The flag on the bridge still had its packing creases. Esther could see them from the bank, three pale lines across the cloth where it had lain folded in a box, and the wind coming up the riverbed was too weak to shake them out.
It hung from the middle of the bridge of thirty-three arches, where the city had put it up for the new year, the first new year Isfahan had spent as a country of its own. The old flag had come down in the autumn. For a few weeks there had been nothing on the bridge at all, and then this one, with its packing creases, and policemen in new shirts at either end.
She went down the steps and walked under the arches instead of over them, because the shade was better. Her grandmother had walked here with her feet in the water. Esther had seen the river run perhaps four times in her life, for a few weeks each time, when the dam upstream let it go. Since the year before last it had not run at all. The bed was a long road of cracked grey mud, packed hard, and boys from the neighbourhood had marked out a football pitch on it with two schoolbags for each goal. A ball came bouncing toward her. She stopped it with her foot and sent it back crooked, and a boy shouted thanks in Persian without looking.
It was the last day of March and the thermometer outside the pharmacy had said thirty-one. Her blouse was stuck to her back under her bag strap.
She had thirty-one children now, the same as the thermometer. In the autumn she had fourteen. The new ones had come since the winter, with their parents and their suitcases, from Los Angeles and from the coast and from towns she had only seen on maps, families whose grandparents had left this city and who had been told it was open again. Some spoke Persian like old men from a film. Some spoke none and answered her in Hebrew or English, and one girl, Tara, had cried every morning for a week because the bread was different. The school had put in a second row of desks in March and borrowed chairs from the synagogue hall.
A dog lay in the shadow of the fourth arch with its tongue out, and did not move when she stepped round it.
The water truck came on Tuesdays and Fridays now, at a time nobody could predict. When its horn sounded in the street, every door in the building opened at once.
Esther carried the two blue jerrycans down four flights. Halfway down she met Reza Karimi coming up with two of his own already full, his face wet and red, and he flattened himself against the wall to let her by.
"Your card?"
"Still at the ministry."
He made a sound in his nose and kept climbing.
The card was the problem. The ration cards had been printed under the old government, with the old country's name across the top, and the new ministry was reissuing them family by family. The Hakimis' had gone in to be stamped five weeks ago. Every Sunday her father went to the office by the Chaharbagh, waited two hours, and was told it would come next week. Without the card the man on the truck would not fill a cup.
She stood in the queue anyway, because standing was something to do, and when she reached the front the man shook his head before she spoke. She carried the empty cans back up.
Zahra Karimi was waiting on the landing between their two doors with a full jerrycan at her feet and a funnel in her hand. She had tied her headscarf back for the work and her sleeves were pushed above the elbow.
"Give."
"Zahra, you can't keep doing this."
"I can. Watch me. Hold it straight."
Esther held it straight. The water went in with a hollow sound that rose as the can filled. Omid sat on the top stair with his chin on his knees and counted aloud, the way his teacher had taught him to count the litres at home so nothing was wasted.
"Eleven. Twelve. Mama, that's half."
"I know it's half."
"Then we have half."
"Then we have half, and they have half, and nobody dies of thirst on this stairwell. Count the other one."
He counted the other one. When it was done Zahra screwed the cap on herself and gave it a small pat, as she patted Omid's head when he finished his homework.
"Tomorrow night is your holiday. You need water for it. All the washing."
"We'll manage."
"You'll manage with my water. That's how you'll manage."
Esther laughed, because there was nothing else to do with it, and Zahra laughed too and went in and shut her door. Through it Esther heard her tell Reza that the ministry ought to be made to stand in the sun for five weeks and see how it liked it.
On the first night of Passover the table was set for three. Her father sat at the head with the cushions behind him, the old way, leaning to the left, his white cap pushed back from his forehead. Across from Esther sat Hadas, who taught the older girls at the school and had no family in the city to go to.
They had washed everything in Zahra's water. Esther had counted the litres in her head, like Omid, all afternoon.
Her father read the Haggadah in Hebrew, slowly, stopping where he always stopped to tell the same small stories, and Esther knew each one before it came and did not mind. His voice was thinner than it had been. He was seventy-four, and the heat that spring had taken something out of him that the winter had not given back.
Hadas could not keep still. Between the cups she talked about the new families, about a cousin in Haifa who was coming in June with his whole house, about the new stamps at the post office.
"Did you see the bridge? They've hung a flag on it. My mother used to say there would never be a flag in this city she could look at without being afraid."
"It still has the creases in it."
"So? It's new."
Her father said nothing. He turned a page.
When the time came, he nodded to Esther, and she got up and went down the little hall to open the door for Elijah. The prophet's cup stood full at the centre of the table. Every year since she was four she had been the one to open the door, and every year some part of her had expected the landing to be different.
She turned the lock and pulled it wide.
The stairwell was dark except for the strip of light from her own hall. On the top stair, where he had sat to count the water, Omid Karimi was sitting in his pyjamas with his knees up, looking straight at her.
"Mama said you open it for someone."
"We do."
"Who?"
"A prophet. Elijah."
He leaned to look past her legs at the table and the candles and the full cup.
"Does he come?"
Behind her she heard her father begin the verse that is said with the door open, in Hebrew.
"Pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know You."
It had always sounded old to her, a line from another century. Tonight, with a boy on the stairs and a new flag on the bridge, she stood with her hand on the door and heard every word.
"Go to bed, Omid. Your mother will kill you."
He went, slowly, looking back once. She shut the door.
Hadas left after midnight, a little drunk on four cups, singing on the stairs until Esther hissed at her from the door. Then the flat was quiet.
Her father insisted on drying. Esther washed the glasses in a basin with as little water as she could, and passed them to him one by one, and he held each to the bulb before he dried it, the way her mother used to.
"Hadas is happy."
"Hadas is young."
"So am I."
"You're my daughter. That's different."
He set the glass down on the cloth and picked up the next. The kitchen window was open to the street, and the air coming in was still warm at one in the morning, with that dry smell of dust and diesel that had replaced the smell of the river. Somewhere a generator was running.
"Ezra Kohanim came to me after the morning service. Yesterday. He and the others."
"The old men."
"The old men. They sit in the courtyard and count things. The river is dust. Prices go up every week. The young no longer listen to the old. Families come back from the ends of the earth to a city with a new name." He turned the glass in the light. "They have a word for it. From the Mishnah. I learned it at school and never thought I would hear grown men say it about a Tuesday."
She waited, her hands in the cooling water.
He put the glass down as if the cloth might not hold it.
"They say we are the generation of the Messiah's footsteps."