The Expelled

by Mois Benarroch

  What I don't get, or maybe I do, is how they decided that the back people were bad and criminals, and when, if they were all asleep. Since there was a majority of front people, none of them stood up against accusing the back people in general, someone said that they were all terrorists and that what they wanted was to rob the bus and kill us all, they were even killing amongst themselves, so life didn't matter to them, you could also hear that. I was the only one, or I believe that I was the only one, who said that we had to go to the nearest police station in the first inhabited town.

  But everyone or at least many people were against that idea. They said that it wouldn't help and that the best thing would be to leave the corpse on the highway someplace it would be seen, and that way someone would call the police.

  “Anyway, it's not like he's going to resurrect,” Camilla said, a back girl from the left side.

  “She's right,” Tuval said, a front guy, “it is better this way, and we won't have to waste time, we each want to get to our town.”

  “Yes, but hold on a second,” Trinidad said, standing from her seat next to the driver, “we have to avoid this situation from happening again, and the best thing would be to forbid the back people from coming to the front or going to the can, we have to create a line that they mustn't overstep, it's less messy this way.”

  “And besides they smell bad.” Three passengers must have said that simultaneously.

  “And we will put a guard to make sure it doesn't happen again.”

  The bus stopped and we left Cash's body on the highway. At that hour, there were no cars driving by.

  It was decided that we should pray for the deceased and for his soul, and we did it on the bus. We, the front people, prayed facing the driver's direction, the back people prayed in the opposite direction. I don't know if it came as an order from someone, but it seemed logical to me, they were back people and they were different and so they prayed in the opposite direction.

  I wonder if what I did was OK, it's a good question, if you don't ask it, then I am going to ask myself. Well, not very good to be honest, but it was better to be part of the front people who were a majority. I have always been a minority everywhere I went, they would have read my career and my life, and for the first time I was part of the majority and it seemed logical at the time that the majority decided what to do with the restroom. After praying, we talked a little about the deceased, he was no longer on the bus and since nobody knew him or at least nobody admitted to knowing him, he stopped existing. I felt good, I was part of a group. I felt better than ever before.

  Someone said that you couldn't forbid the back people from going to the can, and we democratically discussed the problem, each person gave his opinion. Some said that we could do nothing about it and that the back ones were dangerous, therefore it would be a lack of responsibility to let them go to the can, they could take advantage of the situation to attack us. Others said that there was no reason not to let them go to the can and that they already had enough problems just for being back people and not being able to be understood. That's what David said, he was the number 10, now they all had a number which was the number of the seat where they were sitting. I say we let them go whenever they want, he said, but they should ask the guard for permission first. I didn't suggest anything.

  Yes, I know what you're thinking, that maybe I killed Cash and that I invented all this story about the handgun, and even perhaps another survivor told you that, although I doubt there is another, but well, if I am here, that means that there cannot be another one. And I say no, but I'm not even sure anymore, I was sitting in a place where I could see Cash and shoot him, and maybe I wasn't asleep, or maybe I did it while I was sleeping or dreaming, who knows, but that would have been complicated, because to do so I would have to kneel in my seat to be able to see Cash and shoot him and I don't remember Severio giving me his gun, but maybe I had it in my hands a few seconds and after the shot I gave it to someone, and that someone gave it to someone else, at least that seems to be what the others did, from the one who pulled the trigger to the one who found the gun.

  I don't know why he talked about that, I believe it's not very important anymore, what does it matter anymore, not only did he die, they all did, well, not everyone, I am still alive, only if that's not just a dream and I am really alive. Am I or am I not...? Well, thank you for saying yes, it's easy for you to say yes.

  We discussed the situation for about thirty minutes and seven front people spoke. By chance or maybe not, the front people all spoke the same language, either their first language or a language they had learned, but the back people, who were less than us, spoke different languages and didn't understand each other, or they didn't understand us. In the end we voted in favor of Oleg's proposal, number 18, and it was decided that the back people could go to the john when the front people were taking a nap, between 3 and 4 p.m. and between 3 and 4 a.m. It seemed like a very humane and democratic solution to me.

  Someone (who?) said that Cash was a saint and that he had died for our sins and the arguments that were taking place on the bus, and that we had to think about him and his lesson. And then Severio who was sitting in front of me to my left asked how they could know if he was a saint if nobody knew him. “Death has made him a saint”, said his travel neighbor, Ofelia.

  Or maybe that wasn’t her name ... I don't know, the truth is I have a very bad memory for names, but I remember faces or eyes, sometimes phone numbers. And then I may have fallen asleep for a while, I was very tired and I wanted to sleep but it wasn't easy, maybe I just dozed off. I heard someone mention that he was traveling to the other sea, and that he was traveling to look for his father, because after his father died, that's how he told the story, after his father died, his mother told him that this man was not his father. His father was some other man. That never knew about him and that only she knew. That she had been raped by a man in Morocco, just after the independence and that he was a friend of her husband or a business partner, the man came to the house looking for her husband because they had an appointment.

  “What kind of appointment?” a woman's voice asked.

  “What do I know, a business appointment with my father!”

  “But then is he your father or is he not your father?”

  “I don't know, he is and he's not, anyway, then she asked him if he wanted to drink something.”

  “To whom?”

  “My mother to my father.”

  “But didn't you say that your father wasn't there?”

  “Well, the one they call biological father, and I have no idea what I'm doing here. Anyway, she doesn't remember, my mother, whatever she asked, but the man came in and drank a lemonade, that much she remembers. And there, they talked for a while and he declared his love, his eternal love, and that she should get a divorce and they should run away together. Nobody gets a divorce here, well, not in my town, there are no divorces, never, well, unless someone beats you up or abuses you or has an affair, or something very serious, something like that, not for love. And he got all turned on and my mother told him to leave, he had crossed the limit, and then he raped her.”

  “Yeah well, that's all bullshit.”

  “Not one bit, what happened next is that she went to her mother and my grandmother told her not to tell anyone, and less to my father, well, her husband, and the best thing she could do was to sleep with him that same night and the following, just in case she was pregnant, and I was born that year, and I am an only child. My mother says that my father was sterile. And now I don't know why I am going to meet that man, my father. Well, that is if he is still alive and still lives in the same city.”

  “And what's his name?”

  “Who?”

  “And what do you care what he's called?”

  “I don't.”

  “He's called Yusuf Bentato.”

  I do remember that name. The son of Bentato was going from one sea to another. The woman didn't have much to tell.

&nbs
p; “Your story comes straight from a movie, but I'm just going to my village, in the mountains, I'm on my way back from a visit to my sister who went to work in another country and now she's not doing very good, she has breast cancer.”

  “Her too!”

  “Yes, but why her "too"?”

  “It's just that that's all you hear about, that this person has breast cancer, and that other one had it, and half of them are secrets that were told, and what happens with the ones you don't know about. It must be an outbreak.”

  At that moment, Queta got up and said there was an outbreak on the bus, and that's why we had to exit the freeway and turn right. If anyone doesn't agree they should raise their hand. Nobody did it and the driver turned right and entered a road that nobody knew. What was very strange is that there were no ads and no signs of nearby cities or towns, and it was an almost deserted road.

  Then the bus stopped, the reason was that we had to pray for Cash, the saint of the bus. The front people got off the bus and the back people remained inside. We prayed for Cash's soul and asked him to help us reach the other sea. Cash, help us in your death to be worthy of our fate, to get from the big sea to the small one, from water to water and wind to wind.

  When we returned some back people were complaining that they didn't let them pray for Cash and he was one of them. Cash was always a good back person, worthy of that name and a good man. And above all, he could sing, said another voice and in another language. But the front people accused the back people of killing Cash, and they said that because they killed him, it was better not to pray for him.

  “Although, there is freedom of worship here, and everyone can pray what they want and to whomever they want, as long as they leave the can free.”

  “We will pray to saint Cash,” said a back guy, the one who was closest to the can. Oizoa, number 38. Oizoa considered himself the leader of the back people, because he was closest to the can and sometimes he said that the front people were better by law and the back ones had to accept that these were the laws of nature and the world, but most of them didn't listen or pay attention or understand the language he spoke.

  And so it was, in less than a few hours, Cash was the saint and they no longer prayed for him, but to him. The front people had the right to kneel in their place and now they came to sit beside me, the ones waiting for their turn to go to the john. The can was the bus's sacred place, and they all wanted to piss or shit nonstop. Uceda went away and a woman came to sit next to me, she told me that she was coming from Cazarzen, that's how she called the city from where she was escaping, a city I had never heard of.

  “I’m running away from the terror and from death,” she said, “so all this seems like a picnic to me. If I tell you all that I have lived through you wouldn't believe it.”

  “You could try.”

  I wasn't very interested in listening to the stories of each one of them, but I was sitting just above the can, next to the seat that was on top of it, and that gradually brought to my side all the passengers on the bus. Some told me their lives, others remained silent, but everyone did it with such a strange serenity.

  “At first,” she said, “we worked in a shoe factory, but they stopped buying and suddenly in the center of the city they opened an ultramodern transplant hospital, it gave good jobs and good wages to part of the population and the city began to flourish, and the housing prices rose, and other transplant hospitals were opened, before I took refuge in the forest there were five, but I think there are eight now. People from all over the world came to our city to get all kinds of transplants, the most difficult ones, but half the people in the city, or more than half, lost their jobs and sometimes their home, these poor people began selling their kidneys to be able to deal with the expenses of their families, but they always needed more and more donors, and the poor people were not enough, and they began evacuating families from their homes and they established a law, that those who lived in the forest were natural donors, those were the words, and then they began hunting those in the forest, sometimes they took out a kidney and released them back in the forest and sometimes they needed a heart and so they killed them, they took my kidney, here's the scar...”

  “And we have never heard of that around here. What did you say the name of the city was?” I really didn't want to see the scar and so I changed the topic.”

  “It was called Cazarzen, and every time they needed more transplants, they threw more people out of their homes so they would become natural donors. You see, they killed my husband and later in the forest we ate his remains, because if we didn't the wolves would eat them, so it was better to feed ourselves, the meat was hot. My two sons, children were preferred donors, you see, even old people's corneas or a pregnant woman's gallbladder. I don't know or understand how I escaped, but here I am... Well, it was my turn.”

  I think that put me off eating for a while. We kept going on the same road and we couldn't see anyone, it was like a dream. Many times I wondered if I was dreaming. I wasn't.

  We stopped near a lake surrounded by grass that looked artificial. There was nothing alive around there, not even flies. That didn't bother anyone. The back people sat together and the front people sat closer to the lake. We ate what we had, some had sandwiches and others cereal bars. Suddenly we saw a lonely lamb walking a few feet away from us. Severio took out his gun and shot it, I don't even believe he thought about whether to do it or not.

  “Here we go, that's lunch.”

  “Look, and I have here everything we need for a barbecue.”

  I believe it was Santos who went to the bus and grabbed a bag that had all the necessary tools to eat lamb. Nobody really knew how to prepare the lamb until the Tadeuz mother came and joined us. It wasn't a very simple task, she requested a knife and we didn't know what to do then.

  “She's a back woman and it can be dangerous.”

  “Yeah, but she has two children who are front people. A son and a daughter.”

  The Tadeuz were the only family on the bus, they were called Tadeuz son, Tadeuz daughter, Tadeuz father and Tadeuz mother. The children were front people and the parents back people.

  “I don't think she'll do anything, we'll give her a piece of meat.”

  It was a slow process and despite the hunger, it took almost an hour to skin the animal and empty it of its blood, meanwhile Caro prepared the fire with some plants and tree branches that he found half a mile away from the lake.

  The driver came to me and told me something was wrong, that the road was a bit strange, and mainly that he drove many miles but never saw the amount of gas lowering.

  “It must be the saint's doing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Saint Cash.”

  The lamb didn't taste very good, but in the end a woman took out a cake, it's for my daughter's birthday, but we won't make it, so we might as well eat it together. I didn't understand why she said she wasn't going to make it, were we doomed?

  Back on the bus, there was another line to go to the can. Many came to see me, all the front people. They sat next to me, one after another, and I don't remember anymore who was who and who told what. This one was a woman, I think she was called Olvido. Yes, that must be it, do you have an Olvido on the list? Could she still be alive? She told me that she had cancer and that she was going to die.

  “The doctors told me that I haven't got much time left, months, but months could mean many things. Two months? Ten months? Doctors only know how to say a few months, nothing else, and you stay with those months, it's your life, not mere statistics. I have decided to go to the sea, my sea, to die, the sea where I was born, my sea, you understand, I tried everything, vitamins, exercise, psychology, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, a new experimental vaccine. I went to the Mayo Clinic, you know, for this my brothers had money, to be healthy, but never before, to help me out or to buy a car, not even a used car, but when I got sick, ten years ago, my God, I got sick ten years ago, then they became good, very good, super-duper go
od brothers. They began calling me every day, checked if I needed anything, they set an appointment with the best specialist in Madrid, I didn't want the best specialist, but I couldn't say no, then at the Mayo Clinic in the US. Do you see what I was in? I found myself in the same situation of dependency. Before, it was because they didn't give me their money and after it was because they did. When I told them I wanted money to go to a natural medicine clinic in the UK, they said no, they didn't understand, but I went anyway, you know. I sold what little I had, an inherited land from a great-aunt and I went. They got very angry. Of course when they help you, one wonders if they are helping you or helping themselves, or if they want to have a clear conscience, but now you see, now I am going to the sea ... it's my turn.”

  So now I wonder if that Olvido or whatever her name was survived, ironically the one who was going to die, things like that happen sometimes. What you least expect. Well, I see that in here I'm going to be talking alone and nobody is going to respond to anything.

  I don't even know if you're listening, maybe you've fallen asleep, or there's just one of you, or you're recording this and then you'll listen to only parts of what I say.