Salwa had put on weight in three weeks, and she was wearing a new blue dress, and she was happy.
She sat on the bench in the vestry of Saint Simeon's with her hands in her lap and told Elias about it as she would tell him about a wedding. The camp by the river, bigger than any city. The gardens that came up green in the dust where the man walked. The water in tanks, all anyone could drink, so cold it hurt the teeth. The bread. She had not been hungry for a single hour. Her face was smooth. Elias had known her for forty years, since she was a girl selling her mother's pastries at the church door, and he had never seen her face without the small fold of worry between the eyebrows. It was gone.
"And Nabil," she said.
He waited.
"On the evening ground. Everyone goes, in the hour they call evening. He stood up in front of us all and looked at the crowd, and he said, 'Who here has buried someone?' And I put my hand up, Father. Half of us did." She laughed, and her eyes filled. "He looked at me. He said, 'Whom?' And I said my brother. And he called him."
"Called him."
"By his name. Nabil. And Nabil came walking out of the people at the back. In his grey jacket, the one we buried him in. He came up to me in front of everyone and took my face in his hands and he called me Lulu." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "Nobody has called me Lulu since our mother died. Nobody alive knew it."
"Where is he now?"
"He stayed. He has work there, in the stores. He said to tell you he's well." She looked up at Elias with her new smooth face. "I came back for my things. And to tell you. You buried him, Father. I wanted you to know he's not in the ground."
Elias sat down on the bench beside her. His knee hurt. He took her hand, which was soft and cool and smelled of a soap he did not know.
"Salwa. Listen to me the way you listened when you were twelve." He did not let go of her hand. "Saint Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica about the lawless one who comes before the end. 'Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders.' Lying wonders, Salwa. They happen, and they lie." He breathed. "And John saw a beast that 'doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, and deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles.' By the means of those miracles. The rain is a sign. The bread is a sign. And a dead man walking out of a crowd is a sign. Every one of them is real, and every one of them is his, and he is not Christ."
Her hand had gone still in his.
"You weren't there," she said.
"No."
"He knew my name." She took her hand back, gently, as if from a child. "You weren't there, Father. I was."
The cemetery was outside the east gate, in the Christian ground beyond Bab Sharqi, and Elias went that afternoon by the clock with Mira, because she would not let him go alone.
Nothing grew there now. The cypresses along the wall had gone brown from the top down. The paths were white dust and the marble of the old tombs was too hot to touch. They found the Haddad plot and the Khoury plot and went on along the third row to the new graves, the ones from the spring, a row of plain stones with the earth over them still raised.
Nabil's was the fourth. Elias had stood at the head of it at Easter and said the prayers with the heat coming up off the open ground and Salwa holding on to the edge of his sleeve.
The stone was where it had been. The dust over the grave was smooth, packed hard by nine months of sun, and on it lay the fine undisturbed print of a bird's feet and nothing else. The wreath the choir had made of plastic lilies was still pinned to the earth at the head with its two bent wires. The ribbon had faded from purple to grey. Nobody had touched it.
Mira crouched and put her palm flat on the earth. Then she stood up and wiped her hand on her skirt.
"There's a nurse on my ward from Midan," she said. "Her mother says it's what they do. On the road. They take the faces of people's dead and walk up to them in the crowd." She was not looking at him. "She says the old women have always said that. She says it like it's a recipe."
"And what do you say?"
"I say his grave is shut." She looked at the plastic lilies. "And I say Salwa looked better this morning than I've seen her look in my life, and I don't know what to do with that."
He did not know either. He said the prayer for the departed over the grave, standing, because his knee would not let him kneel. Mira said the responses. A dry wind went along the row and moved the grey ribbon and put it back.
The knock came at the side gate at an hour the clock called eleven at night.
Elias was in the courtyard, sitting under the fig in the white light with his prayer rope, because he could not sleep in daylight and had stopped trying. He opened the gate on its chain.
A man stood there with a girl of about seven on his hip and a woman behind him holding a smaller girl by the hand. All of them were grey with dust. The man had a plastic jerrycan in his free hand, and it was empty; Elias could tell by the way it hung.
"Peace be on you, Father." The man's voice was cracked. "Forgive us. My name is Yasin, from Douma. Our wells are sand. We came in on foot. They'll give us a flat in Jobar if we sign the paper, and I won't sign the paper." He lifted the jerrycan an inch. "The mosques round the great mosque have no more room. A man at the water point said the priest at Bab Touma gives water."
Elias took the chain off the gate.
He took them to the tap in the vestry, which still ran an hour a day and had run that morning, and he filled the jerrycan from the barrel he kept under the sink. The girl drank from his own cup with both hands. The little one would not drink until her sister had, and then would not stop. Yasin drank last, standing, and when he had finished he said thank you to Allah in Arabic and then thank you to Elias, in that order, and Elias found he liked him for the order.
Mira came down the stairs in her dressing gown and took the little one onto her hip without being asked.
"Uncle." She had gone to the courtyard window. "They're in the lane."
He went to look. At the far end of the lane two figures in pale clothes were going from door to door with clipboards in the white light, stopping at each one, writing, making a small mark on the frame in pencil. The houses that had signed had their marks already. They were coming this way.
"They counted us at the gate of the city," Yasin said behind him. "They count the ones who said no. They write us down."
Elias thought of Salwa's smooth face, and of the grey ribbon on the grave.
"Come," he said.
The crypt was under the side chapel, down eleven stone steps behind a wooden door that looked like a cupboard. The parish kept its old stacked pews there, and the old processional banners, and the tombs of four priests of the church who had died before the French came. It was the coolest place in the building. He went down first with the torch, and Yasin came after him carrying the girl, and the woman with the jerrycan, and Mira with the little one on her hip and an armful of blankets from the hall.
He put them in the alcove at the far end, where a saint's bones had been kept until somebody moved them in another century, and where the air came through a grating and moved a little. He left them the torch.
"Nobody comes down here but me," he said. "Not even the bishop. I'll bring food when I can."
He went back up the eleven steps and closed the cupboard door and slid the bolt across, and he had his hand still on the bolt when someone knocked at the courtyard gate. Politely. Three times.