The ceiling fans in the synagogue hall turned so slowly that Esther could count the blades.
There were four hundred people in a room built for a hundred and fifty. The chairs had run out before the evening prayer was over, and the men stood three deep along the walls, and the women stood at the back behind the wooden screen, where Esther was pressed between Hadas and a grandmother who smelled of rosewater and sweat. Someone had opened the windows onto the courtyard. It made no difference. Outside the air was as hot as inside, a dry July heat that came up off the stones after dark and did not go anywhere.
The preacher had come from abroad. Esther had not caught where. He was perhaps fifty, with a trimmed grey beard and a small microphone clipped to his collar, and a young man at the side worked a laptop that threw his words in Persian onto a sheet hung from the women's gallery. He spoke in Hebrew and English by turns and did not seem to sweat.
"Look at your river," he said. "Look at your fields. The rabbis told us. In the footsteps of the Messiah, insolence will increase and prices will soar. The young will shame the old. Is it not so? Have you not seen it?"
A murmur went through the men along the wall. Somebody said yes out loud.
He went on. He listed the signs as a man lists stations on a line he has travelled many times. The rains withheld, three years now. A war that broke an empire in a season. The exiles coming home, to this city of all cities, where Jews had lived since the days of the first exile, families from Los Angeles and Haifa and Toronto filling the lanes their grandparents had left. He spread his hands toward the women's screen and the sheet with his words on it, as if he could see every face behind it.
"You are not the end of the story. You are the turning of the page."
Hadas had both hands at her mouth. Her eyes were wet.
Then he spoke about the sickness. He called it a blow upon the nations, like the blows in Egypt, in the cities of those who had hated Israel, so that they would know. The men along the wall nodded.
Esther thought of Tara. Tara had come back to the summer class two weeks ago. She sat in the second row beside the window and did her spelling and did not laugh at anything, and when the other children ran out at break she stayed in her borrowed chair with her hands flat on the desk, as if she were holding it down. Her mother came to fetch her every day at noon and stood at the gate the whole morning before that.
"He's wrong," she said into Hadas's ear. "It took Tara. It took her the same week as Omid."
Hadas did not turn her head.
"Shh. Listen."
At the end he asked nothing for himself. He said there were young men at the door with notebooks, and that any family who wished to be counted among those who were ready should leave a name, so that when the day came nobody would be forgotten. The crowd moved toward the door like water finding a drain. Esther saw the notebooks over the heads, three of them, open on a folding table, and a queue already bending round into the courtyard.
Hadas went. Esther watched her write, bending over the table with her hair falling forward, and then add a second line underneath for the cousin coming from Haifa.
"Aren't you?"
"Ready for what?"
Hadas laughed and squeezed her arm, as if Esther had made a joke.
The old men did not go home afterward.
They never did. They took the plastic chairs that had been carried out to the courtyard for the overflow and set them in their usual half-circle under the mulberry, which had dropped most of its leaves in June, and they sat. Esther waited by the gate for her father, who could not walk home alone in the dark any more, though he would not have said so.
Ezra Kohanim had the chair in the middle. He was a year older than her father and had been his friend for sixty years, and he had a voice that carried to the gate without trying.
"The Ninth of Av is in twelve days," Ezra said. "On the day the Temple burned, the Messiah was born. It's written. Every year we sit on the floor and weep, and every year it could be the year."
"Every year it could," said another of them.
"This year it is. Nissim. Tell them."
Her father had taken the chair at the end, the one nearest the gate. He sat with his stick between his knees and both hands on the handle.
"Tell them what?"
"That you heard him. That you saw the hall."
"I heard him. I saw the hall. The hall was full. That's a fact about the hall."
Somebody laughed. Ezra did not.
"You've gone sour. The river is dust. The land has come back to us from the river of Egypt to the great river. Our children are coming home. What more do you want God to do, write it on the bridge?"
Her father was quiet for a while. A moth came down out of the dark and walked across the back of his hand, and he let it.
"My grandfather's grandfather was a tanner in this city," he said. "In his day word came from Smyrna that the Messiah had come. A man there had said so, and many believed him. The Jews of Isfahan stopped their work. My grandfather's grandfather left his hides in the pits to rot. For a year, Ezra. For a year they waited, and sold what they had, and danced in the lanes." He lifted his hand and the moth went. "Then the man from Smyrna saved his own neck and gave it all up. And my grandfather's grandfather went back to the pits and found nothing in them worth saving."
"That was a false one."
"Yes. He looked, to them, exactly like the true one. That's my point."
Nobody said anything. Through the open windows of the hall Esther could hear the young man with the laptop packing his cables away, and the preacher laughing with someone at the door.
"So you'll sit on your hands," Ezra said at last. "While it comes."
"I'll sit on the floor on the Ninth of Av, and weep for the Temple, the way I've done for seventy years. If he comes, he'll find me there. He'll know where to look."
He planted the stick and got up. Esther came forward and took his elbow, and he did not shake her off.
He did not go to bed. He went to the study, which was also the dining room and the place where the winter coats were kept, and stood looking up at the shelf above the door.
"Get the stool."
She got the stool and climbed up. The top shelf was the one nobody touched: old prayer books with broken spines, her grandfather's commentaries in their cloth covers, a tin of letters. He directed her by pointing. Left. Left. The thin one. It came out with a skin of dust that she blew off over the hall, and she climbed down and gave it to him.
It was a small paper book, much handled, the cover gone soft as cloth. He sat at the table under the lamp and opened it, and on the flyleaf there was a line of handwriting in faded brown ink.
"Whose is that?"
"My father's. He wrote the year he bought it. The year I was born." He ran his thumb along the line. "He used to say every generation needs one man who has read this, and nobody needs two."
"What is it?"
"*Sefer Zerubbabel*. A vision, written long after the Talmud, by someone who was frightened of what he saw coming and wanted to be ready." He turned the pages carefully, looking for something, his lips moving. "Your mother didn't like me reading it at the table."
Esther pulled out the chair beside him. Through the wall she could hear the Karimis' television, low, and Omid arguing about bedtime, the ordinary sound of it.
Her father found the page. He smoothed it flat with the side of his hand and held it there.
"There is a stone in Rome," he read, in Hebrew, and then said it again in Persian for her, slowly, so that she would have it in both. "A stone in the form of a beautiful woman. And from that stone a man is born, and he will say that he is the Messiah, and he will be believed."
He stopped. His finger rested under the next word.
"And his name is Armilus."