She retreated inside the hut. Hagos rolled himself to one side of the blanket. Saba stepped over her brother and squeezed herself in the tiny space next to the wall made of dung. They lay down so that her face was next to his feet. Small stones pierced the thin blanket. Saba spooned herself between the curved wall and a curled-up Hagos.

THE MOSQUE IN THE SAND

It was dark when Saba lay on the blanket with her eyes shut. She touched herself in the way she always did back home in the moments before dawn when her body belonged to her.

But that first morning in the camp, when her chest swelled above the ground like a taut dewdrop on a leaf, she heard their mother grunt in her sleep. The moan of pleasure died behind Saba’s clenched teeth. She sat up and shuffled away from Hagos. A twig protruding out of the mud wall grazed against her leg. She pounded the wall with her fist.

Back home, her room had opened onto the garden of a stone-floored courtyard with terracotta pots full of herbs. She had inherited that room from her grandmother. It was here that Saba’s grandmother found a way to communicate her desire for her neighbour by planting flowers against the wall separating them. Although her trader grandmother grew up without parents, she taught herself to read and write, founded a business before she turned twenty, and travelled from one country to another, from one lover to the next. Her longevity owed itself to tej wine, khat and sex.

Apart from the photo of her grandmother, which Saba had hung on the wall above her bed, that room was decorated with pictures she had hand-picked from the studio of their landlord, where her mother worked as a servant. The landlord, who had gone to Europe as a student carrying his hometown’s dreams, but returned having fulfilled only his own – to qualify from an art school – had appointed himself as Saba and Hagos’s godfather. One of the photos Saba had taken from his studio was of a girl with a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder. Suspended behind the freedom fighter, through the photographer’s trickery, Saba could see the central avenue in Asmara that had changed names three times in recent memory, from Mussolini Avenue, to Queen Victoria Avenue, to Emperor Haile Selassie Avenue, and now the National Avenue under the dergue. The fighter, though, stood against the conquerable street as firm and rooted as the palm trees on both sides of the grand boulevard. Saba practised this pose, to replicate it in her border town.

Next to the fighter there was a copy of a painting given to her by the landlord. The pale skin of a nude woman taking a bath somewhere in Paris still glowed when Saba dimmed the light to sleep.

Books covered the floor and Saba’s bed. History in Tigrinya, translated Russian novels in Amharic, poetry in Arabic. Pencils. Pens. Erasers. Politics. Art. Freedom. Africa. Europe. And Saba. All vying for a space in her small, disordered room.