The great doors of the east gate came open at eight in the morning, and Layla was in the first crowd through them.
She had not slept. Nobody in the quarter had. The news had come up from the coast in the night on a dozen phones and a truck driver's radio and a boy running along the wall shouting it, and by the dawn prayer the whole city knew it and did not know what to do with it. The men had gone to the mosques. The women had gone to the gate.
There were perhaps two hundred of them. They came out onto the plain in a loose wide crowd with their scarves pulled forward against the dust, mothers and wives and sisters and a few old men, walking fast and not talking. Layla had left the twenty-two children with the grandmother who folded drawings without looking at them. She had told the children she would be back by noon. She had not known if that was true.
The woman from the bread queue walked beside her, the one whose sister's husband had gone over the wall for apricots.
"Mine's in Street Nine," the woman said. "He sent word. Street Nine, by the water tank."
"How do you know they have streets?"
"Everyone knows. They had numbers on everything."
The camp lay on the plain ahead of them like a town that had been dropped from a height. Tents leaned. Some had fallen. Canvas flapped on its poles in the wind with nothing to hold it down, and the green fields that had grown up round the camp in the rain had not been watered since yesterday, and the leaves were curling in the heat.
The streets did have numbers. They were painted on boards at the corners in a tidy hand. Every tent had a list pinned to its pole, in the same hand, names and ages in neat columns, like the class lists Layla had pinned to her own classroom door every September for nineteen years.
The women scattered into the streets. Layla heard names called, and then crying, and once a scream that went on and on and was a woman who had found what she came for and found it dead. Most of the tents were empty.
She did not know which street. Tariq had never sent word.
She went down them one by one. She read the lists the way she read her pupils' handwriting, fast and without hope, and she did not let herself stop at the names that were almost his. Street Four. Street Five. A coin lay in the dirt in front of her, a gold one, old, with a worn face on it. She stepped over it. In Street Six there was a whole scatter of them, gold and silver and a cup lying on its side, and nobody had picked any of it up, and she understood without wanting to that nobody would.
In Street Seven, on the pole of a tent with its flap tied back, she found his name.
Tariq al-Mansour. Forty-six. Teacher.
Teacher. That was her work, not his. He had given whoever wrote the list her job.
The tent was empty. His blanket was folded at the end of a camp bed. Beside it, on the ground, was a plastic bowl with a spoon in it and nothing else.
She found him behind the tents, at the edge of the camp, where the ground dropped to a dry irrigation ditch below the orchards.
He was sitting on the bank with his legs hanging over the ditch and a paper bag in his lap. He was wearing a shirt she had never seen, a good white one, clean, and his beard had been trimmed by someone who knew how. He looked well. He looked better fed than she had seen him in three years. He was smiling a little, at the bottom of the ditch, where there was nothing at all.
"Tariq."
He turned his head. He looked at her the way you look at a woman in a shop who has said good morning. Pleasant. Waiting to see what she wanted.
She sat down on the bank next to him.
The bag in his lap was full of apricots. They were the fat ones, too orange, the ones that grew in the rain that fell on the people who said yes. She looked into the bag. None of them had been eaten. Some had gone soft.
"Have you eaten?"
He thought about it.
"They said there would be breakfast."
"Who said?"
He thought about that too, and then he stopped thinking about it, and went back to smiling at the ditch.
She took the bag out of his lap and set it on the bank. She took his hand. It was warm and dry and it let her take it. When she stood up, he stood up. When she walked, he walked beside her. She did not look back at the bag.
The back room of the tailor's workshop had a mattress on the floor and a basin and a window onto the yard. She sat him on the mattress. She knelt in front of him with the basin and washed his face, his hands, his feet, the way you wash a child who has come in from the street, and he let her. The water turned grey. She changed it and did it again.
"You're home," she said.
He looked round the room, at the tailor's chalk marks on the table, the headless dummies stacked in the corner, the children's drawings she had pinned along one wall.
"This isn't home."
"It's where we are."
He seemed to accept that.
She talked to him all afternoon. She told him about the siege, and the bread queue and the twenty-two children and the boy who drew rain falling on one field. She told him that the sun set every evening now at the right time. He listened the way the dummies in the corner listened. Once he nodded at something she said, the small agreeing nod of a man who has been told a price, and she stopped talking for a while.
She did not say Hamza's name. She had said it to him once, a season ago in their own kitchen, when he came back from the camp the first time, fed and smiling. She had asked him where his son was and he had asked her who she meant. She had not been able to say it to him since.
He slept that night on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a man laid out. She lay beside him on the edge of the mattress and did not sleep, and listened to him breathe, and counted the breaths for something to count.
The next day was the same. She took the children in the morning in the front room and kept the door to the back room open so she could see him. He sat on the mattress. Once he got up and went to the window and stood there with his hands at his sides, looking at the yard. She gave the children paper and told them to draw the place they would go when the roads opened.
In the evening, after the sunset prayer, she heard boots in the yard.
She was at the table with a bowl of lentils she was trying to make Tariq eat. He had taken two spoonfuls, politely, and stopped. The light in the window was going. Out in the yard the boots stopped at the pump, and there was the sound of water and of someone washing his face and his arms the way men wash for prayer after a long road, and she knew the sound before she let herself know it.
The door from the yard opened.
Hamza stood in it with dust to his knees and his hair wet from the pump. He had nothing in his hands. His face was thin and burned dark by the sun on the coast road, and there was something in it she had not seen since before the marsh. It was loose. It was the face of a boy who has run a long way and stopped.
"Mama."
She could not get up. She sat with the spoon in her hand.
Hamza looked past her, to the mattress in the back room, where his father was sitting with his hands on his knees. He stood very still in the doorway.
Tariq lifted his head.
He looked at the young man in the door for a long moment, the dust, the wet hair, the empty hands. Something went across his face. It was slow, the way a shadow goes across a field when a cloud passes. His mouth opened.
"Hamza," he said.