We walked to the farthest edge of New Square, to the barbed wire, where the soldiers lounged dreamily atop their armored cars. We didn’t approach them, nor did the silence of the alleyways behind them encourage it.

Bahr was still speaking, and I wondered: If motherhood is an instinct, something bred in the bone, then what is fatherhood?

My understanding—and it might not fit with everyone’s experience—is that fatherhood is a life rinsed clean. Like laundered money. Here are your genes, washed spotless, reborn and innocent. Here you are, with one sacred duty: care for this delicate creature who relies on you entirely; who has no other father in the world but you. What a bond!

You can outwit yourself like that. When part of you starts thinking about all the mistakes you’ve made, when it sounds the alarm and says, “Flee!” then you offer an argument in mitigation: your child. Let’s wait until the kid’s raised and grown, and can (How do they put it? That’s right:) look after himself.

My argument, my pretext for not killing myself, my fresh start, was a boy named Adam. Irene and I chose a name that both of us could pronounce. I waited impatiently for what I never got: his first word. I wanted to know how he’d say it; how his tongue would blend his parents’. But before he could gather those first sounds into words, it was over. Those effortful syllables, that face which bore the faint shadow of my own dark skin—these are my entire memory of him. A bird-call voice singing scattered signs, exquisite little lips that sucked at my neck as I held him, like he was sipping milk through my skin. Wide blue eyes like Irene’s.

Life played a smarter hand this time. Two birds with one stone. It used me to prove its point.

For the first two years everything went well—the relationship, the pregnancy, the birth—and it felt as though my old life were nothing but a story, a lie someone told me a hundred years ago. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night with an inexplicable panic, in a cold sweat, but without any memory of having dreamed. Maybe I hadn’t. But the things I knew, the blows I kept waiting to fall—they ran their fingers over my body as I slept. They ravaged me.

When the blow finally came, it was in the form of a boy, a teenager who harassed Irene on her way to work. Wolf whistles, obscenities, and racism. Irene was an outsider twice over. First, because she came from a village; second, because she was living with a black man. He’d make comments about her milk-white breasts, and always, whether she walked away or turned to shout at him, he’d call her “black man’s bitch.”