The buses had come in the clock's night, and when Esther pulled back the foil at six they filled the street from end to end, white coaches with their engines running and their doors folded open, so close together that their mirrors touched.
People were already on the pavements. They had bags and rolled mattresses and cool boxes and birdcages. They had children on their hips and grandmothers on their arms. Almost every one of them had a shawl, milk-coloured wool round the shoulders or over the head against the sun, and from the third floor the street looked like a river of it, pale, moving slowly toward the square.
She had not slept. She did not think anybody in the building had slept.
Hadas knocked at seven. She had her mother on one side and her aunt in the wheelchair on the other, and a rucksack so full the zip had split. Her shawl was round her shoulders and her eyes were bright and dry.
"They said bring nothing," she said. "Everyone's bringing everything. My mother's brought the good plates. We'll be the only people in the desert with the good plates."
"Wait," Esther said.
She went back to her room and took the shawl out of the drawer where it had been lying since last winter, folded on top of her school reports. She had never worn it. She had taken it out twice to give it back, and twice put it away again, because giving it back would have meant saying why.
On the landing she held it out. Hadas looked at it and did not take it.
"Esti."
"It's yours. You paid for it."
"I paid nothing. Nobody paid anything. That's the point." Hadas's voice cracked and came back. "Come with us. Not today, then. Come next week. There'll be more buses. Bring your father, he'll come if you come. He'll see it. He has to see it to stop being stubborn, he's the most stubborn man in Isfahan."
"I know."
Hadas's aunt reached out from the wheelchair and took the shawl out of Esther's hands, gently, the way you take a cup from a child who is about to drop it, and put it over her own knees.
"For my legs," the aunt said. "They get cold on buses."
Hadas laughed, and then she put her arms round Esther's neck and held on. She smelled of the soap they had both used since they were girls, the green kind from the shop by the school.
"I'll write to you," she said into Esther's hair.
"Where?"
"I'll find out where. I'll write."
The stairwell had a window at every half-landing, narrow, with wire in the glass. Zahra's mother was standing at the one between the second floor and the third, looking down into the street.
She had been there, Zahra said later, since the first bus came. She stood with her hands folded on the sill. She had her prayer beads round her wrist and had not moved them.
Esther came down to stand beside her because there was nowhere else in the building to look from that did not have foil on it. Below them a man Esther knew, a carpenter from the next street, was lifting his sons one by one onto the roof rack of a bus, and they were laughing. A girl from her own class stood on the bus step in her shawl and looked up at the windows of the school.
The old woman spoke without turning her head. She spoke in the voice she used for the price of bread.
"The Messenger of Allah said that the Dajjal would be followed by seventy thousand Jews of Isfahan," she said, "wearing Persian shawls."
Zahra had come out of the flat above. She stopped on the step.
"Mother."
"I'm not saying it against them." The old woman's hands stayed folded on the sill. "I'm saying it because I heard it when I was a girl, and I didn't know what a shawl from Persia was, and I didn't know there were Jews in Isfahan. And now I'm old and I'm standing at a window." She shut her eyes. "I'm sorry, Esther, my dear. I'm sorry it's your people's street."
Esther did not answer. She was counting. It was the teacher in her, and she could not stop it.
When she was small there had been perhaps a thousand Jews in the whole city, a few streets around the old synagogues, and her grandmother had known every family by its grandfather's trade. Then the war, and the new flag over the bridges, and the families coming back. They came from Los Angeles and from Tel Aviv and from places nobody's grandmother had ever left from. They came on charter flights with a band at the airport, and on subsidies, and for the empty houses. The school had gone from two classes to nine. The Thursday hall had needed chairs.
Seventy thousand. She had no way to count a river. She could count the people she knew who were not in it.
She took the register she still carried in her bag, out of habit, and on its back page she began to write names. Her father. The shoemaker's widow on the corner, who had locked her door the day of the vote and had not opened it since. Two old men from the morning prayers. The family of a girl in her class, who had said at the bus stop that her mother did not like crowds. A young doctor from the new families who had said in the Thursday hall that she would go when she saw a medical report, and then had not been seen.
She wrote eleven names. Then she stopped, because the twelfth was her own, and she did not know yet whether she would be able to keep it there.
The buses left at eleven by the clock.
They went one after another, in a slow line toward the square and the western road, and each one sounded its horn as it pulled out, and the people on the pavement who were waiting for the next one cheered. Somebody on a roof rack had a drum. Somebody was singing a song from the Passover table, the one every child knew, about the going out, and the bus took the song away round the corner and the next bus picked it up.
Her father said the morning prayer at the window of his room while they went.
He had put on his own prayer shawl, the old one with the darned corner that had been his father's, and he stood in it with his back to the door and faced the wall where the map of the old city hung. Esther watched him from the corridor. He did not look down at the street. His lips moved and his body rocked a little, forward and back, as it always had, and he did not hurry, and he did not slow down when the horns sounded under the window.
When he finished he folded the shawl in its proper way and put it in its bag and came to stand beside her.
By two the street was empty.
Esther went down to the door of the building. The sun stood where it had stood for a hundred and one days. Its light lay on the pavement and on what had been left there: a child's sandal, a plastic bag of bread somebody had put down and not picked up, a folding chair, cigarette ends, the white tickets the committee had given out, blowing along the gutter. The shoemaker's shutter was down. The pharmacy was locked, and a note on the glass in the brothers' writing said it would reopen, with no date. An old dog came out of an alley and went from the bread to the sandal and lay down in the shade of the chair.
It was very quiet. She had not known how much noise a street made until there was none.
Then she heard footsteps, and a man came round the corner from the square.
He was young, with a lanyard round his neck and a clipboard, and he walked down the middle of the road the way people walk in a street with no traffic. He went from door to door. At each one he looked at the number and at his clipboard, and at some he ticked and walked on. At others he stopped and took a pencil from behind his ear.
He came to their building. He did not see her in the shadow of the doorway, or did not care. He looked at the number, and at his list, and ran his finger down it to two names.
Then he took the pencil from behind his ear and made one short stroke on the wall beside the door, at the height a man holds a clipboard, and went on.