The woman Mira brought up the ladder was carrying a square of cardboard under her arm and a child's drawing folded in her pocket, and the first thing she did on the roof was look east.
"This is Layla," Mira said. "She teaches the children at the tailor's shop by the east gate. She brought me a boy with a fever in the first week and sat with him till it broke. Layla, this is Esther. From Isfahan."
Layla turned from the parapet. She was older than Esther had pictured from the way Mira talked about her, forty or more, with a teacher's habit of standing with her weight forward, ready to stop something.
"Mira says you teach."
"I did. Primary. Then in a crypt, on a flagstone, in chalk."
"I have a tailor's tables and twenty-two children with no schoolbook between them." She almost smiled. "I teach from nothing. You find out what you know."
Esther had brought her register up. She did not know why. It lived in her coat now, and she found she had taken it out and was holding it, the soft cover and the eleven names on the back page and the tally under them, four hundred and forty strokes. Layla read it as one teacher reads another's register, the columns first and then the ticks, and then she took the folded paper out of her own pocket and opened it on the parapet.
It was a wall with small people on top, and below it a field, very green, and one cloud raining straight down in lines.
"A boy from the north of Iraq," she said. "His uncle went over to it. He drew this the first week and I can't make him draw anything else."
The roof of the parish hall was flat and tarred and still warm from the day. There was a water tank in one corner and a broken chair, and a ladder through a hatch to the room below where Father Elias slept, or did not. The quarter kept a watch on its roofs at night as well as its walls. Things came over walls in the dark, people said. Things with faces.
The call for the night prayer went up from the minarets at its proper hour, one and then many. Layla put the cardboard down on the tar and stood on it, facing south.
"We'll watch," Mira said.
They turned their backs to her and their faces out over the roofs. Zahra and Esther's father had learned to give each other that much room in the crypt. Esther heard Layla's voice behind her, low, in Arabic, and then the soft sound of her going down onto the cardboard, and up, and down.
Out past the walls the camp's fires lay on the plain in rows, and over them the cloud, which you could not see at night except as a place with no stars.
Near midnight Mira said her uncle's prayers.
She said them sitting on the broken chair with her elbows on her knees, not loudly, in Arabic, the old words Father Elias said every night in the church below at the hour he called Compline. Esther had heard them through the floor of the crypt for a year without knowing what they were. Mira knew them the way you know a song from the next room. She stumbled once and went back and found her place.
"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night," she said, in the middle of a psalm, "nor for the arrow that flieth by day."
Layla was sitting against the water tank with her eyes shut. She was not asleep. Her son was in the front row tomorrow. She had said that once, when Esther asked, and then nothing else about him at all.
Then the wind turned, and the smell came up over the parapet.
It was new bread, the flat kind just off the iron, and under it wet earth, the smell a field gives off an hour after rain. Esther had not smelled rain in four summers. Her mouth filled before she knew why. Out on the plain, under the place with no stars, a sound had started, soft and even, like sand poured onto a drum: the afternoon's water running off down the channels between the fields.
Esther felt it go through the woman beside the tank like current. Layla's eyes opened.
Layla was on her feet. Esther had not seen her stand. She was at the eastern parapet with both hands on the coping, and then she had one knee up on it, leaning out toward the fires as if the drop to the lane were a step, and her face had gone loose and young.
Esther took her wrist.
She took it the way her father had taken hers in the first night, not hard, just closing her fingers and not letting go. Layla pulled once. Esther held. Mira had stopped praying, and then she started again from the beginning of the psalm, louder, in a voice that shook and kept going.
The wind went back into the west. The smell thinned to dust and cold smoke, and the sound on the plain was only the camp again, a generator and somebody singing a long way off.
They stood there, the three of them, and listened to nothing.
"It rains on them," Layla said, after a long time. Her arm was trembling in Esther's hand. She took her knee down off the coping. "My husband went to the camp. He's out there in it." She looked at Esther. "I only wanted to be wet."
"I know." Esther let go of her wrist. "In the first night something knocked on the church door and talked to me in my friend's voice. Hadas. She's out there too. It had her laugh. It had everything." She heard her own voice go thin and steadied it. "It knew what I'd open the door for."
Layla sat down on the tar where she was.
"I was taken once," she said. "Before all this. Four days. I don't remember them. I thought that meant I'd know it if it came again."
Nobody answered that. Mira finished the psalm and said the rest of Compline to the end, and crossed herself, and put the chair against the hatch.
At two by Mira's watch it was Esther's turn to stay awake, and the other two lay down on blankets against the tank.
She had never said the bedtime Shema over anyone. Her father said it. He had said it over her every night of her childhood, sitting on the edge of her bed with his hand on the blanket, and in the surge he had said it over Omid Karimi in one room while Zahra recited in the other, and in the crypt he had said it over the children on their mattresses. She had always been the one it was said over.
She stood between the two blankets with her hand on the cold parapet.
"Hear, O Israel," she said in Hebrew, softly, "the Lord is our God, the Lord is one."
She said the rest as her father said it, all of it, slowly, so that the words had room. She did not know if it was for Mira, who was a Christian, or Layla, who was a Muslim, or for herself. She said it over all three. She did not think it mattered to the words.
Layla was not asleep. Esther saw her eyes, open, in the dark, looking at her. Layla did not say anything. After a while her eyes closed.
The night went on. Below the roof the quarter began to wake long before the light: doors, feet, the clank of buckets. By four the lanes were full of men queuing at every well and trough to wash before the prayer, nobody talking, as people queue at a hospital, and the sound of the water came up to the roof like rain on the other side of the wall.
Layla got up at half past four, while the east was still black, and folded her blanket.
"My son will be lacing his boots," she said. "I want to see him out of the door. Then the women's rows, for the dawn prayer. I want to be behind him, even if I can't see him."
"Go on," Mira said. "We've got the roof."
Layla went down the ladder. At the bottom she looked up through the hatch at the two of them, and then she was gone into the lane with the others.
Mira came to stand beside Esther at the eastern parapet.
Past the last roofs of the quarter, the open ground on the east side of the city was full of men standing in lines that were not yet straight, thousands of them, dark shapes against darker ground. At the edge of the ground stood the white minaret, plain, catching nothing yet, the only pale thing in the world.
Behind it the eastern sky had begun to come apart from the dark, low down, one long grey seam, and a small figure was climbing the minaret toward it.