Saba was about to follow her husband into their marital hut when she noticed Tedros positioning himself by the window. The pretence of tradition has no limits, she thought. The front of his trousers barely held back his erection. She knew he’d rather be in the bed in his father’s place than outside by the window. Saba no longer wondered what it was about her that stirred him so. It was about ownership. He was speaking to her through an unwritten language: that he could shove the length of his manhood inside her, break her spine to replace it with his own, so that she stood and fell at his behest. And Saba wondered for how long it would be contained, how long before he carried out his threat to induce an irreversible damage. He crumpled up the white cloth. The door closed. The music outside stopped.

In the glow of an oil lamp by the bed that Saba was to share with Eyob, she examined the time that never mattered, but that was now tied to her wrist on a watch given to her by her husband. It was seven minutes past midnight. Saba went out into the compound. Chairs, plates and cups were scattered everywhere. The remnants of the wedding party drifted in the wind. When she looked up, she saw Tedros sitting on a stool outside his hut, an oil lamp by his side. A jug rolled on the ground by his foot. The smell of alcohol filled the air. He staggered to his feet and fiddled with the piece of white cloth. He laughed, the same laughter that she thought made him more attractive when she first heard it. He left the compound.

The cloud thickened. The moon disappeared. The gate flapped. It was a gust of wind. Saba sighed and raised her head towards the hill. The screen of Cinema Silenzioso remained in place.

Back inside the hut from the latrine, Saba took off her pyjamas, one of her wedding gifts. She stretched on the bed next to her husband and kept her eyes locked on the window until the sunrise emerged from behind the clouds. Her watch showed six. She broke into pieces the bread she had baked on the mogogo stove to make kitcha fetfit and put it in a bowl for her husband who sat on the chair next to her.

Tedros came out of his hut and sat on his stool without greeting his father. He took the white cloth out of his pocket and fiddled with it, as if he’d meant to land a blow on his father with each touch. Saba wondered how Eyob restrained himself. He must have seen this thing his son used as a weapon against him, because her supposed impurity reflected on her husband as much as it did on her. Yet Eyob neither said nor did anything. He was, Saba was sure, aware Tedros was waving it outside the camp like a white flag, a sign of his father’s capitulation to a woman’s promiscuous past.