The baby on the second floor had been screaming since the sun went down, and nobody on the stairs told its mother to quiet it.
Layla passed her on the landing with two folding chairs under one arm and a flask of tea in the other hand. The young mother was walking the boy up and down in the dark with her phone torch pointed at the ceiling so he could see something, anything, and he went on screaming at the black window as if it had done him harm. He was eleven months old. He had been born in the long day. He had never seen a night.
"He thinks the world's gone," the girl said, without stopping. "How do I tell him?"
Layla did not know. She touched the boy's foot as she went by. It was hot and kicking.
The roof was full. The whole building was up there and half of the next one, sitting on plastic crates and on the parapet and on the water tanks, and nobody was talking much. The sky was black from one side to the other. The stars stood in it, more than she had ever seen over this city, because the street lamps had been dead since the spring and the power came for two hours a day. Somebody's grandfather was naming them to a group of children in a low voice. Somebody else was crying and pretending not to.
Her mother was already up there, on the prayer rug she had carried up herself, at the corner of the roof that faced the right way. She had prayed the sunset prayer when the sun went down, at its real hour, for the first time in a year, and Layla had watched her stand afterwards with her palms open and her face wet. Now the night prayer was due. Her mother had not needed a timetable for it. She had looked at the sky and stood up.
Layla set the chairs down and took out her phone.
She had rung Hamza at the sunset prayer and he had not answered. She had rung at the night prayer. Now she rang again, and it went straight to the recorded woman who said the number was unavailable. He had rung three times since the city began to shake, the last two from borrowed phones, only to say he was safe. The first call was the one she kept. "Mother, the city shook three times." He had sounded out of breath and happy, as if he had run up a flight of stairs to tell her, and then the line had gone.
She typed: "It's dark here. Is it dark there? Ring me." She looked at it, deleted "Ring me", typed it again, and sent it. One grey tick.
Her mother finished and sat down on the crate beside her, and they drank the tea out of the flask lid, passing it back and forth.
"Your father would have liked this," her mother said. "He liked the roof at night. He said you could hear the sea."
Layla listened. She could. Under the baby and the low talk and a dog somewhere, there was the long breathing of the water three streets down, which she had not heard in a year because the city had never once been quiet enough.
"Tariq used to bring Hamza up here," she said. "To look at the planes."
Her mother said nothing. They did not talk about Tariq. Tariq was in the camp with a full stomach and his son's name gone out of his head, and the last time she saw him he had been in the window of a camp bus, lifting his hand to her the way a man waves to a neighbour.
"Does that boy eat?" her mother said. "In that mosque. Who feeds him?"
"The mosque feeds him. Dates and bread and soup. He says the soup is the same every day and he'd die for it."
"Don't say die."
Layla almost laughed. She looked at the phone again. The grey tick had not turned into two. At the bus depot in the white noon, with his bag on his shoulder, he had promised to call every Friday, and he had called most Fridays. She kept the dates in the back of her school planner. Once he had recited a verse down the line from the mosque courtyard to prove he had learned it, and she had made him do it twice.
She was holding the flask lid when it went.
It began as nothing. Every sound on the roof went on: the baby, the sea, the old man counting stars. Her hands went on holding the lid. But she was not in it. She knew this feeling. She had had four days of it in the spring, four days she could not remember, and what she kept from them was this exactly: a room with the furniture still in it and nobody home. She was sitting on a crate on her own roof, and she was not there.
She did not know how long. Long enough for the tea to go cold against her fingers. Long enough to think, from a great way off and quite calm: it is happening again. Somebody is going to have to call Karima.
Then everything came back at once.
It came through her chest. She would try afterwards to say it to herself in words and never manage it. It sat in the place where pain goes. It was a blow, the flat of something enormous coming down, the way the floor comes up at you when you miss a step in the dark. The lid went out of her hand. She heard it ring on the concrete. She was on her knees and could not remember getting there. Her mouth was open and no air would come into it.
"Layla. Layla."
Her mother's hands were on her face. Her mother's hands were cold and smelled of the washing water. Layla got one breath in, a thin whistling one, and the word that came out on it was her son's name.
Her mother did not ask. She knelt on the roof in front of everybody with Layla's head against her shoulder and recited into her hair. She recited the Throne Verse in Arabic, and then the last two chapters of the Quran, and then the Throne Verse again, not loudly, in the same voice she had used when Layla was six and had a fever. Layla held on to her mother's cardigan with both hands.
The neighbours looked away. They were kind about it. A woman from the fourth floor brought a cup of water and set it down beside them and went back to her crate without a word. The old man kept naming stars, a little louder, so the children would keep looking up.
It passed slowly. Her breath came back first, then her knees, which hurt, then the cold of the roof through her skirt. The shape of it did not come back. She tried to look straight at what had happened and it slid away, like the dream of the door in the spring, always open and never entered. All she had was the certainty that something had been done. Something had been done somewhere, a long way off, in the dark, at this moment, and she had felt it land.
"Hamza," she said again.
"He's in Medina," her mother said. "Nothing can go into Medina. You told me so yourself. The angels on the roads."
"I know."
"Then drink your water."
She drank it. She sat back on the crate with her mother's arm round her and her phone face down on her knee, and she did not ring him again, because she was afraid of the recorded woman. The baby downstairs had stopped. Somebody had got him to sleep at last, or he had cried himself out. The sea went on. She thought of Karima's clinic on the corner and its beds of the light-sick, men and women whose eyes had burned through a year of noon. Tonight they would sleep without the blackout cloth. She did not want Karima. She would not have known what to tell her.
Near dawn the sky went from black to dark blue at its eastern edge, and the people on the roof stood up one by one and turned toward it as if they were waiting for a guest. Her mother rose for the dawn prayer. Layla rose with her. She had washed for it downstairs and was pulling her scarf straight when the phone on the crate lit up against the concrete.
She picked it up.
It was Hamza's number. One message, two words, sent a minute ago.
"I'm alive."