Chapter 4: The First of the Month

The guard has the gate half open when Fantaw reaches the compound, and the notebook is in his jacket against his ribs, closed, the way it has been closed since Monday. Five days since Almaz wrote three words in the margin of a page and pushed it across her desk. Five days since he signed his name under those words. The figure at the bottom of the notebook page is still fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr and it is still in pencil.

The office is loud for eight in the morning. Somebody has the radio on in the kitchen and somebody else is arguing about a fuel advance near the photocopier. Fantaw goes to his desk and puts the notebook down and takes his jacket off and hangs it on the chair.

Dawit comes by with the review agenda. One page, typed, with the boxes for the quarter lined up in order. Fuel and per diem first, because they always come first. Transport second. Office supplies third. Then the regional workshop request. Then, near the bottom, where the small items go, Miscellaneous.

"You're on at nine," Dawit says.

"I know."

"Getachew wants to start on time. He has the bank at ten."

Fantaw reads the agenda and sets it down on the corner of the desk where he can see it while he works. The page has the same twelve thousand birr line on it that has been on it every quarter for three years. Twelve thousand. The same figure that sits in the budget request on the shelf at home, leaning against the binder.

The meeting room is at the end of the corridor, past the kitchen, and it holds eight chairs around a long table with a broken leg that has been repaired with a wedge of wood. By ten to nine the room is half full. Biruk is there with the fuel log, and Dawit is there with the agenda, and two people from the regional workshop office are there with a folder of hotel receipts. Hiwot has the minute book open in front of her and her pen already uncapped, which is how she always starts.

Getachew comes in at one minute to nine with his coffee in his hand. He sits at the head of the table, sets the coffee down, opens the agenda, and says, "Fuel."

The fuel item takes twenty minutes. Biruk reads the log line by line and the numbers hold and nobody has a question. Per diem takes ten. Office supplies takes five, and Dawit reports the toner and the paper and the two cartridges that came in over budget, and Getachew makes a note on the agenda and moves on.

The regional workshop request takes thirty-five minutes. The two people from the workshop office have brought hotel receipts and a bus contract and a list of participants, and Fantaw watches the discussion the way he has watched a hundred of these discussions, from the outside, with half his attention, because it is not his item and not his quarter.

Then Getachew's finger moves down the agenda.

"Miscellaneous," he says. "Twelve thousand for the quarter. Same as last. Any question."

The room is quiet. Biruk is looking at his fuel log. Dawit is looking at the agenda. The two people from the regional workshop office are gathering their receipts into a folder, getting ready to leave, because their item is done.

Fantaw reaches into his jacket, takes out the notebook, and sets it on the table in front of him. Closed. Where it can be seen.

"I have a question," he says.

Hiwot's pen stops.

Getachew looks at him. It is not a hostile look. It is the same look he gave Fantaw in the coffee house two weeks ago when Fantaw asked about the fourth quarter and Getachew told him to fix his roof instead. The look of a man who knows what is coming and has decided to sit through it anyway.

"Go ahead," Getachew says.

"I'd like the receipts against the prior quarter's Miscellany spend," Fantaw says. "Before we approve the next disbursement. So the line is reconciled on the record."

The room does not move. Nobody shifts in a chair. The two people from the regional workshop office have stopped gathering their receipts and are looking at Fantaw the way you look at a man who has just stood up in a mosque and asked about the collection box.

Hiwot's pen is still stopped. She is looking at Getachew and waiting for him to decide whether the pen moves again.

"The receipts are with finance," Getachew says.

"Which finance."

"Head office finance. They hold the disbursement records. This office holds the requisitions. That's the split. It's been the split since before any of us were in this room."

"Then can we have finance send the receipts to this office. So this office has them when the quarter closes."

Getachew picks up his coffee and takes a drink and sets it down in the same spot. "You can ask them," he says. "I can't ask them for you. Write to them and copy me."

"I'll write to them."

"Good." Getachew's finger moves back to the agenda. "Any other question on Miscellaneous."

Fantaw opens the notebook.

The pages are the same pages they have been for weeks, the numbers down the left side and the four receipts and the working notes in the margin and, at the bottom, the figure. He finds the page and squares it under his hand and reads it out.

"Fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr," he says. "Miscellany, prior quarter. That's what the requisitions show against the retirements. I'd like that reconciled before the next disbursement. That's all I'm asking. Not an accusation. A reconciliation."

The room goes so quiet that Fantaw can hear the radio in the kitchen, some singer he doesn't recognize, and the sound of a truck on the road outside.

Hiwot's pen is up. She is waiting.

Getachew looks at Fantaw across the table for three or four seconds. Then he looks at Hiwot and says, "Note it."

The pen goes down and starts moving.

"Thank you for the diligence," Getachew says. "We'll get the reconciliation from finance and bring it back to the room. Next item. Fuel for the Adama run. Biruk."

Biruk starts talking about the Adama road and the price of diesel and the fact that the van needs a part that has to come from the town. The room goes back to fuel and per diem. The two people from the regional workshop office finish gathering their receipts and stand and leave, and the door opens and closes, and Fantaw sits with the notebook open in front of him and listens to Biruk describe a road he has described fifty times.

He does not put the notebook away.

That is the whole of it. He said the number, the number went into the minutes, and the meeting moved on. Nobody shouted. Nobody called him a liar. Nobody stood up. Getachew thanked him for the diligence and went back to the agenda, and the diligence is now in Hiwot's hand on a page that will be typed up and filed and copied to the regional office by Friday.

The meeting ends at ten past ten. Chairs scrape. Dawit collects the agenda pages. Biruk rolls up the fuel log. Hiwot closes the minute book and tucks it under her arm and goes out without looking at anyone, which is how she always leaves.

Fantaw stands and picks up the notebook and holds it against his chest. Getachew is still in his chair, drinking the last of his coffee, not looking at Fantaw directly but not avoiding him either.

"Walk out with me," Getachew says.

They go down the corridor together and stop at the top of the stairs, where the window faces the street and the morning light comes in flat off the roofs.

"You didn't fight me," Fantaw says.

"No."

"Why not."

Getachew finishes his coffee and sets the cup on the windowsill. "Because fighting you would put it on the record twice," he says. "And once is enough."

"What does that mean."

"It means you asked for a reconciliation in front of four people and the minute-taker, and I said we'd get it and note it, and now the reconciliation is a thing that has to happen or not happen, and either way it's not going to be a story about two men arguing in a meeting room. That's what it means."

"And that's a problem for you."

"That's a problem for whoever the receipts belong to." Getachew looks out the window. "You asked me for the summary two weeks ago and I said next week. That was true when I said it. It's still true. The summary is coming. When it comes you'll see what it says and you'll know what to do with it. Until then, you've done what you've done."

He picks up his cup and goes back down the corridor toward his office.

Fantaw stands at the top of the stairs a moment. The street below is busy now, the way it always is after nine, with the small blue-and-white minibuses and the women carrying trays and the man at the corner selling phone cards out of a shoebox. A kettle is going in the kitchen. Somebody is laughing near the photocopier. It is an ordinary Tuesday and the office has already moved on.

He goes back to his desk and sits down.

The notebook is still in his hand. He opens it and looks at the page with the figure, and then he closes it again and puts it in the drawer of the desk, which is a thing he has not done before. He has kept it in his jacket since the day he bought it. Putting it in the drawer is the first time he has treated it as a work object rather than a private one.

It doesn't feel like a victory. It feels like a thing he paid for and cannot name yet.

He takes out a sheet of office paper and writes the letter to head office finance, asking for the receipts against the prior quarter's Miscellany spend, copy to Getachew. He keeps it to four sentences. He signs it and puts it in the outgoing tray and picks up the first requisition of the day.

By eleven he has signed two.

At half past one, after lunch, a man from finance comes down the corridor with a folder under his arm. Fantaw does not know his name. He is young, thin, in a shirt that is one size too big, and he stops at Fantaw's desk and sets the folder down.

"Finance asked me to bring this," he says. "Miscellany receipts. As requested."

"Thank you."

The man nods and goes away.

Fantaw opens the folder. It is thin. Inside there are four sheets of paper: a cover note, a summary sheet, and two receipts with the sub-office stamp, the one Fantaw has seen before, the one that is not registered in this office. The second quarter's receipts are not there. The third quarter's receipts are not there either, and there is no note explaining why.

He reads the summary sheet twice. The dates overlap. Two disbursements in the same week, four days apart, one for twelve thousand and one for thirteen thousand five hundred, against the same workshop. There is no fourth-quarter entry on the summary sheet at all, even though the fourth quarter closed six weeks ago.

The folder is incomplete. It has two of four quarters and one overlap and no explanation.

He looks at it for a minute. Then he takes out his phone and photographs the cover note, the summary sheet, both receipts, and the spine of the folder where a reference number is written in pencil. Nine photographs. He opens the folder again and photographs the inside cover, which has a date stamp, and then he lays the folder flat on the desk and photographs the whole thing from above.

Then he closes the folder and calls the young man back. The man comes down the corridor, takes the folder, nods, and goes away with it, and the folder is no longer in Fantaw's possession.

The photograph is the only copy he controls.

He puts the phone in his drawer next to the notebook and sits for a moment with his hands flat on the desk. In the room the fan turns slowly, the way it does in the afternoons, and the corridor outside has the sound of a hundred small pieces of work, and somewhere in there is the man from finance, carrying the folder back to wherever it came from, and Fantaw thinks about the fact that this is either compliance or an invitation to stop asking. He cannot tell which. There is no way to tell which from a folder.

At four he goes to Almaz's office.

The door is open. She is on the phone again and she waves him in with two fingers and he sits in the guest chair, and she finishes the call and sets the phone down and looks at him.

"Did you eat," she says.

"Yes."

She looks at him a moment longer. Then she picks up the pencil and goes back to the budget printout on the desk in front of her, which has the same pencil marks on it as it did five days ago, and starts writing a number next to a line. she does not ask about the meeting.

She knows. Of course she knows. The meeting ended at ten past ten and it is four in the afternoon and there is a minute book in the office and a corridor between her door and the meeting room, and she has been running this office for eleven years. She knows what was said and what was noted and what was not. She is not going to ask about it because asking would be one thing and knowing is another, and she has decided, the way she decides everything, not to spend today's attention on it.

Fantaw sits there for a moment. Then he stands up.

"I'll bring the retirements on the first," he says.

"The first is Tuesday," she says, without looking up.

"I know."

"Printed."

"Printed and signed."

"Go."

He goes.

That evening, after the children are in bed, he sits at his own desk with the lamp pulled close and the notebook open and the phone beside it with the nine photographs. He writes a second page in the notebook. He heads it with the date, which is the twenty-eighth, which is three days before the first, and under it he writes one word.

overlap.

Beside it he writes the two months that are missing. Second quarter. Third quarter. He writes them as plain as he can, in the same hand as the rest of the notebook, and then he draws a line under it.

The rest of the page stays blank.

He looks at the blank space for a while and then he closes the notebook and turns off the lamp and goes into the other room, where Almaz is at the small table under the window with the household ledger open, writing the rent line.

She doesn't look up.

"The medicine went up," she says.

"How much."

"Two hundred. Same bottle. They said the supplier changed."

Fantaw sits down at the table across from her. The small one is asleep on the couch with her mouth open and the older one is at the end of the room with a schoolbook, and outside the window a dog is barking at something in the street, and Almaz writes the medicine amount in the ledger in the same small square hand she has used for four years.

"Do you want me to take the medicine out of the household and put it on my salary," he says.

"No."

"Because I can. There's room this month."

"There's room every month." She writes the school fees under the medicine, one line per child, the way she always does. "The medicine's not a problem. The medicine's just the month. Don't turn the month into a thing."

"I'm not."

"You are." She underlines the school fee line and moves to the next. "You've been turning things into things since Friday. I can see it. You come home and sit at that desk and write in that notebook and you don't tell me what's in it, and that's fine, that's your work. But don't bring it to this table. This table is the month. The month is not the notebook."

Fantaw looks at the ledger. The month is all there, the fuel card and the rent and the two school fees and the medicine and the money to her brother, and every line is in the same small square hand and none of the lines skip.

"The meeting went fine," he says.

"I didn't ask."

"I know."

She writes down the money to her brother and underlines it and closes the ledger and stacks it with the pen on top.

"Eat," she says. "Food's on the stove."

He eats.

Wednesday he walks to the finance office. Not the one where the young man works, the one in the building on the other side of the compound, the one with the glass door and the counter and the woman behind the counter who has been there since before Fantaw was hired.

Her name is Genet. She is in her fifties and she wears a cardigan in all weather and she keeps the counter clean.

"I'd like to see the Miscellaneous ledger," Fantaw says. "Not the folder. The ledger. The disbursement record."

Genet looks at him for three or four seconds. "Which quarter."

"Second, third, and fourth."

"The ledger's in the safe. The officer has the key."

"Which officer."

"Abebe. He comes in on Thursday."

"Then I'll come back on Thursday."

She nods and goes back to her work, and Fantaw stands at the counter for a moment longer and then turns and leaves.

He knows exactly how the refusal will sound if it comes. He has written it in his head on the walk over, and rehearsed it in the corridor, and tested it against Genet's face at the counter, and it will be some version of the ledger being with the officer, or the officer being with the region, or the region asking why a management office wants the ledger at all. It will be polite. It will be plausible. It will be a shorter sentence than the one he brought.

He is going anyway. Thursday, if the officer is in. And if the officer is not in, Friday. And if the officer is not in on Friday, he will ask to see the regional ledger, or the disbursement book, or whatever the next door is, because the door is the point and the door is not going to open on its own.

On the way back across the compound he passes the guard, who has finished the gutter and is sitting on his stool at the gate with the long broom across his knees. The guard nods at him, and Fantaw nods back.

That night, at his own desk, he opens the notebook to the second page and writes one more line under the word overlap, in the small space above the underline, so it sits between the word and the blank part of the page.

The path from folder to ledger. Genet. Abebe. Thursday.

Then he closes the notebook and sits in the chair with the lamp on and thinks about the meeting again, about the way Getachew thanked him for the diligence and moved the agenda on, about the way the room went back to fuel and per diem inside a minute, about the way Hiwot stopped writing and looked at Getachew and waited. The pen went down. The pen went down and did not stop until the item was closed.

The number is in the minutes now. In Hiwot's hand, and from Hiwot's hand into the typed minute, and from the typed minute into the file, and from the file into the regional office's copy, by Friday. Fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr, Miscellany, prior quarter, reconciliation requested. The number belongs to the office now and not to Fantaw. Whatever happens next, it will happen to a number that four people heard out loud and one person wrote down.

That is what he wanted. He knows it is what he wanted, because he planned it, and he said it, and it went the way he planned it.

It doesn't sit the way he thought it would sit.

In the coffee house Getachew had told him to do this in a room with one door. He didn't fight me, Fantaw thinks, and that is the part that keeps turning over. A fight he could name. A fight he could carry home and put on the table and say, he fought me, and Almaz would nod and write the next line in the ledger. There was no fight. Getachew thanked him. Getachew drank the rest of his coffee and walked him out to the stairs and said the reconciliation would have to happen or not happen, and then he picked up his cup and went back down the corridor.

The cost is somewhere in that sentence and Fantaw cannot find it yet. He will find it later. He has the sense of a bill that hasn't been written. He paid something in that room and it will show up on a page in a month or a year, and when it does he won't be able to name it either.

He turns off the lamp and goes to bed.

Friday morning he takes the notebook to work again, and this time he does not put it in his drawer. It stays in his jacket. He signs three requisitions and answers a question from Dawit about the regional workshop hotel rates and takes a call from the woman at the copy shop on Churchill Avenue asking about the copies he ordered, which are ready, and he says he will come by Saturday. He eats lunch at his desk.

At three in the afternoon Getachew comes down the corridor and stops at Fantaw's desk.

"Got the summary from the regional office," he says, and sets a single folded page on the desk. "It's what you asked for. It's what I could get."

Fantaw unfolds the page. It is one sheet, typed, with a list of approvals for the fourth quarter, and the Miscellany line is on it, and the line reads twelve thousand birr, disbursed, and there is a signature at the bottom that Fantaw does not recognize.

"This doesn't have the retirements on it," Fantaw says.

"No."

"This is just the disbursement."

"That's what the region sends. The region sends disbursements. The retirements are this office's to keep. That's the split."

Fantaw looks at the page. It is a clean page. There is nothing wrong with it. It is a page that says twelve thousand birr went out and a man he cannot name signed for it, and it does not say who received it, and it does not say what it bought.

"The number I read in the meeting was fifty thousand three hundred fifty," Fantaw says. "That's not what this page says."

"That's not what this page is." Getachew puts his hands in his pockets and looks down the corridor, not at Fantaw, at the far end where the light comes in from the back window. "The page is the disbursement. Your number is the reconciliation. Two different pages. You asked for a reconciliation in the meeting and the reconciliation is coming. This isn't it."

"When is it coming."

"When it comes." Getachew looks at Fantaw. "I told you two weeks ago to fix your roof instead of writing about it, and you went and put it on the record instead, and I let you, and now the record will decide. That's all. There's nothing for me to do about it now and there's nothing for you to do about it except wait for the reconciliation and then decide what to do with whatever it says."

He takes his hands out of his pockets and goes back down the corridor.

Fantaw sits at the desk with the single page in front of him. Then he folds it in half and puts it in the notebook, between the page with the figure and the second page with the word overlap. The notebook is getting thicker. It is becoming a thing with a shape.

He reaches for the phone and dials the coffee house, the one near the office, the one where Getachew takes his calls at night. Selam answers.

"Is he there," Fantaw says.

"No. He's at the region until Monday."

"Then tell him I'll come by on Monday. Before the meeting, if he has time."

"Which meeting."

"The budget meeting at the first of the month. It's Tuesday. Monday's the day before."

"Then I'll tell him." A pause, then: "How's the number."

"The number's in the minutes."

"Which minutes."

"Department review minutes. Tuesday's."

She is quiet on the line for a moment. Then she says, "You put it in writing."

"I asked for a reconciliation. The minute-taker wrote it."

"Getachew let you."

"He did."

"Then you've got a witness." Her voice is flat, the way it is when she is saying something she has been waiting to say. "You asked me last week whether I'd be one, and I told you yes, but a minute-taker is a better one than me. Hiwot writes the words down the way they were said. That's her whole job. If she wrote the figure, the figure is the figure."

"She wrote it."

"Then that's the number." Selam says something to somebody off the line, and then comes back. "I have to go. There's a customer."

She hangs up.

Fantaw puts the phone down and sits with his hands on the desk. The fan turns slowly, and the corridor outside is quiet because it is Friday afternoon and half the office has gone, and somewhere in the building a door closes.

He takes out the notebook and opens it to the second page and writes one more line under the word overlap, in the space he left for what he does not yet know.

Hiwot's minute, Tuesday. The figure is the figure.

He closes the notebook.

The first of the month is Tuesday. On Tuesday morning he will print the retirements at the shop on Churchill Avenue, and he will sign the page, and he will walk it down the corridor to Almaz's office and put it on her desk. Two hours before the first of the month, he will see Getachew at the coffee house and ask him one question and hear his answer. On Wednesday he will go back to finance and ask Genet for the ledger and probably be told the officer has the key. On Thursday he will ask for the officer and probably be told the officer is at the region.

He knows how all of it sounds. He knows the shape of every refusal before it comes. He has written refusals before, in the book, in the section on obstacles and institutional resistance, and the refusals in the book were always delivered by a system and not a person, by a rule and not a face, and the book said the way to beat a system is to find the person inside it and give them a reason. He has been looking for the person for two weeks and the person keeps turning out to be a counter and a folder and a window with a guard sweeping in front of it.

So he will go to the ledger by walking through the doors one at a time. He will bring the retirements to Almaz on the first. He will bring the reconciliation question to the next review. He will bring the receipts to Almaz when she asks for them, which she will, because she told him she would, one thing at a time.

The flat is quiet. The children are asleep. Almaz is at the small table under the window with the household ledger open, writing the last line of the month, which is always the money to her brother. Fantaw stands in the doorway and watches her write it and underline it and close the ledger and stack the pen on top, the way she has done every month for four years.

She doesn't turn around.

"You'll be late Monday," she says, to the window.

"Yes."

"Then take the umbrella. It's the rainy season."

He says nothing. She gets up and goes through to the bedroom and closes the door, and Fantaw stands in the doorway a moment longer, and then he goes to his desk and turns the lamp on and opens the notebook and reads the two pages back.

The first page has the figure at the bottom, fifty thousand three hundred fifty birr, unchanged, in pencil. The second page has the word overlap, and under it the two missing months, and under those the path from folder to ledger, and under that one line about Hiwot's minute, and under all of it the blank space he left for what he does not yet know.

He picks up the pencil, and at the very bottom of the second page, under everything, he writes the only thing the week has actually taught him.

The number is in the minutes now. The minutes are in the file. The file is in the region. There is no version of this where the number goes back into my pocket.

Then he closes the notebook and puts it on the shelf next to the binder, where it can be seen from the chair, and he sits in the chair a little longer than he needs to with the lamp on and the flat quiet, because the first of the month is Tuesday, and on Tuesday he has to bring a printed page to Almaz with his own signature under a number he has been carrying in his jacket for three weeks, and when he signs it the number stops being his notebook's number and starts being the office's number, which is what he asked for, which is what he wanted.

He is going anyway.

The dog barks once at something in the street, and the refrigerator hums, and the lamp writes a small circle of light on the desk around the two closed notebooks where they sit against each other on the shelf, one four hundred pages and one forty, and Fantaw turns off the lamp and goes to bed.