Her father had stopped winding the clock.
Esther noticed it on Tuesday evening, when the kitchen was too quiet and she could not say why, and then saw the hands standing at twenty to six. It was the brass clock from her grandfather's shop, and her father had wound it every Friday before the candles for as long as she had been alive. Last Friday he had not.
She wound it herself and set it by her phone. The tick came back into the room like someone breathing again.
It had been five days. On Thursday, at ten past five in the afternoon, every dog in the riverbed under the bridges had started barking at once. She had been marking spelling at this table. So had the whole street heard it; she had heard windows going up and a man shouting at the dogs from a balcony, and the barking had gone on for perhaps a minute and then stopped all together, as if someone had shut a door on it. Her father had been at the window in the middle of the afternoon prayer, and he had stopped too. He stood with his hand on the frame and his lips not moving, looking at nothing she could see. Then he finished.
She had asked him about it at breakfast.
"The air," he said, and buttered his bread. "It weighs more. Don't you feel it?"
She had said no. Since then he had slept badly, and so had she, and the flat had felt each night like a room after a party when everyone has gone but the chairs are still pulled out.
Hadas came by at nine with a bag of figs from her cousin's car. The cousin had arrived from Haifa at last, with his wife and three children and a trailer, and was staying with her until his flat was ready.
"Four thousand," she said, sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging her heels. "In the notebooks. Four thousand names, just here, just our city. They're opening a second office by the old square."
"For what?"
"For more names, silly." She ate a fig. "Your father still won't?"
Esther looked down the hall. Her father's door was shut, with a line of lamplight under it, and through it she could hear the small sound of a page turning. The thin book had not gone back up on the high shelf since July. It lived on his bedside table now, under his glasses.
"No. He won't."
When Hadas had gone she took him a glass of tea. He was sitting up against the headboard with the book open on his knees, and he moved his glasses so she could put the glass down.
"Ezra signed," he said. "Yesterday. Him and both his sons and their wives."
"He told you?"
"He came to tell me. I said the Ninth of Av came and went, and we sat on the floor, and nobody was born that I heard of." He picked up the tea and did not drink it. "He said a birth is not a coming. He said births take time." He put the glass down again, exactly on its ring. "Sixty years I've known him. He never once said a clever thing until this summer."
Later, Esther went across the landing with the last of the figs. Zahra took them and pressed a jar of quince jam on her in return, and over Zahra's shoulder Esther could see the flour bin in the corner of the kitchen. Under the flour, in a plastic bag, were the twenty-eight yellow leaflets the ministry man had not found. Zahra had put them there herself, and said that if the ministry wanted them it could bake for them.
"You look tired."
"Everyone looks tired."
"Reza says it's the heat." Zahra glanced back into the flat, where the television was showing a map with red across it. "Reza says everything is the heat."
The door stood in a wall of mud brick, the old kind, the colour of the riverbed, with straw showing in it where the plaster had come away.
She knew she was dreaming. That did not help. The wall ran left and right further than she could see, and there was nothing on her side of it at all, no lane, no houses, only packed ground going back into a dark she did not turn round to look at. In front of her the door was open. It was a plain wooden door, painted blue a long time ago, with an iron ring for a handle, and it stood back against the inside of the wall as if someone had swung it wide and gone through and not come back to close it.
Past it there was grey. She could not tell if it was fog, or dust, or the hour before morning. It did not move.
Across the sill, from one side of the frame to the other, lay a line of ash. She knew it at once: the fine grey of burnt newspaper, sifted. It was smooth. Nothing had crossed it in either direction.
She stood in front of the door for a long time. She did not want to go through. She did not want to leave either. She could feel the grey on her face, cool and dry, the way you feel a room with a high ceiling before you see it, and she stood with her hands at her sides and looked at the ash and did not step over it, and nothing came out.
Somewhere a long way behind her, in the dark she had not turned to see, someone was saying the bedtime Shema.
She woke with the sheet wound round her legs and the room grey.
For a moment she did not know which side of the door she was on. Then she saw the wardrobe, and her school bag on the chair, and the tiles by the bed, bare and swept, where the ash had lain in June. She had swept it up herself the morning after, without looking. She had never told anyone that she had not looked.
The clock in the kitchen ticked.
Then the call to prayer began from the mosque at the end of the street.
She had heard it every dawn of her life. It was part of the morning the way the water truck was, or the pigeons on the bakery roof; she slept through it more often than not. This morning she lay and listened. It was the same voice, the old muezzin with the cough, and the same words in Arabic she could not have repeated but knew by their shape. But it came up the street slowly, as if it were walking against something, and when it reached her window it seemed to lean on the glass a moment before it came through. Each line took longer to arrive than the last. She found she was holding her breath between them.
Down the hall her father's door opened. She heard his stick on the tiles, and then nothing, and knew he was standing in the hall listening too.
Someone knocked at the front door.
It was a soft knock, two taps, the knock of someone who does not want to wake a house and cannot wait for it to wake on its own. Esther got up and went down the hall in her nightdress, past her father, who stood by the bookcase in his vest with his hand on the wall. He did not ask who it was. He watched her turn the lock.
Zahra stood on the landing in her house clothes, with a scarf thrown on crooked and her feet bare on the concrete. The timer light was off. The grey from the stairwell window lay on her face, and behind her the Karimis' door stood open on their dark hall. The call was still coming up the stairwell, slow, line by line.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's early. I know it's early."
"Zahra. What is it?"
Zahra looked past her, at the open doorway Esther was standing in, at its frame and its sill. She looked at the sill a long time.
"I dreamt a door," she said. "In a wall of mud. It was open. There was a line of ash across the bottom, and I didn't step over it."