-

27

One day, I was walking outdoors and saw Najat pushing the baby stroller towards our building. I looked at little Milaad, who was born the same day I arrived at the ASC. Now he was already big enough to sit up in the stroller.

“Look at this one, will you,” I said with a lump in my throat. She thought I was talking about her son, instead of about my own wait.

“How old is he now?” I asked her, because I wanted to know how long I’d been here.

“Do you want to know when his birthday is, so you can buy him a present?” she asked in Tunisian Arabic. I stared at the little boy, who smiled and fidgeted with his hands. “In three weeks and one day he’ll be a year old,” she said, and headed for the entrance, because it had started to rain. I stood there. So I’d been in this building for almost a year without hearing anything from the IND or the Justice Ministry. It was starting to eat me up. I had to get out of here.

“Want me to bring you some shampoo, Samir?” Sayid joked as he passed me on his way inside. I followed him in.

I don’t really know how to explain what happened to me then. It was like I’d been asleep for months, and had woken up in a world I didn’t know. I looked around me, confused. Like when you spin around in circles, and suddenly stop, but your head wants to keep on spinning and escape from the rest of your body. Little Milaad became the symbol of my waiting. It was like I could look my wait straight in the eyes.

Zainab, the Iraqi woman with the sewing machine, was standing in her black clothes at the counter, while Wouter, the receptionist, tried to make it clear to her that there was no mail today. Then he explained for the umpteenth time what the IND was, to which she replied, with her pathetic voice, “What? What? What?” over and over. I walked further and saw Fatima with a plate full of snacks, trudging from the Social Services office to the Foreigners’ Police, then to Reception and after that to the Dutch volunteers, offering everyone a taste and hoping to maybe get a residence permit in return. At O-139 I stuck my key sluggishly into the lock. My roommate Walid was lying on his back, wearing only his trousers. His belly was a hairy bulge. I lay down on my bed and wished it would sink through the orange wing deep into the earth.

“Are you sick?” Walid asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe.” I was sweating, and my body was on fire.

“You look pale. I’ll go get you some aspirin from Reception.” Walid put on a shirt and his slippers, and returned with a glass of water and two pills. I swallowed them and draped a towel over my face. I heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Do you want another aspirin?” Was it the Fourth, back from lockdown?

“No,” I said.

“What?” Walid asked. I removed the towel from my face and saw Walid standing over me. “You were talking in your sleep.” I put the towel back and fell asleep. I dreamt. My brother and I were on our donkeys, riding under the date palms on our way to school. Not to take classes, but to stamp out the ashes, because we had burned down the building the day before.

That’s how it went in our village. The villagers had built the school out of reeds, clay, and date-palm leaves. During lessons we sat on a carpet of palm leaves. The blackboard was tall and narrow, and the teacher would use the top half, while the bottom rested on the ground. My brother and I were first-year students but also last-year ones, because you learned everything from the other students, and nothing from the teacher.

But now it was harvest time, and just like every other year, the blackboard and palm-leaf carpet were removed from the school, and the students and parents then set fire to the building. This practice started after the government instigated compulsory education, including during harvest time. The villagers had a problem with this new rule. Their solution was to burn down the school, so the children could help out with the harvest, simply because there was no school to go to. Once the harvest season was over, everyone got together and rebuilt the school in a single afternoon.

Our donkeys knew the way through the date palms, and my brother and I looked forward to seeing a layer of ashes on the site of our school. Emerging from the palm grove, we could see the hill where the school once stood. There was a new teacher that year, and he stood there with a few students and fathers.

“Don’t worry,” one father said to the teacher. “After the harvest, we’ll rebuild it.”

“But the children will miss so many lessons,” the teacher fretted.

“But not their brains,” another father said. “It’ll be fine.”

“Fortunately there were no children inside.”

“What do you think?! That we’d burn down the school with children in it? We even removed the blackboard and carpet.”

“Does this happen often?”

The fathers looked at each other, surprised.

“Of course. Every year.”

“But why?”

“Because of the harvest. Only then,” said a father.

And my brother and I turned our donkeys around and disappeared back into the palm grove. The sun shone high in the sky, birds chirped, and the clear water of the Euphrates flowed and sang at the same time.

I awakened from a deep sleep. I was sweating. It was six in the evening.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Walid said.

“What did I say?”

“The only thing I could understand was donkey,” he said. I tried to sit up, but my muscles were frozen. I closed my eyes, fell back to sleep and woke up four hours later. I went to Reception, took two aspirins, and paced up and down the hallways among the ghosts of the ASC. I tried to convince myself that I only had a fever and wasn’t losing my mind.

“I’m not staying here,” I told myself. The idea of leaving felt like a cool breeze blowing into a stuffy cell. If staying in the Netherlands was so difficult, it should make leaving all that much easier.