The jerrycan was lighter than it should have been, and Father Elias knew before he tipped it that there would not be enough.
He poured anyway. The water went into the font with a hollow sound, a sound he had not heard in that copper in forty years of baptisms, because the font had always been filled from the tap in the sacristy and the tap had always run. It had stopped on Thursday. The truck came on Tuesdays. Between Thursday and Tuesday there was a baby to baptise, and a church that held two hundred people, and a kitchen in the parish hall that fed thirty old men a week on lentils and whatever the bakery could spare.
He set the empty can on the flagstones and looked at the water. It covered the bottom of the font by the width of his hand.
Saint Simeon's had stood in Bab Touma since before the Ottomans, and it had a cistern under its courtyard like every old house in the quarter. Elias had lifted the iron cover in January. He had shone a torch down and seen dust and a broken bucket and the pale stripe on the stone where the water used to stand. The man from the governorate had come in February with a clipboard and told him every cistern inside the walls was the same, and the river was the same, and Elias should pray for rain, which was a strange thing to hear from a man with a clipboard.
He had prayed. The sheikh at the mosque on the corner had led the prayer for rain twice since the new year, the men standing out in the dry lot behind the bakery with their hands turned palm down. Elias had watched them from the bell tower. Nothing had come for them either.
It was the third spring like this. He had stopped saying so aloud, because people looked at him as if he were reading out a list of the dead.
The side door scraped. Samia came in sideways, holding a second jerrycan against her hip with both arms, her face red under her scarf.
"For the baby," she said. "My sister will kill me if he's baptised in a puddle."
"You can't spare this."
"I can't spare it. Take it."
He took it. It was full, and his back told him so. Together they tipped it into the font, and the water rose to a depth a child could be lowered into, and Samia stood with her hands on the rim and breathed.
"Where is Fadi? I thought he'd be carrying this for you."
"At home. He's tired all the time." She wiped her hands on her skirt. "He and his cousins went down our cistern in February, the three of them, with a torch and a rope from the roof. To look for water. They thought there might be a spring at the bottom that nobody had found." She laughed, not much. "There was dust. And an old lamp, a clay one. He brought it up and I made him put it back."
"Boys," Elias said.
"Boys," she agreed, and went to find her sister.
Mira came home at eleven at night with her shoes in her hand.
He heard her on the outside stair and had the kettle on before she reached the top. The flat over the parish hall had two bedrooms and one window that caught any breeze there was, and Elias had pulled both chairs in front of it. There was no breeze. There had been none for a week. The thermometer on the frame said thirty-four, at eleven at night, in the first week of April.
His niece sat down without a word and put her feet up on the sill. She was twenty-eight and had worked at the public hospital since she was twenty-two, and she had the face she wore when the ward had been bad, which meant she would talk in a minute and not before.
"Sixty-one," she said.
"Sixty-one what?"
"Heatstroke. Today. In April." She held out her hand for the tea and he gave it to her. "Old men from the bread queues, mostly. They stand three hours in the sun for bread and fall down in the line. The ice machine broke on Monday. We wrap them in wet sheets and put them under the fan and hope. The fan in bay four is held together with tape."
"Did you lose any?"
"Four." She drank. "And the cooling in the morgue went off at noon, so."
He did not ask her to finish. Down in the street a water seller's cart went by, the man calling his price in a tired voice, and nobody came out to buy.
"There was an old woman," Mira said after a while. "From Duma. Muslim, a sweet lady, very proper. She held my wrist while I was taking her pressure and told me her grandmother used to say that before the end of the world there would be three hard years. The first year the sky keeps back a third of its rain, the second year two thirds, and the third year all of it."
"Did she say what comes after?"
"She said I should ask my priest." Mira put the glass down. "I told her I live with him and he doesn't know anything either."
"Thank you."
"It's climate, Uncle. They have graphs."
"I've seen the graphs."
"And?"
"And they're very good graphs." He took her glass and filled it again from the kettle. "Rain is God's to send. Graphs don't change who sends it."
She looked at him the way she had looked at him when she was twelve and he had told her that her father's death was not a punishment for anything. She had not believed him then either, and she had let him say it.
"There's a baptism tomorrow," he said. "Samia brought her own water."
"Of course she did," said Mira, and closed her eyes.
On Palm Sunday the children walked round the outside of the church three times with candles as tall as they were, wound with white ribbon and sprigs of olive, and the whole quarter came out to watch.
Elias walked at the front with the censer. Behind him came the choir, singing the hymn of the entry into Jerusalem in Arabic, and behind the choir came forty children, the small ones held by the hand and the bigger ones walking proud and solemn with their flames bending in the heat that came off the stones. Somebody's grandmother was throwing rice from a balcony. He had seen it every year of his life. This year the olive sprigs were brown at the edges, cut from trees that had not been watered since the autumn, and nobody mentioned it.
Fadi was in the third row of the bigger children. Elias saw him on the second circuit, twelve years old and thin in his white shirt, holding his candle straight in both hands, and was glad. Samia walked at the side, as mothers did, watching him and not the procession.
On the third circuit they came round to the west door, and the doors were thrown open, and the children went in the way they always went in, in a rush that the choir pretended not to notice, into the cool and the smell of wax.
Fadi stopped on the step.
The children behind him walked round him, the way water goes round a stone. He stood with his candle and looked into the nave, and his face did not change at all.
"Go on," Samia said, close to his ear. "Go in, love."
He did not move. She put her hand on his back, gently, and then not gently, and he leaned back into it like a boy leaning on a wall. His candle tipped. Hot wax ran down over his knuckles. He did not look at it.
Elias handed the censer to the deacon and went back out into the sun.
"Fadi."
"Father." His voice was polite and ordinary.
"You're letting the cool out. Come in."
"I'm all right here."
"I know you are. Come in anyway."
The boy shook his head. Elias took one step down toward him and Fadi took one step back, down onto the street, the candle held well out in front of him now, as if it were the thing he wanted to keep away from the door. Samia's mouth had gone thin. People were looking. Elias crouched, which his knees would make him pay for, until his face was below the boy's.
"Tell me why."
Fadi looked over his head, past the open doors and the children and the gold of the screen, to the font standing full by the pillar where Samia's sister's baby had been lowered into it the day before.
"Not here," he whispered. "Don't make me say it here, Father. It can hear."