Mere hours before the ship that was supposed to take me back home departed, I sat, drinking glass after glass with a Moroccan.

The ground was rocky, just like this, but covered with a light grass. We were sitting, the superstructures of container ships looming in the port nearby, time running slowly away like water from a leaking flask. With every drop of brandy I grew lazier and more indifferent, and when the clock struck ten in the morning it was too late to change my mind even if I’d wanted to. I watched my ship depart and then draw away. I thought I could hear it sounding its whistle, a great whistling, and I thought I could hear the whistle crying out my name: Bahr! Bahr!

The ship departed, and I watched it go from the grass where I sat, and it was as though I were watching my life drawing away: my past, and everything I had ever known; my country, slipping away like a wave runs back from the rocks to rejoin the great body of water at its back.

When I was a young man, the idea of traveling to Europe to find work had come easy. I’d known for certain that I was never coming back. It wasn’t a question of making a decision to stay, though. It was a feeling: blood thrilling to see the ship go back without me. I knew I was going to have to disappear for a long time, that I would suffer and go on suffering, but as long as I was away from this shithouse of a country, none of that mattered.

There was a rush of courage from the brandy. I pulled a lighter from my pocket, flicked out a flame, and with my free hand I raised my passport aloft, bulky and leaden like a disaster. I spoke aloud: “Fire purges everything.”

As Bahr spoke, it was as though the tang of saltwater rose off his story, not blown in from the shore nearby where the reeds were being battered about in the wind. There was no one around, though they had told us this was where all the boats set out; that it was from this thin spit of sand that Wahda had slipped away. I was silent, full of a heavy gloom that had descended when he’d told me the story of the boy. The boy he thought he’d killed.

I didn’t know then that his end was near, that he wouldn’t be coming back with me.

In the two silences—my silence and the silence of the sea that lay behind the faint wash of its waves—Bahr told me what came next, during his first days of running from the boy beside the lake: