The clerk lit his candle the wrong way again, from the bottom, and the wax ran down over his fingers.
Elias watched him from the door of the vestry of Saint Simeon's. The clerk was a young man from Lahore in a grey suit bought for a bigger man, and he came every Thursday at the hour when the old women used to come to light candles, and he lit one, because Sheikh Anas had told him that a man who comes into a church and lights nothing is noticed. He did not cross himself. He stood in front of the sand tray with the candle burning crookedly and his lips moving in his own prayer, and then he came to the vestry, and took a brown envelope out of the inside of his jacket, and gave it to Elias without a word.
"Same as last week," he said in English. "He still sends them. Twice a week, by the camp's lorries, to the embassy for the ministry. The ministry has not opened a bag from us since December." He wiped the wax off his fingers with a handkerchief. "I copy them before they go in the bag. Then they go in the bag."
"Does he know?"
"He knows the ministry doesn't answer." The clerk put his handkerchief away. "He writes them anyway."
Elias read it in the vestry with the door shut, before the sheikh came, as he read every one.
The officer's name was Ibrahim. He was a policeman from Karachi, the ministry's liaison at the camp, and he wrote like no one Elias had ever read. Every entry began with a time, to the minute, in the margin. Then the date by his own count of days. Then what had happened, in short flat sentences, as if each one had been weighed on a scale before he let it go.
The first envelope had come in the winter. Elias kept it at the bottom of the drawer, and he still took it out.
Day one hundred and fourteen. Eleven registered. All declined repatriation. Below that, in the margin, a time, 10:40, with nothing written beside it at all.
Elias put his finger on the empty line and kept it there. Every other time in the report had a sentence after it. This one had been written down and then left, as if the man had seen something at twenty to eleven and decided it was not his to put in a ministry's bag. Downstairs, under the floor, the rabbi was teaching Omid his letters with a stick in the dust of the crypt. Elias did not know why he thought of him.
Day one hundred and fifteen. Ruined village, hill above the road. Metal objects rose from the ground and followed him. The officer had written that sentence and then nothing under it for the rest of the page.
Day one hundred and fifteen, evening. Offered a house with running water by the camp as a courtesy to the ministry. Accepted.
Elias read the last word several times. It sat on its own line.
This week's pages were what the sheikh wanted. Which way the camp had turned at each crossroads, and when. How many lorries of flour. Which villages had shut their doors and which had gone out, and how long the rain had lasted on the ones that went out. Where the camp's people said it would go next, and whether it had gone there. The officer had kept a list, numbered, of every place the camp had stopped since he joined it, and beside each one the time he had arrived and the time he had left, and the times went on page after page like the readings on a meter.
Sheikh Anas came at the hour the clock called evening, and they climbed the bell tower together, because it was the only place in the quarter where a telephone would work.
The tower was square and narrow, with a wooden ladder that creaked at every rung, and at the top a small stone room with louvres on four sides, where the bell hung in its frame above the hole the rope went down through. Up here there was a little wind. Through the louvres you could see over the roofs of the old city to the green of the districts that had said yes, a dark heavy green, and to the grey of the ones that had not, and the line between them.
Anas laid the pages out on the stone floor under the louvres one at a time and photographed each one with his phone, holding it steady with both hands and his elbows on the stone. He did it slowly. When the bars on his phone came up he sent them, and waited, and sent the next.
"Where do they go?" Elias asked. He had asked before. He asked again because he liked to hear the answer.
"East. To the counter's people. They were in a school gymnasium in Karachi until the winter. Now they're on the road north, coming this way." Anas watched the little wheel on his screen go round. "There's a man there who runs the cells. The counter, they call it. The same people who sent the leaflet you gave your volunteers, the year of the surge. They're feeding a column of thousands on what they can carry, and they need to know where the camp is going before it gets there."
"And the man?"
"His name is Muhammad. He's from a village nobody had heard of." Anas sent another page. "Some of us have pledged to him. He doesn't call himself anything. When people call him by a big name he asks them to stop." He looked up from the phone at Elias. "Some of us call him by it anyway. Behind his back. I'm told it annoys him."
"What do you call him?"
"To his face? I've never seen his face." Anas smiled. "I call him by his name."
The bell hung over them in its frame, heavy and dull green, cast in Russia in the year his grandfather was born. Elias put his hand flat on the bronze. It was warm from the day that did not end. He thought of the Thursday clerk's crooked candle, and of a policeman in a borrowed house writing "accepted" on a line by itself, and of a man in a gymnasium who asked people not to call him what they called him. He thought that if anyone had told him two years ago that he would stand in his own bell tower helping a sheikh send a policeman's notes to a Muslim teacher in Pakistan, he would have offered them a chair and a glass of water. He did not take his hand off the bell.
The camp's trucks came down the Straight Street the following Tuesday.
Elias heard them from the courtyard, heavy engines in low gear, and went to the end of the lane to look. There were six of them, white and clean, loaded with sacks of flour and plastic water tanks, moving at a walking pace between the shuttered shops. People in pale clothes walked beside them, smiling up at the balconies. A woman with a clipboard stopped at every door.
The old city shut. He watched it happen. The shutters came down one after another along the street ahead of the trucks, with a sound like a long roll of thunder that never got any nearer. The coppersmith. The spice seller. The man who sold cassettes of old songs. They came down and stayed down, and the woman with the clipboard knocked on them and smiled and wrote something and moved on.
Anas found him there. He had come fast from the direction of the great mosque, and he was out of breath.
"They took a boy's phone," he said. "Outside the mosque, after the noon prayer. They didn't hurt him. They asked him nicely, and two of them held his arms, and they asked him nicely again." He wiped his face with his sleeve, and his soft hands were shaking. "He'd sent nothing. But they looked through every picture in it. They're looking for something, Father. They'll come to my shop. They'll take mine."
"Then stop sending from your phone."
"I'll stop. But the pages have to be somewhere when I do. Somewhere they won't look. Somewhere none of theirs will put a hand." He looked at Elias, and Elias saw what he was going to ask before he asked it, and saw that the sheikh knew exactly what he was asking.
"Keep a copy behind your screen," Anas said. "In the altar."