On the morning of the fifth of August Suhail had been on his feet since before first light, not because there was anything left to carry out, seeing that the mattresses, the blankets, the plates and the clothes had been stacked for two days already under his brother-in-law's lean-to, but because he wanted to be the one to open the door when they came, "I'll open the door myself," he had said the evening before, as though opening were a way of remaining master of the entering. The house he had raised over nine years of evenings and Fridays, one course of blocks at a time (he unloaded the blocks from the van after work, in the dark, and his wife kept the yard light burning for him, counting the trips from the window), and now it stood entire in the demolition order taped to the doorpost. On the roof only the water tank was left, white, a third full, mounted the year of the second son; and at the end of the street, stopped behind the jeep, the yellow loader waited with its engine running, and the diesel smoke rose straight up into the still air.

His wife made a last round of the empty rooms, not to check that nothing had been left, because nothing had been left, but to photograph the pencil mark on the doorpost of the boys' room, the ladder of heights that began at seventy centimetres and ended at a metre sixty-two, and since pencil does not show in a photograph she set her thumb beside it, to give the scale, and took the picture again; then, since her thumb covered the oldest date, she took it once more. Nobody told her to hurry.

Fadel meanwhile had gone up. He had not asked permission, or rather he had asked it in his own way, saying aloud, to nobody, that a new tank cost four hundred shekels and that at his house, from that evening on, twelve of them would be sleeping with a single tank, which was not an opinion but a reckoning, and Fadel's reckonings were always right, even when they arrived at the moment nobody wanted to hear them; he had set the ladder against the east wall, had climbed with the wrench in his belt, and had set to work on the collar the way one works on a site, with the economy of a man who does not want to think about what the gesture means but only about what the gesture produces.

From the end of the street came the sound of tracks, low at first, then inside the houses, a sound the neighbours of Qurnat al-Da'mas knew by now well enough to tell the travelling gear from the working gear; they sat down on the low walls, holding the children by the wrist, and looked at the roof, where there were now two men and a tank, and where one of the two, the one who had built the house, was still standing by the hatch with empty hands.

Suhail had come up last by the rung ladder, the ladder he himself used every autumn to check the sheeting before the rains, and now, on the roof, he did not go towards the tank but towards Fadel, who was already bent over the fixing collar with the wrench tight on the first bolt, and he laid a hand over his hand, without pulling, the way one stops a thing that is not wrong, "it is not wrong," he said to himself, "it is only not mine," and he stayed like that until his brother-in-law understood and sat back on his heels. Then Suhail did a thing that was neither of the two the morning had set before him, that is, he neither left the tank full to the loader nor handed it down dismantled to the van: he opened the drain cock, the low one, the one he had fitted himself with two turns of hemp and green paste, and he aimed the stream into the beaten-earth channel that ran down towards the vegetable plot, where his wife's tomatoes were and the fig tree planted for the first son. The water began to run down the channel; the neighbours on the low walls heard the sound too, and stopped talking.

The tank emptied in less than half an hour, because there was little water in it, a third perhaps, and when the last thread stopped beating in the channel Suhail closed the cock with two fingers, out of habit, as though the tank were still to be of use, and came down the ladder last, after Fadel, who had not touched the bolts again and kept the wrench pushed through his belt like a tool that had not been needed. In the street the family was already standing behind the line the soldiers had marked with an arm, and from there Suhail watched the loader climb the slope, take up its position, and begin with the east wall, the one with the ladder, which came down first together with the piece of roof where the tank, empty, made a sound different from all the rest; a short sound, of tin, that none of those present would have been able to say what it resembled, because it resembled nothing broken. That evening, in the vegetable plot at Fadel's house, the earth of the channel was still dark.

The house was no longer there. The water was.