Zahra laid the paper on the kitchen table and smoothed it with both palms, as if it might roll itself up and run.
"From the mosque. The imam's cousin sent it to his phone from Karachi. He printed twenty and they went in an hour."
It was a single sheet, folded in four, the folds already furred. Arabic down one side, English down the other. There was no picture and no name. At the top, in English, it said only: "If someone in your house is taken."
Esther read the English side. It did not take long.
"One. Do not leave them alone, day or night. Two in the room. Three is better. Two. If you can, move them to the house of the person they trust most. Three. Keep a notebook. Write the hours: when they sleep, when they eat, when it comes. Four. Watch the hands, not the eyes. Five. Keep a light on and a voice in the room all night, low. A radio will do. Six. Do not call their name after dark. Speak to them. Do not shout. Seven. Pray as you pray, and mean it."
She read it again. Number two was what they had done with Tara, without knowing why. Number five was the generator in the street and her father's voice in the chair.
"Who wrote it?"
"Nobody says. People who know." Zahra tapped the seventh line. "I read the Arabic to Reza. That line is the same. It doesn't say how. It doesn't say to whom."
"The new families can't read Persian. Half of them. They came from Haifa and Netanya. The children read Hebrew and the grandparents read nothing."
"So write it in Hebrew."
Esther looked up.
"And in proper Persian. The imam's Persian is terrible. Get a pen. I'll make tea."
They worked at the kitchen table until midnight, with the window open to the heat and the fan pushing the same air from one side of the room to the other. Omid lay on the floor under the table with a comic and kept reading out the bits he liked, and nobody told him to stop.
"Number four is right," he said once, without looking up. "My hands went first. Before anything. Baba said they were like spiders."
Zahra's hand stopped on her tea glass. Then she drank, and she did not ask him anything more, and Esther did not either.
The Persian went quickly. Esther wrote a line and Zahra read it aloud and made a face, and Esther crossed it out, and Zahra said it the way her mother would have said it, and Esther wrote that down instead. Zahra's Persian was older than hers, full of words from the villages. It sounded like someone's aunt giving instructions in a kitchen, and Esther liked it better than her own.
The Hebrew she did alone. Most of it was easy. Watch the hands. Two in the room. Then the seventh line, and her pen stopped above the paper.
Pray as you pray. That part had a plain Hebrew form, and she wrote it. But for "mean it" there were five ways to say it, and four of them were wrong. One was too soft, the kind of thing written on greeting cards. One sounded like a court. In the end she wrote the word her father used, the old word from the prayer book for the heart turned toward what it says, the word he had been waiting for in the chair by Tara's bed when his voice stopped in the middle of the line.
Zahra leaned over to look, though she could not read it.
"What did you put?"
"Aim your heart."
"Hm." She sat back. "My mother would say the same. Different word."
Her father came out of his room at eleven in his vest, because the light was on, and stood reading the Hebrew over Esther's shoulder with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and the page held at the length of his arm. He took her pen. He changed one word in the fifth line, so that it said a voice and not a noise. Then he gave the pen back.
"There's nothing in it a Jew can't do."
"There's nothing in it anyone can't do. That's why it works."
"You know it works?"
Zahra looked at him, and then at the floor where her son was lying, reading a comic, a boy of ten who had counted to a thousand in a stranger's voice six weeks ago.
"I know what I know, Rabbi."
Reza printed three hundred the next morning at his shop on the Chaharbagh, a hundred of each language, on the cheap yellow paper he used for restaurant menus. He would not take money. He said the machine had nothing better to do.
Esther took the Hebrew ones. She pinned one to the synagogue noticeboard between the times of the Ninth of Av services, which had passed, and an advertisement for a flat. She gave a stack to Hadas for the girls in the summer class to take home. Hadas read it standing in the corridor and said it was sweet. Then she went door to door in the lanes where the new families lived.
At number fourteen the son opened the door before she knocked. He was a heavy man in his forties with a Haifa accent and a week of stubble, and behind him in the dark flat a woman was saying something in a high, steady voice that did not stop for breath.
"My mother. Since June. The doctors say it's the heat. She doesn't sleep. She talks to the wardrobe."
Esther gave him the yellow sheet. He read it in the doorway, his lips moving, and when he reached the end he read the end again.
"Who is this from?"
"People who know."
He came to the Hakimis' door three nights later, at nine, with a box of pastries from the bakery on the corner. He did not come in. He stood on the landing and held the box out to her with both hands.
"She slept," he said. "Last night. Six hours. We put her in my sister's room, my sister sat with her, we left the radio on. My sister said the prayers our grandmother said. I didn't know she remembered them." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Six hours. She woke up and asked for coffee."
Across the landing Zahra's door was open a crack. Esther saw her eye in the gap, and then the door closed softly.
By the end of the week there were yellow sheets on the wall of the mosque at the end of the street and in the window of the bakery, Persian and Hebrew side by side, and a woman Esther had never met stopped her by the water truck to ask if there were more.
The man from the ministry came on Monday morning.
Esther saw him from the school gate. He wore the new uniform, pale grey, with the badge on the pocket that still had its plastic shine, and he carried a folder and a roll of tape. He went to the synagogue board first. He took down the yellow sheet with care, as if it might be evidence, and slipped it into the folder. Then he went down the street to the mosque and did the same, and then to the bakery, where he had to ask the baker to open the window.
At each place he left something behind. She went across when he had gone.
It was a printed notice, white, with the ministry's new crest at the top and two stamps at the bottom. He had taped it exactly where the leaflet had been.
Her father came out of the synagogue and stood beside her and read it with his glasses on. It did not take long either.
"By order of the Ministry of the Interior. The leaflet titled 'If someone in your house is taken' is Muslim religious propaganda. Its printing, display and distribution are forbidden. Copies are to be surrendered."
"Muslim," her father said. "I changed a word in it myself."
The tape had gone on crooked. On the cork around the notice were the four pinholes where her sheet had hung, and the baker stood in his doorway down the street with his arms folded, watching the man go.
He did not go far. He stopped at the corner, opened his folder, checked something on a list against the street and turned back the way he had come, toward the school gate. Esther thought of the staffroom, and her bag on the chair by the door, and the forty Hebrew copies she had not yet given out, folded in four, on top of her lunch.