The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [50]
– Soon, said Daub, everything we see here will be under water. There is an illusion of peace. But there is trouble and like much of the trouble in the desert, it is caused both by the living and the dead.
My father had a habit, which I find I have inherited, of clipping articles from the newspapers. He used to form an idea about the world, a theory, and then he would happen upon all kinds of ‘proof’ in the papers – coincidental, of course, but it amused him. And it became a small obsession.
Once, he held up a newspaper photograph of a dark-featured child, her hair wrapped in a scarf or shawl, holding a bundle of cloth.
‘What do you see?’ my father asked me.
‘A DP from the war in Europe?’
‘A Palestinian refugee, 1948.’
He showed me another clipping, very similar to the first.
‘And this?’
‘Another Palestinian boy?’
‘No. A Jewish boy who has arrived in Israel from a refugee camp in Germany. And this?’
He held up a photo of a line of people, weighed down with suitcases and satchels, clearly carrying all they owned.
‘Immigrants to Israel?’
‘No, Arab Jews forced to leave Egypt, also 1948. And this photo – a Polish boy, a Christian, in a camp in Tashkent; and this – a Yugoslav boy in a refugee camp in Kenya; and another in Cyprus; and in the desert camp at El Shatt in 1944; and here, a Greek child in the camp near Gaza, at Nuseirat, also 1944. Quite a few times,’ said my father, ‘I have found faces that are almost identical. These two – one is from a refugee camp in Lebanon; the other, from a refugee camp in Backnang near Stuttgart. When you see just their faces, nothing else, do they not look like twins? That resemblance is what caused me to begin this collection, photos everyone sees every day, from newspapers or magazines, refugees from every side.’
Did you know, said Daub, that the first plans for the High Dam were drawn up by West Germany to appease Egypt, after compensating Israel after the war? There is so much collusion, from every side, it might be possible to sort it out, if only a single soul possessed all the information.
Here I am, a British citizen, whose father was born in Cairo, and whose grandfather died in London in the Blitz, sitting in the Sudanese desert, with a Canadian and her British husband, talking about refugees in Kenya, Gaza, New Zealand, India, Khataba, Indonesia …
Daub rested his head in his arms on the steering wheel. The breeze lifted the hair from the back of his neck and Jean felt a pang at the sight; a place of vulnerability. One could live a lifetime, she thought, and perhaps never be touched there.
– I was in Faras during the first evacuation. I was working in Halfa then, said Daub, and I went to witness it. I saw a mother and daughter saying their farewells. They had lived in two villages that were side by side, a short walk from each other. The daughter had moved to live with her husband's family when they were married, but the mother and daughter saw each other very often, just a walk of short distance between the two villages. However, the villages happened to be on either side of the border between Sudan and Egypt, that invisible border in the middle of the desert, and so now the mother was being moved to Khashm el Girba and the daughter fifteen hundred kilometres away, to Kom Ombo. Everyone watching this scene knew they would never see each other again. After the daughter, who was very big with child, boarded the train, and the train moved off into the desert, the mother looked down at her feet and saw the satchel she had meant to give her, with family things inside, now left behind.
Daub looked at them and then looked out at the hills above Sarra. It was dark now, the sand pale under the stars.
– When I witnessed this, I thought of my father's collection of pictures. It goes on and on, as my father understood, like the detritus of the Second World War that ended in bits and pieces, leaving behind horror and misery in isolated