The men came out of the mosque by the Jobar gate in twos and threes, putting their shoes on against the wall, and every one of them looked at the priest standing in the street in a black cassock at a quarter to five in the morning.
Father Elias had stood in worse places. He kept his hands folded and his face pleasant and waited until a heavy man in his fifties came out last, carrying a plastic bag of water bottles in each hand, with the red eyes of someone who had not been to bed.
"Sheikh Anas?"
The man stopped. He looked at the cassock, and the cross, and the face, and something tired in his own face shifted into something wary and then, by degrees, into something amused.
"Ahmed," he said.
"Ahmed."
"Of course. He sends me everyone he can't carry from two thousand kilometres away." Sheikh Anas set the bags down on the step and shook Elias's hand. His palm was damp and soft, a cloth merchant's hand. "What is it? A boy? He said a boy."
"He telephoned you?"
"He sent a message at three in the morning. Three words. Priest. Boy. Bab Touma." Anas almost smiled. "I've been on the wards since the wave. I can give you tomorrow, early, before the heat. Is that too long?"
"He's had it since February. One more day."
"One more day is not nothing," said Anas, and picked up his bags.
Samia's brother George brought Fadi to Saint Simeon's at seven the next morning, and the boy walked up the street between them like a prisoner being taken to court, polite, quiet, with his eyes on the church door from the moment it came into sight.
He stopped on the step, as he always did. George, who was a builder and as broad as the doorway, put a hand on his shoulder and waited. Samia stood a little apart with her arms wrapped round herself.
Anas came up the street at ten past, in a clean white shirt, with an old Quran in a cloth bag. He nodded to Elias. He did not go into the church. He sat down on the step beside Fadi, at a polite distance, and set the bag on his knees.
"Good morning. I'm Anas."
"Good morning," said Fadi.
"I'm going to read a little. You don't have to do anything."
He read in Arabic, the opening chapter of the Quran and then the Throne Verse, in a low unhurried voice that was nothing like the loud reciters on the cassettes in the taxis. Elias had heard the Throne Verse all his life, through walls, from radios, from the mosque on the corner. He had never heard it this close, read to one person.
On the fourth line Fadi's head turned. He looked at Anas with an expression Elias had never seen on a child, a sort of offended patience, as at a guest who has started rearranging the furniture.
"I was here first," said the boy, and it was not his voice. It was dry and low and very old, a voice with dust in it. "Before your bells. I was under the house when the house was a field."
Anas kept reading.
"He came down into my house with a light." The voice was almost reasonable. "He took my lamp. I have the right."
Samia made a sound. Anas finished the verse and closed the book on his finger.
"Inside is better," he said to Elias, low. "He doesn't want to go in. That's a reason."
Elias nodded to George. The builder bent and lifted his nephew the way you lift a sack of cement, against his chest, and carried him over the threshold.
The boy went rigid in his arms. His heels drummed on George's thighs. The dry voice said things that made Samia put her hands over her ears, about her, about her husband in the cemetery, about where the men of this family went at night, all of it said without heat. George carried him the length of the nave and laid him on the mat Elias had put down before the iconostasis, under the icons of Christ and his mother and John the Forerunner and the archangels on the deacons' doors, and knelt and held his shoulders.
Anas stood at the boy's feet. He looked once at the screen, at the gold and the faces, and then turned a little, perhaps a quarter turn to the right, so that he faced south along the side aisle toward the direction of prayer. Elias saw him do it and understood and said nothing.
Anas began to recite again. Elias stood at the boy's head and began to pray.
He prayed the ninetieth psalm, because he had prayed it every night since the wave and his mouth knew it. Under his breath, between the verses, he said the old short prayer the monks said, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me," and he made the sign of the cross over the boy slowly, the way the old priest from Saidnaya had taught him. Anas's voice and his voice went on together in the empty church, in the same Arabic, with different words, and neither man raised his voice over the other.
It went on a long time. The boy fought. Then he stopped fighting and talked, and then he stopped talking and only breathed, a hoarse dry breath like wind through a broken window. Anas read the last two chapters of the Quran, the short ones, three times through. Then he spoke to the thing in the boy, plainly, the way you speak to a lodger who has outstayed his welcome.
"Leave him, in the name of Allah. Go out the way you came, and harm no one, and don't come back to this house or this family."
The boy coughed.
He coughed again, hard, and George turned him on his side, and he brought up onto the mat a little spit and a little water and a fine grey powder like the dust at the bottom of a dry well, which lay on the mat where it fell and did not run.
Then he was asleep.
Elias found that his knees had given and he was kneeling. He did not remember deciding to. He gave thanks, there on the floor, silently, the way he had at Mira's birth and at Rima's death, without many words. Then he looked up and saw Anas, standing at the boy's feet with the closed Quran held against his chest and his eyes shut and his lips moving, and knew that the man was giving thanks too, in his own words, and that neither of them would ask the other which of them had been heard.
Fadi woke twenty minutes later and asked for water.
George gave it to him. The boy drank the whole glass and looked round at the church, at the candles and the gold and his mother on her knees in the front row with her scarf over her mouth.
"It's cold in here," he said, in his own voice, surprised.
Then his face crumpled and he said to his mother, "I didn't put the lamp back. I said I did. It's under my bed."
They drank tea in the parish office afterward, the two of them, with the door open to the courtyard and the fan off because of the cut. Samia had taken Fadi home. George had gone to find the clay lamp and carry it down into the cistern, with a rope, and Anas had told him what to say when he put it down, and George had repeated it twice to be sure.
Anas took four sugars in his tea. He had a small notebook with a green cover, and he took it out of his shirt pocket and opened it on the desk.
"Every case," he said. "Twenty-two years. The date, the house, the name. What I read. How long. What happened."
He wrote the date. He wrote Saint Simeon's, Bab Touma. He wrote Fadi, twelve. He wrote the opening chapter, the Throne Verse, the two chapters of refuge, three times. He wrote two hours.
Then he sat with the pen over the next line, where he wrote what kind of work it had been.
"What do I call it?" he said.
Elias thought about it. He had a word for what he had done and Anas had a word for what Anas had done, and the words were not the same word and were not going to become the same word, and the boy was asleep in his own bed.
"I don't know," he said.
Anas looked at the empty line a while longer. Then he left it empty, and closed the notebook, and they finished their tea.