The driver stopped the car at the edge of the square because he could not drive any further, and Ibrahim got out into the crowd.
The village sat on the west bank of the Euphrates, an hour from the Iraqi border. It was a grid of mud-brick and breeze-block houses with a mosque, a pharmacy and a square of beaten earth where the road came in. The sun stood at the top of the sky. It had stood there for forty-one days by Ibrahim's watch. He had set it to Karachi time when he left and had not changed it, so that he could write things down and know later when they had happened.
There were three of them on the ministry's list. Ibrahim. A consular officer from the embassy in Baghdad, a tired man in a linen jacket who mopped his neck every few minutes and wanted to go home. And their driver, a young man from Anbar called Saif, who had learned his English from films and translated everything, including what nobody had asked him to.
They were here to find Pakistani nationals and take their names. There were a great many of them on the road. They had come up from the Gulf, from building sites in Dubai and Doha, in hired buses and borrowed cars. Now their families in Sialkot and Mardan had begun to ring the ministry.
The first one Ibrahim found was sitting on a wall by the pharmacy, eating an orange. He was perhaps forty, in a dusty salwar, with cement still under his fingernails.
"I'm not going back," he said, before Ibrahim had finished asking. He said it pleasantly, in Punjabi, peeling the orange. "Tell my wife. I put wheat in the ground in a village two days back. It came up in four days. Four days, sir." He held up four fingers sticky with juice. "Show me the government that does that."
Ibrahim wrote his name in his notebook, and the name of his village, and the words "will not return". He did not write the wheat. He did not know which column it went in.
Across the square somebody had painted a word on the pharmacy wall in green, and the paint was still running. Saif read it out without being asked. It said welcome. On the house opposite, the same word had been painted in the same green, and then somebody had gone over it in black until nothing could be read.
The crowd changed before Ibrahim saw why.
It was a crowd of several thousand by then. Villagers and travellers and the people who had walked in with the road were pressed into the square and along the roofs and up the minaret's outer stair. Its noise went down all at once, the way the noise of a classroom goes down when a door opens. Every head turned toward the east end of the square, where the road came in.
A man was walking up the road.
He walked on foot, at an ordinary pace, with the dust of the road on his shoes. People walked behind him and beside him, a great many of them, some singing, some carrying children on their shoulders to see. Ibrahim could not have said afterward what he had expected. Something larger. He saw a broad man in plain clothes with his head bare, and the crowd parting for him the way water parts for a boat, without being asked.
Ibrahim looked at his watch and wrote the time on the back of his hand. 4:22.
Then, because the reciter had asked him on the telephone six weeks ago, he looked at the eyes.
He was perhaps twenty paces from the man when the man reached the middle of the square. Close enough. The left eye was an ordinary eye, dark, alive, looking at the crowd. The right eye was blind. It stood out from the face, pale and swollen and smooth, like a grape floating on water. Ibrahim wrote in the notebook in the words he saw, as Ahmed had told him to, and not in any translator's: "Right eye. Blind. Like a grape floating." He underlined "right" twice. His hand was not quite steady.
The man stopped in the middle of the square and looked around him.
The village had two sides. Saif had told Ibrahim that in the car, in the half-joking way he told everything. The houses north of the road belonged to families who had sent their sons out the day before to meet the man on the road, with bread and salt. The houses south of the road belonged to families who had locked their doors. There had been a fight about it in the mosque. A man had been hit with a chair.
Now Ibrahim saw what the fight had been about.
Clouds were coming up from nowhere. One moment the sky was white and empty from edge to edge, as it had been for forty-one days. The next, low grey cloud was boiling up over the north side of the village, over the flat roofs and the water tanks and the washing lines. Rain came down out of it. It came straight down, hard, smelling of wet earth, onto the north houses and their yards and the people on their roofs, who threw their arms up and shouted into it.
It stopped at the road.
Ibrahim stood at the edge of it and watched. The rain fell on the north half of the tarmac and darkened it. The south half stayed pale. The line between them was as straight as a ruler. On the south side a wind had got up out of the dry. It lifted the dust off the yards and the locked doors and blew it across the road into the faces of the people standing there. They turned away coughing, with their scarves over their mouths. A child on the south side held its hands out over the road into the rain, and its mother pulled it back by the collar.
The crowd roared. Most of it was joy. Some of it was not.
The consular officer had his phone up, filming. Saif stood at Ibrahim's elbow saying the same word over and over in Arabic. Ibrahim knew it was the name of Allah. Saif had not said it once in four days of driving.
An old woman had come to stand at Ibrahim's other side. She was very small, in black, with a face as brown and folded as a dried date, holding the end of her scarf across her mouth against the dust. She was from the south side. Ibrahim could tell by the dust on her. She was not looking at the rain. She was looking at the man in the middle of the square, steadily, the way you look at a dog that has got into the house.
The man turned his head.
He looked across the square, over the heads of the crowd, through the rain on one side and the dust on the other, straight at Ibrahim. The look came to him and stopped. The good eye was dark and patient, and it was in no hurry at all. Ibrahim felt it go through his clothes and his notebook and the time written on his hand, and settle.
The old woman took her scarf away from her mouth.
She spoke in Arabic, loudly and clearly, the way a child reads a word off a blackboard. She said one word. Then she said it again, slower.
"She's reading," Saif said in his ear. His voice had gone strange. "She says it's written on his forehead. Between his eyes. She's saying 'unbeliever'." He swallowed. "Sir, she can't read. She told me in the car park. She's never read anything in her life."
The old woman said the word a third time, pointing.
Ibrahim looked at the forehead she was pointing at. He looked as he had been trained to look at a document, line by line. He saw skin, brown from the sun, a crease, a drop of sweat. He saw nothing written there at all.
The man was still looking at him.