On the Karimis' television the rain stopped at the road for the ninth time, and Zahra's mother said, from the sofa, "Turn it off."
Nobody turned it off. Reza had the remote, and Reza was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as if the screen were a long way away. The film had been shot on somebody's phone. It shook, and the sound was mostly a crowd roaring and a man near the phone saying one word over and over. It showed a village square somewhere on the Euphrates. Rain was falling hard on one half of a road and not on the other, and the line between them was as straight as a ruler. Then the picture swung up toward a man in the middle of the square, and went white with glare, and the channel ran it again from the start.
Esther sat on the floor with her back against her father's knees. The Karimis' front room was the dark room on the landing now. Zahra had taped foil over both windows behind the curtains in the third week, and the two families sat in it at the hours that would once have been night, with the television's light on their faces and the sun outside standing where it had stood for forty-four days.
It stood high in the south-west, where it had stood since a Friday afternoon in August. Esther had been in the kitchen that day with the Sabbath candles in their holders, looking out every few minutes to see how long was left before she lit them. She was still waiting. Her father lit them now by the clock, at the minute the old calendar on the kitchen wall gave for sunset, and said the blessing over a window full of noon.
"Is it real?" Omid asked. He was lying on his stomach with his chin in his hands. "The rain. Is it a trick?"
"It's real," Reza said. He did not take his eyes off the screen. "The ground's wet. Look at the boys on the roofs. You can't fake boys being wet like that."
"Reza."
"I'm only saying what's on the television."
Zahra's mother got up off the sofa, slowly, a hand on each knee. She was small and wore black, and she had lived in the building longer than anyone. She went to the set and switched it off at the wall. In the sudden dark Esther heard her breathing.
"In my village," the old woman said, "they told us he would come with water and fire. They told us his water burns." She felt her way back to the sofa. "And everyone would want the water, because everyone would be thirsty first. That's how it was told. Thirsty first."
Her father's knee moved against Esther's back. He did not say anything. After a while she heard him begin under his breath the words he said every night over his bed, and she knew that he had decided it was night.
The hall behind the old synagogue in the Jubareh quarter held four hundred on folding chairs, and on Thursday it held more than that. People stood along the walls and in the doorway and out into the courtyard, where the old men's mulberry stood with its leaves gone brown on the branch.
Esther stood near the back with Hadas, who had her shawl round her shoulders in the heat and kept touching its edge.
The man from abroad spoke first, as he always did now. He had come to the city the summer before last. He spoke in Hebrew and English, and a young man beside him put it into Persian, and he smiled between his sentences. People said that about him: he smiled even when he spoke of the dead. He told them what they had all seen on the television. He told them the rains of the whole world had been held back for years, and the lake of Tiberias was a puddle, and now on the road between Syria and Iraq the rain had come back, and it had come back for those who went out to meet it.
"Our fathers waited by the rivers of Babylon," he said. "They waited in Isfahan for two thousand years. They waited through the Shahs and the mullahs. They waited for a sign. You have seen it on your phones. I am not asking you to believe me. I am asking you to believe your eyes."
The committee had a table on the platform with a cloth on it. The men behind it were men Esther had known all her life. The man who had taught her the Hebrew letters. The two brothers who owned the pharmacy on the square. Ezra Kohanim, her father's friend of sixty years, who had to be helped up the steps now, and who had once told her father that the generation of the Messiah's footsteps would be a generation of insolence, and laughed, and said he would know it when the young stopped standing up for him.
They had a proposal. When the buses could be arranged, the community would go out to him together, properly, as a people. Every household would register. There would be water on the buses.
Hadas squeezed Esther's arm hard enough to hurt.
It was her father's turn to speak only because he stood up. He stood up in the third row in his good coat, and the hall went quiet in the way it went quiet for him, though less than it once had.
"In Deuteronomy," he said, "a prophet comes to you with a sign. A wonder. And the sign comes true." He did not raise his voice. "And then he says, let us go after other gods. And the Torah says, do not listen to him. The Lord your God is testing you." He put his hand on the back of the chair in front of him. "It doesn't say the sign is false. It says the sign comes true."
Somebody at the side said, quite loudly, "Rabbi, your own tap is dry."
"Yes," her father said. "It is."
"And the Rambam," he went on, "says not to imagine the King Messiah must do signs and wonders. He doesn't need them. He is not a rainmaker." He looked up at the platform, at Ezra. "Ezra. You told me once you would know it by the young."
The old man on the platform looked back at him with wet, kind eyes, and did not answer. One of the pharmacy brothers leaned over and said something in his ear, and he nodded.
The vote was not a vote. Her old Hebrew teacher asked who was for it, and the hall stood up. It was a noise more than a sight, four hundred folding chairs scraping back on stone at once. Esther stayed where she was because she was already standing. Hadas was clapping. In front of them a woman Esther had taught to read was crying with her face in her husband's shoulder, and the husband had his hand on the back of her head and was saying, "There. There. It's over now. It's over."
Her father sat down in the third row and stayed sitting.
They walked home by the river because her father liked the bridge, though there had been no river under it for most of Esther's life.
The arches of the long bridge stood over a bed of cracked grey mud, thirty-three of them, cool in their own shade. In the hours that would have been evening, families still came down to sit under them out of habit. There were fewer now. The sun lay on the riverbed at the same angle it had lain for forty-four days, and the mud gave the heat back up into their faces.
"Hadas registered," Esther said. "Her mother and her aunt. Her aunt can't walk to the end of the street."
"They'll have buses."
"Father." She stopped. A boy went past them on a bicycle with a water jug tied to the handlebars, and the jug was empty, and it banged against the frame. "I saw it too. On the television. It rained. Hadas says that's all anybody needs to know, that it rained, and she's not stupid. You taught her her portion for her bat mitzvah. She's not stupid."
"No," he said. "She isn't."
He went to the parapet and looked down at the dry bed for a long time. An old dog lay in the shade of the third arch, panting. Beyond it, where the water had once been deepest, someone had dug a hole in the mud to see if there was anything underneath, and given up.
"Then what did we see?"
Her father turned round. His face was the colour of the bridge, and very tired, and quite calm.
"You saw where it stopped," he said. "He brings rain only to those who bow."