Saba opened the door of her hut onto the square. She raised a hand against the sun. The judge and the men making up the committee of elders stood in front of a crowd.
Days before she left their hometown, her teacher – a woman who had said she was a direct descendant of the Queen of Sheba, not in blood but in power – comforted her that a new place always offered a new beginning and a fresh start.
But what would her teacher have made of the judge staging another moral trial which, he explained, helped retain cultural values and entrench tradition in this place in the wilderness?
Back home, the judge said through his megaphone, I presided over many cases that highlighted to me the dark sides of our humanity. I fought them there and I will do so here even more. Today, the moral trial was aimed at stray unmarried girls who … He paused, as if searching for the appropriate words. Saba completed his sentence to herself: Girls who discovered how to enjoy the same pleasure as boys without destroying their marriage prospects.
Saba wondered whether it had been Samhiya who was caught, but it was another girl, who was found in the bush, her dress lifted up to her waist. She sat in the front of the eager spectators. The trial, which was more like a public re-enacting of the crime, started.
The girl with plaited hair and a cross tattooed on her forehead stood in front of the heavily built man she was accused of seducing. The man turned away from her and ran to his wife in the audience: Forgive me, he said to his wife, surrounded by their children.
The judge ordered the man to come back and when he did, the girl’s mother rushed forward and screamed: My daughter did not seduce this man. He raped her.
But the girl’s father scurried towards his wife and slapped her. It’s your fault for letting her wear this. Against his body he held the dress his daughter wore that night: Just look, he said.
On the instruction of the judge the girl was taken away to a nearby hut and returned wearing the dress, which barely covered her knees.
The judge read out a statement with a verdict: Impurity will be rooted out from this camp. We will not allow this wilderness to corrupt our souls. This girl will bear her sin on her back.
The man climbed on the back of his seducer. And the girl trudged around the square carrying the man, her sin, an adult double her size.
The girl’s back bent. Yet, Saba noticed, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t wince. Girls, she thought, are used to carrying things: firewood, water, food for their families, their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, as well as themselves and their own sorrows. No amount of weight can crush a girl.
But Saba also knew that this girl’s real punishment was the reputation inflicted on her. From now on, she would be confined to the backroom of life, to a place where she would be forgotten, like a building left alone to decay, so that when a man drove past and sought shelter in her body as a last resort, in his drunken hour, he would find her infested with rats, bats, spiders, mites. This girl, Saba thought, would be a moral ghost story for generations to come.
Saba turned the wick down and leaned against the wall. There had been a storm that night, and the rain that began when Saba lay down on her blanket hadn’t stopped. She brought her legs up against her chest. Humid air seeped through the cracks in the window and the door.
The rain outside intensified, dispersing the warm air inside the hut. Hagos wrapped his arms around himself. He used to hold her as they slept. There were moments when Saba would wake up in the middle of the night to find her legs embraced by his arms. His cheek resting on her feet. A smile on his face.
She heard the rumbling of the sky, the hissing wind, and saw a flash of lightning through the window. She imagined the thatch stripped off the roof, the rain leaking through. Her head above the water, so she could hardly breathe.
She fell asleep with that thought, with the feeling of suffocation, her head leaning against the wall. And when she woke up some time later, both her mother and her brother were still asleep. Her blanket was dry, though her underwear was wet.
The next morning was sweltering, the breeze heavy with moisture. Little heaps of dry mud dotted the square, and the red rocks of the mosque were covered in sand, the outline of the mosque obscured, once again. God is everywhere, Saba repeated to herself, recalling the imam’s words on that first morning.
She was on her way to the river, barefoot. As she looked at her toes covered in mud, Saba felt that her dress had shrunk, travelling up on her growing legs, stretched by her widening hips. Her knees were visible. It seemed miraculous to her that she was still growing, while feeding on sardines and the powdered milk and rice that had arrived only recently.
Saba walked with firm steps. The muscles in her calves pressed her feet down. She left permanent footprints. This was her wilderness. She entered the damp narrow path that led to the river. A path like a black viper slithering between the grass, pushing against the cactuses and thorny shrubs. A lizard crept from underneath a rock. An old man came down the slightly sloping land from the opposite direction. He walked unaided, his gait youthful, his age visible only in his wrinkles and eyes that squinted to fit what was worth observing around him. The old man paused. Good morning, bella, he said.
Saba stopped. She stared at her shadow on the path, the outline of the bucket against the grass. Why are shadows always dark? she thought, recalling the time her landlord back home took her to his studio and showed her the negatives of the pictures he was developing. Then he came behind her in the darkroom and squeezed her waist and Saba discovered that everyone has a dark side.
The old man came closer, their shadows merging on the long, dry grass. You might not know it, he said to Saba, but I have been watching you ever since we arrived. My lady, you have grown beautifully.
A lady? The future had caught up with her while she stood in the same place. She had deemed time irrelevant, because it was as infinite as the air. But time moved even if everything else in the camp remained static.
The man reached his hand to her face. He caressed away a strand of her hair. We are lucky, it is a quiet morning, he said, stroking the side of her arm.
He pointed to the field, to the natural bed, wild grass, roasting sand, wet rocks teeming with insects. The old man took her hand but Saba didn’t move.
People have confused being a refugee with the end of life, he said. They have mistaken being in a camp with being inside a graveyard. We are human beings. We have our needs wherever we are. But I shouldn’t blame you all. I am not young and have suffered the misfortune of war and exile a few times already. I have learned never to leave my desires behind me in the ruins.
The grass around them shook. For a moment, she felt like an animal trapped. His pulse that pounded on her wrist calmed. The old man released her hand. I want a woman to be alive in my arms, he said.
And then he was gone.
She ran up the hill, past the trees, over shrubs, along the valley, zigzagging on another narrow passage, before she sprinted down the slope all the way to the bank of the river. There, she chose a quiet spot and perched on a small stone. Cool water lapped against her shins. There were a few girls scattered along the bank in the far distance to her right washing clothes. Heads bowed. Hands scrubbing.
Saba rubbed her underwear with scentless soap. Her hands weakened for a moment and the river current tugged away her piece of clothing. She threw herself into the water and swam further into the river. Holding her breath, she dived.
From the river, Saba walked deep into the bush and climbed to the top of an acacia tree, spreading her dress on the branches around her. She sat on another branch until it dried. She unwrapped her arms from around her chest, freeing her breasts. The hair under her arms was as long as the dense bush between her legs. She recalled the old man’s warning.
Don’t make the mistake I did when the first war found me when I was young and took suffering to heart, he said. Life is for living even if you are far away from home.