Outside, the wind howled as hard as it could, rain came in flurries and the village dogs, smelling an unfamiliar scent, my scent, were barking as loudly as they could. I knew, I remembered: if they were pups of the dogs we used to have, they wouldn’t stop until dawn, not until the goats were let out and bounded down into the valley, to the roaring torrent of the wadi. I felt suddenly happy. Everything seemed innocent, so incredibly permanent that you forget everything, forget your own troubles and the troubles of the world.

I slept like a baby that night. It had been a long time.

Malrich’s Diary - 16 December 1996

Malrich’s Diary

16 December 1996

It had been a terrible day. I’d done just what Rachel had done, I’d gone from house to house, drunk coffee after coffee, babbled as best I could and, in the end – partly because I felt shattered and needed to get the hell out and partly because mourning does not wait on twilight – Mimed took me to the cemetery. The sun, which had risen early, was sinking now, framed by big black clouds but still visible, the wind had died away. The air stinging my lungs was bitterly cold.

This, then, was the martyrs’ section where my parents were buried. The grass had grown over it, the whitewash on the stones had faded and they were covered in mud. Now the martyrs were like the rest of the dead, there was nothing to distinguish them from the others, they had joined the rest of the cemetery where the people who died of natural causes were buried, or maybe, more rightly, those who’d died of natural causes had come to join the victims to shoulder some of their pain. Soon they would be united in the same dust. You couldn’t see the small monument erected by the authorities any more, all the dead were now subject to the same power, to time which obliterates everything.