Chapter 3: The Number in the Notebook

The metal notebook lies open on the desk with the lamp angling across it, and the number at the bottom of the page is fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr. Two days have passed since Fantaw wrote it there, and in those two days he has not changed a single digit of it.

He reads it again. Fifty thousand three hundred fifty. The difference between what Hiwot's note said the quarter spent and what Fantaw's own tally said it should have cost. He wrote it in pencil, which was a mistake, because pencil invites revision, and he has revised nothing. The number sits where it sat on Monday night, and he has started to think of it the way a man thinks of a tooth he keeps touching with his tongue.

Across the room the shelf holds the binder, four hundred-odd pages, five chapters, and beside it now, because he put it there without quite meaning to, the budget request for the coming quarter. The two documents lean against each other like relatives who do not speak. The binder says measure what matters. The budget request says twelve thousand birr for the same line, no questions, same as last quarter and the quarter before.

Two days of not telling anyone at work that he is watching the line. He has said nothing to Getachew, nothing to Almaz, nothing to Hiwot. At his desk in the office he has signed the requisitions that came to him, four of them, the way he has signed a thousand others, and each signature felt like a small lie he was telling with his hand.

The monthly department review is tomorrow. He wrote it in the notebook three weeks ago, before any of this started, and circled it, because the review is where numbers are supposed to get their day in the room.

He closes the notebook. Sleep does not come, and when the lamp finally goes off, the number stays behind his eyes, on the back of the page, patient.

The review starts at nine in the big meeting room with the long table and the whiteboard that never gets erased.

Fantaw arrives early, which is not his habit, and takes the chair by the window where he can see the whole table. The room fills the way it always fills. Biruk from transport, who runs the fuel log and has the tired eyes of a man with a very old van. Selam from programs, who brought a stack of attendance sheets because she has learned to bring everything. Dawit, who sits at the end and keeps his phone face down. Hiwot at the corner with the minute book open, pen ready. Getachew at the head, leaning back, coffee in hand, which is how he opens every meeting, as though the chair is furniture and he is a man visiting it.

"Minutes from last month," Getachew says. "Any corrections."

There are none. There are never any. Hiwot reads them back in her flat voice, and the room agrees, and then the agenda begins.

Vehicle fuel comes first. Biruk has the numbers, and the numbers are worse than last month, and the discussion goes where it always goes, which is that the van is old and the road to the woreda is bad and the price at the pump has moved twice since the last budget revision. Getachew asks three short questions. Biruk answers them with three short answers. Nothing gets decided, and that is also a decision, and Fantaw writes nothing in his notebook because there is nothing new to write.

Per diem comes second. Selam has brought the attendance sheets and the issue is the field staff who stayed overnight in the town and claimed three days, and whether three days was right, and Biruk says the road. Getachew listens with his chin on his hand and then says the road is the road, and asks how many of the claims have receipts, and Selam says most, and Getachew says bring the ones without to the next review and let's see them. Fantaw waits.

The agenda moves on. There is printing, there is a request from the regional office for a quarterly narrative that Hiwot will have to prepare, and there is a new directive about vehicle insurance that no one understands. The clock above the door reads ten past eleven, and then half past, and Fantaw has been sitting in this chair for two and a half hours with a number in his notebook, and the number has not been mentioned.

He knew it would not be. He has attended this review every month for six years and the Miscellaneous line has never once been read out, not because anyone is hiding it, but because the line was never built to be read. It was built to move. It sits at the bottom of the page in its own row with the number and the signature and no explanation, and the review passes over it the way a river passes over a stone that has been there long enough to become part of the bed.

"Any other business," Getachew says.

Fantaw looks at the clock. Three minutes past twelve. Four people are already closing their folders.

"I have one," he says. "It's small."

Getachew turns. "Go."

"The Miscellaneous line. I want to know what the quarter came to."

The room does not fall silent, exactly. What happens is smaller. Selam's pen stops, then starts again. Hiwot's head comes up from the minute book and stays up for a moment before she writes something down. Getachew's coffee cup is halfway to his mouth and it goes the rest of the way.

"That's a finance question," Getachew says. "Hiwot, do you have it."

"I have the requisitions," Hiwot says. "I don't have the retirement summary in this room. I can bring it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow then," Getachew says, and starts to close the agenda, and Fantaw does not let it close.

"I have a number," he says. "I'd like to know if it's the same one."

He had not planned to say that. It comes out of his mouth the way things come out of a man's mouth when he has been sitting in a chair for two and a half hours holding a question, and the moment it is out, he notices he is not going to be able to put it back.

Getachew's face does not change. That is one of his gifts. He has a wide slow face and it can hold anything, and right now it is holding the number Fantaw just said, without moving a muscle.

"After the meeting," he says. "My office."

The meeting ends. The room empties. Selam stops beside Fantaw on her way to the door and says nothing but looks at him for a beat too long, and then she goes. Hiwot gathers the minute book and does not look at him at all, which is its own message, and Fantaw is left with the long table and the unerased whiteboard, and he stands up and follows Getachew out.

The supervisor's office is two doors down and much smaller than Almaz's. There is a window with a dead fly on the sill, and a shelf of ring binders, and a photograph of Getachew's small daughter on the desk, and a chair for visitors that Fantaw has sat in many times, mostly for things that did not matter.

Getachew sits down behind the desk and motions at the chair, and then he does not say anything for a moment.

"That was a room full of people," he says finally.

"I know."

"You asked a finance question in a room full of people." Getachew turns his chair a little, so he is side-on to the desk. "You know what that does."

"I do." Fantaw sits. "That's why I did it."

"Explain."

So he explains. He tells Getachew about the notebook, and the yellow folder, and the numbers he pulled by hand, and the fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr, and while he talks Getachew listens with his chin on his hand, and his face stays the same wide slow face the whole time.

When Fantaw finishes, Getachew opens a drawer, takes out a folder of his own, and puts it on the desk without opening it.

"The quarter came to sixty-one thousand two hundred," he says.

Fantaw takes his notebook out of his jacket. He opens it to the page and writes the number under the one already there, so the two sit side by side, fifty thousand three hundred fifty and sixty-one thousand two hundred. Ten thousand eight hundred fifty birr between them.

He does not say which one is right because he does not know. That is the whole thing. He has a number from a folder of receipts and a number from a supervisor, and both of them are lower than the amount that left the account for the quarter, and only one of them can be what the line actually spent.

"Sixty-one two is what I have," Getachew says. "The requisitions were the ones you signed. The folder has the receipts. Anything above that, you'd have to ask Almaz, because anything above that did not come through me."

"I'll ask her for the supporting summary."

"It's not hers to summarize. The line's not mine either. It's nobody's. That's how it's been." Getachew opens the folder, which does not contain a summary, only a set of requisition copies. "You said you wanted the summary."

"I did."

"Next week."

Fantaw looks at the folder. The copies are stapled in threes. He can see one signature at the bottom of the top page that does not look like the requester's, but he does not reach for it, because he has learned one thing already this morning, which is that the room in his office has eyes in it and a folder on a desk is worth more than a folder in a hand.

"Thank you," he says.

Getachew closes the drawer. "You want some advice."

"I'll take it."

"Don't do this in the review again. Do it in a room with one door." He picks up his coffee, which is cold by now, and drinks it anyway. "And Fantaw. You've been here six years. You know what the line is for. Everybody at that table knows what the line is for. What none of them know is what it costs. That's a gap. It's a real gap and you're right to sit in it. But sitting in a gap is a lonely thing, and you should think about who you want standing next to you before you make it any deeper."

"Almaz knows."

"Almaz knows I'm your friend and you're in my office right now, and Almaz knows you pulled three years of requisitions by hand, and Almaz is the reason you're still holding that notebook instead of a warning letter. She has a longer view of you than I do. Which is why you should go and see her before you do anything else."

"I have the meeting this afternoon."

"Not that meeting." Getachew stands up, which is how his meetings end. "The other one."

The rest of the afternoon belongs to the office. There is a reporting deadline that has moved for the fourth time, and a print job that has to be walked down to the shop because the network is down, and a call from the regional liaison about the quarterly narrative that lasts twenty minutes and produces nothing, and Fantaw does all of it with the notebook against his ribs and the two numbers in it like two stones in the same pocket.

At six he takes the folder Getachew gave him, which Getachew let him keep, and he walks to the copy shop on Churchill Avenue, because the copy he wants is the kind he does not want to do in the office. The shop is one room with two machines and a boy behind the counter who does not look up. Fantaw pays for the copies by the sheet and asks for the receipts, which he has never done before, and the boy writes them out on a small pad and hands them over.

Then he goes down to the coffee house near the roundabout.

Getachew is already there, because he always is, and he has ordered the macchiatos, and there is a third chair pulled up to the small corner table with a jacket over it, which means Selam is coming, which Fantaw did not plan.

She arrives five minutes later and sits down and takes the jacket off the chair and puts it on her lap.

"You asked in the room," she says.

"I did."

"Why."

"Because if I asked you first, you'd have told me what I wanted to hear."

Selam thinks about this. She is in her thirties and runs three field programs and has a way of holding her face very still while she decides whether to be honest, and right now she is deciding.

"No," she says. "I'd have told you to ask Getachew. Which is what I'm telling you now. So it worked either way."

"Selam."

"I'm not being difficult." She wraps both hands around her cup. "I'm telling you that the reason you got nothing in that room is that nobody in that room has ever had to account for that line, and the first person who asks is going to be treated like the first person who asks. That's not fair, and it's also true, and I've watched it happen to other people. Which means if you're going to do this you should know it's a long game and it's going to cost you. I'm saying that as a friend, and as someone who would like to still be able to send prints to that shop without the counter boy looking at me sideways."

Getachew laughs at that, and Fantaw laughs too, a little, but his mind is on the counter boy, and on the small pad of receipts folded in his jacket pocket, and on the fact that a receipt he never asked for before is now the only paper in this entire thing that he can prove.

"I know," Fantaw says.

"You keep saying that."

"Because I keep meaning it."

Selam drinks her coffee and says, in a different voice, "The review is tomorrow week. Almaz will be at that one. If you're going to do this in front of her you should think about how she'll hear it."

"I'll handle Almaz."

"You'll handle Almaz on your own time." She stands up. "I have a child to collect. Getachew, thank you for the coffee. Fantaw, do not make me regret coming here."

She leaves. Getachew watches her go and then he says, "She's right. You should ask her to be one of the witnesses when you bring the number."

"What number?"

"You know what number."

Fantaw does. He sits with it for a moment and lets it sit, and then he drinks his macchiato, which has gone cold, and goes home.

At home he lays the folder out on the desk and goes through every page again.

This is the third time. The first time was in the office with the crate from Hiwot. The second time was after dinner. This time he is looking for something different, because Getachew gave him sixty-one thousand two hundred and the folder says sixty-one thousand two hundred, and the account says something larger, and the difference has to be somewhere in the paper.

It is.

On the fourth page of the fourth quarter, there is a requisition for a workshop in Adama, one hundred and fifty people, three days, and stapled behind it are two receipts for the same date. The first is a copy of the original from the shop in Adama. The second is a photocopy of the same receipt, taken from a different angle, printed on the office machine in Addis. The amounts are the same. The signature at the bottom is the same. The only difference is that the second copy has a stamp on it in the corner that Fantaw does not recognize, and the first does not.

He sits with that for a long time.

Then he goes through the folder a second time looking for the same stamp, and finds it on three other receipts, all in the same quarter, all for field activities, all small amounts. Nine hundred birr. Twelve hundred. Seven hundred fifty. Sixty-one thousand two hundred minus the sum of those four amounts comes to a number that is still higher than his own tally, so the stamp does not explain everything, but it explains a piece, and a piece is something.

He writes the four amounts in the notebook under the two current numbers, and then he puts the notebook down and looks at the wall.

The word fraud sits behind his teeth. He does not say it. He does not have the evidence, and he has been in this office long enough to know that a word like that, said too early, will belong to the person who said it and not the person who earned it. What he has is a folder, a stamp he cannot find in the office, four receipts, and a difference. That is not fraud. That is a question that has not been asked, and sometimes a question that has not been asked is just a question that has not been asked.

He closes the folder and sits in the chair with the lamp still on, and the rain has started on the tin roof, which means the power will go soon.

The front door opens and closes. Footsteps come down the hall, and Almaz comes in with the rain on her shoulders and a plastic bag in her hand, and she sets the bag on the counter and goes through to the bedroom to change.

She comes back in a dry sweater with her hair pulled back, and she goes to the small table under the window where she keeps the household ledger, and she sits down and opens it and starts writing.

Fantaw watches her write. He knows what she is writing because he has watched her write it every month for four years. Fuel card, rent, school fees for two, the smaller one with the cough medicine that costs too much, the thing her mother sent from the town, the money to her brother that is never quite expected and never quite a surprise. She writes in a small square hand and she does not skip a line.

"Did you eat," she says, without looking up.

"Yes."

"The problem. Is it finished."

He thinks about the notebook open on the desk behind him. He thinks about the four receipts. He thinks about the fact that he has not told her anything about any of this, because he has not told her and she has not asked, and the way that has worked for two days is by neither of them naming it.

"No," he says. "Not finished."

"Did you tell Getachew what you found."

"I asked him for the summary."

She keeps writing. Fuel card. She writes the amount, which is eight hundred twenty birr, next to the date, and then she underlines it, and then she moves to the next line.

"That's not the same thing," she says.

"I know."

"You know." She stops writing and looks at him. Her face is not angry. It is the face she uses for household arithmetic, which is worse. "You asked him for the summary and he said next week, and now you are sitting in my kitchen telling me it's not finished. That's not a problem, Fantaw. That's a delay. A problem is a thing that has a shape. A delay has no shape. It just sits there."

"It has a shape. I just told you I don't have the evidence."

"Then say you don't have the evidence. Don't say the problem isn't finished. That's a way of saying nothing while looking like you said something."

She turns back to the ledger and writes the next line. School fees, two children, and she writes the amounts separately even though the school sends one bill, which she has always done, because she says that way she knows which child costs what.

Fantaw stands in the doorway and watches her for a moment and then goes into the other room and sits down at his desk.

The metal notebook is there. The folder is closed. He opens the notebook and reads the four amounts for the fourth time, and under them he writes a single line, in the plainest hand he can manage:

What I know, and what I do not know, and what I have asked for.

Then he draws a line under that and starts.

What I know: the account shows a figure for the quarter. The requisitions in the folder total sixty-one thousand two hundred. Hiwot's note and my own tally came to ninety thousand six hundred fifty, which means there is a gap. On the fourth quarter there are four receipts with a stamp I cannot find.

What I do not know: where the difference goes. Who signs the receipts with the stamp. Whether the stamp is a real stamp from a real place and just not registered here, or something else. Whether the figure the account shows and the figure the folder shows are supposed to be the same figure or two different figures measured in two different ways.

What I have asked for: the supporting summary from Getachew. Due next week. A meeting with Almaz. Not yet scheduled.

He reads the three lines back and puts the pencil down.

It is not a case. It is a paragraph of plain statements, and it is the first thing he has written in two days that sounds like the book he spent nine months writing, and that, more than anything else, is what tells him he is going to have to do this properly whether or not it ends well.

The rain keeps going on the tin roof. The power does not cut, which is unusual. In the other room Almaz closes the ledger and gets up, and a moment later he hears the tap run and stop, and then the bedroom light goes out, and the flat is quiet except for the rain.

He picks up the pencil one more time and writes, at the bottom of the page, the thing he has been circling all week.

Measure: the number of retirements, quarter by quarter, against the number of requisitions. If the number of days between request and disbursement goes up while the number of retirements stays flat, the line is not producing flexibility. It is producing something else.

Then he closes the notebook and sits in the chair a little longer than he needs to, because the flat is quiet and the rain is steady and the question he has just written is small enough to fit in a pocket and heavy enough to keep him still.

Monday morning the first thing he does is go to Almaz's office.

The door is open. She is on the phone and she waves him in without looking up and points at the guest chair with two fingers, which is her way of saying sit and wait, and he sits and waits for four minutes while she finishes a call about a reimbursement from the regional office that has been sitting for six weeks.

She puts the phone down and looks at him and waits.

"I did what you said," he says. "I brought the measure before I started. I've pulled the retirements for three years. And I asked a question in the review, and I should have asked it in your office first."

"Which question."

"Miscellaneous."

Almaz folds her hands on the desk. "What did you get."

"Getachew gave me a figure. Sixty-one thousand two hundred. I have a folder with receipts that adds to about the same. And I have Hiwot's note from the quarter and my own tally, which both come to more than that. So there's a difference I can't yet explain."

"How much."

"Ten thousand eight fifty against Getachew's number. More against the account."

"And what did you do with that."

"I wrote it down. I asked for the summary. He said next week."

She leans back. Her office is at the end of the corridor and the window faces the back lot, and out there the guard is sweeping the gutter with a long broom, and the sound of it carries in through the glass.

"You asked in the review," she says, in a flat voice.

"Yes."

"In front of Selam and Biruk and Dawit."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because I wanted it on the record."

Almaz does not nod and does not smile. She looks at him for a long time in a way that has no temperature to it at all.

"You put it on the record because you wanted the record to protect you," she says. "That's what that was. And it will. Now there are four people who know you asked. Whatever comes out of this, you'll be a man who asked, and not a man who didn't. Good. That's not a criticism. It's the right move, and it's the move I would have made. But don't tell yourself it was about the office. It was about you."

"Fine."

"Not fine. Understood. There's a difference."

She opens the top drawer of her desk and takes out a page, one page, with a table on it, and slides it across the desk to him.

"Yesterday I pulled the retirements for the last four quarters," she says. "I did not pull three years. That would have taken me the day, and I don't have the day. But I pulled four, and I put the requisitions beside them, and I looked at the same thing you did. You want to see it."

He looks. The table has two columns and four rows and a bottom line, and the bottom line reads average days from request to disbursement, and the numbers in it go up and up and up, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-six. And beside them the retirement counts rise much more slowly, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen, fifteen.

"It's not a mystery," she says. "It's a design. The line is designed to be fast and vague, and the faster and vaguer it gets, the more it costs to retire. Every requisition that isn't retired on time generates another request above it. The system feeds itself. Nobody stole anything. Nobody had to. The line is just badly made, and nobody has ever paid the price for that except the comptroller, who pays it every quarter in a budget he can't explain."

"Then change it."

"Change it how."

Fantaw thinks for a moment. The answer he wrote in the notebook is on the page in front of him in the shape of the two columns.

"By measuring the retirements instead of the requisitions. Every month. In the review. In your name."

Almaz looks at him. Then she picks up her pencil and writes, in the margin of the page, three words: retirements per quarter.

"That's the number I want to see," she says. "Not requisitions. Not the spend. Retirements. And days. When the line is healthy those two numbers move together. When they pull apart, somebody has to explain, and the somebody will be you, because you asked the question and the question now has your name on it. Do you understand what I just offered you."

"I think so."

"Say it back."

"You've offered me the line," Fantaw says. "Not the money. The line. I get to be responsible for the numbers, and if the numbers are bad, I'm the one who takes it to the review."

"Yes." She sets the pencil down. "And if they're bad, I will not defend you. I'll sit in the chair and let you stand in the middle of the room, and I'll watch what you do, and that's the whole of my help. That's the deal. Take it or leave it."

The rain from last night has stopped. Out the window the guard has finished the gutter and is leaning on his broom, and the back lot smells of wet dust and diesel the way it always does on a Monday after rain.

"I'll take it," Fantaw says.

"Good. Then bring me the retirements every month, first of the month, printed, not handwritten, and sign the page." She picks up the phone. "Now go. I have the region on the line at ten."

He stands. At the door he stops and turns.

"The four receipts," he says. "The ones with the stamp. Do you want to know about those."

Almaz's hand rests on the phone.

"Not yet," she says. "Bring me the retirements first. Then bring me the stamp. One thing at a time, Fantaw. That's how you keep a thing alive long enough to see it."

He goes.

In the corridor the office is in full morning. Somebody is making tea in the kitchen. The printer is running. Dawit stops him outside the door with a question about the deadline that moved again, and Fantaw answers him in three sentences and gets a nod, and then walks the length of the corridor to his own desk and sits down.

The notebook is in his jacket. The page with the two columns is back in Almaz's office, on her desk, with three words in the margin. The rain is done. The budget request for the coming quarter is still on the shelf at home, leaning against the binder, and the line inside it is still twelve thousand birr for the same thing it bought last quarter, and now there is a number Fantaw has to bring to the first of the month and sign.

He takes out the notebook and opens it to the page with the three lines and looks at what he wrote, and under it he adds one more sentence, which is the only thing the morning has actually taught him:

The measure is not the number. The measure is who signs it.

He puts the notebook away and picks up the first requisition of the day, and signs it, and the ink goes down the way ink goes down on a Monday.

That evening, Almaz is already at the table under the window with the household ledger open when he gets home, and dinner is on the stove, and the small one is asleep on the couch with her mouth open, and the older one is at the other end of the room with a schoolbook and a pencil.

"Food's on," Almaz says, without looking up.

He fills a plate and sits down across from her at the table, and for a while there is only the sound of her pencil in the ledger and the tap dripping and the older one copying something out of the book.

"Did you finish," she says.

"One thing at a time."

"Which thing did you finish."

"Getachew's number. Sixty-one thousand two hundred. I put it beside mine and got a difference of ten thousand eight fifty."

She writes the fuel card amount, underlines it, and moves to the next line.

"And you didn't tell him which was right."

"I didn't know which was right. I still don't."

"Nobody ever knows." She writes. Rent, same as last month. "That's the whole of the problem, Fantaw. Everybody in that office thinks the number is something you find. It's not. It's something you make. You make it by signing the page and standing behind it, and then it becomes the number, and the old number goes away, and the people who liked the old number come and ask you why. That's what you've gotten yourself into. That's what you do now."

She turns the page.

"When the audit comes," she says, "they will ask you for the retirements and you will have them, and they will ask you for the receipts and you will have them, and they will ask you what you did with the difference and you will say you don't know yet, and they will ask you why you didn't know, and you'll say because it took three years to see. And that answer will hold or it won't, and either way you'll be the man who signed it."

The pencil moves down the page. She writes the small one's medicine next to the school fees, which is how she does it, so the household can see the month in one column.

"Eat," she says. "Food's getting cold."

He eats. The older one finishes her copy and comes to show it to her mother, and Almaz looks at it for a moment and says the letters are better than last week, and the girl goes back to the end of the room and starts the next line.

Later, after the children are in bed, Fantaw sits at his own desk with the lamp on and the notebook open, and he writes the last thing for the day.

Tuesday: the review. Wednesday: the folder, the four receipts. Thursday: Almaz. Friday: the page in her office with the two columns and the three words.

Monday: the first of next month, the number in the notebook, printed, signed, in her hand or no.

He closes the notebook and turns off the lamp, and in the dark the flat is quiet, and the number is still there in the drawer of the desk, and in five days he has to bring it to the first of the month whether it has anything good to say or not. That is the commitment. He can still walk it back. He has walked back commitments before, with a smooth sentence and a full calendar and a good reason, and he knows exactly how it is done.

The difference this time is that there is a page in Almaz's office with three words written in her hand, and the page has his name on it, and the name is signed.

He goes to bed.