Zainab fled. She did not use her staff; she ran by instinct and agony, finding her way back to the cabin with her feet in despair. She sat in the darkness for hours, the cold earth seeping into her bones.
Quando Yusha si ritirò, l'aria sembrò diversa. Su olor a humo de leña ahora olía a engaño quemado.
"Zainab?" he asked, noticing the change. He placed a small package on the table: bread, perhaps, or some cheese. "What's happened?"
"Were you always a beggar, Yusha?" she asked. Her voice was hollow, like a reed rustling in the wind.
The silence that followed was long and heavy, filled with things that could not be said.
—I told you once —he said, his voice devoid of its poetic warmth—. Not always.
My sister met me today. She told me you're a liar. She told me you're hiding. You use my darkness to stay in the shadows. Tell me the truth. Who are you? And why are you in this cabin with a woman you pay to take you up?
Muoviti heard it. Not moving away from her, but drawing nearer. He knelt at her feet, his knees hitting the hard earth with a dull thud. He took her hands in his own. They were trembling.
“I was a doctor,” he whispered.
Zainab leaned back, but he held her.
Years ago, there was an outbreak in the city. A fiber. Yours was young, arrogant. I believe I could cure everyone. I worked myself to the bone. I made a mistake, Zainab. A calculation error in a dye. I didn't kill a stranger. I killed the provincial governor's daughter. A girl no older than you.
Zainab felt the air leave the room.
“They didn’t just strip me of my title,” Yusha continued, her voice breaking. “They burned my house down. They declared me dead to the world. I became a beggar because it was the only way to disappear. I went to the mosque, seeking a way to die slowly. But then your father arrived. He spoke of a daughter who was ‘useless.’ A daughter who was a ‘curse.’”
He pressed his hands against her face. She felt the dampness of his tears; not her own, but his.
I didn't take you because they paid me, Zainab. I read you because when I described you, they told me we were the same. We both wandered into ghosts. I thought... I thought that if I could protect you, if I could see the world through my words, then I could recover my soul. But it makes me fall in love with the ghost. And that was never part of the plan.
Zainab was paralyzed. The betrayal was there, yes—the lie of his identity—but it was wrapped in a much more painful truth. He was not a beggar by destiny; he was a beggar by choice, a man who lived in a self-imposed purgatory.
—The fire —she whispered—. Aminah ha parlato di un incendio.
"My past burns," he said. "I have nothing left of this man, Zainab. Only the knowledge of how to heal. I've been treating the sick in the village at night, in secret. That's where the extra money comes from. I bought your medicine last week."
Zainab reached out, her fingers trembling, as she traced the contours of her beak. She encountered the bridge of her nose, the eyes, the moisture of her eyes. He wasn't the monster her girlfriend had described. He was a man destroyed by his own humanity, trying to mend it with his own
