Saba poured tea for Eyob. Hagos left his blue hut and watered the flowers he had harvested weeks before from the wild and replanted by the door of his hut. Bees buzzed around him. Hagos’s face looked as captivating as the yellow, red and white jasmines. He had found his place, Saba thought. His paradise.

Hagos returned to his hut, leaving behind the bees which had abandoned their hives to congregate at his turf. Eyob took two cups of tea and the bowl of bread with berbere and butter that Saba had prepared, saying he was going to have his breakfast with Hagos. She watched him tread through the compound to the blue hut as if he were stepping on an imaginary rope hanging up in the air. This will take some time to get used to, Saba thought. She looked up at the cinema and wondered if Jamal had seen Eyob retreating to Hagos’s blue hut, to the bed once owned by Nasnet, the mauve sheets soaked in forbidden love.

Saba couldn’t help but wish all wars could end this way, the way Eyob and Hagos had gained their freedom without shedding a drop of blood. Hagos’s laughter wafted out of his hut. He giggled. Then he moaned. His words might have been caged forever inside him, his love was not.

Saba retreated inside her hut and from under her bed she pulled out the luggage, full of wedding gifts, and a jute sack containing the second-hand clothes given to her by the aid centre. She sat on her bed, naked between the sack and the luggage, wishing she could wear her own skin until she could buy her own dress. She stayed like this, the breeze stroking her skin, caressing her inner thighs, all day long until the light outside her window faded. The time on her wrist said seven-forty in the evening. Saba headed to the bar, for the drink Azyeb had promised her once she was a married woman. From there, she stuttered to Zahra’s hut.

Light beamed through the door Zahra’s grandmother always kept open, especially at night. It had become a shelter of safety within the camp. Because, the grandmother said, women flee their husbands mostly by night.

Saba peeked through. She noticed the grandmother and a few girls sitting on a blanket. Zahra stood next to the pole with a tape player in hand. She pressed the play button. Her mother spoke: Zahra, my daughter, first, I want to share a thought. My fight is not only about freeing my country, it is also about freeing me from the chains of my own people. I will not go back to a country I helped free if my people are not free from their prejudice. I’d rather be free in this wilderness than oppressed in my own land which I and my comrades helped liberate.

Zahra turned the tape off just as Saba pushed the door open.

Zahra looked away from the new bride. But her grandmother stood up and welcomed Saba with a song: