I look at the skin of my legs, wiggling my body like a worm, to get the best view. The skin is very red, blood red, swollen, but it’s not bleeding, and I don’t think anything is broken. But I will have some serious bruises, on my legs, my back, where the bullets hit. Luckily, they did not use real bullets. Only rubber ones. The guards are not allowed to use real bullets on children and workers, only if it is a matter of life and death.
My whole body is still shaking, trembling like a leaf in the strong wind. I listen and feel for a moment, and yes, the wind, the real wind, is still blowing, strongly, though that’s no surprise, I have gotten used to it by now, that it will never end.
I sit under a tree, at the top of a small height, outside The Camps. The other workers stand by the van now. I watch Arien speak to one of the guards. He is gesticulating like crazy, like he has gone insane, and maybe he has. He deserves to let himself go mad for a minute. This is a get-mad-about thing. This is worse.
I watch the little girl too. She has gone back into The Camps. She did not want to. Her family was there, inside the opening, yelling at her to come to them, and I tried to make her do that, but she refused at first, she kept clinging to me. Eventually I was forced to put her down on the ground, which felt like something close to torturing her. She grabbed my hands then, speaking rapidly in an eastern language, and how I wish I could have understood her. Instead I took off my necklace, a little silver necklace I got from my mother when I was born, that she had inherited from her own mother, and I put it around her little neck, showing it to her. It had this pendant, in the shape of a heart, with a little, pink rose painted on it. She looked at me intently, now clenching that little heart between her fingers, instead of me. Then she finally turned around and ran to her family. I was not allowed to follow her; the fence was closed for workers at that point. So instead I rotated my body, like a robot, and walked to the van, passing it, kept walking, up against that hill, and sat down. From the top, I could watch her with her family, standing outside their tent. Eventually they got inside, she disappeared into the folds, and that was the last time I saw her.