On the second morning Sheikh Yusuf took the same folding chair by the gymnasium door, set his walking stick across his knees and watched the man ladle lentils.
He was sixty-eight. He had spent forty-three years on the law and the sciences of hadith, written seven books, supervised nineteen doctorates and buried a wife. Men had come to his door all his life with a name to sell him. A dreamer from the coast who saw green birds. A schoolteacher who had counted the letters of a verse and found his own birthday in them. He had listened to every one of them with courtesy and sent them home with tea.
His grandson had come back from this place two days ago white in the face, with the answer to the one question Yusuf would not put on a telephone. So Yusuf had come in a taxi, and sat, and watched.
He had watched for vanity first, because it is the cheapest thing to find. The man gave out bread and did not look to see who saw him do it. He had watched for the hunger to be believed. The man spoke to perhaps forty people in two days, and Yusuf did not once see him check a face to learn whether he had been believed. The man's voice was ordinary, with none of the soft holy hush Yusuf had learned to distrust, and he laughed once, at a child who had put a slice of bread on her head.
This morning the man helped an old woman carry a cup of water back to her bedding, one hand under her elbow, and waited until she was sitting before he stepped away from her.
Yusuf picked up his stick and crossed the floor.
"I am Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman."
The man paused. Perhaps a second.
"You're welcome here, Sheikh."
The second had been long enough for the name to land. Yusuf saw it land, and saw the man decide not to mention the books.
"May we sit?"
"Your grandson sat there two days ago. He asked well."
"He asked what I told him to ask."
"He asked one more." The man did not say what it was. "Please. The bench in the corridor is quieter."
They sat on the bench in the corridor where his grandson had sat. The breakfast line was inside, and the corridor smelled of floor polish and boiled lentils.
"I have questions."
"I'm listening."
He asked them one at a time, and after each answer he took what time he needed to set it against forty-three years of reading.
"Your name."
"Muhammad."
"Your full name."
"Muhammad ibn Abdullah. My family is from al-Qaryah, in the mountain district."
Yusuf kept his face still. He had taught the report about the name and the father's name for forty years, and he had watched it make fools of better men than himself. Half the men in the mountain district were called Muhammad, and a good number of their fathers were called Abdullah.
"Your teachers."
"The village school until sixteen. Then Sheikh Bashir of al-Murawwaq, privately, until twenty-six. After that, on my own."
Sheikh Bashir. Yusuf knew the name the way he knew the names of certain old manuscripts: respected, rarely seen, never lent.
"Why no institution, after?"
"I didn't feel called to one."
Yusuf held that one longer. A student of Bashir's would usually say money, or family, or that degrees were vanity. This man had said called, and used the word as if it were the ordinary ground a man stands on to decide things.
"What have you been doing in the communities?"
"Helping where I could."
"Describe it."
He did, in plain working language: the kinds of affliction he had met, what he had told households to change, what had worked and what hadn't. He gave no count of his cases and did not name the quarters he had been in.
"By what authority do you tell households how to conduct themselves with jinn in the house? In the tradition I know, that is reserved to particular people."
"I know the tradition."
"And your standing in it."
The man did not answer at once. Yusuf had the sense of someone who had arranged his whole work so that this question would never need asking, and now it had been asked.
"I've carried a responsibility since I was a boy. I didn't ask for it. I've done the work in front of me as it came. This crisis has put more in front of me. The work is the same. The amount is different."
"Name the responsibility."
"No."
There was no heat in it. Yusuf had heard that word on benches before, from men who then told him who they were, and it had always come wrapped in something: the shine of a fanatic, or the careful modesty of a liar waiting to be pressed. This man said it the way he had said the village school.
So Yusuf said it for him, low, on the bench, with the floor polish in his nose.
"Then I'll name it. You are the Mahdi."
He watched the man's face while he said it. The man did not take the word and did not push it away. He looked at Yusuf with the same attention he had given the old woman with her cup.
"That isn't mine to say about myself, Sheikh. You asked what I carry. I've told you."
Yusuf did not ask for signs. A man who wants to be believed will always supply signs. He asked instead about the man's life, the dull parts: his mother's illness, the year the village school lost its roof, what Bashir had made him copy out at seventeen. The man told him small things across thirty years, none of them weighty alone and none told as if it meant anything. Three times Yusuf asked him to go back over a detail. Three times he went back without changing a word.
Then Yusuf sat without speaking. By the clock above the corridor door it was three minutes. The man did not fill them. Yusuf ran through every test his discipline had taught him to run before a man of knowledge gives his assent to something like this, and he ran through his own heart too, looking for the old hunger to be the one who found him. It was there. He set it to one side and looked at what was left. He thought of Abdul Wahid, who had shared his room at the seminary at nineteen and his first teaching post at twenty-six, and who had given his hand to a man with a beautiful voice in a provincial town forty years ago. Wahid had spent the rest of his life writing letters to explain it. Yusuf still had nine of them in a drawer. He thought of the nineteen doctorates, and the chairs, and what each of those men would say at their dinners tonight if he was wrong.
He held out his hand, in the old way of the pledge, a believer binding himself to the one who receives it.
The man took it. He did not hesitate, and he did not take it eagerly. His grip was an ordinary grip, dry, a little rough at the knuckles, and it held as long as the pledge requires, and neither of them spoke while it held.
When he let go, Yusuf's hand was shaking. He put it on his stick.
"My students will hear this afternoon. Most will come. Some will need what I needed. I'll send them here, and you'll receive them."
"I'll receive them."
"Not all at once."
"No."
"Not with ceremony."
"No."
"Good."
He walked back down the corridor. At the gymnasium door he looked round once. Muhammad had already gone inside, and a woman with a small notebook in her hand was coming out past him toward the yard. She nodded to him. He nodded back, as if nothing had happened.
In the taxi Yusuf rang his oldest student, a man with a chair of his own and a beard going grey.
"Come to the school shelter in the eastern district," he said. "Today. Bring nobody yet."
He had not finished the next sentence before the phone buzzed against his ear with a second call, and then a third. His grandson had not kept his errand to himself. By the time the taxi reached the ring road the screen in his lap showed eleven missed calls, and it was still lighting up.