Seif, I’ve never been sure whose voice I heard in that corridor; what face it was I saw. I mean, maybe I mistook somebody else for her, because I was looking at a face, not the legs. Regardless, the point is that it was in that police station I learned that dignity has a specific weight—somewhere between seventy or eighty kilos.

Before they let us go, they took us out the back door of the cellblock into this dirt yard. They stripped us naked, or half-naked, and made us lie down on our stomachs. I didn’t dare turn to look at the others. An officer came and put his shoe on my neck, then let his whole weight bear down on me till my face was crushed into the dirt. Like a mountain. Like there was a camel or a truck driving over me, driving me into the ground. There were tears in my eyes, and through the tears I saw a tiny insect crawling along by my nose, and then this fat fly came and settled right on the insect’s back, and I… It was like the fly was staring at me out of two big blue eyes. My mother used to say that the flies that fly close to the ground are the spirits of our ancestors, and at that moment I fully believed it. I was convinced it was going to speak to me. The officer’s weight on my neck was getting lighter, though he didn’t get off, and it was then that I had a realization, like a revelation. The weight on my neck wasn’t the officer, pulled to earth by gravity and crushing me in between. This was my dignity: seventy or eighty kilograms. It was puppy fat: the dignity I was yet to use up, and the time had come to let it fly away in the company of that departing fly. So I let my nose be crushed into the dirt, and I let my neck turn slack like sponge, and I made an alliance with that oh-so-tiny insect, crawling along now by my eye: “You and me, together in the dirt, but you carry no dignity with you, no false dreams, no anger. You live and die without philosophy, as we all should. Hook my dignity out through my nose, little friend, and take it away. Help me bleed it out so I can be as weightless as you.”

An odd contentment passed over me, like the breeze, and I felt that I was the ground itself, that I was a bank of dust across which the officer’s weight was now distributed, unmoved and unaffected.

Then the stench that hung around the place prompted another revelation. You can never make a living room out of a bathroom.