The first grey came through the high windows on the east side of the gymnasium, and Huda watched the man by the far wall fold back his blanket and get up without waking anyone.
She had watched him do it for nineteen mornings, ever since he walked in one evening with a bedroll under his arm. The school, in the eastern district, had been emptied of its pupils in the second week and filled with families like hers, a hundred and seventy-three people at the last count, bedding along every wall under the basketball hoops. The director had opened the doors without waiting for his board, because the board could not be reached and the families were already in the car park. On the Friday before the man came, the men had held the prayer for rain on the school's dry pitch, and the sky had stayed white all afternoon.
The man slept on a bedroll like everyone else, in no particular place. He washed for prayer at the sink in the corridor, because the toilets were needed by people in more of a hurry. Then he unrolled a small prayer rug in the centre circle of the court, set it on the diagonal toward the corner where the direction of prayer ran, and began.
Nobody had ever joined him. Most people were asleep at that hour, and the ones awake were busy holding their afflicted.
This morning, as he raised his hands for the first unit, an old man on the east wall got up. Huda knew him a little. His granddaughter had been possessed for nine days and was sleeping in a side room at the mosque. He crossed the floor in his socks and laid his rug behind the man's.
A young wife on the north wall went next. She had told Huda the week before that since her husband was taken, the prayers she had known all her life sat strangely in her mouth, like someone else's teeth. Huda watched her lie on her bedding looking at the two men, and then stand up as if someone had called her.
Three more stood up during the first unit. Four more for the second. When the man turned his face to the right and then the left to close the prayer, there were eleven people in two crooked rows behind him.
He turned and saw them. He nodded to each, a small nod, and made nothing of it. Then he began the quiet remembrance after the prayer, counting on his fingers, and the eleven went on with him.
Huda had not stood up. She sat cross-legged against the west wall with her shawl around her knees, and when he rolled his rug and looked around the hall, hers was the eye he caught. She tipped her head. He came and sat on the floor about a metre from her, not closer, hands on his knees.
"Speak, if you want to."
She looked at her hands first. They had got thin. She was thirty-five, and for four weeks she had slept in pieces and eaten whatever the children left.
"My husband."
"Yes."
"Four weeks. He was one of the first in our building. He's past the worst. He's up most of the day, he talks to me, he remembers where the scissors are. But when I look at him I see someone doing my husband. Doing him well." She pulled the shawl tighter. "Maybe he's tired. Maybe that's all it is."
"You're afraid it's still there."
"Yes."
"Lighter now. Settled in."
"Yes."
He did not answer for nearly a minute. His eyes stayed on her face, and she understood he had not stopped listening when she stopped talking. At last he asked one question, low: had her husband gone back to his own prayers, or his work, or his children? She said no to each, and saw that this was what he had been waiting to hear.
"Something is left in him. Less than in the first weeks. It can stay a long time if the house lets it, and it can go in days if the house changes. There are three things."
"Tell me."
"Once a day, at the same hour, say aloud in front of him what you think is in him. Plainly. Then seek refuge in Allah from it, aloud, and mean it. Choose the hour now."
She swallowed. For four weeks there had been one word she would not let into her mouth.
"Noon."
"Noon. Say it once now, so you know you can."
She said it. Her voice shook on the first syllable and then held, and the word turned out to be smaller than the fear she had built around it.
"Good. Second. For seven evenings, ask people to supper. His family one night, yours the next. Never more than three, and different faces. He'll say he doesn't want visitors. Have them anyway."
"Why?"
"What's left in him does well alone with him. It does badly when it's seen."
"And the third?"
"The same seven days, go to the mosque for the dawn prayer. Alone. Be back before he wakes."
"What does that do to him?"
"Nothing to him. You've been holding this house up for four weeks without once putting it down. Go and put it down."
She was quiet, working out how all three would go in the flat when the building reopened on Thursday, two rooms, two children and a man who flinched at the doorbell. She had run a household for fifteen years. She treated it like any other instruction that mattered and began, in her head, a list of cousins.
"Seven days."
"On the seventh you'll know. If it's working, go on until it leaves. If not, find me on the eighth."
She did not get up. There was one more thing, and it felt rude to want it.
"Can I ask who you are?"
"My name is Muhammad."
He said it the way anyone says a name at a bus stop. No pause before it, none after. Nothing in his voice asked her to remember it.
"Muhammad. May Allah reward you."
"And you, and your husband, and your house."
She went back across the court to her bedding. When she looked round he was still sitting where she had left him, eyes lowered, letting a moment pass before the next thing.
Her husband was awake.
He lay on his side on the next bedroll with the children asleep between them, his cheek on his folded arm, and he was looking past her at the man in the centre circle. He had a pleasant expression. It was the face he used to wear for her mother.
"Who's your friend?" he asked.
"Nobody. A man who helps with the food."
"He has a good voice for the prayer," her husband said, and smiled, and did not blink for as long as it took her to lie down and turn her back to him.
He spent the next two hours at the long table by the kitchen hatch, stirring the big pot of lentils, handing out bread, carrying water to the ones who couldn't walk to the line. Huda took her cup and stood behind a woman with twins.
Halfway down the line a boy of about seven went rigid. His cup hit the floor. His mother caught him under the arms, and his heels began to drum on the boards, and the high, thin sound started in his throat that everyone in the hall had learned to dread.
In the first week of the shelter, that sound had emptied whole walls. Huda had seen grown men climb over bedding to get away from it, and children cry because the adults ran.
Nobody ran. The woman with the twins pulled them closer and stayed where she was. The man at the pot put down his ladle, walked to the boy at his ordinary pace, crouched beside the mother and said something to her, not to the boy. The mother nodded and began, shakily, to recite. The line shuffled forward around them, as a queue moves round a puddle. In two minutes the boy was asleep on his mother's lap with a crust of bread still in his fist.
Huda found she had not spilled her tea.
When the bread was gone she saw the man go out into the corridor. A young man was sitting on the bench by the main door, neat and nervous, with a briefcase on his knees and the face of someone who had been rehearsing one sentence since dawn. He stood as Muhammad came out.
"My grandfather sent me," the young man said. "He has a question for you. He wouldn't put it in a phone call."