I can hear Ahmad thinking, "Now there is less to do", even though where he used to live there weren't that many kids around. On some days he would go over to his mother and he would hang out of one of her sleeves, "I'm bored... I'm bored...I'm bored..... I'm bored...... I'm bored..", and he would get to enjoy his mother's huffing. She would huff but not lose her temper even though he would be going on and on, and he knew he was going on and on, and he would enjoy it, and no matter what she said it was going to be a "no, I don't feel like doing that", and every now and then she would come up with something that he would like to do but he would keep it to himself and do it later after he had finished with her, or after she really begged him, and he didn't want her to be really huffing because then she would start spilling things and she would get mad with herself and he didn't want that to happen to her.

With his aunt it's different. If he tells his aunt that he is bored, it would end up being up to him to find something to do. She wouldn't brush him away but she would treat him as if he was the one who had the solutions, and he did know that he had the solutions, but he didn't want them from himself. Strange, but that's how it was and he knew it. He couldn't get his aunt to huff like his mother, and he felt funny when he asked her for something he knew he had. With his mother it was different.

Today their aunt got a phone call in the middle of their lunch and while she was talking she was very very happy. She kept on smiling and nodding her head as if the person on the other end could really see her and she would turn to Ahmad and Habib and she would smile at them a very big smile. When she hung up, after the other person had hung up for sure, she told them that she had heard news about their father, that someone knew where he was and that his group was trying to negotiate with the other group. 'Negotiate' meant more than a hour, more than a week, more than two weeks. Their aunt didn't know how long 'negotiate' was, and for that they couldn't understand how come she was so happy. She tried to explain but it didn't work so she tried to convince them that they should be happy, and she did, by the sheer force of hope shoving reason out of the way. It worked for a while, a short while, and then things went back to how they were.