Across the street the balconies were dripping, and Esther stood at the stairwell window with an empty kettle and watched the water run off them into the dust.
It had rained over there every clock's night for a week, on the building opposite, and on the bakery, and on two houses further down whose doors had a small neat ring in pencil beside the bell. The rain came down out of a low grey cloud that sat over those roofs and no others, and it fell straight, and it stopped where the ringed walls stopped. Their side of the street got the wind that came after. It lifted the dust off the pavement and blew it up the stairwell and under the doors.
The taps in their building had been dry for ten days. The tanker still came to the end of the street on Sundays and Wednesdays, and the driver still got down, but he filled only the cans that were carried out of ringed doors. He had a list. He was sorry. He said so each time.
Reza Karimi came up the stairs behind her, slowly, with nothing in his hands.
"Well," he said. "That's that."
He had been to the mosque, and then to his cousin's, and then to the bazaar, where his shop had been shut for a month because there was nothing to sell in it. The cousin had a ring on his door now. He had offered Reza a can at the back of the yard, and Reza had stood there with it in his hands for a long time and then put it down.
"Did you take it?"
"No." He looked out at the dripping balconies. "It's the same water, I suppose. Wet is wet. But I couldn't tell you what I'd be drinking."
In the Karimis' kitchen Zahra's mother had a map open on the table, an old one from a school atlas, with the borders of a country that was not there any more. Esther's father sat beside her with his glasses on. Omid was asleep on the floor with his mouth open. His lips had split at the corners, and Zahra kept touching them with the end of a wet cloth that was not very wet.
"Damascus," Zahra said, as soon as Reza came in. She had said it the day before, and the day before that.
"Isa son of Maryam comes down at the white minaret east of Damascus," her mother said, with her finger on the map. "That's what we were taught. That's where I'd go, if I were young. Not that he'll come for us. But I'd want to be near."
"Mother, it's a thousand kilometres. More. Through three countries that weren't countries last year."
"Then you'd better start."
She herself would not go. She had said so plainly. Her son had a house in a village in the hills with its own well, and the well had not been ringed or stroked by anybody, and she would go to him tomorrow and sit by it.
Esther looked at her father. He had his hand on the edge of the map, on the part that had been blue once, where the lake behind the dam was printed.
"Father."
"I'm an old man," he said. "I don't walk fast."
"You won't walk. There's the car."
"Then I suppose I'll be a heavy old man in a car." He took off his glasses and folded them. "My tallit. My prayer book. One bag." He looked at Esther. "Not the books. I've read the books."
They left at ten that night by the clock, under a white sky, in Reza's old Paykan with the bags tied on the roof and three cans of fuel in the boot that had cost Reza his wedding watch.
Omid slept across Esther's and Zahra's knees in the back. Her father sat in front with his bag on his lap. The road west ran out of the city through suburbs Esther knew and then through suburbs she did not. Then it climbed into bare brown hills, past villages whose gardens were green behind their walls and villages that were dust to the windowsills, side by side, sometimes on the same slope.
The first checkpoint was at the edge of the republic. It had the flag with the gold arches on a pole and two soldiers under an awning, and one of them looked at the papers with a torch, out of habit, in the full sun, and waved the car on.
The second checkpoint was at dawn by the clock, at the border of the next country, the one that had been a province. It had a different flag and more soldiers. One of them was a boy no older than Esther's oldest pupils, with a rifle he held like a broom. He walked round the car twice. He opened the boot and looked at the fuel.
"Going to him?" he asked, leaning in at Reza's window.
Esther saw Reza's hands on the wheel. She saw him decide to say yes, the way a man decides to step over a puddle. He opened his mouth.
"No," her father said.
The boy looked past Reza at the old man in the passenger seat. Her father looked back at him with his bag on his knees.
"No," he said again, kindly, as if the boy had asked the way.
The boy straightened up. He looked tired, and a little embarrassed for them.
"Then there's no water on this road for you, uncle," he said. "Not anywhere west. They won't sell to you." He went round to the boot and lifted out two of the three fuel cans and carried them under the awning and set them down with the others. There were a great many others. Then he banged on the roof twice with his palm, and the barrier went up.
Nobody spoke for an hour after that. Reza drove with his jaw set. Once he hit the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, not hard. Zahra put her hand on his shoulder from the back seat and left it there.
"I was going to say yes," he said at last.
"I know."
"It's only a word to a boy at a barrier."
"Yes," her father said. "That's how they ask for it. One boy at a time."
The car died in the mountains at a little past one in the afternoon, by the clock and by the sun, which for once agreed.
It coughed twice on a long climb and rolled to a stop on the shoulder, and Reza tried it three times and then sat with his hands in his lap. Below them the road went down in loops toward a plain that was the colour of a biscuit. Somewhere on the plain, Reza said, was the old border, the one that had been on the map in the kitchen.
They walked. There was nothing else to do. Reza carried Omid on his back and the bags on his front. Esther took her father's arm, and he let her, which frightened her more than the fuel. Zahra walked a little ahead with her lips moving. Esther knew the sound of what she was saying, though not the words. Zahra had said it over Omid's bed through the bad nights of the surge, in Arabic, the opening of a chapter she called the Cave, and Esther's father had said his Shema in the other room, and in the morning both children had slept.
The heat came up off the asphalt through the soles of Esther's shoes.
There was a woman sitting on a stone at the next bend.
There was no village at the bend, and no car, and no path down the hillside that Esther could see. The woman sat on a white stone beside the road with her hands in her lap, in a plain dark coat and a headscarf the colour of the hills, as if she had been waiting for a bus. Beside her on the stone stood a plastic bottle of water. It was full. The sun went through it and made a bright wobbling coin on the stone.
She stood up when they reached her. She looked first at Omid, and then at Esther's father, and then at the rest of them.
"Peace be on you," she said. She spoke Persian well, with an accent Esther could not place. It did not belong to anywhere. "The boy first. Then the old man. Small sips."
Zahra did not move. Reza did not move. Esther looked down, because her father had taught her where to look, in the surge, beside a bed sifted with ashes.
The woman's feet were in cheap sandals, dusty, with a plaster on one heel. They were a woman's feet.
"You're right to look," the woman said. She did not sound offended. "I'll tell you so you don't have to wonder. I'm of the jinn. I wear this so as not to frighten the boy." She held out the bottle. "There's no water west of here for anyone who said no. But there's a way under the road, if you'll take it."