The woman looked at the bottle in Ibrahim's hand, then at his face, and spat on the road between his shoes.
He looked down at the bottle. It was clear plastic, still cold from the cool box in the pickup that had dropped him at the junction. A green paper label went round its middle, with a small printed leaf on it. He had taken a dozen of them from the house without thinking. Water was water. In the camp nobody looked twice at a green label, because everything had one.
The woman walked on with a child on her hip and did not look back. Two men behind her had seen it. They looked at the bottle and at his shoes, which were new, and at his shirt, which was clean.
Ibrahim unscrewed the cap and poured the water out on the verge. It ran into the dust and was gone. Then he dropped the bottle in the ditch and kept walking. The two men let him get a little ahead before they followed.
The column went north on the highway as far as he could see in both directions. Families on foot. Pickups loaded to twice their height with mattresses and gas bottles and goats. A tractor towing a trailer full of old women under an awning made of a carpet. Nobody hurried. The sun stood over the road where it had stood for a year, and every one of them walked in the same short black puddle of shadow.
He had his mother's prayer mat in a plastic bag under his arm. He had his bureau card in his left sock, where it rubbed. He had nothing else that was his.
They halted at a petrol station that had run out of petrol in the spring. The pumps had plastic bags tied over their nozzles. The shop had been emptied to the shelves and then the shelves had been taken too. Men from the column had set up under the forecourt roof with a table and a thermos and a list, and the newcomers who had joined at the junction were sent to stand in front of it.
The man at the table was about sixty, with a grey beard cut short and a policeman's eyes. Ibrahim knew those eyes. He had used them himself for twenty years.
"Where from?"
"The camp."
The man waited.
"I was with it most of the year. They gave me a house. I left nine days ago."
"Why?"
Ibrahim had thought about how to answer that on every mile of the road, and had not found a way that would sound sane. He told it plainly. The house in the dry town with water in the taps. The rain-grown things left on his porch every morning. His mother's prayer mat, which he had last seen on the floor of her shut house in the hills above Mansehra, rolled up behind the melons one morning with a paper that said it was for him. Then the evening walk along the court line. He had looked at that forehead every evening for months and seen nothing. That evening he had read the word without trying.
The man at the table listened without moving.
"There are things on this road that wear faces," he said. "Your dead mother. Your brother. They walk up and ask to come with you. So we ask everybody the same thing." He turned his cup on the table. "The first ten verses of the chapter of the Cave. Say them."
Ibrahim opened his mouth. He knew the Opening. He had known it since he was five, from his grandmother's knee. He said it now in Arabic because it was the only thing in him, all seven verses, his voice coming out rusty and too fast. Then he stopped.
"That's what I have."
The man looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached under the table and took out a sheet of paper from a stack, a photocopy of a photocopy, the Arabic gone furry at the edges, with a line of English under each verse in small print.
"Then learn," he said. "A verse a day. You're walking anyway."
He walked the next stretch with the sheet folded in his shirt pocket over his heart, and he thought about Saba.
She had come to the camp a month after he did, with her two boys, because he had written to her that there was water. He had given them the big bedroom. The boys had grown fat and loud. They swam in a plastic pool in the yard and threw the rain-grown plums at each other. When he packed the bag that night, Saba had stood in the bedroom door in her dressing gown with her arms folded and watched him.
"You're mad," she had said. "You've gone mad from the light. There's nothing on his face."
He had asked her to come. He had asked her to look at the man once, properly, and tell him what she saw. She had said she had looked at the man a hundred times, and she saw a man who fed her children. She had not stopped him leaving. She had not come to the gate.
He had wanted to tell her that the house was never theirs, and the water was never theirs, and the mat had turned up on the porch because something in that camp knew exactly what he would miss. He had not said it. She would have heard a brother who was jealous of the water.
The boys had been asleep. He hadn't woken them.
At the hour the column's timekeeper called the afternoon prayer, a young man climbed onto the roof of a pickup and gave the call, and the column stopped where it was and spread out off the road onto the gravel.
Ibrahim stood with his bag in his hand.
He had not prayed in eight years. He could put a date to the last time: his mother's funeral, the funeral prayer, standing at the back with his hands folded and his mind on the drive home. Before that, the festival prayers. Before that, his mother calling him from the yard at the hours, and her voice going up on his name. He had stopped as most men he knew had stopped, without deciding to.
He took the mat out of the bag and unrolled it. It still smelled of her house, of the cedar box she had kept it in. The pile was worn flat in two places where her knees had gone down for forty years.
He had to choose a direction. The sun was no help. It hung where it had hung for a year and gave him no east or west, only up. He looked at the road and worked it out the way he would work out a map at the bureau: they were walking north; the holy city was behind them; behind was south. He laid the mat with its top toward the way they had come, and stood on it, and raised his hands.
The men around him had already begun. He followed their bending and their rising half a beat late, a man copying his neighbours at a wedding dance. He said the Opening again under his breath. His knees found his mother's two worn places. When he went down into prostration and put his forehead on the wool, it was cool and smelled of cedar. Something in his chest that had been held tight for eight years let go so suddenly that he stayed down longer than the others and had to scramble up after them.
When it was done he sat back on his heels with his eyes shut.
A hand touched his shoulder. He opened his eyes. The man on the next mat, an old farmer in a frayed jacket with a plastic compass on a string round his neck, was leaning toward him. He did not look unkind.
"Brother," he said, and took Ibrahim by both shoulders, and turned him a little to the left, the width of a hand. "It's that way. You were facing almost right."