The table the camp's clerks had given Ibrahim had one short leg, and he had folded a page of the ministry's own instructions under it to stop it rocking.
He sat at it under an awning at the edge of the camp's moving market, with a sign in English and Urdu taped to the front that said "PAKISTANI NATIONALS, REGISTER HERE", and wrote down names. It was the hundred and fourteenth day by his watch, which was still on Karachi time. Saif had driven home to Anbar on the sixtieth day, without explaining, after a night when Ibrahim heard him through the wall of their room saying the same word in Arabic over and over until the dawn prayer by the clock. The consular officer had flown out of Baghdad a week after that. The ministry had told Ibrahim to stay.
So he stayed. The camp moved and he moved with it, in the back of a supply truck with his table and his folding chair, and wherever it stopped he set the table up and his countrymen came. Labourers, mostly. Cooks. A dentist from Multan. They gave him their names and their villages, and their passport numbers if they still had passports. He asked each one the ministry's question, whether they wished to be repatriated. Each one laughed at him or looked sorry for him, and he wrote "declined".
That morning a column had come in on the road from Isfahan, from the new republic, and the clerks had needed a whole field for it. A clerk with a clipboard said seventy thousand. They wore Persian shawls. Ibrahim had heard of them before, at the stove in his mother's kitchen, read aloud from the book she kept beside the rice tin: the Messenger of Allah had said that the Dajjal would be followed by seventy thousand Jews of Isfahan wearing Persian shawls. He had been nine, and had asked her what a shawl was. He did not write the column down. They were not Pakistani nationals.
His sister rang him that night from Karachi, on a line that dropped twice. Saba had two boys and a husband working in Muscat who had not sent money since the sun stopped, and she kept her voice bright for the boys in the room. Their taps had been dry for a month. The woman downstairs had said yes to the people with the clipboards, and now she gave Saba a bucket a day over the balcony rail, and would not take anything for it.
"She says it's sweet," Saba said. "She says it's the sweetest water she ever drank. Brother, are you eating?"
"I'm eating."
He had stopped looking at foreheads. He had looked at hundreds, and found nothing on any of them but sweat.
The ruin was on a hill above the road, and the camp went up to it on the hundred and fifteenth day for no reason anyone gave.
Ibrahim went because everyone went. It was a village that had been dead a long time, longer than the houses on the road: low walls of fitted stone with no roofs, a cistern choked with sand, the stump of what might once have been a tower. Nothing grew there. The crowd spread out among the walls and waited. Children climbed on the stones. A man with a loudspeaker tried to make a song happen and gave up.
The man came up the hill on foot, as he did everything.
He walked into the middle of the ruin and stood there. Ibrahim was close enough to see the dust on his shoes and the blind right eye, pale and swollen, turned a little toward the sky. He did not look at the crowd. He looked at the ground, at the fitted stones, as a man looks at a drawer he knows has something in it.
He said something short in Arabic. Ibrahim did not catch it. A man beside him in a farmer's jacket repeated it under his breath, and then, seeing Ibrahim's face, said it again for him in English, as you explain something to a child.
"He told it to bring out its treasures."
For a few seconds there was nothing. Then the ground began to hum.
Ibrahim felt it through his shoes first, a deep busy vibration, like standing on a hive. The sand in the choked cistern stirred. Something bright came up out of it, a coin, then a handful of coins, then a flat dish green with age and a chain and the neck of a jar, and they did not fall back. They rose. All over the ruin, from under the fitted stones and the sand between them, metal and glass and clay came up out of the earth with a sound like bees in a wall. It gathered in the air in loose shifting swarms, catching the sun. A swarm of gold coins as big as a car turned slowly over the cistern. Smaller ones, rings and beads and buttons of silver, went past Ibrahim's face so close he felt the air of them. One brushed his cheek. It was cold.
The crowd made a sound he had never heard a crowd make.
The man turned and walked back down the hill. The swarms went after him. They did not fly ahead or wander. They followed close behind his shoulders and above his head, humming, as bees follow a queen. The crowd parted to let them through. Children ran after them with their hands up.
Ibrahim stood in the ruin until it was empty. Then he took out his pen and wrote the time on the back of his hand, and opened the notebook, and wrote the date and the place and "ruined village, hill above the road, approx. one hundred and fifty metres". He wrote "metal objects rose from the ground and followed him". He looked at the sentence for a long time. Every form the ministry had ever given him had a box for a thing like a stolen car, or a body, or a missing person. None of them had a box for this.
He closed the notebook. His hands had a fine tremor that he blamed on the heat.
The clerk found him at his table that evening by the clock. She was a pleasant woman in a pale headscarf with a clipboard, and she had a set of keys on a string.
"Officer Ibrahim," she said, and smiled. "From the ministry. You've been sleeping in the trucks."
"I'm comfortable."
"You're not. Nobody is in the trucks." She held out the keys. "There's a house in the town below. It's empty. The water is on. It's a courtesy to your ministry, for all your help with the registrations. Nobody expects anything."
The town below had not seen a tanker in nine days. He had walked through it at noon, which was every hour. Half its doors had pencil marks beside them. Those houses had gardens. The rest had dust to the sills and old women sitting in doorways with empty buckets beside them, looking at nothing.
He looked at the keys.
"Whose house is it?"
"Nobody's, now." She smiled again. "The family went away."
He took the keys. He did not decide to. His hand went out and took them as it would take change at a counter.
The house was on a side street of breeze-block houses near the bottom of the town. It had a blue door and a small yard with a dead lemon tree in a pot. The rooms were clean and empty except for what the family had left. A sofa with a sheet over it. A child's plastic tricycle on its side in the hall. A calendar in the kitchen, still turned to the month before the sun stopped. Somebody had swept the floor before they went. There were three bedrooms. He stood in the doorway of the second and thought, without meaning to, that it was enough for Saba and the boys.
In the kitchen he turned the tap.
There was a cough in the pipe, and a shudder, and then water came out, a full clear stream of it, loud in the steel sink. He stood and listened to it for a while before he touched it, the way you would listen to rain on a roof, if rain ever came. Then he held his fingers under it. It was cold. It was colder than any water he had touched in three months, cold enough to ache in the bones of his fingers.
Through the kitchen window he could see the house across the street, its door with no pencil mark beside it, and an old man sitting in the doorway with an empty plastic jug between his feet.
Ibrahim took a glass from the drying rack, where somebody had left it upside down, filled it, and drank it to the bottom.