The power went at nine, as it did every night now, and the nave of Saint Simeon's went from yellow to nothing in the time it took the fridge in the sacristy to shudder and stop.
Father Elias stood still in the dark and let his eyes come back. He knew the church by its smells better than its shapes: wax from the stand by the door, the incense ground into the wood of the screen, damp stone that no longer had any right to be damp. Somewhere near the front a woman was breathing in short pulls. Somewhere near the side aisle a man was laughing.
He had been laughing in that pew since four in the afternoon.
Elias found the matches in his cassock pocket and lit the candles one by one, starting with the lamp before the icon of the Virgin, because that was where he always started.
Three of them tonight, two new since Monday. Nour Saadeh, fifteen, who had woken on Monday and called her mother by her dead grandmother's name and gone on doing it. Jad, who drove a taxi and had a wife and two small girls, and who had come home on Monday night and sat down in his kitchen and started to laugh, a pleasant, unhurried laugh, the laugh of a man at a wedding. And Fadi, who was not new. He had been standing outside church doors since Palm Sunday.
The doctors at the public hospital had seen Nour for ten minutes and given her mother a prescription for a sedative they did not have in stock. Jad's wife had not tried the doctors. She had brought him straight here, holding his elbow the whole way through the quarter, and she had not cried yet, which frightened Elias more than the laughing did.
He prayed the Compline because it was the hour for it, and because he did not know what else to pray.
The small Compline was what the parish used outside Lent, short and familiar, the psalms the old women could say with him under their breath. He began it as he had begun it every night of his priesthood, in Arabic, his voice steady in the candlelight, the blessing, the trisagion, the psalm of repentance. Nour's mother said it with him. Jad's wife did not know the words and held her husband's hand.
Then he did something he had never done. He turned the pages back to the Great Compline, the long one for Lent, and found the psalm his book numbered ninety and the Protestant missionaries' Bibles numbered ninety-one, which the long service kept and the short one did not, and he prayed that one out of season.
"He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty," he read in Arabic. "You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness."
He went to Nour first. He made the sign of the cross over her, slowly, the way he had been taught as a deacon by an old priest from Saidnaya who said a cross made in a hurry was a cross made for the people watching. She was lying across two chairs with her head in her mother's lap. She looked up at him and said, very clearly, in a voice that was hers, "Grandma, he's here." Then her eyes went somewhere past his shoulder.
He read the psalm again, over her. He did not raise his voice. He thought of nothing but the words and the girl, or tried to, and when his mind went to the grocer's bill and the water truck and the cracked bell rope he brought it back the way you bring back a goat that has wandered, without anger.
On the third reading Nour sighed. It was a long sigh, the kind a child gives on the edge of sleep. Her hand opened on her mother's knee. Her mother looked up at Elias with a face he would remember for a long time, and he shook his head at her, gently, because he did not know anything yet and did not want her thanking him for something he could not name.
Nour slept.
He went to Jad.
Jad smiled at him. He was a broad, handsome man of thirty with a moustache he was proud of, and his eyes were dry and bright. Elias made the cross over him and began the psalm, and on the second line Jad began it too.
He said it half a breath ahead of Elias, word perfect, in Elias's own voice: the same cracked low note on the same word, the same catch on the breath before "pestilence", as if Elias were hearing himself on a tape that ran a little fast. Jad's wife let go of his hand.
Elias stopped. Jad stopped, and laughed.
Elias began again. Jad began again, ahead of him. Elias went on, through the whole psalm, to the end, and the voice that was his voice went on in front of him the whole way like a man walking ahead with a lamp, and at the end it said "Amen" a breath before he did and laughed a little more, kindly.
He prayed it a third time, and a fourth. He made the cross. He laid his hand on Jad's head, which he had seen done in the old books and had never done himself, and the hair under his palm was hot and damp and the laughing went on underneath it, steady, a motor left running.
At midnight Jad's wife stood up.
"I'll take him home," she said. "The girls are with my sister. They'll be frightened."
"Stay. Stay the night here. There's room in the hall."
"He won't sleep." She took her husband's arm, and he stood at once, obliging, and smiled at Elias as if thanking him for a meal. "He hasn't slept since Monday. Thank you, Father. I'm sorry."
He walked them to the door. It was only when he reached it that he saw Fadi.
The boy was sitting on the step, outside, in the dark. The candlelight from the nave lay across the stone in a long yellow slab and stopped a hand's width from his shoes. He had his knees up and his arms round them. Elias did not know how long he had been there. Samia was nowhere.
"Fadi. Your mother?"
"Asleep. I came by myself." He did not look up. "I wanted to hear."
"Then come in and hear."
The boy shook his head, and drew his feet back a little further from the light, and Jad went past him down the steps, laughing, and the boy's head turned to follow him all the way to the corner.
Mira found him there at one in the morning, still sitting on the step where the boy had been. Fadi had gone home at the stroke of the half hour, as if someone had called him.
She sat down beside him in her hospital trousers. She smelled of disinfectant and someone else's sweat.
"Nour?"
"Asleep. Her mother took her home."
"And the taxi man?"
"No."
Mira nodded as if he had told her a blood count. She had a way of filing things, and he let her file it.
"We stopped giving it a name at six," she said. "The registrar said acute confusional state, and then at four o'clock there were thirty of them, and he stopped saying anything. A man who knows every language except his own. A woman who keeps setting the table for twelve. A boy who answers questions before you ask them." She pushed her hair back. "They want to send them to the psychiatric hospital and it's full. It filled on the first night."
"Where do you put them?"
"Corridors. Chairs. Anywhere a relative will sit with them."
"Did the relatives bring anyone? A priest? Anyone?"
She looked at him then, a long look, and he saw that she had been carrying something up the stairs to him that was not the numbers.
"Uncle," she said. "Most of my ward isn't ours. Most of it's Muslim families, from Jobar and Qaboun and the camps. Their sheikhs came in this afternoon, two of them, with the Quran, and recited over the beds." She took a breath. "It's the same thing. The same laugh. They've got exactly what Jad has."