You can’t see who is the girl and who is the boy, he would say, his exact words repeated each visit, the same actions too. He would rub Hagos’s breasts – as if he could flatten them by pushing them inward – and pull Saba’s nipples harder and longer to increase her breast size.

It’s for your own good, he would say. But he could never reverse God’s creation. And so one day, on another trip to his town, one of the last before they fled to the camp, the uncle, professing doubt about their respective genders, asked the siblings to pull down their underwear. To make sure, he said.

That’s when Saba realized that Hagos might have been born a mute, but their society turned every child into one. Her uncle knew this, and it was what made him touch them everywhere, all the time, until he decided to sleep between them. But don’t worry, he told Saba, whispering his words, reassuring her that he would not spoil her future, because he would have her the same way he was going to have Hagos. Saba didn’t understand. That was when he turned them both forcibly and slowly ran his hands down their backs. You are both mute now, he said to Saba and Hagos. You hear? And as he moved between them, digging, he planted more than doubts, fear, anger and pain into Saba and Hagos, he also seeded a bond between them as he scooped blood from one sibling to deposit it into the other.

TV: LIBERATION OF A MAN

Saba hadn’t seen Jamal for a while and when one day three funeral processions passed in front of her hut, all for men who had died suddenly, Saba walked up the hill where the entertainer lived. Saba saw a table laid out with flowers and a tape player. She was about to walk towards Jamal’s door when he came out holding his box. The TV is back, Saba blurted out.

Jamal turned and their eyes locked. Saba smiled. She wanted to ask him if he had brought back Dawit and the Signorina from the dead to continue their forbidden love story. Jamal didn’t say anything as he placed the box on the table, but Saba caught a fleeting smile on his face as she walked over and sat on a chair facing the cardboard.

Jamal began narrating. Today’s show is called: The Last Liberation: The Way a Man Wants to Make Love. He slipped his cardboard character into the TV from the hole at the top. The male character stood next to a Vespa against a drawing of Africa. He was holding a bag.

Saba noticed a mysterious smile on the face of the man about to journey across the continent, as Jamal narrated, for someone who can love him the way he is and make love in the way he wants.

Jamal turned on the tape player. Soft, sensual Ethiopian music accompanied the man’s lonely travels on his Vespa. Then the man stopped and began to talk, imagining he had found a woman with whom he could be free, showing her how music inhabited his bones.