And now my innovation had infected Saba too. I wasn’t ready to hear the truth. I picked up a chunk of charcoal and stood up ready to hurl it at the sheet. Burn down my cinema for good and with it my fantasy, and Saba, and all the fragmented scenes of her I had collected and woven together. The scenes through which I had survived. My life was a mirage because Saba was a mirage.

Turn off the lamp, she said.

I dropped the ball of fire. And when I did as she asked, she faded. But her purple thighs and the chair under her dark body shimmered in the moonlight. Half of her turned into a sitting silhouette, as if she was the negative of a picture, the real person behind the image being somewhere else.

Whenever she inhaled on the cigarette, her features emerged inch by inch, redrawn out of darkness, in the way she wanted, as if she were ready to replace with her own words all the stories told about her.

But then came the knocks I had been dreading. Loud and persistent.

Jamal, we know you are in there.

I could hear the court clerk shouting through the door.

Jamal, open the door at once. Are you talking to yourself again?

I slipped my hands through the screen, touched Saba’s purple thighs, and drew my breath from the violence printed on her skin, as if confronting her wounds was the only way to confirm her existence, and challenge her invisibility in my mind.

Jamal, open the door now before I break it, the clerk said.

Saba zoomed out of the cinema screen. I followed the tip of her cigarette as she strode to the hill. The clouds scattered.

Her trial began under a bright sky.

And as soon as I opened the gate to my cinema, the clerk stepped in, followed by droves of people.

Girls carrying firewood trudged in line. The firewood on their backs squeaked. Behind them, old men in turbans and with gabis swathed around their blazers stopped, blocking the entry. They reminisced about Asmara. Since I arrived here, and every time I close my eyes, said the eldest among them, I see Mussolini in the central boulevard he named after himself.

They held hands and moved forward together, facing the memories in unison. Buonasera, Jamal, they greeted me as they sat in the front row. A herder showed up while still shaking her goatskin in which she churned milk into tesmi. The smell of butter receded when a sex worker – face covered in black seed oil perfumed with cinnamon – appeared in the doorway.

Asmarino boys entered my compound with cardigans tied around their necks, still holding their playing cards. The joker among them mimed an explosion with his hands as women balancing jerrycans full of river water on their heads arrived through the gate. The women, though, smiled, threw their hips to the side, arms akimbo. Their chattering stopped when an eighty-something-year-old woman, whose daughter and granddaughter had been martyred at the front fighting for our country’s independence, arrived on her donkey. The animal brayed when the grandmother dismounted from its back.