Elias sang the morning office alone, as he had since the choir went east, and under his feet two other prayers were going on that he could not hear.
He faced east in Saint Simeon's. Every church he had ever served in faced east, toward the rising sun, though the sun had not risen in six months and stood now where it always stood, a little west of the top of the sky, white through the high windows. He sang the psalms of the morning to the empty stalls and the icons on the screen. When he came to the Great Doxology he sang the line about the light, glory to thee who hast shown us the light, and his voice did not catch on it. It had caught the first month. He had made it stop.
Below the floor of the side chapel, in the crypt, the hour by Sheikh Anas's notebook was the dawn prayer. The sheikh had come down the stair the first week with a school exercise book and a clock and sat with Yasin and Reza Karimi over the times for an afternoon, the way men sit over a contract, and written them out. Now Yasin and Reza stood in a row of two on a blanket by the south wall and prayed together. Zahra prayed behind them, alone. The children slept.
A little apart, under the low arch where the floor was most even, the rabbi stood in a white shawl with black stripes and said his morning prayers facing Jerusalem, which from Damascus was south and a little west. Elias had seen his chair the first week, set a hand's width to the right of the line of the Muslims' blanket. He had not asked why. He had moved his own lamp so that it did not throw the rabbi's shadow across anyone's mat.
Nobody had planned the three directions under one roof, and nobody had argued about them. When he came down the stairs at the end of his office, they had all finished, and Zahra was boiling water on the gas ring for tea, and the rabbi was folding his shawl.
There were eleven of them now. He counted every morning. Yasin, his wife, their two girls. Reza, Zahra, the boy Omid. The rabbi and his daughter. Mira and himself upstairs. Eleven mouths and one tap that ran an hour a day.
He kept the count in the back of his service book. Water: four jerrycans a day, if the tap ran, and it ran most days. Bread: what Mira brought from the hospital canteen, and what the bakery on the Straight Street sold him out of the back door because he had married the baker's daughter, and what he could buy. Rice. Lentils. Oil, very little. He had stopped going to the water point on the square, where the clipboard people stood now, smiling, offering to fill anybody's can who would write their name.
Reza had asked on the second day what he could do, and Elias had given him the roof. He had been an engineer in Isfahan. He rigged a sheet of tin and a length of hose over the courtyard so that the hour of tap water ran into a barrel instead of down the drain. Yasin, who had grown apricots in Douma, swept the courtyard every clock's morning. Neither man would sit still. Elias understood that. He had not sat still since August either.
Esther had found chalk in the vestry. She sat on a mattress with the three children and drew sums on the flagstones, and the children did them, the boy fast and wrong and Yasin's girls slowly and right. She had been a teacher in Isfahan. She held the chalk the way he had seen teachers hold it all his life, like a cigarette, and wiped out mistakes with the side of her fist.
"Again," she said to the boy. "Slowly. You're not racing anyone."
"I'm racing them," said Omid, and the older of Yasin's girls laughed out loud, and her mother shushed her, and then laughed too.
Elias sat on the bottom step and watched them and thought that he had not heard a child laugh in his church since Christmas, and that it had taken a Muslim girl and a Jewish teacher in a cellar to do it.
The rabbi brought him tea on the step, which he had done every morning since the second week, and sat down beside him with his own glass.
He was older than Elias, past seventy, thin, with a white beard he kept short with a pair of nail scissors. His Arabic was slow and learned, the Arabic of books, and he apologised for it, and Elias had told him to stop apologising.
"Your bell is flat," Nissim said.
"Since a night in August. The year before last."
"I hear it every morning through the stone." He turned his glass in his hands. "My daughter says I should not say so. That it's rude to a host."
"It's true. A truth isn't rude."
The rabbi was quiet for a while. On the flagstones the boy had got a sum right and was showing everybody.
"Half my community went out to him," he said. "Seventy thousand, they said. In shawls. Good people. My daughter's friend." He drank. "We have a book, Father. Not one of the holy ones. A late book, from a hard century. It has a name in it for a man who comes before the true one and makes the people bow to him. I took it down off my shelf two winters ago, and I have not been able to put it back."
"We have a name too," Elias said. "In our Scripture. The lawless one. The one who sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God."
They looked at each other. Neither of them said his name aloud. Elias felt that they had come to the edge of something, and that if either of them took one more step they would have to start arguing about everything else, about whose temple and whose Messiah and whose book, and they were too old for that, and too grateful to each other for the tea.
"Then we agree about him," Nissim said, "and about nothing else."
"That's enough to keep a cellar."
The rabbi laughed, a short dry sound, and went to see what the boy had done.
The knock at the side gate came at the hour the clock called evening, while Elias was in the courtyard under the fig counting jerrycans.
Mira got there first. She had just come in from her shift with her bag still on her shoulder, and she opened the gate on its chain, and Elias saw over her shoulder who it was.
A young woman in a plain dark coat and a headscarf the colour of the hills. He knew her. He had seen her once, a month ago, at the corner of the lane, walking away from five strangers who had come to his gate grey with dust and said they had been brought. He had made the sign of the cross after her without knowing why, and then he had let the five in, and asked them who she was, and the rabbi's daughter had said, carefully, that she had told them herself, and that they would rather she told him.
She had a jerrycan in her hand. It was full. He could tell by the way she held it, and by the beads of cold water running down its sides in the heat.
"For the crypt," she said. "Peace be on you. I wanted to see that they were well."
Mira looked at the can. She looked at the cold water running off it onto the hot stones. Every tap in the old city had been dry since noon. She looked down, at the woman's dusty sandals and the plaster on one heel, and back up at her face.
"Who are you?" Mira said. Then, more quietly, as if she had heard the wrong question come out of her own mouth: "What are you?"
The young woman did not look away. She looked at Mira as if she had been waiting a long time for someone to ask her in exactly those words.
"I'm of the jinn," she said. "Of Nasibin. My name is Rahma."