Saroya's Justification

She asked Saroya to come to Behr's, because Behr's was the room in which Iyla had, over the course of seven years, learned how to listen to a person without being persuaded by them, and because the conversation she was about to have was not one she wished to have on a chair Saroya had chosen.

Mr. Behr was at the till when Saroya came in. He did not look up. He had, that morning, when Iyla told him what she intended, said only, "I will be here. I will not be at the back," and gone, with the small dignity of a man being asked, after a long apprenticeship, to bear witness rather than to teach, to the stool behind the counter, where he had stayed with a book open in front of him at a page he was not, Iyla noticed, turning.

She had put the coin on the counter before Saroya arrived, face up, so that Aren the Second's small inattentive profile faced the door. She had not decided what the coin was for. She had decided only that it would be there, and that its use would become apparent in the next half hour, or would not, in which case it would have been there anyway.

She had also, on the way in, seen the boy. He had followed her in the loose way the unmoored will follow a person who has, recently, given them a name; he sat now on the step outside the shop, in the autumn light, his back against the doorframe, looking at his hands. He was not, from inside, audible. He was, through the glass of the door, perfectly visible. She had arranged this, along with a great many small things this morning, with the cold competence of a person who had, the night before, written a list titled NAMES TO BE RESTORED and added nothing to it since.

Saroya, when she came in, took in the shop in the small thorough sweep of a woman used to taking in rooms. She took in Mr. Behr, and gave him the slight courteous nod one gives a person whose presence one has decided not to remark on. She took in the coin. She took in the boy through the glass, and her eyes, on the boy, stayed a fraction of a second longer than they had stayed on Mr. Behr, which Iyla noted.

"You wanted to talk," Saroya said.

"I wanted you to talk," Iyla said. "I have been doing, this week, more than my share."

Saroya smiled, faintly. She was wearing the grey coat. She did not sit, because Iyla had not, deliberately, offered her a chair; she stood on the customer's side of the counter, gloved hands resting lightly on the edge of it, an inch from the coin, not touching it.

"All right," she said. "Then let me. I had hoped — and I would like, for honesty's sake, to say this first — that we would have come to this conversation later, when you knew us better, because it is easier when there is, on both sides, a longer acquaintance to set against the difficulty of it. But you have, characteristically, moved faster than we planned. So I will be plain.

"What the Society does, what we have done for a hundred and fifty years, is a kind of stewardship. The worlds Authors make are extraordinary. They are also, in the strict sense, surplus. They were not there a year ago. The boy on your step was not there a year ago. He did not exist. He is, in the most literal way, additional — his hair, his hands, the fact that he can sit on a step, a quantity of human reality that has been added, by you, to the total. Do you see."

"I see what you are saying," Iyla said. "Go on."

"In the total of the world there has always been a great deal of suffering that is not surplus. Let me give you the case I have, in my own conscience, been carrying for nine years. In a basement in eastern Aleppo, in the spring of two thousand and sixteen, forty-one children were sheltering in what had been, before the shelling, the storeroom of a bakery. Forty-one. I can give you their names. I have given them, in my head, every Sunday since. The youngest was two. The bread that kept them alive for eleven days — the bread that meant that thirty-eight of the forty-one were still alive on the twelfth — was Halun's. Multiplied by the small careful patience of forty people over a number of years. A loaf of Halun's bread is fourteen hours of nutrition, in a city that has, in the not-surplus part of the world, none. We are not vandals, Iyla. We are not, despite the heat of your week, thieves. We are accountants — the kind who has noticed that there is, in the ledger of the human, a column that has been until very recently empty, and that filling it carefully can —"

"Stop," said Iyla. "Stop there."

Saroya stopped. She did it cleanly, in the way of a person used to being interrupted by people less practised than herself, and waited.

"You said the bread that kept them alive was Halun's," Iyla said. "You said it as though you knew. As though you had stood in the room and watched a child eat it."

"I have read the —"

"On Tuesday," said Iyla, "Halun told me he could not, that morning, remember the name of the dog that comes to his back door at midday. He told me because he is the kind of man who, when something has been very lightly taken from him, notices, and tells. He did not tell me he had ever met you. He did not tell me he had ever sold a loaf to a woman in a grey coat. Halun remembers the people he sells loaves to. He remembered Kettle, on Tuesday, with effort, and Kettle was with me for one afternoon. You have eaten his bread, haven't you. You have stood in his shop. And he does not remember you. Why."

There was a pause. A small pause. The pause of a woman who had, in the warm forward motion of her own paragraph, said a sentence she had not strictly meant to be auditable, and was now, very quickly, auditing it.

"Because," Saroya said, and there was, in the word, the faintest catch, "because we have, in some cases, found it more — more practical — to —"

"To take the memory of having been there," Iyla said. "With the loaf. Yes. Go on."

"That is not —"

"It is what you were about to say, and then decided, in the air, that you would prefer to have said something else. Don't. Say the first one. I would like to hear it in your voice, please, and not in mine."

Mr. Behr, behind the counter, turned a page. He turned it very quietly. He turned it, Iyla understood, because he had decided this was a sentence Saroya should be allowed the silence to produce, and the small sound of a page turning was the only thing in the room he could offer that was not, technically, intervention.

Saroya was quiet for a long second. Then she said, "When a thing has been handed across freely, by an inhabitant, the cleanest crossing is the one in which the inhabitant does not, afterwards, retain the having-given. It is gentler, on the inhabitant, in fact — the absence of the loaf, without the memory of the giving, registers in them only as a small forgetfulness, rather than as a — as a wound."

"Gentler," said Iyla.

"On them. Yes."

"The children in Aleppo. You said forty-one. You said you have their names."

"I do."

"Say one."

Saroya looked at her. "Iyla —"

"You have just used them. You have just used a basement of children to set up the landing of your paragraph. You don't get to use them without saying one. Say one."

"Rana," said Saroya, after a small pause. "Rana Haddad. She was four."

"Rana Haddad. Aleppo. Two thousand and sixteen. Bread for eleven days. Thirty-eight of forty-one. The bakery in the basement of which the storeroom was."

"Yes."

"And Halun did not know."

"No."

"He gave you the bread because you were a woman in his shop, and you asked, and he gave bread to people who asked, and then you took, in addition to the bread, the having-asked, so that Halun could not, afterwards, have decided whether he would have wanted to. So that the question of whether Halun would have given his loaves to Rana Haddad was answered, in your accounting, by the fact that the loaves had reached Rana Haddad, and the question of whether Halun had been asked was — gentled."

"Yes," said Saroya, very quietly.

"How many."

"How many what."

"How many of them have you been gentle with."

Saroya did not answer.

"How many in Lentar specifically," Iyla said. "Not as a policy. As a count. How many of my people have you been, this month, gentle with."

"I would have to consult Penn's —"

"Consult her now. In your head. You have a number. You are a woman who has, at all times, a number. What is it."

"Around forty," Saroya said.

"Forty. The same number as the children."

"It is a coincidence of —"

"It is not a coincidence. It is the size of an operation you have learned to run. Forty here, forty there. The accountants' round number. And in the dyers' quarter."

Saroya looked, for the first time, at the coin. "In the dyers' quarter we made a different decision."

"Yes," said Iyla. "I have seen the different decision. The boy outside has seen the different decision. His aunt was called Saba. She had a song. Tell me, please, the reasoning by which the different decision in the dyers' quarter was the decision you arrived at."

"The dyers' quarter," Saroya said, slowly, in the voice of a woman reading from a document she had hoped not to read aloud, "presented an unusual density of named-ness. It was, in the surveys, the part of your city with the highest concentration of specific particulars per unit of architecture. A name to a stool. A song to a stirrer. A colour to a day of the week. Penn observed, and I agreed, that the more economical operation was to take the quarter in a single pass, rather than return to it many times."

"Economical for whom."

"For us. For the inhabitants, also; many small interventions are felt more than one larger one, because the inhabitants —" She stopped. She heard herself. She closed her mouth, briefly, then opened it more carefully. "I would like to retract that sentence."

"Don't," said Iyla. "I will retract it for you, in my notebook, by writing it down. The single pass. What did it take."

"Iyla —"

"What did it take. By column. You have a column. Penn has a column. I read her notebook on Wednesday afternoon, on a crate behind Halun's. I know there is a column. What was in it for the dyers' quarter."

There was, in the room, a sound. A small sound. It was the sound of Mr. Behr setting his book down, face up, on the counter, and Iyla did not, although she heard it, look at him; she understood, without looking, that he had set it down not as a signal to her but to himself — that he had reached the point at which he no longer needed the book as a courtesy to either of them.

Saroya said, "Names. Songs. The names of three dyers and the song of one daughter and the name of one aunt and the name of a game children were playing, and the name of the dog at the bakers' back door, although that one we let go, because the dog itself was the size of an artefact we did not, on reflection, want to be carrying. We took the name and left the dog. Halun has, you say, since recovered the dog."

"I gave it back to him," Iyla said.

"Yes."

"You took my aunt's song."

"We took a song. I am not in a position to —"

"You took my aunt's song," said the boy.

He had come in. Iyla had not, in the small heat of the last minute, noticed the door open, and he had come in, in the soft way of a child who had been listening through a pane of glass and had decided, at some point, that he was a person who got to be in the room. He came as far as the counter. He looked at Saroya with the calm of a child who had spent three days being no one in particular and was, this morning, slightly more present than that. "You took my aunt's song. Saba's song. I would like it back."

Saroya looked at him. She was, Iyla saw, a woman with a great many trained responses to a great many varieties of interlocutor, and she did not, in her training, have a response prepared for this one. She started to say something. She stopped. She started again. "I do not — I do not personally hold the —"

"Who does," said Iyla.

"Penn has the catalogue."

"Where."

"In the C room. In the cases. The smaller items are kept as written transcriptions — the songs, in a green book on the second shelf."

"You have," said Iyla, "a green book, on the second shelf of the C room, with my aunt Saba's song written down in it. Possibly also, on a nearby shelf, the names of forty-one children in Aleppo."

"That is —"

"A different book. Yes, I imagine it is. I imagine you keep them on different shelves. I imagine the shelves are labelled."

Saroya did not answer.

"I want the book," Iyla said.

"That is not —"

"I want the book, and Penn's notebook, and the list of the forty in Lentar, and the timetable on which the Small Bridge is to be avoided between fourteen and sixteen, and I want, in writing, the name of every person in your Society who has been through one of those four doors in the last six months. You may take a minute to decide whether you would prefer to give me these things or to have me, by other means, take them. I am told, by people who would know, that I am unusually good, this month, at taking."

Saroya was quiet for a long second. Then she said, with the small careful precision of a woman who had decided the conversation was no longer the conversation she had walked in to have, "You are angry. That is fair. I had hoped —"

"You had hoped to reach the landing of your paragraph," Iyla said. "The landing where you would say that the surplus of an Author is, on balance, in the great accounting of the world, a thing decent people permit themselves to draw on with care; that you and I, being decent people, could agree, over a cup of something, that the care had on one or two occasions been imperfect; and that the imperfections were the subject of a protocol you and I could, going forward, refine together. I am not going to let you reach the landing. Today is a day on which paragraphs do not get to land. The book. The notebook. The list. The timetable. The names. Please."

The boy stood very still at the counter. He had put one hand, flat, on the wood next to the coin, in the way a child puts a hand on the corner of a table at which an adult conversation is taking place, to remind the adults that the table is also his. The coin lay between his hand and Saroya's. Aren the Second looked, on his small flat face, faintly bored.

Saroya looked at the boy. She looked at the coin. She looked at Mr. Behr, who was, by now, not pretending to read, and who was looking back at her with the mild interested attention of a man who had, in fifty years of selling secondhand books, seen a great many people try to leave a shop with something they had not paid for.

"I will need," Saroya said, slowly, "to bring you the notebook and the list myself. The book in the C room — Penn does not permit removal of —"

"Penn will permit it," said Iyla, "or Penn will permit a great many other things she will like considerably less. Tomorrow afternoon. Here. Three o'clock. Not the green door. Here. On this counter. With Mr. Behr present, and the boy, if the boy wishes."

The boy nodded, gravely, at the counter, as if a vote had been taken and he had cast his. "And the song," he said.

"And the song," said Iyla.

Saroya inclined her head. It was the smallest concession — the concession of a woman who had come into a room to deliver a paragraph and was leaving it having delivered, instead, a list of items to be returned, and who was, in the small recalibration of her shoulders, already drafting the longer paragraph she would deliver in a different room, on a different day, to a different audience, about the cost of having underestimated, on a Thursday afternoon in October, in a secondhand bookshop that smelled of rain, the speed at which the woman in front of her had decided to grow up.

She turned to go. At the door, she paused. She did not turn back. She said, to the door, in a voice that was almost — almost — the voice in which she had, weeks earlier, said Lentar over a café table, "It will not, in the long view, be possible to keep all of them. Rana Haddad will still have been four. The basement will still have been in Aleppo. The bread will still have got there. You will, eventually, have to decide what you do with that."

"I am not interested," said Iyla, "in your long view today. I am interested in this afternoon, and tomorrow at three, and the song of a woman called Saba. The basement I will sit with on my own time, and you do not get to put it in my hand on your way out of a door, like a coat you forgot you brought."

Saroya went out. The bell over the door, which had been, until that moment, the bell on the door of Behr's secondhand bookshop, sounded, briefly, like a bell.

The boy looked at the coin. He looked at Iyla. "Is that the man whose face is on the money."

"Yes," said Iyla.

"He looks," said the boy, "as though he is not paying attention."

"He is not," said Iyla. "That is, in part, how we are here."

Mr. Behr, behind the counter, picked up his book again. He turned, this time, a page he had actually read, and said, without looking at either of them, in the mild voice in which he had, seven years ago, told a sixteen-year-old girl that attention was the rarest currency in the world, "Three o'clock tomorrow. I will make the room ready. There is, I think, a chair in the back that will do, for the boy, if the boy intends to stay."

The boy considered. "I intend to stay," he said.

"Then there is," said Mr. Behr, "a chair."

Iyla put her hand, briefly, on the coin, then took it off, and left it where it was, because the coin, she had decided in the course of the last half hour, was going to stay on the counter until tomorrow afternoon, as a small bronze witness to a meeting that had not, yet, finished happening.