The family of three sat to eat dinner.
Three silences.
Hers.
Her brother’s.
Her mother’s.
They were empty of things to say to each other. And Saba wondered how the camp took one’s language too as if it was flesh attached to bones. She could visualize the haemorrhaging of her words, everyone’s words. No one without a language is alive.
Saba lay in her blanket and was awake when footsteps tapered into silence.
She left the hut. Lately, she had started walking around the camp by night. Saba felt less impatient then. The horizon that she scanned by day, that open sunlit bright space that stretched into infinity, the empty space she filled with her dreams, that space was reduced to nothing at night.
Life, and all its possibilities, became obscured by darkness. And night offered her freedom by giving her invisibility from herself (from the coloured wound on her thighs), from men, from the midwife, from her mother who inspected her for signs of puberty, from her brother who sought her body as a blackboard for a language he lacked.
Night was a better time to live in the camp, Saba decided. It was also when she masturbated in the open toilet, where she orgasmed as well as urinated and defecated.
Saba inhaled her orgasm. It had the smell of her insides. A garden. The garden of climbing flowers her grandmother had planted to break through the barrier separating her from her lover, full of pepper plants, lemon trees and that sour tasty orange. Saba smuggled this garden, the desires that bloomed every spring with the flowers, into the camp in her womb, without her mother watching, and without the smuggler, who charged for every single item, ever finding out.
The chirping of crickets filled her ears. Now and then, howls rose out of the bush. And petered out. Saba sauntered across the square. She noticed a shadow against a wall behind her. It was the same silhouette that followed her on most of her recent walks. The tall black figure with a yellow flat cap who glided on the mud walls behind her. She suspected it was Jamal.
He was her shadow by night. Silent. He was her dark side, never visible in daylight. She knew more than he supposed.
Saba entered the field. When she crouched, her toes, long, unfiled nails, appeared in the light of her torch. The hair on her legs had grown. Her dry skin itched. Her curls had returned. Since she stayed awake by night, and away from Hagos’s care, wildness returned to her. Her guilt slept with Hagos.
Wind blew through the field. Long grass whipped against her and Saba lowered her head and examined the map of her thighs. Her pubic bones protruded like columns guarding a monument. But Saba quickly freed her thoughts and language from the corset of decency that imprisoned her body parts in politeness. She pushed her clitoris back and forth against the dark lips of her vagina. Between her legs she saw a hand that rustled through the dry grass. Fingers clasped into a knot, holding a handkerchief. Saba shivered as the cool hand rested against her inner thighs before reaching further, further towards the skin she usually scraped at with stones.
It was on one of her walkabouts – as she strode among the night moths and clouds of insects, pausing now and then against a hut, listening to beds creaking under the weight of tenderness or restless sleepers – that Saba discovered, located in the east of the camp, a woman called Azyeb who had turned her hut into a bar selling suwa.
Saba switched off her torch and sat behind a thick shrub at the side of Azyeb’s hut. She held on to the privilege of invisibility. The odour of fermented beer and sounds of laughter wafted through the air. The athlete and Jamal sat opposite each other next to empty stools in the light slanting from the hut’s window. A three-stone stove in the middle, the fire shimmering. Smoke twisted in front of them.
Azyeb emerged from her hut behind a short man, buttoning up her blouse. Saba recognized the praise poet. He had become known around the camp not for his poetry but for forcing his wife to eat his share of the aid meals. He loved his women plump. Although the real reason was different, the joke went around that his wife requested a divorce when her malnourished husband couldn’t function in bed any more.
Azyeb sat down on her stool and lit a cigarette on the stove. Taking a long drag, she sighed. I needed that, she said.
The smoke of a satisfied woman reached Saba. The faces of the three men appeared and disappeared in the flickering light. Conversations between them and the barwoman flew back and forth over beer. Saba overheard it all, and when she went home that night she took with her what was said about Hagos.
And when Saba and Hagos sat down for breakfast, the dialogue of the night before replayed in her mind: Poor man. He is older than us, said the praise poet. His mother has been looking for a wife for him. But no girl, I mean even the poorest or the ugliest, would take an illiterate mute for a husband.
But how do you know it is the girls and not the parents who reject him? said Azyeb. Since when do girls have a say about who they marry anyway? Perhaps things would be different if we did.
Saba looked at Hagos. His hair covered his ears now. He ate like her mother. Fingers turned into an elegant spoon, his chewing inaudible. He was the girl her mother had always wanted.
You are growing fast, the midwife had said to Saba some time ago. One day soon, a nice man will walk into this hut with a ring. Since then, Saba had begun to imagine herself at her wedding, in her husband’s bed, a certain time in a future when she was surrounded by her own children, while Hagos remained in this blanket, in this hut, old, lonely, childless. Dying without ever experiencing love.
Saba tucked his hair behind his ears. She hushed the flies away. She found it strange that Hagos was twenty-something and had yet to grow a moustache or beard. That was a miracle. God ought to be thanked for Hagos’s eternal youth, she thought. There was still time. Love was bound to find its way to him.
Saba wiped the grains of sleep from the corners of her brother’s eyes. Hagos smiled. But Saba yearned for a conversation now, something else between them rather than silence. Smiles no longer had the same weight. They faded against the urge to talk, to exchange jokes, to scream. Screaming at him, for rejecting her pleas to teach him to read and write for all those years.
Perhaps, Saba thought, they ought to play the game they used to play. A game that started when the Paris-educated landlord and photographer had told Saba and Hagos that a picture said more than a thousand words. Then, Saba had wanted Hagos to take as many pictures of her as possible. So she could know his thoughts about her, his feelings towards her. She’d wanted him to talk to her this way, instead of having to rely on guesswork, on her endless interpretations of his actions. Saba no longer wanted to be an interpreter. She wanted to sit back and listen to him.
As if he could read her mind, Hagos had made a fake camera using a tin can. Saba’s poses, though, were real. Hagos had stood behind his tin camera, beginning a dialogue.
Now, as she sat in front of him in their hut, Saba recalled some of the pictures he’d taken. Their meanings became clearer with the distance of time and place. And Saba, the resident of the camp, could remember without a hint of remorse or shame the time he fiddled with her cheek, nose, eyes, until he had scrunched her up. The time he braided her hair into a bun and crossed one of her legs over the other, his hands opening the buttons of her dress, his cold skin on her chest, her breasts exposed to this photographer peering through the hole in the tin. The picture he took after he kohled her eyes, and then wet her eyelashes, remained in her mind as vividly as it would have done had he taken an actual picture. Saba’s body bore his dejections, his happiness, dreams and desires.
Saba wondered if he’d brought the tin camera with him, to continue the conversation in this place.
Later that night, Saba lay on her side, her head on her arm, watching a sleeping Hagos. His face glowed next to the dimmed oil lamp she put by his side. Saba could hear the rain splattering against the roof. The wind falling like blows on the mud wall. On a night like this, her senses heightened. The world was about to fall. And not just hers. The praise poet’s words from the day before came again to Saba: Poor Hagos, he will die a virgin.
Saba stood up and prepared to wash herself. She undressed and turned up the wick of the lamp. Her chest, torso, thighs and legs all came alive, unburying her from the darkness. Hagos opened his eyes. And closed them again.
Saba stepped out of the bucket and shuffled to Hagos’s jute sack. Knowing she should not, she still went ahead and broke the oath, and for the first time since they arrived at the camp, she opened the sack. She slipped her hand inside and rummaged through his belongings folded and stacked away. Underneath a shirt, a pair of trousers and some shorts, there was a plastic bag. On opening it, an intense aroma burst out. Hagos had packed Indian oil for skin and hair. Perfumed acacia. Sandalwood for incense-bathing. A jar of caramelized sugar wax. Dilka, the perfumed exfoliate.
Saba put aside Hagos’s collection of aromatic bottles and searched further. A leather bag at the bottom of the jute sack caught her interest. Inside, she found a set of colouring pencils and a stack of papers wrapped in a black lace scarf. A discovery in the middle of the pile distracted her from her thoughts. There it was, the nude painting gifted to her by the landlord. For years it had hung on the wall of her room back home. Saba had wanted to take it with her when they fled, but feared it would not fit in a camp. Yet Hagos had brought it.
Saba brought the familiar painting of a woman taking a bath, somewhere in Paris, closer to her face. We meet again, my dear, she mumbled. How much I missed you.
Saba blew the dust off her one-time roommate. The warm air bounced off the painting. Their naked skins touched. Heat, sweet memories, shelved desires sank into her pores. Saba rubbed her inner thighs, inserting a finger inside herself. A cockroach slithered from underneath her and climbed her brother’s legs.