My grandfather kept his diving stone under the bed for forty years. It was a flat grey weight the size of a loaf, worn smooth in the middle where the rope had rubbed. When I was seven I tried to lift it with both hands and got it as far as my knees before I had to let it drop.
"That," he said, without looking up, "is how you know you are not ready."
He had gone out with the fleet for the first time at fourteen, in the last good years, when the boats left Al Khor in June and did not come back until September. He told the story the way he told everything, in short pieces, as if the whole thing were too heavy to lift at once and had to be carried in loads.
The ghaws — the diver — went down holding the stone, he said, and the saib held the rope above. Down in the green half-dark you had a bone clip on your nose and a basket at your neck, and you had perhaps ninety seconds. You did not look for beauty. You looked for oyster shells, and you took whatever your hands found, and then you pulled the rope twice and the saib hauled you up faster than you had gone down.
"Did you ever find a big one?" I asked. I was seven. I wanted treasure.
"Once," he said.
"What happened to it?"
"It paid a debt."
That was the whole answer, and it took me another ten years to understand what it contained. The divers did not own the pearls. The captain advanced money for food and rope and the family's flour before the season, and the pearls paid it back, and if they did not pay it back the debt waited politely until the next June, and the June after that. My grandfather's father had died owing money to a man who had already died owing money to someone else.
The season he called his last was 1949. He was thirty-one. He said the water that year was exactly the same as always, warm at the top and cold in the layer beneath, and that this was the thing nobody believed afterwards: that nothing about the sea had changed at all.
What had changed was a factory in Japan, where someone had learned to persuade an oyster to make a pearl on request. The price of a natural pearl fell like a stone with a rope tied to it. The merchants stopped coming. Then the boats stopped going. Then the men who had done nothing but dive since they were fourteen sat on the shore and considered what else a pair of hands could do.
"Were you angry?" I asked him, much later, when I was old enough to ask properly.
He thought about it for a long time.
"I was thirty-one," he said. "I had a good chest and no other skill. Yes, I was angry." He turned the diving stone over with his foot. "And then oil came, and there was work, and my sons went to school, and one of them is a doctor, and you are asking me questions instead of holding a rope in the dark. So I stopped."
He never said he was glad. I noticed that. He simply stopped being angry, which is not the same thing, and he kept the stone under the bed where he could reach it.
When he died we found it there, and my father, who is the doctor, carried it out to the car with both hands and had to set it down twice on the way.