The Ministry for the Future

37

This is hard to write. I was born in Libya, I’m told, and after my father disappeared, no one knows how or why, my mother took my sister and me to Europe, on a boat that carried mostly Tunisians. They made it to Trieste and were transferred by train to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where we were caught up in the riot there. That’s my first memory—lots of us running into a building and everyone screaming. And my eyes burning from the tear gas. My mom tried to shield us inside her sweater, so I didn’t see very much, but my eyes still burned. A woman and her two little girls, all crying our eyes out.

I don’t remember much about the days that followed. The Swiss took care of us better than the sailors on the boat had. We were fed and had beds in a big dormitory, with showers and toilets in a compound next to it. It felt good to be clean and dry and not hungry. Mother finally stopped crying.

Then we were taken to a room and introduced to a group of people who spoke in French to us. Eventually Mother was invited to a refugee shelter just outside of Winterthur, and she eagerly and gratefully agreed to go. My sister and I were scared to move again, but Mother assured us it was for the best, so we got on a train again and said goodbye to the shelter in St. Gallen, which in truth had been the nicest place we had ever lived. But off we went.

The shelter outside Winterthur was in a beautiful garden. On certain days we could see the Alps in Glarus, very far away. We hadn’t known that the world was as big as that, and at first it made me scared. How could we get along in a world so big?

Jake was one of the regular visitors to our shelter. His French was slow but clear, and he had a look on his face that right from the start I knew was different. As if he was suffering even more than we were. I wanted to tell him that we were all right.

He taught English to both children and adults, in different classes. Mornings for children, afternoon and evenings for adults. He spent most of every day there, Sundays included. At lunch he sat with us and ate. Sometimes at meals he sat there looking at us with his eyes moving back and forth, side to side, as if he was tracking a bird or having a thought. He seemed fond of us, and like all the sponsors, he grew to spend more time with particular refugees, greeting us by name and asking how we were doing, in both French and later English.

That went on for a long time, later I learned it was almost a year, and then Mother told us that she was going to marry Jake, and we would all move in with him in a nearby village. My sister and I had had no inkling that this might happen, and at first we were surprised and uncertain; the shelter was again the nicest place we had ever known, and going off with a single one of our helpers into the unknown struck us as a bad idea. We didn’t know what was going on between Mother and this man with the twitchy eyes, and we suspected the worst.

But in fact we moved nearby into a little two-story white house with a walled garden beside it, and we settled in quickly and went back often to the shelter to see our friends there. Jake and Mother were always warm and cordial to each other, although they were never openly affectionate in front of us. But we could see that Mother was fond of him, and grateful to him, and he was always very kind to us, and always spoke to us in a mix of English and French, so that it seemed like the two languages were one, and later it took some sorting out on our part to get the two into their separate places in our heads. In that effort, Arabic seemed to slip away.

So we were a little family for a few years, from when I was seven until I was eleven. We went to school in Winterthur, played with friends from school and from the shelter, and all was well. In those years my mother was happy.

Then, when I started going to the middle school, I began to see signs that things were not well between my mother and Jake. They would sit in our kitchen after dinner looking at their screens or out the window. Watching them together I saw something that struck me very strongly; even just sitting there doing nothing, they were very different people. My mother is a calm person. She pours herself into a chair and relaxes there like a cat. Her eyes will move, her hands will do some sewing or knitting, but her body is still as can be. This is somewhat her nature. We’re lucky to have her.

Jake on the other hand would sit there and yet he wasn’t even close to still. Not that he fidgeted, or tapped his foot or anything like that; it was just that you could see that he was spinning inside. It was like you could see all his atoms spinning the way they are said to do. If people could be rated for their spins, like atoms or car engines, then Mother would be almost motionless, while Jake was always spinning, at thousands or even millions of revolutions per minute. RPM ten million, he said once; this whole image I am giving you comes from one of his own ways of assessing people. He would say we are all like quarks, which are the smallest elementary particles, he told us—smaller even than atoms, such that atoms are all made up of quarks held together by gluons. He made us laugh with these stories. And like quarks, everyone had a certain amount of strangeness, spin, and charm. You could rate everyone by these three constants, and our mother was the most charming person on Earth, but not very strange, and with almost zero spin. Jake confessed to having a high spin rate, also strangeness; and we found him charming too. He didn’t agree to that.

So sometimes he would sit in his chair at the end of a day at the shelter, obviously exhausted, and his eyes would be moving left-right-left-right, which I think takes a lot of effort, and somehow it was clear that he was spinning. There was something dark inside him. Mother said he had done development work in his youth and had seen some bad things. We believed it. Sometimes he would stare at us, and sit hard on the floor and give us a hug: How I love you, he would say, you are such wonderful girls. Other times he would stare at us with his body rigid and his face contorted, clutching the sides of his chair as if preparing to leap to his feet and dash from the room. It was frightening to see that.

Then times came when he would shout at Mother, and even at us. He would leap to his feet, he would dash from the room; but sometimes first he would shout at her, in English it seemed but we couldn’t understand it, and besides we were too scared to listen, we ran from the room at those times. It was so shocking at first; then it became something that could happen, something we were watchful for, so that when he was friendly, or contrite and remorseful, we would take it with a grain of salt, not knowing if he might turn on us in a second. Volatile people, you can’t trust them, that’s the thing; and they know it. So that even if they feel remorse, it does no good, and they know that too. So they get lonely. And they feel the remorse less and less, maybe. They give up. In any case, he left. One day Mother woke us, she was crying as she told us that he wouldn’t be coming back, that we would have to move again. We all sat on the stairs and cried.