The chalk line was Omid's, from the spring, and it was the boy who saw the shadow leave it.
He had drawn it round the foot of the bell tower's shadow on the courtyard flagstones with Esther's chalk, months ago, as a game, to prove to Yasin's girls that nothing ever moved. The shadow had lain inside the line every hour of every day since. No rain had come to wash it off. People stepped over it on the way to the tap. Elias had stopped seeing it, the way he had stopped seeing the white sky.
"Father," the boy said from the crypt door. He said it quietly, the way children say a thing they are afraid will stop if they say it loud. "Father Elias. It's outside."
Elias was under the fig with the rabbi and two glasses of tea. He looked where the boy was pointing.
The edge of the tower's shadow lay a finger's width beyond the chalk.
He watched it. The rabbi beside him had put his glass down on the bench. The shadow did not go back. While they looked it went on, as slowly as the hand of a clock, over the second finger's width, over a crack in the flagstone that it had never reached, toward the fig tree's roots.
Nissim stood up. He did not say anything. He took off his glasses and put them on again.
They came up out of the crypt one after another without being called. Esther with chalk on her fingers. Zahra, and Reza behind her with his hand on Omid's shoulder. Yasin's wife with the little one on her hip and the older girl holding her skirt, and Yasin last, who stood in the doorway and looked up at the sky and then down at the flagstones and then up again. Mira came down the outside stair from the flat in her stockinged feet, with her hair wet from the tap, and stopped on the bottom step.
Nobody spoke. Out in the lane somebody was shouting, a long way off, and somebody else had started to laugh.
It took the whole afternoon.
The light went yellow. Elias had forgotten that it did that. It went yellow on the stones of the tower, and then deeper, the colour of the honey the baker's wife used to bring at Christmas, and the shadows came out of everything and lay down long across the courtyard toward the east. The fig's shadow. The tap's. The children's, enormous, reaching up the wall of the parish hall, so that Yasin's girls held up their arms and laughed at the giants they made. The rabbi's shadow, thin and long, lay across the bench and the flagstones and touched the foot of the crypt stair.
The heat went out of the stones. He felt it go through the soles of his shoes.
Over the roofs of the old city, the swifts came out.
He had not known he missed them. There were hundreds, out of nowhere, out of the eaves and the cracks of the old walls where they must have waited all year, screaming, cutting round the tower and over the domes and back in long falling loops against a sky that was turning, at last, at its western edge, the colour of a peach. Mira had both hands over her mouth. Zahra was crying without a sound. Omid ran in circles under the swifts with his arms out.
Esther had gone down into the crypt and come back up with the old school register from Isfahan, the one she kept under her mattress. She stood in the long light turning to the back page and running her finger along the strokes she had made in fives.
"Three hundred and sixty-six," she said. "I counted them every morning. It was a leap year." She looked up. "I wasn't sure I'd counted right."
"We were told the first day would be like a year," Zahra said, wiping her face with the end of her scarf. "Nobody told us it would be a leap year."
The rabbi laughed out loud. Elias had not heard him laugh like that in six months, a real laugh, from the stomach, and the rabbi put his hand on his daughter's shoulder and kept it there.
"Write it down," he said. "Write the date. Somebody should know it."
"I'll have to go in," Mira said from the bottom step. She had not moved. "The hospital. Half the ward has never slept in the dark. They won't know what's happening." She did not go in.
The sun went down behind the roofs to the west of the city, red and very large, and touched them, and was gone.
The call came from every minaret in the old city at once, at its true hour, for the first time in a year.
It began at the great mosque and then the others took it up, near and far, the voices overlapping, a little out of time with each other, so that the words went over the roofs in waves. Allah is greatest. Elias had heard that call every evening of his life in this quarter. He had never stood still to listen to it. He stood still now.
Yasin and Reza laid the blanket from the crypt on the flagstones of the courtyard, facing south. Zahra stood behind them, and Yasin's wife behind her with the girls. They did not need Sheikh Anas's notebook. The sun had told them. Yasin led them, and his voice cracked on the first words, and he went on.
The rabbi had gone a little way apart, by the wall, facing Jerusalem. He had his shawl over his shoulders. Esther stood beside him. Elias heard him say, in Hebrew and then softly again in Persian for his daughter, the blessing he said every evening: blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, who by his word brings on evenings. He said it as if he had been saying it every day into a noon sky and had not been sure it was still true, and now it was.
Elias went into the church.
It was dark inside, really dark, for the first time since last August. He stood in the nave and could not see the icons on the screen. He found the lamp before the icon of Christ by feel, and the matches beside it, and lit it, and the small light came up and showed him the face. Then he sang, alone, the hymn the Church sings at the lighting of the lamps, the oldest hymn he knew, older than the walls. O gladsome light of the holy glory of the immortal Father, heavenly, holy, blessed Jesus Christ. Now that we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening. He sang it through to the end. His voice caught on the setting of the sun, and he let it.
When he came out the courtyard was blue, and the first star was over the tower.
He went to the tower door. Mira saw him and understood and came with him, and stood by the wall. Inside the door the air was cool, actually cool, coming down from the louvres above, and through the open doorway behind him the old city lay with its first lamps coming on, and over it all the stars he had not seen in a year, more of them every moment, going all the way down to the hills.
The rope hung where it always hung, down through the hole in the ceiling.
He thought of the eleven empty stalls in the choir and of Salwa's new blue dress, and of Rami's voice going east through the open windows of a bus. He thought of the rabbi's chair set a hand's width to the right, and of Yasin thanking Allah first and him second, and of a young woman at his gate with a cold can of water who had said plainly what she was. He did not know what any of it would come to.
He thought of the night two summers ago when the boy had pulled it and it had rung flat a hand's breadth from his face, as if a hand were laid on the bronze. He had rung it every day since, for every office, every hour, so that the quarter would know an hour had passed when the sky would not tell them, and every day it had rung flat, and every day he had heard it.
He took the rope in both hands, and pulled.
Above him in the dark the bell swung up in its frame, and came down, and spoke.
It rang true.