This is where we will live, said their mother, fastening her scarf around her waist to relieve the pain in her lower back, which had started to ache when the family of three started their journey hunched on a mattress tied on the camel’s back.

Hagos gathered Saba’s long, thick hair and tied it back into a bun. Saba followed him inside the hut that reeked of dung. He shone his torch around. Insects teemed out of the thatch. She watched the flight of a moth, its wings flapping in the heavy air. Hagos passed the torch on to Saba and went outside.

Saba contemplated the wooden pole made from a thin twisted tree in the middle of the hut. It went all the way to the apex, supporting the roof. She hoped she would not bump into it.

Hagos returned with jute sacks, his face bathed in the floodlight streaming from her hand. As he placed the sacks against the wall, Saba tried to compose herself too. They needed to make sure their mother could get some rest. Saba understood that when Hagos took out a blanket from one of the sacks. She followed his movements, wondering if she could ever care for their mother the way he did.

The thin blankets would be their sleeping pads, for now, their mother said.

Saba and Hagos held each end of a blanket. They beat it up in the air and laid it on the bare ground next to the wall, coughing in chorus. Saba dusted off her black dress as Hagos helped their mother onto her blanket. Her bed. He folded a scarf into a pillow and placed it under his mother’s head. He kissed her forehead and used his gabi, given to him at his cleanness party by the midwife who doubled as a circumciser, as a cover for his mother.

Saba spread out the other blanket on the opposite side of the hut. Here, Hagos and Saba would sleep. Share dreams. And a new life. This would be a place of reunion. They would spend nights talking. Laughing. Singing. Sharing stories from back home. And recounting childhood memories. Here, Saba would make up for the years she neglected Hagos. Years when she could see nothing around her apart from her textbooks. War had brought her closer to the person she had opened her eyes to first. Their mother often told her how, at only a few hours old, baby Saba had searched for milk on Hagos’s chest. Hagos was also the first name she ever spoke. Hag. The other letters – o and s – came later. And like his name, his presence in her life would be realized piecemeal.

Saba peered through the window. She saw a group of men entering the square, their oil lamps flickering and their shadows merging into one amorphous body. Heavy and slow.

The group had gone out to search for the river. According to the lorry drivers, it should have been to the west of the camp. But they had turned back without success. There had only been bush.