2. The Widow's Share

The police station at Stone Town was a colonial relic built of coral rag and whitewashed lime, its arches copied from a Portuguese garrison and its cells sunk into the bedrock where the tide sometimes rose through the floor gratings and left a slick of brine across the stone. Zahir el-Fassi had worked in this building for twenty-three years, and he still could not smell the salt without thinking of blood.

Idris Bakari arrived at the station shortly after the dawn call to prayer, his clothes still smelling of the steamer and his eyes raw from a night spent reading his mother’s letters by the light of a kerosene lamp. He had not slept. He had sat cross-legged on the floor of the room above the tea shop, the letters spread around him in a fan, and he had read every one in order, constructing from the fragments of her handwriting the shape of the life she had lived without him. The letters grew shorter over the years, the sentences more clipped, the complaints more veiled. In the final letter, dated three weeks before her death, she had written that his father had been talking to men from the company, that there was talk of resettlement, that she did not trust the men but his father had told her to be patient and to pray. The letter ended with a line that Idris had read seven times: Your father has forgotten that patience is not the same as surrender.

Zahir was at his desk when the duty sergeant announced the visitor. The desk was a chaos of carbon papers and tea stains and the dried husks of a beetle that had died on the blotter some months ago and that Zahir had never bothered to remove. He looked up and saw a young man with the cheekbones of the Bakari family and the mouth of the dead woman in the photograph, and he knew immediately who had come.

“You are the son,” Zahir said.

“I am Idris Bakari.”

“Sit.”

Idris did not sit. He remained standing in the centre of the office, his satchel clutched against his chest, his gaze moving across the maps on the wall and the shelves of ledgers and the rifle rack behind Zahir’s chair. “You closed the case on my mother’s death.”

“I did not close it. The magistrate closed it. I filed a report, and the magistrate accepted the findings, and the file was transferred to the dead archive. That is how these matters are handled.” Zahir leaned back in his chair and studied the young man. He had seen this before, the fury of the bereaved son, the belief that grief entitled one to a hearing that the world was not prepared to give. He had been that son himself, long ago, when his own father had been beaten to death by colonial gendarmes and the official report had listed the cause as accidental drowning. “You wish to see the file.”

“I wish to see the suicide note.”

“The suicide note is in the file.”

“Then I wish to see the file.”

Zahir sighed and rose from his chair. He walked to the iron cabinet in the corner and extracted a folder of buff paper, its edges frayed and its cover stamped with the case number and the date of closure. He handed it to Idris and returned to his seat. “You will find nothing new. The clerk confessed. The permit was forged. The company has disavowed all knowledge of the forgery, and the family of the clerk has returned the bribe money to the municipal treasury. The matter is settled.”

Idris opened the folder and spread its contents across Zahir’s desk. There was the permit, yellow and brittle, its forged signature looped across the notary seal. There was the suicide note, written on a sheet of cheap foolscap in a hand that trembled only at the beginning and then steadied into a rigid cursive. And there was the bank deposit slip, stamped with the date and the amount and the name of the receiving account. Idris bent over the documents and studied them with the same intensity he had once applied to the commentaries of Ibn Khaldun, and after a long silence he said, “The ink does not match.”

Zahir looked up from his tea. “What?”

“The ink of the suicide note and the ink of the permit are the same. Iron gall ink, the standard formulation used in the municipal offices. But the ink of the bank deposit slip is different. It is darker, and it has not faded at the edges. This slip was written with a different pen. And it was written by a different hand.”

Zahir set down his cup and came around the desk to stand beside Idris. He took the documents and held them under the lamp, and he saw what the young man had seen: the suicide note and the permit shared the same ink, the same stroke width, the same hesitation in the loops of the letter ghayn. The bank deposit slip was a forgery of a different order, cruder and more hurried, and the ink had a bluish cast that suggested a fountain pen rather than the municipal dip pens. “You have a sharp eye,” Zahir said. “But a sharp eye is not enough. The magistrate will say that the clerk used a different pen for the deposit slip, and the account number matches the clerk’s account, and the money was returned by the clerk’s widow. The chain of evidence is intact.”

“The chain of evidence is a necklace of lies,” Idris said. “The clerk received a deposit of two hundred rials, enough for a passage to Aden. But he did not take the passage. He killed himself instead. Does this seem probable to you? A man who has just sold his integrity for a bribe does not hang himself the night before the bribe bears its fruit. He waits. He takes the money and runs. Unless he was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of the men who paid him.”

Zahir walked to the window and looked out at the harbour, where the dhows were beginning to unfurl their sails in the morning breeze. He was thinking of the week before the demolition, when he had seen a man in a red tarboosh drinking coffee with the harbour master, and the harbour master had later mentioned that the man was a representative of the Al-Mansour Trading Company, and that he was looking for warehouse space. The memory had seemed trivial at the time. Now it troubled him. “The clerk’s widow,” he said at last. “Her name is Fatima. She lives in the old Jewish quarter, near the synagogue that is no longer a synagogue. If you wish to ask her about her husband’s state of mind, I will not prevent you. But I warn you, she has already been questioned. She will tell you what she told me: that her husband was a troubled man, that he had debts, that he had spoken of ending his life. She will weep, and you will feel like a monster for disturbing her grief, and you will leave with nothing.”

“Then I will leave with nothing,” Idris said. “But I will have asked.”

He left the police station with the folder still open on Zahir’s desk, and Zahir did not call after him. The detective sat alone in his office, turning the deposit slip over in his hands, and after a while he took the photograph of Idris’s mother from his pocket and placed it beside the suicide note. The woman in the photograph was smiling, and her smile was the smile of someone who believed that the world would eventually be just. Zahir had stopped believing this many years ago, but he could still recognize the faith in others, and the recognition was painful.

The old Jewish quarter was a maze of narrow streets and shuttered windows, built in the sixteenth century by merchants fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition and abandoned two generations ago when the last of Zanjibar’s Jewish families had emigrated to Israel. The synagogue still stood, its doors locked and its courtyard overgrown with jasmine, and the houses around it had been subdivided into tenements for the families of municipal clerks and dockworkers. Fatima Haddad lived in a ground-floor room with a single window and a courtyard shared with a family of Coptic Christians who kept a goat that grazed on the weeds between the flagstones.

Idris found her sitting on a stool in the doorway, shelling fava beans into a copper bowl. She was a woman in her forties, her hair covered with a black scarf and her face lined with a weariness that predated her husband’s death. She looked up as Idris approached, and her hands stilled on the beans.

“I am the son of Khadija Bakari,” Idris said.

The widow’s face did not change. She had been beautiful once, and the beauty was still visible in the architecture of her bones, but it had been overlaid with the sediment of years and losses. “I have already spoken to the police,” she said. “I have nothing more to say.”

“I am not the police.”

“No. You are worse. You are the one who will not let the dead rest.” She resumed shelling the beans, her fingers working the pods with the automatic precision of long practice. “Your mother is dead, and my husband is dead, and no amount of questions will bring either of them back.”

Idris crouched in front of her, bringing his face level with hers. “My mother died because a bulldozer destroyed her house. Your husband died because he signed a permit that should not have been signed. Those two deaths are connected, and the connection is a man in a red tarboosh who works for the Al-Mansour Trading Company. I want to know his name.”

The widow’s hands stopped. She looked at Idris, and in the silence he heard the goat bleating in the courtyard and the distant clang of the harbour bell. “You do not know what you are asking,” she said.

“I am asking for a name.”

“You are asking for the name of a man who will kill you if you speak it.” She set the bowl aside and folded her hands in her lap. “My husband was a good man. He worked for the municipality for twenty-five years. He came home every evening and kissed his children and complained about the damp in the walls. He did not want to sign the permit. He was told to sign it. He was told that if he did not sign it, our son would lose his place at the military academy, and our daughter would lose her marriage prospect, and we would lose this room. He signed because he was afraid, and then he could not live with the fear, and he killed himself. That is the whole story. There is no conspiracy. There is only a weak man who was broken by the world.”

“Who told him to sign it?”

“I do not know. He did not tell me the name. He said only that the order came from the municipal commissioner’s office, and that the order was verbal, and that there was no record of it anywhere.”

Idris studied her face. She was lying, or she was not lying, and he could not tell the difference. The truth had been buried so deep in her grief that she herself might no longer recognize it. “The bank deposit,” he said. “The two hundred rials. Where did the money come from?”

“I do not know. My husband had savings. He had been saving for years.”

“The police report says the money was a bribe, and that you returned it to the treasury.”

“I returned it because I was told to return it. The police came to my door and said the money was stolen from the company, and if I did not return it I would be charged with receiving stolen property. I gave them the money. I would have given them anything. I wanted only to be left alone.”

Idris rose from his crouch, his knees aching, his heart heavy with the knowledge that the widow was both a victim and an obstacle, and that he could not press her further without becoming the monster Zahir had warned him of. He thanked her and turned to leave, and as he reached the courtyard gate she called after him.

“The man in the red tarboosh,” she said. “I do not know his name. But I know that he wears a ring on his left hand, a gold ring with a black stone, and that he is missing the tip of his little finger. My husband mentioned it once. He said the man had beautiful hands, except for the missing finger.”

Idris memorized the detail and walked back through the narrow streets to the harbour front, where the dhows were now fully rigged and the stevedores were hauling bales of cotton from the warehouses. He was thinking of the ring and the finger, and he was thinking of his father, who worked at these same docks and who had spoken to no one from the company and who had received no notice, and as he walked he began to notice the looks that the dockworkers gave him, the sidelong glances and the sudden silences that fell over the groups of men smoking at the warehouse doors. He was known now. The son of the dead woman had come home, and his coming had disturbed the equilibrium of a place that preferred its grievances to remain unspoken.

He found his father at the end of the causeway, sitting on a coil of rope and eating a piece of flatbread with a wedge of hard cheese. Omar looked up as Idris approached, and something flickered across his face that was not surprise but something closer to resignation, as if he had been expecting this confrontation and had prepared himself for it.

“You have been to the police station,” Omar said.

“I have been to the police station, and I have been to the widow of the clerk, and I have been to the municipal archives, where the permit was issued for a warehouse and then altered to read slum clearance.” Idris sat down on the coil of rope beside his father. “The detective, Zahir, he showed me the file. The clerk’s suicide note is a forgery, and the bank deposit is a forgery, and the clerk was murdered because he knew too much and too little. Someone wanted him dead before he could talk. And you, Father, you know more than you have told me.”

Omar chewed his bread slowly, his jaw working in circles, his eyes fixed on the harbour where the water was the colour of lead. “When you were a child,” he said, “you were always asking questions. Why is the sea salty? Why do the dhows have triangular sails? Why does the Sultan live in a palace while we live in one room? I could never answer your questions. I am not a learned man. I know only what I have seen, and what I have seen has taught me that questions are dangerous.”

“Questions are what separate the living from the dead,” Idris said. “My mother is dead because no one asked the right questions.”

“Your mother is dead because the world is unjust,” Omar said, and his voice cracked on the word unjust as if it were a bone breaking. “The world has always been unjust. Your mother knew this. She fought against it anyway. She refused to leave the house because she believed that the law would protect her, that the Sultan’s justice would reach down to the slums of Stone Town and save a woman with flour on her hands. She believed, and her belief killed her.”

The silence that followed was filled with the cries of the gulls and the clanking of the cranes. Idris looked at his father’s hands, the knuckles swollen from years of labour, the nails rimmed with dirt, and he saw that the hands were trembling. “What did they promise you, Father?”

The question hung in the air between them, and Omar did not answer. The flatbread sat uneaten on his lap, the cheese sweating in the midday heat, and the dockworkers moved around them like water around a stone. After a long while, Omar stood up and brushed the crumbs from his tunic and walked away toward the warehouses, and Idris let him go.

That evening Nadia al-Hashimi was in her office, a rented room above a bookbinder’s shop on the Street of the Lamp Makers, when she heard the footsteps on the stairs. She had been expecting Idris Bakari ever since the telegram arrived from Cairo, and she was not surprised to see him standing in her doorway, his eyes hollow with sleeplessness and his satchel bulging with documents.

“You are the lawyer,” he said.

“I am Nadia al-Hashimi. Come in.”

Her office was small and crowded with law books and case files and a tea kettle that had not been cleaned in a year. She cleared a space on the client’s chair and gestured for him to sit, and she poured him a cup of tea that he did not drink.

“My father told me about the permit,” Idris said. “He said you discovered the forgery.”

“I discovered one forgery. There are others. The problem is not finding the forgeries. The problem is proving who ordered them.” Nadia sat behind her desk and folded her hands on the blotter. “The Al-Mansour Trading Company is owned by a consortium of investors who are incorporated in Aden and registered in the name of a holding company that is itself owned by a trust that pays its taxes in Gibraltar. The director of the company, a man named Khalid al-Mansour, is the nephew of the Sultan’s chamberlain. He is protected by connections that the courts are reluctant to challenge. If I file a case against him, the case will be dismissed on a technicality before it reaches a hearing. I need evidence that ties al-Mansour directly to the forgery, and that evidence does not exist.”

“The detective, Zahir, he has the file.”

“Zahir has a file that proves nothing except that a dead clerk forged a permit. The coroner’s inquest found that your mother’s death was accidental, and the accident was caused by the collapse of a substandard building, and the substandard building was the property of the municipality, which is immune from prosecution under the Public Works Protection Act of 1892. The law has been constructed with great precision to ensure that no one is ever held responsible.” She spoke without bitterness, as if she were describing the weather, and Idris understood that she had spent her entire career losing cases to the same mechanisms and had learned to treat defeat as a form of weather.

“Then there is no justice,” Idris said.

“There is law. Law and justice are not the same thing. The law is a machine, and like any machine it can be operated by anyone who knows how to pull the levers. The rich know how to pull the levers. The poor do not. My job is to pull the levers on behalf of the poor, and sometimes I succeed, but more often I fail. In your mother’s case, I am prepared to fail, but I am not prepared to give up. Not yet.” She opened a drawer and withdrew a sheaf of papers bound with red ribbon. “This is a draft petition for the High Court, challenging the validity of the demolition order on the grounds of procedural irregularity. It will not succeed. The judge will rule that the petition was filed too late, and the case will be dismissed. But the petition will create a public record, and the record will be embarrassing for the company, and the embarrassment may force them to offer a settlement. It is not justice, but it is something.”

“I do not want a settlement. I want the man who killed my mother.”

“Then you will be disappointed, because the man who killed your mother does not exist.” Nadia set down the papers and leaned forward, her eyes meeting his. “Your mother was killed by a system. The bulldozer was driven by a labourer who was paid a day’s wage. The permit was forged by a clerk who was coerced. The order was given by a manager who was following instructions from a director who was maximizing profits for shareholders who live in London and Cairo and do not know that the Al-Nour slum ever existed. There is no single man. There is only a chain of complicity, and the chain is so long that no court can hold the whole of it in its hands.”

Idris stared at the petition on the desk, the red ribbon and the legal language and the careful phrasing that would be dissected by a judge and found insufficient, and he thought of his mother’s photograph and the blue curtain and the bread dough that had been rising under its cloth. “There is something my father is not telling me,” he said. “Something he is hiding. I do not know what it is, but I can feel it, like a stone in the rice.”

Nadia was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I have interviewed your father twice. The first time, he told me he had never met anyone from the company. The second time, he told me he had spoken to a man in a red tarboosh, but the man had only asked for directions. The third time I called on him, he refused to see me. Your father is afraid, and the fear is eating him from the inside. If you want to know what he is hiding, you will have to ask him, and you will have to ask in a way that makes him answer.”

“I have asked. He will not speak.”

“Then you must find a way to make him speak, or you must find the truth without him.” Nadia picked up the petition and rolled it into a cylinder and tied the ribbon around it. “I will file this in the morning. You will go home and eat dinner with your family, and you will watch your father, and you will listen to the silences. The silences will tell you more than the words.”

Idris left the office as the muezzin called the evening prayer, and the streets of Stone Town were filling with the smells of grilling meat and the sound of shop shutters being lowered for the night. He walked through the old slave market, now a garden of jasmine and bougainvillea, and he thought of the chain of complicity that Nadia had described, and he wondered where in that chain his father’s name belonged.

When he reached the room above the tea shop, the family was already seated around the low table, and the tray of food had been brought up from the kitchen. Omar sat at the head of the table, his back to the window, and Amina and Samira sat on either side of him, their hands folded in their laps. The food steamed in the lamplight, and no one was eating.

Idris took his place at the table and looked at his father, and his father looked away. The silence was thick and textured, full of the things that had been said and the things that had not been said, and as Idris reached for the bread he saw something glint on the floor beside his father’s foot. It was a gold ring with a black stone, and it was missing the tip of its setting, as if a piece had been broken off. Or, Idris thought, as if the finger that wore it had been missing a tip.

He said nothing. He broke the bread and dipped it in the lentils and ate it without tasting, and the stone of suspicion that had been lodged in his chest since the widow’s courtyard settled deeper into his gut. His father wore no rings. But his father had a cousin who visited the house at odd hours and spoke in whispers, and the cousin worked as a guard at the Al-Mansour warehouse on the harbour front, and the cousin had been seen in the company of a man in a red tarboosh three days before the demolition.

The bread tasted of salt. The silence tasted of betrayal. And Idris understood, with a clarity that made his hands tremble on the table, that his father had not only received a visitor from the company. His father had made a deal. And the ring on the floor was the proof that the deal had been sealed not in a boardroom or a municipal office, but here, at this table, over a meal that his mother had prepared with her own hands.

He reached down and picked up the ring, and he held it out to his father in the palm of his hand. “Whose ring is this, Father?”

Omar looked at the ring, and the colour drained from his face, and his daughters looked at him with eyes that were too old for their faces, and the silence stretched out like a rope pulled to its breaking point.

“It belonged to the man who came to our house,” Omar said at last, and his voice was barely a whisper. “The man in the red tarboosh. He left it here, the night before your mother died. He left it as a pledge. A pledge of what we had agreed.”

“What did you agree, Father?”

But Omar did not answer. He rose from the table and walked to the window and stood with his back to his family, and the lamplight threw his shadow across the floor like a stain. And Idris sat at the table with the ring in his hand and his sisters’ eyes upon him, and he knew that the truth was closer now than it had ever been, and that the price of the truth would be higher than anything he had imagined.