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outlying clusters of huts were burned, though some had mud rooms and enclosures that were still standing.
    I had been to this village many times, including for several weddings, which are a big part of life for us. A wedding goes on for four evenings, with wonderful dancing and singing. I saw an area of large trees and remembered all the dancing that used to happen under them. The women form a long line and sing traditional songs about village life,and then dance in this long line—so beautiful in their brightly colored gowns floating about them in the firelight. The men watch and jump in a ceremonial way. In ancient days they would have their spears with them, since this was the symbol of the male. At the last wedding I went to, some men had guns and they fired them in the air, to show their appreciation for the great dancing and singing by the women.
    That now seemed so long ago, and forever lost. As we arrived, we could see that many huts were still standing. My sister’s hut was among them.
    After my sister Halima recovered from seeing the man her baby brother had grown to be, she made a small joke that I was always doing things backward, that a Hari should not come home to roost in the middle of a war. She was joking that our family name,
Hari
, means “eagle.” Birds are famous for leaving a village before a battle, not for arriving during one.
    Her husband was away somewhere with a group of men. They were perhaps moving the animals to safety or preparing to defend the village. Women are often not told about the troubles of war, though they suffer them greatly.
    But whether they are told or not, the women know everything. The children see it all and, as they do their chores, the women ask them to tell what they have seen. I did not ask Halima where my brother-in-law might be. He was somewhere doing what needed doing, just as the women were busy hiding caches of food out in the wadis to the west of the village, should a hasty escape be necessary.
    Halima told me of the prior bombings in the village,which killed seven people. I knew these families, though some of the victims had come into the world in the years I was away. Thus I had missed their whole lives, which was very sad to me.
    In the evening, when the children of the village finished their chores with the animals and gardens, I talked to them under a tree in a slight rain.
    “Tell me what happened,” I asked the eldest boy, who was perhaps fourteen and would surely be among the resistance troops in a few days or weeks. He was wearing torn jeans and a shredded UCLA sweatshirt that probably had come through marketplaces from Algeria to El Fasher, having first been donated years ago in the United States.
    “All the birds flew up and away. This is the first thing we noticed,” he said.
    Then he mimicked the noise of the Antonov bomber as it cruised high over the village.
    “We could not see it,” he said. The others nodded.
    “But our mothers knew it was the Antonov as soon as they saw the birds leave, and they yelled at us to go hide in the wadi, and take some animals quickly. So we took the donkeys and some chickens and goats as fast as we could. As we ran, we could hear people in the village yelling to get this person or that person out of a hut and help them get away. We could not hear the Antonov at this time. We thought it had gone away and we were safe, and that our mothers were crazy. Our fathers were far away with the animals.
    “Then we heard the Antonov coming back,” the boy continued under the tree. “It was coming lower, and wecould see it coming up the wadi. It dropped a big bomb on each of the water points along the wadi to destroy the wells and maybe to poison them with this…”
    The boy then pulled up his sleeve to show me red blisters on his arm. Other boys did the same, revealing backs, necks, legs, and stomachs burned by some chemical.
    “The bombs sent balls of fire and sharp metal everywhere, even to where we were hiding, where