The Ministry for the Future

48

Babies crying at dawn. Already hot. People hungry. Sun over the hills like a bomb. Hot on the skin. Don’t look that way or you’ll be seeing white all morning. Shadows running off the west edge of the world. It’ll be that way until the tent roof blocks the glare, about nine. By then it will be too hot to move. Better to sweat than not. Dust settles on the sweat and you can see little tracks of mud on your skin. Showers not till Saturday. It’s my time of the month. Need that shower.

The dining tent opens at eight, still lit by the horizontal light. Long line of people at the entrance. People let the moms with little kids go first. Most people anyway. They’re stacked up next to the entry, line collapsing, fretting. Unless you’re starved, it’s easier to hang back. Not to mention the right thing to do. After a while it’s just a habit. You go where you’ve gone before. The group of women I usually join is there trying to stay normal, talk.

Inside the smell of eggs and onion and paprika. Big bowls of plain yogurt, my favorite. Load up on that and hope to last till nightfall. Skip the trials of the midday meal. It’s too much sorrow to go through the dining hall three times in a day. People are exposed there, fretting and anxious, hot and hungry.

And bored. The same food, the same faces. Nothing else to do but eat.

The aid workers are from some northern country. They talk among themselves. Some are quiet and serious, others laughing and animated. Clean. They sweat but they’re clean. I don’t know where they come from. Sometimes I recognize faces, not just the handsome men, but a look, something in their look will catch my eye long enough to impress that face on me. After that I can’t help seeing them. Not that they see me. When they work the serving line, dishing out food onto our plates, they make eye contact and ask if we want what they’re serving, but very few of them really see us in any way that would register on them. It’s one way to do their job without getting too sad. Even so they burn out pretty fast. Or maybe their deal is short. Either way, they come, they go. They aren’t quite there and they aren’t really real.

But it’s important to refuse to get angry at them. You focus your feelings on what you can see, that’s just the way people are. So there’s a world out there of people who have put us in this camp. Not all of them specifically did it, but they’re all part of it. They live in a world where this camp exists, and they go on. Anyone would.

But it adds up to us being imprisoned here, for nothing we’ve done except to live. Just the way it is. People know we’re here, but there’s nothing they can do about it. Or so they tell themselves. And in truth it would take a lot of doing to release all the people incarcerated in this world. So they don’t. They focus their thoughts elsewhere and forget about us. I would do that myself. In fact I did do that myself. Only when things fall apart do you realize it can happen to you. You never think it can happen to you, until it does.

So then, some of these people volunteer to come to our camp and help feed us and do everything else that needs doing when you have eighteen thousand people stuck inside a fence unable to leave. Cleaning toilets, washing sheets, all that. And of course feeding us. Three meals a day. That’s a lot of work. And yet here they are. Most of them are young, not all, but it takes a certain idealism, and that’s mainly a young person’s feeling. They are almost all younger than me now, but not so long ago, when I first came here, they were my age. And they learn things and see the world and meet other people like themselves and so on. And so they have to keep a distance from us, they have to or else they would become as unhappy as we are. At their best they are still indignant in our cause, and that’s a stress on them. So they have to keep that distance. I know that.

But I still hate them for not seeing me. For looking me in the eye while they put food on my outstretched plate, and yet never seeing. I try not to but I hate them. Just as I hate everything else in this life.

No one likes to feel gratitude. Gratitude is recommended by the clerics but I say no one likes it, no one. Not even the clerics. They go into their trade in order never to be in a position to have to feel it. They receive our gratitude as they receive our pain, but they never have to give gratitude themselves. Or only in their professional capacity as our receptacles of feeling and of meaning, our representatives to God or whomever. No, I don’t like clerics either.

When the sun is far enough to the west that I can do it without being scorched, I walk out to the northern perimeter of the camp to look at the hills. I should be back in the tent where we teach the children, and I’ll get there eventually, but first I come out here. The hills still remind me of my home hills where I grew up, even though these are as green as limes. There’s a ridgeline that looks just like the one I used to look at from our town when I was a girl. In late spring our hills would turn green also, not this wet green, but green enough: olive and forest green, in a dapple of furzes. I look through the links of the fence, which is like any fence anywhere, but topped with rolls of razor wire. Yes, we are prisoners here. They don’t want us getting any idea that we’re not, by way of looking at a fence that could be climbed. As for the wire mesh itself, it looks weak, like you could cut it easily, not with scissors maybe, but with tin snips for sure. No problem. But we have no tin snips in this camp.

So I lean against the wire mesh and feel it bell out under my weight. The bottom of the wire is dug into the earth pretty far, I can see that. Once upon a time it might have been possible to dig it up to crawl under it, with a spoon or one’s fingers even. But now the dirt has flowed together and hardened. It would take some effort to dig under it, and worse, some time. They would see me. Still, I consider it every time I come out here. At sunset when I’m here I see the last of the sunlight pinking the ridgeline at the top of the hills, and I scuff at the dirt. No way. Maybe. No way. Maybe.

The sun goes down, the sky goes twilight blue. Then indigo. This is the 1,859th day I have spent in this camp.