Naseema arrives at the CONI in Cosenza at half past two on that Saturday in June, on a coach that left Cassano allo Ionio at twelve, along a road that crosses hills already yellow in June, yellow like the hills of Logar she remembers from childhood and has for twenty years remembered less and less well, because the memory of hills is the first to blur, before the voices, before the names, and only the oil poured over the rice at her brother's wedding feast has stayed vivid to her — that thread of pale oil running down yellow like these Calabrian hills now sliding past the coach, at which she cannot look for more than three seconds.

The plastic bag she keeps in her lap for the whole journey. Inside it are three photographs of Safi: one from the day he got his licence in Pakistan, one in front of the Amendolara minibus in the first week of March, one from when he was six and was holding a plastic knife. She knows the knife was plastic because she was the one who bought it for him at the market in Charikar, and she remembers the stall exactly, a wooden stall three by two with a neon lamp that swayed, one of those lamps that in Charikar in the nineties swayed in every market on the outskirts and that made the wooden stalls look smaller than they were.

The woman who receives her at the entrance to the Conference Hall is called Carmela and is about sixty, a light scarf at her throat despite the heat, and she holds her hand a second too long, the way those with a cause do. She leads her to the front row, points out the middle chair, with a white card on the seat and something written on it. Reserved. Family of the victims. Naseema reads the writing, then looks at the chair, then looks at Carmela, then looks at the plastic bag in her own left hand, then walks slowly towards the second row and sits down in the second-to-last seat of the second row, next to a lady with the companion dog she has brought with her to the panel.

The front-row chair stays empty. Carmela looks at it, looks at Naseema, starts to say something, then does not say it. She goes towards the stage. The panel begins. A mayor speaks. A bishop speaks. A trade unionist speaks, raises his voice. A sociologist from Cosenza speaks at length about the strawberry-picking supply chain in the Plain of Sibari and about the relationship between the big retail chains and the gangmasters of Amendolara — a connection she already knew about before the first of June, she says, but which on the first of June she learned to call by its name. The sociologist is called Antonella and took her degree at Messina, and Naseema, who does not understand most Italian words, hears their tone and their rhythm clearly, and in that rhythm she recognises something: the rhythm of someone counting the dead. Counting the dead the way you count the rice that comes out of the sack when you pour it into the pot: by handfuls, by handfuls that get smaller and smaller, until the sack is empty and you roll up the edge to close it.

At the twentieth minute of the panel the moderator looks at Naseema. Everyone looks at her. The moderator says something in Italian that she does not understand in full. She understands «family», she understands «if she wishes». The Bengali-Italian interpreter they have assigned her — because nobody thought a Pashto one would be needed — leans in to her on the chair and whispers: they want you to come up, you can come up. She shows her the stage. She shows her the front-row chair, still empty. The interpreter is young, perhaps twenty-two, fine hands, and she looks at her with the same grip as Carmela. She can go up onto the stage, take the microphone, show the photograph of Safi with the plastic knife, say a sentence that the interpreter will translate as best she can. Or she can stay seated, shake her head, and nobody will force her.

Naseema looks at the plastic bag. She opens it. She takes out a single photograph, the one of the Amendolara minibus from the first week of March. She holds it in her hand. The interpreter waits. The hall waits. The moderator waits. The front-row chair stays empty.

She shakes her head. Once. Slowly. The interpreter turns to the stage and says in Italian: the lady prefers not to speak. The moderator nods. They pick up again with the trade unionist, who starts over from where he had left off.

The panel ends at ten past five. The front-row chair stays empty all afternoon, three hours and forty minutes of emptiness in the middle of a full row, and nobody moves it because the white card stays on the seat, and that white card becomes the most read thing of the day, photographed seven times by four journalists, one of those photographs ending up in a national daily the following day with the caption: the chair the mother did not take. Naseema leaves the hall. Carmela holds the door for her. At the exit a journalist comes up to her with his notebook open. She holds out to him the photograph of the minibus. She does not say her son's name. The journalist looks at the photograph. Naseema boards the coach for Cassano. The coach pulls away. The hills turn yellow again. She looks out for three seconds and then turns her eyes away, as always. The bag is in her lap. The other two photographs are still inside.