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in like goats. Rashid was light-hearted. He played the tabla and gathered resin from rubber trees. His brothers died during the deportation, and he was put onto a ship and sent into exile on a chain of islands with the name Tremiti. No one heard from him again. No one ever knew anything about his death or his new life.
    Farid looks at the sea.
    Grandfather Mussa told Farid about his father’s voyage.
    A sandstorm rose; a wind of grey powder swept the coast, as if the desert were rebelling against that cruel exodus. The Bedouins boarding the boats wore dirty tunics, their faces hollowed by months of starvation, the sorrow-filled and vacant eyes of a herd pushed into nothingness.
    Once, Mussa, as an adult, travelled all the way to the port his father left from, in a Toyota that belonged to some desert archaeologists, a group of kids from Bologna. They slept together in the old Tuareg camps, visited the Garamante necropolis and the white labyrinths of Ghadames.
    From the Gulf of Sirte, Mussa looked at the sea that had swallowed up his father. He thought about setting sail, going to find Rashid in Italy and presenting himself, tall and elegant, with his English bone glasses and his white djellaba. He dreamt of picking up his old father in his arms and bringing him back to his desert on a camel.
    The rust of homesickness scratched Mussa’s teeth like sand.
    But all that blue scared him. It was as if a hand were pulling him backwards by the neck. The ancient terror of the sea.
    But he did have time to see a group of half-naked tourists on the beach. They were drinking lime juice and eating blackberries from a basket made of woven leaves.
    He came back with his story, which became more risqué over time, the women more naked and inviting, like virgins of paradise.
    Farid looks at the sea and thinks of paradise.
    His grandfather told him that the women there are more beautiful, the food tastier, and all the colours brighter, because Allah is the painter of the dawn.
    Farid thinks of the picture hanging in the dining room of his father, Omar. The photographer retouched it with markers, made the lips redder, the gaze more intense.
    Farid’s father doesn’t look anything like the legendary Omar Mukhtar. He doesn’t have any political ideas. He’s shy and has weak nerves.
    Farid looks at the sea.
    Tears leave his eyes and slowly meander through the tiny, salt-whitened hairs on his face.
     
     

The Colour of Silence
    Vito scrambles over sea cliffs, descends into sandy coves. He’s left the village behind him, the noise of a radio, a woman hollering in dialect. Now it’s just wind and waves leaping high against the rocks, extending their paws like angry beasts, foaming, retreating. Vito likes the stormy sea. When he was a little boy, he’d jump in and let it slap him around. His mother, Angelina, back on the beach, would yell herself hoarse. She looked tiny as she stood there waving her arms like a marionette. She was such a little thing, with her dress flapping around her legs. The sea was stronger. Take a running start, ride the fast wave, slide as if on soap, be swallowed up by it, bang against the angry throat of the vortex. He’d roll, sand and big rocks tumbling him about on the murky bottom and leaving him dizzy. Sea in his nose, his belly, waves sucking him backwards, scaring him.
    Real joy always contains some fear.
    These were his best memories – his bathing suit full of sand, his eyes wounded and red, his hair like seaweed. Becoming a weightless rag, trembling with happiness and fear, lips blue, fingers numb. He’d come out for a little while, running, and throw himself down upon the warm sand, trembling and shivering like a mullet in its death throes. Then he’d dive back in, his brain devoid of thought, feeling more fish than human. So what if he didn’t make it back? That would be that. What was waiting for him back onshore, anyway? His angry mother, smoking. His grandmother’s octopus stew. His summer