The stair inside the gate tower had sixty-three steps, and Esther counted them because the jerrycan was full and she had to think about something that was not her arms.
At the top the light hit her like a slap. The wall walk ran away to the left along the top of the old wall, a path of worn stone with a parapet on the outer side and the backs of houses on the inner, where people had built their kitchens into the wall centuries ago and hung their washing off it. There was no washing now. There was a line of men and boys sitting with their backs to the parapet in whatever shade it threw, and a few standing at the gaps, looking out.
Reza was one of the standing ones. Beside him a boy from Father Elias's choir had a pair of binoculars with one lens cracked. Further along, an old man from one of the cellar families sat on a folded blanket with a shotgun across his knees that Esther did not think had been fired in her lifetime. Sheikh Anas was walking the line with a notebook, writing down who was where. The quarter kept its watch that way: whoever could stand, from whichever house, in the order they came up the stairs.
"Water," she said.
Reza turned round. He looked at the can and then at her face.
"You shouldn't have carried that up on your own."
"There was nobody else. Everyone's on a wall." She set it down and straightened, and her back cracked. "How many cups?"
"Twenty-six of us on this stretch." He did not take a cup. "Esther. Before you look. They've come round this side."
She had seen it from the courtyard, in pieces, all afternoon: a grey edge of cloud over the roofs to the south, then to the east, then a darkness at the end of every street that ran outward. She had not seen it whole.
From the gap in the parapet the plain went away to the north and east, the orchards and the old farm villages that had been brown for four summers. They were not brown now. Below the wall, beginning about a stone's throw from its foot, everything was green. The camp lay on the green in blocks, tents in rows with lanes between them, numbered on boards at the corners, and over all of it hung a low grey cloud, and out of the cloud the rain came down fine and straight.
It fell to a line. Esther could see the line. On one side of it the earth was dark and wet and the grass stood up. On the other side, the city's side, the dust lay as it had lain for years, and a wind came over the wall from behind her and lifted it and blew it out toward the rain, and the rain knocked it down.
She drank the cup of water Reza put into her hand without noticing she had taken it.
The block nearest the wall was pale. For a moment she did not understand why. Then she did. The people in it were wearing shawls, and the shawls were wet and clung, cream and milk and the colour of new wool, hundreds of them, more, standing and sitting in the lanes between the tents with the rain running off them.
"The Messenger of Allah said that the Dajjal would be followed by seventy thousand Jews of Isfahan," Zahra's mother had said at the stairwell window on the morning of the buses, "wearing Persian shawls." She had said it low, as if she were apologising for something. She had said she was sorry it was their street.
Esther had not believed the number then. It had seemed a number from a book. She did not try to count now. She looked for faces, and at that distance there were no faces, only the shawls and the rain and the shape of people.
Then she heard them singing.
Her father came up the last of the sixty-three steps on Reza's arm, slowly, one step and a breath and one step. He had heard about the wall from the boys in the courtyard, and he had said he would come up and see it, and Esther had said he would not, and here he was. He stood at the gap with both hands on the parapet and his shoulders going up and down.
The singing came up from the pale block on the wet air, faint, a great many voices together that were not trying to be together. Esther knew the tune before she knew the words. Every child she had ever taught knew it. It was a song for a table, for a long evening with too much food and the grandparents falling asleep, a counting song that went on verse after verse, a little longer than the children's patience.
Her father listened to two verses with his eyes closed.
"Dayenu," he said.
The boy with the binoculars looked at him.
"It's a Passover song," her father told him, in his slow Arabic, kindly, as he would have told a pupil. "For the table. Each verse is a thing God did for us when we came out of Egypt. And after each one we sing that it would have been enough." He opened his eyes and looked down at the rain. "If he had only done this, it would have been enough. If he had only done that."
"Enough for what?" the boy asked.
Her father did not answer him. He stood a little longer. Then he took his hands off the parapet and turned and put one of them on Reza's arm again.
"I've seen it," he said to Esther. "I'll go down now."
"I'll come."
"No. Give them the water. Give them all of it." He went to the head of the stair, and at the top step he stopped and said, without turning round, "I sang that song at Hadas's table when she was six. She did the counting on her fingers."
He went down. She listened to his feet on the stair until she could not hear them.
She gave out the water. She gave twenty-six cups, and one to Sheikh Anas, who drank it standing and thanked her and wrote her name down too, and when the can was empty she went back to the gap.
She found Hadas the way you find your own child in a playground, without looking.
It was the way she stood. Weight on one hip, one hand on the strap of a rucksack, chin up as if somebody had just said something stupid and she was deciding whether to laugh. She stood at the very edge of the camp, right on the line where the rain stopped, with the wet on her side and the dust a step in front of her toes. Her shawl was pulled up over her hair. The rucksack had a length of string tied round it where the zip had split.
Esther's hands had gone tight on the stone.
She thought of the knock at the church door in the first night, three times, and the voice that had been Hadas's voice to the last crack in it. She thought of her father holding her wrist. She looked down at the girl's feet, as her father had taught her in the surge, and could not see them. They were in the grass, in the wet, too far.
Beside the girl stood a man in a raincoat with a clipboard. He was writing something. He finished it and looked up, like a man checking a house number against a form, and his face turned toward the wall and the gap and Esther in it.
He looked for a while. Then he bent his head and wrote one more thing on his clipboard.
The girl at the edge of the rain followed where he had looked. She saw Esther. Her chin came down and her whole face changed, and she lifted her arm high over her head, in the wet shawl, and waved, the way she had waved from the bus.