The candle on the upturned crate had burned down to the third notch, which meant it was the clock's morning, and Esther was teaching long division to three children who had not seen a night in eleven months.
They sat on a mattress against the crypt wall with an exercise book between them. Omid still raced and still got them wrong. The two little girls from the family Father Elias had brought down in the winter worked with their tongues between their teeth and got them right. Esther wrote the sums in chalk on a flagstone, because paper had to be kept for letters and lists.
The crypt was the only cool place in Damascus that she knew of. Its vault was low and its walls sweated a little, and if you put your palm flat on the stone at the back, behind the old stacked pews, you could feel something like night in it. Everyone had a patch of floor. The Karimis had the corner by the stair. The family from the dry side of the road had the alcove at the far end, where the air came through a grating. Esther and her father had the space under the low arch, two mattresses and a tea glass and his tallit bag on a nail.
She still kept the register from the school in Isfahan. It lived under her mattress with its cover soft from the road. On the inside of the back page were the eleven names she had written at the stairwell window the day the buses left, and below them she had kept a tally of the days since the sun stopped, in fives, the way she had once counted children for a school trip. Three hundred and forty-one strokes. Mira, who worked twelve-hour shifts by the clock at a hospital where the generators failed every afternoon, said she was the only person in Damascus who still knew the date. Esther did not tell her it was the only list she had left that did not get shorter.
On the other side of the crypt Zahra was praying, alone, at the hour she and Reza had worked out with Sheikh Anas from a notebook and a clock. She faced the south wall. Her mat lay on the flagstones at a slight angle to the lines of the floor.
Esther's father had worked out his own direction the first week, with a map Mira had brought him and a pencil and the old calendar. He faced a little to the right of Zahra when he prayed, toward Jerusalem, a few degrees west of Zahra's Mecca. The two of them had stood up once at the same minute, by accident, and seen each other, and her father had moved his chair a hand's width to the right without a word so that their shoulders were not in a line. Zahra had nodded to him. That was all.
Above them, through the floor, Esther could hear Father Elias singing alone in the church, the long falling notes that came every clock's morning at this hour.
"Is it a remainder or did I do it wrong?" Omid asked.
"You did it wrong. Do it again."
Mira came down the stair at eleven with her nurse's bag over her shoulder and a jerrycan in her hand and an envelope held between her teeth.
She put the can down by the Karimis' corner, where the water was kept, and took the envelope out of her mouth and held it out to Esther.
"A boy brought it to the door," she said. "He wouldn't come in. He said a man in the market gave it to him and paid him to bring it, and the man had come up from the south with the camp's people." She wiped her hand on her uniform. "It has your name on it. I didn't open it. Uncle said I should give it to you and then go back up and leave you alone, so I'm going back up."
The envelope was white and good quality, the kind the committee in Isfahan had used for its notices. On the front, in round blue capitals that Esther had seen on a hundred notes passed under desks, it said: "ESTHER HAKIMI. WITH THE PRIEST. BAB TOUMA. DAMASCUS."
She sat down on the mattress. The children had stopped doing their sums.
There were four pages. Hadas wrote the way she talked, without paragraphs.
"Esti, my Esti, I said I'd find out where and I did. You'll laugh. There are clerks here with lists of everybody, absolutely everybody, they have tables under awnings and you just ask. I asked for you and a girl with a lanyard looked you up in two minutes. Gone west with the Karimis. Now in Damascus with a priest. With a priest! I laughed so much she had to wait for me to finish.
"I don't know how to tell you what it's like. It rains here. It rains every night by the clock and in the morning everything is green, Esti, things grow while you watch them. My mother has a vegetable patch outside the tent and she says she has never grown aubergines like it in her life. The goats come back in the evening so full of milk the boys pour it on the ground. Nobody here is thirsty. Nobody is hungry. I think I'd forgotten what it's like when nobody is hungry.
"My aunt is well. She sits in the shade with the old ladies from the Thursday hall and they sing the songs from the Passover table all day long, all of them, even the ones nobody knows the end of.
"I saw him. He walked past our row of tents with all the people behind him. He's just a man, Esti. You'd be disappointed. He didn't look at me but I was so close I could have touched his sleeve.
"Please come. Bring your father. He was right about some things, tell him I said so, but he was wrong about this. Bring the Karimis, nobody minds here, there are all sorts. There's room. There's water. I've kept your shawl, my aunt gave it back. It's folded in my bag. It's waiting.
"All my love, all of it. Your Hadas."
Esther read it to the end and sat with the pages in her lap, looking for whatever was hidden in them. She could not find anything. Hadas had never hidden anything in her life.
Her father was sitting on his chair under the arch with his eyes closed. He was awake; his thumb was moving on the arm of the chair.
She put the pages on his knee. He opened his eyes and put on his glasses and read them.
He read slowly. He always had. When he got to the end he turned back to the first page and read it all again, at the same pace, his lips not moving, his finger resting on the margin. Across the crypt Zahra had finished her prayer and was rolling up her mat, watching them without seeming to. Reza had put down the tin he was opening. Omid sat with the chalk in his hand.
"She's happy," her father said, when he had finished the second time.
"Yes."
"She isn't lying. Not one word of it." He folded the pages along their creases. "The aubergines. The goats. I believe all of it."
"Then what?"
He did not answer. He reached over to the crate, where the morning candle was burning at its third notch, and held the corner of the folded pages in the flame.
"Father."
"You would read it tomorrow," he said. He did not look at her. He watched the paper. "And the day after. You'd keep it under your mattress and read it when the children were asleep. And one day you would hear it in her voice, and it would sound like water."
The corner caught. A small blue flame went up the edge of the pages and turned yellow, and he held them sideways so it would climb, and turned them, the way a man turns meat on a spit. Hadas's round blue capitals went brown and then black and then curled away into the air of the crypt, which was too still to carry them anywhere.
When it reached his fingers he dropped the last of it into his empty tea glass and let it finish there.
Then he picked up the envelope from the mattress, and turned it over to fold it, and stopped.
On the back flap, where Hadas would never have thought to write anything, someone had made a mark in pencil, small and neat, the size of a fingernail. One short stroke.
He held that to the candle too.