The rain on the phone was falling on one side of the road only, and Rami played it three times so that everybody could see.
They were in the parish hall of Saint Simeon's after the liturgy, with the blinds down and the strip lights on and the urn of coffee going cold, because nobody drank hot coffee any more. Outside it was noon. It had been noon for ninety-three days. Elias stood by the urn with his cup and watched his parish lean over a phone.
On the little screen a road ran through flat country. On the left of it a village stood in the rain. Rain was coming down hard on the roofs and running off the gutters, and children were standing in it with their faces up and their arms out. On the right of the road, three metres away, the dust was blowing. A man on that side had his hand held out, palm up, at the edge of the rain, as if he were feeling for the wall of a room.
"That's near Mayadin," Rami said. "My friend's uncle filmed it. It's not a trick. Look at the line."
"Who else makes it rain?" said Abu Samir from his chair.
"My cousin in Deir ez-Zor saw him," Salwa said. She had brought the pastries as she always did, and she had not sat down. She held the empty tray against her chest. "She went out to the road. She says he looked at her and she couldn't stand up. She says it's him, Father. She says he's come back, the way you always told us he would."
The hall was quiet. The urn ticked.
Elias put his cup down.
"I did tell you he would," he said. "I've told you every Sunday for thirty years. We say it in the Creed. He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead." He looked round at them, at the Khoury sisters and the choir boys and Abu Samir with his stick, people whose children he had baptised and whose parents he had buried. "And I told you how. The angels told the apostles on the mountain. 'This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.' He went up. He comes down. From heaven. Not up a road from Iraq."
"You don't know where he'll come," Rami said. He was twenty, with a good tenor voice and no patience. "Nobody knows the day or the hour. You say that too."
"I do. And the Lord said what to do when someone tells you they know. 'Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth.'" He said it slowly, so the boys would hear the words and not only his voice. "'For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.' Lightning, Rami. The whole sky at once. Nobody has to film it on a phone and send it to his friend."
"And if it's him?" Rami's face had gone red. "If it's him, and we stayed home because you said?"
"Then I'll answer for it. Not you."
"My cousin says he raises the dead," Salwa said, very quietly.
Nobody answered her. Elias saw her knuckles white on the edge of the tray, and he remembered her at the graveside at Easter, with her brother's name on her lips, and he could not think of a word to say that would not be cruel.
He walked to Sheikh Anas's shop in the afternoon by the clock, because he needed to walk and because Anas was the only man in Damascus he could say the next thing to.
The shop was off the Straight Street, a narrow room stacked to the ceiling with bolts of cloth, with a long cutting table and a brass measuring rod screwed to its edge. Sheikh Anas sold cloth in the mornings and sat over the afflicted in the evenings, and had done both for twenty years. He was a small man with a hoarse voice and soft hands. He looked up from a bolt of white cotton he was measuring and saw Elias's face and put the scissors down.
"They say Christ has come," Elias said.
"Mine say it's the one they've been waiting for too. The one who'll fill the earth with justice." Anas ran the cotton through his fingers. "My wife's brother took his family to the green side of Jobar on Thursday. The people with the clipboards gave him a flat with a tap that works. He rang to tell her how cold the water was." He let the cloth fall. "We were told he'd come from the east. You were told your Lord comes on the clouds. Neither of us was told he'd come by bus with sacks of flour."
"My boys don't hear me."
"They hear you. They're thirsty." The sheikh laid his palm on the white cotton. "Anybody can see the colour of a cloth from across the street, Father. You have to hold it to the light to see the weave. And nobody brings a cloth to be held to the light when they like the colour."
On Wednesday at the hour that used to be evening, choir practice began with eleven empty places.
There were twenty-two stalls in the choir by the screen. Elias had sat in them himself as a boy. He had filled them, one at a time, over thirty years, with the voices of the quarter. Now eleven of them were empty, and the ones who had come stood close together on the left as if the empty side were a draught. On Rami's music stand somebody had left the book of the Paschal hymns open.
He rang the bell for practice himself, as he had rung it for everything since the sun stopped, so that the quarter would know an hour had passed even if the sky did not. It rang flat, as it had since last August. He had stopped hoping to be used to it. He stood under the rope afterwards with the note still in the stones and counted the empty stalls a second time, as if the number might be different, and it was not.
"They've gone to Bab Sharqi," said one of the altos. She did not look at him. "There's a bus. The clipboard people laid it on."
He went himself. He did not take off his cassock. He walked down the Straight Street under the white light, past the shut shops and the old men on their stools, and came out at the old gate in the east wall where the buses stopped.
The bus was there, a long white coach with a hand-lettered sign in its windscreen that said a town on the Euphrates. Its engine was running. People were climbing aboard with suitcases and blankets and water bottles. A woman with a clipboard stood at the door ticking names, and she smiled at Elias as he came up, as if she had been expecting him.
They were all at the windows on his side. Rami. Both Khoury boys. Salwa, with her pastry tray on her knees. The young baritone he had married in the spring, and his wife beside him. They saw him and some of them waved and some of them looked away.
The door hissed shut. The bus pulled out under the arch of the gate.
As it went, they started to sing. He heard Rami's voice lead it, clear and true, the way Elias had taught him, through the open windows. It was the hymn of Pascha, the hymn of the night of the Resurrection, the one Elias had sung with them at midnight every spring with the candles lit and the bell going overhead. Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
The bus turned onto the road east. The singing went on, getting thinner, until the engine covered it. Elias stood under the gate in the noon with the woman with the clipboard smiling beside him, and the last thing he heard of his choir was eleven voices singing it in tune.