I stood and gave up my chair to this woman whose womb had once upon a time sheltered lionesses. Saba is free, she said, squeezing my hand. Saba is free. A woman is free before her country is liberated.

I kissed her forehead.

The judge and the elders had yet to arrive. One woman lamented the peculiarity of putting each other through trial, as if life in the camp wasn’t doing this already.

The crowd soon laughed again though, when our camp’s barber asked me if I had finally lost my virginity to the uncircumcised woman working at the aid centre, whom I helped translate English to Tigrinya and Arabic. I wanted to bring a quick conclusion to what would no doubt be a long discussion by revealing I had lost my virginity instead to an uncircumcised man. I said no such thing, though. Instead, I smiled and kept the mask of pretence going.

My silence intensified the curiosity. Eyes continued to probe the disguise over my face. I firmed my posture to affirm my manhood, countering the femininity that infected my bones like ants digging holes in the ground. Somehow, I collected my fragmented body into one, and stood straight as a doum palm tree.

The judge will arrive soon, said the clerk.

And, as if to kill time while waiting for the trial to begin, a man handed me and the son of our Sufi imam a sword each. Time, the saying goes, is like a sword: if you don’t cut it, it cuts you.

The mystic and I were requested to jump closer to the divine, closer to exhilaration, and return to this ground bearing his love. The imam’s son and I jumped, elevating ourselves high above the compound, the camp, and glided towards the berry-coloured sky, our blades clashing mid-air, and together we tapped our weapons into the monotonous sky until it bled. Dusk arrived. Blood filled the curves of the thatched roofs.

My friend and I fell back to the ground giggling. We hugged, our swords behind the other’s back. In this isolated, neglected place, it’s your friend you must watch out for, Saba had once said to me.

Recalling her words, I dug the heel of my hand into my friend’s shoulder blade, just as he did mine. We marked each other’s presence in the other’s memory and, laughing, we returned to our seats.

But where is the judge? I asked, hoping to put an end to this charade once and for all. Not that I had had enough of my fellow refugees. On the contrary. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was their merciful solidarity that kept me alive during the first weeks and months of life in the camp. Some families allowed me to share their children’s beds and their few spare items of clothing, so that at night both their children and I slept naked as our clothes dried outside. Our limbs intertwined, sweat glued us together.

And for a long time, before I had inherited my hut from a man who had drowned in the river, I slept in different huts and laid my head on the same pillow as a poet, a rapist, a widow, an adulterer, a fantasist and compulsive liar, an imam, a homosexual, a priest, a closet transvestite, a man who molested his son, a mother who beat her children until her rage was engraved on their skins, and for a while, I dwelt with a young widow who spent her nights parked on the ground of her hut on all fours, surrendering her naked body to the ghost of her deceased husband, so I went to bed with the smell of her yearning sex filling my lungs.