Saba shuffled on her stool next to the open furnace. She wanted to ask her mother just how long they had been here. Days? Weeks? She could see time passing on her own body, on the people around her. People in the square had said this was a temporary place and the day of return would not be far off. For now, though, life itself was suspended, quietly churning like milk in a goatskin. Soon it would curdle.
The family of three sat down in a circle on the round thatched rug Hagos had woven together days before. In the middle of this gathering were a jerrycan, a tin of sardines, tea made from the black powder which Saba had bartered from a neighbour in exchange for sugar, and himbasha bread which their mother had baked before leaving their hometown and rationed ever since. It had hardened, but water dissolves even mountains, said their mother, as she sprinkled it over the bread, mumbling prayers.
The hut smelt of fish. Saba closed her nostrils. Eat, the mother said. You are losing weight.
But no matter how big she was, Saba thought, she would never fill her mother’s eyes.
Eat, the mother said. Eat.
You are like a little girl, the mother said. Eat. Here, take some of my food.
Saba looked at her mother, who had paid for her daughter’s schooling by working as a servant. Saba now had to come up with something else to compensate for all her mother’s hard work. She needed to put on weight, Saba thought, to offer something tangible to sell to men. Saba stared at her mother’s hand. Her three fingers – the thumb and the middle and index fingers that made an elegant hand-spoon for a lady – held a small piece of bread. The food in her hand was barely visible. It was a skill Saba had failed to inherit. The invisibility that a woman ought to inhabit. Saba was heard and seen. She argued. Talked. Laughed. She left traces of her presence everywhere. At home, for not being girl-like. At school, for being the best. Even at the market, where she fought back. Once she’d squeezed a man’s bottom, to repay the compliment, she said. The man, an off-duty policeman steeped in tradition, slapped Saba for stooping so low, and for turning, he said, our culture on its head.
The faint light seeped through the window of the hut. Behind her mother, she saw slippers, a plastic stool, the open furnace. Next to pots and cups, there were the jute sacks, where they kept their clothes. They had exchanged vows not to look into each other’s sack, as if they were locked, keys deposited with their respective owners.
A puff of dust flew in through the window. Hagos stood up and closed the beaded straw curtain he had woven himself.
Her mother’s eyes were red. Women, her mother said, were the colanders through which the suffering of their nation was purged. But Saba wondered how much she herself had contributed to her mother’s sadness. Their mother had been hurt by having a mute child and two dead infants. Saba’s father said he couldn’t live with the continuous wailing, her inability to accept fate. Saba’s mother lived her life waiting for the next misfortune to strike. He wanted to be with a woman who could love. He was gone by the time Saba turned six.
According to the midwife, though, Saba was the main source of her mother’s anguish. The mother had imagined a life with a daughter who would be by her side, learning from her, listening to her, relieving her duties at home and at work, someone who would grow up to be like a sister, a best friend, a girl in the image of her own mother.
Saba thought of the moment she told her mother of her own dream, that she wanted to be a doctor, not a domestic servant. And Saba flew on her chosen path. One of the best students we have ever taught, her head teacher remarked. Every year Saba was alone when she received another award for excellence. Without her mother or brother, she sat with her favourite teacher, an Ethiopian woman who taught science, to draw up a study plan that would have taken her all the way to a university in the capital city. She had to orphan herself to reach her goals.
Saba’s eyes returned to her mother. Their battles against each other had created an unbridgeable distance. And Saba wondered if they could ever love each other again. Hagos would know how. He cooked for their mother, washed and ironed her clothes, massaged her when her back was aching, and made her ginger juice to soothe her heartburn.
I will make up for it when I finish my studies, Saba had vowed back then. Catching up on the lost love after graduation, as Doctor Saba.
The fragrance of frying onions and garlic rose in the air but was soon overpowered as the breeze carried the stench of the open toilet again into the square. Saba and Hagos sat on a blanket outside their hut.
Hagos stretched his legs on the ground, resting his head on Saba’s lap. He smelt of butter. Since they had run out of medication for his recurrent headaches, the midwife had advised their mother to massage his head with ghee every night before bedtime. The jar borrowed from Samhiya’s mother was half empty.
Saba stroked her brother’s temples, massaged the thick ropes of his veins. The collar of her white chemise fluttered in the breeze. This nightgown of her older cousin was loose on her. Before Saba left her hometown, her cousin gave Saba some of the wedding clothes bought by her husband as a gift. Everyone knew, though, it was Hagos who’d helped their cousin’s husband to choose these wedding presents. Silent men are the best readers of a woman, the cousin used to say.
Hagos’s eyes were shut. Her thighs cooked under his ghee-soaked head on this warm evening. But Saba didn’t push him away. The priest and the imam of their hometown had been in rare agreement when their mother asked them for a divine cure for her son’s muteness. She should instead celebrate what God has given him, they said. His innocence, his guilelessness, a good heart, and thus a guaranteed place in heaven.
Hagos had chosen Saba’s black dress too. When she wore it for the first time, the mother grabbed the dress by its collar. It showed too much of Saba’s legs, the mother said. It was too tight around her hips.
I am not returning it, said Saba. The mother slapped her that day. But Saba took her mother’s wrath without revealing the dress was Hagos’s choice. This was more than a dress. He had chosen something that fitted her like the skin she had lost.
Saba was used to bearing things on his behalf, even knowing that by doing so she helped maintain his perfection in her mother’s eyes, and in everyone else’s. When Hagos came home drunk one night and the mother smelt alcohol in the courtyard the following morning, Saba stepped forward and begged forgiveness. The mother forbade Saba from venturing out in the evenings and hit her palms with a stick. Saba had not been able to do her homework for days. But Hagos, Saba was certain, loved her too, even though she had taken his place at school. He taught her how to swim in the wild river, away from people and away from the unwritten rule that girls shouldn’t swim. He made sure Saba would never drown like some girls in their hometown. He washed and ironed her school uniform, drawing out the creases even from the inside pockets, made her egg sandwiches, sharpened her pencils.
Eventually, Hagos stood up and went inside the hut. In one corner of the square, young men played football. The athlete rose high to head a red sock ball flicked by his co-striker into an imaginary net. Not far from the football match, a few men were talking, too far away for her to eavesdrop, but the seriousness that accompanied their gesticulations made Saba think they were discussing politics. Agonizing over the independence fight, perhaps, about how rebels in shorts and rubber sandals, armed with Kalashnikovs, were going to defeat an enemy equipped with tanks and fighter planes. The men shouted. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Samhiya was giggling to the whispers of the athlete who had abandoned the football game to play with her manicured fingers. Ahead of the happy pair, children carried each other piggyback. From the dust swirling in the air, a young man emerged wearing a waistcoat over his long robe, jumping up and down in front of his family, his feet beating on the foreign soil, the edge of his sword sparkling in his stretched arm, brandishing the weapon of gallantry to defeat the pain of exile.
The football match resumed. The barefoot athlete manipulated the ball with his toes and exchanged passes with his co-striker before scooping it above Samhiya, who ignored the game and strutted with swaying hips straight through the ranks of watching children.
When the ball landed on the roof of a hut, the athlete hauled a boy against its wall. The boy shook the thatch until the red sock ball rolled from the yellow roof.
Hagos returned to the blanket with Saba’s black dress. She had ripped the side as she collected firewood in the bush earlier that day with Zahra and Samhiya. Her mother said that Saba had brought her clumsiness with her when they fled their home. The idea that habits flee with people wherever they go terrified Saba. There was no new beginning anywhere, she thought. The same people in a different place. Memories from home shuffled through her head, her room, her bed, her teacher, her best friend, the doum palm tree, books, rain, the Mareb river, a plan to take her to Addis University, dergue soldiers, death, dreams in the field of sorghum, her bed, her naked body at dawn.
Saba turned towards the brightest side of the square. The flame of an oil lamp flickered against Hagos’s face, drawing out the concentration in his eyes as he sewed the rip in the dress.
One thing Saba had left back home was her talkativeness. People used to say she talked for both of them. Not any more. Her silence, though, was temporary. Just like her brother’s. When she was little, she always believed that Hagos would talk one day, and often fixed her eyes on his mouth, waiting to be the first to hear him utter his first word.
There was a scar in the corner of his lower lip. So subtle was this cut that it appeared designed to ease the load of the unsaid words. God is merciful this way, she thought, standing now.
Saba told Hagos that she needed to go to the open field. He put the dress aside and looked up at her, his mouth half open. A long time ago, he used to try to force himself to talk, to force out words. But every time he did, it was as though each word was a large, sharp object carving the back of his throat. His cheeks inflated. His eyes widened and tears welled up in his eyes. Only incomprehensible sounds left his lips. He had stopped trying.
Hagos signalled to Saba to wait. Dusk settled on the thatched roofs. Darkness like thick ink splotched on the walls, and between the alleys, wood-burning stoves glowed red from the black ground.
Hagos took a torch and beckoned her forward.
I’ll be fine going alone, Saba said.
In his company, she was economical with words. Hagos walked forward. His inability to argue made him decisive in her mind.
On catching up, she held his hand. Hagos turned to the right of the hut. Saba assumed he took this route, even though the fastest way to the toilet was straight ahead from the hut and through the east of the camp, to avoid the crowd in the square. Hagos jumped over a shrub and flicked aside an empty sardine can that rolled towards Saba. A scorpion latched onto her sandal. She shook it off her foot. The scorpion darted across the lane.
The wind pushed a door to her right open. Saba saw a man defecating in a pot, a woman caressing his head. His cries for a doctor faded as she sped up behind her brother. Privacy was mixed with the dung and sand when this camp was constructed, Saba thought. She had figured out by now that the huts were built in no order and without proper planning. They were scattered around, with some having more space between them than others. Some of the lanes were so narrow that only two people at most could pass at a time. And doors faced each other. Refugees, Saba thought, were all the same, the same as each other, the same as the shrubs, the same as the hibiscus, the same as shit and piss, the same as the sky and earth.
Some had brought their beds outside to sleep in the open air. Hagos dimmed his torch as they negotiated their way between hands and feet dangling from beds. When Saba tried to avoid a young man sitting at the feet of a woman braiding his hair, she almost stepped on the white shells laid out by a fortune teller. Hagos steadied his sister, but as she moved aside to let the midwife and the judge through, Saba pushed against a door to her left. Through the slit, she noticed a woman bending low to blow on the charcoals of an open furnace. Her skirt lifted and crawled up on her skin.
Saba looked away but noticed Hagos’s eyes lingering on the woman, who had managed to ignite the charcoals, the fire of the furnace rising and flickering between her dark thighs.
Saba could not stop thinking about what had just happened as they arrived at the open toilet. Hagos’s manhood hadn’t been extinguished because he was disabled, like her cousin and her friends back home had assumed. Saba turned to Hagos and embraced him, letting go of his warm body when it occurred to her she might be interrupting a beautiful moment in his head.
They arrived at the last rows of huts yet to be occupied. New refugees are on the way, the English aid coordinator explained to Saba when she had asked if she could move with her family into this quarter. The open field, which the refugees shared as a toilet, didn’t disturb her any longer, it was the crowd in the square, the noise, the endless talking, the screams, it was living life under the nose of everyone else that she couldn’t get used to. Hagos raised his torch. The long grass parted and three girls emerged out of the darkness. The girls mumbled their greetings as they strode past brother and sister.
Hagos bent to the ground and looked around, picking up smooth stones for Saba to wipe herself with after she had finished. Saba walked into the field. Grass caressed her arms. An insect bit her. Mosquito? Or a fat beetle depositing shit in her skin? She was about to sit when she heard loud, repeated coughs. Saba advanced forward until she found a quiet spot. She searched for other dangers. The afternoon before, a woman had encountered a viper and men armed with sticks came to clear the area. But there were still many snakes about.
She shone the torch here over there here again over there again. A grasshopper landed on the grass in front of her. The leaf quivered when something slithered in the grass, Saba leapt to her feet and wet her underwear as she scampered away.