“Not now,” she was saying to his father.

“Yassirah, we must tell him,” he said back.

Now Hazar was walking through the open front door, Asa a papoose on her back. “Such a day!” Hazar trilled.

“Take Asa out of this house,” Aziz’s mother said. She was as fierce as Aziz had ever seen her. “Do you hear me? Now. Take her.”

Aziz felt drained out, childlike. In the background Hazar and his mother were saying something quickly, and Hazar’s footsteps melted into Asa’s crying. A siren was screaming, but he knew it wasn’t. Little babblings made hoarse accusations in his ear, or was it behind his eyes? His neck hurt. His arm was sore. He looked at his mother trustingly.

“Soumeya was murdered,” she said.

“Irhabi.” His father spoke the word so softly Aziz could only just hear him.

“Irhabiya.” She corrected her husband.

His father nodded. “Many of them.”

“Many violated her.”

“They were animals.”

“It knows no bounds what they did.”

“They had a shovel.”

Aziz remembered taking off his uniform to cover her.

He had washed her face, the face he had not recognized, with water from his canteen. With moistened lemon leaves he smoothed her to her shoulders. He went to a prone figure and took his possessions. Among them was a flask of olive oil. He rubbed her feet and softened the soles. He took the remnants of her dress, and a long shawl, and began to wrap her form in them, circling underneath and across her again with his eyes shut, going only by touch.

One of Antar’s men who had gone ahead had fixed on Aziz. Keep going, Aziz silently ordered this straggler. Keep going. But still this man looked.

Let me bury her. This man still looked. Another had turned to stare.

Aziz picked up the shovel and hurried to catch up.

Chapter 30

30

It was four years to the day since Aziz had rowed Arzew’s night-black harbor to the tanker that took him. Soumeya was with him in the old fluka his oldest brother and he prayed across the water. The memory of her broken contour, the slime of men on her thigh, the lap of blood he tried to close—they were any woman until his mother’s words made them Soumeya’s. And the hold, it was her hold. He was running from reminders of what he had done, but they congregated around him, warring with the unnamed others he had slaughtered to occupy his enforced alone. What he remembered, he now resaw with the puncture and tint of unwelcome detail. An infirm throat under his knife was a Tamazight baba with eyes whimpered shut. A boy’s skin like an egg’s membrane flocked his thumbs. He smelled talc on an elbow torn from a girl.