The boy at the checkpoint wanted to see his hands.
Officer Ibrahim held them out, palms down, then palms up. He had walked the last eleven miles from the place where the lorry dropped him, along a road lined with orchards somebody had stripped to the twigs, and his hands were grey with the dust of it. On the backs of both, under the dust, his own handwriting ran in faded blue biro up past the wrists. Numbers, times, two place names, and a word he had written very small and gone over twice.
"What's this?"
"Counts," Ibrahim said. "From the camp. I didn't have paper."
The boy looked at him a long moment. He was perhaps seventeen, with a borrowed rifle he held like a broom. Beside him an older woman in a white headscarf did the thing Ibrahim had heard the Mahdi's cells did at every gate. She looked into his eyes for a while, the left and then the right, the way a nurse checks for concussion. Then she looked at his forehead, as if she could read it. Perhaps she could. He had stood in a village square and failed to read a word that a woman beside him read aloud, and he had stood in a free house months later and read it in a single breath, and he no longer knew who could read what.
"He's clean," she said. "Take him up. They'll want the counts."
The boy walked him up through the camp. It filled the eastern suburbs of the city, tents in schoolyards and car parks and on the verges of the ring road, and it was the opposite of the camp he had come from in every way he could count. Nobody here was fat. A queue of women with jerrycans stood at a water tanker and moved up one place at a time without pushing. Men in their shirtsleeves were digging latrines along a wall. Under an awning a boy of ten was reading Quran aloud to an old man who had his eyes shut, and when the boy stumbled the old man corrected him without opening them.
They gave him a chair in a classroom of the girls' secondary school on the eastern edge of the city. Somebody had pushed the desks to the walls. The blackboard still had a lesson on it, half wiped: the parts of a flower, in coloured chalk. There were eight people at the table. He knew none of them and he knew, before anyone pointed, which one was the Mahdi.
He was the least remarkable man in the room. That was how Ibrahim knew. He sat at the far end in a plain grey jacket, a man in his thirties with a short beard and tired eyes, and he had a glass of water in front of him that he had not touched, and nobody else at the table quite stopped knowing where he was. A thin older woman beside him had a blanket over her knees and coughed into a handkerchief.
"From the beginning," said a big man with a commander's way of folding his arms. "Everything you saw. Numbers first."
So Ibrahim gave it to them the way he would have given it to a duty sergeant.
At the salt marsh outside Medina, when he went back in, the camp had been between sixty and eighty thousand people, by his count of tents in blocks of a hundred and the fires at night when there was a night. It had grown since, at every town on the road north. Besides them, seventy thousand of the Jews of Isfahan followed him, wearing Persian shawls. Vehicles, perhaps nine thousand. Livestock beyond counting, every beast of it fat. Over the camp went a grey cloud that did not travel with the wind, and rain fell from it on the ground the camp stood on and on nobody else's.
He told them about the ruins. In a dead village off the road a ruin had been told to bring out its treasures, and the gold had come up out of the ground and followed the man away the way bees follow a swarm. He had seen it with his own eyes. He had not believed it while he saw it, and he believed it now.
He told them about the faces. Things that wore the faces of people's dead walked between the tents when there was a night, and people got up from their blankets and followed them.
"Devils," the commander said.
"I didn't have a word for them then," Ibrahim said. "I do now."
His grandmother had had the word all along. He had spent most of his adult life being glad not to need her words, and then a year of noon had taken that gladness off him like a coat.
He told them about the man who ran the human side of the camp. An Englishman named Gardner, Julian Gardner, about forty, who kept lists: who had given what, who had said yes, which households had come in whole and which had held somebody back. Gardner had been given charge of a crew of jinn once and lost them. Now he had the humans. He was one of a few dozen foreigners who sat nearest the man at the fire and called themselves the Concord. They had been with him, they said, before he came out. He drove a white car with diplomatic plates from a country that no longer sent diplomats anywhere.
"And the man himself?"
Ibrahim looked at the backs of his hands.
"One eye," he said. "The right one's blind. It sits out of his face like a grape floating. And the word." He did not say the word. Everyone in the room knew it. "For a year I couldn't read it. Then I could."
The Mahdi spoke for the first time.
"The children in the camp," he said. "Do they go to school?"
Ibrahim blinked. It was not a question on any form he had ever filled in.
"There are schools," he said slowly. "In tents. They teach them songs. About him."
The Mahdi nodded, as if that was what he had needed to know, and wrote nothing down.
The commander had a dozen more questions: routes, weapons, whether the camp kept watches at night, and Ibrahim answered them all. The ink on his hands gave out before the questions did. When the others had finished, the Mahdi asked the second one.
"How did you live, in there?"
He could have answered it a dozen ways that were true. He had a police officer's training in the true answer that leaves out the part that matters.
"Well," he said. "They gave me a house. With water in the taps, when there was drought on every side. I took it. I lived in it for months." He made himself go on. "I found my mother's prayer mat in it, among the things they gave me. I don't know how it got there. That's when I ran."
Nobody at the table said anything. The thin woman with the blanket had stopped coughing to listen.
The Mahdi looked at him. It was not a long look. Ibrahim had been looked at by magistrates and by murderers and by a man with one eye, and none of them had looked at him like this, as if what he had just said was ordinary information about a road, to be noted and gone past.
"Most of the people in this city took something," the Mahdi said. "Some of them are still holding it."
Somewhere outside a voice began the call to prayer, thin and unsure, a young man by the sound. It was the afternoon prayer by the estimate the camp had sent round, under a sun that had hardly moved since Ibrahim walked up the orchard road. The people at the table began to rise. Chairs scraped. The commander rolled up his sleeves for the washing.
Ibrahim stayed in his chair. He had prayed in a column on a road, at guessed hours, half a beat behind strangers, and one of them had turned him by the shoulders to the right direction. He did not know what a man like him did in a room like this one. He thought perhaps he would go out to the yard and pray at the back.
The Mahdi stopped beside his chair on his way to the door.
"Wash, and stand next to me," he said. "There's room."