But Juba knew it well. He had lived twenty years in such degradation, one of many children of a village chief in another country, virtually uneducated, beaten like a dog for any infraction, untouched by love from mother and father, for each had too much to do to spend precious seconds on that. There was never enough food. And the television reception—every house, no matter how poor, had a television—showed fuzzy images of some other world that was unreachable, unimaginable.

His life was defined by the wheat. From the age of eight on, he toiled in the fields. It wasn’t any mechanical kind of farming but instead the ageless struggle of the Arab peasant, the harvest by hand, with flail and hoe, as the tough thistles on the stalks rubbed the fingers raw, and one had to bend to get to them, until the back knitted in pain, and the ground cut into the knees, while above the sun was merciless, and his father kept yelling, “Faster, faster, you lazy little insects. Do you want to die of hunger? This is survival!”

Only the True Faith was real, and only it offered some kind of escape. He could lose himself in the mandates of the Qur’an and the idea that somehow this life had structure and definition. So the only place he felt human was in the madrassa, where he applied himself hard, hoping to earn Allah’s pleasure. It turned out he had a nimble mind, and at least one of the leaders said that among them all, he had the possibilities. He could escape from this world without tomorrows.

“You’re smart,” he was told. “There can be more for you. You can escape the great nothingness of your people.”

“If God wills it, it will happen,” he said, and believed.

One day after he turned eighteen, the letter arrived, informing him that he had been conscripted for two and a half years. He would be taken away and trained in some military skill. Maybe that would be his future, maybe it would open his eyes, maybe it will come between him and the life laid out for him, the life of labor and uselessness.

But the army was another delusion. A rural Arab conscript was the lowest form of military scum, and he was again laughed at and cursed and beaten and starved for his crudeness and ignorance. Sergeants mocked him, officers ignored him. He was invisible, his prayers without weight. God had forsaken him.

And then he discovered the rifle.

6

The black cube