Breach

by Olumide Popoola

The camp is not very far from my grandparents’ small farm, but I seldom use that last stretch of the motorway. It leads only to the harbour, the ferries and a flat stretch of small factories – I have little call to go that way in general and no inclination since the tents began to appear on the sand. I see the camp on the news and the internet and that’s enough. To be frank, I felt some anxiety about driving that way. How abruptly we swept off the motorway and down towards the blue tents. A few police officers stood by a white police van at the bottom of the slope and I saw that the camp began right there, almost underneath the motorway. The tarmac road turned sharply to the left and away, while the dirt track to the right led into the mass of tents and shacks. There were people everywhere, some walking under the motorway, beside the high concrete graffiti-covered walls and out the other side, ignoring the police, ignoring my little car as I pulled over.

  ‘Thank you, madame,’ Omid said as he opened the door.

  Directly ahead of the car was a simple wooden shed of pale new planks, a storefront faced with chicken wire, a man behind the counter. Beside the shop, on the low swell of a dune, was a tent, no more than a pup tent but with two sections, one of them open, and a pair of brown shoes visible there, side by side. Someone’s home. I imagined crawling in, leaving my sandy shoes just inside, out of the rain, crawling through to sleep in there.

  Too late, I thought of giving Nalin my umbrella. They were gone, walking fast along the dirt track, not looking back. I leaned over to open the passenger door and close it properly. As I locked it, the man behind the plank counter gave me a mild wave of greeting. Like any shopkeeper in any village anywhere. That surprised me more than anything. People passed behind and in front of the car, so I had to wait before I could reverse out safely. A policewoman cradling a rifle ducked her head to look in at me as I drove by, but without much interest. All along the road, drab factories on one side faced the new white fence along the other side, hemming the train tracks and topped with scrolls of white barbed wire. Despite the rain, men paced along the fence, alone or in groups, not hurrying, not like they had places to go but rather time to kill.

  Even though I had stayed in the car, barely opening the door at the camp entrance, I felt that I must wash my hands when I got home. I felt gritty, as though I had in fact crawled into that pup tent. This is what comes of going too close, I told myself. You lose all perspective. I kept myself busy with laundry and then I picked fruit in the orchard, but my mind was on the world, the underworld, that I’d glimpsed from its edge, the figures pacing the high white fence along the railway line, shoulders up against the cold, hands deep in coat pockets, dark heads bent. Like figures from history or documentaries, I realised, like second-hand memories of war.

  ‘It doesn’t look like a jungle, that camp,’ I said to Omid when he came home, after dark, his coat wet.

  ‘What does a jungle look like, madame?’

  ‘Thick with trees and creepers and bushes, with birds and animals.’

  ‘A jungle,’ he said, ‘is a place for animals only. And that is a jungle, I tell you, madame.’

  ‘Get dry,’ I told him. ‘I will make tea.’

  Nalin had stayed there, in the camp. In the cold. She would sleep with another family in their shelter.

  ‘I made that shelter,’ Omid told me, sitting at the table in the kitchen. ‘With some volunteers. Of all the Kurdish families, I am the one to speak English. Or,’ he corrected himself, ‘the good English. They need me there.’

  ‘And why does Nalin want to stay there?’

  ‘She miss her friend,’ he said. ‘There is another girl there, younger, twelve years old. They talk. She is safe with that family.’

  ‘But the cold?’

  ‘She sleep with the mother and the daughters. They make warm together,’ he said. I set a cup of tea in front of him and he looked down at it. ‘But also,’ he said, ‘water falls.’ He mimed drops from above.

  ‘The roof leaks?’

  ‘No, no, no.’ He was affronted again. ‘The shelter is strong. But at night…’

  ‘Condensation?’ I said, and he nodded.

  I meant to leave it there – I wasn’t going to get too close – but I heard myself say that he seemed worried.

  ‘In the jungle, good and bad people. All mix,’ he said. ‘Before we come here, I keep her in the shelter. And always I stay nearby. Men, too many men…’ He shook his head. ‘Some women, they have no money to pay smuggler.’

  ‘Did you pay smuggler?’ My English, never fluent, became even more abrupt and approximate, echoing his.

  ‘Of course I pay.’

  I sat down across the table from him, kept my eyes on him. He shrugged and, in his exhausted flat voice, told me about the money. After his father was killed and they’d left Syria, he and his sister, he’d saved some money, working in Turkey in a car wash and as a waiter in a restaurant. Nalin had sold her gold. He’d paid 900 euros for two places on a boat across to Greece (vomiting on board, wading drenched to the shore, a fire on the beach, kind Greek fishermen bringing food). From Greece to Macedonia, forty euros for tickets for a bus, seven hours.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I said. I brought my laptop to the table to follow the journey on Google Maps.

  ‘In Macedonia, they give us a piece of paper to get to Serbia by train. Now, we have no money. We sleep two nights in a bus station. From Serbia to Croatia, then to Hungary we go by train, 4,000 people in one train, free for everyone. Hungary to Austria.’

  I tracked the story with my finger across the map on the screen, zooming in, zooming out. It was a saga he was describing, an odyssey. No – I recalled the mass of figures I’d seen on the news, trudging across Eastern Europe – it was something more brutal, like a forced march. I glanced up at the portrait of Grand-père, Resistance hero. It crossed my reluctant mind that he’d have taken a stand if he were still alive. He’d have been on the side of the weary marchers.

  ‘In Germany, in Passau city,’ Omid continued, ‘the police catch us in the train station. They want to take my fingerprints. I say, “I don’t want to stay in this country because I have family in UK.” They say, “No problem, it’s just for numbers.” I say, “I don’t want, I don’t want,” but they force us.’

  As he recounted this, he clenched his fists, tucking in his thumb, hiding his prints.

  ‘Why didn’t you want to give your fingerprints?’

  ‘It is law in Europe. Where they take your prints, that is the country you must get asylum. I must not get stuck, madame. I must find my mother.’

  He uncurled his fingers and we both looked down at his palms, open on the kitchen table. His future, quite literally, in his hands, at his fingertips. Then he smiled up at me, his old man’s tired, ironic smile on his boy’s face.

  I wanted to give him something, so I stepped out onto the terrace to collect the quinces I had picked. The strong scent of the fruit filled the dining room and Omid let his head fall back. ‘Perfume,’ he said. He closed his eyes and breathed it.

  He hated to ask for anything, that boy. It offended him, his honour. But the laptop stood open on the table next to the fruit basket and now he asked if he could use it to check his emails.

  I don’t offer it to guests – they can use the Wi-Fi on their own devices – but this boy could barely hold on to his boots, his sister or his fingerprints on that journey, never mind a computer.

  ‘Not every day,’ I said, ‘but now, today, you may.’

  I looked over his shoulder as he typed in his address on Gmail. It ended with what looked like a date.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, making conversation. ‘Year of your birth – 1994?’

  He looked alarmed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not 1994, 1999. I am a minor. I am seventeen.’

  The quince-scented moment had passed. Omid banged hard on the keys, typing in a foreign language, hurrying to be done and gone. I gritted my teeth to stop myself telling him not to pound, to type softly. This is why I must keep my life and my things to myself, my thoughts we
nt. It was only after he’d closed Gmail and given a curt thank you on his way to his room that I came to wonder about the question of age. He didn’t look seventeen years old to me. Why lie to me? What other lies might he be telling? He said Nalin was fourteen but she might be older too. Perhaps she wasn’t even his sister. Perhaps they weren’t refugees at all, but criminals, or even terrorists.

  My dreams were turbulent that night, but not seething with anxiety about the lies that Omid might be telling. Instead, his story of crossing the sea to Greece set me on a boat all night, through the dark. It wasn’t a dream of empathy, however – it concerned myself, as all dreams do, I suppose. As the waves rose and fell, the dream dinghy crashed from zenith to trough and I was thrown out, first high into the air, then down into the surging water. I laboured desperately through the waves to reach the boat; I clawed at the rubber surface seeking purchase; I reached for the rope ringing the boat edge, the lashing; but again and again I slipped back, down into the depths, weaker each time.

  Waking at last, exhausted, the winter morning still dark, I was pinned to the mattress by a heavy grey melancholy. I understood that I am now old. Whatever new waves rise beneath me, I will fail to catch them, to rise in the way I have always risen before. The adventurer on the motorcycle is gone. I am an old woman. The tide subsides.

  Nalin came back happier. Girlish. She hugged me in the kitchen. What had she been doing with her friend in the Jungle? ‘We sew,’ she told me. And when she grew up, what did she want to do then? She gave answers, Omid translated: ‘Well, she said she’d like to be a housekeeper, or a fashion designer. Or no! A crime reporter on television.’ She ragged her brother (if he was in fact her brother) about his typing skills. He was back on my laptop, pounding away at the keys, and I asked where he’d learned English.

  ‘Facebook,’ he said. ‘I have many friends in US. And Norway.’

  ‘Pff!’ Nalin said. ‘He don’t know English. Is lazy. He don’t study.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked her. ‘Do you study?’

  ‘She knows nothing,’ Omid said. ‘I do everything for her.’

  But he was smiling. She swatted him with her table napkin.

  Perhaps they were lovers, like the fake ‘brother and sister’ in that Terrence Malick movie, Days of Heaven. All this time, everything I knew about them I’d heard from Omid. It was more than the language barrier – he kept Nalin tucked behind him, he spoke for her. But then again, he’d had to protect her across God knows how many thousands of kilometres.

  ‘Madame,’ Nalin said, settling down on the chair beside mine at the table, teacup in her hand. ‘Kurdish language. I teach you.’

  She called out words, I tried to spell them phonetically in roman script and Omid made corrections in capitals, pressing hard on the paper, along with the Kurdish version, each symbol a kind of artwork. ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘I am fine’. I could remember only supas – ‘thank you’. Pronounced, it sounded to me, like s’pass.

  ‘How old were you when you left Syria?’ I asked, out of the blue. Omid looked up sharply. He translated for Nalin and they consulted in Kurdish.

  ‘I was ten and she was six,’ Omid said.

  So unconvincing, I found them. How old when they arrived in Turkey? How old when they left Turkey? I was a terrier – I would not let go. Nalin’s sweet face fell. Omid turned resentful. I kept asking, interrogating. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to understand if they were lying to me, and if so why. Their answers were hesitant and unhappy.

  ‘Thank you for tea, madame,’ Omid said, standing when I paused for breath.

  ‘S’pass,’ I said brightly, but neither of them even smiled. ‘If you want to learn French I can teach you,’ I said.

  Omid turned in the doorway and shook his head. ‘English is international language, madame,’ he said.

  Nalin wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  They left. Of course. Back to the camp.

  Late that afternoon, my friend Marianne called, as she does most days. Conversation is best, I find, when there’s no real news, only jokes and memories and random reflections. But Marianne wanted to talk about the refugees and the camp, of all things. What a mess. How would Calais ever get rid of them? She’d seen on Facebook that very day, she said, photographs of a fire in the camp. ‘You can’t blame Calais locals,’ she said. ‘It must be very trying. Maybe this is the only way to get rid of them – smoke them out.’

  From high on my wall, heroic Grand-père looked down at me from his frame. ‘They’re human beings, Marianne,’ I said. ‘And when was this fire?’

  ‘Today! Right now, I tell you.’

  I said goodbye and pulled on my coat. The sun was already setting along the low, flat horizon as I drove, one of those absurdly riotous sunsets that my tourists like, crimson streaking into fuchsia. Today, though, it put me in mind of flames. Or blood.

  I knew exactly where I’d park – outside one of the factories a few streets away from the camp. My unconscious had perhaps been rehearsing this journey because I did not hesitate. I saw no fire engines, though, no flames, no French vigilantes. I strode up to the storefront, to enquire of the shopkeeper who’d waved at me before.

  ‘Many fires in the jungle,’ he said. ‘Today, I hear it is a gas bottle exploding.’

  I nodded. Beside his shop, the pup tent was zipped up. It was even smaller than I’d remembered.

  ‘Well, I’m here now,’ I told the shopkeeper, ‘so I might as well go into the camp.’ As if he cared. I bought a bottle of water from him. It cost more than at Lidl.

  ‘I am looking for a Kurdish family,’ I said, and he directed me towards the area where, he told me, Kurds had their shelters and tents.

  ‘Ask there,’ he said.

  No one paid me any attention as I walked. Not the volunteers, speaking English, French, Dutch and German. Not the police patrol, like Lego figures in bulletproof black, four and five abreast. And not the refugees, walking in twos and threes up and down the rough tracks. I passed a set of taps on a wooden stand and noticed one man in particular among those gathered there to wash. He’d rolled his trousers up his fat legs and was holding a large naked foot under the cold water. I shivered. Where on earth did Nalin wash here? Where did she go when she had her period?

  I caught snatches of language, none familiar to me, bar the volunteers’ chatter. I passed many more stores and also structures labelled cafés and I saw the spire of a home-made-looking church behind a wall.

  ‘Kurds?’ I asked people. ‘Kurds from Syria?’ And they pointed me onward: ‘Turn right over there.’ I passed a marquee where Hare Krishnas seemed to be handing out food. People stood around with bowls, a few women and children along with the men. What would Marianne say, I wondered, if she could see me now, in the almost dark in the refugee camp? Or Luc the plumber, glowering from his brother’s house nearby?

  Omid was surprised to see me, when a neighbour showed me to his particular shelter and I knocked on the door. I could see him hesitate. He wanted to send me away, but Nalin came up behind him and drew me into the square box of a room. I left my boots at the door, with other boots, and sat down on the floor. It was like being inside a slow cooker, the sides lined in that silver astronaut paper, like tin foil. Grubby backpacks hung from nails on the walls and more bags were piled in a corner, out of the rain. Sitting cross-legged against the far wall was a bearded Englishman.

  ‘This is Murray,’ Omid said.

  ‘I am Eloise,’ I told Murray, reaching over our socked feet to shake his hand.

  ‘Eloise,’ Nalin repeated. She’d never heard my name before.

  ‘Murray will help us to get to UK,’ Omid said. ‘To join our mother.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ I said.

  ‘Because we are minors,’ Omid said. ‘And minors can perhaps join their family in UK. A new law.’

  He must be seventeen, I saw that now. He had to be, or else he would be left here.

  I understood him to be floundering in the
choppy dark sea of my dream, bearing Nalin along through the waves and then lifting her into the boat, with every chance of being left to sink by himself.

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘A law for minors.’

  ‘Age,’ said Murray. ‘It can be a problem when someone doesn’t have a birth certificate. The authorities tend to make arbitrary judgements based only on their impressions.’

  Like I had.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they stay with me, these two, for some time now and I can say for sure that they are minors.’

  All three looked at me. I never lie. I hate to lie. But this lying, if it was in fact lying, I was prepared to do. Let’s say it was for Grand-père.

  But what happened was that Omid held up a folder.

  ‘For us,’ he said, ‘is not a problem. We have birth certificates.’

  ‘And perhaps,’ Nalin said, ‘we give our blood.’

  ‘To show it matches our mother’s blood,’ Omid said.

  Nalin held her hand forward, thumb extended towards Murray, like a hitchhiker’s. Her thumb for the pricking, for the blood, for the proof. Fingerprints. Age. Genes. DNA. Proofs of the body.

  Murray finished making notes in his file and stood to leave, promising to be in touch, to send forms and to arrange for a lawyer in the UK to speak with their mother. I waited by the shelter as Omid and Nalin said goodbye to their friends, and then we three walked back to my car and drove home in the dark. By the back door, I patted the handlebars of my old motorbike. That’s another one that’ll be moving out of here soon.

  Extending a Hand

  You sit on the side of the road, Mariam and you. The reception isn’t working inside today. Just that annoying crackling you get when someone is on the line, and most of the time there are no bars at all. Outside, here, passing the bridge that hangs over the side of the camp, with the towering fence, it is easier to get a signal. It’s also quieter.

  The kerb is a little cool but dry. A few people are walking up and down the street that leads straight into the camp. Mainly volunteers, mostly Brits, who park their cars or vans and then move on to the show inside. And it is indeed: the display of poor refugees, the lack of humane conditions. They, the ones who give up their time, are here to extend a helping hand, to help make things survivable. But you don’t need a hand; you have two of those. What you need is opportunities.