Ahmed stood by the car with one hand flat on the cold roof and the silence from the upstairs window in his ears.
He closed his eyes and recited the Opening once, silently, in Arabic. The words ran through him along a channel worn for exactly this. When he opened his eyes the street was the same street and he was the same man, but the gap between him and the work had closed. He took his hand off the roof and crossed to the gate the way a diver steps off the board, already falling.
The mother met him at the gate. She was smaller than he remembered from the autumn, as if the three weeks had taken something off her. Her headscarf had slipped to one side, which told him she had stopped thinking about herself days ago. She took his hand in both of hers and held it. He let her. Her palms were damp and she didn't seem to know she was squeezing.
"Upstairs."
The father stood up from the plastic chair when Ahmed came through the courtyard and closed the little Quran on his finger. He did not seem to know what you did next when a man came into your house to do this, and after a moment he sat down again. His face had gone past tiredness into the country where exhaustion is how you live.
He asked the mother for a clean corner first, and she showed him the front room, where the good cushions were stacked against the wall and a calendar from a tyre shop hung beside the clock. He prayed the night prayer there, four units, with the muttering coming faintly through the ceiling. He did not hurry it. A man who hurried the prayer to get to the work had his order wrong, his teacher used to say, and the work always knew. When he said the final peace to his right and to his left, the muttering above had stopped again, and the mother was standing in the doorway with her hands knotted at her waist.
The stairs were narrow. The mother went first, and with each step the sound from above came clearer. It had started again. There was no screaming. Whatever was up there was not panicking. What he heard was a low run of sound with a cadence like speech, structured and deliberate, in no language he knew.
The room was at the end of the hall. The door stood open and the light was on.
He knew the room. The cousin had slept here last spring, and since then someone had pushed the bed under the window and hung a new curtain that breathed in the draught. There was a wardrobe, a low dresser with a framed photograph of a girl in a graduation gown, and a side table holding a glass of water nobody had drunk from. The air smelled of sweat and of the rosewater the mother must have sprinkled at the door, which was what mothers in this neighbourhood did when they had tried everything else.
Fatima lay on the bed with her dark hair loose on the pillow, and her body was arguing with itself. Her back arched while her shoulders pressed flat. Her hands gripped the metal bed frame above her head so hard her knuckles had gone white, the grip of someone afraid of being dragged out of the only solid thing in the room. Below the heels of her hands, both wrists were ringed with bruises gone yellow at the edges and fresh purple at the centre.
"We had to hold her," the mother said from the doorway. "Last week. And before."
Ahmed nodded. Some of the bruises were older than last week.
Her eyes found him at once.
Then he looked at the eyes, because the eyes sorted a case faster than anything a family could tell him. In seventeen years he had learned three kinds.
A jinn that had come in by choice looked out with a slow pleasure in the family's fear.
A jinn driven in against its will looked frantic and furious, an animal cornered twice.
A jinn placed by a sorcerer's hand and pinned there by knots it couldn't see looked through the host at something behind everything, frightened and calculating at once.
Fatima's eyes carried marks he had seen dozens of times. The whites held a faint yellow haze, too faint for a doctor to write down, visible only to someone who knew to look for what seeps out under a long occupation. Her irises were the brown common in this country except at the rims, where the line between brown and white was softened, as if a thumb had smudged it. The pupils were uneven. Under the overhead light they should have been round, and the left one was drawn out very slightly top to bottom. The right one was the same, a little less. At the outer corners of both eyes fine creases fanned toward her temples, darker than her skin, and she was too young for creases of any colour.
Those marks meant weeks of it, perhaps months, long enough for whatever lived in her to leach into the surface of her face. The three weeks fit. So did the strength, the muttering and the terror behind the eyes.
The sound from her throat stopped, and the room went quiet. Her mouth moved.
The first thing out of it was a cluster of syllables his ear could not hold. It was not Farsi, or Turkish, or any of the regional tongues he had heard in this work. The consonants were stacked hard against each other and the vowels pressed thin, and he could hear the throat straining at shapes it was not built for.
It shifted to something older, close to a dialect he had once heard from an old man in the south, and then not quite that either, a kind of speech that might not have been spoken aloud in a long time.
Then it landed.
"You've come."
The voice was young and tight. It used the language of the house with an accent that belonged to no region in this country, the consonants wrong at their edges and the vowels held a beat too long. The words themselves were clear.
"Good. Let us see what you have."
Ahmed heard all of it, the searching and then the landing, and filed it where he had filed every first speech for seventeen years. The jinn performs and tests, and feels around for whatever will buy it time. Calm was a posture, and any jinn could hold a posture until the recitation began.
The host is suffering, and the host comes first. He had said it to himself on hundreds of nights, and it held because it stood on something too simple to crack. The jinn is in the body. It should not be in the body. It has to leave. Everything else is noise.
He laid his Quran on the small table by the bed and pulled up a chair, within arm's reach of her and outside grabbing distance, and sat.
"I am going to begin."
He said it to the room, to the mother in the doorway, to the woman on the bed and to whatever was in her.
He had expected thrashing, and there was none. Her body drew tight, but it did not flinch away from him. It went still, like a card player who has just seen the size of the other man's stack.
He recited the Throne Verse in Arabic, clearly and at an even pace, and watched her face as each phrase arrived.
The thing in her did not scream or twist her features into the defiant mask he had seen so often it had grown dull. Her jaw loosened. Her grip on the frame eased a fraction. The eyes, which had held him with that calm, flickered once. It was a small flicker and there was no fear in it. It looked like a creature changing its estimate of the room.
He had seen fear in this work and he had seen rage. He had never seen this.
He went on, because the host came first. Whatever had flickered in there was the jinn's affair. He set it aside for later.
At the last phrase of the verse the eyes left his face. They moved a little to his right and up, to the empty air just above his right shoulder, and they stayed there.