The stairwell light clicked off between the second floor and the third, and Karima climbed the last flight in the dark with the cloth bag pressed to her chest.
Inside the bag were a copy of the Book, a small cup, a bottle of water and one sheet of paper folded in four. The sheet held the order of the work in her own handwriting, everything three days in a side room of the gymnasium had put into her. She knew it by heart. She had brought it in case her heart went blank.
Someone was sitting on the top step. She nearly trod on his hand.
"Sorry," a young man's voice said. "The light. I stopped pressing it."
He reached up and slapped the switch, and the bulb came on over a boy of nineteen or so in a university sweatshirt, a phone dark in his lap. He looked at her bag, then at her face, and something in him dropped.
"You're from the gymnasium."
"Yes. My name is Karima."
"I'm Hamza. She's my mother." Hamza stood and knocked on the green steel door behind him, two short knocks, and did not follow her in.
The husband opened it. He was a thin man in a pressed shirt, the accountant the woman on the phone had described, Tariq al-Mansour. He looked past Karima down the stairs as if someone else might still be coming up.
"They sent you?"
"They sent me."
He had wanted an old man, she thought. A beard and a voice. A week ago she had stood in a hospital lab labelling tubes of blood, and on the way home she had walked into a gymnasium in her lab coat and given her hand to a quiet man named Muhammad, because nothing else that month had pointed anywhere. On the third evening her teacher said she was as ready as anyone could be now, and gave her this address.
Tariq stepped back and let her in.
The flat smelled of cold cooking oil and mint from the balcony. An old woman sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap and did not get up.
"My daughter is in the bedroom," she said. "Her name is Layla. She teaches small children. Sit down and let him tell you."
Tariq told it standing, by the kitchen door, where he could see the stove.
Four mornings ago Layla had been making breakfast. He was at the table with the paper. Hamza was brushing his teeth for an early lecture. She was cracking an egg over the pan and halfway through she stopped, the shell open in her fingers, the white stringing down into the oil and the oil spitting. She stood looking at the egg and then at the pan for about a minute.
"As if she had never seen a pan," he said. "Then she put the shell on the counter and sat across from me and cried. Twenty minutes. Twenty years married. I never saw her cry like that." He looked at the stove. "When she stopped, she smiled at me. A small smile. And she said. . ."
"Go to work. I will be fine."
"It was her voice," he said. "It was not her."
His mother had told him to call the imam. The imam had given him a number going round the mosques, and the number had told him what to do for eighteen hours.
"On the second night she stood in that room and said the names of every child she ever taught," the old woman said from the sofa. "In order. Nineteen years of children." She looked at Karima. "My daughter cannot find her keys in her own handbag."
Karima kept her face still. They had practised that. A frightened worker makes a frightened house worse.
"I would like to go in. I would like someone with me she is close to."
"Not me," Tariq said quickly. "In the bad hours she is angry with me. I don't know why."
The old woman stood up. It took her two tries. She looked Karima over from her socks to her headscarf.
"Young woman. Can you do this?"
"I will try."
"That is not what I asked."
"I've been trained for three days. Long enough to follow the steps. If the steps are not enough, I will call someone who knows more. I won't pretend."
The old woman considered that.
"Good," she said.
Layla lay on her back on top of the bedspread with her eyes open. Her hands were folded on her chest, right over left, the way a body is laid out for washing. The mother saw them from the doorway and swallowed and said nothing.
Karima did not go to the bed. She stopped at its foot, close enough to be there and far enough not to crowd, and set the bag on the floor. She greeted Layla by name. Layla did not answer. Then Karima spoke to what was in her, plainly, in the words she had been given. She told it that it would be spoken to. She kept the anger out of her voice, because her teacher had said anger gives it a handle.
Layla's eyes left the ceiling and settled on a spot on the wall a hand's width from Karima's ear.
Karima began. She recited the opening chapter of the Quran in Arabic, then the Throne Verse. After each stage she checked what the sheet told her to check: the mother still in the room, Layla's breathing, where the eyes went. The words were Allah's and the healing was His to give. The sheet only held the order.
At the third stage Layla's hands came apart.
Nobody had shown her this. The hands slid down either side of the body and lay flat on the bedspread, palms down, fingers spread, pressing, as if the bed were a table and something meant to push itself up from it. Karima's own heart went hard and fast against her ribs. She stopped. Her mouth was dry and her tongue stuck to the roof of it. She made herself look at what was there. There was no thrashing. The hands pressed and did not lift. It was shifting its grip because the words had reached it.
She wet her mouth from the bottle and went on.
At the fifth stage she told it to leave. She said it in Arabic, the way she had said it forty times in the side room to a folding chair: leave this woman, by Allah's permission, and go where you will harm no one. For three days she had been afraid her voice would shake on that sentence. It shook on the last word, and she let it, and did not say it again.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the body on the bed let go. The stiffness ran out of it the way water runs out of a wrung cloth. Layla's fingers curled loose on the bedspread. Her eyes closed and her breath went long and slow, and in the doorway the mother made a sound she had not meant to make.
Karima recited the last two chapters to the end, so the going would be complete. Before she finished, Layla was asleep.
Karima sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed because her legs decided it.
Her hands were shaking. They had told her they would. It ran from her wrists to her fingertips like a shiver in cold water, and she could no more stop it than stop her teeth chattering in winter. She held them between her knees and it went into her knees.
The mother laid her palm on Layla's forehead and left it there.
"Will she be herself?"
"In a week, mostly. She'll be confused when she wakes, maybe frightened. She won't remember the bad hours."
"And after the week?"
Karima told her what they had been taught to tell. Layla would carry this. Some days it would come back to her, and they would learn together which days. She would teach and laugh and burn the rice. She would also be someone this had happened to, for the rest of her life.
The old woman nodded once and called her son-in-law. Tariq stood at the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets and watched his wife sleep. He did not cry either. Then he went out to the landing, and Karima heard Hamza's voice, and the switch slapping, and the light coming on.
In the hallway the mother caught Karima's arm above the elbow and held it.
"You did a good thing today."
"I did what I was taught."
"That does not argue with what I said."
Karima walked home in the late afternoon with her hands pushed into her armpits so nobody would see them. She was more tired than any night shift had ever made her, a weight behind the eyes and in the shoulders, and she knew it would sit on her for days.
Her phone buzzed against her knuckles. It was the number. An address, and a time: tonight, after the sunset prayer.
She read the address twice. She stopped at the corner of her own street and looked down it, past her own door, to the house two doors down, where the curtains had stayed shut in daylight all week and she had walked past them every morning on her way to the gymnasium.