Hagos’s eyes were shut. Her thighs cooked under his ghee-soaked head on this warm evening. But Saba didn’t push him away. The priest and the imam of their hometown had been in rare agreement when their mother asked them for a divine cure for her son’s muteness. She should instead celebrate what God has given him, they said. His innocence, his guilelessness, a good heart, and thus a guaranteed place in heaven.

Hagos had chosen Saba’s black dress too. When she wore it for the first time, the mother grabbed the dress by its collar. It showed too much of Saba’s legs, the mother said. It was too tight around her hips.

I am not returning it, said Saba. The mother slapped her that day. But Saba took her mother’s wrath without revealing the dress was Hagos’s choice. This was more than a dress. He had chosen something that fitted her like the skin she had lost.

Saba was used to bearing things on his behalf, even knowing that by doing so she helped maintain his perfection in her mother’s eyes, and in everyone else’s. When Hagos came home drunk one night and the mother smelt alcohol in the courtyard the following morning, Saba stepped forward and begged forgiveness. The mother forbade Saba from venturing out in the evenings and hit her palms with a stick. Saba had not been able to do her homework for days. But Hagos, Saba was certain, loved her too, even though she had taken his place at school. He taught her how to swim in the wild river, away from people and away from the unwritten rule that girls shouldn’t swim. He made sure Saba would never drown like some girls in their hometown. He washed and ironed her school uniform, drawing out the creases even from the inside pockets, made her egg sandwiches, sharpened her pencils.

Eventually, Hagos stood up and went inside the hut. In one corner of the square, young men played football. The athlete rose high to head a red sock ball flicked by his co-striker into an imaginary net. Not far from the football match, a few men were talking, too far away for her to eavesdrop, but the seriousness that accompanied their gesticulations made Saba think they were discussing politics. Agonizing over the independence fight, perhaps, about how rebels in shorts and rubber sandals, armed with Kalashnikovs, were going to defeat an enemy equipped with tanks and fighter planes. The men shouted. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.

Samhiya was giggling to the whispers of the athlete who had abandoned the football game to play with her manicured fingers. Ahead of the happy pair, children carried each other piggyback. From the dust swirling in the air, a young man emerged wearing a waistcoat over his long robe, jumping up and down in front of his family, his feet beating on the foreign soil, the edge of his sword sparkling in his stretched arm, brandishing the weapon of gallantry to defeat the pain of exile.