The Year of Rice and Salt

'Don't worry,' Budur said, and ran down the hall to her room. She looked around: a room search, perhaps a house search, and the bag of papers was big. She looked around, thinking over the zawiyya in her mind, wondering if Idelba would mind if she somehow managed to destroy the bag entirely – not that she had any method in mind, but she wasn't sure how crucial the papers were – but possibly they could be shredded and flushed down a toilet.

There were people in the hall, women's voices. Apparently the police who had entered were women officers, so they were not breaking the house rule against men. A sign perhaps; but men's voices came from out in the street, arguing with the zawiyya elders; women were in the hall; a big knock on her door, they had come to hers first, no doubt along with Idelba's. She put the bag around her neck, climbed onto her bed, then the iron headboard, and pulled herself up the wall and shoved up a panel of the false ceiling, and with a push off like a dance step, knee in the meeting of the two walls, got under the panel and onto the wall's dusty top, which was about two feet wide. She sat on it and put the panel back down into place, very quietly.

The old museum had had very high ceilings, with some glass skylights that were now almost perfectly opaque with dust. In the dimness she could see over the ceilings of several rows of rooms, and the open tops of the hallways, and the true walls, far away in every direction. It was not a good hiding place at all, if they only thought to look up here, from anywhere.

The top of the walls consisted of warped wood beams, nailed to the top of the framing and over the drywall like coping. There were two sheets of drywall to each wall, notoriously transparent to sound, nailed onto each side of the framing; so there would be gaps between the two sheets of drywall, if she could get a beam off the top somewhere.

She moved onto her hands and knees and swung the bag onto her back, and began crawling over the dusty beams, looking for a hole while staying well away from the hallways, where a glance up could reveal her. From here the whole arrangement looked ramshackle, cobbled together in a hurry, and soon enough she found a cap where three walls met and a beam had been cut short. It wasn't big enough to fit the whole bag, but she could stuff papers in there, and she did so quickly, until the bag was empty, and the bag dropped in last. It wasn't a perfect hiding place if they wanted to be comprehensive, but it was the best she could think of, and she was pretty pleased with it, actually; but if they found her up on the beams, all would be lost. She crawled on as quietly as she could, hearing voices back in the direction of her room. They would only have to stand on her bed's headboard and push up a panel for a look to see her. The far bathroom did not sound as if it had anyone in it, so she crawled in that direction, ripping the skin over one knee on a nailhead, and pulled up a panel an inch and peered in empty she pulled it aside, hung from the beam, dropped, hit the tiled floor hard. The wall was smeared with dust and blood; her knees and the tops of her feet were filthy with dust, and the palms of her hands marked everything like the hand of Cain. She washed in a sink, tore off her jellabah and put it in the laundry, pulled clean towels from the cabinet and wetted one to clean the wall off. The panel above was still pulled aside, and there were no chairs in the bathroom; she couldn't get up there to move it back in place. Glance out in the hall – loud voices arguing, Idelba's among them, protesting, no one in sight – she dashed across the hall to a bedroom and took a chair and ran back into the bathroom and put the chair against the wall, stepped up onto it, stepped gently on the chair back, reached up and yanked the panel back into place, smashing her fingers between two panels. Yank them free, push the panel into position, down again, the chair slipping across the tile with her movement. Clatter, bang, catch herself, another glance out, more arguing, coming closer; she put the chair back, went back in the bathroom, went to the showers and got in, soaping her knees and feeling the sting in the cut. She soaped and soaped, heard voices outside the bathroom. She washed off the soap as quickly as possible, and was dried and wrapped in a big towel when women came into the room, including two in army uniforms, looking like soldiers from the war whom Budur had seen long ago, in the Turi railway station. She looked as startled as she could, held the towel to herself.

'Are you Budur Radwan?' one of the policewomen demanded.

'Yes! What do you want?'

'We want to talk to you! Where have you been?'

'What do you mean, where have I been? You can see very well where I've been! What is this all about, why do you want me? What could have brought you in here?'

'We want to talk to you.'