A puff of dust flew in through the window. Hagos stood up and closed the beaded straw curtain he had woven himself.

Her mother’s eyes were red. Women, her mother said, were the colanders through which the suffering of their nation was purged. But Saba wondered how much she herself had contributed to her mother’s sadness. Their mother had been hurt by having a mute child and two dead infants. Saba’s father said he couldn’t live with the continuous wailing, her inability to accept fate. Saba’s mother lived her life waiting for the next misfortune to strike. He wanted to be with a woman who could love. He was gone by the time Saba turned six.

According to the midwife, though, Saba was the main source of her mother’s anguish. The mother had imagined a life with a daughter who would be by her side, learning from her, listening to her, relieving her duties at home and at work, someone who would grow up to be like a sister, a best friend, a girl in the image of her own mother.

Saba thought of the moment she told her mother of her own dream, that she wanted to be a doctor, not a domestic servant. And Saba flew on her chosen path. One of the best students we have ever taught, her head teacher remarked. Every year Saba was alone when she received another award for excellence. Without her mother or brother, she sat with her favourite teacher, an Ethiopian woman who taught science, to draw up a study plan that would have taken her all the way to a university in the capital city. She had to orphan herself to reach her goals.

Saba’s eyes returned to her mother. Their battles against each other had created an unbridgeable distance. And Saba wondered if they could ever love each other again. Hagos would know how. He cooked for their mother, washed and ironed her clothes, massaged her when her back was aching, and made her ginger juice to soothe her heartburn.

I will make up for it when I finish my studies, Saba had vowed back then. Catching up on the lost love after graduation, as Doctor Saba.

The fragrance of frying onions and garlic rose in the air but was soon overpowered as the breeze carried the stench of the open toilet again into the square. Saba and Hagos sat on a blanket outside their hut.

Hagos stretched his legs on the ground, resting his head on Saba’s lap. He smelt of butter. Since they had run out of medication for his recurrent headaches, the midwife had advised their mother to massage his head with ghee every night before bedtime. The jar borrowed from Samhiya’s mother was half empty.

Saba stroked her brother’s temples, massaged the thick ropes of his veins. The collar of her white chemise fluttered in the breeze. This nightgown of her older cousin was loose on her. Before Saba left her hometown, her cousin gave Saba some of the wedding clothes bought by her husband as a gift. Everyone knew, though, it was Hagos who’d helped their cousin’s husband to choose these wedding presents. Silent men are the best readers of a woman, the cousin used to say.