Over the Rainbow

Emma said she would come get me as soon as Sumaiya’s family settled in the barracks. It should not be more than fifteen minutes. The family had spent a couple of hours registering and had to wait for bed assignments. When I hung up, the little gang leader wanted to know what I wanted to see in the camp. I explained that I had to wait in the same spot until my friend came for me. Another boy asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom, and when I said no, he said I should be grateful because the public bathroom was anything but clean. He knew of a French woman who was so disturbed by the filth that she ran to her car, drove for fifteen minutes to a gas station, and used their facility. He wanted me to know my options in order for me to plan ahead.

A young couple in neon-red volunteer vests walked up the hill, took out their phones a few feet from us. A third volunteer passing by wondered what they were doing in the camp on their time off. The young man held up his phone as explanation. The Iraqi girl tugged on my hand and pointed to a bloated cardboard sign stuck with black masking tape to the concrete wall behind us, free wi-fi stenciled on it. I asked her if she’d understood the volunteers, if she could speak English, and she nodded. Every time she looked at me she would narrow her eyes, and her chin and nose would lift, which made her look like a studious resident. Did she learn the language in school? She shook her head, raised her pale, almost indecipherable eyebrows, then spoke her first words: SpongeBob.

Soft raindrops fell on us but were still too insubstantial to penetrate. Only the fetid pool at the bottom of the hill, next to the public bathroom, seemed affected by the drizzle. The Iraqi girl continued to cling to my hand. I glanced at my phone for the time, four in the afternoon. Must be a shift change. The area around us flooded with volunteers in different color vests coming and going. A few moments of chaos before the sun broke through.

Newly arrived families trudged uphill carrying their belongings, pulling rolling suitcases, their voices submerged in the hullabaloo of conversations among the volunteers, the tap-tap of hard soles on harder concrete, the bustle of movement. A Syrian family ascended toward us, mother, father, three kids, the eldest a boy of perhaps twelve, his face a picture of glacial determination. A large group of young volunteers in neon-yellow vests walked next to them, boisterous and unselfconscious. One of them, a blond in her early twenties, screamed. Everyone stopped. She screamed again, pointing at the sky. “Oh my God, oh my God.” She screamed once more before she was able to form an actual sentence. “Look, it’s a rainbow,” she yelled. She tried to engage my Iraqi girl, kept pointing at the far sky, spoke louder in English to make herself understood, but my girl wanted nothing to do with her, wrapping her arms around my waist, clinging roughly. As the Syrian family reached us, I was able to hear what they were talking about.

“She’s excited because she saw a rainbow,” the father said.

The mother shook her head. The twelve-year-old boy said in a quiet voice, not realizing that I spoke his language: “She should shove that rainbow up her ass.”

The father snickered. The mother smacked the back of his head, not violently, for they were both carrying heavy loads.