I sit for about an hour on that hilltop, looking down at the scene below. I feel like a god, distant and helpless, but with the best possible view of the chaos below.
Arien comes up, joining me, sitting down on the grass beside me. We sit in silence for a while, just watching The Camps, where people are now returning to their tents, those who are lucky enough to have one.
“We got in the middle of it, you and I,” he says. The other workers were spread around at the edges of The Camp when it started, safe from the smoke and the blitz that had shrouded me and him.
“How lucky,” I answer.
He chuckles a little.
“Has this happened before?” I ask.
“Oh yes, many times,” he says. “And it’s usually children who cause it. Playing too close to the fence for instance, or running after a ball outside the gate.”
“But how can they do that? How can it be allowed? It’s just kids, they’re not meaning any harm, they’re not even doing any harm. How can they react like that?”
He sits thoughtful for a moment.
“I read a book once. It was this crazy love story, almost fantasy, but not quite, written for many years ago by this guy, and I remember a quote that I really liked. It said that the world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness. How these guards responded to that little boy putting up a tent is an excellent example of just that. It was an action neither logical or kind.”
I think about that for a moment.
“But still. How can things like this be allowed? They are the ones who should be in prison, or sent here, I guess.”
“They are guards from The West. They can do whatever they like to people from The East, no matter what The Law forbids or doesn’t forbid. It is not supposed to be like that, but some people can use or not use the rules as they like. You understand?”
Not really. Some things just cannot be understood, I think. But I nod.
“Let’s go back.”
We drive in silence. There is a lot of silence on this island. Maybe because there are no words for what is happening here. Wordless. That word has a double meaning. It is wordless, and it also sounds like worldless, a world less, like this is a place outside of the real world. Or the opposite. It is the real world outside the fake one. A small, real world.
At the headquarters, we all sit down, drink tea. I am going to miss this tea when I am home, so as I drink it I try to memorize it, the taste, the smell, the texture. Strong and sweet, the liquor dark, almost black. I can see my reflection in it too. This is what I think about, this tea, because thinking about anything else now will be unbearable, it would mean ripples, ripples in the sea that is my mind, my thoughts are waves.
It is afternoon by the time I am dismissed, when Arien realizes that this waiting, drinking tea in silence, is pointless. I feel pointless.
I should eat some, but my stomach is still numb. Shock perhaps. It’s not unusual that workers, coming back home from their penalty, are traumatized. It’s not unheard of. But I do not feel like that, like a neatly named diagnosis, I feel more than that, I feel trembling. Like a balloon filled with so much air it is about to burst, and it will burst, and it can burst at any second, but it does not, and that is the terrible thing, that waiting to burst.
As I leave, Arien says he does not know what we will do tomorrow. The Camps will still be closed off, and there are no more clothes or things to organize in the warehouse. He says he will call us, me, tomorrow, when he has figured out what to do with us. That was something I had not expected back home. All this waiting. Drinking tea, waiting, waiting outside the fence for it to open, waiting for the bus to take the people to The Camps, waiting to go, waiting to leave, waiting for clothes, we wait, everyone is waiting on this island. But for what?