The list was written on the back of a funeral notice, because that was the paper there was.
Elias held it flat on the stone bench inside the gate of Bab Touma while Anas wrote, and the wind off the road kept trying to take it. The gate stood over them, the old Roman arch with the Ottoman stones on top and the modern iron doors shut across it and chained, and against the doors on the outside, by the feel of the shade, somebody had stacked sandbags as high as a man. Above the arch two boys from the mosque sat on the wall with a pair of binoculars between them and argued about whose turn it was.
The clock said half past seven in the evening. The sun said a little after three. It had said a little after three for most of a day now, the third of the long days, the one the Muslims said would be like a week, and the shadows in the square lay toward the north-east at the same slant they had lain at when Elias woke, and when he ate, and when he had lain down for an hour in his clothes with a towel over his eyes and not slept.
"Names," Anas said. "Who's come?"
Elias looked up. The square inside the gate was full of men, and some women standing at the edge by the shuttered shops, and a few boys who should have been sent home. The Mahdi's captains had walked the walls two days ago with a map and a grease pencil and divided the city into pieces, and they had given every quarter its own gate to keep, and had said, plainly, that they could not spare a single man of their own for Bab Touma, and that the quarter would have to hold its gate itself, or not.
So the quarter had come.
He knew the men from Anas's mosque by sight: the baker, the two brothers who mended shoes, the retired schoolmaster with the cane. He knew his own people. Abu Samir, recovered, in his good jacket. Two of the Khoury cousins. Three of his choir out of eleven, the three who had stayed. Father Boulos from the Latin church across the street had come with four of his parishioners, and the old Armenian deacon with his son. And in the second row, standing together a little apart as if they had not yet been told whether they belonged in the square at all, were the people from his crypt.
Reza Karimi in a borrowed coat. Zahra beside him with her arms folded. Omid, who was ten, holding his mother's sleeve. Esther, very straight. Yasin from Douma, who prayed beside Reza at the estimated hours. And the rabbi, with his stick, who had climbed the crypt stair that afternoon one step at a time and refused Elias's arm.
"Write them all," Elias said.
It took an hour to make the watch, and most of the hour was prayer.
That was what nobody had seen coming. Anas had begun with the walls, so many men to each stretch, in turns of three hours by the clock, and it had gone well until the shoemaker said that his turn from nine to midnight ran across the night prayer, and the schoolmaster said his ran across the dawn, and then the Khoury cousins wanted to know what happened to the turns that ran across the Divine Liturgy on Sunday, and Father Boulos said gently that his people had a Mass.
Then the rabbi spoke, from the second row, in his slow careful Arabic that he had learned from books and from the radio.
"My daughter and I pray three times in the day," he said. "And when the sun goes down the Sabbath begins, by your clocks on Friday, and on the Sabbath I may not carry this." He lifted his stick an inch. "I'm sorry. I'll stand there without it. But you should know."
Somebody laughed, not unkindly. The square shifted. Elias saw some of the men from the mosque look at the old man in a way they had not looked at him before, and saw some of his own people look at the floor.
Anas put the pencil down.
"Then we'll do it the other way round," he said.
He turned the funeral notice over and began again. He did not start from the walls. He started from the prayers. He wrote the five times of his own people down the side in a column, by the clock, as the Mahdi's camp sent them out each morning. Elias gave him the hours of the church beside it, the morning office and the evening and the late one, and the Liturgy. Father Boulos gave him the Mass. The rabbi gave him the morning and the afternoon and the evening, and the hour of the Sabbath, and Esther corrected her father's sum by four minutes, and he let her.
Then Anas drew the walls across the top, and put the names into the grid one by one, so that every man who was at his prayer had a man beside him on the wall who was not.
"When we pray, you stand," he said to Elias, not looking up. "When you pray, we stand. When the rabbi has his Sabbath, Omid's father carries his stick for him." He glanced at Reza. "If you will."
"I'll carry it," Reza said. "I carried his bag across four borders. I can carry a stick up a wall."
Nobody laughed this time. Elias looked at the grid. It was ugly, and full of crossings-out, and it was the first thing he had seen in a year that made sense to him. Nobody's prayer had been changed in it by so much as a word. They had only been laid out side by side, like the shifts on Mira's ward.
He walked the wall afterwards with the boys and the binoculars, because it was his first turn and because he could not have slept.
From up there the city lay brown under the stuck sun, roof after roof, with its domes and its minarets and the two bell towers of Bab Touma that he knew the way he knew his own hands. Beyond the walls the orchards were dead to the horizon, grey trees in grey dust, and the road went out through them to the south and the east and lost itself in haze.
"There," said the older boy, and gave him the glasses. "Low down. Past the last pylons."
Elias looked for a long time before he understood what he was looking at.
It was a cloud. One cloud, flat-bottomed and grey and very far off, low on the edge of the world in the south where the Deraa road went, the only cloud in a sky that had been white and empty since before the drought's fourth summer. It did not move with the wind. It sat on the horizon like a lid. Under it, so faint he thought at first it was his eyes, the haze had a colour the haze had not had in years. It was green.
"That's them," the boy said. "That's where the rain is. My uncle says it goes along with him. It rains on them every afternoon."
Elias handed the binoculars back. He found his hand was not quite steady and put it on the parapet. The stone was hot. The green under the cloud stayed with him when he closed his eyes, the way a lamp stays after you look away from it.
"Is it close?"
"Not yet," he said. "Watch it. Write down when it moves."
The boy took a pencil stub from behind his ear, pleased to have been given a job.
Anas found him there at eleven by the clock, with the sun still at three, and leaned on the parapet beside him and looked at the cloud through the glasses and said nothing for some time.
"My night prayer's at a quarter past," he said at last. "The schoolmaster will stand for me." He lowered the glasses. "You should sleep."
"I'll sleep when you do."
"I'm fifty-eight. I don't sleep. I lie down and think about my sins."
"Then lie down here." Elias nodded at the funeral notice, which Anas had folded into his coat pocket. "There's a gap in the grid. Midnight to the dawn. Nobody's name is on the gate itself."
Anas took the paper out and unfolded it against the stone and looked. Elias could tell he had seen it and left it there, because he had not wanted to give it to anyone.
"Two men," he said. "Half each. You take it from midnight to my dawn prayer, so there's a man on the gate while I pray. I'll take it from the prayer to the full light."
"The full light," Elias said, and looked at the sun, which had hardly moved since breakfast. "How will you know?"
"By the clock, like everybody else." Anas took the pencil out of the boy's hand without asking and wrote, under the gate, in the empty square of the grid, two names, Elias's first and then his own, and drew a line between them.