The merchant threw the shawl out across the counter the way a fisherman throws a net, and it fell open over Hadas's arms before she had decided whether she wanted it.
"Kerman wool," he said. "Feel it. No, feel it properly. Close your eyes."
Hadas closed her eyes. Esther stood behind her in the cloth row of the bazaar with a satchel of marked exercise books against her hip and watched the man's hands. They were quick and soft, a shopkeeper's hands, and they never stopped moving. While Hadas stroked the wool he was already pulling a second shawl from the bale, and a third, laying them in a fan across the counter.
His stall had been a carpet stall in the summer. Esther remembered it because her father had argued over a prayer rug there for most of an afternoon and bought nothing. The carpets were gone now. In their place, from the floor to the brick vault, stood bales of shawls wrapped in sacking and tied with blue string, and on top of the nearest bale lay a ledger the size of a paving stone.
"It's like holding a cat," Hadas said, with her eyes still shut. "Esti. Hold it."
"I believe you."
"You don't. You never believe anything until you've marked it in red."
Esther touched the corner. It was very soft. It was plain undyed wool, the colour of milk with a little tea in it, and it smelled of the loom and of nothing else.
"How much?" she asked.
The merchant named a price. Esther had bought a scarf in this bazaar every winter since she was twelve. The price he named would not have paid for the string round one of his bales.
"That isn't a price."
"It's the committee's price." He smiled at her. He had a good smile, and he knew it. "The rest is paid. A fund, from abroad. People who love Isfahan and want to see her dressed properly." He tapped the ledger. "I don't sell these one at a time, miss. Twenty thousand ordered so far, and the looms in Kashan running through the night. I sell them by the thousand. You two are the small change."
"Dressed properly for what?"
He looked at her as if she had asked him which way was up.
"For the welcome," he said. "When he comes, the community will go out to meet him. You want to go out in an old coat?"
Hadas opened her eyes. She had the look she used to get at school before a trip, when the bus was already outside.
"Two," she said. "One for her."
The lights in the classroom had gone off at ten, as they did every morning now, and the girls in the back row were writing by the light from the windows, which came in white and hot through the dust on the glass.
Esther walked between the desks. Fourteen girls were on the register and eleven were there. Two had gone to Tel Aviv with their families in the autumn. One was sick with the heat. She did not know which of those three she was supposed to mark as absent, so she marked them all present and drew a small dot beside each name, which was a thing she had started doing in the spring and had not told the head about.
Under the desks, half the schoolbags had shawls in them.
She saw the first one when a girl in the front row bent for a pencil: milk-and-tea wool, folded small, pushed in beside a lunch box. After that she saw them everywhere. One girl had hers round her shoulders under her cardigan, though the room was thirty degrees. One had tied hers to the strap of her bag, the way girls tie a ribbon.
"Who told you to bring those?"
Nobody answered for a moment. Then the smallest girl, who answered everything, put her hand up and spoke before she was asked.
"My father, miss. They gave them out at the hall after the Thursday talk. So we're ready."
"Ready for what?"
The small girl looked round at the others. They looked back at her with the patience of girls who all knew a thing the teacher did not.
"To go out to him," she said. "The Messiah. When he comes. The man from abroad said he's very near now, he's nearer than he's ever been, and we have to be ready to go out to him like when they came out of Egypt. With everything. And the rain will come."
Esther stood by the window. Below it, in the schoolyard, the drinking fountain had a padlock on it and a sign from the municipality that said NOT FOR USE. The almond tree beside it had dropped its leaves in August.
"Open your books at page forty," she said.
They opened them. She taught the lesson. She was good at teaching a lesson while she thought about something else; she had learned it from her father, who could chant a portion of the Torah without a slip while he worked out a household's debts in his head. What she thought about was the price of the wool, and the size of the ledger, and the word the girl had used. Him. Not the Messiah, the way her grandmother had said it, a word for the end of a very long sentence. Him, as if he had a face, and a road he was coming on, and a time of arrival.
At the end of the lesson the girl from the front row stayed behind and asked whether Miss Esther had a shawl yet.
"I have one," Esther said, and found that it was true. Hadas had pushed it into her satchel at the bazaar gate, on top of the exercise books, and run off before she could give it back.
Zahra Karimi was on the landing with the water when Esther came up the stairs.
They shared the landing and the stairwell and, since the spring, the ration. The tanker came to the end of the street on Sundays and Wednesdays. Reza carried the cans up because he had the back for it; Zahra measured, because she did not trust men to measure. Two blue jerrycans for the Karimis, one for the Hakimis, and a jug from the Karimis' second can poured over into the Hakimis' kettle because Rabbi Hakimi was old and drank tea as other men breathed. That was the arrangement. Nobody had ever said it aloud.
Omid sat on the top step doing his homework on his knees. He was ten and had grown a hand's width since the summer. He looked up at the satchel.
"Is that one of the shawls?"
"How do you know about the shawls?"
"Everyone knows. The man in the bazaar gave my friend's father one by mistake. He thought he was Jewish." Omid grinned. "He gave it back. His mother said it was a nice shawl, though."
Zahra did not say anything. She poured the jug into the kettle and handed it to Esther and looked at the corner of milk-coloured wool showing from the satchel, and then at Esther's face, and went in.
Her father was at the kitchen table with his tea glass and the newspaper, which he read for the obituaries and the weather. He had taken off his good coat and put on his cardigan with the darned elbows. When she put the satchel down he looked at the wool too, the way Zahra had.
"Hadas bought it. I didn't ask her to."
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face said it."
"My face is seventy-four years old," her father said. "It says whatever it likes."
She was filling the kettle when the knock came.
It was a confident knock, three short and one long, the knock of a man who expected the door to open. Her father got up before she could. She heard the chain and then the voice, and knew it, and put the kettle down.
The merchant stood on the landing with a shawl over his arm. He had changed his shirt. Behind him on the stairs a boy held a bale on his shoulder, and Omid sat on the top step watching them both with his pencil in his mouth.
"Rabbi Hakimi." The merchant bowed a little from the neck. "Forgive me. The committee asked me to come myself. They want the rabbis at the front, when the day comes. They said the old families should be seen."
He held the shawl out across the threshold. It was finer than the ones in the bazaar. There was a narrow border woven into the edge, cream on cream, that you only saw when the light from the stairwell caught it.
Her father looked at it for a long moment. He did not touch it.
"No," he said.
"Rabbi, it costs you nothing."
"Then it's a bad bargain for somebody."
The merchant laughed politely, the way a man laughs at a joke he has been told about in advance. He did not lower the shawl.
"You don't understand me. I'm not selling it to you. Yours is already paid for." He glanced down at a slip of paper pinned to the wool, and read from it. "Hakimi, Nissim, rabbi. Paid in full, a month ago." He looked up, pleased. "Somebody is thinking of you, Rabbi."
Her father closed the door.