I close my eyes and try to make my mind a blank, silent, still, no ripples.
23
I have a strange dream. A dream not yet a nightmare, but something close. Like when you put on music, a song you have heard before, but it’s wrong, somehow, a remix. Someone else is singing it, there are different instruments, same melody, but everything with it is strange, out of place. I am by the cliff again, standing there in the wind, but there is no sunshine. The boat is coming in, fast, headed for the stones at the bottom of the cliff, and Arien screams at me to come down and help, to make a line with my body, but I don’t move, I cannot, I know this has happened before, but there was sunshine, and it cannot happen again without sunshine. So instead I look up at the overcast sky and wait for the sun, and I wait, and I wait, and I open my eyes to the sound of my alarm.
I go to the small bathroom, brush my hair, my teeth, the makeup is forgotten, and I put on woolen pants and outdoor clothing, boots, gloves on my hands. Then I stop and stand still for a moment, listening. The wind is still blowing, endless.
I go downstairs and eat the breakfast Madani has put out. She reminds me of a ghost. Sometimes she is here, so I can see her and talk with her, and sometimes she is gone, but still I can feel her looming presence in the house. I eat earlier than the rest of the family, it seems, somewhere in the house I can hear a man snoring, and sometimes late at night I can hear a young girl talking outside, as she comes home late, from somewhere, a boyfriend perhaps, or a party. I feel a little embarrassed, and grateful, that Madani wakes up extra early to make me breakfast before the others.
As I drive to the storage, I try to remember how many days I have been here, or how long I have left, but the days kind of get mixed up in my head. I have five more days here? Four? I will be leaving on the tenth day, that much I know. So four more days, I think it is. How I will be able to blend in back home, in that life, I cannot imagine. I feel so different, marked, an alien, and people home will feel it, sense it, like people always do when someone is different than them, like a smell, almost undetectable.
I show up at the storage early, so I have to wait a few more minutes in the car, wishing the radio would work. Inside, in my chest, there is this feeling that comes whenever I think about going back home. Not to Madani’s, but to my real home, back to The West. A sort of pressure, a tension. I focus on it, trying to figure out what it means, what it wants. It feels like I will not be able to go home. Like something will go wrong, terribly wrong, and I will be forced to stay here forever. And it’s not a fear, it is not that kind of feeling. It feels more like knowledge. I tell myself it’s silly, but the pressure is rock hard, unmoving.
The van pulls up just then, and I jump out of my car to greet the others. We hug each other; there is a new intimacy between us since yesterday, the last piece of shyness shredded.
“How are you?” Mary asks.
“I’m OK. Better. And you?”
“I guess I’m better too. But my chest feels so sore, you know what I mean?”
I nod. I do.
We put tents and sleeping bags in the trunk. There is just a few, and it all fits easily into the van, so there is no need for my car. My car. It is so easy to forget that it really isn’t mine at all.
Today, I am, therefore, to squeeze into the van with the others, sitting at the edge of a seat in the back, pressed against the door, but as long as I can look out the window I’m happy. When we get out of town, I see that multiple trees have been bent in the wind, from yesterday when the storm was at its worse. A small, tiny one is parallel to the ground. If the trees are like this, how can the tents be?
I soon find out.
Walking up the hill, the whole camp looks like a war zone. Only the biggest and most solid tents still stand, and those in the middle of the camp that has been shielded; the rest have been thrown over, lying in the mud.
“Why are they smiling? This place is terrible,” I say, when I see it. Because even though their homes are in ruins, many people are smiling. Not a big grin, just a little, small, smile, as when you listen to a melody you like by yourself.
“Because it’s sunshine today.”
When I came home that day, I asked Madani for a notebook and a pen, then I wrote it down, those words. They seemed important, I wanted to remember them. Happiness can be in such small things.
It takes us two days to restore all the tents. It is difficult, because the wind is still blowing, and sometimes the guards get mad, for some reason, and send us away, closing off the area, so we have to leave for a couple of hours. We spend that time wisely, of course, eating, for instance, gaining strength, but still Arien becomes furious when this happens, cursing in heavy dialect. Us losing time means that more people have to sleep outside, on bare ground, in the cold. It is terrible to see, bodies, alive bodies, lying under a blanket in ditches, trying to find some shelter against the wind. The good thing is that I meet the little girl again, the one from my first visit here.
I stand with a tent pole, holding it still while an eastern man attaches the tent folds to it, when I see her, looking at me. She is still wearing that summer dress of hers, but wrapped around her is also the blanket I gave her.
She walks towards me shyly, waving her little hand, and I smile at her, encouragingly. The rest of the day she follows me everywhere, holding my hand whenever it is possible. We do not speak out loud, we communicate with our hands, tiny squeezes, and smiles, and looks. I wish I knew her name, that I could ask her, about her, and her family. Still it is enough to just be together like that. Whenever I have the time, in a small break or when the labor requires more physical strength than I am capable of, she takes me with her to her friends and we have this clapping game, where they all line up in front of me, and we clap our hands together from different angles, making rhythms, faster and faster, until one of us makes a mistake and has to go back in line. I realize that this is how the children here make the time go by.
And despite everything, I find myself enjoying it. The clapping games, holding that little girl, putting up tents. Sometimes, Hasin is there too, and we hold the little girl between us, playing house almost, lifting her up between us so that she can fly. Despite the terrible conditions, there is so much love here, a love without conditions, that does not depend on your popularity on Social Media, likes, followers. We are just together, in a small fraction of the universe, and love each other. I think that is a pretty wonderful thing. And for a few moments, I thought it would last too, that my last few days here on the island would be peaceful. But that peace came short, and the second day of putting up tents, catastrophe hit again.
24
This is what happened. Someone had brought a small tent meant for children. The kind kids used back home, camping in the backyard of their parents, in the summertime. Here, on this cold island, it’s useless. But it ended up in the trunk of the van, and handed out, for fun possibly, to a little boy. I did not see this myself, but I can picture him showing it to his friends, proud. Then they took it with them, he and a friend, to set it up. The problem was that there was no room, because of all the mud that covers the area. The only place with grass that had not been tampered down into the dirt was by the fences, surrounding the camp, patrolled by guards with cold eyes. It is not allowed to put up a tent within a radius of four meters from the fence. Of course, the little boy and his friend did not know this. They just wanted to put it somewhere with grass, and that was the only place.
I was standing about ten meters away. The little girl was holding my hand, as we watched Arien and three other men put up a tent, waiting to see if they needed my help with holding the poles. They did not. They never got around to that part. Suddenly, it was like a war broke loose around us. It was a war, I think. I do not know the definition, but it was just like I had pictured it. Grenades started to fall around us, like rain. Or maybe it was not grenades, they did not explode in fire, only light, a blitz, flashing at us, blinding us. Others released smoke, that intoxicated us, m
ade me turn over coughing, and I was in the middle of it, in the middle of that little war. And then there were the gunshots.
At first, I stood frozen. That is how your body responds at first, when your surroundings change so abruptly. I had read about in psychology, evolutionary psychology it was called, like when you see a snake on the road before you and you freeze or jump away. That response was what had helped our ancestors survive, and therefore, it had become a part of us, of me, now.
I stood like that for I do not know how long, but suddenly the little girl grabbed me by the waist and clung to me, terrified. She made this sound, a mix of a scream and a sort of howling, high pitched and full of terror. It woke me, and without thinking I grabbed her, lifted her up in my arms, and ran. I did not have any particular destination in mind, my legs moved by themselves, running, running, and I was terrified I would slip and fall in the mud, because I knew that would be the end of it, of me, of us. I pressed her tightly against me, blinded by the smoke that hurt my eyes, or maybe it was the blitz that hurt. Her whole body trembled as she coughed too, the smoke burning her little lungs; she almost curled up in a ball from the power of it.
Finally, I saw the opening in the fence, where the van was parked, the smoke lighter here, and there, behind the fence, the air seemed clear, so I ran in that direction, my heart was thumping like crazy, I did not think a speed like that could be possible for a human heart, I almost expected it to be just too much, and that it would just stop.
We were almost by the van when the sound of gunshots started up again, the sound much closer than before, the sound was terrible, it shattered my head, broke it, making my ears go numb. I screamed to the little girl to cover up her ears, forgetting that she did not understand me, and then I felt the bullets hit me, in the back, one time, four times, in the leg, legs, three times, four, and it burned, and I thought I would fall over and lose her, but I did not, and then we were out the gate.
25
I look at the skin of my legs, wiggling my body like a worm, to get the best view. The skin is very red, blood red, swollen, but it’s not bleeding, and I don’t think anything is broken. But I will have some serious bruises, on my legs, my back, where the bullets hit. Luckily, they did not use real bullets. Only rubber ones. The guards are not allowed to use real bullets on children and workers, only if it is a matter of life and death.
My whole body is still shaking, trembling like a leaf in the strong wind. I listen and feel for a moment, and yes, the wind, the real wind, is still blowing, strongly, though that’s no surprise, I have gotten used to it by now, that it will never end.
I sit under a tree, at the top of a small height, outside The Camps. The other workers stand by the van now. I watch Arien speak to one of the guards. He is gesticulating like crazy, like he has gone insane, and maybe he has. He deserves to let himself go mad for a minute. This is a get-mad-about thing. This is worse.
I watch the little girl too. She has gone back into The Camps. She did not want to. Her family was there, inside the opening, yelling at her to come to them, and I tried to make her do that, but she refused at first, she kept clinging to me. Eventually I was forced to put her down on the ground, which felt like something close to torturing her. She grabbed my hands then, speaking rapidly in an eastern language, and how I wish I could have understood her. Instead I took off my necklace, a little silver necklace I got from my mother when I was born, that she had inherited from her own mother, and I put it around her little neck, showing it to her. It had this pendant, in the shape of a heart, with a little, pink rose painted on it. She looked at me intently, now clenching that little heart between her fingers, instead of me. Then she finally turned around and ran to her family. I was not allowed to follow her; the fence was closed for workers at that point. So instead I rotated my body, like a robot, and walked to the van, passing it, kept walking, up against that hill, and sat down. From the top, I could watch her with her family, standing outside their tent. Eventually they got inside, she disappeared into the folds, and that was the last time I saw her.
26
I sit for about an hour on that hilltop, looking down at the scene below. I feel like a god, distant and helpless, but with the best possible view of the chaos below.
Arien comes up, joining me, sitting down on the grass beside me. We sit in silence for a while, just watching The Camps, where people are now returning to their tents, those who are lucky enough to have one.
“We got in the middle of it, you and I,” he says. The other workers were spread around at the edges of The Camp when it started, safe from the smoke and the blitz that had shrouded me and him.
“How lucky,” I answer.
He chuckles a little.
“Has this happened before?” I ask.
“Oh yes, many times,” he says. “And it’s usually children who cause it. Playing too close to the fence for instance, or running after a ball outside the gate.”
“But how can they do that? How can it be allowed? It’s just kids, they’re not meaning any harm, they’re not even doing any harm. How can they react like that?”
He sits thoughtful for a moment.
“I read a book once. It was this crazy love story, almost fantasy, but not quite, written for many years ago by this guy, and I remember a quote that I really liked. It said that the world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness. How these guards responded to that little boy putting up a tent is an excellent example of just that. It was an action neither logical or kind.”
I think about that for a moment.
“But still. How can things like this be allowed? They are the ones who should be in prison, or sent here, I guess.”
“They are guards from The West. They can do whatever they like to people from The East, no matter what The Law forbids or doesn’t forbid. It is not supposed to be like that, but some people can use or not use the rules as they like. You understand?”
Not really. Some things just cannot be understood, I think. But I nod.
“Let’s go back.”
We drive in silence. There is a lot of silence on this island. Maybe because there are no words for what is happening here. Wordless. That word has a double meaning. It is wordless, and it also sounds like worldless, a world less, like this is a place outside of the real world. Or the opposite. It is the real world outside the fake one. A small, real world.
At the headquarters, we all sit down, drink tea. I am going to miss this tea when I am home, so as I drink it I try to memorize it, the taste, the smell, the texture. Strong and sweet, the liquor dark, almost black. I can see my reflection in it too. This is what I think about, this tea, because thinking about anything else now will be unbearable, it would mean ripples, ripples in the sea that is my mind, my thoughts are waves.
It is afternoon by the time I am dismissed, when Arien realizes that this waiting, drinking tea in silence, is pointless. I feel pointless.
I should eat some, but my stomach is still numb. Shock perhaps. It’s not unusual that workers, coming back home from their penalty, are traumatized. It’s not unheard of. But I do not feel like that, like a neatly named diagnosis, I feel more than that, I feel trembling. Like a balloon filled with so much air it is about to burst, and it will burst, and it can burst at any second, but it does not, and that is the terrible thing, that waiting to burst.
As I leave, Arien says he does not know what we will do tomorrow. The Camps will still be closed off, and there are no more clothes or things to organize in the warehouse. He says he will call us, me, tomorrow, when he has figured out what to do with us. That was something I had not expected back home. All this waiting. Drinking tea, waiting, waiting outside the fence for it to open, waiting for the bus to take the people to The Camps, waiting to go, waiting to leave, waiting for clothes, we wait, everyone is waiting on this island. But for what?
27
How I long for a book. Any book, really, but that book, that real book that got me here would have been perfect. Or any rea
l book, maybe.
I lie down on my bed, and think that I will never fall asleep. It’s too early for that, still just afternoon. I think about calling home, to my parents, or Jenny, I know that at least my parents have called me, my mother. But my days here are almost up, so that conversation can wait until I get home, I do not feel like talking to anyone from that world, not while I am here or maybe never again. Though I will have to once.
Maybe I fall asleep. Or maybe not. It is strange what happens in your brain after such incidents. Like the Landing, and the attack in The Camps. Dissociation, I think it’s called. Everything feels so dreamlike, like a veil thrown over the world. Am I awake? Am I sleeping? Am I dreaming? Am I real? Do I exist, is this body mine? That is what I think about, lying in bed. I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I open my eyes and it’s morning.
My second last day. On the third day from now I will be leaving. I have tried not to think about it, because that feeling, that leaving this island will never happen, is still strong. But in theory, I only have two more days here. Only. Back home, two days are only, but here, they are much longer, more like many two days here, forever pressed within 24 hours.
Arien calls while I am eating breakfast. I brought the food set out for me up to my room, for a change. I needed a change, and here you can only change the little things, like where to eat your food. As usual, it’s bread, dark bread, shaped extremely square, with salami and cheese and orange juice.
Color Me Blue Page 8