Bringing up a girl is the ultimate responsibility God has placed on a parent, Saba remembered the midwife telling her mother after her father left when she was six. But I will help you, my sister. Saba is like my daughter. I will make sure she is brought up well.

Let me go to tell the businessman, said the midwife, freeing herself from the mother’s embrace. No time to wait, she is ready.

That evening, though, it was another man who came asking for Saba’s hand. He was not even the first. And like all those before him, he arrived with a gift.

Hajj Ali brought a plastic jug full of milk, mutton and eggs in a straw basket. Saba, though, knew her mother would turn him down, like the others. There was only one man in her mother’s and the midwife’s minds. A man with his own land back home, who would make the return, when it came, smoother.

She is still as strong as an ox, said the nomad of his wife’s strength. But age hit her here, he dug his finger in his brown vest-clad chest. While the capacity to love in my heart swells with the passing of every day.

The mother asked Saba to wait outside the hut as she conversed with Hajj Ali. Saba sat with Hagos next to the oil lamp that engraved an island of solitude around them. Brother and sister reunited in silence, like old times. How strange, Saba thought, that distance wedged between them while they lived in the same camp and the same hut, their blankets next to each other. It had been a long while since they had spent time with each other in the way they used to.

Eyob had come between them, she thought. He gave her a job, and the possibility to dream again, while at the same time he provided Hagos with a friendship he had never had. Eyob gave her and Hagos the chance to have some space from each other in this confined place. Saba remembered what Zahra had said. To see is not the same as to be seen. That was what kept her sane, how she managed mentally to create a distance for herself, by merely pretending at times to ignore others. And even herself.

Saba drew her feet up and hugged her legs. But you are a traveller, Hajj Ali, her mother’s response came through the window. Saba had never heard her mother speak with such confidence.

You might not realize it, but you are all eternal travellers, Hajj Ali responded. People from a place with continuous violence seek oases like nomads.

Hagos stood up. Saba followed him with her eyes as he paced up and down. He picked up a stick and sat in front of her. He tried to talk. Saba leaned forward. His cheeks inflated. Words stuck in his mouth and his tears fell. Saba wiped at her brother’s face until clarity returned to his eyes. She tried to read the reason for his rage in them, understand his burst of emotion.