The goat hobbled. But Hajj Ali was as steady as the rock on which he sat. When he finished milking, the goat trudged away, then rushed to her flock in the barn, where Hagos was rubbing mud off his chest.

Of course, she cried.

i do it will, I wrote to Saba in the broken English she taught me, a language that was foreign and new to us both and that we spoke as though we had regressed to the time we ought to have spoken it first as toddlers.

no, she wrote back, never let i you this do

but saba say you not always we same are that our bodies same are feel you pain when feel i pain we one are one we are

When she hugged me after reading my note, whispering in my ears, oh Hagosey, I love you, I tell you, I felt as broken as the words we spoke, as unnatural as the foreign language we tried to root in us. A day would come, though, we both said to one another, when we would tell our history, recount this time in our own language. But that day would be when we returned to our country, the country Saba was on her way to fight for in Zahra’s place.

As Hajj Ali rose from me, I stayed supine on the ground of the barn, remembering Tahir, the lorry driver, and the words he said to Saba as he asked her to keep the seeds from the orange he gave to us, so she would plant it in the camp: Our country, Saba, is like any in the world, there are good and bad people. I hope and pray you won’t have to pay a high price to leave the camp.

I wished he’d made that same prayer for me too.

Dung. Dung everywhere. Around me. And on me. The smell of that first time we entered the camp wafted to me from my chest that Hajj Ali had squeezed with his hands smeared in manure, from the barn where I lay, from my face, my feet. It was as if I was a hut, a camp built with animal remains to last in this wilderness.

Dawn embraced me now. I stood still in the barn looking at my sister next to the nomad. He drank some of the milk from his goat and passed the bowl to Saba as he munched on some dates, thanking God, his voice reaching my ears, as if I was Saba near him. He thanked Mother Nature. And in the camp, nature possessed tenderness. I wept as Saba wrapped her arms around herself. In the same way I did.

The donkey brayed. Come, let’s go, Hajj Ali called to my sister as he pulled the cart and linked it to the reins around the donkey. He wound his turban and, looking at the sky, he spread his hands in prayer: May God make our path ahead safe.

Saba stroked the donkey’s face and wiped the secretion from its eyes, for the road ahead, for the journey ahead, for the life ahead. Fighters don’t cry, I wanted to shout. But then she was a human being first. She freed herself before her country, she freed me, and freed love in our compound, in our camp, before she set off on her way to the front to pick up a gun to free a piece of land.