The parish office had one working socket during the cuts, wired by Samia's brother to the battery in the hall, and Father Elias sat beside it with the telephone on his knee and the cord pulled tight across the desk.
It was ten at night. The fan was off to save the battery. He had dialled the Beirut number four times since the evening service and four times got a woman's recorded voice telling him the line was busy, in Arabic and then in French.
He had not meant to telephone anyone. He had meant to wait, as he had waited in April and May, for the boy to grow out of it, or for an answer he could understand to come up the church steps. Then the wave had come, and gone on, and the boy had sat on the church step most nights since, in the dark with his arms round his knees, and that evening Samia had stood in the office doorway and said, in an even voice, that Fadi had asked her whether the people in the church could hear him breathing from inside. Elias had said he would make some calls. She had thanked him the way people thank a doctor who has just said there is nothing more to try.
On the fifth the line rang through.
"Yes," said a man's voice, worn thin.
"Sheikh. It's Elias Haddad. Rima's husband."
There was a silence on the line, and then a long breath out, and the voice became a person.
"Father. Forgive me. I didn't know the number." The reciter had lived across the stairwell from Elias's wife's family in Beirut for fifty years. He had read over Rima's mother when she was dying, at the old woman's request, and Elias had stood in the doorway and listened, and afterward the two men had drunk coffee on the balcony and talked about the price of lemons. "How are you? How is the niece, the nurse?"
"Working. Sheikh, I need someone who knows about these things. Someone who will come to Damascus, or tell me who in Damascus."
"Everyone needs that." The reciter's voice dropped. "I have eleven on my book. Eleven, Father. Last spring I had two a month. I sleep in my car between houses."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Write this down."
Elias wrote down a number with a code he didn't recognise.
"Lahore," the reciter said. "An old man there keeps cards on all of us. Every reciter he trusts, every city. He'll find you someone. Tell him I sent you, and tell him plainly what it is. He doesn't like to be flattered."
"Thank you."
"Father." The line hissed. "The ones on my book. Do yours do everything in order? As if somebody had taught them?"
Elias thought of Jad, laughing in his kitchen for the twenty-eighth day, and of Nour, who was back at school and could not remember June.
"I don't know what order looks like," he said.
The Lahore number rang nine times. Elias was about to put the phone down when it was picked up, and someone on the other end took his time about speaking.
"Peace be upon you," said an old man in English, slowly.
"And upon you peace. Sheikh Bilal? My name is Elias Haddad. I'm a priest, in Damascus. The reciter in Beirut gave me your number."
"A priest." Bilal said it with interest, as if Elias had told him he grew tomatoes. "Wait, please." There was a scrape and a creak, a chair, a drawer. "I am finding a card. Go on. Speak slowly, my English is from the radio."
Elias told it slowly. A boy of twelve. Since February, before all this. He would not cross the threshold of any church. He had stood at the door on Palm Sunday and stepped back from it, and he had come every night of the first week of the wave and sat outside on the step in the dark to listen to Compline, and he had never come in. He was polite. He ate. He slept in the day. He said it could hear.
"It."
"His word."
The pen scratched for a long time. Elias could hear a clock, and a street with rickshaws, and the old man breathing through his nose.
"I have a man in Damascus on the cards," Bilal said at last. "A good one. Since the wave he does not answer. I think he is in the hospitals. I think he is at the bedside day and night and does not hear the phone." Another scratch. "I will give you another. In Karachi. He is very tired too. But he answers everyone, on the third ring, always the third. He will tell you what you need, and he will tell you if it is beyond the telephone."
"Thank you, Sheikh."
"Is it hot there?" Bilal asked.
"Forty-three today."
"Here forty-six. The canal behind my house is dry since February. Boys play cricket in it." The old man sighed into the receiver. "My late wife said the boxes of cards would bury me. Now I think it will be the heat. Tell him Bilal sent you. Tell him it's a boy." He paused. "You will want to apologise for being a priest. Don't. He won't notice."
The phone in Karachi rang twice and was picked up on the third ring.
"Yes."
"My name is Elias Haddad. I'm an Orthodox priest in Damascus. Sheikh Bilal gave me your number. He said to tell you it's a boy."
"Go on."
That was all. No greeting after the first word, no surprise. Ahmed had a flat, quiet voice, and behind it there was a sound like someone pressing pins into a board. Elias told it again, in English, as cleanly as he could.
When he finished there was a short pause.
"Before February. Where did he go?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The week before it started. Where did he go that he doesn't usually go? Somewhere empty. Dry. Under the ground."
Elias opened his mouth to say he didn't know, and then saw Samia at the font in April with her hands on the rim, laughing a little. Boys.
"A cistern," he said. "Under their house. It's been dry since last year. He went down with his cousins, with a rope and a torch, looking for water. He brought up a lamp. His mother made him put it back."
"The cousins?"
"Fine, I think. I'd know."
"His eyes. When he's at the door. Where do they go?"
"Past me. Into the church. To the font."
"Water in it?"
"Yes."
"Does he sleep at night?"
"No. In the day."
"Can he hear the Quran?"
Elias found he was smiling, in the dark office, at the absurdity of it.
"I don't know. I've never tried. I'm a priest."
"Try," said Ahmed. "Not you. Someone who reads. If he leaves the room, or sleeps, or speaks in a voice that isn't his, you'll know more than you know now." The pins stopped. "This isn't the wave. The wave is new. They go in quickly and they're careful. This one is old and it's comfortable. It has a house. It likes the house."
"Can you come?"
"No."
He said it the way he might have told Elias the time.
"There's a man in Damascus," Ahmed said. "Anas. Bilal's card. He won't answer, he's at the bedsides. Go to the mosque by the Jobar gate after the dawn prayer. He prays there before he goes to the wards. Tell him I sent you."
"Anas."
"He's good. He's slower than me. That's better for a boy."
Elias wrote it on the back of his hand, because the paper was out of reach and he did not want to lose it in the dark. Then, because the man had given him so much and asked for nothing, and because it was late and the battery was going and he did not know when he would speak to anyone who understood the question again, he said what he had been thinking for a month.
"We have a story. In the fourth century. A monk called Antony went out into the desert in Egypt and shut himself in an old tomb, and the demons came for him. As beasts, as soldiers, as women, as noises in the night. They beat him. He lay on the floor of the tomb for a night like a dead man. And they couldn't do anything to him. They ran from his prayer and from the sign of the cross." He stopped. "I've read it a hundred times. I always thought it was about Antony."
The line was quiet. Elias waited for the reciter to correct him, or to excuse himself, or to say the polite thing a Muslim says to a Christian about a story that is not his.
The pins began again, one, then another.
"Pray as you pray," said Ahmed. "Mean it."