Rania had a wet pillowcase in one hand and a peg in her teeth when the stranger walked into the middle of the courtyard and stopped.
She watched the courtyard because she could no longer stop. Her flat was at the top of the old building, five flights up, and three of the four lanes that ran into the little square had afflicted houses in them. Since the second week the square had turned into a waiting room without walls. Families carried their possessed between the flats where they were kept and the ground-floor room of the mosque, which the sheikh had opened to anyone who wanted somewhere quieter than home. He had told them himself he did not know what else to do. The roof tank had been dry since Tuesday, and the pillowcases had soaked in water she carried up five flights from the tanker in the square.
The stranger was neither young nor old. He wore a plain shirt and the kind of face she passed fifty times in the market and never kept. No bag, no book, nothing in his hands. He stood the way a man stands in a room he has just been shown, taking in the corners. Then he crossed to the mosque step and spoke to the man sitting there.
Rania knew the man on the step. His son had been carried down from the second floor the day before, with his heels knocking every stair. She couldn't hear what the stranger said. She saw the father listen, then stand, then go inside and come back with two women of his house. The stranger talked to the women for three minutes. They nodded.
When they came out again they had the son slung between them in the heavy sleep the afflicted fell into between fits. They did not carry him home. They carried him across the square to the flat at the end, where the father's old sister lived, the aunt the boy had clung to since he could walk.
She took the peg out of her mouth. Her jaw ached from holding it.
On the second morning she noticed that he never raised his voice. A child screamed and he did not. A mother wept on the bench by the east wall and he did not. Late in the morning two brothers, worn hollow by three nights of holding their uncle down, started shouting in the far corner. One put his fist flat against the other's breastbone. Families shuffled their children away.
The stranger was across the square with an old man. He finished his sentence to the old man first. Then he walked over at the pace he walked everywhere and stood beside the brothers, close enough to count, not close enough to crowd. The fist came down. He said something short. A minute later the two of them were sitting on the mosque step sharing one cigarette, not looking at each other.
On the third morning a husband carried his wife out into the light in the middle of a fit. She was rigid as a plank. Her head was turning further than a neck should turn, and her lips shaped words that made no sound. The families drew back and left a ring of empty paving around the two of them, and Rania's hand found the window frame and held it.
The stranger went into the ring. He did not take the woman or touch her. He stood in front of the husband, nearer than she had seen him stand to anyone, and said something, and the husband answered with the face of a man who has finally found someone to ask. Then the stranger turned to the wife and spoke to her face.
It was no voice Rania knew. The families coaxed their afflicted in frightened sing-song, and the old man in her mother's village used to shout over sick women until his throat went. The stranger talked to her the way you tell a neighbour her tap is running. It lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. The twisting slowed. The plank of her went soft, and the husband's arms gave with it. The woman stood mostly on her own feet, opened her eyes and looked at the stranger like someone who has walked into a kitchen and forgotten what she came for.
He nodded to the husband. Then he walked away.
That afternoon the sheikh came out to talk with him. Rania had sat in the sheikh's Friday class as a girl, and he did not take advice from strangers. They spoke for ten minutes. At the end the sheikh nodded once, the nod he gave in class when someone answered correctly, and Rania, five floors up, sat down on the edge of her bed.
A week in, the sheikh's nephew knocked at her door. He was a thin boy who had run the sheikh's errands since he was nine, and he was out of breath from five flights.
"There's a girl in the next alley. Fourteen. The mother hasn't slept since Thursday. They need a woman to sit nights."
"Why me?"
"My uncle asked him who. He said the lady on the top floor who watches."
She felt her face go hot. She had thought the window made her invisible.
"What do I do? I'm not a reciter. I don't know anything."
The boy took a folded scrap of paper out of his shirt pocket. He plainly knew it by heart.
"He said: keep the radio on, low, any station with talking. Don't let anyone say her name after the night prayer. If she laughs, laugh with her, and don't stop until she does."
She went that evening with a shawl and a thermos of tea. The girl lay on a mattress in a room that smelled of rosewater and something under it, like a match just blown out. Her eyes followed Rania across the floor. Rania turned the radio on, low, to a man talking about cricket, and sat.
At two in the morning the girl laughed. It was a high, delighted laugh, an adult's, and every hair on Rania's arms stood up. She made herself laugh back. Her voice cracked on it. She kept going, laughing at nothing in the dark beside a stranger's child, until the other laugh stopped and the girl turned on her side and slept like a girl.
Walking home at dawn she counted it off the way her father used to count the pieces on his backgammon board: the sick boy carried to his aunt, the brothers sat down on the step, the wife stood on her own feet, and now her, the woman at the window, moved one alley over. Nobody had appointed him. She had gone when he sent for her without asking why, and she could not remember the last time she had done that for anyone.
On the twenty-first day a man she had never seen came to the boy's family on the second floor. He carried a worn leather bag and a small Quran and had the grey, sanded-down look of someone who had not slept in a week. The father met him on the step, and Rania, at her window with the shutter half open, heard enough to know he was a reciter, one of the ones who went from house to house. He had been coming to the boy for days, it seemed, and today he had found him calmer than he expected.
The father told him about the aunt's flat and the man in the courtyard.
"Who is he?"
The father lifted his shoulders. He let them drop.
"He doesn't do your kind of work. He doesn't read from anything. He talks as if he knows. He knows the names of what's happening, and he tells us when to say them and when to keep quiet."
The reciter took a small notebook from his bag and wrote, standing on the step. His pen stopped.
"His name?"
Nobody on the step knew it. Nobody in the courtyard knew it. Rania had watched the man for two weeks. She could have told the reciter how he walked, how he stood next to angry men, how he finished every sentence before he turned. She tried to see his face and found she could not have drawn it for money.
The father looked across the square at the mosque door, where the stranger had stood every morning for two weeks. The step was empty. Two pigeons walked on it.
"He didn't come this morning," he said.