Jamal slipped in a brown puppet. Signorina Patricia was watching a film at Cinema Impero in Mussolini Avenue. Dawit, forbidden access to the whites-only cinema, waited for the signorina outside behind a palm tree, his black skin helping him to remain invisible. Smoke that Jamal blew through a hole in the boy’s head coiled in front of Dawit. Saba squinted and followed Dawit through the fog of Asmara’s high mountains as she paced up and down. As the signorina exited, Dawit ran to her and they embraced on the footpath. Behind them chatters of disgust grew. Jamal leaned over the TV and blew his breath through the hole. Asmara’s winter wind bit the signorina. The Italian girl shivered in her lover’s arms.

The lovers retreated to the back street.

Another round of applause. And loud cheers: Yes. Yes.

As if emboldened, Dawit’s voice grew: Let’s go to my house.

In a bed made of a sardine tin and covered in thatch, a sheet of paper for pillows, the signorina and Dawit lay down.

SIGNORINA: Do you hate my parents?

DAWIT: Patricia, we are not original. Our story is a repetition. And the end is known to both of us.

SIGNORINA: Yet we choose to engage in a story with a foregone conclusion.

DAWIT: We are humans. We like a good fight because we think we can win where others have failed.

Dawit and Patricia embrace each other.

Padre breaks down the door. Gun in hand.

The first show of the camp television had long ended. People had retreated into their huts. Hagos was asleep. Saba closed the door and stood outside. She noticed Jamal in the distance, surrounded by the committee of the elders. The midwife arrived with the athlete, who had rolled up his sleeves. His yelling overlaid the chorus of crickets rising from the bush. The air cooled down.

Mosquitoes buzzed around her, their thirst for her blood seeming to have intensified with the arrival of the moon. Squatting down on the ground, Saba unwrapped the scarf from her neck and spread it over her shoulders, covering the flesh that appeared through holes of her dress, on her back, on the side of her arms. Saba contemplated the new mosquito bites on her forearm and felt the bump on her forehead from when she had walked into the pole of the hut earlier. A swelling on her foot had appeared, a scorpion sting. Her skin swelled in parts and Saba imagined herself rising up like a balloon. Rising above the shrub, above the men fighting Jamal, above the camp and gliding towards the starred sky.

She heard Jamal yell. The athlete snatched the puppets out of the ex-cinema worker’s hands. He ripped up the cardboard characters and flung the pieces into the air. Jamal flitted past Saba like a shadow. Behind him, the lovers’ carved-up bodies scattered on the moonlit ground. The lovers died twice that night, Saba pondered, thinking back to that last scene when Dawit and Signorina had made love under the threat of death.