Stop, David. Stop. We are going to find them now. They are here. Anna and August will be in the camp. Because this was where Anna wanted to go. She had spoken about the place for a long time. It was supposed to be decent. Here there was food and electricity from solar panels. And not least, there was water. Clean, cold water from a faucet.

And from this camp it was supposed to be possible to continue north.

The driver put on the brakes. He drove onto the side of the road and stopped. Lou woke up.

“There,” he said, pointing.

In front of us was a military-green tarpaulin fence.

Anna. August.

The driver let us out. He mumbled “good luck” and drove away in a cloud of dust.

The air hit us like a hot wall. Lou blinked toward the sun, clinging to my hand.

The fireball in the sky sucked every drop of water out of me. The asphalt was burning. It was so hot it had to be on the verge of melting.

My phone was broken. My wristwatch had been bartered away. I didn’t know what time it was. But the fence before me still cast a short shadow, so it couldn’t be more than three.

I walked quickly. Now we would find them again. For sure they had arrived here before us.

We reached the entrance. Two guards wearing military uniforms sat by a table. They looked at us without seeing us.

“Papers?” one of them said.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said.

“Papers first,” the guard said.

“But—”

“Don’t you want to go inside?”

I placed our passports in front of him, but left Anna’s and August’s passports in the bag. The guard didn’t need to see that we had them. He would certainly start asking questions.

He leafed quickly through the pages in my passport, stopped at the photograph. I was startled every time I saw it. The guy in the photograph—was that me? Such round cheeks, almost chubby. Had the camera distorted my face? No, that was just how I was at the time. Stout, not fat, merely in good health. Or maybe just normal, actually. Maybe that was how we all looked before.

He picked up Lou’s—it was newer, but Lou grew so fast. The child in the passport could have been anyone—four years old when the photograph was taken. Smiling. Not as serious as she is now.

I had braided her hair this morning. I was good at it. Brushed it and divided it into two identical sections, with a sharp part in between. Then I quickly made two tight braids that hung down her back. Maybe it was because of the braids we had finally been picked up by a driver. Now I hoped they distracted people, so they wouldn’t notice how dirty she was, and thin—so they wouldn’t notice her seriousness. She seldom smiled, my child. Before she was the kind of child who was always jumping, running, skipping. But now the braids just hung down her back, completely motionless.