The Ministry for the Future

92

Word got around one morning that we were to be released. Did you hear? someone said, bursting into the dorm. They’re letting us go!

Quickly everyone had heard the news, and then most people doubted it. Yet another camp rumor. They always flashed around at the speed of speech, word of mouth moving through the camp to full saturation within an hour, I would say. But then always the doubt. So many rumors had proved false. Almost all of them in fact. But occasionally it was just the news, that’s all. And this time there was a meeting announced for right after breakfast. Or meetings; there was nowhere in the camp that would have held everyone in it at once. So each block would have a meeting in its dining hall. Request to keep the smallest children back in the dorms, so there would be room for almost all the adults at once.

Of course it would happen this way. No warning; ad hoc; an improvisation, just as it had been all along. They toy with us: cage us, release us, it’s all made up moment to moment. That’s history.

We assembled. There was a team from the camp administrators, a couple of them familiar faces, and a few more strangers. Swiss looking. Whatever else, the meeting was real.

They had said the meeting started at eleven, and we had learned well that the Swiss meant what they said when it came to schedules and times. The big digital clock on the wall went from 10:59:59 to 11:00:00, and one of our regular keepers went to the mike and said, “Hello everybody,” in English, then “Guten Morgen” and then “Sabah alkhyr.”

She continued in English, which I thought was odd, as about seventy or eighty percent of the people in this camp spoke Arabic, and about thirty percent of those didn’t speak English, at least that was my impression. But then I got caught up in her message.

They were indeed releasing us. We were to be given world citizenship, meaning we had the right to live anywhere. We were warned there would be immigration quotas for many countries, and possibly we would have to get on a waiting list for some of them. But we could do that, and the quotas for all the countries put together added up to two hundred percent of the number of people who had been held in refugee camps for over two years, which was the criterion for this world citizenship. Citizenship would be in your name, non-transferable, with a global passport. Families would be wait-listed together. The requests for residency were to be coordinated all over the world, and the ones who had been in camps the longest would be the first allowed to choose. They could take their immediate families with them. The process of relocation would begin at the start of the next month. Combined with a worldwide universal job guarantee commitment, and transport and settlement subsidies, everyone should end up okay.

Switzerland had committed to taking twice as many people as were now being held in all the Swiss refugee camps. The housing for these new citizens had been built already or was being finished. It was distributed throughout the country, every canton taking a proportional share. The housing was to consist of apartment blocks conforming to ordinary Swiss building and housing codes. Employment would be offered according to need, the canton as employer of last resort. There was work to be done. Facilities for cooperative restaurants were already in place, ready for opening if the newcomers so desired. It was felt that food could be both a gathering place for the new residents and an outreach to the host community. So it had often been in the past.

This arrangement was not quite the same as open borders, they said. Countries would still have passports and immigration quotas. The hope was that many people would want to return home. Polling showed that many refugees felt that way, and would go back home if it could be done safely. The destabilized countries that had generated the most refugees would be helped to restabilize as much and as quickly as possible.

People had lots of questions, of course. That part shifted into Arabic for the most part, and other people on the stage answered, taking turns, or answering when a question matched their expertise.

Before it was over I left the meeting and went to the north perimeter, full of clashing thoughts. Anywhere! What did it mean? Where would I choose?

Most of us would be talking it over with family. Some of us would go back home. I could see the lure of that. Assuming it would be safe, why wouldn’t you? But I didn’t think it would be safe. I didn’t trust any of it. Surely there had to be a catch. Surely, if this was possible, they would have done it long before.

But why think that? Things change.

I tried to convince myself that things change. It wasn’t that easy. Do things change? I had lived the same day for 3,352 days. It seemed proof that things don’t change.

But of course that was wrong. Nothing stays the same, not even life in the camp. We had formed study groups, classes, sports clubs, activity groups. We had made friends. We taught the children. People had been born, people had died. People had gotten married and divorced. Life had gone on in here. It wasn’t the case that things hadn’t changed, that time had stopped outright.

But there is change and there is change. Looking through the fence at the mountains, hazy in the late morning light, I felt a deep stab of fear at the idea that my life might really and truly change. A big change. New people. Strangers. A new life in a new city. After such giant changes, would I still be me? Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself, every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place. No doubt true. I recalled also the old notion from psychotherapy that people fear change because it can only be change for the worse, in that you turn into a different person and are therefore no longer yourself. Thus change as death.

But death of habits. That’s all it is, I told myself. Remember the poem; you can’t help being yourself. You’ll drag yourself with you all over the Earth, no matter how far you flee. You can’t escape yourself even if you want to. If what you fear is losing yourself, rest easy.

No: the fear I was feeling was perhaps the fear that even if things changed, I would still be just as unhappy as before. Ah yes, that was a real fear!

Well, but I was always afraid. So this was no different.

Would I miss this place? The beautiful mountains, the beautiful faces…

No. I would not miss it. This I promised myself; and it seemed like a promise I could keep. Maybe that was my form of happiness.