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fiancée, who disappeared when he did. She is sitting on the grass in the sun, her face offered up to it like a sacrifice, with her closed-toe shoes kicked off and her pencil skirt keeping her legs chastely together, crossed at the ankles, toes curled as she soaks up the warmth. That thick hair. I used to find strands of it on my brother’s pillow when I was younger, so young that I would snoop about his room, desperate for clues about things older boys did, for clues about women, and sex, and intimacy. I collected what she had left behind, the only evidence she had been there, thick enough that even singly I could tie them into knots without snapping them. I couldn’t believe those hairs were dead.
    She opens her eyes and the angle her face makes with the sun means she is looking directly at me. Do I flatter myself to think she would recognize me? That she has banked my face in her memory? She closes her eyes again, uncrosses her ankles and lies down completely, her head against her palms, relaxed.
    ‘I just want to see her,’ says the portraitist. ‘Not even speak to her or touch her, I just want to see her.’
    His wife. The man guarding us, in the intimacy that comes from looking at women together, says, ’She walks in the rose garden in the mornings, on the other side of the courtyard. We let her walk and stretch for an hour.’
    The portraitist grips his forearm. ‘I have to see her. Please. She doesn’t even need to know I’m there.’
    The man is feeling good in the sun. Maybe he has his own lover amongst the women milling below. He hesitates, then agrees. ‘You can see the rose garden from the opposite passageway. I’ll take you there.’ He turns to me. ‘I’ll watch you from across the courtyard. I know you won’t move.’
    I won’t move. She is beneath me, in the sun. An image of my mother flits into my mind like a fly that needs swatting: in the hospital, disguised by tubes, thinking I was my brother and crying with joy that he had found her at last. Her last words were: ‘My son’, but she wasn’t speaking about me.
    I say my brother’s fiancée’s name, then call it more loudly, and a few people in the courtyard look up at me, registering my presence. I shout it and she opens her eyes and sits up, looking around her to source the voice. A man points up to me, to the railing where I’m standing, and she looks up, shielding her face from the sun with one hand. She can’t see me because of the glare. She stands and walks barefoot towards the edge of the courtyard and looks up, then disappears from my sight, into the passageway beneath me. I am relieved, relieved that it isn’t her, that I don’t need to know. Somebody touches my shoulder gently and I turn. It’s her. She stands before me, barefoot on the cement floor, her hair ruffled from lying on the grass, slightly out of breath from running up the stairs.
    ‘My God,’ she whispers. ‘For a moment I thought…’
    I know what she is thinking, she and my mother, wishing me away, wishing he were back.
    She reaches out a long limb to cup my face. ‘With that beard…’ She can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t need to. ‘What are you doing here? Are you with the movement? What section are you in?’ She is holding back tears unsuccessfully; they bank and spill, bank and spill.
    ‘I’m being held captive. I was taken in during the coup. They’re keeping me with two other men in a room.’
    ‘Captive?’ She wipes her tears away impatiently, trying to concentrate on my words. ‘But that’s impossible, there must be a mistake…’
    ‘No mistake. I’m one of the old guard. I shaved him each day, plucked hair from his nose, made him look presentable…’
    ‘The President?’ she says, incredulously.
    ‘The President.’
    ‘You mean you held a knife to his throat every day and never slit it?’ Her tears begin to collect again. ‘After what he did? To me, to your brother?’ They are spilling hopelessly now. Her face is