Dawn at Tobruk. Five thirty. The flat-hulled motorboat leaves the old customs harbor, engine at half revs. Musa Bushnaq, forty-seven, light cotton trousers and a red shirt, steers west, then swings north. The sea is oily, without a ripple, lead-colored, lightening. The light turns low orange. On the good-month fishing banks there is nothing now. Musa keeps on toward the east, over the eastern current that in June brings the mullet. The engine holds a fixed sound, like hot metal.

Eight miles from the harbor, the wake. An orange life vest, salt-bleached, half sunk. Then a cloth backpack, blue, a school one with a plastic zip. Then a rubber sandal, the kind sold in every market of the Sahel. Musa cuts the engine. The motorboat carries on by inertia, silent. Musa does not speak. On the water the small gurgle of bubbles under the hull. He follows the wake in silence for eight minutes. The keel drifts slightly northeast, the current shifting it.

Then the two bodies. Fifty meters off. A boy and a girl. Hand in hand. Face down. Two days have passed. The skin is swollen, the water has done what it does. The boy has a blue shirt, the girl a long ochre dress. The girl has a cloth bracelet on her wrist. The boy has a silver stud in his right ear.

Musa idles the engine against the keel, works the tiller by hand. The motorboat comes in slow. He kneels at the gunwale. The box under the seat he knows by heart: the line, the iron hook with its point bent back for tuna, a folding knife, a five-liter can. He takes the hook. It is bright, he used it yesterday for a twenty-kilo tuna taken off Bardia.

Over Tobruk the muezzin is not singing yet, forty minutes to fajr. The light on the water is that of the first minutes when you see without the sun. The boy and the girl hold hands. Not hard, the way a living person holds. Softly. Musa had never seen two bodies holding hands after two days. The salt has not yet parted them.

Musa bends down. If he hooks the girl's wrist to bring them aboard, at the Tobruk landing the coast police of the Benghazi government, the new one, the one that opened its office last week, the new June law bars entry to Sudanese, Eritreans, Somalis, Ethiopians, and bars aid to their bodies, not only their living bodies but the dead ones too. They would look at the gray blanket. They would seize the motorboat. The motorboat had been his brother Nasser's, dead in the year two thousand twenty-one at sea on the crossing to Crete, the boat Nasser had left him with a letter written by hand that said use it well. If instead Musa moves the hook and pushes them out to the open sea, the current carries them past Bardia, maybe as far as Musaid. No one will find them again. They will go on holding hands until the water parts them.

Musa remembers the imam of the neighborhood, Sheikh Rida. Two summers ago, on the Friday evening, after Yusuf had not come back from swimming with his cousins at the beach of Ain al-Ghazala, after Musa had spent three days on the coast asking the fishermen if they had seen a boy of eleven, Sheikh Rida had told him, under the fan of the old mosque: whoever saves a dead man is as if he brought him into the world. Yusuf had not been saved. His body had not been found. Musa had sworn to the imam, that evening, that every body he could bring to shore he would bring. He had learned an aya for Yusuf, he recited it every maghrib.

Musa lowers the hook toward the girl's wrist. Then he stops. He looks at the wrist. Under the cloth bracelet a thin silver ring, a school ring, the kind children trade at recess. Yusuf had had one just like it, brought by the cousin from Benghazi. Musa stares at the ring for eight whole seconds. Then he hooks. The girl first. He lifts her slowly by the side, lays her on the floor of the motorboat. Then the boy. Their hands come apart at the first movement. Musa gathers the sandal too, the backpack. Then the gray blanket from the locker. He covers them.

He starts the engine again. Course east. The engine at half revs. He passes the mullet bank, where yesterday there was nothing. Today he goes past. At seven twenty he reaches the Tobruk landing. The sun is high. Two militiamen in light green in front of the new office, caps in hand for the heat. They see the gray blanket. One raises his arm. Musa cuts the engine. He feels under his foot the vibration ending.

He whispers the aya, the one he had learned for Yusuf. He does not raise his eyes. He waits.