Chapter Three: The Man Who Makes Light of the Invigilator

Waddah comes into the hall the way a man comes into a place that has nothing to do with him. He turns the paper over and then leaves it, and busies himself with what is around him: who is sitting beside him, what make of pen the other man has, why the window of the hall is open. If the invigilator warns him he straightens up a little; when the invigilator turns his back, he goes back to it. He has one sentence he repeats whenever the paper closes in on him: later. I will write in a little while; I will answer in the last part of the time; there is still room left in the years.

The strangest thing about Waddah is that he is not ignorant that there is an invigilator; he knows there is a Watcher in the hall, but he deals with Him by the logic of a school invigilator: an eye that can be deceived, a back that gets turned, an attention that tires and slackens towards the end of the hour. And this is where the whole error lies: he measured the absent by the present, and the all-encompassing by the limited.

And Waddah's cheating does not stay inside the borders of the paper. A man who has got used to earning the mark without the labour goes out of the hall with the same habit: he buys by one measure and sells by another, takes his own right in full and gives short, and grinds down the man who cannot complain. In the revelation there is a description of such men that begins with woe and ends with the mention of the day they will stand: “Woe unto the defrauders: Those who when they take the measure from mankind demand it full, But if they measure unto them or weight for them, they cause them loss. Do such (men) not consider that they will be raised again Unto an Awful Day, The day when (all) mankind stand before the Lord of the Worlds?” (Al-Mutaffifin 83:1–6, Pickthall)

So you find the mark of this contempt going out of the hall into the house and the market: a trust left with a man and not given back, a promise made and not kept, a weak man's right put off until its owner despairs of asking for it. And all of these, on the paper of the greater examination, are not margins. They are the body of the answer.

As for putting it off, it is more dangerous than cheating and quieter than it. The man who cheats knows he is cheating; but putting it off wears the dress of resolve: I will do it. And the time spent waiting for tomorrow is not counted as blank space; it is counted as a written line its owner cannot rub out. In the greater hall the man who leaves is asked about four things and does not move past them until he answers, and among them are his life and his time: “On the Day of Rising no servant's feet will move from where they stand until he is asked about four things: about his lifetime and how he spent it; about his knowledge and what he did with it; about his wealth, where he earned it and where he spent it; and about his body and how he used it up.” (meaning; Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2417 — Abu Barza al-Aslami, good and sound (hasan sahih) — al-Tirmidhi)

Waddah usually does not wake until a hand reaches out for his paper to take it. Then all the devices fall at once: the timing he had perfected, the angle he had trusted, the sentence he kept repeating. And he finds that the pleasure he won by breaking the rules was shorter than the time he spent arranging it.

A Breath Before We Go On

Perhaps you read that last chapter knowing the man in it very closely indeed. Perhaps you saw in Waddah your own sentence, the angle you yourself trusted, the night you said: tomorrow I begin. Do not close the page.

For this part has a fourth chapter, and it was written for nobody but you: for the man who read the third and found himself in it. The bell has not been rung, the paper is in your hand, and the ink has not dried. There is no chapter in this book called: your case is closed.