Saba stretched her arm through the gap in the screen and took the cigarette I had lit in the open furnace before her arrival. I wished I could hold her hand for just a moment, but to do so would mean calling into question all that I had believed until then. This is a cinema in a refugee camp, I told myself. Saba is an actor in a film made in a foreign land.

She puffed out cigarette smoke. Her face vanished in the cloud. Saba has a history of disappearance, and reappearance. And for a moment no one existed on the screen. Not even the camp. Saba was a lie, this camp an illusion. But the fumes of neglect rose from the camp behind her, rooting me to reality. The smell of damp yellow thatches, of dung-filled mud walls, of the open field we all shared as a toilet where I had encountered Saba so many times.

An eagle landed on the hibiscus tree inside my cinema, opening its beak as if Saba’s black dress was laced with bloodied memories, her flesh the thread holding this fabric together.

The moon disappeared behind the clouds. Saba vanished in this momentary darkness, her face resurfacing as she drew on her cigarette. But darkness always returned in this place. Lamps ran out of oil. Batteries expired. Half our lives were spent in darkness.

Talk, I urged Saba. Please say something.

And she did, after the eagle flew away. I used to believe, she said. I believed that, although people flee their homeland, leave their belongings behind, our traditions stay glued to our core. They escape with us to wherever we go.

She paused and raised her eyes to the sky.

What was she trying to tell me? What was she trying to prepare me for? Did this have anything to do with the trial?

A gust of wind whipped life back into the hissing charcoals. Sparks hit the side of my face. Tears welled up in my eyes. It was I who encouraged members of the audience to hold no fear when they entered my screen. Instead of retelling their tragic stories in the camp, I urged them to recount their dreams so that they turned into fantasy in this remote place. Once they were within the confines of my cinema, they were not refugees bound by their exile; instead, they could say or do whatever they wanted. Because, I told them again and again, you are characters in a film made in a free place somewhere far away.

And some believed it. I remember the boy who told of his fantasy about his uncle’s wife. His brothers dragged him out of the screen through the hole in the sheet and beat him unconscious. Or the girl who was to be married off by her parents, but who became captivated by the illusion of my cinema, declaring the name of her true love the moment she stepped inside. Her parents disowned her.