready?” asked Sara on the phone. “Wail, in my post I never said that he confessed.”
“And I won’t say he confessed. I tell the truth: that a man who built his reputation on not lying came out of the station crying in the middle of the night and that a sheet fell from him which he said was not his.”
“That’s how it was. And his photo?”
“An old picture from the company’s website.”
“And if he is innocent?”
“The innocent clarifies. And if he can’t? Then he’s not innocent.”
A short silence. Sara said: “Wail, I said that too. It wasn’t true.” “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that people want to hear something.”
He pressed the broadcast button. His face appeared on the screen, behind him a faint blue light: “Good evening, folks. I am Wail. And this is ‘Vigilant.'” In the first minute four thousand tuned in. In the tenth there were twelve thousand. In the thirtieth the name Adam al-Khatib was written and repeated in every comment, along with the photo of a smiling man in a suit and beneath it the word “accountant.”
I permit myself a little anger here, for I am a narrator and not a stone. Consider Wail’s sentence: “The innocent clarifies. And if he can’t, he’s not innocent.” That is not the sentence of a bad young man; it is the sentence that founded all the inquisition courts in history, from the first witch trial to the last electronic marketplace. It turns the whole legal principle on its head: Instead of the accuser proving the accusation, the accused is required to prove that he didn’t do it. And note too that the “public” here does not feel cruel: It “merely takes part.” This cold participation of the many is the deadliest thing our age has invented.
In the morning Adam entered the company and knew. He had not opened his phone since the night, but the employees’ eyes said everything. At his office door Karim was waiting: “The Hajji wants you.” He went to the top floor. Hajji Tawfiq sat behind his desk, the curtains drawn, the smoke dense.
“Have you seen what they’re saying? And you don’t deny it?” “What should I deny?” “That you were at the station.” “I was there. I wanted to tell Rana something. I didn’t tell it. I couldn’t.”
The Hajji looked at him with tired eyes: “You know I cannot ignore what is being said. The company is facing a deal, and the buyers don’t want to hear the name of the company’s chief accountant on social networks. Therefore I want to suspend you. Temporarily. With full pay. Until things clear up.”
“Hajji, I want to ask you a question. Are you the one who entered the false postings?”
The Hajji froze. The smoke seemed to stand still in the air. “Which postings?” “The ones Samir was blamed for. You told me it was a software error. Why, then, does someone go into the system at a quarter past two at night with your account?”
A long silence. Finally the Hajji said: “Perhaps my password was stolen.” “Perhaps.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “Nothing.” “Adam, you are the most honest man I have known.” “And that frightens me. For honesty is sometimes the reason one is used.”
The Hajji lowered his head: “I am doing what I can to protect you. But I cannot stop what has begun.” “And who began it?” “I don’t know.”
Adam went out, his hand trembling on the handle. He was not sure what he had heard: Had that been a confession? Or a tired man worn down by questions?
At school Yusuf entered the classroom as if entering a forest. Heads turned toward him and turned away. On the wood of his desk someone had written in black marker: “Son of the man who doesn’t lie.” And beneath, in different handwriting: “Lied.”
“Your father is a thief,” said a boy from the last row loudly. “No,” said Yusuf. “We saw him on ‘Vigilant.'” “Everyone knows nothing.” “And you know?” “I know that my father doesn’t lie.” “That’s why he cried.”
Two boys laughed, then the whole class laughed. And in this laughter was nothing that resembled laughter; it was something like a stone thrown at him from all sides. In the corner sat Rami alone, his face flushed. He was the one who had broken the window. He was the one who knew that Yusuf had taken his blame. And Yusuf looked at him: a brief look in which lay a strange reproach and coldness. Then he took his bag and left the classroom. “Where to?” called the teacher. “To the bathroom.” And he did not come back.
At eight in the evening Adam was home again. Samira in the kitchen, the plate on the table, touched by no one. “Where is Yusuf?” “In his room. He hasn’t come out since he got home from school. I was with him an hour ago, the door was closed. I called, and he didn’t answer.” Adam climbed the stairs and knocked on his son’s door: “Yusuf, I am your father.” He opened the door. The room was empty. The bed made. The school bag lay on the floor, the wardrobe half open.
“Samira!” She came running. “Where is your son?” “My God.”
At that moment the window glass burst on the lower floor. A sharp, splintering sound filled the house. Samira screamed. Adam ran downstairs: in the middle of the living room, among the shards of glass, lay a large gray stone, wrapped in a sheet of paper. He bent down and took the sheet. In thick black script, without a signature:
“Silence will not be forgiven.”
He looked at the shattered window. In the dark street he heard receding footsteps, a short laugh, then silence. Samira whispered: “Adam.” “Don’t be afraid.” “Where is Yusuf?” “We’ll find him.”
With trembling fingers Samira pulled out her phone and opened the location app on which she had registered her son’s device since the summer. On the map a small blue dot appeared. She stared at it, her chest rising and falling. She turned the screen toward him. The dot had stood still since noon at the bend by the Great Mosque. On the same pavement. Where the old man had sat.
And notice the irony that no novelist can do anything but smile at bitterly: On the stone that shattered the window someone had written: “Silence will not be forgiven.” And whoever threw it was most likely a young person like Shadi or Wail, who in his life has made not a single effort to break his own silence about anything. So the stone becomes the preacher, and the preacher becomes the coward who throws from behind the wall. The most zealous condemners of silence are often those who keep the most silent about their own faults.
Chapter Fourteen
“The Man on the Curb”
The Eleventh Day
Adam ran through the dark street, his breath coming in gasps, and Samira behind him tried to keep up, her hand on her chest. He said, without turning around: “Stay at the door.” “I’m not staying.” “Then follow me calmly.” At the bend by the Great Mosque he slowed. The yellow streetlamps were weak, the pavement empty, the passers-by few. And by the wall, at the spot he had not been used to seeing empty for days, he saw a small light: a gas stove, a black kettle and two tin cups. And beside it two men: an old man wrapped in a tattered coat, and a small boy with a school bag at his feet.
“Yusuf!”
The boy raised his head: “Papa?” “What are you doing here?” “I’m drinking tea.” “Your mother has been looking for you since noon.” “I couldn’t.” Adam knelt in front of him and took his face in his hands: “Did anyone do anything to you?” “No. I came because I wanted to see the place where you stand every morning. You give him money every morning,” and he looked at the old man. “I wanted to know why.”
Adam turned around. The old man looked at him with pale, honey-brown eyes, and in the corner of his mouth lay a small smile that did not resemble a beggar’s. “Good evening, Mr. Adam.” “You know my name.” “For nine years. I heard how people call you.” “And I never asked you for your name.” “No. Because you did not think to ask.”
Adam felt something cold creep into his stomach. He said quietly: “Yusuf, go to your mother. She is at the start of the street.” The boy stood up and looked at the old man: “Thank you for the tea, Uncle.” “Go in peace, my son.” “May I come back?” “If you want.” He took his bag and ran toward the distant light where his mother stood.
The two men remained alone. “Sit down,” said the old man. Adam sat down on the cold pavement. “Who are you?” “Don’t you know? Try. Thirty years ago. At the company.”
Adam studied him. The eyes were the same. Something in the face, beneath the gray and the wrinkles and the weariness. And lips that spoke in a tone he knew, as if it came from an old memory. “Impossible.” “My name is Mansur.”
The silence afterward was dense. Adam did not move and did not blink. Then he felt the ground tremble beneath him, without earthquake and without noise, the way a building trembles when an invisible pillar is pulled out.
“You are dead.”
“So they said.”
“Mansur… the guard? All these years?”
“Nine years here. And twenty-one before that in other places.”
Adam lowered his head. And for the first time since childhood he found no sentence. He said: “You held out your hand to me every morning.” “And you put money into it.” “And I…” “And did not ask.” “I didn’t know.” “You could have known.” “I…” “You didn’t want to.”
I leave you, dear reader, alone a little with this scene, for it is the most beautiful thing I have written and the hardest thing I have heard. Nine years, every morning: One gives, one takes, and between them a pit the size of the world that no one crossed. And the pit was neither poverty nor wealth; it was the refusal to ask a single question: “What is your name?” We have built a whole civilization out of alms, charitable associations and donation boxes and never asked the poor man a single question about his name. As if we feared that if he has a name, he might also have a right, and that a right weighs heavier on the purse than alms. You don’t believe me? Then tomorrow morning, when you pass someone who holds out his hand to you, put something into his hand and then ask him his name. And see what happens in your chest.
“I do not say this to call you to account,” said Mansur calmly. “I say it because I want you to hear it. Every morning I wished that you would ask: ‘What is your name?’ Only that.”
Adam closed his eyes: “Why didn’t you say it?” “Because I was not ready.” “But you were here.” “I looked at you because I wanted to see the face of the one who kept silent. And I waited to hate you.” “And did you hate me?” “I tried.” “And?” “I grew tired.”
He reached for the tin cup, poured fresh tea and handed Adam the cup: “Drink. This is tea. Nothing else.” Adam took the cup and held it with both hands. He said quietly: “I was there, on the night when…” “I know.” “I saw Fakhri.” “I know.” “And I took money.” “I know.” “And I wrote the postings into the notebook. With my hand. And I did not understand.” “That I did not know.”
Mansur raised his head: “You wrote them?” “And my initials stand beside them.” Mansur stared at him, and the silence lasted long. After a while he said: “I thought you were only a witness.” “I thought so too.” “When did you find out?” “A day ago.” “Is that why you cried?” “No. I cried before. Because I heard your name on the radio. And could not tell them who I am.”
Mansur smiled bitterly: “The man who does not lie.” “Don’t say that. For I have lied for thirty years.” “No,” said Mansur calmly. “You did not lie. You kept silent.” “And is that something different?” “No. But it is milder.” “I don’t want mildness.” “No. And I do not grant it either.”
He looked at the yellow, trembling lights: “What will you do now?” “I don’t know. And you, what do you want?” Mansur thought for a long time: “I want to sleep one night and know that someone knows that I am I. And after that I want someone to say it aloud, so that I believe it.” “What?” “That what happened was not just.”
Adam clutched the cup: “It was not just,” he said in a breaking voice. “Say it again.” “It was not just.” “A third time.” “It was not just, Mansur.” Mansur closed his eyes. And Adam saw the first tear run down the gaunt cheek. The old man did not wipe it away. He let it run, like one who receives it thirty years too late. He said: “Thank you.” “Don’t thank me.” “I thank you for having said it. The others will need time.”
Did you notice that everything Mansur wanted after thirty years of injustice and homelessness was neither revenge nor compensation nor even an official acquittal? He wanted someone to say in a loud voice: “It was not just.” How many wronged people in the world ask for no more than this sentence? And how much money, how many lawyers and settlements do we expend to avoid a sentence of four words? The admission of injustice is cheaper than any compensation, and that is why we are stingy with it.
Mansur stood up and packed kettle, cup and stove into a cloth bag with practiced movements. “I’m going. To a place where I sleep.” “My house is open.” “I cannot sleep in your house, for you would tell me until morning that you are sorry.” Adam laughed briefly and wept as he did. “I don’t want regret. I want truth.” “You will get it.” “I won’t wait another thirty years.” “You won’t wait.”
Mansur stretched out his hand and pressed Adam’s shoulder with astonishing strength: “Go back to your son. I’ll be here tomorrow. On the curb.” And he went with slow steps, carrying the bag, until the dark swallowed him.
Adam stayed behind alone. Then he pulled out his phone and looked for a number. “Hello?” said Huda. “I found him. Mansur. He is alive. He is the man at the mosque.” “I know. Bilal told me.” “And why didn’t you tell me?” “Because you were not ready. Adam, I have bad news. Mansur is officially registered as dead. For twenty-three years. At his wife’s request. That means a dead man cannot file suit. No one can sue in his name unless we first revoke his death certificate.” “And how long does that take?” “Weeks.” “And how much time do we have?” “Ten days.”
Chapter Fifteen
“The Eye of the Neighborhood”
The Thirteenth Day
On the thirteenth morning Sara did not sleep. She sat on her bed, the phone in her hand, and the follower counter rose every minute: sixty-two thousand, then sixty-three thousand. A week ago it had been forty thousand. And in her chest was something like nausea.
Samar came into the room with two coffees: “Adam al-Khatib’s son went missing yesterday, and they found him at the Great Mosque. They brought him home safe, but they smashed the window of their house. And under your page are comments saying your post was the origin of everything.” “I didn’t want that.” “No one does.”
Samar sat down on the edge of the bed: “Sara, I want to show you something. My photos. The ones I took that night. I only uploaded them yesterday.” She pulled a small camera from her bag and turned the screen toward her. A night photo of the street opposite the station: yellow light, wet asphalt, and a man in a gray jacket sitting on the curb, his back bent, his head between his hands. And beside him a young woman, leaning forward, her hand on his shoulder. “That’s Adam? He didn’t flee. He sat.” “Yes. And that is the station’s employee. She comforted him.”
Samar flipped to the next picture. In the third the man stood up alone, with traces of tears on his face, and walked slowly. He did not run. “He walked. And Shadi said he was fleeing.” “Shadi said what he had heard.” “And I published what Shadi said.” “And I didn’t upload the pictures in time.” “Don’t blame yourself.” “And you?”
Sara stared at the photo and said: “I’m publishing it.” “Now? And if you lose followers?” “Then I lose them.” “Are you sure?” “No.” Samar smiled: “That is an honest answer.”
Three chapters ago I gave you an exact dissection of how a rumor is made. Now it is time to show you the other side that no one mentions: The correction of a rumor is a hundred times slower than the rumor. The photo that Sara publishes today will reach ten percent of those the first post reached; for the truth carries no excitement in it, and innocence pleases no one. Consider how unjust this slope is, and consider how often you took part at the beginning of a story and were absent at its end.
At noon Anas sat in a cramped room under the stairs of her house in front of three screens and a heap of cables. Seventeen, lean, with thick glasses, he spoke fast, as if the words were hurrying ahead of his thoughts. Ru’a had been standing in the doorway for ten minutes. “I want to know who sent me these messages.” She laid her phone in front of him, and he read: “Ten fifteen, at the side door of the station.” “Thank you for being in the right place.”
“Burner numbers, a virtual number generated on the net and then deleted. Hard, but not impossible. Give me an hour.” After fifty minutes he raised his head: “I found something. The same number was used for other messages. To Wail, the operator of the channel ‘Vigilant.’ To Sara. And to a woman named Arwa, who is registered under this name on the main account. A freelance researcher. She coordinates the messages for the account holder. And who he is? I haven’t found that yet.”
On his screen a message suddenly appeared: “Delete what you wrote. You don’t know who you are dealing with.” Anas froze. “Are you being threatened?” “Maybe. Doesn’t matter. I only want to warn someone. The journalist who wrote about the case. Nader. Because he is the only one who will know what to do.”
At four in the afternoon a small café near the university was almost empty. Sara, Samar and Ru’a sat at a table, opposite them a young woman of twenty-five, elegant, a phone in her hand, a cup of tea she did not drink. “Arwa?” said Samar. “You sent the messages.” “I carry out assignments. I know him from an advertisement: ‘Researcher for a journalistic project. Good pay. Work from home.’ I wanted the money. He asked me to collect information, observe people and send messages at set times. He said there was a girl who would see something important, and I had to make sure she went.”
“How did he know I would go?” “I don’t know.” “Why didn’t you ask?” “Because I needed the money.” “And Sara’s post?” “That gave me an idea. He said: Find an account that loves excitement. Give it a small piece of information, and it does the rest.” Sara looked at her hands: “As if I were a tool.” “We all are.”
“And how do you communicate with him?” “Encrypted messages. He signed with the letter F. ‘Mr. F.’ I met him once in a public place: a man of fifty-five, inconspicuous features, but he speaks with a frightening calm. I saw in his hand an old, faded press card, on which was written: Fuad.” “How did he know about the yellow envelope?” asked Ru’a. “He told me: There is a man who works in the cellar of the company and tells me everything. The guard.” “The guard of the archive?” “I don’t know his name.”
It grew quiet. Then Ru’a said: “He is the one who called the station? Then all of this is arranged.” “And why?” “I don’t know,” said Arwa honestly. “He said people only move when they feel that time is running out.”
At that moment a man entered the café: Bilal. His face was tired, in his hand the phone. He wanted to thank Samar for the photos. He said: “People are beginning to see the truth.” “A little,” said Sara. “A little is enough.” He looked at Arwa: “Who is that?” And before Samar could finish speaking, Bilal’s phone vibrated on the table, and the screen lit up: a new message from a sender saved under a single name: “Mr. F.” And above it in short letters: “It is time, Bilal. Are you ready?”
Everyone saw it. Bilal froze. Arwa said quietly: “That name. That is he. The one who directs me.” Bilal looked at her, and in his eyes was something like the collapse of a wall. He said:
“That is my source. For two years.”
Ah, my friend. Now the thread that has lured you through everything so far begins to move between our fingers: all these events, all these coincidences, all these secrets that open at their proper time, as if someone were playing on them… Did you think the novel consisted of mere coincidences? No. But I ask you once more not to hastily accuse “Mr. F.” Not out of fear for him, but out of fear for you: You have seen in the last chapters where a quick suspicion leads us: to a stone at a window.
Chapter Sixteen
“The Key of the Trust”
The Fourteenth Day
On the fourteenth morning Lubna stood at her mother’s door, a white rose in her hand. Thirty-eight, a lecturer at the university, with neat hair and a dark green dress, and in her eyes a weariness that was not audible in her voice. She had heard the radio three days ago and had not slept since. She rang. “Lubna?” said Su’ad as she opened. “You didn’t tell me you were coming.”
They sat in the small living room, where for thirty years the picture of her father Fakhri had hung on the wall: a handsome man with glasses, smiling politely, and in his eyes a sadness that did not suit a memorial photo. “Mama, I heard my father’s name on the radio. They named the company and Mansur and Fakhri. I want to know what he did.” “He did nothing. He was a good man.” “I’m not asking about his goodness. I’m asking about what he did.” “Why now?” “Because I didn’t ask before.” “Because you were a child.” “And now I am no longer a child.”
Su’ad was silent for a long time. And in her silence lay thirty years of careful steps around words that were not said. “Did you know?” “Yes. Before he died. He told me he had wronged a man and wanted to confess. And I told him: No.” “Why?” “Because I wanted to protect you. From the scandal. I was young, my husband was ill, and I had a girl of eight.” “And would his confession have killed us?” “It would have destroyed the family’s name.” “And Mansur’s name?” “I did not think of that.” “Why?” “Because I did not know him.”
Su’ad wept. It was a different weeping from the one Lubna knew: not sobbing, but a slow sinking, as if something were collapsing from within. “I was not brave. Every day I told myself: Let us live.” “And we lived.” “And we lived.” “At whose expense?”
Su’ad did not answer. Lubna stood up, knelt before her and took her hands: “I’m not saying this to call you to account. I say it because I want to know who I am.” “You are my daughter.” “And the daughter of a man who wronged another.” “And the daughter of a woman who kept silent.” “And do you hate me?” “No.” “And you?” “I want to do something. What you did not do.”
In this scene lies, I think, the most important thing in the whole novel: that there are victims who are not mentioned when we speak of injustice, namely the children of the perpetrators. Lubna committed no crime, but she inherited a guilt she did not choose, and her hands are clean of a wrong that nevertheless clings to her brow. So it goes with whole generations in many places: the children of those who did it, and the grandchildren of those who kept silent. Religions and philosophies have taught us that a person is not liable for his father’s guilt, and then life taught us that moral inheritance exists nonetheless and that true courage consists in the heir saying: I did not do it, but I will make it right.
In the evening an old neighbor knocked at Su’ad’s door: Khulud, seventy, in a black dress, a plate of sweets in her hand. She sat in the living room at the far end of the sofa and did not look at Fakhri’s picture. “I heard that the walls speak. They say you carry a secret.” “For thirty years.” “I judged you. When Fakhri died, you did not cry at the funeral, and you wore black no longer than three days, and you never mentioned him. I told the neighbors you were cold and had not loved him.”
Su’ad smiled: “You were right.” “No. You carried something we did not know.” “I did not carry it. I hid behind it. Silence is more comfortable than grief.” “I came to apologize for thirty years of judgments.” “Don’t apologize. We all judged. No one knows what is in another’s breast. But it is enough that you came.”
That afternoon Ismail sat in a small room next to the Great Mosque. The mosque’s administrator, sixty-six, with a well-kept white beard and a small turban, before him a heavy wooden cabinet full of keys. Lubna entered, and with her Salim. He said: “This is Lubna, Fakhri’s daughter.” Ismail raised his eyes: “God have mercy on him. You look like him.” “We have come to ask about a trust that Fakhri left with you.” He lowered his gaze: “Then his time has come. I knew that someone would come one day. He told me: Ismail, keep this key. Don’t ask what it is for. And give it only to the one who comes and asks about Mansur. And I said: Yes, sir.” “And you didn’t ask?” “A trust is not questioned. I told myself: What I don’t know does not torment me.”
That is, and what a sentence, the wisdom of half-trustees in all ages: “What I don’t know does not torment me.” And how well it protects people from guilt! If there were a religion of deliberate not-knowing, Ismail would be its high priest. And, my dear reader, don’t think I mock him; for I know that I have said this sentence myself countless times, when the answer was only one question away.
Salim smiled sadly: “You are not alone.” “Is that a comfort?” “No.” Ismail reached toward the cabinet and opened a lower drawer with a small key and drew from among cloths a piece wrapped in a white rag. He opened it slowly: an old, heavy iron key, ten centimeters long, with a round handle, black and tending toward rust. “And what does it open?” “I don’t know. He said you would know.”
Lubna took it with trembling fingers and turned it. On the handle was a small, barely visible engraving: a single number. “3.” “Three?” she whispered. “Which three?” asked Salim. He had frozen. He said quietly: “The third warehouse. There is no other.”
In the evening everyone was in Huda’s law office: Huda, Bilal, Salim, Lubna and Adam. On the table, in the middle, the black key. “It opens the third warehouse?” “I don’t think it opens its door,” said Huda. “The safe. The one Iyad mentioned. Into which Fakhri put the envelope.” “If the building isn’t demolished.” “And when will it be demolished?” Adam looked at the floor: “Karim said the contract will be signed on Wednesday and the machines would begin the same morning.” “Four days. That means the safe that contains everything Fakhri left will be buried under rubble in four days.” “And the law lapses after seven.”
Bilal looked at the black key on the table: a small rusty piece that bore the weight of thirty years. Then he said: “Perhaps it was not only the yellow envelope that set us on this path. I mean, there is someone who wants us to get there before the demolition.” “And who?” “I don’t know.” “And why?” “That is the question.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Numbers Don’t Lie”
The Fifteenth Day
At seven o’clock on the fifteenth morning Aiman entered the studio of “The Truth First,” a gray briefcase full of documents in his hand. Thirty-three, a freelance financial analyst, with narrow glasses and an elegant suit, he wrote articles in business papers about “transparency in companies.” He sat down at the microphone, and Rana stared at him from the other side.
“Mr. Aiman, you say you have documents on the financing of silence in the Mansur case.” “One hundred percent. The papers say that Hajji Tawfiq, the owner of the Modern Trade company, personally financed a series of monthly payments to former employees in order to buy their silence. Bank transfers.” “Where do you have the documents from?” “From a reliable source. I cannot reveal it.” “Then I cannot say that they are reliable.” Aiman smiled with slight arrogance: “You were not so precise years ago.”
Rana felt a small sting but did not show it: “Are you sure the Hajji ordered them?” “The account bears the company’s name.” “And the company is not he.” “But he is the owner.” “And the owner doesn’t sign everything.” Then she said: “Will you allow me to verify first? With a second source.” “The show is live.” “And I will stop it.”
She pressed a key. Silence in the room. Mahir raised his head in surprise: “Did you stop the broadcast? Why?” “Because I don’t want to say a name before I have checked three times.” “You know that this destroys the suspense.” “I know.” And she looked at Aiman: “We will air the episode after verification. If your statement is true, waiting won’t hurt you.” “And if it is false?” “Then I have saved you.”
Do you remember what Mu’tazz wrote in Rana’s notebook? She has learned. And this moment, in which a woman halts a live broadcast because she does not want to do injustice, is the rarest thing in our present. We live in the age of “Now!”, in which value is measured by speed, in which whoever verifies comes too late, whoever comes too late loses, and whoever loses is forgotten. Who will defend these three minutes that lie between accusation and certainty? Perhaps no one but a woman who once did injustice.
Two hours later Murad stood before a large white board in Huda’s office. Thirty-two, a data analyst, lean, with a quiet voice, he wrote in very small script, as if shy of disturbing the paper. Huda had called him that morning after Rana asked her for a second source. He said, pointing to Aiman’s documents: “These documents are genuine, but he has read them wrongly.” He wrote on the board a column of names: “Salim. Iyad. Nabil. Adil. Ramis…”, and next to each name a date and an amount. “These are the monthly payments for the old people, paid every month for twenty years. But the Hajji did not order them.” He drew a red arrow from the names to a small box and wrote in it: “M. al-Kassim.”
“Muaz?” “Muaz al-Kassim, board member. He runs a small subsidiary. The amounts are drawn from its account and booked in the books under ‘loyalty bonuses.’ And in the parent company’s figures these sums do not appear. Whoever pays this way wants no one to see.” “And Salim’s gift?” “The timing fits.” “That means Muaz is the one buying the silence, not the Hajji.” “So it seems.”
At three came Hussam: a man of fifty-five, small, in an old brown coat, in his hand a thick envelope. A former archivist at the Ministry of Industry. He said: “I don’t know whether this is what you’re looking for. Twenty-eight years ago I was a small clerk and was to review a report on a deficit in the Modern Trade warehouse. I found that the figures did not fit the guard; he cannot steal this way. I wrote that. And the report was changed. The department head changed it. And I did not object, because I wanted to keep my job. But I photocopied my original draft and hid it.” “Twenty-eight years?” “Perhaps because I wanted to prove to myself that I had not been entirely silent.”
Huda opened the envelope: a sheet in the type of an old typewriter with the stamp of the ministry, beneath it: “There is no evidence of involvement of the guard.” “And the department head?” “His name is Mahmoud. He became an undersecretary.” Huda called. She said: “Mr. Undersecretary, I have the draft of a report on the Modern Trade warehouse from twenty-eight years ago.” Silence. “Did you change the wording?” “Yes. For the sake of stability.” “The stability of a company that paid half of the city’s taxes.” “At the cost of an innocent man?” “He was not innocent,” said Mahmoud in a weak voice. “How do you know that?” “I did not know.” “And how do you judge, then?” “I did not judge. I only… concluded.” “And do you find peace?” “No.” And he hung up.
“I did not judge. I only concluded.” That is the administrative formula of crime. In the past century injustice learned to speak no longer in the language of the powerful but in the language of employees: “I concluded,” “I forwarded,” “I transferred,” “I signed without reading.” And each of these acts seems innocent in itself, until, when dozens of innocent acts come together, a man emerges from them who sleeps on the street for thirty years. Dear reader: Do you still believe that evil needs the evil?
At six in the evening Murad was still in the office. Everyone had gone, only the cold lights and the soft hum of the small fans remained. On the screen before him stood a long table of transfers. Then he paused. Strange. He looked again. Then he called: “Huda! Look at this.” He pointed to a small entry at the end of the table that had repeated every month on the same day for thirty years: “From: private account. T. al-Rashid. To: account. Mansur al-Khalil. Amount: 2000.”
“Hajji Tawfiq? Thirty years?” “Three hundred sixty transfers. To an account in Mansur’s name.” “And was any of it withdrawn?” “The entire balance is there. Not a single piaster has been withdrawn.” Huda stood motionless. “Aiman would have said that this is the price of silence. But whoever buys silence does not leave the money lying uncollected. So this is not a price.” “Compensation?” “Or apology.” “Or guilt.” “Or all three.” “And he doesn’t know it.” “No one told him.” Murad switched off the screen. And in the silence Huda said, as if to herself: “Whoever buys silence does not leave such money lying in a bank.” “And whoever wants an apology finds no other way than an account that no one sees.”
Chapter Eighteen
“A Message from the Hajji”
The Sixteenth Day
Hajji Tawfiq’s house stood on top of the hill, surrounded by old pines, the iron gate always open, as if someone were expecting someone. At six in the evening on the sixteenth day Lama sat on the steps of the veranda, beside her Omar. Neither knew how they had come here. “My father asked me to stay. He said someone would come.” “Lama, I must tell you something. I work at the station that talked about your father’s company.” “I know. Since the second day. I saw you delete a message before sending it. I waited for you to say it.” “I’m sorry. I should have told you.” “And I should have told you about my father. Every Friday he goes alone to the third warehouse. He sits there for an hour and comes back and doesn’t speak until morning. Since I was fifteen. Why didn’t you ask him?” “Because I was afraid he would answer.”
At that moment a small white car appeared at the gate, and from it stepped a man of fifty-eight in a gray suit, a bag in his hand. “Mr. Adam,” said Lama. “The Hajji has asked for me.” “Yes. Go in.”
The Hajji’s office lay on the second floor at the end of the corridor, and the smell of tobacco reached through the door before it was opened. The man sat behind his large wooden desk, before him an ashtray overflowing with butts and a cold coffee cup. He looked much smaller than his office: shoulders sagging, hands trembling, face ashen. “Sit down. Thank you for coming.” “You called me. What do you want?” “To tell you something. No. You first. You know it.”
Adam looked at him for a long time. In his eyes was not yet anger, but the weariness of a man gathering scattered pieces. “The postings. You entered them.” “Yes.” “A quarter past two at night. Why?” “Because I wanted you to be sent to the cellar.” “You laid down the envelope.” “Yes. And the number I wrote with my own hand. And I trembled even more as I wrote.” “And the smell of tobacco?” “I was there half an hour before you came down. I stood at the other door. And I did not dare.”
Adam laughed a dry laugh that did not resemble laughter: “Do you know what you did to me? To my son?” “The post I did not expect.” “And Samir?” “He had to be a little afraid.” “A little?” “I justify nothing.” “Why did you do it?”
The Hajji closed his eyes: “I will tell you. But do not interrupt me. Thirty years ago something happened in this company that I cannot forget. I was not the only one who kept silent, but I was the only one who inherited. I inherited the company and the safe and the secret.” “Did you know?” “After my brother’s death.” “And what did you do?” “Nothing.” “Thirty years?” “Because I am a coward. I have said it. No one says it.”
I pause here to ask you something strange: Do not hate Hajji Tawfiq. I know that you want to. He took from the safe and kept silent and inherited the crime like a piece of land and let us dream he was an ordinary man. But this last sentence, “Because I am a coward. I have said it. No one says it,” is the most beautiful sentence in his mouth. And how many cannot even say it to themselves! Between the Hajji who admits his cowardice and the coward who claims to be brave lies a much longer distance than between the criminal and the innocent.
“And why now?” “Because time is running out. The twenty-one days. After that no one can call anyone to account.” “And that relieves you.” “I waited for that. And I changed my mind. Because I realized that I do not want to die relieved.” “Why me?” “Because you do not lie.” “I have lied.” “You did not lie. You kept silent. And that means you are capable of speaking.” “And you cannot say it yourself?” “No. For confession with my own voice is harder than being caught. To say ‘I did it’ is one thing. That they say to you ‘You did it’ is another. The first is a decision. The second is a fate. I do not want to be the one who chose.” “That is another cowardice.” “Yes.”
Adam sat motionless. After a while he said: “Do you know what we found? An account in Mansur’s name. Three hundred sixty transfers. Nothing was withdrawn.” The Hajji lowered his head: “You found it. I was not allowed to know where he is. And I paid every month to a man I thought dead.” “He is alive.” The Hajji raised his head sharply: “What?” “And he is in this city. At the Great Mosque. On the pavement. For nine years.”
The Hajji’s eyes widened. And for a moment he looked as if someone had pushed him from behind. “The mosque… I pass there every Friday.” “I know. And I passed him every morning.” “And we did not ask him.” “And we did not recognize him.” The Hajji put his hand over his mouth and breathed slowly. In his eyes stood tears that did not fall. “How much time do I have left to see his face?” “I don’t know.” “They will demolish the third warehouse on Wednesday. The board has the majority. And if I objected, they would ask why.” “And if it is demolished?” “Then the safe is lost. The one my brother left. I do not have the key. I tried once twenty years ago. I could not. Because I was afraid of what is in it.” “And what is in it?” “The truth. And I want you to open it. All of you. Those who kept silent.”
Adam drew the black key from his bag and laid it on the desk. The Hajji looked at it, then stretched out his hand and did not touch it: “That is it. I thought my brother had taken it with him into the grave.” “He did not take it.” “Then he did not die entirely without a confession.” “No.” He drew back his hand: “Take it. I want you to go there and open. And I will be there when everyone comes together.”
Adam stood up: “Hajji, the one who took the money, who was it?” The Hajji froze. He looked at the ashtray, at the cold cup and at his hands. Finally he said: “Fakhri was not the only one. But I will not tell you who he is.” “Why?” “Because I cannot. Hear him there. The one who knew.” And he did not answer the question “And who is it?” He stared at the door as if he saw thirty years behind it. Then he said, in a voice quieter than any he had spoken that day:
“I wanted to be caught before I had to confess.”
Part Four: The Green Earth
Chapter Nineteen
“The Third Warehouse”
The Seventeenth Day, at Night
At midnight the old harbor lay still, only the soft slap of the waves against the eaten quay walls could be heard. At the end of the dirt road, behind a sheet-metal fence, the third warehouse stood like a gigantic corpse waiting to be woken: a long stone building, the roof of corrugated metal, the main gate closed with a rusty chain. One flashlight after another came on.
“Here,” said Iyad. He stood at a side door, a white bandage around his head, in his hand a small key. “For thirty years I guarded this door.” He turned the key, the door screeched long, and from inside came the smell of dust, old oil and damp.
They entered one after another, their lights trembling on the walls: empty iron shelves, rotted sacks, broken wooden crates, a high ceiling from which cobwebs hung like curtains. In the middle of the hall a wide open space, lined with pillars. “Sit down,” said Huda. “Where?” asked Ramis. “Anywhere.” Salim set a wooden crate on the floor and sat, and one after another they settled, in an irregular circle: Salim, Iyad, Amna, the notary Nabil, the retired judge Adil, the imam Bashir, Munir the bookseller, Ramis the merchant. And behind them, standing or sitting on the floor: Salma, Ismail, Jamal, Rashid, Su’ad, Lubna. Bilal and Maryam side by side, without looking at each other. Nader, his shoulder against a pillar. Rana, holding a small recorder and standing near the door. And Adam alone at the edge of the circle.
“We begin,” said Huda. “Not with a trial and not with an interrogation. Only with saying what happened.” “And why here?” asked Nabil. “Because everything began here.” “And who starts?” “Whoever wants.”
Silence. Then Salim said: “I. I told you in my house, but I say it here. I accepted a gift from Fakhri and kept silent. That I will bear.” “And what did you do with the gift?” asked Lubna in a trembling voice. “I still have it. I could not sell it, for to sell it would have meant that I forgave myself.”
Nabil stirred uneasily, sixty-five, with thick glasses and an ironed black coat, his hands behind his back: “I am the notary. I notarized the widow’s waiver.” “Why did you explain nothing to her?” asked Maryam. “Because the company pressed to conclude the matter quickly, and I worked on its behalf. And I knew that she had not understood.”
The retired judge shook his head slowly. Adil, sixty-eight, in an old suit, with the tired eyes that judges have when they have judged: “Mansur’s wife came to me and said that injustice was being done here. I told her: There is no mandate. I cannot intervene. I could have asked. But judges do not ask one who has not formally asked them.” “Was that just?” “No.”
The imam Bashir spoke in a calm voice that knows how to take its place: “I believed in Fakhri’s repentance. He came to me before his death and said: Sheikh, I have sinned. He wept and asked me to pray for him. And I prayed. And I did not ask him what he had done, because I thought repentance lay between the servant and his Lord.” “And between the servant and Mansur?” “I did not think of that. And I led the faithful in the mosque at whose wall Mansur sat. And I said to him: God give you.” “And he did not need a gift,” said Munir quietly. “He needed a name.”
I beg you to allow me a boldness here that you are not used to in many novels. The imam of the mosque, the judge, the notary, the teacher and the trustee, on whose chests we so gladly pin medals of morality, were in this story the first line of defense of injustice. I do not say this in contempt of religion, justice or education, for noble institutions always consist of people, and people are afraid. I say it because it is time to stop believing that an “office” bestows a conscience on its holder. The turban confers no courage, the judge’s robe no justice, the university diploma no integrity. Conscience is something one practices every day, or it dies.
Ramis intertwined his fingers. He was seventy, a little stout, in an open shirt: “I did nothing.” “That is exactly it,” said Lubna. “I was a partner of the old Hajji. And when I was asked to agree to the ‘settlement,’ I nodded. Because I did not want to lose my share. And I earned a great deal.” “And did you know that what you earned came from injustice?” “I knew,” he said in a broken voice. “I just did not name it.”
So the confessions followed one another in the dark. And each had a different taste: some heavy as stones, some light as an apology that does not know to whom it is addressed. When all were finished, only Adam remained. He stood up. “I did not say it. Thirty years ago I saw Fakhri falsify a book. And I took money from him. And with my own hand I wrote the postings for which Mansur was accused. Everything you have heard from the others, I did, and in addition that I wrote. I thought I was a witness. And I was a partner.” “Why do you say this now?” asked Maryam. “Because silence is not enough.”
At that moment the side door sprang open with force. Two men came in, then four, then more, with strong lamps and heavy boots. At their head a man of sixty-five in an elegant black suit and wool coat, beside him Khalid. “Good evening, all. I am Muaz al-Kassim, board member of this company. This place belongs to us, and you have no right to enter.” “We came in with a key,” said Nader. “That is trespassing.” “No,” said Huda calmly. “We are here at the invitation of a man who worked here for thirty years.” And she pointed to Iyad.
Muaz looked at him and smiled a smile without warmth: “Abu al-Fadl. You look well.” “No,” said Iyad. “But I am alive. Your men beat me.” “I have beaten no one.” “Tell the truth, Muaz,” said Khalid suddenly. All turned to him. His face was pale, his eyes did not look at Muaz: “I will lie no more. These men beat Iyad. I saw them. I sat in the car. And I stayed sitting. I did not intervene.” “You have gone mad.” “No. I have grown up.”
He stepped forward. He placed himself between Muaz and the circle and turned his back on the latter: “For thirty years I carried out orders. But tonight I do not carry them out.” “Khalid,” said Muaz quietly, “you will lose everything. And your family?” “Is that a threat?” “That is reality.” “No,” said Khalid. “That is what I always told the others.”
Dense tension. Muaz’s men advanced. At that moment Rana lifted her small recorder, pressed a red button and said in a clear voice: “I am Rana from the station ‘The Truth First.’ We are broadcasting live from the third warehouse.” All froze. “If you want to beat us, people shall hear you.” “You…” “I only broadcast.”
Muaz looked at his men, then at Khalid, then at the circle. Then he took a step back. He said in a cold voice: “Fine. Enjoy your night. The demolition begins at dawn.” “The Hajji said Wednesday.” “The Hajji does not decide alone. I carry out.” “For whom?” “For the interest.” He turned. His men followed him out, one after another, like shadows withdrawing from a room.
When the place was empty, all breathed out. Huda said: “Khalid, thank you.” “Don’t thank me. I am thirty years too late.” “We all are.” “And I the first.” “No,” said Iyad and touched his shoulder. “I am the first.” Khalid smiled a small smile: “Then we are the seconds.”
Adam drew the black key from his pocket and laid it in Huda’s hand: “The safe?” “Behind the guardroom,” said Iyad. “In the small room.” They walked between the pillars, between crumbled crates and dust that penetrated the throat. At the end of the hall a small room with a stone wall and a wooden door that had half fallen off. The guardroom. In it an old iron bed, a small table, a chair. And at the back wall a black iron safe, half sunk into the stone, with a gigantic lock on which the engraving stood: “3.”
Huda inserted the key. It turned slowly and gave a heavy metallic sound. Then the door began to move. And at the same moment, before it opened fully, a voice came from behind them out of the dark. A calm, soft, weary voice:
“You come thirty years too late… and three hours.”
They all turned around. At the end of the room, in the darkness of the corner that no light had reached, stood a man. A gaunt old man in a tattered coat, in his hand a small oil lamp that he had just lit. The yellow light rose to his face: a face chiseled by time, and pale, honey-brown eyes. “Mansur?” whispered Bilal. “Yes, my son.” “Father?” said Maryam in a barely audible voice. He did not answer. He only looked at her. Then he said, in a voice that, despite everything, did not tremble:
“You have come at last.”
Chapter Twenty
“The Tape”
At Dawn of the Eighteenth Day
No one moved. The yellow light trembled on Mansur’s face, and all looked at him as one looks at something one has taken for a legend. Maryam stepped forward, then once more. “Father?” “Yes, my child.” “You are the man from the clinic. You knew who I was.” “I recognized you when you said your name.” “And you said nothing.” “I could not.” “And why did you leave before dawn?” “I was afraid of weeping.” “And where were you?” “Here. For nine years. In this room. When I am not sitting at the mosque. I was the guard of this place. I know where I sleep.”
She slowly stretched out her hand and touched the sleeve of his coat. Then, without a word, she threw herself into his arms. And Bilal came and embraced him with his sister, as if protecting what remained of something old. And the others stood in silence and did not know where to look. “That is not enough,” said Mansur after a moment in a hoarse voice. “But it is more than I dared to dream.” He wiped his face with his sleeve, then looked at the safe: “Have you opened it?” “We have begun,” said Huda. “Open it completely.”
Huda slowly pulled the iron door open. It opened with a heavy sound, and stale air streamed out. They directed the lamps inside: three small compartments. On top a huge black leather book with the company’s stamp, without a title. In the middle a large cardboard envelope, closed with a string. Below an old tape recorder the size of a book and beside it a small tape. “That is the true book,” said Adam quietly. “The one that was not falsified.” Huda took it and leafed through: Everything was there. The original amount, the signatures, the dates. And even a copy of the receipt that had been destroyed. Fakhri had kept it.
And she opened the cardboard envelope: a folded deed in official script with an old seal. She read in a slow voice: “Deed of gift. I, Fakhri al-Rashid, being of sound mind, give the land known as ‘The Green Earth,’ situated at the edge of the city, with all trees and buildings upon it, to Mr. Mansur al-Khalil, as compensation for the harm done to him and as atonement for an unforgivable guilt.”
Silence. “The Green Earth?” whispered Jamal. He stood at the door, the straw hat in his trembling hands. “The garden? In which I live?” “It.” Jamal suddenly sat down on the floor as if his legs had betrayed him: “I thought it had no owner.” “It had one.” “All these years…” “And you did not ask.” “I did not ask.” He looked at Mansur: “Is it your house?” “I don’t know. I was never told.” “I don’t want it.” “And I did not say I want it. Don’t decide now.”
We have arrived, dear reader, at the land whose name the heading of this part bears. And I want to tell you frankly: I did not want the land to be merely a reward. I wanted it to be a thought: that what was stolen from a person is restored not by apology and not by money, but by returning to him the place where he could have grown. And Jamal, who for thirty years tended a land that did not belong to him, stands for something more beautiful than he thinks: He is the proof that a trust can work in secret, even if its owner does not know. It turned green alone in the middle of the drought, because someone treated it well without knowing for whom.
Huda held the small device: “And this?” “The tape,” said Iyad. “I once saw it in Fakhri’s hand. He told me: That, Iyad, is the truth.” Huda looked at everyone. No one objected. She put the tape into the device and pressed a button. Hissing. Then the sound of breathing. Then the voice of an old man, heavy, cutting, known to anyone who knew those days.
“Sit down.”
“Father,” said a young, sharp, tense voice. “I…”
“I said, sit down, Tawfiq.”
The Hajji froze, he who had just arrived at the door, leaning on his daughter’s arm, his face pale. No one had seen him enter. The next voice was softer, calmer and sadder: “Father, it is not that simple.” “Fakhri, you sit. You listen.” “I am listening.” “A sum is missing from the cash. Who took it?” A brief silence on the tape. “Tawfiq.” “I don’t know…” “Don’t lie to me. I know it.” “I had debts. A failed business. I wanted to return the money before anyone found out.” Then the sound of a sheet being turned. “My God,” said the father.
Huda stood motionless. “And what do we do now?” “Someone saw it,” said Fakhri. “Mansur. He told me he had seen someone open the safe at night.” “Did he see me?” “He said no name.” “But he saw it. So he knows.” “No one knows,” said the father. “Except the three of us. We pin it on him.” “Father, no!” “On the guard. We say it was he.” “The man is innocent.” “And do you want to hand your brother over to the police? He is a guard, his salary is small, and people will believe that he stole.” “That is injustice.” “That is life.” “No.” “Fakhri, who runs this company?” “You.” “And you know what its collapse would cost. If people learn that my son stole, everything collapses. Do what I say.” “…” “Fakhri?” “Yes, sir,” said the gentler voice after seconds.
“And you, Tawfiq.” “Yes, Father.” “You will not leave this meeting the way you came in. You owe your brother. And no one must find out.” “No one will find out.” And on the tape one heard a chair being moved, then a door opening. And after a minute Fakhri’s voice alone, soft and tired, as if speaking to a wall:
“To whoever hears this tape. I am Fakhri. I recorded this meeting secretly, because I knew that one day I would need a justification before myself. I do not justify. I betrayed. That is all.”
Hissing. Then silence. Huda pressed the button. And silence filled the room, and no one spoke. In the corner by the door stood Hajji Tawfiq, pale, bent, Lama’s hands holding his arm. “Father?” she said in a barely audible voice. “That is you. Is that your voice?” “My voice at forty-two.” Lama closed her eyes.
In another corner Nader froze, and his eyes wandered between the Hajji and the sheet that he slowly drew from his inside pocket: “Huda,” he said in a hollow voice. “This is the fourth page. I took it days ago from Jamal. I did not tell you.” Huda took it and looked: “‘And if you want to know who he is, his name is:'”, then the letter “T” and ink dots. “I thought it was Tamer al-Husaini,” said Nader in a broken voice. “Because he was finance director. And I did not think of the Hajji, because I could not imagine that the owner steals from his own cash. And I almost published it.” “You almost accused an innocent man.” “Yes.” “As Mansur was accused.” Nader lowered his head: “I know. And I say, I have learned.” “Too late.” “Yes.”
I promised you to comment on this moment. Nader’s first accusation, “Tamer al-Husaini,” was clever, logical, supported by a letter, a piece of information and a dubious past. And it was false. And that is the most dangerous kind of error: the logical error. For the fool does not know that he errs, but the clever man convinces himself and us that he has reached the goal by logic. So beware of your beautiful logic when it rests on a smudged letter.
At that moment the Hajji stepped forward: “Let me, Lama.” He withdrew his hand, walked slowly to the middle of the room and stopped before Mansur. Their eyes met for the first time in thirty years. “Mansur. I am Tawfiq. I am the one you saw. I am the one who took the money. And I am the one who kept silent.” “I know.” Mansur raised his hand: “I do not want to hear everything you did. I want to hear one thing. Why did you not say it?”
The Hajji opened his mouth, and no sound came. Then he said in a breaking voice: “Because I was afraid. Of my father. Of the company. Of myself. Of being who I am.” “And did you become it?” “No. Because I knew what I am.” “And after thirty years?” “I know it better.” Mansur looked at him for a long time: “I do not forgive you,” he said finally. “I do not ask for it.” “But I am glad.” “About what?” “That you said it.” He said it without smiling. Then he added: “Late. But you said it.”
At that moment a distant tremor was heard. The roar of a gigantic motor. All turned to the door. “Machines,” said Khalid. “The demolition. Muaz has advanced the date. Half past four.” “In an hour?” “Less. We must get out. At once.” The people began to move, gathered their things, carried notebooks and envelopes. Huda took the large book and the deed. Bilal the tape and the device.
And suddenly Mansur turned around: “The safe. There is something else. A letter Fakhri left for me. He wrote on it: ‘To Mansur alone.’ It lay in the back wall, behind a board. I saw him put it in.” “I’ll get it,” said Adam. “No. That is my business.” “And I am your partner in it.” They looked at each other. Then they went back together into the guardroom. The ground shook under their feet, and dust trickled from the iron ceiling like fine rain. Outside shouting, then a gigantic impact, then the sound of tearing metal.
“Adam! The wall!” Adam raised his head. He saw the ceiling bend slowly, then come down all at once. And he heard, before the darkness flooded everything, Huda’s voice screaming from afar:
“No! Come back!”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Under the Rubble”
The Eighteenth Day
The darkness was complete. Not the darkness of night through which stars penetrate, but the darkness of stone and earth that presses on the eyes as on the chest. Adam opened his eyes and saw nothing. He coughed. Earth in his throat, dust in his nose, and from above a distant sound seeped down like rain. “Mansur?” No one answered. “Mansur!” “…Yes.” The voice was near, nearer than he had thought. “Where are you?” “To your right.” Adam stretched out his hand and touched wet cloth, then a bony shoulder. “Are you all right?” “There is something in my chest. A bone. Perhaps a rib.” “Don’t move.” “I am not moving.” Mansur laughed softly and coughed: “No one can move here.”
Adam tried to lift his left leg. A sharp pain. A heavy iron beam pressed on his leg from ankle to knee. “I’m stuck.” “So am I. We are in the guardroom. The back wall has fallen onto the door.” “Is there air?” “As long as we breathe.” Adam drew his phone from his pocket with a trembling hand. The screen was cracked, but it lit up. Battery: eleven percent. “Save it. Turn it on only when we need it.” He switched it off. And the darkness returned.
Above them, in the open, the morning began to color the eastern edge of the sky a pale gray. The third warehouse was half collapsed: The front wall lay on the ground, part of the iron roof was bent like a newspaper sheet. A single ambulance, a fire truck and dozens of lights moved among the rubble. “Back!” shouted the fire officer. “No access to the north wall!” “There are two men inside!” screamed Maryam. She stood at the edge of the rubble in her white, earth-smeared coat, her hair disheveled, her hands bleeding. “How long?” “We don’t know.” “What we can do isn’t enough!” “Maryam,” said Bilal and held her shoulders. “Calm down.” “He is my father.” “And I am his son.” “And I am a doctor.” “Then be a doctor.” She looked at him. Then she nodded: “I need equipment. Oxygen. And I need someone to be quiet and listen.” She said it with a sharpness she did not know in herself.
At that moment a man came running out of the darkness. Fifty-five, lean, in a brown, dust-covered suit and heavy coat. He stopped at the rubble. Then he knelt and began to dig with his hands. “Who is that?” asked Bilal. “Fuad.” Bilal froze. “You are Mr. F.” “Yes.” “You are the…” “Later. Let us dig now.” “Why are you here?” “Because this place is thirty years of my life. I want them to come out.” “Are you telling the truth?” “I am telling the only truth I have.” Bilal stared at him for a moment. Then he knelt beside him without a word and began to dig.
Under the rubble Adam breathed slowly. “How much time has passed?” “I don’t know.” “And if they don’t find us?” “Then we stay here.” “I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of dying before I have heard something. That you have forgiven.” Silence. “I will not tell you that now. For you would believe me because you need it.” “And is that bad?” “No. But it is not honest.” “And what do you say?” “I say, I don’t know. Do you know that I never hated you? I saw you every morning, you gave me the money and said: ‘God provide for you.’ And I knew you said it because you wanted to flee. But you came back every day. And a person who returns every day to the place that hurts him cannot be evil.” “And not innocent.” “No.”
Mansur smiled in the dark: “Do you know what is hardest about it? That I too kept silent. I did not defend myself.” “They threatened you.” “Yes. But I told myself: I am going, and I will come back when something changes. And nothing changed. And I did not come back. Because I was ashamed that I had left my daughter at two weeks old.” “You had no choice.” “I had. But I chose the easy one. And you, did you have a choice?” “Yes.” “Then we both know it. And that is why we sit here.” “In the dark.” “Where no one can lie.”
I want to stop talking for a while, dear reader, for the two men have a greater right to this place than I. I put them in the dark on purpose; for darkness brings out honesty more easily than light. In the dark faces do not count, no pictures are shown, and no one is measured by the one who sees him. And a person lies only before one who looks at him. So if you want to know a person’s truth, do not ask him in the light; sit with him in a darkness under a wall and listen to what he says when he does not believe anyone sees him.
Mansur coughed. The sound of his cough was different now: deeper, slower, as if coming from a distant earth. “You cough a lot. Why didn’t you go to the doctor?” “I told Aisha: Doctors ask for the name.” “And now your daughter is a doctor.” “And now she is. And she asked me for my name. And I said it.” “Because you are no longer afraid?” “Because I am tired.”
Adam felt in his pocket: “I found something. The letter. When the ceiling collapsed, I was holding the door. And it was in my hand.” The phone lit up: a cold, white, trembling light that for the first time showed Mansur’s face: dust on his beard, a wounded forehead and two shining eyes. And in Adam’s hand an old yellow envelope, on it in slanting script: “To Mansur alone.” “I cannot read. My glasses are gone.” “I will read.” He opened the envelope: a single folded sheet. He drew breath and read:
“Mansur. You do not know me well, and I do not deserve that you know me. But I know you. I know that you are a man who demanded nothing and took nothing and that all we took from you never belonged to us. I do not ask that you forgive. No one has this right over another. But I ask for one thing. We decided everything about you. I, my father, my brother and the lawyers, even those who wanted to protect you. We all decided. And no one asked you. In this safe is everything needed to tell the truth. And everything needed to bury it. And I have no right to choose for you. So you choose. If you want the truth to be told, tell it. And if you want it buried, bury it. And I will accept, wherever I may be, what you decide. Fakhri.”
It was over. The light fell from his hand, and the darkness returned. And only the sound of the two men’s breathing remained. “We decided everything about you,” whispered Mansur. “Yes.” “And no one asked me. Thirty years.” “Yes.” “And now I am asked? After everything has collapsed.” Mansur laughed. A long, brittle laugh with thirty years of unwept tears: “I am the first person in the world who is asked what he wants while lying under a mountain of stones.” “And what do you want?”
Mansur was silent. And from above they heard a sound: metal on metal. Then voices of men. “Here!” shouted one. “I hear them! Under the south rubble!” And a trembling, loud woman’s voice: “Father! Father!” “Maryam,” whispered Mansur. “Tell her I am here.” “You yourself.” “No. You tell her. My voice is weak.” Adam raised his voice, and it was his first strong voice in thirty years: “We are here! Under the wall! We are alive!”
The rescue took four hours. They dug with their hands and with their equipment and carried the collapsed wall away stone by stone. Maryam was ahead of everyone, the oxygen tube in her hand, calling instructions of which she did not know she knew them. Behind her Bilal, Samir, Salim and Iyad and all who had been in the warehouse that night. And among them Fuad, who dug with bare hands, his fingers bleeding, his nails black with dust. When at last the gap opened, a trembling hand came out. Adam’s hand. Fuad seized it and pulled. He drew him slowly out between the stones while Adam groaned. “Careful! His leg!” “It’s all right,” said Adam in a hoarse voice. “Pull me.” He brought him out and set him on the ground. Then he went back and afterward brought out Mansur, whom he held the way one holds something old that might break.
Maryam ran to her father and put the oxygen mask on him. “Father, I am here.” “I know.” “You will make it.” “I don’t know.” “You will.” He closed his eyes and smiled.
Fuad sat down beside Adam on the ground. He panted, his hands trembled, his face was covered with white dust. “Thank you,” said Adam. “Don’t thank me.” “Why?” “Because I did not do what you think.” Fuad looked at the gray sky. Then he said softly, so that only Adam heard:
“I too took an envelope.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“To Whom the Name Belongs”
The Nineteenth and Twentieth Day
In the municipal hospital, third floor, a small room with a window onto the parking lot. In the bed a gaunt man, the rib bandaged, the nose connected to a thin tube, the eyes half closed. Mansur, on the nineteenth day, breathed deeply for the first time in years. Maryam sat on a chair beside him and checked the numbers of the device on the wall. “How high is the oxygen?” “Ninety-eight.” “Good. You should sleep.” “And you should rest.” “For thirty years I have been resting.” “No. You fled.” “And what is the difference?” “Resting doesn’t make you tired.”
He opened his eyes fully: “You look like your mother when you are angry.” “And you look like… I don’t know. I don’t know you yet.” “And I don’t know you. Shall we try?” “Yes.” He stretched out his hand and took hers. It was rough and cold, but it did not tremble.
In the corridor Fuad sat on a plastic chair, his hands bandaged, his face unwashed for two days. When Bilal came closer, he raised his head: “Sit down.” “No. I don’t like sitting beside the one who deceived me.” “I did not deceive you.” “You let me believe you were my friend.” “Sit down, Bilal. I tell you only one thing. Thirty years ago I was a young journalist. I came upon a thread indicating that something was wrong at Modern Trade. I wrote a whole report. Then a lawyer named Saad al-Din came to me. He said: This story will harm innocent people. And there is a sum that compensates your effort. I took it. Because I was hungry and ambitious and full of fear. And from it I built my library and my archive.”
“From hush money. And you are the one who hunted us?” “I wanted one of you to do what I did not do. I moved you.” “Like puppets?” “Like people who only move when they feel that time is running out.” “And that justifies it?” “No. I only say it.” Bilal stood up: “I don’t know whether I will forgive you.” “I am not asking for it.” “And I don’t know whether I will hate you.” “That is enough for me.”
I have shaken you with Fuad, I know it. I did not do it to heighten the plot, but to place this heavy truth before your eyes: Often the one who drives people to tell the truth is the very one who himself kept silent about it. The old penitent is the most zealous preacher to the new generation, for he wants to see in their eyes what he did not see in the mirror. Do not despise the penitent preacher and do not rely on him: Take what he said and check it, as Bilal checked what Fuad had said.
At nine in the evening on the twentieth day the red light above the studio door burned. Rana sat behind the microphone, before her a list of names, an old notebook and a glass of water. In the control room stood Mahir and Omar and behind them all the station’s employees. “Good evening, city,” she said in a voice she did not know in herself. “I am Rana, and this is a special program titled ‘Thirty Silences.’ We will accuse no one tonight. We will do something harder: We will read names, and each name says what it kept silent about.”
“Salim.” “I am here,” came a voice from the telephone. “I accepted a gift and kept silent about my suspicion.” “Amna.” “I knew what the boy had seen, and did not tell Mansur’s wife.” “Iyad.” “I saw and took the money.” “Nabil.” “I did not explain to the widow what she was signing.” “Adil.” “I said I had no mandate.” “Bashir.” “I believed a man’s repentance and did not ask.” “Munir.” “I said: That is none of my business.” “Ramis.” “I nodded.” “Adam.” “I wrote the postings with my own hand,” said Adam from a room in the hospital. “And I considered myself a witness.” “Fuad.” A brief silence. “I took money to drop an investigation,” said the tired voice. “And built my library with it.”
Then a voice came from the third line: “I am Kamil. Eight years ago I gave Rana the name Said.” Rana froze. “I told you he had used substandard material. And I was wrong. Or lied. I don’t know.” “And why now?” “Because his son listened to you.” “And I passed on what you said without checking.” “And I said it without proof.” “Then we both.” “We both.” And so one after another. Some say a sentence, some weep, some are silent and then speak. And at the end of the hour one name remained. “Huda.” “I am here. I am the lawyer who inherited Saad al-Din’s practice. And in his practice stands a box in which he left a receipt: I advised the depositor to keep silent. I am the Ninth. My teacher knew. And I accepted the teaching without a question. And a lawyer who does not tell the truth when he knows it is no lawyer.” And she quickly wiped away a tear.
At that moment the fourth line lit up. “We have a new caller,” said Rana. “Please.” “Good evening.” A slow, tired, but firm voice. “I am Mansur al-Khalil.” Rana put her hand over her mouth. And in the control room Mahir held his breath. “You decided about me for thirty years. And I do not want anyone to decide about me tonight. I do not want anyone to go to prison. Of those who kept silent, some are dead, some are dying, and some no longer know who they are. And I do not want to be the reason a man goes to prison who can no longer stand. I want my name to be read. In the neighborhood where it was stolen. In the mosque at whose wall I sat. In the street through which all have walked. I want it to be said: Mansur al-Khalil did not steal.” “We will say it.” “No. I want it said by the one who kept silent.” “Is that enough for you?” “No. But it is a beginning.” “And the law?” “The law forgets.” “And conscience?” “Conscience does not lapse.” And he hung up.
“Conscience does not lapse.” I waited twenty-three chapters to put this sentence into the mouth of a homeless man. And I know that jurists will say conscience too lapses, for people forget, generations change, and for what happened a century ago the grandchildren of the perpetrators are not to be held to account. And in some things they are right. But Mansur does not speak of a claim, but of the “name”; and the name remains, if it was stolen, stolen as long as its owner breathes. Neither the law nor time has the right to return names to people; only he who took it can return it, or he who kept silent when he saw it taken.
That night Hajji Tawfiq lay in the intensive care unit in the white bed, a tube in his arm, and beside him Lama held his hand. “Did you hear? He did not say he wants me in prison. And he did not say he has forgiven. How shall I sleep? Tomorrow I want to sign a confession. Before a notary. With my name. With my hand.” “Father, you are exhausted.” “And that is why it must be now.” “I’ll call Huda.” “Lama, I am sorry.” “Don’t say that. You have said it so often in the last two weeks.” “Then I’ll say something else. I love you.” She smiled and wept at once. Then he fell asleep.
At ten past five in the dawn of the twenty-first day Huda’s phone rang. “Huda…” Lama’s voice, hoarse and broken. “My father died half an hour ago. He could no longer sign.” Huda stood in the dark, the phone at her ear: “I am sorry.” “It’s all right.” And she looked at the calendar. A single day. And beneath it before her a sheet with an old question in her handwriting: “Who files suit when its holder is legally dead?” And no signed confession. And no living plaintiff.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Before the Law Forgets”
The Twenty-First Day
At nine in the evening on the twenty-first day the courthouse hall was almost empty: cold marble floor, a high ceiling, a huge wall clock above the entrance to the filing office whose hands moved with provoking slowness. Mansur sat in a wheelchair, a thin blanket on his knees, beside him Maryam, in her lap a bag of medications. Behind him stood Bilal, Huda and Adam, leaning on a crutch. On the wooden benches Salim, Iyad, Salma, Jamal, Ismail, Rana, Su’ad and Lubna. A side door opened, and a woman of thirty-five stepped out, slight, in an ironed white shirt, with glasses and a green folder in her hand. Reem, the clerk of the filing office. “Good evening,” she said in a cold voice. “Before midnight. The time will not suffice for you. You want to have a death certificate revoked and at the same time file a complaint. Procedurally yes. Practically that needs proof.”
Huda laid the black book, the deed of gift, the tape, Fakhri’s letter and the fourth page on the table. Reem examined everything with patience and fingers that did not hurry. “That is good. But it is not enough. The evidence proves a crime. It does not prove that this man is Mansur al-Khalil. And according to the register he has been dead for twenty-three years. And I cannot accept a man without identity who claims to be a living dead man.” “He has witnesses,” said Adam. “Adam al-Khatib. I was his colleague. And I am writing the statement now.” “And I,” said Salim. “And I,” said Iyad. “And I,” said Salma. “No judgment without proof,” said Reem with the calm of one who is used to repeating the sentence. “And every statement must be written and signed.” They sat down at the long table, and each took paper and pen. The sound of the pens on paper was like the trickling of a small stream.
Consider this scene before we go on: Seven men and women, after thirty years of silence, sit at a court table in a single night to write with their pens what it would have sufficed to say with their mouths. That is the cutting difference between silence and word: The word needs paper and pen and signature and a cool clerk who checks the stamp; silence needs nothing. It is free, and precisely for that reason the world is full of it.
At half past ten an elegant man in a gray suit with a leather bag entered. “Ziad. The lawyer.” Bilal froze: “You are the one who came to my mother thirty years ago and told her the law allows a missing person to be declared dead and that this was in her interest, and did not explain that the settlement meant silence.” “I carried out.” “For whom?” “For the interest. I have come to advise the widow to sign nothing today, for she will lose what she received.” “I know,” said Maryam from her chair in a very calm tone. “I studied with that money. I would like you to leave.” “This is a public place.” “And I am a doctor. And if I have a fit of rage, you would not want to be standing in front of me.” Ziad stayed a moment. Then he turned his back and left.
At a quarter to eleven Reem had gathered the papers in a thick folder: The proof was clear, the witnesses had signed. One thing remained: the revocation of the death declaration. The law demands that it be withdrawn by the one who applied for it. The widow. Aisha al-Khalil. No other. “But she has not come.” “Then I cannot.” Huda looked at Maryam: “Call.” “I called ten times. She does not answer. She is at home, because she is afraid. Of herself. For the revocation of the declaration means that she admits having filed the application when he was alive, and having taken money. And that is a legal confession.”
Lama, who had arrived a few minutes before, took a small envelope from her bag and handed it over: “My father’s letter. He wrote it on the morning of the first day, before all these events began, and sealed it and gave it to me and said: Open it only after my death. I opened it today.” Huda opened it. In trembling, slanting writing that did not resemble that of a strong man: “To whoever reads this sheet. If you read it, you did it without me. And I am grateful and ashamed. I am Tawfiq al-Rashid, and I confess that thirty years ago I took from the safe of the third warehouse a sum that was not mine. And that an innocent man named Mansur al-Khalil paid the price for it. And that my brother and my father and I kept silent. And that in my life I did not find the courage to say it with my voice. So accept it written.” Beneath signature and date: twenty-one days ago. Huda read it aloud and then laid it before Reem. “That is a statement. Dated, and its author is dead. It will be admitted as a document. As proof of the crime. Not for the revocation of the death declaration.”
All looked at the clock: ten past eleven. Half past eleven. And no one came. “We will not make it,” said Maryam in a breaking voice. “My mother is not coming. She decided for thirty years not to speak. She does not know how.” Mansur straightened in his chair: “Do not reproach her. She did nothing but love. Love is sometimes silence.” Maryam looked at him and took his hand: “And will you forgive her?” “I don’t know.” “And if she doesn’t come?” “Then that is her decision.”
At ten minutes to twelve the main gate of the court opened. A woman of sixty stepped in, in an old black dress, a white scarf on her head, a small cloth bag in her hand. And she stopped. At first no one turned around. Then Maryam saw her: “Mama?” All stood up. Aisha came slowly closer, step by step, across the silent marble. Her eyes were red, but not uncertain. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am late.” “It doesn’t matter.” “It does.”
She stepped before Reem: “I am Aisha al-Khalil. Twenty-three years ago I filed the application for the death declaration of my husband Mansur al-Khalil. And he was alive. And I knew that he was alive. And I took money. And signed a waiver.” She drew from her bag a folded sheet, written with a trembling hand: “This is a complaint. Against me.” Reem read the first line and raised her head: “Do you know that this is a confession? And that you can be prosecuted? No one is forcing you.” “Because a man sat on the curb for thirty years, and I brought him food every Friday and told myself that I love him, and feared to say it with my voice. I am the last one who kept silent. And I will not be the last to speak.”
Then she turned and looked at Mansur. He sat in his wheelchair, and in his eyes was something that no one dared name. “Aisha,” he said in a weak voice. “Say nothing. I have said it. That is enough for me.” She stretched out her hand and touched his shoulder, once, briefly, as if to make sure he was there. “Sign here,” said Reem. Aisha signed in a script that did not tremble. Reem took the documents, arranged them quickly and set the stamp: a heavy red stamp that struck the paper audibly. And at the same moment the huge wall clock struck midnight. One stroke. Two. Three. “One second before twelve,” said Reem and raised her eyes to the clock. “The complaint is accepted.” “Accepted?” whispered Bilal. “Before the law forgets.”
And the hall was empty of every sound. Then the silence broke under the weeping of a woman. It was not Aisha. It was Maryam.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“The Green Earth”
Three Months Later
Three months later the garden of the Green Earth was greener than it had ever been. The lemon trees bent under yellow fruit, heavy red berries hung from the rows of tomatoes, and the mint filled the paths with a scent like no other. In the early morning, when the sun had not yet risen over the stone wall, two men were pruning an old fig tree. “No,” said Jamal. “Here. Above the knot. Otherwise the tree will be weak.” “And the shears?” “Lighter in the hand. Like so.” Adam took the shears and cut a small twig that sank soundlessly to the ground. “Well done.” “I didn’t know I’d still learn this at my age.” “We all learn what we have neglected.”
Adam looked at his hands. They had changed: rough, a little cracked, a trace of earth at the fingertips that no longer left. Since losing his post at the company he had looked for no other. On the first day he had come and said to Jamal: “I understand nothing about farming.” And Jamal had said: “And I understand nothing about being a day laborer on land I thought was mine.” And they had laughed. It was the first time two men laughed together about the same burden.
On the other side of the garden, under a large lemon tree, an old mat was spread. Mansur sat, leaning against a small cushion, a wool blanket on his knees. He had gained a little weight, his beard was trimmed, his eyes lay less deep. Beside him sat Maryam and Bilal and Aisha, at the edge, who filled the food into small plates and did not often look at him. “Sheikh Bashir read your name in the mosque on Friday,” said Bilal. “He said: Mansur al-Khalil did not steal. In a loud voice, before everyone.” “And did you feel something?” “I felt that I wanted to stand up. And I did not stand. Because I wanted to hear it once more. And he repeated it. And wept.” “He too walked past me every day.”
Aisha handed over a small plate: “Eat.” He took it and ate a bite. Silence. “I don’t know whether I have forgiven you,” he said after a while. “I know.” “But I am learning it.” “That is enough for me.” “It is not enough for me. For I do not want to learn for thirty years.” Aisha laughed a small, brittle laugh that he had not heard in thirty years: “You will learn faster.” “Aisha, there is no more food to carry to the curb. What will you do on Friday?” “I will come here. I will sit. Every Friday. If you permit.” “I permit.” And in his answer, which was neither forgiveness nor refusal, was something that resembled a beginning.
Do not expect me, dear reader, to tell you that the Green Earth is paradise. It is a small garden at the edge of a city in which sits a man with a broken rib, a woman who is ashamed to look at her husband, and a man of fifty-eight who has just learned to cut a twig. And that is exactly what I wanted. For forgiveness is, after everything I have seen of the world, not a glorious moment in a film scene, but a small daily labor: a glass of tea, a plate of food, a quiet sitting under a lemon tree and a question that is asked slowly: “What is your name?”
At noon Yusuf came with Samira, a small bag in his hand, in it food and a notebook. He had grown a little, or it only seemed so to Adam. “I came to work.” “You don’t have to.” “I want to. Rami apologized to me. The one who broke the window. He came on Monday and said he was sorry. And I said: Me too. Because I didn’t tell you the truth from the start.” Adam smiled: “You are like me.” “Or am I like Grandfather?” “Whom?” “Uncle Mansur.” Adam looked at the mat under the lemon tree. “Perhaps.” Yusuf stood beside him and looked at the trees: “Papa, did you sleep well?”
Adam was silent. That was the question Samira had asked every morning for twenty-five years, and his answer had always been the same sentence: Like a man with nothing to hide. “No,” he said. “No?” “Because I still dream. Of the cellar. Of the darkness. Of Mansur’s voice saying: Say it again.” “Is that bad?” “No. Then I have slept the way a man sleeps who has said everything.” “And how does he sleep?” “Little,” said Adam. “But well.” Yusuf laid his head for a moment on his father’s arm and then went to help pick lemons. And Samira came and sat down beside Adam on a tree trunk. “You have changed. You no longer say: I am the one who does not lie.” “Did I say that?” “Every day, with an inner voice.” “I was wrong.” “No,” she said. “You were incomplete.” “And you?” “I knew it. And kept silent.” “And now?” “Now we talk.” He took her hand. And they stayed sitting on the tree trunk in the midday sun without saying anything else.
In the studio of “The Truth First” Rana drank her morning coffee and read through the remaining news of the past months. Muaz and Khalid stood trial, for the assault on Iyad and for the monthly payments to buy silence, and Khalid alone had confessed everything and been promised mitigation of sentence. Nader had written an article in his newspaper titled “A Mistake That Did Not Happen,” in which he told how he had almost accused an innocent man and how he had learned. Fuad had handed his whole archive over to the city’s public library and sat three days with Salma to sort the notebooks with her, and spoke only when necessary. Samir had been promoted to chief accountant of the company, which now stood under new management and the supervision of an employees’ committee. Lama and Omar had gotten engaged on a quiet night, and Rana was the first to learn of it. Huda had replaced the brass sign at her office door: “Huda al-Sharif, Attorney at Law.” And Hind had returned to Adam the sheet that had fallen from him that night. No one had opened it. Adam read it once, then tore it up and said he no longer needed it.
Mahir came in: “Rana, we have a visitor. Karim.” A man of forty in an ironed shirt, with eyes that carried a sleeplessness he did not hide, in his hand a yellow envelope. “I am not waiting thirty years. Five years ago we had an employee named Hiba. She applied for a higher position and deserved it. And the position was given to the son of a board member. And I was the personnel director. And I signed. And I concealed her true evaluation. Here it is.” “And why now?” “Because I saw what happened to those who kept silent for thirty years. And I did not want to be one of them.” She looked at the envelope. It was light. Lighter than one expects when one carries the silence of five years. “Thank you, Karim.” “Don’t thank me. I am five years late.” “And I eight. I began with a single person.”
And after he had gone, Rana kept holding the envelope in her hand. She looked out the window at the street through which all had once walked without asking a person’s name. Then she opened the envelope and began to read. Thirty silences, broken after thirty years. And one silence, broken on the same day.
A Word After We Have Finished
Dear reader, now we have arrived at the door through which we entered, and the face of the place has changed.
You came to this novel, presumably in search of a story: a riddle whose knot unties, villains who are punished and good people who are rewarded. And here I hand you a story without villains. A story in which at the end all step out of the warehouse, and each carries something he cannot give back: Adam carries his hand that wrote, Salim his watch, Rana the name Said, Aisha thirty Fridays, and Mansur his name, of which he did not know that it deserves to be spoken.
I called them “Thirty Silences” because, after I had counted the silent, I discovered that there are far more than thirty. They are you and I. They are that neighbor who saw and did not ask, that colleague who heard and said nothing, that mother who knew and did not open the drawer, that friend who laughed with the laughing at a person he did not know. And I am the first of them. Otherwise I would not have written this novel.
And if you ask me: And what is to be done? Then I do not answer you with a sermon. I tell you a small secret I learned from Adam: The hardest word in the language is the one that begins with a small question and not with a great answer. Ask your neighbor his name. Ask your friend what you do not dare to ask. Ask yourself about the drawer you have not opened. And if you do not find the courage in yourself, then begin with what a man of fifty-eight began with: Say a single honest sentence, aloud, to a single person, today.
Then come, if you like, and tell me. I am still here, in my place, at the edge of the curb.
Numan Albarbari
