The water came out of the shower hot. It always did. Ibrahim stood under it with his palms flat on the tiles and let it run on the back of his neck, and counted, as he did every morning, how many minutes he could stand there before he turned it off.
Four. Yesterday it had been six.
The house had two storeys and a flat roof with a tank on it that nobody filled, and the tank was always full. Outside, the town was dust. He could see it from the bathroom window: the well in the square with a padlock on its cover, the women at the end of the street with their cans, waiting for the camp's lorry. The ones who had said yes had green yards. The ones who had not had the lorry, which came when it pleased.
He turned off the water. He wrote the time on the back of his left hand with the biro he kept on the sink. He had done it for months now, every day, the way the captain had told him to: write down when. He had stopped knowing what he was recording. He kept recording it.
Downstairs Saba was singing along to the radio. His sister had come out a month after he took the house, on a bus the camp paid for, with her two boys and one suitcase, and on the first night she had stood at the kitchen tap and cried into the running water. The boys had put on weight since. They slept late and woke hungry, and she let them. She had stopped asking when the ministry would call him home.
The porch had filled overnight, or in the hours the clock called night. It did every day. Two melons, split to show they were ripe. A clay jar of honey with the comb still in it. A bolt of blue cotton. A transistor radio in a box. The porters who brought them never knocked. Sometimes he saw them walking away up the street, two young men in pale clothes, laughing with each other.
Behind the melons, leaning against the wall, was a rolled mat tied with string.
He knew it before he had the string off. He did not let himself know it until the mat was open on the porch boards.
Green, faded nearly to grey. A border of small brown diamonds. In the bottom left corner, a scorch the shape of the point of an iron, where he had knocked the board over when he was nine and his mother had snatched the iron off the mat and burned her wrist doing it. Two pale places in the weave where her knees had gone down five times a day for forty years. Above them a smaller pale place, rubbed thin, where her forehead had touched.
He knelt on the porch beside it. He did not kneel on it.
She had died in the village eight years ago, in the house with the blue shutters, while he was on a course in the capital. His sister had sent the message. He had driven up for the funeral and stood at the graveside in his good suit. Afterwards his sister had asked if he wanted anything of their mother's. He had said no, and driven back the same night, and been at his desk by nine. The mat had stayed in the house. The house had stayed shut. In the second month of the long day his sister had phoned to say the village was finished. The wells had gone, and the last families had left for the town.
He put his hand flat on the pale place where her forehead had been. It was cool. Everything else on the porch was warm from the sun.
"You like it?"
One of the porters had come back up the path, smiling, wiping his hands on his shirt.
"Where did this come from?"
"From the dead village up the valley." The porter was pleased to be asked. "He told the ruins to give up their treasures, and they came up out of the ground after him, like bees. Gold, pots, all sorts. We sort it out and share it round." He nodded at the mat. "That one was in the pile with a paper on it. It said for the officer."
Ibrahim had seen it with his own eyes, in another valley, months ago: the swarm of things following the master out of a dead village, rising out of the dust behind him, dented and shining, and the camp cheering. He had written it down with the time.
His mother's village was in the hills above Mansehra, four countries east of this valley. Her house was locked, and the key hung on a string in Saba's handbag downstairs. Something had gone into that shut house, lifted this off the floor, rolled it, tied it, and set it on his porch behind the melons.
"Thank you," he said.
The porter went away whistling.
He sat on the porch with the mat until his legs went numb. He tried, once, to remember how to begin. He knew the movements. He had watched her make them every day of his childhood. His hands remembered the height of his ears. He could not find the first word. It had been years. It had been since before Qureshi's file, since before the map, since before the captain's handwriting in the margin. When he looked for the beginning of the prayer in himself he found the clock times he had written on his hand.
He could see her doing it. He had lain on his stomach on the floor of the front room with a comic, eight years old, and watched her over the top of it: the hands raised to her ears, the bend, the slow going down, first the knees, then the hands, then the forehead to the green weave, and the stillness there that went on longer than he could hold his breath. He used to try. He never once managed it. When she came up she would see him watching and pretend she had not.
He did not pray. He rolled the mat up again, tight, and tied it with the same string, and when the camp's bell went for the estimated evening he put it under his arm and walked to the court ground.
He had walked to the court ground most evenings since they gave him the house. He was the liaison. Nobody had told him to stop. It was his job to stand at the clerks' end of the line, and watch, and report to a ministry that no longer read his reports. He took his place. A thin Englishman with a ledger stood two places along, as he always did, and nodded to him, and Ibrahim nodded back.
The light did not change. The master came out of the great tent.
The heat came first, as it always did, against the face. Then the shape: short, broad, slow on its bowed legs, the right eye standing out of its socket like a floating grape, the good eye moving along the line. The court lowered its eyes or raised them. Ibrahim raised his. He had looked a hundred times at the place between those eyes. He had seen a woman in a village square read something there out loud, on the first day, and he had seen nothing. Since then he had seen nothing every evening.
He looked now, with the mat under his arm.
The letters were there.
They sat on the skin between the eyes as plainly as the name over a shop, black, in a hand he could have read across a street. He did not have to spell them out. He read the word the way you read your own name on an envelope, all at once, before you mean to.
Unbeliever.
The heat on his face grew until it was like standing at the door of a bread oven. The good eye came along the line toward him. Ibrahim's feet had already turned. He felt the mat crush against his ribs and the dust slide under his shoes. Behind him the Englishman said something, sharp, surprised. Then he was past the end of the line and between the tents and running as he had not run since he was a boy, with his mother's mat held against his chest in both arms.