The chirping of crickets filled her ears. Now and then, howls rose out of the bush. And petered out. Saba sauntered across the square. She noticed a shadow against a wall behind her. It was the same silhouette that followed her on most of her recent walks. The tall black figure with a yellow flat cap who glided on the mud walls behind her. She suspected it was Jamal.

He was her shadow by night. Silent. He was her dark side, never visible in daylight. She knew more than he supposed.

Saba entered the field. When she crouched, her toes, long, unfiled nails, appeared in the light of her torch. The hair on her legs had grown. Her dry skin itched. Her curls had returned. Since she stayed awake by night, and away from Hagos’s care, wildness returned to her. Her guilt slept with Hagos.

Wind blew through the field. Long grass whipped against her and Saba lowered her head and examined the map of her thighs. Her pubic bones protruded like columns guarding a monument. But Saba quickly freed her thoughts and language from the corset of decency that imprisoned her body parts in politeness. She pushed her clitoris back and forth against the dark lips of her vagina. Between her legs she saw a hand that rustled through the dry grass. Fingers clasped into a knot, holding a handkerchief. Saba shivered as the cool hand rested against her inner thighs before reaching further, further towards the skin she usually scraped at with stones.

It was on one of her walkabouts – as she strode among the night moths and clouds of insects, pausing now and then against a hut, listening to beds creaking under the weight of tenderness or restless sleepers – that Saba discovered, located in the east of the camp, a woman called Azyeb who had turned her hut into a bar selling suwa.

Saba switched off her torch and sat behind a thick shrub at the side of Azyeb’s hut. She held on to the privilege of invisibility. The odour of fermented beer and sounds of laughter wafted through the air. The athlete and Jamal sat opposite each other next to empty stools in the light slanting from the hut’s window. A three-stone stove in the middle, the fire shimmering. Smoke twisted in front of them.

Azyeb emerged from her hut behind a short man, buttoning up her blouse. Saba recognized the praise poet. He had become known around the camp not for his poetry but for forcing his wife to eat his share of the aid meals. He loved his women plump. Although the real reason was different, the joke went around that his wife requested a divorce when her malnourished husband couldn’t function in bed any more.

Azyeb sat down on her stool and lit a cigarette on the stove. Taking a long drag, she sighed. I needed that, she said.

The smoke of a satisfied woman reached Saba. The faces of the three men appeared and disappeared in the flickering light. Conversations between them and the barwoman flew back and forth over beer. Saba overheard it all, and when she went home that night she took with her what was said about Hagos.