It was dark when Saba lay on the blanket with her eyes shut. She touched herself in the way she always did back home in the moments before dawn when her body belonged to her.
But that first morning in the camp, when her chest swelled above the ground like a taut dewdrop on a leaf, she heard their mother grunt in her sleep. The moan of pleasure died behind Saba’s clenched teeth. She sat up and shuffled away from Hagos. A twig protruding out of the mud wall grazed against her leg. She pounded the wall with her fist.
Back home, her room had opened onto the garden of a stone-floored courtyard with terracotta pots full of herbs. She had inherited that room from her grandmother. It was here that Saba’s grandmother found a way to communicate her desire for her neighbour by planting flowers against the wall separating them. Although her trader grandmother grew up without parents, she taught herself to read and write, founded a business before she turned twenty, and travelled from one country to another, from one lover to the next. Her longevity owed itself to tej wine, khat and sex.
Apart from the photo of her grandmother, which Saba had hung on the wall above her bed, that room was decorated with pictures she had hand-picked from the studio of their landlord, where her mother worked as a servant. The landlord, who had gone to Europe as a student carrying his hometown’s dreams, but returned having fulfilled only his own – to qualify from an art school – had appointed himself as Saba and Hagos’s godfather. One of the photos Saba had taken from his studio was of a girl with a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder. Suspended behind the freedom fighter, through the photographer’s trickery, Saba could see the central avenue in Asmara that had changed names three times in recent memory, from Mussolini Avenue, to Queen Victoria Avenue, to Emperor Haile Selassie Avenue, and now the National Avenue under the dergue. The fighter, though, stood against the conquerable street as firm and rooted as the palm trees on both sides of the grand boulevard. Saba practised this pose, to replicate it in her border town.
Next to the fighter there was a copy of a painting given to her by the landlord. The pale skin of a nude woman taking a bath somewhere in Paris still glowed when Saba dimmed the light to sleep.
Books covered the floor and Saba’s bed. History in Tigrinya, translated Russian novels in Amharic, poetry in Arabic. Pencils. Pens. Erasers. Politics. Art. Freedom. Africa. Europe. And Saba. All vying for a space in her small, disordered room.
The realization of where she was now shook her out of her reverie. Saba buried her face in her hands, feeling the density of the mud walls around her. She sat on her knees. The earthy smell of shrubs under her window rose and mixed with the dung-smothered morning air. She raised her fingers to her face and inhaled the scent of her thighs.
Saba staggered out of the hut. Streaks of orange light appeared on the horizon, as curved as the humps of a camel. Footsteps shuffled across the sandy ground. A figure emerged from a narrow passage into the square. The man stopped in the middle of the square, placing the oil lamp he was carrying on the ground next to him and creating a circle of radiance around his feet. He announced the call to the first prayer of the day.
No one answered. The man waited, arms folded. Dust covered his sandals. Without his turban, his gabi, his rug, without a minaret, a dome, four walls, a direction of prayer, the imam’s authority, Saba thought, was left in the lean and tall silhouette of his shadow printed on the bare ground of the camp.
He called for the prayer again and again. His voice grew hoarse. No response. He soon fell silent. He dug his foot in the sand and dragged it along, beginning to outline a place of worship. He stopped and looked back. The faint outline behind him grew dimmer as he marched onwards with his oil lamp. He returned to the starting point and began all over again. A hardened fighter refusing to give up a battle despite losing his armoury. That thought came to Saba as she walked towards him, and followed his outline, digging her foot harder and deeper behind him, marking human presence in this wilderness.
The imam lifted his lamp. Her face glowed in response to his smile. He coughed. He regained his voice.
This should be big enough, he said after a while. But we can expand it if needed. After all, it is a line in the sand.
Where is the direction of prayer? Saba asked.
The imam raised the hand with the oil lamp high against the sky. Rays of light poured from his high arm. God is everywhere, he said.
The mosque in the sand was completed. Saba skipped back to her hut as if she had participated in the construction of a real mosque that would last beyond her life on earth. The thought, though, made her shiver. What if life in the camp ended up being only as firm as that line in the sand?
The imam prayed alone. His jellabiya fluttered in the breeze, the white fabric pressed against the darkness. Saba picked up her torch and set out to search for a school in the camp. When her mother had decided to flee with her children, Saba had asked if there was a school on the other side of the border. Saba’s mother threw a shoe at her daughter. Our neighbours have been killed, she said. We are leaving home, and all you think about is school.
Saba’s cousin, who came to bid them farewell, took her aside. You need to be patient and find the right time for your questions. But don’t worry, you are going to the biggest country in Africa. And it is full of educated and intelligent people.
Even the war would not interrupt Saba’s march towards her dream then. Only divert it. Like the Nile, it would face hills, mountains, forests, and find a way to pass through many countries.
The alleyways were a labyrinth in which she could get lost. Saba continued, diving into the dark. She stumbled upon unused thatch scattered alongside woods, twigs, ropes. The builders of the camp must have left in a hurry, she thought. She stepped over the abandoned litter on the ground and turned left into another lane. Doors were shut. The familiar sounds of morning were absent. There were no cockerels to announce the arrival of dawn. There was no scent of roasted coffee beans in the air. Air untouched by berbere mixed with ghee, by aftershave, by perfumes. Saba walked on enveloped by a different kind of morning that lacked the rhythm of dough slapping against mogogo stoves, of spoons clinking against pots as women stirred flour to make ga’at porridge. She didn’t hear car engines sputtering. Bicycles clicking in the hills. The place was empty of women and men rushing to the fields, to the market, of students reading aloud from their textbooks. This was a silent morning.
And where is the school? Saba asked herself, shining her torch higher, lighting up the yellow pointy roofs that stabbed the dark skyline. As if a school could be up there, a castle above the clouds.
It was as she leaned against her hut that the sun dispersed the remnants of the night. Saba noticed a young man wearing a yellow flat cap staring at her, his head tilted to the side, his mouth open. She wondered if he was mistaking her for someone he’d left behind or someone killed in the war. The sun intensified. Heat rose off the ground into the skirt. of her black dress. Her preference for black clothes went back to the time she had suffered burns to her thighs, turning her skin purple. Saba wore black to remind herself of what she loved and had lost forever.
Good morning, said the young man. My name is Jamal.
Saba didn’t respond.
Panting, Jamal swung round to face the square. There is no shop in this camp, he said. There is nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Calm down, said another man, striding past Saba.
Saba pushed herself to her feet and stared at this light-skinned man with narrow shoulders and slick black hair, in a blue cardigan over a blue shirt, blue trousers and shiny black shoes. He had a book, its title written in English, under his arm.
The man bowed his head at Saba and, patting Jamal on the back, he said, Remember, it is the absence of things that makes people creative. Things will change.
How? said Jamal. Have you looked at this place? Maybe you need to wear your glasses.
The man removed his glasses from his head and put them on. What a glorious sun, he said. I feel it is going to be a wonderful day.
This is Africa, Jamal said. The sun is always bright and so it was on the day the war came to us. Weather has nothing to do with how great one’s day is going to turn out.
The man chuckled, his shoulders shaking. The book under his arm nearly slipped out, but he caught it before it hit the ground.
Do you have a pen and paper, Khwaja? said Jamal. I need to write my film script.
Need is no longer a word appropriate for this place, the man said, without objecting to Jamal using the nickname for a Westerner for him. Yes, I have a pen, but I’d rather keep it. After all, you are right, there is no shop in this camp.
I think I saw you in Cinema Impero when I worked there, said Jamal.
Perhaps, the Khwaja said, laughing. I am glad to meet a fellow Asmarino in a refugee camp. The world is small, they say.
The Khwaja slipped his hands into his pockets and smiled at Saba. Buongiorno, shokorina, he said. Che bella giornata.
And he sauntered off, greeting those on his way in various languages, even those brought by the colonizers. Saba wondered whether his peace with himself was because the conflicts in his mixed blood were in the past. But for Eritrean-Ethiopian Saba, half from an occupied country and the other half from the occupying, the conflict was ongoing. Half of her was at war with the other half. That’s why she was in a camp.
Saba left Jamal and followed the Khwaja through the camp. His blue outfit reminded her of what her father had worn the morning he carried her to school to take Hagos’s place, when Hagos was pulled from school by their parents after a visiting doctor diagnosed him as mute. That day, Saba saw Hagos hiding behind a tree outside the school. She waved at him. Hagos ran away crying.
Saba trailed the Khwaja as he made his way through the crowd, swerving around people, saying sorry, scusami, pardon me, a’thazouli, asmhoelee. He stopped in front of a group of men huddled over a torn newspaper, words hanging low to the ground. A man cut the paper into pieces as if it was a loaf of bread and divided it among his companions. The men scattered off in different directions with broken sentences, as if nothing needed to make sense.
Music bellowed out. A singer tuned her krar. The high-pitched beat drew people. From now on, the singer said in her honeyed voice, she would only sing about the war to make sure no one forgot why they were here. Her nephew, though, whispered to Saba and those nearest to him that he was carrying memories of all her love songs as well as of the beats of his double-headed drum. He promised to heat the blood of the dispossessed with one side of the koboro and soothe the hearts of lovers with the other.
Further up the square, a widow had dressed up for her first outing in the camp. She wore a green dress with sequins sewn to its wide lush hem. She had consigned her mourning dress to the bottom of her jute sack, she said to those around her. A woman mourns, but a woman moves on too. The Khwaja patted the widow’s back. Saba noticed the mark of his dusty hand on the young woman’s green dress.
An eagle circled the camp. The bird threw its shadow on a girl painting her toes as her mother began to set her hair in rollers. The girl’s name passed from one boy’s lips to another. Samhiya. From Asmara. Samhiya popped her chewing gum and, placing her red lips on her palm, she blew kisses to those in front of her. Her cherry-flavoured breath wafted over to Saba.
When she turned away from the city girl, Saba saw the woman whose jerrycan her brother had saved the night before. The woman wandered into the square, wearing a long yellow gown. The adults, including Saba’s mother, were searching for familiar faces in the crowd. But some faces must have changed, Saba thought. Or were, at least for now, masked with sorrow. Her mother had not been the same since the camel took its first step away from their hometown. Saba wondered if she herself had changed too.
Strangers consoled each other, fighting back grief with small talk to shore up strength, and in doing so they established new friendships. The Khwaja, though, joined the children running around, laughing, falling and crying along with them.
As Saba looked at the scenes unfolding in front of her, it occurred to her that life in this place would be about searching for alternatives. Hopes and prayers murmured in the square caused a silent tremor across the camp. Right under her feet.
Saba came out of her hut clutching a handful of seeds from an orange that Tahir had told her to plant. They will grow into a beautiful orange tree, he said.
A gust of wind blew through the camp. Doors flapped. Rope latches snapped. A cloud of dust swirled around Saba. She closed her eyes. Screams echoed through the square, then faded. And when the wind calmed, Saba looked further down the square. The mosque that she had helped build in the sand was erased. She looked at the seeds in her hand. Was there any point in planting them?
A few yards away, a priest in a white turban, a white gabi draped over his white tunic and white pants, stood head bowed as if in prayer. Flies crawled on his shoulders. He raised his horsehair fly swatter and uttered prayers to the congregation standing in a circle around him, some huddled close as children do to a mother.
Saba tried to guess the time by observing the sun’s position in the sky. Light flooded her retinas until the sun’s glare forced her to cast her gaze away from the sun, from time.
Squatting low, she dug a hole in the ground close to the wall of her hut with her bare hands. A girl sneaked up on her and asked what she was planting.
I love oranges, said the girl, introducing herself as Zahra. I will help you, this hole is not deep enough. We also need to surround the hole with sticks and logs so that people don’t walk over the seeds. We have to look after this, I can’t believe we are doing this already.
Saba gaped at her.
Zahra’s laughter drew Hagos out of the hut.
Am I talking sense?
Saba nodded, her eyes lingering on Zahra’s face.
Ah, this, Zahra said, rubbing the scar on the bridge of her nose. I fell off the camel on the way to this country. We all have wounds, but some are just more visible than others.
Saba uncrossed her legs and pulled up the hem of her dress, settling it around her purple thighs.
Was that a bomb?
No, said Saba.
Those who love you most are also most capable of hurting you, Zahra said.
Saba said nothing. She forced her eyes away from Zahra, towards where the smoke wafted in the distance, towards the eagle that steered its way between thatched roofs, and towards the blue sky.
Saba!
Saba shuddered when Zahra pulled her in for a tight embrace. I am sorry, said Zahra. I didn’t mean to remind you.
Silence.
Thank you, said Saba.
Saba gave her new friend – in her mind, friendship was already exchanged – some of her seeds.
They started planting. This will be a beautiful orange tree, said Zahra.
But it doesn’t mean that just because you are helping me now it’s going to be our tree, said Saba, laughing.
It takes more than twenty years for these seeds to grow into an orange tree, said Zahra. By then I hope none of us will be in this place.
Saba kept digging.
Saba, say amen, said Zahra.
Double amen, said Saba, chuckling.
Zahra had come to the camp with her grandmother. Her mother had stayed back in the trenches, fighting the independence war.
But we will be back home soon, Zahra said to Saba. That’s what my mother promised me.
What is your mother’s name? she asked.
Major Lemlem, said Zahra, her voice rising as if she could no longer hold on to this secret.
Major Lemlem, Saba repeated as she looked at Zahra.
Soon after the two girls began planting the seeds, Samhiya arrived, hair set in red rollers, trailed by boys.
My God, Saba, Samhiya said. Who taught you to swim like a boy? And by the way, everyone in the camp knows your name after last night.
Saba had forgotten about her dive into the dark water. She straightened her back and pointed at Hagos, who was standing by the door. My brother taught me, Saba said. He is the best.
Samhiya craned her head towards Hagos.
Are you sure you are a man? I mean you are so beautiful, that’s what I meant, she stammered, breaking into a giggle.
The boys behind Samhiya sniggered.
The look on Hagos’s face didn’t change. Saba had long understood his silence was like a pair of dark glasses on a blind man. But she hoped he would at least respond to his admirer with an expression.
Let her see your even more beautiful smile, Saba mumbled at him.
Would you teach me, please? Samhiya asked Hagos.
Saba’s grin widened until it pierced the dimples on her cheeks. A chance of affection had arrived in Hagos’s life, she thought. Finally.
Hagos’s eyes, though, were fixed on his sister. Saba reached with her hand to his face as if to turn him towards Samhiya. She stopped. Yes, Saba said to Samhiya. Hagos will be happy to teach you to swim.
Samhiya rolled her head back and asked Saba, Why can’t he talk for himself? Did I make him speechless?
He is mute, said one of the boys behind Samhiya.
Silence.
Saba abhorred those moments when girls became quiet, perhaps pondering life with a handsome but disabled man.
I have to go, said Samhiya, planting a kiss on Saba’s cheek. Ciao bella.
Saba brushed past Hagos and barged inside the hut. Her brother followed her, closing the door on those left outside.