"I didn't mean to," I said.
Sabra waited with her pen over the folder. She had the patience of something that gets paid the same whether you talk or not.
"Nobody means to," she said. "Which parts?"
"The last three chapters. The Throne Verse. The short ones he read at dawn." I thought about it. "The opening chapter. Seventeen times a day for twenty-two years."
"Seventeen."
"Five prayers. It adds up."
She wrote that down. Her handwriting was small and upright and went straight along the line without a ruler. I watched the words go onto the yellow paper and felt something I'd last felt in 1979, when a customer came back into the shop with his wedding jacket over his arm.
"Say one," she said.
I opened my mouth. The opening chapter was right there, behind my teeth, the way a cough is there. I could feel the shape of the first word and the breath it wanted.
I shut my mouth.
"Good," Sabra said. "Don't. Every time you say any of it, it goes on the file. I don't make the rules. I write them down." She pulled open the dented drawer of the filing cabinet with her foot, without looking, and took out two books of tickets held together with a rubber band.
The ration chits were green, like old raffle tickets. She tore off forty of them in one strip. The lodging chit was pink and on its own, and somebody had stamped it SUDS CITY, MARKET ST. in purple ink.
On the back of every green one, in small grey type, it said: "You have found a place to spend the night and dinner." On the back of the pink one it said only: "You have found a place to spend the night."
"One chit, one meal, canteen's past the lifts on the left," Sabra said. "Lodging is the address on the chit. Assessment is Thursday. You have forty days to be placed. I don't reissue."
"And on the forty-first day?"
She put both pairs of glasses back where they belonged, one on her nose and one on her head, and opened the next folder on her desk.
"Then you won't need chits," she said.
The canteen smelled like a bus station after midnight. There was a steam tray behind a glass hood and a jinn behind the steam tray with a ladle, and his hand on the ladle had a knuckle too many on every finger, so that it bent in a place a hand doesn't bend.
I gave him a green chit. He gave me a paper plate.
On it was half a chicken wing, grey at the bone, and a spoon of rice that had been in a foam box in an office in Clifton since lunch, and two cold fries. All of it had been somebody's. Somebody had sat down to it and not said the name, and the Office had come round afterwards the way gulls come round a car park.
"Next," the ladle said.
I ate it standing up. It went down and didn't arrive anywhere.
The lodging was half a mile from the falls. Suds City was open twenty-four hours, with a row of dryers going round in the window and a man on a folding chair by the change machine, watching boxing on his phone with the sound up. Nobody had ever said anything at that door. You could tell. The air in there was soft for us, like a coat somebody else had warmed.
The toilet block was at the back, past the vending machine. Two stalls, a sink with a crack across it, and four bunks bolted to the walls above the cisterns, two to a stall, one over the other.
Tusk had the bottom bunk in the first stall. He sat up when he saw me.
"Mansour! Neighbours!" He reached up and patted the bunk over his head as if it were a horse. "That one's yours. It's good, right? Twelve years, nobody's said a word in here. Not one. They checked."
The other two were already in the second stall. One lay facing the wall with his knees up. The other sat on the edge of the sink with his hands in his lap and looked at the mirror, where there was nothing to look at. Neither of them said hello. Neither of them said anything for the rest of the night.
I climbed up and lay on my back with the cistern ticking under me.
I was hungry. I had been hungry for twenty-two years, so I know the difference. That old hunger had been a locked kitchen, with the smell coming under the door. Even then, he fed me. He forgot. A date eaten standing at the fridge with the phone at his ear. A sip of tea at four in the morning when he was too tired to say anything over it. Crumbs, but they came, and they came through him, and I never had to go looking.
This was a hunger with no kitchen in it.
The fat years started with the bell over the door.
Mansour Tailoring opened in April 1971, on Main Street in South Paterson, between a shoe repair and a travel agent who sold tickets to Amman. Ibrahim was twenty-six. He had a second-hand Singer, a cutting table he'd built out of a door, and a bell over the shop door that he'd bought for a dollar from a church sale, and every time it rang he looked up like a dog hearing its name.
They lived over the shop until 1980. Three rooms, the kitchen at the front over the street, a window that rattled when the 74 bus went by.
I remember a night in 1976, in winter. He came up the stairs at half past eight with pins still stuck in the cuff of his sweater. The kitchen was full of steam. Nadia was at the stove with her sleeves pushed up, and the baby, Karim, was in the high chair beating a spoon on the tray.
Stuffed squash. Yoghurt sauce with garlic. Flat bread from the bakery on the corner, still in its paper.
He didn't sit. He never sat. He tore a piece of bread, reached past her into the pot, and pulled out a squash with his fingers, and ate it over the sink in three bites, burning his mouth.
"Ibrahim. There are plates."
"I'm hungry."
"Sit. Say it, at least."
He waved his hand with the bread in it. He was already reaching for a second one.
"You worked eleven hours," I told him. "You can eat in your own kitchen."
And he could. And so could I. The squash went down him and into me, rice and lamb and that sour yoghurt, the heat of it, the salt. I ate everything he ate in those years. The coffee in the mornings with cardamom. The sweet cheese pastry from the bakery at Eid, which he bought by the tray for the customers and ate half of himself in the back. Lamb at weddings. Beer, twice, at the Greek's. I was as fat as a tick.
Nadia brought the plates to the table and sat down with the baby on her knee. She said the name over her own food, low, in Arabic, the way her mother had. I felt the edge of it go by, like the draught from a door opened somewhere else in the house.
Her plate was hers. His plate was mine.
Later, when he was asleep in front of the television with his shoes still on, she went into the bedroom and shut the door, and through it I heard her start to pray. Alone, the way she prayed for thirty-four years.
I lay in his nose and listened to his stomach work.
I didn't decide to go back. I was lying on the bunk with the cistern ticking, and the dryers out front going round, and then I was on Market Street with the boxing still in my ears, and then I was over the railroad, and the street was going uphill the way it went uphill under his feet.
Twentieth Avenue was dark except for the house.
The front door was on the latch. It had been on the latch all day, for the visitors. I could see the day's traffic in the hall: shoes in a pile by the radiator and a stack of foil trays somebody's wife had sent. The last of the uncles had gone out talking and pulled it shut behind him without a word, and it hadn't caught.
I went in under it.
The front room smelled of coffee and other people's coats. His chair was by the window where it had always been, the green armchair with the lever on the side, the arms worn through to the weave where he'd rested his elbows for twenty years. There were paper cups on the windowsill beside it and on the carpet around its feet. People had stood around it all day. Nobody had sat down.
I had never sat in it either. I'd sat in him, and he'd sat in it.
I sat in it.
The springs knew the weight of a man and took mine instead. The cushion still had his shape, a dip on the left, from the bad hip. I put my arms where his elbows went. The chair creaked once, a long low creak, the one it always made when he leaned back to reach the lever.
On the sofa across the room, under a blanket, Samira was lying with her eyes open. I hadn't seen her. Her phone was face down on her chest and the light from the street was on her face.
She was looking straight at the chair.
"Jiddo?"