And when Saba and Hagos sat down for breakfast, the dialogue of the night before replayed in her mind: Poor man. He is older than us, said the praise poet. His mother has been looking for a wife for him. But no girl, I mean even the poorest or the ugliest, would take an illiterate mute for a husband.

But how do you know it is the girls and not the parents who reject him? said Azyeb. Since when do girls have a say about who they marry anyway? Perhaps things would be different if we did.

Saba looked at Hagos. His hair covered his ears now. He ate like her mother. Fingers turned into an elegant spoon, his chewing inaudible. He was the girl her mother had always wanted.

You are growing fast, the midwife had said to Saba some time ago. One day soon, a nice man will walk into this hut with a ring. Since then, Saba had begun to imagine herself at her wedding, in her husband’s bed, a certain time in a future when she was surrounded by her own children, while Hagos remained in this blanket, in this hut, old, lonely, childless. Dying without ever experiencing love.

Saba tucked his hair behind his ears. She hushed the flies away. She found it strange that Hagos was twenty-something and had yet to grow a moustache or beard. That was a miracle. God ought to be thanked for Hagos’s eternal youth, she thought. There was still time. Love was bound to find its way to him.

Saba wiped the grains of sleep from the corners of her brother’s eyes. Hagos smiled. But Saba yearned for a conversation now, something else between them rather than silence. Smiles no longer had the same weight. They faded against the urge to talk, to exchange jokes, to scream. Screaming at him, for rejecting her pleas to teach him to read and write for all those years.

Perhaps, Saba thought, they ought to play the game they used to play. A game that started when the Paris-educated landlord and photographer had told Saba and Hagos that a picture said more than a thousand words. Then, Saba had wanted Hagos to take as many pictures of her as possible. So she could know his thoughts about her, his feelings towards her. She’d wanted him to talk to her this way, instead of having to rely on guesswork, on her endless interpretations of his actions. Saba no longer wanted to be an interpreter. She wanted to sit back and listen to him.

As if he could read her mind, Hagos had made a fake camera using a tin can. Saba’s poses, though, were real. Hagos had stood behind his tin camera, beginning a dialogue.

Now, as she sat in front of him in their hut, Saba recalled some of the pictures he’d taken. Their meanings became clearer with the distance of time and place. And Saba, the resident of the camp, could remember without a hint of remorse or shame the time he fiddled with her cheek, nose, eyes, until he had scrunched her up. The time he braided her hair into a bun and crossed one of her legs over the other, his hands opening the buttons of her dress, his cold skin on her chest, her breasts exposed to this photographer peering through the hole in the tin. The picture he took after he kohled her eyes, and then wet her eyelashes, remained in her mind as vividly as it would have done had he taken an actual picture. Saba’s body bore his dejections, his happiness, dreams and desires.