The door was open again.
This time it stood in a wall of pale brick she had never seen, with a step worn hollow in the middle, and past it there was only a grey that could have been fog or morning. Last night it had been a blue door at the end of a garden. The night before, a door with no wall at all, standing alone on bare ground with its frame around nothing. Each time it was open. Each time Layla stood in front of it and didn't go through, and didn't want to, and couldn't look away. Then she woke.
She lay beside Tariq until her heart slowed. The clock said a quarter past two. She found her cardigan on the chair by feel and went to the kitchen for water.
The kitchen of the flat was the same. The fridge hummed. The tap dripped twice and stopped, because the building's water came on for an hour at dusk now and the pipes were dry the rest of the day. Her school bag sat on its chair with a sheaf of drawings from the little ones sticking out of the top, a giraffe's purple neck uppermost. Everything was where she had left it, and the silence in the room was wrong. She stood at the counter with the glass and tried to say how. It was thicker, like a room after snow, though it was nowhere near winter.
She had learned not to trust her own kitchen completely. Of the four days she had lost she remembered almost nothing: an egg, half a shell in her hand and the yolk sliding off her wrist, and then her mother's face very close and Karima's voice reading. Tariq said she had cried for twenty minutes at this table afterward. She believed him and didn't remember it. What she had kept from those days was a habit of listening to rooms, and every room of the flat had sounded ordinary since. Tonight this one didn't.
It was the dream still on her. It was tiredness, it was the heat. She knew as she thought each one that it wasn't, and she had nothing better.
The kitchen window looked down three floors into the courtyard. Someone on the second floor had left the stairwell light on its timer, and while she watched it clicked off, and the courtyard went from yellow to blue. A cat crossed the bins without hurrying.
She rinsed the glass, set it upside down on the rack and went back to bed.
On Friday the men of the building came up from the mosque together, talking on the stairs, their voices going round and round the stairwell until the doors shut them off one by one. Tariq came in last. He sat on the low step inside the door and took his shoes off slowly, the left one first, the way he did when he was turning something over.
"The imam said something strange," he said. "After the prayer, not in the sermon. Old Faris asked him whether he was ill, because he stopped twice in the middle of the sunset call on Thursday. Everyone heard it."
"And?"
"He said he wasn't ill. He said the call has felt heavier this week, as if there were more in the air for it to get through." Tariq set the shoe on the rack. "He said he's started asking Allah every morning for clarity about something he can't name. Then he said his own teacher used to tell him some of the signs before the end came long ago, and the rest come in their order, and the order isn't ours to know." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Then he went home. That was all."
Layla thought of the door with no wall.
"Did you believe him?"
Tariq looked at the other shoe in his hand.
"A year ago I'd have laughed," he said. "Then I stood in our bedroom and listened to you say the name of every child you ever taught. In order. You didn't miss one."
Karima came on Tuesday afternoon. She was in the city for one night on her way back to the region where she trained her new workers, and she had sent a message that morning asking if she could come by. She did this with all of them when she passed through, Layla knew. She still looked too young for it. She still carried the cloth bag.
Layla's mother sat her in the good chair and brought the tea in the glass with the gold rim, and stood over her until she drank some.
"You're thinner," she said. "They don't feed you, over there."
"They feed me, auntie."
"Feed you what? Nothing grows." She sat down across from her. "My grandmother used to say there would be three hard years. The sky keeps back a third of its rain, then two thirds, then all of it."
Hamza put his head round the door of his room, laughing at his grandmother, said hello with one earphone out, and went back to his revision. He was nineteen and had exams in a fortnight. In the first weeks after the four days he had not let Karima out of his sight, and he had slept on the sofa within earshot of his mother's door. Layla had said nothing about the change in case saying it made it stop.
When her mother went to the kitchen, Layla told Karima about the door.
"Five nights now. It's a different door every time. It's always open. I never go in."
Karima had been reaching for her glass. Her hand stopped.
"A woman in the next district told me the same on Sunday," she said. "A man on the coast road told one of my workers yesterday. An old door, a new door, a door in a wall, a door without one." She set the glass down without drinking. "Always open. Nobody goes through."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know."
She took a small notebook from the bag, its spine split and mended with brown tape. Layla watched her write the date, then "door, open, does not enter", then stop with the pen above the page, as if there ought to be another column and there wasn't.
"It goes to the first circle," she said. "They collect these now. Anything odd. The doctors won't have a word for it, so don't waste a morning in their queue."
"I wasn't going to."
Karima almost smiled. Then she looked at Layla for a while, the way she had on the fourth day when Layla came back into her own face.
"Your street knows something now," she said. "Tariq knows it, and your mother, and Hamza. The family upstairs. Most streets don't know it yet. Whatever comes next, you won't be starting from nothing." She picked up her bag. "It's not much. It's what I've got."
After she left, Layla sat at the table with the drawings and marked them. A house with a sun. A cat with too many legs. A boy had drawn his family in a row in front of a door and coloured the door solid black, going over it until the crayon shone, and she looked at it a long time before she remembered that his family's door was black. She gave it a star.
She woke before the alarm on the eighth morning with the door still in front of her, plain wood this time, swung wide on a grey she could almost smell. She hadn't gone in. She lay and breathed until it thinned.
The flat was dark. Tariq slept on his back with his mouth a little open. Down the hall her mother's door was shut, and through the gap of Hamza's she could see one long arm hanging off the bed and his phone face down on the floor where it had dropped. She washed for prayer at the basin, the water cold on her wrists and face and feet, and went down the hall in her socks.
She didn't go to the rug. She went to the front door, the green steel one Tariq had painted the summer Hamza started school, turned both locks and pulled it open.
The landing was black. She pressed the switch and the stairwell light came on with its tick, yellow on the concrete, on the neighbours' shoes lined up outside their doors, on the stairs going down to the street and up toward the roof. Somewhere below a kettle was starting. The air smelled of dust and cold stone and somebody's bread.
Then the call to prayer began, from the mosque two streets over, and a moment later from the one beyond it, the two voices overlapping a little across the roofs.
She heard what the imam had meant. It was the same voice and the same words in Arabic she had heard every dawn of her life. But it came in through the window on the half-landing slowly, like a man wading, and climbed the stairwell floor by floor, and the concrete seemed to take each line and hold it a moment before it let it go.
The timer ran out. The stairwell light clicked off, and the window on the half-landing was grey.
Layla stood on her threshold with the door open at her back and the flat asleep behind her, and listened until the call was finished.