me a bat. I looked at this man squirming, trying to free himself, and I saw that it was Nadim. He looked so different there on the ground, his face full of fear. The men held him down and others took turns beating him. I stood motionless and watched as they beat him until his eyes were rolling in his skull and his face was broken, until his legs and arms twitched.
‘Why are you just standing there?’ one man said, nudging me. ‘Don’t you know this man is the devil?’ And so I took a step closer to take my turn, and I heard the cheers of the men and then everything and everyone around me seemed to vanish and all I could see was Nadim’s face looking up at me. For a moment his focus cleared, his eyes fixed on mine and he said something to me that I couldn’t hear, while a voice from behind urged me on and I felt the throb of my wound and remembered the innocent faces of the twins and some other anger grew in me, one that I did not recognise, and I brought the bat down onto his skull.
Then he was motionless. I dropped the bat and stepped back. One man kicked him and another spat on him, and then they all ran off, in all directions, into the woods or back to the campsite.
I dragged his body deeper into the woods, where the trees were closer together, where the noises of the city and the noises of the campsite were far away, and I sat beside him until the sun began to rise.
By the dim light of dawn, I made my way back to the camp. I came upon two men having a heated discussion. I recognised them immediately and quickly stepped into the shadows. One of them was sitting on the splintered log where Nadim had once sat; the other was restless, pacing up and down, stepping over a baseball bat.
‘What the hell are you feeling guilty about?’
‘We killed someone.’
‘He was taking those boys. You know what he was doing, right?’
‘I know. I know that.’
‘What if it had been your son?’
The man on the log didn’t reply.
‘I mean, can you imagine?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘He was evil. The worst kind of evil there is.’
‘Did you not hear what happened to Sadik’s son?’
This wasn’t really a question, and the man sitting down lowered his eyes, running his hand over his face.
There was silence for a while and I didn’t dare to move, to even take a breath. The wind picked up and leaves on the trees rustled above us and I could hear footsteps in the woods and the sounds of laughter and faint music.
The man sitting on the log stood up now to face the other man. ‘What leads a man to do such things?’
I didn’t hear the reply because a group of boys walked between us, about five or six of them. One held a football in his hands, another had an Arabic song playing on his phone and a few of the boys sang along to the chorus. The two men took this as their cue and began to walk back to the camp. I took their place on the log, and felt its ridges and grooves with my fingers. I imagined Nadim; I could see him, as if he was sitting right there beside me, penknife in his hand, slicing his skin, that look in his eyes, full of rage.
‘What happened to you, Nadim?’ I said out loud. ‘What led you to do such things?’
And the wind replied, it lifted the fallen leaves, it tossed them about around me and then dropped them and the laughter and the music faded now completely, the boys lost to the depths of the woods.
Then I returned to the camp. Angeliki had gone now and I lay down beside Afra.
‘Where did you go?’ she whispered.
‘There was a problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘You don’t want to know, trust me. It’s finished now.’
I remembered a verse from the Qur’an:
Be merciful to others and you will receive mercy. Forgive others and Allah will forgive you.
I then recalled some words from the Hadith:
The prophet would not respond to an evil deed with an evil deed but rather he would pardon and overlook.
And I looked at my hands, turned them over as if I was seeing them for the first time: one wrapped in a bandage, the other that had held the bat. I began to feel