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31

Yelena was standing outside the door to her room. She was wearing glasses. “Do you still go the sea sometimes?” she asked.

“Only to steal a bike,” I replied. It was meant as a joke, but she turned and marched back into her room. When the water kettle whistled, she came out and went to the kitchen.

“So when do you go to the sea?” she asked, as though I had just told her I went there every day.

“After I’ve had my tea.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said. Later, after I’d drunk my tea, I was leaving the ASC grounds and saw her sitting on a bench near the gate. I walked past her, and she called out for me to wait.

“Life in the camp is becoming unbearable,” she said. “The four Russian books I own, I’ve already re-read a thousand times. I thought of going to a hostel, but it was too expensive and besides, they asked for my ID card. As soon as they saw my W-document, the receptionist looked at it suspiciously, front and back, and then called someone over to explain what it was.”

We had arrived at the sea before I knew it.

A few weeks later, I saw Yelena in the kitchen, smiling. She told me she had a boyfriend. A Dutch guy named Maarten. It was like she’d finally gotten a residence permit. At that time I was planning my escape from the Netherlands. So while I was trying to make Yelena a long-ago memory, she kept finding me in the ASC and talking about Maarten, a blond beanpole more than six feet tall. She started sleeping at his place, and after a while only showed up at the ASC to sign in. Sometimes Maarten dropped her off, sometimes she came alone. She carried a small snapshot of Maarten in her wallet, and showed it to everyone. The other asylum seekers regarded Maarten’s photo as Yelena’s residence permit.

I remember the first time I saw Maarten in real life. We were standing in line to sign in, and as usual it was not moving. Yelena joined the back of the line. Every once in a while she checked the wristwatch Maarten had bought for her. Suddenly the real Maarten appeared.

“Good morning,” he greeted the line. And to Yelena: “I thought you’d be done already.” She said she’d been standing there for a while. We watched as Maarten walked up to the counter, and leaned his head close to the window. He asked the officer if Yelena could sign in. The officer, for whom we had been waiting for a good twenty minutes, smiled back.

“Just a sec,” he said, and called the first asylum seeker in line, and then the rest of us. Within two minutes everyone, including Yelena, had signed in. She strutted proudly, hand in hand with Maarten, out of the ASC.

Shortly thereafter she offered to let me sleep in her room whenever I wanted to be alone.

“All my things are in the cupboard. It’s locked.”

It was wonderful, after such a long time, to be able to sleep without other people’s snoring, nightmares, and breathing, because since landing at Schiphol I hadn’t experienced this, except in a cell. I was happy. I could roll over in bed as much as I wanted. I could sit the way I wanted. I looked at the walls: they surrounded me, and me alone, and for that reason they were, for that moment, my personal property, and not my prison.

A few days later, Sayid asked me how much I paid Yelena to sleep in her room. How he knew I was sleeping there, I don’t know, because I sneaked there late at night when no one would see. Some days after that, Mr. Van ’t Zijde told me it was forbidden to sleep in another room, and that he’d told Yelena this too. Sayid had obviously snitched on me. So I enjoyed her bed for only a few days. But even without her in it, Yelena’s bed had made the ASC a heavenly place.