Simply Stories - Don't Weep for Me

Don’t weep for me

by Jackie Anderson

“In you go.  Step right up to the wall.  Now stand still while I search.” 

The policeman finally gets his hands on me.  I think he’s been aching to rip at what’s left of my clothes, to peel open my pockets.  There is anger in his stubbled face and callouses on his bear-paw hands. I can understand the search because I know mistrust.  But I don’t understand the anger.

Beside me stands a woman, also in uniform.  She writes everything he says to her into a small, black book.  She is short compared to him, no taller than me, and to me he is a giant of a man.  Her face is pinched with tiredness.  Her high cheekbones and sea-green eyes speak of a youthful beauty that has not quite faded despite the years that have left lines on her brow and at the edges of her lips.  I think that she is not aware that her beauty lingers in the kindness of those eyes.

Her sea-green eyes.  I shiver despite the summer heat and have to look away.  The memory is too painful.

The big policeman feels down my legs and lifts my bare feet in case I hide something in the soles.  He curses.  It is one of the few words of his tongue that I can recognise.  I almost topple as he bends my legs to show her and I have to rest the palms of my hands against the wall.  I wince, but the cool of the tiles soothes the heat of my sores.  She curses too and writes more in her book.  When I look at her again her eyes are wet and I have to look down.

Don’t shed tears for me. I move my lips but there is no sound.  I can no longer speak.  There are no more sounds that can escape my throat.  No more begging, pleading, crying, weeping, sighing.  I am empty.  I am silent.

I shed my last tears out at sea.  The wind was cold, so cold it tore at my lips, seared my skin. The waves had soaked us and we shivered day and night.  She was sick, the youngest of us.  She was the last of my sisters. She burned with sickness.  They would not give her water.  She had been forced to give them everything, yet they gave nothing in return.  When I let go of her hands, let her slip away to rest among the waves, there was gratitude in her eyes.  I wept until my tears ran dry.  Her little face, thin and gaunt, eyes and mouth open, still haunts my dreams.  When I dream.   I think, like her, my dreams were all swallowed up by the jade jaws of the cruel sea.

“You don’t have to be so rough with him,” says the woman.  Her voice is low and soft, like my mother’s.

At the thought of my mother my heart stalls.  She might still be in the village, if the rebels haven’t shot her, or raped her, or mutilated her.  She won’t know about Jamila, or Hamed or little Yasmin.  She had entrusted them all to me, to the eldest brother.  And only I am left.

The woman holds my arm until I steady and the trembling eases.  She looks at me and I see her eyelashes are damp.

No, don’t weep tears for me.  I am here, alive.  My skin is flayed by the salt and the wind and the waves.  It is blistered by the sun.  My hands are infested with sores from the cuts made by the boatmen when they threw dice for my favours and I fought them off till I could fight no more.

“Torture?” says the policeman.  I understand that word.  He looks furious.  It wasn’t my fault.  They burnt the soles of my feet before I could escape and take my sisters with me.  They were going to be traded for guns, but they managed to drown first.  I think of Yasmin slipping gratefully into the water and wish I had drowned too.

“How old?” the policeman is speaking to me but I cannot speak. His English sounds nothing like the words my English teacher taught me at home.  But perhaps he is not expecting me to answer.

“About your son’s age,” says the woman.  Her voice cracks and I look at her face. 

Don’t weep for me, I want to say, I am nothing.  I am no-one.  I am a failed brother, a lost son.  I am just the toy of a trafficker, a hunk of meat and bones that no one wants.  My face is blank; my soul is dead inside me.  I am lower than the lice that gnaw at my sores, less than the crabs that nipped at my toes when I sheltered among the rocks at the edge of the beach where my body, still alive, unwillingly drifted to the shore.  It was the sound of an aeroplane lifting into the sky just above my head that woke me from my stupor.  It was the dog chasing a ball on the beach that yelped out my presence.  It was its owner who spoke into his phone and dragged me into the warmth of the sunshine and tried to help me drink while I squinted at the sun and shrank back at the sight of a wall of stone even those of us south of the great desert know to be one of the Pillars of Hercules.  Perhaps it will be a pillar of safety.

“The doctor’s on his way, he may be able to confirm age,” says the policeman.  His voice is gruff, his hands rough, his movements brusque.  “Poor sod,” he continues, “if I ever catch the bastards…”

His voice breaks and I look into those sea-green eyes of the woman, the eyes that remind me of Yasmin.  I try to plead with my silence: don’t weep for me.  I am empty.  I am nothing.