The grass on the pitch had died so long ago that it had stopped being grass, and the ground under Layla's prayer mat had cracked into plates the size of dinner trays.
She could feel the edges of them through the mat when she knelt. It was eight in the morning and the concrete of the stands already gave back the heat like an oven door left open. The women's section was the east stand, under a strip of shade that the roof threw down over the first twenty rows and no further. Below them, on the pitch, the men stood in rows that ran from one goalmouth to the other, white caps and grey caps and bare heads, thousands of them. The goalposts had no nets. Somebody had taken them down for the prayer, or for something else, a long time ago.
Her mother knelt on her left with her shawl pulled forward against the sun. On her right a woman from their building held a small boy on her lap and kept wetting his hair from a bottle.
Layla looked for Hamza and found him, because she always could. He stood near the halfway line beside his father, a head taller than Tariq now, his shoulders already dark with sweat through his shirt. Tariq had his hands folded in front of him. Hamza had his arms at his sides and his face turned up.
The whole city had been told about it for a week. On the radio, in the mosques, on a banner across the flyover. The prayer for rain, in the stadium, on Friday morning, everyone to come. The last time Layla could remember one in the city she had been a girl, younger than the boy on her neighbour's lap, and it had rained before they got home. Her mother remembered it too. She had talked about it all week.
The imam came out to the middle of the pitch in white. He was an old man and he walked slowly over the cracked plates with a stick, and when he reached the microphone he stood a long time without saying anything. Then he took off his shawl, turned it inside out and put it on again over his shoulders. Layla had read that the Prophet had turned his cloak in the prayer for rain. All across the pitch the men did the same with their shawls and scarves, a long rustle of cloth like wind through a field, and beside her Layla's mother turned her own shawl with her old careful hands.
They prayed. Two units, the imam's voice going out of the loudspeakers on the stands and coming back off the far side a beat late, so every word arrived twice. Then he spoke. He asked Allah's forgiveness, for himself first and for the city after, in Arabic and then in their own language. He named the sins of the city, plain sins, the cheating at the scales and the water sold by the can to people who could not pay. His voice did not rise. Then he raised his hands, the backs of them turned toward the sky, and the stadium raised its hands with him.
Layla raised hers. The sun lay on the backs of them like a weight.
She listened to the stadium the way she had learned to listen to rooms. Thousands of people, and under them a hush so complete that she could hear the loudspeaker cables ticking in the heat on the stand roof. A baby cried somewhere in the north stand and was hushed. A man on the pitch coughed. Nobody's hands came down. She looked at her mother's hands beside her, the backs brown and spotted, trembling a little with the effort of holding them up, and she held her own higher.
She waited.
Nothing came.
The sky over the stadium was the colour it had been every day since March, a white so pale it hurt to look at, with no edge to it anywhere. There was no wind. There was no cloud, not one, over the city or over the hills to the north where the clouds used to come from. The flags on the stand roofs hung straight down. The imam lowered his hands, and the stadium lowered its hands, slowly, like people putting down something heavy they had been asked to hold.
People got up. Mats were rolled. Bottles were passed along the rows. Nobody hurried, and nobody talked loudly, and on the steps going down from the stand a woman Layla did not know was crying without any noise, her face perfectly still.
They walked home in the heat, the four of them, through streets where every shop had its shutter half down and a hose run out from the back to wet the pavement in front. The hoses were dry today. Most of them were dry every day now.
"My mother said there would be years like this," her mother said, holding Layla's arm on the kerbs. "Three of them. She said the sky keeps back a third of its rain, and then two thirds, and then all of it. And the earth the same with what grows." She stopped to get her breath under a tree with no leaves. "She said it was before the end. I used to laugh at her."
"The man on the radio says it's the ocean," Tariq said. "Some current in the Pacific."
"Then the man on the radio should come and pray," her mother said, and walked on.
Hamza said nothing. He had said nothing since the stadium. He walked a little ahead of them with his rolled mat under his arm and his eyes on the pavement, and Layla watched the back of his head the way she watched a room she did not trust yet. He had been like this since last summer, the week she lost four days and came back to her own face in the bedroom with Karima's voice reading over her. He had grown up in that week. He listened now, as she did, for the second sound after the first.
Hafeez came to supper on Fridays, and he came that Friday too, though nobody had felt like cooking.
He was eighty-one and had taught half the boys in the street to read the Quran, Hamza among them, in the back room of the mosque with a fan that only worked on the slow setting. His wife had died in the winter. He sat at the end of the table in his clean white cap and ate the rice Layla's mother made him, slowly, with his fingers, and praised it more than it deserved.
The power went off halfway through. Tariq lit the gas lamp. In its light the old man's face looked carved. Outside, down the stairwell, they could hear the family on the ground floor arguing about the water tank on the roof, whose turn it had been to pay the tanker man and whether the tanker man would come at all.
Hamza had not eaten much. He sat with his plate pushed back and his hands flat on the table. Layla saw him get ready to speak twice and not do it. The third time he did.
"Is it one of the signs?"
Hafeez looked at him over the lamp.
"The rain," Hamza said. "The three years, what Grandmother said. Is it one of the signs of the Dajjal?"
Tariq put his glass down. Layla's mother made a small noise in her throat, the noise she made when a child said a bad word at the table. Layla did not move. She was watching the old man's hands.
Hafeez wiped his fingers on the cloth, carefully, one finger at a time.
"Your grandmother's report I don't know the chain of," he said. "I won't tell you what I don't know." He folded the cloth. "But my own teacher used to say a thing about him, when I was younger than you. He said the Dajjal would come out when people had stopped thinking about him. When the imams had stopped mentioning him from the pulpit."
"Is that true?"
"It's what he said. He said it was weak, and that he said it anyway, to make us think." The old man looked at the dark window, where there was no light in the street and no moon in the white haze over the roofs. "I've been going to Friday prayer every week for seventy years."
He turned back to the boy.
"Nobody has mentioned him from a pulpit in years."