Layla had bought the blue dress the afternoon of the day before at the market in Tyre, where she went once a month since she had been living in tent 14B of the Deir Qanun camp, and she had paid the trader thirty Lebanese liras for it, a thin man with a ring on his little finger, who had at first asked her fifty but had immediately come down to the price of thirty not because she had haggled (Layla never haggled, haggling seemed to her a small violence done to the trader and to the time the trader had spent folding the clothes and laying them out on the table), but because the trader had seen, immediately, two things: the first, that Layla would not haggle; the second, that Layla had the face of someone who buys a dress for a child who will wear it within the next two days and that therefore the dress had to leave the stall at a price the trader could afterwards tell himself was, in the end, an act of pity.

Yara, who was five years old, had been born in Idlib in 02021 and had had time to learn the meaning of only three words, and the three words were "wind," "uncle" and "milk," and each of these words belonged to a precise season of her very short life: the wind was the noise of the plastic of the tent when it tensed, and Layla had explained it to her in a whisper, the wind, the wind, until Yara had repeated it; the "uncle" was the boy of the Risala scouts paramedics, Karim, who brought her milk in the morning and who had died on Friday with her under the Israeli drone; and "milk" was the word Yara loved most, because milk meant Karim, and Karim meant the smile, and the smile meant the room outside the tent where the wind no longer came in. Karim was nineteen, born in southern Beirut, with a small birthmark on the left side of his chin that made Yara laugh every morning, and Karim would say: "Yara, it's a fly, do you want to catch it?" and Yara would try to catch it with thumb and forefinger and laugh, and Layla would watch the scene every morning from the threshold of tent 14B with the same participation with which a mother watches her own daughter sleep, because it was exactly the same thing: the daughter who lives, and you watching her live, and having to know that you cannot watch her forever.

The evening of the twenty-second of May, after Layla had signed the paper for the transfer to the camp cemetery and had paid the gravedigger the fifteen liras for the transport (a kind man who had insisted on the price of eight, but Layla had insisted on the full price because she found it unbearable that even death should have a discount), and had spent four hours in tent 14B with the blue dress folded on the table, she had come to the question — that question whose prologue the trader had seen in her face and that now came to call her to account.

The blue dress, made of light cotton, with vine leaves embroidered in pale gold on the right sleeve, had been bought in view of Saturday, of the community feast in the large tent where a group of women had organized a lunch for the children of the camp. The old dress, of a coarse cotton ash-coloured by now sun-bleached, with a small mended patch in the shape of a half-moon on the bottom of the left sleeve (Layla had made it in Idlib the night before the flight, leaving it there as a seal so that the cloth would not unravel further on the journey), had been Yara's only dress for the first eight months at the camp. When Yara had begun to grow and the dress had become short, Layla had lengthened it by three centimetres at the hem, taking the cloth from a piece of discarded sheet, and now, on the table, the old dress showed at the edges of the sleeve and of the hem this double genealogy: the half-moon patch above, the added lengthening below.

Layla chose the old dress. The choice did not occur, properly, as a decision: it occurred as a recognition occurs, which is that particular movement of the mind by which what is right presents itself not as the result of a calculation, but as that which had always been there and which only now is seen. The blue dress would have been the dress of the Yara who could have lived until Saturday, and as such belonged to a Yara who had not existed and who therefore had no right to be clothed in what she had not known; the old dress, instead, was the dress of the Yara who had been, and the Yara who had been had the right, now, to leave the world dressed in everything of the world she had known, and in nothing other than that.

She ironed the old dress with her right hand, one fold at a time, slowly; having neither an iron nor water to dampen the cloth, she did it only with the warmth of her palm, pressing from one side to the other, and at each fold Layla thought one of the things she had learned in fourteen months at the camp, and that by Saturday she would have had in some way to forget; and the idea that folding replaced thinking, and thinking replaced forgetting, and forgetting replaced not knowing — this idea made her press her hand on the cloth with such force that, when she had finished, the old dress lay flat on the table as if it had been passed under a weight.

The blue dress, still folded at the top of the table, was put back by Layla beneath the mattress, where it had been before. The trader in Tyre, if the trader had known, would have known nothing; the trader would have continued to believe he had made the price of thirty out of pity, and Layla, in the end, was content that it be so, because to explain to him that the blue dress had not been worn would have been like reclaiming pity back from him, and pity is not reclaimed.

The mother-in-law arrived the next day from the nearby village. She saw the old dress on Yara in the small cemetery of the camp, beside Karim, and beside the freelance photographer whose camera had been found intact twenty metres from the body, and she said to Layla, in Arabic, with that precision which mothers-in-law possess and which is a form of love disguised as a wound: "You bought her the new dress precisely so as not to have to do this." Layla did not answer. Beneath the mattress, the blue dress remained folded, the vine leaves embroidered in pale gold in the half-light of the tent, for the three days during which the mother-in-law stayed; and when the mother-in-law left again, Layla, one evening, took it from beneath the mattress, looked at it, folded it once more, and put it back where it had been.