At twenty to five in the afternoon every pigeon on the dome of Saint Simeon's went up at once, and Father Elias, who was kneeling in the courtyard with a spanner in his hand, looked up and watched them go.
They did not circle. They flew east, all of them, a grey sheet of wings over the roofs of the quarter, and did not come back. A moment later the dogs began. The fat yellow dog that slept under the stationer's cart, the two that belonged to the Armenian family on the corner, a dog somewhere toward the Jewish quarter that he had never seen. They barked together for perhaps half a minute, all in the same key, and then stopped together, as if someone had shut a door on them.
His ears popped, the way they did in the lift at the hospital.
That was all. He waited for more and there was no more. The sun lay on the courtyard stones as it had lain all day, white and heavy, and the iron cover of the cistern was hot under his hand, and the tap he had been trying to free for the third time that week was still stuck. He wiped his face with his sleeve and went on with the tap.
Later he would try to remember what he had been thinking at twenty to five, and would find he had been thinking about the price of washers.
Fadi came at six to ring for Vespers.
He had asked to do it in the first week of August, standing in the office doorway with his hands behind his back, as formal as a boy asking for a girl's hand. He was twelve and thin and he went into the church now without looking at the threshold at all, the way any boy goes through any door, and Elias had said yes before he had finished asking. The old sexton's knees had been bad for years. The rope hung down through a hole in the vestibule ceiling, and the boy liked to wind his wrists in the loop at the bottom and lean back on it with his whole weight and let it lift him off his feet on the upswing.
He did it now. The rope went up through the ceiling and the bell spoke in the tower.
It was wrong.
Elias heard it from the sacristy, where he was putting on his stole, and stopped with the stole half over his head. The bell of Saint Simeon's had been cast in Russia in the year his grandfather was born and carried overland from Beirut on a cart, and it had one note, a deep round note that sat under the noise of the city like a stone under a river. He had heard it every day of his life. He had heard it ring through two wars and an earthquake and a winter so cold the rope froze. It had never once been anything but itself.
This was flat. Not cracked; he knew what cracked sounded like. Flat, dull, a heavy note with no ring in it, like a pot struck with a spoon.
Fadi pulled again. Again the dull note. The boy stopped and stood holding the rope and looked at Elias through the vestibule door with his face very white.
"I didn't do anything, Father."
"I know you didn't."
Elias took the torch from the hook and climbed the tower ladder, which he had not done in two years, with his cassock hitched up into his belt. At the top the bell hung in its frame with the evening coming in through the louvres on four sides, and the heat up there was like an oven with the door open. He shone the torch over every part of it. He ran his hand round the lip. No crack. The clapper was sound on its leather. The yoke was sound. The pigeons' droppings lay on the beams where they always lay, and there were no pigeons.
He made a fist and struck the bell with his knuckle, gently, near the lip.
It rang true. A small, perfect, round note, the right note, the note he had known for sixty-four years, humming up through his arm.
"Pull," he called down.
Fadi pulled. The clapper swung, and the bell spoke a hand's breadth from Elias's face, and the note that came out of it was flat.
He came down the ladder slowly. His hands were shaking. He told himself it was the heat up there, and the ladder, and his age. In the street the neighbours had come out onto their balconies. Mira was standing at the church gate in her hospital trousers with her bag still on her shoulder, home early for once.
"They sent me home," she said before he could ask. "At twenty to five every one of the polite ones on the ward sat up in bed at once. All of them. Then they lay down again and started crying, and none of them could tell us why. The registrar sent half the day staff home to come back for the night." She looked up at the tower. "What's wrong with the bell? It sounds like a pot."
"Nothing's wrong with it."
"Uncle, it sounds like a pot."
"I know what it sounds like."
He took the rope from Fadi and rang it himself, for Vespers, because it was time and the people would be waiting, and every stroke of it was flat. Up and down the street it went on being flat. At the corner the call to the sunset prayer began from the mosque, the same voice as every evening, and the two sounds went over the roofs of Bab Touma one after the other, and he could not have said why the one sounded so much like itself and the other did not.
Eleven people came to Vespers. Ordinarily it was thirty. Nobody spoke of the bell. Abu Elie's daughter came without her father and stood at the back and cried without a sound through the whole of the evening psalm, and when Elias went to her afterward she said she did not know why, it was only the bell, and she was sorry.
He sent Fadi home before dark and prayed Compline alone.
Mira had gone to bed. The power had not come back. He sat in the parish office afterward with one candle on the desk and the window open on a street that was quieter than it should have been at ten at night in August, with no radios, no televisions, no voices from the balconies, only somewhere far off a car alarm that went on and on and nobody switched off.
He thought of the boy on the rope. He thought of Jad, who had asked his wife what day it was, and of the old woman from Duma who had told Mira to ask her priest. He thought of the pigeons. None of it went together. He did not try to make it.
He took down his Bible from the shelf. It was his father's, the old Arabic one with the soft black cover and the pages gone thin as onion skin at the end, where his father had read the most. The church did not read the last book aloud. Not in the liturgy, not at Vespers, not on any feast of the year. His father had told him once, when he was a seminarian and full of questions, that some books were for the whole church and some were for one man alone at night who needed them, and the last book was the second kind.
He had never needed it. He opened it now at the thirteenth chapter, because his father's thumb had worn the corner of that page soft, and read by the candle.
"Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea."
He read on, slowly, the way he had read the ninetieth psalm over the boy, every word. He read that the beast had a wound that was healed, and that all the world marveled and followed the beast. He read that another came after it, and performed great signs, so that he even made fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.
The car alarm stopped.
Elias sat in the silence with his hand flat on the page. Then he closed the book, and did not open it again that night.