The council chamber was a plain room with high windows and rows of wooden chairs, and it smelled of old paper and floor polish. Rania Itani sat at the long table with her papers in a neat stack, and she looked out at the room, full of people who had come to be heard. There were shopkeepers in their best shirts, officers in uniform, clerks with folders, and neighbors who had left their stalls and shops for the afternoon. At the back, in a row by themselves, sat the vendors, sitting straight, their hands in their laps, waiting to speak last.
Mariam sat among the vendors, with Sami Barakat on one side and Rami on the other. She wore her best dress, the dark one she kept for occasions, and her headscarf was pinned neatly, and her hands were folded, and she was not nervous, which surprised her. She was here to tell the truth about her corner, and she knew the truth by heart.
The meeting began with the reading of the old rule, in a dry voice, by a clerk who read without looking up. The old rule said that a vendor must have a permit, and that the permit cost more than most vendors earned in a week, and that the forms must be filled in a certain way, and that a vendor without a permit could be moved on. The clerk read it all, and the room listened, and nobody interrupted, because the rule was the rule, even if everyone also knew it did not work.
Then Elias Khoury stood, and he spoke plainly, about his empty shelves, and his due rent, and the shop his father had built, and the fear that had made him file the complaint. He did not hide his fear, and when he finished, he said, "I was wrong to ask for the crates to be taken away. I was frightened, and I acted out of fright. The crates were never my enemy. My empty shelves were my enemy." The room was quiet, and Elias sat down, and Mariam looked at him, and he looked at her, and they nodded at each other, the way they had nodded at the chalk line.
Then Captain Fouad Salim stood, and he spoke carefully, about the complaint, and the video, and the fine he had set aside, and he said that duty had to include judgment, and that a city that could not tell the difference between a danger and a grandmother selling tomatoes was a city that had lost its way.
Then Nadia Hamdan stood, and she said in her kind voice that the forms were too hard, and the fee was too high, and that good people were kept off the paper by words they could not read and money they did not have.
Then the neighbors spoke, one after another, about the corner, and the crates, and the woman who had sold there for thirty years. A woman said that Mariam had fed her children when they were small. A man said that Mariam had given him greens when his money ran short.
At last, the vendors spoke. Sami Barakat stood first, and he spoke about bread, and about the early mornings, and about carrying crates for a friend, and about the dignity of work done honestly. Another vendor spoke about flowers, and another about lemons, and each one spoke briefly, and each one spoke truly, and the room heard them, and the room was changed by hearing them.
Mariam stood last of all. She was seventy four years old, and she was small, and her voice was not loud, but the room went very quiet when she stood, the way the street had gone quiet on the morning of the confrontation, and she spoke about her corner, and her crates, and her tin cup, and her grandchildren, and the rent, and the medicine, and the thirty years, and the chalk line, and the paper in her pocket, and she said, "I do not ask for much. I ask for a square of pavement, and a paper I can read, and a fee I can pay, and the right to sell what I grow and what I buy, to people who know my name."
She sat down to applause, and she smiled a small smile.
Rania Itani stood, and she thanked the vendors, and the shopkeepers, and the officers, and the clerk, and she proposed, in plain words, a new rule: low cost permits, forms in plain language, help with the reading, and a pitch for every vendor who had sold honestly on the same corner for years. She proposed that the fee be set at a sum a vendor could earn in a day, and that no vendor be moved on while a permit was being sought.
The room voted. The hands went up, one by one, and then in a wave, and the vote carried, and Rania Itani wrote the result down, and stamped it, and the sound of the stamp was firm and final, the same sound Mariam had heard in the permits office. Mariam thought that a stamp could sound like a door closing on a long worry, and like a door opening, too.
Outside, the sun was setting, and the vendors walked home together, and Rami walked beside his grandmother, and Mariam walked steady, her paper in her pocket, her name on the pitch, and the council's vote behind her, and she was glad.
Chapter Thirty
The Permit That Cost Less Than a Day of Tomatoes