Someone kicked his head, but softly. This one was barefoot. His feet were ulcerated and stank of festering. Aziz looked up. The trucks were gone. The wounded one stood over him. No uniform on this one. He was dressed like an Afghan. The sun-thickened skin on his face was the color of cedar. Aziz got up from the esparto grass he had slept in. He saw brushwood and juniper—it was possible he had been taken somewhere near the Aurès Mountains.

“As-salaam aleikum,” the wounded one said.

“Wa aleikum as-salaam,” Aziz said.

“Allah Karim,” the wounded one said. He spoke with a solemnity Aziz had only heard from old men. “Kaif halaq?”

“Bi-khayr. Al hamdu-lillah,” Aziz said. “Bi-khayr.”

“Anaa Antar,” he said. He looked at Aziz with intensity. Maybe this Antar had heard a description of Nazzar. Maybe he was thinking Aziz did not match this description. Aziz could have been worried, but instead he gave Antar a disembodied stare and said, “Anaa Nazzar.”

They walked for days, and then the days were weeks. The man in front of Aziz was wounded. His balls were bleeding; when he walked, he fell down, and when he was down, he tried to get up again, because stopping was lying in blood. “Dog,” the man said. “Dog,” he said again. Aziz tried to carry him, but the man called him dog and pushed him away. Aziz wondered where the man had been. Was it right to wonder? Up above the sun shrank.

Night was coming. He knew this, and yet he wished he would be burned into ash, before anything else. They had a woman.

The mouth, the saliva, the pulse of the lip under her other lip.

Someone had torn it. There is no e in the language.

So say evil, they told her. Say evil.

She was lost in alif and wa and then the sun made his left knee into reddened raw.

Kill her, go ahead.

She wanted nothing but to show herself, so that is her way.

One of them put his thumb on one part of her, then the heel of his palm into her softness below the carriage of her throat. Literally: A wife possessing them.

A prostration is to be performed here.

He leveled himself in body and mind.

She died easily, as it turned out. Antar began with his knife to cut back her hair between her legs. She was still breathing, because she jumped. He took the knife in her, cutting left and right, and then up, but still she would jump. So he put his boot on her mouth and, covering her nose, stomped once; pushing the knife again, she jumped, so he stomped harder; and still, after the knife, she jumped, so he played with the knife, feeling the jittering of her.

Then we took vengeance upon them; so look into how was the end of them who cried lies.

Still, she was not still.