Behind the White Walls

The key was smaller than the one she had surrendered. She disliked herself for noticing.

The woman who showed her the room waited by the threshold while she considered its narrow bed, its table, its single window looking into the courtyard. Someone had scrubbed the floor. Someone had placed a cup beside a jug. These kindnesses made her anger feel both necessary and difficult to defend.

“You may move the chair,” the woman said.

“May I?”

The answer came without injury. “It belongs to the room. So do you, now.”

She put her bundle on the bed. Across the courtyard, an elderly resident was arguing with a cabbage that would not divide beneath her knife. A second woman took the knife, cut the cabbage cleanly, and returned it without interrupting the argument.

The newcomer almost smiled.

Then she saw the names above the gate: men remembered in stone for making provision for women whose names no one had thought to carve.

“Does he come here?” she asked, pointing toward the newest inscription.

“The benefactor? Sometimes.”

“And does he know anyone?”

Her guide considered her for a moment.

“He knows the steward.”

She untied her bundle and laid her good shawl across the chair. She had lost a house, a husband, and the right to assume that tomorrow would resemble yesterday. Her voice, apparently, had survived the journey.