Tariq packed the way he always packed for a trip, folding each shirt in thirds against his chest and laying it in the bag collar-down, so the collars would not crease. Layla stood in the bedroom doorway and watched his hands do it. They were steady. They had got heavier since the apricots, the knuckles sunk into the backs of them, and he had begun to whistle while he worked.
"Three days," he said. "Abu Sami's going, and the Bakri brothers. They've got a doctor out there, Layla. A real one, with a clinic in a tent. They've got a bakery." He tucked a pair of socks into a shoe. "I'm not saying yes to anything. A man has to see a thing before he judges it. That's all I'm doing."
"You've seen the balconies."
"I've seen water on our neighbours' balconies and none on ours." He zipped the bag. "Your mother thinks it's the end of the world. Maybe it is. I'd like to look at it before it ends."
He kissed her on the forehead on his way past. He smelled of soap and of something sweet under the soap, like fruit left too long in a bowl.
In the sitting room her mother was on the rug with her prayer beads, though it was no prayer time on the sheet. Tariq bent to kiss her too. She turned her face to the wall, and he laughed, softly, and kissed the top of her head instead, and went out.
Layla heard his steps go down the stairs, light, two at a time, like a younger man's.
The clinic had forty mattresses now. Karima had taken the parcels office next door and knocked a hole through the wall between, and the light-sick lay in rows under the black windows with wet cloths over their eyes, and the volunteers moved between them in socks.
Layla did the register. She did it every clock's day from eight until four, and on the days she could not sleep she did it longer. Karima had stopped telling her to go home.
"Do any of them come in?" Layla said. She had been waiting all morning to ask. "The ones who've been out to the camp. Do they get sick?"
Karima was counting tablets into paper twists at the sorting table. She finished the count before she answered.
"Not one," she said. "I've had people from every street in the district. I've had the imam's wife. I've had a policeman who cried for six hours because he couldn't remember if he'd prayed. Nobody who's been out there and come back has ever walked through that door." She twisted a paper shut. "They sleep. They eat. They smile at you in the street. They don't need me."
Layla wrote the next name in the register. Her pen had stopped in the middle of the surname, and she made it finish.
"Tariq?" Karima said.
"Three days. He said three days."
Karima did not say anything. She put the twist of tablets in the tray with the others and started counting the next.
Hamza rang the clinic desk on the fourth day, from the shop behind the mosque. The line hissed. Behind his voice she could hear a fan, and men talking in a language she did not know, and something that might have been pigeons.
"Mama. Are you all right? You sound tired."
"Everyone sounds tired. It's the light." She pressed her free hand flat on the clinic desk. "Tell me about you."
He told her. The circle by the pillar, the teacher with no front teeth who hit the floor with a stick when anyone got a word wrong, the white umbrellas that never folded, the people who slept in the mosque in rows. He said the city felt full, as if more people were in it than you could see. He laughed at himself for saying it.
"I've got them," he said. "The ten. Do you want to hear?"
She said yes. He recited them in Arabic, down the bad line, from the first verse to the tenth. His voice was steadier than she had ever heard it. He stumbled once on the sixth and went back and took it again. When he reached the end of the tenth he stopped, and she could hear him breathing.
She had her hand over her mouth. A volunteer looked at her from the mattresses and looked away.
"Is Dad there? Can I tell him?"
"He's out," she said. "I'll tell him. He'll be proud."
She did not tell him where. The line clicked and hissed, and Hamza said something about the money running out, and then he was gone.
On the sixth day she went to look for him.
The camp sat on the waste ground past the ring road, where the city's lorries used to park overnight. She took two buses and walked the last mile along the hard shoulder in the glare with a scarf over her mouth against the dust. She heard it before she saw it. There was music, a drum and a reed pipe going round the same tune, and under the music a sound like a market, hundreds of voices, nobody shouting.
The fence was a ring of white lorries parked nose to tail. In the gap between two of them stood a table under an awning, and at the table sat the woman with the clipboard.
She knew Layla. Layla saw it in her face, a small, pleased recognition, as if a pupil who had been slow in class had finally come to ask for help.
"Mrs al-Mansour," the woman said. "Have you come to stay?"
"I've come for my husband. Tariq al-Mansour. He came on Saturday."
The woman turned the pages of the ledger without hurrying. She found the line and turned the book round so Layla could read it. There was Tariq's name, in the woman's neat hand, with the date and the number of the tent. In the margin beside it someone had drawn a small ring.
"He's very happy here," the woman said. "He's eating well. He sleeps like a child. You could see it yourself, if you came in." She smiled. "He'll come home when he's ready. They always come home. They bring presents."
Behind the lorries the drum went round and round. Through the gap Layla could see a stretch of green grass, real grass, with children rolling on it, and a man in a clean white shirt sitting cross-legged on the grass peeling an orange in one long curl. He was too far off to see his face. She looked at him until her eyes watered in the glare, and he did not look up.
She walked back to the ring road. On the way home the bus went past the street behind the Bakri building, and it was raining there, a soft grey rain falling on that street and no other, and the people on it stood in their doorways with their faces turned up.
Tariq came home on the seventh day.
She heard him on the stairs first, whistling, and then the key, and then he was in the doorway with his bag over one shoulder and a white cardboard box in his hands, tied with gold ribbon. He had put on weight even in a week, in the face mostly, and his skin had a shine on it like a polished apple. His shirt was new and very clean.
"Sweets," he said, holding up the box. "For the building. There's enough for every flat. They make them out there every day, Layla, you wouldn't believe it."
He put the box on the table and sat down and stretched his legs out, and smiled at her. It was a good smile, wide and easy, the smile of a man who had slept well for seven nights. She waited for him to ask about her mother, or the clinic, or the taps.
He did not ask about anything. He sat and smiled and looked around the kitchen as if it were a pleasant hotel room.
Her mother had come to the doorway of the sitting room. She stood there with her beads in her hand.
"Hamza called," Layla said. "From Medina. He's learned the ten verses. He recited them for me down the phone."
Tariq's smile stayed exactly where it was. He looked at her with friendly interest, the way a man looks at a neighbour telling him news of some relative he has never met.
"Who's Hamza?" he said.