Saroya's Justification
Saroya came to the café on the Friday, because Friday was the day they had, by a small accreted habit neither of them had thought to renegotiate, made theirs; and because Saroya was, Iyla had to give her this, a woman who kept appointments she had not, strictly, made. She came in out of a thin rain, shook her coat once at the door in the way of a person who has decided the coat will dry better on the chair than on her, and sat down opposite Iyla with the small unforced ease of a colleague joining a colleague on a matter both have agreed is overdue.
Iyla had decided, on the walk over, several things. She had decided that she would not, today, raise her voice, because raising her voice would have allowed Saroya the pleasure of being the calm one, and the pleasure of being the calm one was, Iyla suspected, half of how Saroya did her work. She had decided that she would not, today, cry, because crying was a currency she had a finite supply of and she was not going to spend it on a woman who had been to the dyers' quarter on a Tuesday. She had decided, finally, that she would let Saroya speak first, because Saroya had come prepared with sentences, and the sentences were going to be, she was certain, the most useful thing she would hear all week — useful in the way a map of a minefield is useful, which is not the way the map's maker intends.
"You've been to Lentar," Saroya said. She did not ask. She set it down between them, on the small table, alongside her cup, like a piece of evidence she was content to enter into the record.
"I have," Iyla said.
"And you have seen."
"I have seen."
Saroya nodded. She did not, Iyla noticed, perform any of the small theatres a woman in her position might have performed; she did not look sorry, and she did not look not-sorry. She looked like a woman who had, on the way over, rehearsed the conversation in full, and had found, in rehearsal, that the conversation went well for her, and was now interested to see whether it would go as well in the room.
"I want to tell you," Saroya said, "what we are doing. Not what you have inferred. What we are doing. And I would like, if you will allow it, to tell you in the order I would have told you, eventually, anyway; because the order matters, and because the inference you have arrived at, while not wrong in its particulars, is in its shape unjust to us, and I think you are a person who would prefer, before deciding, to have heard the shape."
"Go on," said Iyla, who had decided, also, that she would not, today, refuse the courtesy of listening, because refusing it would have allowed Saroya to say, afterwards, that she had not been heard.
"There are forty of us," Saroya said. "There are, in the whole world we have so far been able to find, perhaps a hundred and twenty more like us, of whom we know roughly where eighty are. Of those — of the whole two hundred — there are, at this moment, four Authors. Four. You are the fifth. The others are an old man in Lisbon who has not written anything new in nine years; a woman in Kyoto whose worlds, for reasons we do not yet understand, will not yield objects across the threshold; a man in Buenos Aires who has, very deliberately, made his world uninhabitable to anyone but himself; and a child in Hyderabad whom we are not, on principle, asking anything of yet. That is the supply. The supply is four, and it is, in three of the four cases, closed."
"And I am the fifth."
"You are the fifth. And your world, Iyla, is — I am going to say this plainly, because I would rather offend you with plainness than flatter you with euphemism — your world is the richest we have ever encountered. It generates. It fills itself in. It produces, for reasons we frankly do not know and you do not yet either, names and faces and small histories that you did not write and that travel, when carried, with their weight intact. The coin with Aren the Second on it. The baker. The locksmith, now. The aunt called Saba. These are not, on our measurements, ordinary outputs. They are something we have, in two hundred years of looking, never seen at this density."
She paused. She let the praise sit, which was, Iyla noted, the cleanest move of the conversation so far; a person who lets praise sit is a person who has been taught that the praise is more effective when one does not press it.
"Now," Saroya said. "What do we do with that. There are, in the world we both live in — the kitchen world, the café world, this world — a great many problems for which the binding constraint is not effort, or money, or even cleverness. The binding constraint is unowned material. A medicine that works requires, sometimes, a compound that does not exist on this side of any door. A famine in a place that cannot grow its own bread is, at root, a problem of bread that has somewhere to come from. A child who needs a name, in a legal system that will not give her one, needs a name from a place where names are not yet spoken for. Most of what we have done, in two hundred years, has been small. A grain that travelled. A song that travelled. A pigment, once, that broke a cartel. We are not, Iyla, robbers. We are — and I am aware of how this sounds — we are a quiet, badly funded, badly understood public works department, and our supply has just, with you, increased by an order of magnitude."
"And so you went in without asking."
"And so we went in without asking. Yes. I am not going to pretend that part." Saroya turned her cup, a quarter turn, on its saucer. "I will tell you why, and you will not like the why, but the why is the why. We did not ask because asking would have made it your decision, and your decision, on the evidence of every Author we have ever met, would have been no. Not because you are selfish. Because you are responsible, and a responsible person, asked whether strangers may enter the city she has made and remove from it the things that travel cleanly, says no. The four Authors before you all said no. Three of them said no in ways that have cost the rest of us, frankly, lives. We did not ask you because we have learned, in the worst possible way, that asking the Author is a method that fails reliably, and that the failure of the method is paid for by people who were never in the room."
She looked up. Her eyes were, Iyla noted with a small unwelcome respect, perfectly steady.
"The boy on the step," Saroya said, "did not, before yesterday, have a name. I know. I read Penn's notes. I am sorry about the boy. I am sorry about Saba. I am sorry about the song. I am going to say something now that I would like you to hear before you answer, because it is the hinge of the whole conversation, and if you answer before you have heard it you will be answering a different question. The things we took from Lentar, Iyla — the named-ness, the small particulars, the ore, as I imagine you have been calling it to yourself — those things, in the kitchen world, became: a six-month supply of a tincture that is, this winter, keeping forty-one children in a clinic in Aleppo from dying of a fever for which the kitchen world has no other answer; a fund, raised on the sale of a single Aren the Second coin to a private collector in Geneva, that has paid the rent of a women's shelter in Marseille through the end of next year; and a name — yes, a name, the aunt's name, Saba, transferred under protocols I will explain to you if you ask — given to a girl in a refugee camp in eastern Turkey who would otherwise have grown up undocumented. That is what the theft bought. I am not telling you this to make you feel that the theft was therefore right. I am telling you this because if you are going to decide it was wrong, you should decide it was wrong knowing the children in Aleppo, and the women in Marseille, and the girl, whose name is now Saba, and who is four."
Iyla did not, for a moment, answer. She had prepared, on the walk over, for many shapes of argument, and she had not prepared for this one, or rather she had prepared for it in outline and not in specifics, and the specifics were what the argument was made of. The specifics were the work. Forty-one children. A shelter. A girl of four. These were not, she understood, invented. Saroya was not a woman who invented specifics under pressure; Saroya was a woman who arrived with the specifics already in her coat pocket, because she had known, the moment she sat down, that the specifics were the only thing that was going to do the work the rest of her sentences could not.
She drank, slowly, from her tea, which was cold. She put the cup down. She allowed herself, for a small honest second, the recognition that what she was about to say was going to be harder than what she had walked in planning to say, because what she was about to say was going to have to be true in the room with a girl of four in it, and not just in the room with herself.
"Saroya," she said. "I am going to do you the courtesy of taking the argument seriously, because the argument is a serious argument, and because if I dismiss it I will spend the rest of my life wondering whether I dismissed it because it was wrong or because I was tired. So. Forty-one children in Aleppo. A shelter in Marseille. A girl who is now called Saba and is four. I have heard you. I am holding them in the room."
"Thank you," said Saroya, who did not, Iyla noticed, smile.
"Now. Here is what I want to say back. The first thing I want to say back is small, and you will think it is a quibble, and it is not a quibble; it is the whole thing. The girl in Turkey is called Saba because an aunt in Lentar was called Saba and is now not. You have described this as a transfer. A transfer is a word for what happens when a thing moves from one place to another and is, after the move, in the new place. The aunt is not in the new place. The aunt is nowhere. The girl in Turkey has a name; the boy on the step in Lentar does not have an aunt; and the boy, until yesterday, did not have a name either, because the same operation that gave the girl her name took, from the boy, the particular small fact of the woman who would otherwise have, eventually, named him. You have not moved a name. You have made a name in one place by unmaking a person in another. I understand that on your ledger this comes out positive, because a four-year-old with a name is, by any reasonable count, worth more than an aunt nobody on this side of the door has ever met. I want you to notice that the reasonableness of the count is doing all the work, and that the reasonableness of the count is available to you only because the aunt is on the other side of the door, and the aunt is on the other side of the door because I put her there. You are not, Saroya, doing arithmetic across a neutral boundary. You are doing arithmetic across a boundary I made, and which you have decided, on my behalf, is the kind of boundary across which arithmetic of this kind is allowed. I did not give you that decision. I would not have given you that decision. You knew I would not have given you that decision. That is, you said so yourself, why you did not ask."
She paused. She had not, she noticed, raised her voice. Her hands were on the table. Her face had not gone. These were small mercies and she catalogued them, briefly, the way she had catalogued the stones of the Small Bridge.
"The second thing," she said, "is larger. You have told me that asking the Author is a method that fails reliably. I believe you. I believe that the four Authors before me said no, and I believe that the cost of their no was paid by people who were not in the room. I want to say two things about that. The first is that the fact that a method fails reliably is not, on its own, an argument for the next method; it is, sometimes, an argument that the thing the method was trying to do should not, in fact, be done. You have skipped that step. You have gone from 'asking fails' to 'therefore we do not ask,' and you have not paused, in between, on the possibility that what asking was failing to deliver was a permission you were not, in fact, entitled to. The second is more practical. You have told me that not asking is what you have learned to do because asking fails. I have not yet said no. I have not been asked. You and I have been in a room together — this room, and the Reading Room, and Mr. Behr's shop in a small way through me — for some weeks now, and in all of that time you have had ample opportunity to ask, and you have used the opportunity, instead, to teach me a vocabulary in which the asking would, by the time it arrived, feel like a formality. You did not skip the ask because the ask fails. You skipped the ask because you were not sure, this time, that it would, and you preferred a fait accompli to a refusal you might have had to respect."
Saroya, to her credit — and Iyla was, at this point, in the business of giving Saroya credit where credit was due, because credit given honestly was the only thing that was going to make the rest of the conversation land — did not look away.
"Go on," she said.
"The third thing," said Iyla, "is the one I am least sure of, and so I am going to say it slowly. You have made an argument from scarcity. There are four Authors, three of them closed, and now me; the supply is small, the need is large, and the arithmetic of small supply against large need is the arithmetic by which a great many people, in a great many rooms in this world, have justified a great many things. I notice that the arithmetic is always done by the people who are not, themselves, the supply. The children in Aleppo did not vote to mine the dyers' quarter. The women in Marseille did not vote to take the song from Saba. The girl who is now four and called Saba did not, at any point, ask to be named after a woman who would, in the naming, cease. You have placed yourself, Saroya, in the position of the person who decides, on behalf of the people who would benefit, what the people on the other side of my door will be asked to give. That is a position. It is not a neutral position. It is, in fact, the position from which most of the harm I have read about in books was, at the time, done; and the people doing it then also had columns, and ledgers, and on the ledgers the arithmetic also came out positive. I am not comparing you to them. I am saying that the structure of the argument is the structure of the argument, and that I have read enough of the books on Mr. Behr's shelves to recognise the structure when it sits down across from me at a café table on a Friday and orders tea."
"That is not fair," Saroya said, quietly.
"It is not meant to be fair," said Iyla. "It is meant to be accurate. I will, in a minute, say the thing I am going to say that is fair, but I want, first, to be accurate; because if I let the fair thing come before the accurate thing you will, very reasonably, remember the fair thing and forget the accurate one."
She drew a breath. The café around them was, she registered distantly, doing the small Friday-evening thing it did, of filling slowly with people who had not had as hard a week as she had and who deserved, by no fault of their own, to be allowed not to notice the conversation at the table by the window.
"The fair thing," she said, "is this. You are not, I think, a cruel woman. I do not think Penn is cruel either. I think you have, all of you, done a thing that several generations of careful people doing similar things have done, which is to build, slowly, a small institution that solves a small problem well, and to discover, over time, that the institution is the only one of its kind, and that being the only one of its kind has, by a process so gradual no one in the institution can put a finger on the day, turned solving the problem into a thing the institution does whether or not the people the problem belongs to have asked it to. You have, I suspect, saved lives. I am willing to believe forty-one, in Aleppo, this winter, and I am willing — this is harder, but I am willing — to be glad about the forty-one even while I am furious about the dyers' quarter. I can hold both. I am holding both. I want you to notice that I am holding both, because the next thing I am going to say is not going to come from a place that has not held the forty-one."
Saroya waited. She had, Iyla saw, gone very still, in the way of a person who has realised, somewhere in the last two minutes, that the conversation is not going to end where she had planned, on the walk over, for it to end.
"The next thing," said Iyla, "is that I am not going to let you go on. I am not going to let you go on even if it costs the forty-second child in Aleppo, next winter, the tincture that the forty-one had this winter. I want you to hear that I have said that, and I want you to hear that I am not saying it lightly, and I want you to hear that I am saying it anyway. Because the thing I have learned, this week, from a boy on a step and a baker who could not remember a dog, is that the cost of your method is not paid in the currency you are accounting in. You are accounting in lives saved, which is a real currency, and I respect that it is a real currency. The cost is paid in a currency you have decided does not count, which is the named-ness of people on the other side of a door I made, and the trust of a city in its Author, and the trust of an Author in the only people in her own world who knew what she was. Those are also real currencies. You have left them off the ledger because they are denominated in a unit you do not, institutionally, know how to convert. That is a problem with the ledger. It is not a problem with the currencies. And I am not going to let you keep running the ledger with three of the columns missing, on the grounds that the three you have are, by themselves, in the black."
She stopped. She had said, she realised, more than she had planned to say, and she had said it without her face going, which was a small private victory she would, later, when she was alone, allow herself to feel. For now she put her hands back around her cup, because the cup was warm where her hands had been on it, and the warmth, transferred back, was a fact she wanted to notice.
Saroya, across the table, took a small breath. She did not, Iyla noticed, immediately answer; she did the thing a serious person does when a serious thing has been said, which is to let the air around the said thing settle before disturbing it again. When she spoke, it was not, Iyla thought, with the sentences she had walked in with.
"I am going to need," Saroya said, "to think about some of what you have just said. I am not going to pretend that I am persuaded. I am going to admit that some of it has landed in a place I had not, this morning, expected to be hit in. That is — that is more than I have said to an Author in a long time. I would like you to know that."
"I know that," said Iyla.
"What do you want."
"I want," said Iyla, "to be done with this conversation for tonight, because I have been holding a great many things in this room and I would like, soon, to put them down. I want you to know that I have heard the forty-one, and that I will be hearing them at three in the morning for a long time, and that I am going to do, anyway, what I am going to do. I want you to take, from this table, the understanding that the next time you come to me you will come to me having asked, in advance, for what you want; and that the answer may still be no; and that if the answer is no you will accept the no, the way grown people accept the no of other grown people, and you will find another method, because the method of not asking is closed to you now, on my world, because I have closed it."
"And if we do not accept that."
"Then," said Iyla, "we will have a different conversation, and I will not, in that conversation, be the person I have been in this one. I would prefer, Saroya, very much, that we not have that conversation. I am telling you that I would prefer it because I would like you to have, on the record, the fact that I tried, on a Friday in a café, to keep us out of it."
Saroya looked at her for a long moment. Then she did a small thing Iyla had not, in any of her preparations, expected: she nodded once, slowly, and picked up her coat from the back of the chair where it had been drying, and put it on, and said, "Thank you for the tea," in a voice that was, for the first time since Iyla had met her, the voice of a woman who had been, in some small but real way, answered. She left. The bell over the door did its bell thing. The rain, outside, did its rain thing.
Iyla sat for some minutes with both hands around the cooling cup, until the warmth her hands had left in it was gone and the cup was a cup again. Then she took out the notebook, and turned past the Lentar side and the model side to the page at the back, the one headed in capitals, and under the boy on the step she wrote, in her ordinary writing: the girl in the camp in eastern Turkey, four, now called Saba. She looked at the line for a while. She did not yet know which column the girl belonged in, or whether a child given a name and a woman who had lost one could ever be made to balance, or were only ever made to balance by people who got to keep one of the two on the far side of a door. She wrote the name down anyway, because writing it down was the only thing she had that was the opposite of leaving it off. Then she closed the notebook, exactly when she wanted to, and went out into the rain, which had not, in the hour she had been inside, troubled itself to stop.