They sat us on the ground beside a man who was making tea and coffee for the officers and conscripts. There was this air of business-as-usual to everything going on around us. The handcuffs were biting into the man I was cuffed to. He was moaning and it was grating on my nerves. I was too thin for the cuffs to hurt me. Nearby, there was a woman in a black robe clutching a plastic suitcase and talking with a little girl of about twelve. From time to time they would turn to look at us, then go back to talking. I assumed at first that they must be talking about us, but after a while I realized what it was: They were looking at us the way you might look at a chair, say, at any inanimate object that might happen to fall in your line of sight. We were nothing. Or rather, we were just part of the scenery, and would be even if we were to start bleeding out altogether, like the man hitching at his pants.

Then I saw my parents. My father was talking to a conscript by the gate, wearing an expression I’d never seen on him or anyone else before: an extraordinary blend of weariness, rage, worry, and humiliation, and I wished I could shrink where I sat, grow smaller and smaller until I disappeared into one of the tiny holes the ants had opened in the walls. Then, all of a sudden, there was my mother, kissing the conscript’s hand.

Their voices didn’t reach me where I sat. I watched the scene play out silently:

My mother’s body, rarely seen outside our house, stooped in the reeking yard to kiss the hand of a young conscript who could do nothing in any case, not for her and not for me. My mother, abasing herself without realizing that she had no hope of getting anything in return. I watched my father step back and stare at her. His back was turned to me, but I could picture the shock on his face.

It was in that moment that I understood, Seif: If you rebel against fate, if you insist on being master of what you call Your Destiny (the insolence!), then life itself might come out and force your mother to her knees.

That day, life chose to let me go, though my release had nothing to do with my mother’s kiss. They left us in the yard past noon, then undid our cuffs and made us sign papers, and we were allowed to leave. As I signed my name to testimony I had never spoken, the officer said with a smile that we’d meet again soon.