Saroya, Diminished but Not Defeated

Saroya wrote on Thursday.

The letter came in the ordinary post, in an ordinary envelope, addressed in the handwriting Iyla had by now seen on three cards and two notes and the inside flyleaf of a borrowed book. The stamp had been put on slightly crooked, which Iyla noticed because she had not, until that moment, thought of Saroya as a person who put stamps on envelopes at all. It was the sort of small detail that, six weeks ago, she would have missed; she had been keeping a list since Tuesday of the small details she did not want to miss, and the crooked stamp went on it, between the chip in her cup and the sound the radiator made at half past four.

She opened the letter at the table. It was short.

Iyla, it began, without honorific, which Iyla recognised as a small concession and possibly a small needle. Three of our readers reported, on Monday, that the doors they have used to reach Lentar now deliver them to the inside back cover of a paperback. The note in that margin is, I am told, polite. Tomas has read it twice. He is not, I think, used to being asked.

I will not pretend I am pleased. The arrangement we had built over four years has, in the space of a Sunday morning, been converted into a knocker. I have spent the week explaining to people who do not like to be made to ask that they are going to be made to ask, and I have explained it, you should know, without making the obvious counter-argument, which is that the knocker could be removed by a person sufficiently determined to remove it. I have not made that argument because I do not, at present, wish to find out whether it is true. I would rather not know what you have written into the margin that I cannot see.

Iyla read that sentence twice. It was, she thought, the most honest sentence Saroya had ever written to her. She set it aside in her head, in the place where she kept sentences she would need to think about later, and read on.

I should also tell you that the powder did not, in the end, go to the child in Aleppo. The route we had been using closed on Monday morning, for the reason you now know. The child is, I am told, alive. Another route was found. I tell you this not to absolve you and not to accuse you. I tell you because you asked me, in September, what we did with what we took, and I owe you, in the rest of this correspondence, a habit of saying.

You have done a very small and very exact thing. I disagree with it. I am, in some private compartment I do not intend to show you, impressed by it. I would not have thought of routing the redirect through a paperback. I would have built a wall. The wall would have been beautiful and the wall would have failed, because walls, in our line of work, are read as invitations. You wrote a knocker. The knocker will hold for longer than a wall would have.

I am not finished with you. I want you to know that, because I would rather you know it than discover it. The Society will not, in my lifetime, stop being interested in Authors who write worlds that generate unowned things. The argument I made on Saturday is the argument I still believe; you have not changed my mind, you have changed my access, and those are different. I will write to you again. I will, when I do, write to you through the channel you have specified, in the margins of the book you have named, because you have set the terms and I am, for the moment, willing to be set terms by. Do not mistake the willingness for a change of view. It is a change of method.

One further thing. Tomas would like to meet you. I have told him no, for now. I tell you this so that when, in some year, he asks you himself, you will know that I held the line for as long as I could, and that the line was held because I think you and he in a room together would produce a conversation neither of us would be able to govern, and I am not yet ready to be ungoverned in that particular way. Consider it a courtesy. Consider it also a warning.

— S.

Iyla read the letter through once without stopping. Then she read it again, slowly, with a pencil, the way she read a book she meant to argue with. She underlined two sentences. She put a small question mark next to the paragraph about the powder. She put a longer mark, the mark she used for sentences that frightened her in a useful way, next to I am not finished with you.

She thought, for a while, about what to do with the letter.

She could burn it, which would be theatrical and would feel, for about an hour, like winning. She could keep it in the notebook, which would be sensible and would mean she would read it on bad days and let it do whatever bad-day work it would do. She could, she thought with a brief private smile, write back to it in the margins of Jane Eyre, which would be funny and would also be the answer to the question of what she had built the channel for. She put the letter into the inside back cover of the paperback, between the lists of her teenage self and the paragraph she had written on Sunday, and closed the book, and put it back on the shelf.

She was not, she realised, relieved. She had thought she might be. She had thought there might be, in the receipt of a letter that effectively said you have won this round, some small flooding sense of arrival. There wasn't. What there was instead was a quieter thing, harder to name: the recognition that she had acquired, in Saroya, a correspondent. Not a friend. Not an ally. A person who would write to her, at intervals, in margins, for as long as both of them could hold a pencil — who would disagree with her in legible handwriting and would, occasionally, tell her the truth about a child in Aleppo, and who would, somewhere in some year Iyla could not yet see, send Tomas. The conflict had not ended. It had been converted into a form she could live inside. That was, she thought, what the small solutions did. They did not end things. They made the things into shapes you could carry.

She wrote in the notebook: Saroya wrote. She is not finished. Neither am I. She looked at it. She added, beneath it, in a smaller hand: good.

Then she put the kettle on, because it had gone cold while she was reading, and because there was, this evening, one more small ordinary thing she could usefully do.