The dust came over the border post at Taftan in a brown wall at eleven in the morning, and Officer Ibrahim watched it come through the window of the customs hall with his file open on his knee.
It was the twenty-first of January. The thermometer in the jeep had said thirty-one on the drive in. In January in Taftan, the driver had told him, his grandfather had worn two coats and slept with the goats for the warmth. Now the driver kept a wet towel round his neck, and the goats along the road had stood in the scraps of shade under the parked lorries with their mouths open.
The hall had been cleared of benches for the meeting. In their place stood a long table with a white cloth, bottled water at every place, and a row of small flags on chrome stands down the middle. Ibrahim knew two of them. One was his own country's. One was the United Nations' blue, because a woman from the refugee agency had driven up from Quetta with a laptop and a cough. The other three he had looked up the night before in his hotel room, under a ceiling fan that stopped every time the power went.
The nearest to him was green and white, with a bridge of gold arches across the middle. The Republic of Isfahan. A year ago there had been no such country. A year ago the road out of this hall had run west to Zahedan and on, all the way, inside one border. Now it crossed three.
The man behind the green and white flag was perhaps fifty, in a grey suit that fitted him, and he spoke a careful Persian that a young translator turned into careful English. He had been polite all morning. He was polite now.
"The convoys will pass," the translator said for him. "Water convoys, aid convoys. My government has no objection. The difficulty is at the second crossing, which is not ours."
Ibrahim wrote it down. Not ours. He had written that phrase five times since nine o'clock, from three delegations, about the same stretch of road.
His part of the meeting was small. The bureau had sent him because the missing persons lists crossed here and somebody had to read them against each other. Pakistani names from the camps on the other side. Names from the other side found in Karachi, in Lahore, in a lorry container at the port. He had his own list and he read it out slowly, name by name, while the delegates checked theirs. Some of the names came back with a nod. Most came back with nothing.
One came back with a photograph. The delegate at the far end, a woman in a black headscarf from one of the other new states, turned her laptop round to face him. On the screen was a man of about thirty in a camp clinic bed, his lips split. Ibrahim had the same man on his own list with a Karachi address and a mother's phone number. He had got off a bus that broke down in the desert in October and walked. The woman said he had asked for water and then for his mother, in that order, and died in the night.
Ibrahim wrote the date beside the name and drew a line under it. He would ring the mother himself. He had decided that in his first month at the bureau: those calls did not go by letter.
At the bottom of his file, under the lists, was the other folder. The thin one. The one Ahmed had asked him to keep open on the steps of the bureau, the week after the wave, in a voice so flat that Ibrahim had heard it every night since. He had not opened it in Taftan. He had brought it because he took it everywhere now, the way some men take a photograph.
At the lunch break he went outside.
The dust had blown through and left everything the colour of tea. Beyond the gate, past the wire and the concrete blocks, the people were waiting where they had been waiting when he drove in. There were hundreds of them. Families sat on bundles under sheets stretched between lorries. Old men squatted with their backs to the wind. A woman held a baby against her shoulder and fanned it with a piece of cardboard torn from a box of biscuits. In front of them a line of plastic jerrycans ran along the fence like a row of yellow teeth, waiting for the water truck that came at two.
A boy of about ten stood at the wire, looking at Ibrahim's bottle.
Ibrahim held it out through the gap. The boy took it, drank half, and ran back with the rest to the woman with the baby. She looked up at Ibrahim. She did not smile or thank him. She looked at him the way people look at weather that has stopped for a moment.
Major Kasi came and stood beside him. He was the Frontier Corps liaison, a big man from Nushki with a moustache going white at the ends, who had been at Taftan four years and had stopped being surprised in the second.
"They come from everywhere now," Kasi said. "Before, it was from one place. Now it's from three countries that used to be one, and they don't agree whose they are." He spat to one side. "Some of them say their wells went dry first and then the soldiers came. Some say the soldiers came first. I think they don't remember any more."
"What do you put on the form?"
"Displaced," Kasi said. "There's a box."
The canteen had one television, high on a bracket in the corner, and it was always on.
Ibrahim ate rice and dal at a plastic table with the translator and the woman from the refugee agency. The translator ate fast and did not talk. The woman talked about the camps. Nobody watched the television until the picture changed, and then the whole room turned to it, because the pictures had become something everybody watched now, the way people watch a fire.
It was the lake of Tiberias. An aerial shot from a helicopter, slow, low over the water. Under the helicopter there was hardly any water, only a broad white rim of mud and stone that had been under the water, with boats lying on their sides on it like dropped shoes, and a pier standing on its legs a long way from anything it could reach. The water itself was a smaller grey shape in the middle. The caption said it was the lowest level ever recorded. The presenter said a spring somewhere south of the Dead Sea had been reported dry for the first time in living memory, and read out its name, and Ibrahim did not catch it.
Then the news moved on to the price of wheat.
"Every night they show it," the woman from the refugee agency said. "Every night a little smaller. Like a countdown." She coughed into her elbow. "I don't know why it frightens me more than the camps. It's only a lake."
The translator glanced up at the screen and down again, and said nothing. He had been born, he had told Ibrahim that morning, in a town that was now in a different country from the one his mother lived in.
The meeting ended at six with a joint statement that said the convoys would pass and did not say how. Ibrahim signed his copy and put it in the file.
Outside the light had gone orange and the heat had not gone anywhere. Kasi was leaning on the bonnet of his jeep, smoking, watching the line of people at the wire. The water truck had come and gone. The jerrycans were back along the fence, empty.
Ibrahim stood beside him. For a while neither of them said anything.
"Three years," Ibrahim said at last. "In Karachi the old men say three hard years."
"In Nushki they say it too." Kasi tapped ash onto the sand. "My wife's mother says it. My wife's cousin, who has a phone and a degree, says something else."
"What does she say?"
Kasi looked at the people at the wire. The woman with the baby had fallen asleep sitting up, the cardboard still in her hand. The boy who had taken Ibrahim's water was curled against her side.
Kasi did not laugh. He dropped the cigarette and stood on it.
"She says there's a man coming," he said, "who will make it rain."