The windscreen wipers had been going for three days, and somewhere in Iraq Esther had stopped hearing them.
The bus was one of the white ones. It still had the committee's number taped inside the windscreen and a sticker on the luggage rack that said, in Persian and Hebrew, "Welcome", with a little drawing of a sun. They had found it on the plain outside Damascus with its keys in and half a tank, among forty others, and a man from the community, a driver who had taken the first convoy out of Isfahan, had walked up to it and got in behind the wheel without asking anybody. He had driven them east ever since. He had not said a word. He stopped when Zahra asked him to stop for the prayer, and when Esther's father asked him to stop for his, and once at night for a long time at the side of the road with his forehead on the wheel, and then he drove on.
It had rained the whole way. Not out of one cloud on one side of the road. It was the ordinary rain Esther remembered from being a child, grey and general and boring, falling on the road and on the fields on both sides of it and on the villages that had said yes and the villages that had said no, without asking any of them. On the second day she had watched a farmer standing in a ditch by the road with his arms out and his face up, soaked, and she had not been able to tell which kind of village he came from.
Hadas sat across the aisle with her aunt. The aunt had the window seat and the wheelchair folded in the rack above her, and two shawls over her knees, and she smiled at the rain for a thousand kilometres. Hadas held her hand. Hadas had found out on the morning they left Damascus, from the lists the men put up at the south gate, and she had not said her mother's name since. She had said other things. She had said them at night, mostly, in the crypt, with her head on Esther's shoulder. Esther had let her.
She had her register on her knee. On the first morning of the road she had opened it to make the day's stroke and found she did not want to. The sun had come up behind the rain at the hour the clock gave it, and it would go down at the hour the clock gave it, and anyone could know the date now. She had closed the register on four hundred and forty-three strokes and the eleven names, and put it back in her coat.
"There," Omid said, from the front. He was kneeling up on the seat behind the driver with his nose to the glass. "There. Look."
The road came down out of the hills into the city from the west, past the new border post, where nobody stood under the awning any more, and through the suburbs Esther knew, and along the river.
She had seen the river run four times in her life. The dam upstream let it go for a few weeks in a good spring, and the whole city went down to the banks to look at it, and then it stopped, and for years now it had not come at all. The bed had been a long road of cracked grey mud with dogs asleep in it.
It was running. It was brown and fast and wide, much wider than she had ever seen it, carrying branches and plastic and a whole uprooted bush that turned slowly as it went, and it filled the bed from bank to bank and slid under the old bridges with a sound she could hear through the bus window over the wipers.
"Stop here, please," her father said.
The driver stopped. He stopped in the middle of the road, by the end of the bridge of thirty-three arches, and opened the door with a hiss.
Her father got down by himself. He did not take anybody's arm. He walked out onto the bridge in the rain with his coat collar up and his bag over his shoulder, slowly, the way he walked everywhere now, past the policemen's empty hut and under the flag, which was wet and heavy and hung straight down. People were standing along the parapets. A great many people, in raincoats and without them, with umbrellas and without them, looking down. Nobody was saying very much. A boy threw a stone and his father did not stop him.
In the middle of the bridge her father stopped and put both hands on the parapet, the way he had at the wall in Damascus, and looked down at the water going under him.
Esther did not go after him. She went down the steps at the end of the bridge instead, under the arches, where the walkway ran along the water at the bottom, where the shade had always been better. The water was running a hand's width below the walkway's edge. Her grandmother had walked here with her feet in the river. Esther had heard about it all her life the way you hear about snow in a hot country.
She crouched and put her hand in. It was cold, much colder than she had expected, and it pulled at her fingers, and it smelled of mud and of the hills.
When she looked up, her father was standing at the parapet above her, looking down, with the rain running off the brim of his hat. He did not say anything. He lifted one hand off the stone, an inch, and put it back.
The street was half empty.
The houses on the other side, the building opposite and the bakery and the two houses further down, stood with their doors shut and their windows dark. The small neat pencil rings beside their bells had run in the rain into grey smudges, like thumbprints. Nobody had come home to them yet. Esther did not know if anybody would.
On the wall beside their own door, at the height a man holds a clipboard, the stroke was still there. It was under the lip of the doorframe, where the rain had not reached it, short and neat and dry.
She looked at it for a while. Then she went to the downpipe at the corner of the building, where the gutter was running over, and wet her thumb in the water, and came back and rubbed the stroke off the wall. It took longer than she thought. Pencil holds on plaster. She rubbed until there was only a pale clean patch the size of a fingernail, and her thumb was grey.
Behind her Reza was carrying the aunt's chair up the front steps with the aunt in it, backwards, one step at a time, talking to her the whole way as if she were answering. Hadas walked beside them with her hand on the chair's arm.
The stairwell smelled of dust and closed rooms. Esther went up it behind her father and stood on the landing between their two doors, under the window where for three summers they had split the water ration in half, where Omid had sat in his pyjamas on the top stair to count the cans. The window was streaked with rain. The tap on the landing, when Omid turned it, coughed twice and gave a long rusty spit, and then ran, brown and then clear, into his cupped hands, and he shouted.
Zahra's door opened. She had gone in ahead of them, and she came out now onto the landing with her coat still on and her scarf wet, carrying a tray. On it were glasses, small ones, the good ones, one for each of them, Esther's father and Reza and Omid and Hadas and the aunt in her chair and Esther, and the teapot in the middle with steam coming off the spout.
She set the tray down on the windowsill between the two doors, where the water cans used to stand.
"Sit," she said. "All of you. Sit."
They sat on the stairs, because there was nowhere else, and she poured the first glass and held it out across the landing to Esther's father, the way she had once held out half the water.