He knocked. That was the first wrong thing. He had carried a key since he was eleven.
Layla opened the door with the chain still on and saw a slice of him through the gap: the edge of a jaw, a shoulder in a shirt she did not know, the stairwell light behind him. She shut the door to free the chain and her hands would not do it. She tried twice. On the landing Hamza waited and said nothing, and that was the second wrong thing, because the boy she had raised would have laughed at her through the gap.
Then the door was open and he was in it.
He was thinner. The shirt was a white one from somebody else's cupboard, washed so often it had gone soft as a cloth, and his own clothes were in a plastic bag in his hand. He had not shaved. His eyes were his, and they were steady in a way she had never seen them, steady the way a glass of water is steady on a table nobody has touched.
"Mama," he said.
She held him. He let her. He put his arms round her the way he used to when he was small and wanted to be let go of, patient, waiting. Behind her she heard her mother come out of the kitchen and stop, and say Allah's name once, and begin to cry.
Over his shoulder the window at the end of the landing showed the sky. The sun stood where it had stood when she woke, and where it had stood when she slept before that. It was the third day, the one the imam had said would be like a week. It had barely moved since the dawn prayer.
He ate standing at the counter. He had never done that in his life. Bread, and the lentils her mother had kept warm for three sleeps against the chance, slowly, all of it. Then he washed the bowl himself and dried it and put it in the wrong cupboard.
She had a thousand questions and she asked him one.
"Are you hurt?"
He thought about it. She watched him think about it the way he used to think about whether he had finished his homework.
"No," he said. "Not now."
After that she did not ask, because she saw it cost him. She had felt it two hundred miles away at the hour it happened, a nothing and then an everything that had put her on her knees on the roof, and then the message from his number, two words, and then nothing for the whole of the long month. She knew what the city was saying. She did not need him to tell her it was true. She needed him to sleep.
He slept on top of the covers in his room with the blackout curtain open and the white sun on his face, and he did not seem to mind it. She went in once and stood by the bed. He had always slept with one arm over his face. He slept now on his back with both hands open on his chest, and when she bent to pull the collar of the borrowed shirt straight, his hand came up, without his waking, and closed gently round her wrist and moved it away from his throat. Then it let go and lay back down.
She stood in the doorway a long time.
The neighbours came on the second sleep. The widow from upstairs brought a dish of rice. The greengrocer brought a bag of oranges, big and bright, the kind nobody in the district had seen since the dust came. Two students from the university came with nothing and stood on the landing craning past her toward the hall, one of them with his phone half out of his pocket.
"Is it him?" he said. "Auntie. Is it really him?"
Layla took the rice and the oranges and thanked them and shut the door on the students, gently, and stood with her back against it holding a dish that was still warm. Later Hamza came out of his room and looked at the oranges on the counter for a while. Then he looked at her. She put them in the bin, bag and all, and he went back to his room.
He woke for every prayer. Nobody called him. The imam's timetable said the noon prayer was due, and the afternoon, and the sunset prayer under a noon sky, and the night prayer with the sun still standing, and the dawn prayer of a dawn that had not come; and each time Hamza was already up, already washed, already on the rug facing the wall by the bookcase. He prayed slowly. He stayed in prostration so long the first time that her mother started up from her chair. Then he rose, and she sat back down.
Tariq's shoes were still in the rack by the door, the brown ones with the split heel. Hamza looked at them on the first evening that was not an evening, and looked at her, and she shook her head, and he nodded and did not ask either.
Karima's clinic had moved into the back of the girls' school when the light-sick outgrew the mosque basement. Layla went in for her shift because it was her shift. There were twenty camp beds under taped-up windows. Children cried because the sky would not let them sleep, and old men had stopped eating. A woman from the next street lay with a damp cloth over her eyes and had not spoken since her husband came home from the road fed and smiling.
They talked over the beds. They talked about the man from Medina.
"He walked straight up to him," said the woman with the cloth on her eyes, who had not spoken in a week. "My cousin's boy saw it. Straight up, and told him to his face."
"Told him what?" said someone.
"What he was."
Layla wrung out a cloth over the basin. Her hands were shaking and she let them. Karima looked across at her from the medicine table and looked away again, and said nothing. Karima knew. Karima had been in the flat the night Layla came back into her own face, and she had seen the boy in the doorway then. She kept it, as she kept everything in her notebook, and passed Layla the next cloth.
The imam read it after the third day's fourth noon prayer, standing on the step of the mosque because the loudspeaker had failed. He had a paper in his hand that had come down the chain of cells from the north.
"Those who can go, go to Damascus," he read. "Men and women. Bring water and what you can carry. Buses will leave from the ring road when the sun is at the height after next. Those who cannot go, stay and keep your prayers."
The street went quiet. Somebody asked how far. Somebody else said it didn't matter.
She walked home behind the others. She had not decided anything. She was thinking about the clinic, about who would take her shifts, about her mother's knees on the stairs.
The bag was by the door when she came in. His old school rucksack, blue, the zip mended with a paperclip, full and buckled, set beside Tariq's shoes. Hamza was at the counter with a glass of water.
"When did you pack that?"
"When I got home."
So he had known before the imam stood on the step, before she had even seen him through the gap in the chained door. He met her eyes and did not explain, and she understood that he was not going to, not about this and not about the marsh, not today.
She looked at the rucksack beside the brown shoes. If she went, the flat would hold her mother and a pair of shoes and nobody else, and if Tariq ever came home from the road he would come home to that. If she stayed, her son would walk north alone for the second time in his life.
Her mother spoke from the kitchen doorway.
"There's a big bag on top of the wardrobe," she said. "Your father's. It has wheels."
Layla went and got it down.