Layla was halfway down the stairwell with two empty jerrycans when the trucks turned into the street. She heard them before she saw them, heavy engines in low gear, and under the engines a sound it took her a moment to place, because nobody on the street had heard it since the start of summer. Water was slopping in a tank and pattering off a tailboard into the dust.
She went down the last flight. She stood in the doorway of the building with the cans against her shins.
There were four trucks, white and clean in a way nothing in the city had been clean for months. The first carried flour in sacks stacked as high as a man. The second carried a plastic tank with a hose coiled on top, and the hose dripped. Men and women in pale clothes walked beside them, smiling up at the windows. One of the women carried a clipboard, and she was the one who came to the step.
"Peace be with you," she said. "How many in the flat?"
"Why?"
"For the flour. And the water, if you want it. He sends it to every house that takes him." She said it the way the gas man used to say the meter needed reading. "You only have to say yes. Say he's your lord, and the rain is yours tonight."
At the second truck the Saeeds from the fourth floor were already holding out a washing-up bowl. Mr Saeed was laughing. His wife had her scarf pulled forward against the glare and she was laughing too. It was the first laughing Layla had heard on the street since the second month.
Layla looked at the hose. A thread of water ran from the nozzle and made a dark coin in the dust, and the coin was already shrinking at its edges.
"She'll say nothing," her mother said behind her.
Layla had not heard her come down. Her mother stood on the bottom stair in her house slippers, one hand on the rail, a head shorter than her daughter, and she looked at the woman with the clipboard the way she looked at a butcher with his thumb on the scale.
"We know whose trucks these are," she said. "My grandmother told me about him when I was smaller than that tank. He brings bread and a river, she said, and you don't touch either."
The woman went on smiling. "Nobody has to," she said. "He doesn't force anyone." She made a mark on the clipboard, one short stroke, and moved on to the next door.
Layla could not see what the mark said. She carried the cans back up the stairs, empty.
The rain came in the hours the clock called night.
She slept through it behind the blackout curtain Tariq had nailed up in the third week, with a towel rolled along its foot to stop the seam of light. When she woke at the clock's six the room smelled of something she could not name. It took her three breaths to find it. Wet earth. Her heart began to go fast before she understood why.
The light on the balcony hit her as it always did now, flat and white from the same place in the sky, with no shadow anywhere that had moved since August.
Across the courtyard the Saeeds' balcony was green. The geraniums Mrs Saeed had let die in the second month stood up thick and red. A vine Layla had never seen on that wall had come from somewhere in the night and run the length of the railing, and its leaves were wet. Water dripped from their tips onto the balcony below, which belonged to Abu Sami and was green as well. Down in the courtyard some of the paving squares were dark and some were pale. The dark ones ran in a line. They followed the drainpipes of the flats that had said yes and stopped at the others as if someone had drawn the edge with a ruler.
Her own balcony held the dead basil in its tin and a skin of dust on the tiles. She put her hand on the rail. It was dry and hot.
In the kitchen the tap coughed twice, gave her a cupful of brown water, and stopped.
On her way down to the clinic she looked at the door frames. Every flat had a pencil mark beside its bell now, small and neat, at the height a woman holds a clipboard. Theirs had a short stroke. So did Umm Ali's on the second floor, and the imam's widow's on the ground. The Saeeds' had a ring. Layla licked her thumb and rubbed at the stroke on her own frame, and it did not smudge. It had gone into the paint as if it had been there when the paint was wet.
At the clinic every mattress was taken, and two men slept on the old sorting table with their shoes under their heads. Karima was cutting a bandage for a boy who had walked into a wall with his eyes shut, and she listened to Layla without looking up. "Mosque street's dry the whole length," she said. "The Bakri building's wet on two floors and dry on the rest. A woman came in from Old Market saying her neighbour's lemon tree had fruit on it this morning. Ripe, she said. It had no leaves yesterday."
"Did she take any?"
"She came in here." Karima tied off the bandage. "She hasn't slept in nine days."
Layla wrote the woman's name in the register. Under it she wrote the boy's name, and under that a man who had stopped speaking when the clocks passed midnight for the hundredth time and had not spoken since. She kept her letters small and level, the way she had taught thirty children a year to keep theirs.
Her phone buzzed against the desk. It was Hamza, a photograph first: a queue of buses at a concrete barrier, the sky above them the same white as hers. Then the words. "Still at the crossing. They say it shuts after tomorrow. Tell Grandma to pray I'm on this side of it when it does." He had never once asked anyone to pray for him.
Layla showed Karima. Karima looked at the picture for a long time.
"He'll get in," she said. "The roads to that city are kept."
Layla wanted to ask who kept them. Karima had already gone back to the mattresses.
It was past the clock's nine when she climbed the stairs. Her mother was on the rug in the sitting room, praying the night prayer by the times on the sheet taped to the fridge, the estimate the first circle had sent out in the first week of the light and Karima had copied by hand for every flat on the street. The curtains were shut. The lamp was on against the sun outside. Her mother switched it on at the clock's six every day and would not hear of switching it off.
Layla sat at the kitchen table and read Hamza's message again.
The key turned in the door. Tariq came in sideways, his shoulder against the frame, a plastic bag swinging from two fingers. He put it on the oilcloth in front of her.
Apricots. A dozen of them, orange flushed with red, and they were wet. Drops stood on their skins and ran together and slid off onto the cloth. Nothing in the flat had been wet for four days except what came out of a can.
"Abu Sami," he said. "He had a whole crate of them. That tree in his yard was dead last week, Layla. I saw it. Dead wood." He was smiling, and he looked younger than he had in months. "I didn't say anything to anybody. A neighbour gave me fruit. That's all it was."
In the sitting room her mother finished the prayer and turned her head to the right and to the left. She did not get up.
Layla looked at the bag. She looked at her husband's hand, resting on the table beside it. There was a stone in his palm, pale and clean, with a little orange flesh still on it.
He had eaten one on the stairs.