The clerks' tables were still standing under their awnings, and on every one of them the papers had been weighted down with stones, as if the clerks meant to come back after lunch.
Esther stood at the first table with the wind lifting the corners of the lists under her hand. The awning was striped green and white, a market awning, and somebody had hung a hand-painted board from its front edge in Persian and English. It said "Isfahan. Enquiries."
You just ask, Hadas had written. There are tables under awnings and you just ask.
There was nobody to ask. The camp lay all round her on the plain, a town of tents with the life gone out of it in a night, canvas cracking in the wind and the rows going away in every direction under a sky with no cloud on it anywhere. The rain had stopped. Nobody had to tell her that; the ground told her. Yesterday it had been green to the wall. This morning the grass was already lying down in the heat, and the leaves on the aubergine plants by the tents had gone soft and dark, and there was a smell coming off the ground like a fruit bowl left too long.
Mira had come out with her, in her nurse's shoes, with her bag. She had gone on ahead down the lane between the tents to where a woman was sitting on the ground.
The Isfahan streets were numbered like the others. Esther walked them slowly. She knew it was useless to hurry, and she could not have hurried anyway; every few steps there was something on the ground, a cooking pot, a child's sandal, a gold coin with a worn face lying in the dust that nobody had touched, and the shawls. There were shawls everywhere. They lay where people had dropped them, in the lanes, across tent ropes, trodden into the mud that had been mud yesterday and was drying now into cracked grey plates. Cream and milk and the colour of new wool. Nobody had folded a single one.
She found the list on the pole of a tent in the eleventh street. The tent flap was tied back. A vegetable patch outside it, a metre square, edged with stones, the aubergines in it gone black.
Hadas. Twenty-four.
Under it her mother's name, and under that her aunt's, and beside the aunt's name, in the same small square capitals, the word "chair".
The tent was empty. There was a rucksack in it with a split zip and no string. There were the good plates, stacked. That was all.
Mira found her there a while later, sitting on the camp bed with the list in her lap. She had taken it off the pole without deciding to. Mira did not ask about it. She said the woman on the ground at the end of the lane had been sitting there since the rain stopped and did not know her own name, and that there were others like her in every street, hundreds, smiling, fed, and that the hospital would send carts. Then she held out her hand and Esther took it and stood up.
She did not tell her father.
Her father was in the crypt when she came back, sitting on his chair under the low arch with nothing in his hands. He looked at her as she came down the stair, at her dusty shoes and her face, and he did not ask her anything, and she understood that he was not going to, and that he had decided this before she went out.
She lay down on her mattress. Over by the stair Zahra was making tea on the little gas ring. The two girls from the alcove had gone up into the courtyard to look at the sky, and every so often one of them shouted down the stair to tell everybody it was still blue.
"There'll be lists," her father said, after a long time. "They'll put up lists. They always do, afterwards."
"I know."
"Not today, maybe." He looked at the candle on the crate. "Today people are walking."
Esther put her arm over her eyes.
The men who had gone south after the one-eyed man were coming back through the day in twos and threes, and they brought the news of the road with them into the lanes, and the lanes brought it down the stair. The road to the coast. The followers who had run after him, lying on it where they had fallen, all the way through the hills, without a mark on any of them. Nobody knew how many. Men had been burying them since first light.
She thought of the empty tent and the good plates. She thought of the word "chair".
At dusk Esther went up to bar the door of the church for the night.
Father Elias left it a hand's width open until the sunset prayer, so that anyone in the lane could see there was a light inside. The nave was nearly dark. The last of the day came in through the gap in a long grey stripe across the flagstones, and halfway along the stripe there was a shadow, a head and a pair of shoulders, somebody sitting on the step outside with her back against the wood.
She had not knocked. She had not called. She sat with her head down, the way people sit at a bus stop when the bus is very late and they have stopped looking up the road for it.
Esther stopped with her hand on the iron bar. She had stood here before, and her father had held her wrist here, and on the other side of this wood something had talked to her in exactly Hadas's voice. She did not say anything.
"I didn't want to knock," the girl on the step said, without turning round. "They knock. That's what they do. So I sat down and waited for you to come and look."
It was Hadas's voice. It was hoarse and tired, and it had no laugh waiting under it at all.
Esther looked down through the gap at the step.
There were feet on it. Two of them, in cheap sandals with the straps worn through, and the heels were raw and blistered and grey with the dust of the plain, and one toenail was painted red and the rest had grown out. A girl's feet. A girl who had walked a long way in the wrong shoes.
Esther drew the bar and pulled the door wide.
Hadas got up off the step and turned round in the dusk with her arms wrapped round herself. She was thin. Her face had burned and peeled and burned again, and her hair was tied back with a piece of tent cord, and she had nothing round her shoulders at all, only a cotton blouse with the sleeves torn off at the elbow. She looked at Esther the way people look at something they had stopped believing was there.
"I gave my shawl to Auntie," she said. "For her legs. She's got both of them now. She's sitting in the shade with the old ladies and she smiles and she won't get up. I said come. She smiled at me." Her mouth worked. "Mama ran. When he ran, people ran after him, and Mama ran with them, and I had Auntie's chair and I couldn't." She stopped. "Do you know where the road goes? Has anyone come back up the road?"
Esther did not answer. She found she had taken Hadas's hand.
"I saw you on the wall," Hadas said. "I waved. I was so happy. And the clerk wrote something, and afterwards I asked him what, and he showed me." Her hand was cold and hard in Esther's, and gripping. "Your name, with a line by it. Everybody who stayed had a line. I asked him what the line was for and he said for afterwards. After the city. He said it like it was a timetable, Esti, like a bus. That's why I wrote. That's why I wrote you all that. I thought if you came first they'd rub it out."
Behind Esther, at the head of the crypt stair, she heard her father stop.
She did not turn round. She looked down at the blistered feet on the step, and then she put her other arm round Hadas's back, under the shoulder blades, where the bones were, and brought her in over the threshold, out of the dusk and into the church, and put the bar across the door behind them.