But the day had given him nothing. Perhaps Benane had not come to the camp, as the rumors had it. Now the sky was ink and the tents quiet. Near the foot of his blanket, Aziz made out the outline of Mohammed Nazzar, a soldier in his unit. Nazzar was dim; Aziz in his mind called him turnip. Nazzar was from Belcourt. He talked, it seemed, always about some bomb in Belcourt. Today, he talked too much about one that left blood, lines of it on pavements, crossing over streets. Never walk on the blood of your brothers, Nazzar kept saying. It is a sin. Go get some water to wash this blood. Aziz decided Nazzar was mad or meant to make him mad.

His outline looked asleep, but Aziz moved and rustled to test and see.

“Aziz.”

Not asleep. It would be more Belcourt.

“Aziz, are you awake?”

He had heard that they put people beside you to test you. That his commanders, and some soldiers, spent most of their time and their energy finding out where you stood: FIS or FLN, hizb esserqa or hizb frança, le clan réconciliateur or le clan éradicateur, Islamist or secularist, khandjiya or patriots, crazy or practical, bad or good, dumb or wise. Could this turnip be crafty? Not so far. Nazzar had no nuance. Or was that to lull? Then again, he could be a man near ruined by bombs and death. Or, most innocently, he could be a simple comrade, unaware. Perhaps Nazzar had not felt the disappearance of Ahmed and Fawaz and Bahir, soldiers in their unit Aziz had known well. Perhaps Nazzar had not wondered, as Aziz had, why it was that Ahmed and Fawaz had been close to a tight-faced soldier named Wahid, who died in a training accident. Perhaps Nazzar did not lie on these sand floors in the heat, thinking, made restless by thinking. There were times when Aziz believed he was the last man who thought or noticed or knew what it was to imagine something wretched or remember something fine.

“Yes, have to piss.”

Life was a series of commonplaces leading to reasonable events. He had once thought that. He could not believe he had ever been someone who thought such a thing. Life was a series of dramas in which the goal was a place where you could talk, truly talk, and say whatever it was that haunted you at night alone. He would get to that place. He would get to that place, but Nazzar was not going to get him closer to it, no matter who or what he might be.

“I can’t sleep,” Nazzar bleated.

“Jerk off, you’ll sleep.”

“They are harki, all of them,” Nazzar said. Aziz kept walking as if he had not heard him.