The counting came through the wall at ten past three.
Esther lay still and listened. It was Omid's game, the litre game, the numbers going up one by one as they did when the cans were filled. Except it was the middle of the night, and nobody was filling anything, and the voice saying the numbers in Persian was too low for a boy of ten.
"Four hundred and six. Four hundred and seven."
She got up and went to the door in her nightdress. Across the landing the Karimis' door opened at the same moment, and Zahra stood in it with her hair loose and her face grey.
"Since midnight. He won't stop. He won't look at us."
Behind her, in the hall, Reza had Omid by the shoulders. The boy stood straight with his arms at his sides, facing the wall as if there were a window in it. The timer light on the landing clicked on as Esther stepped out, and Omid turned his head toward it. For a second, no more, his eyes were a flat yellow, the colour of a street lamp through dust. Then they were his own brown again, and he went on counting.
At the outer corners of his eyes there were lines she had never seen on him, fine and dark, fanning out like an old man's.
She had seen the clips. Everyone had. For two weeks the radio had talked about hospitals in Karachi and Cairo and Lagos and a sickness with no name, and the new ministry here had said it was the heat, and told people to drink water they did not have.
"I'll wake my father."
"Your father is seventy-four."
"He's awake. He's always awake."
On Wednesday Tara laughed in the middle of a spelling lesson.
The school was closed for the summer, but the new families had asked for Persian classes, and Esther taught them in the mornings because nobody else would in that heat.
It was not a child's laugh. It came out of the second row, where Tara sat beside the window in a borrowed chair, and it was low and pleased, the laugh of a grown woman hearing a joke she has heard before. Twenty-six children turned round. Tara sat with her pencil in her fist and her eyes on Esther, and kept laughing, and did not blink.
Esther sent the class to the courtyard with Hadas. She sat down beside the girl and took the pencil out of her hand, finger by finger. On the page, where the spelling words should have been, Tara had written one Hebrew letter over and over, down the margin and across the lines, pressing so hard the paper had torn.
"Your mother had a blue dress," Tara said, in English, in that voice. "With white buttons. She wore it to the hospital."
Esther's mother had worn a blue dress with white buttons to the hospital, the last time, nine years ago. Tara had been born in Los Angeles that year.
The parents came for her at noon. By evening they were at the Hakimis' door, the father carrying Tara wrapped in a sheet and the mother behind him with a bag of clothes, because in their new flat the girl had screamed at every wall and said there was a woman standing in each corner, and she had only gone quiet when they said Miss Esther's name.
"We don't know anyone," the mother said on the landing. "We don't know anyone here. We came back and we don't know anyone."
Her father put two fingers on the woman's arm and stood aside to let them in.
Tara slept that night in Esther's bed, and Esther slept on the floor beside it, and nobody else in the flat slept.
On Sunday night her father burned newspaper.
He did it on the balcony, in the old copper pot her mother had used for jam, feeding in the pages one at a time: the new ministry's announcements, the price of bread, a photograph of the dam with no water behind it. When the pot held only grey flakes he let it cool, and then he took the flour sieve from the kitchen and sifted the ash into a bowl, tapping the rim with two fingers, the way he had shown her to sift flour for the holiday cakes when she was small.
"What is it for?"
"The Gemara says it. In Berakhot. Whoever wants to know them should take sifted ash and put it around his bed, and in the morning he will see something like the footprints of a rooster."
"Them."
"The shedim." He said it the way he might name a disease to a doctor. "I want to know what is in that room with her. That's all."
"And will it keep them out?"
He looked at her over the bowl.
"Ash is ash, Esther. It shows. It doesn't keep. Only God keeps."
He went into her room in his socks and knelt with difficulty, one hand on the bed frame, and let the ash fall in a thin ring on the tiles around the bed where Tara lay with her eyes open, watching the ceiling. He did not hurry, and he said nothing over it. When he stood his knees cracked, and Tara's eyes followed the sound.
Across the landing both doors were open. Reza had propped theirs with a shoe and Esther had propped hers with a chair, and the stairwell between them was dark except for the light that fell out of each hall. From the Karimis' flat came Zahra's voice, reciting in Arabic. Esther knew some of the pieces by their shape now, after four nights: the long verse about the Throne, which Zahra had told her was the one her own mother said over cradles, and then the short last chapters of the Quran, again and again, the same three, steady as someone walking.
Her father sat down on the chair by Tara's head. He took off his glasses and folded them in his lap.
He said the bedtime Shema. Esther had heard it all her life, said over her in this same room in this same voice when she was Tara's size, and she had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing a clock. She heard it now. The first line in Hebrew.
"Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one."
Then the verses after it, and the blessing of the angel who redeemed Jacob from all evil, and the line from the psalm, into Your hand I commit my spirit. He said it slowly. Once his voice stopped in the middle of a line and she thought he had lost the place, and then she saw that he had not lost it. He was waiting, with his eyes shut, until he could say the next word and mean it. Then he went on.
Esther took a cushion out onto the landing and sat with her back against the wall between the two open doors.
From her left came her father's Hebrew, low and dry. From her right came Zahra's Arabic, low and wet with tiredness. The two did not fit together, and neither was trying to. Two people in two rooms, each asking in their own words for a child, and she sat in the dark between them and asked too, in no language at all, with her knees pulled up and her forehead on them.
Reza came out at one and sat on the top stair, where Omid had sat to count the water. He offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. He did not light his own.
"He stopped at a thousand last night. Started again from one."
"Tara stopped laughing yesterday. She just watches."
He nodded, as if this were news of the weather, and they waited together.
At some point the recitation on the right went on alone. Esther lifted her head. Through her own door she could see her father still in the chair, his chin on his chest, his glasses in his lap. His lips were moving. Then Zahra's voice thinned and stopped, and there was only the generator in the street and a dog somewhere toward the river.
Nobody counted, and nobody laughed.
She must have slept, because the next thing she knew the stairwell window was grey and Reza was gone from the stair. She got up stiffly and looked into the Karimis' hall. Omid lay on the sofa under a sheet with one arm flung over his face and his mouth open, snoring a boy's snore, and Zahra was asleep sitting up beside him with her hand on his ankle.
Esther went back into her own flat.
Tara was curled on her side in the bed with her thumb near her mouth, breathing slow and even, the sheet kicked off. Her father had not moved from the chair.
Both children had slept through the night. Around the bed the ash lay in its pale ring on the tiles, and Esther stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and did not yet look down at it.