Then I heard the back door open, Mama's weight nudge the car. She waited in silence, not asking, 'What's the matter, what's the matter?' Then she said, 'Let's go,' and with that Baba and I came apart. He turned on the engine. It was a pleasant sound, a regular, comforting hum governed by tempered revolutions. He flicked the indicator in the opposite direction and pulled out. As he took the straight road it flicked obediently off. I looked back at Mama, she had a bag full of sesame sticks in her lap, sunglasses covering her eyes.

The airport was empty. I felt as nervous as I had on the first day of school. Orange plastic chairs lined up in rows like boy scouts across the dark marbled floor. I only noticed she didn't have a bag with her when Baba was lifting my heavy suitcase on to the check-in conveyor belt and I remembered that she had said, 'You are going on a trip.' 'You', not 'we'. I told myself off for not noticing this detail before, before when I could have clung to the door frame, the garden gate, could have run to the sea.

Baba was now busy talking to a woman dressed in a uniform. She had a brooch in the form of a wing fastened to her lapel. He pointed his finger at her, then placed money in her hand. She nodded, touched him on the arm and walked away, smiling the whole time. Then he dug his hands under my arms and lifted me into his embrace.

'We will come and see you,' he said, squeezing me too tightly.

Mama, standing behind him, had one hand over her mouth, her eyes concealed behind the black sunglasses. 'You'll be home soon,' she said, nodding as if to reassure herself.

'Please don't cry, Slooma,' Baba said.

Then I was taken by the stewardess, who seemed to know everything. I looked back and saw Mama in Baba's arms. There they were, the two people I loved the most, the two people I was certain would do anything to keep the truth from me, huddled together in the empty airport, disappearing. Is this the time to wave? But I could no longer see them. In every direction I turned they weren't there.

The truth couldn't be kept away, it was cunning, sly-natured, seeping through at its own indifferent pace, only astonishing in how familiar, how known it has always been. I had known I was going to be sent alone to Cairo, that the name of the school she had written down, telephone receiver held between ear and shoulder, was of my future school, knew it before I noticed she had not brought a bag to the airport, knew it when I cried, 'I don't want to leave, I don't want to see the Pyramids,' into Baba's belly while Mama was buying the sesame sticks meant to sweeten my mouth, cover the bitter taste, cheat me out of my grief. I knew it and didn't run to the sea. And when I was finally brought to my seat inside the aeroplane, the aeroplane I had up to that moment fantasized about entering with my father, both men, both dressed in suits, busy with the world, heavy as all men are, I knew that I would never see my father again, that he would die while I was installed alone in a foreign country to thrive away from the madness.

The boom and thunder of the plane taking off frightened me before I looked around and saw how calm all the other passengers were. The hostess who had taken me from Mama and brought me to my seat, into whose delicate hand Baba had stuffed a bundle of tightly folded dinars, kept smiling at me and bringing me sweets with aeroplanes on their wrapping. The clouds were cotton, the blue tremendous, the world below the page of an atlas alive with worm-like cars, silent windows reflecting the light. Libya was coastline, on one side the relentless yellow desert stretching into Africa, on the other the foam-sprinkled and curling royal blue of my childhood-Mediterranean.

When we landed in Cairo International Airport my hostess took me by the hand. The ladies that worked in the duty-free shops gathered round me, kissed me, then wiped their lipstick off my cheeks. Each smelled different, none like Mama. I filled my pockets with more aeroplane-wrapped sweets. My heart leaped when I saw Moosa, his head above the crowd, his arms waving in a half-moon. I hugged him and had to restrain myself from asking to be sent back. He shook hands with my hostess, bowing shyly. She kissed me goodbye. 'When will he be flying back?' she asked. Moosa hesitated, then said, 'Soon, God willing.'

Cairo was green, crowded, busy with farmers' turbans and women in short French dresses. An endless labyrinth stitched with cars, the wide eyes of nervous donkeys and the cry of street pedlars: clamorous, restless and darkly jubilant. I immediately liked the city. Moosa knew it well, told me stories all the way from the airport about the different neighbourhoods we passed, stopped at the famous decline at Muqattam Mountain, put the car into neutral, and I was amazed how it kept ascending. It was the only place in the world, he said, where things are pulled upwards by gravity. He then stopped at a fruit-juice stand and bought me a huge glass of sugarcane juice.

Judge Yaseen took immediate command of my affairs. And shortly after my arrival Moosa got a job in one of the new quarries that furrowed the Egyptian desert for gravel and sand. The job seemed to suit him: stone, big tractors, jeeps, the monumental scale of the land. It also helped keep him away from his father's grip. Every few weeks he would come home for a week's rest, his hair dusty, his hands parched, his neck bronzed by the sun, and be met by Judge Yaseen's disappointed gaze, mournful that instead of following in his footsteps his eldest son was squandering his time as a quarry foreman.

My life was spent mostly with his parents. His father, the solemn judge, liked how obsessive I was about my studies and so spared no expense or effort in supporting me. He was kind, generous and often reminisced about his days in Libya. I guessed he was trying to compliment me. But Libya grew distant in the background, began to mean little. All that tied me to it were the increasingly sparse telephone calls with my parents. My accent had quickly become Caireen, and I stopped trying to adjust it when calling home. Baba, in particular, disliked this. 'You have become a/bul-eater.'

I had integrated rather smoothly into my new Egyptian existence. My young age and the judge helped make this possible. His wide circle of friends and associates became mine, and those old moist-lipped Egyptian judges that used to meet on his balcony in Tripoli, all those years ago, close to our house, in the neighbourhood the judge liked to call Gorgi Populi, regarded me with particular affection. Doors, in a country full of closed doors, opened effortlessly, easing my progress and my definition of myself.

What was astonishing is how free I came to feel from Libya. If one of my friends teased me about my 'Bedouin origins' or about our ineffective football team, I smiled only to please them, but truly felt nothing, none of the fervour that had once caused me to cry, after six hours of watching a chess match in which a Libyan had lost to a Korean at the International Chess Championship in Moscow. Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded. I neither sought nor avoided the Libyans who lived in Cairo. This even when I knew that the embassy had a file on me. I was down as an 'Evader' because I had not returned for military service. Then, when I became too old to be militarized but was still too young to be forgiven, another decree meant that if I were to return I would serve the same period in prison. And like all Libyans who don't return, the shadow of suspicion fell firmly on me, strengthened further by yet another decree, issued when I was fourteen, promising that all 'Stray Dogs' who refused to return would be hunted down. These decrees got ever more desperate. The government's next move was to refuse my parents a visa to leave the country, holding them hostage, as it were, until the evading Stray Dog returned.