Rami was standing outside the gate when Elias came down to light the lamps, and he would not come in.
He stood on the step in the grey before dawn with his hands at his sides, in a shirt that had been good once and was now the colour of the road, and his feet were bare. He was heavier than he had been. His face was fuller, pink across the cheeks, the face of a boy who has been eating well for a year, and under it the bones of the face Elias had known since the font looked out like someone at a window.
"Rami," Elias said.
"Father."
"Come in. It's cold."
Rami looked down at the threshold, the worn stone under the gate where the whole parish had stepped for two hundred years, and did not move. Elias had seen a boy do that once before, in the spring of the third dry year, a parishioner's son who would not cross into the church and could not say why. That boy had been afraid of what was inside. Rami, he thought, was afraid of what was inside too, and it was not the same thing.
Elias went out to him instead, and sat down on the step in his cassock, and after a while Rami sat down beside him.
He had come from the south. He said so in a voice gone flat and careful, the way a man speaks who has been ill and is not sure yet which words still work. When the one-eyed man ran, half the camp had run after him down the road to the coast, and Rami with them, because everyone was running. He had been far enough back. At the end of the road the camp had stopped in some orchards, and at dusk it had broken apart, all at once, and in the morning there were people sitting among the trees who did not know their own names. Rami knew his. He had started north on foot, and his shoes had come apart on the second mile, and after dark a truck of men going home to Damascus had stopped for him.
"The others are coming," he said. "Some of them. Elie and the Saadeh boy. They're slower."
"And the rest?"
Rami shook his head, which could have meant anything.
Elias did not ask him why he had gone. He knew why. He had stood at this gate in the long day and watched half his choir climb onto a bus with their bags, singing the Paschal hymn he had taught them, and Rami at the window had looked back at him with such pity that Elias had gone inside and sat down in the vestry and not been able to stand up for an hour.
"I went to see him," Rami said. "Yesterday. On the way. The one who came down. People were going out to him from everywhere, from the orchards and the town, all along the road. I went." He looked at his bare feet on the step. "I didn't get near. There were too many. I stood on a wall with some men from the camp and I saw him from far away."
Elias waited. Down the street a shutter went up. Somewhere a cock crowed, the first he had heard in the quarter in two years.
"He broke the cross, Father," Rami said. "I saw it."
He said nothing else. He did not say how, or which, or what anyone around him did. He said it the way he would have said the bread had run out, and then he put his face in his hands.
The cross in the courtyard was iron, as tall as a man, set into a block of grey stone by the fig tree with four bolts sunk in lead. It had stood there since 1860. Elias's grandmother had told him the story so many times that he could see it without closing his eyes: the summer the quarter burned, the churches gutted, the people of Bab Touma running through the smoke to the house of the Emir, the Algerian, whose men had taken them in by the thousand and stood at his doors with rifles and would not give them up. When it was over, the survivors had come back to the ashes, and the blacksmith of the parish, who had lost two sons, had made this out of the iron bands of the burned church door.
Elias sat down on the stone block under it, with his back against the iron.
He sat there a long time. The sky went from grey to white. Rami had gone into the vestry at last, when Elias asked him to, and lain down on the bench under the icon of Saint John, and Elias could hear him sleeping. The crypt was empty now. Its guests slept upstairs in the parish hall since the siege lifted, and none of them was awake. The courtyard was very quiet.
He had seen him. Three days ago, from the wall, at the hour of his prayer, in two saffron garments with his hands on the wings of angels and the light on the drops. He had knelt on the stone and known him. Nobody had told Elias who he was. He had known him the way he had always known him, from the Creed he said every Sunday and the Gospels he had read aloud at that lectern for thirty-one years. He comes from heaven. He shall so come in like manner. Elias had believed all of it, and it had come true in front of his face.
And now this.
He thought about it the only way he knew how, which was in the words he had been given. "Let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." He had said that line over the coffins of half the parish. It had never once occurred to him that the one who said it might come back and ask for the cross.
He did not understand it. He was too old and too tired, and he knew that whatever he made of it this morning he would be making of it for the rest of his life. The Councils and the Fathers he left to the Patriarch in his house on the Street Called Straight. He thought about the iron at his back, which his grandmother's blacksmith had made out of a burned door, and about the man at the minaret in saffron, whom Elias knew, and whom he had followed, as well as he could and very badly, all his life.
If it was his to break, it was his. Elias had hung his whole life on that iron, for him. He would not make him come to Bab Touma to take it down.
Mira found him in the bell tower doorway with the long spanner from the boiler room in his hand.
"What are you doing?"
"The bolts. They're set in lead. I'll need the hammer too."
She looked at the spanner. She looked at the cross. He saw her understand, and saw her face go white and then red, the way it had gone when she was nine and he told her that her mother had died.
"Nobody asked you to," she said. "Did anyone come here? Did he come here? Did Anas?"
"No."
"Then leave it."
"Nobody will come, Mira. That's why."
She stood in front of the cross with her arms out, not touching it, as if it were a child near a road. He stayed where he was. He waited, with the spanner hanging from his hand, and after a while she put her arms down. She would not help him, and she would not go in. She sat on the edge of the dry fountain with her hands pressed between her knees and watched him, and the tears ran down her face and she did not wipe them.
At some point Anas came to the gate with bread under his arm. Elias saw him through the bars, in his grey coat, with his glasses on their cord. Anas looked at the spanner and the hammer and the cross and Elias's face. He gave no greeting and came no further. He set the bread down on the gate's stone ledge, carefully, and stood there a moment longer with his hand on the bars, and then he turned and went back down the street the way he had come, slowly, like a man leaving a funeral before the end because he cannot watch.
The lead was soft from a hundred and sixty-eight summers. It took an hour. When the last bolt came free the cross leaned toward him on its own, the whole weight of it, and he caught it against his chest and went down on one knee under it on the stones.
He did not break it. He wrapped it in the old green altar cloth from the vestry chest, the one his wife had mended, and carried it down the crypt stair on his shoulder one step at a time, and laid it on the floor under the low arch where the rabbi had slept, and came up again into the daylight.
Mira had not moved.
"What are you now?" she said.
He did not know how to answer her. He thought he had never known less.
"The same old man," he said. "Who saw him. Ask me again when I know what that means."
On the stone block by the fig tree, where the iron had stood since the summer the quarter burned, there was a square of pale clean stone the size of his two hands, and four holes, and nothing in them.