The censer was the coolest thing in Saint Simeon's, and it was full of coals.
Elias swung it toward the icons on the screen and felt the heat of the nave come back at him off the stone, older and heavier than the heat in his hand. It was eight in the morning. The doors stood open to the courtyard and the courtyard was full, and the street beyond the gate was full, people standing in the strip of shade along the wall with their service sheets folded into fans. In thirty-one years of priesthood he had never seen his church like this on an ordinary Sunday. Not at Pascha. Not at his wife's funeral, and the whole quarter had come to that.
Before the liturgy he had rung the bell himself, as he did every Sunday. It had rung flat. It had rung flat since a night last August, as if a hand were laid on the bronze, and a man had come from the bell foundry in Aleppo in the winter and found no crack. Elias had stopped mentioning it. He heard it every time.
"Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," he sang, and the people sang back that it was so, more of them than the walls were built for.
He knew most of the faces. He knew the old women in black on the left who had come every week of his life, and the Nassars and the Khourys and the Saadehs in their usual places, and the young tenors of the choir in the stall by the screen. He did not know the rest. Catholics from the next street. A family of Protestants he had seen at the water point. Men who had stopped coming when they married, back now with grey in their beards, standing very straight by the pillars as if they had been called to a meeting. People who had not crossed a church threshold in years were standing in his courtyard in the sun, and he did not think it was his preaching.
During the Gospel an old man by the door went down without a sound.
Elias saw it over the top of the book. He kept reading. At the back of the nave his niece was already moving. Mira had come off a night shift at the hospital and had not gone to bed. She had a crate of water bottles under the fig tree and a bucket of wet towels, and she knelt over the old man and turned him on his side and had a towel on his neck before his wife had finished saying his name.
He finished the Gospel. He did not hurry it.
"Fourteen," Mira said afterwards in the vestry, while he hung the vestments up. "Two to the hospital. Abu Samir is fine, he only wanted to go home. The Saadeh baby wasn't drinking. I've sent them to the clinic on Baghdad Street but the clinic has no ice either." She sat on the bench and pushed her hair back with both hands. "You should shorten it."
"The liturgy?"
"In this heat. They'd forgive you."
"They didn't come to be forgiven for an hour and a quarter. They came for the whole thing." He folded the stole. "Why do you think they came?"
She held something out to him instead of answering. A sheet of yellow paper, printed on one side, soft from being handled.
"A boy was giving these out at the gate. To everyone leaving. Rami took a bundle to hand round the choir."
It was in Arabic, badly, and in English underneath. At the top was a line drawing of a cracked earth and a sun with rays. THE HEAVENS ARE SHUT, it said. FOUR SUMMERS. HE IS COMING. Below it a time that evening, and the name of a wedding hall in Qassaa that Elias had married three couples out of, and a photograph of a large smiling man in a white shirt with his hand raised.
"Four summers," Elias said.
"It's true, isn't it? This is the fourth." She stood up. "I'm going to sleep. Don't go."
"I wasn't going to."
She looked at him the way his wife used to look at him, and went upstairs.
He went.
The wedding hall had mirrored pillars and a generator running in the yard behind it, and the air conditioning had given up an hour before he arrived. Six hundred plastic chairs were full. People stood along the walls under the mirrors. Elias took a place at the back by the door in his cassock and felt the hall notice him and look away.
Half of it was his parish. He counted without meaning to. The Khoury sisters. Abu Samir, who had fainted that morning, with a towel still round his neck. Rami and four other boys from the choir near the front, Rami with his phone held up, filming. Salwa, who made the pastries for every feast and had buried her brother at Easter, sitting with her hands knotted in her lap.
The preacher came on without music. He was a big man, broad and soft, with a quiet voice that his translator had to lean in to catch. He did not shout. Elias had expected him to shout.
"Elijah prayed," he said, and the translator said it after him. "He stood before King Ahab and said, 'As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.' Three years and six months, the Bible says, the heavens were shut." He held up his Bible but did not open it. "And in the last days two witnesses will stand in the street of the great city, and it is written that they 'have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy.' You know this. You've read this. Your fathers read this."
The hall was so quiet Elias could hear the generator through the wall.
"Count with me," the preacher said. "Twenty twenty-four. Twenty twenty-five. Twenty twenty-six. And this one." He held up four fingers. "Four summers. The lake in Galilee is a puddle. The Euphrates is a ditch. Your Barada is a road for goats. The heavens are shut, brothers and sisters, and they were never shut for nothing. They are shut because He is near." He let his hand fall. "He is at the door."
A woman near the front began to cry. Then others. Salwa had her hands over her face. Rami lowered his phone.
Elias stood by the door with his back against the frame. He believed that Christ would come again. He said so every Sunday in the Creed, in front of the whole parish, and he meant it every time. He had no argument with the preacher's Bible. He had an argument with the four fingers. He had read the same verses as a seminarian and had read, after them, the line that said the day and the hour no man knows, and he had found it the most restful line in Scripture. He did not find it restful tonight. He found the hall too hot and too sure, and the people in it very tired.
At the end the preacher asked them to stand and pray for rain, and they stood. Elias prayed with them. He did not know what else to do with his hands.
The preacher found him at the door afterwards, while the hall emptied round them into the street.
"Father." He held out his hand, and Elias took it. It was dry and cool, the only cool thing in the building. "I saw you at the back. I hoped you'd stay. I'm glad your people came."
"So am I," Elias said. It was true, and he did not like the way it was true.
"You don't agree with me."
"I agree with Elijah. I don't know about the counting."
The preacher smiled, the easy smile of a man who has slept well every night of the drought. He looked over Elias's shoulder at the street, where Rami and the choir boys stood in a knot under a lamp post that had no power, talking with their heads together.
"I'll tell you something I don't say from the stage," he said, and lowered his voice so the translator, a step away, could not hear it. "Christ is coming. I believe that with my whole heart. But not this summer. This summer something else." He still had Elias's hand. He pressed it. "Friends of mine in the east have been told. A man is coming, Father. Before the summer's out. And he's going to end it."