The old women came at eight, as they had come every morning of his priesthood, and the first of them stopped inside the gate and looked at the stone.
Elias watched her from the church door. She was the eldest of them, ninety or near it, in the black she had worn since her husband died in another century, with a stick in one hand and her prayer book in the other. She stood very still in front of the block by the fig tree, with its square of pale stone and the four holes. The others came in behind her and stopped too, one after another, the way the queue at the water point had stopped when the iron lid came up.
He had rung the bell for them. He had not known whether to. He had stood under the tower with the rope in his hands for a long time, and in the end he had rung it because it was eight, and because they would come whether it rang or not, and it had sounded as it sounded now, whole and round, over the roofs.
The old woman turned from the stone and looked at him across the courtyard.
He had no explanation to give her, and she did not ask for one. She looked at him for a long moment out of a face that had seen the quarter through four wars and a drought and a year of noon, and then she crossed herself, slowly, toward the empty block, the way she would have crossed herself toward the iron. She came on across the courtyard and past him into the church, and the others followed her, and none of them said a word.
He said the morning office for them. His voice did not do what he wanted it to, but it did enough.
When he came out again the sky had changed.
It had been white for two years. Even in the ordinary days, since the sun began to keep its hour, it had stayed white, a hard pale lid over the city from one edge to the other, and the dust had hung under it so that the domes at the far end of the quarter were only shapes. Now it was grey. Not the bruise colour of the cloud that came every afternoon to stand over the camp. A soft, low, even grey, from the roofs on one side to the roofs on the other, with no edge to it anywhere that he could find.
He stood on the church step and looked up at it. He did not let himself think anything.
Something touched the back of his hand.
He looked down. There was a dark spot on his skin, the size of a lentil. As he watched, another landed beside it, and another on the stone of the step, and one on his sleeve, and then he heard it, all round him, the small dry ticking on the leaves of the fig tree that he had not heard since the spring before the drought's first summer, so long ago that for a moment he did not know what it was.
It was rain.
It came down thin and cold out of the whole grey sky. It fell on the courtyard and the fig tree and the step and the dry fountain and the block of stone, and on the roofs of the quarter beyond the wall, and on the street outside the gate, all of it the same, with no line anywhere where it stopped. He went out into the middle of the courtyard to see whether there was a line, and there was not. He turned all the way round. It was falling on the mosque's dome across the roofs, and on the bell tower, and on him.
The quarter came out to it.
Doors opened all down the street outside the gate. He heard voices go up, and a child shriek, and somebody bang a pan with a spoon over and over as if it were a wedding. Abu Samir came into the courtyard in his slippers and stood under the fig with his face turned up and his mouth open, and the old women came out of the church in a cluster and stood on the step and did not go back in for their scarves. Rami came out of the vestry barefoot, with his hair flattened on one side from the bench, and stopped in the doorway and held both hands out flat in front of him, palms up, and looked at them filling.
Upstairs, the window of the parish hall banged open.
The rabbi leaned out of it with his glasses in one hand. Elias saw him put out the other hand, into the rain, and hold it there, and say something under his breath in Hebrew, short, a blessing by the shape of it. Then the old man's face changed, and he went on holding his hand out and said nothing else at all. Behind him in the room Elias could hear Zahra Karimi reciting, low and fast, and Reza laughing, and Esther calling for Omid to put his shoes on, and Omid not putting his shoes on, because the boy was already pounding down the outside stair into the courtyard in his socks.
Elias stood in the middle of it all and let it fall on him.
He said his own thanks, which were very old and very short. "Glory to thee, O Lord, glory to thee." He said them in Arabic, as his mother had said them over the bread. He said them again. He had nothing to add to them, and it did not matter, and he was soaked to the skin.
The rain ran down the iron bars of the gate. It ran off the fig leaves in strings. It filled the cracks between the courtyard stones, which had been grey with dust for two years, and turned them dark, so that he could see the pattern of the paving for the first time since the drought began, the old diamond pattern his grandmother had swept every Saturday. On the block by the fig tree it was filling the four bolt holes, one after another. Each one held a little water now, round and dark, like four small wells.
He looked at them for a long time.
Mira was still sitting on the rim of the fountain.
She had not moved since he carried the cross down the crypt stair. She had sat there with her hands pressed between her knees all through the office, and he had seen her through the church door every time he turned to bless the people, sitting with her back very straight and her face set. Now the rain was falling on her. It was running off her hair and down her neck into the collar of her uniform, and her shoulders were dark with it, and she sat there in it with her face still set, as if she had decided to be angry with him for the rest of her life and the weather had not been told.
Behind her, in the stone bowl of the fountain, a little water had begun to gather. It lay in the bottom in a thin grey skin, trembling under the drops. Two years of dust were turning to mud under it.
Omid saw it first. He came across the courtyard at a run in his wet socks, skidding on the stones, shouting something in Persian to nobody, and stopped at the fountain beside her and looked into the bowl. Then he put both hands into the water, all the way to the wrist, as if he had to make sure, and brought them out full, and threw it over her.
Mira gasped. She sat bolt upright with water running down her face.
Omid stood frozen in front of her with his dripping hands out, unsure whether he was about to be in very great trouble. Elias saw her look at him. He saw her mouth twist.
Then Mira put back her head in the rain and laughed, out loud, the way she had laughed when she was a girl in this courtyard and the fountain still ran, and the sound of it went up off the stones and over the wall and into the street, where the whole quarter was standing in the rain with its hands held out.