And I keep returning to her wedding night. I still shiver at the thought of her brother tiptoeing his way to the marital bedroom long after the music had died and the guests had departed to leave the bride and groom to consummate their marriage. How he twisted as he placed an ear to the wall.

Now, I was thinking about Saba, her crime, her impending trial, when she exited her hut and appeared on the screen in her black dress, her other skin. Sitting back on my stool, I returned to watching my cinema and Saba through it. She perched on her bed under her lime tree, a book in hand. The oil lamp by her bedside flickered. Saba always slept outside in the open air, and I would watch her every night as the moon and stars cascaded over her taut skin.

I assumed she would read her book now. She’d been rereading Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog, which the English coordinator had left in our camp with his British newspaper, as if by reading it over and over again she would have an equally happy ending to her own love story. But whom did she love?

The screen of my cinema quivered. Saba turned on her radio. Music blurted out into the silent evening. And moments later, as I placed a pot of milk on the open furnace, I heard footsteps. When I raised my head, I saw her walking up the hill towards me, gliding like a ghost among the shrubs and cactuses. As I leaned forward, I nudged the open furnace.

Saba, in her black dress and ankle-strap sandals, stood next to the multicoloured chair in front of me, a bag in her hand. She looked like a character escaped from an Italian film. A figment of my imagination? I could see her though. Smell the perfume of her body.

She walked away from the screen and hung her black dress over the low branch of a hibiscus tree near the edge of the hill. She returned to the screen naked and sat on the multicoloured plastic chair, the same chair on which performers sat to tell stories, to recall life in our homeland before the war, before our exile. In the cinema, I often pleaded with performers that they were free to say and do what they wanted. But people remained bound by their exiled condition. I knew I didn’t need to remind Saba of this.

Ants climbed her toes, pedicured by Hagos the evening before.

Saba retrieved a pair of scissors from her bag and began cutting away at her hair. The white-silver glow of the bright sky poured onto the screen. As the long strands of her black hair fell on the floor, she stared at me through her dense eyelashes. The whites of her eyes were disturbingly clear.

The wind stirred. Sparks flared up in all directions. The milk in the pot boiled up, turning into a fluffy dome of white spilling over, putting out the flame.