MY HUSBAND.

my husband.

 

danait is 19 and comes from eritrea.

now she lives here, in my posh little suburb.

She is housed  in of the tin containers the authorities

had put up and shares i a room of fourteen

square meters  with five other women.

she never says a bad word about of her roommates,

but i know she wishes herself to a place far away.

danait can not be separated from her cell phone.

incessantly she talks  to the one she calls her husband,

-my husband-, she says whenever she speaks of him,

he is now in another country, they were separated

on the run.

and the chocolate ice cream drips on her hand,

she doesn’t get to lick it even once,

because she just can´t stop talking to him.

tomorrow danait will be allowed to go to school

in the city for the first time,

and today she tells me about her sister,

who she’s been worried about lately..,

because she, too, has set off for Europe, via libya,

and then across the mediterranean sea.

she tells me how she herself sat in a boat on her flight,

together with 450 other people, and the boat

was leaking, and the engine stank, and she drank

the sea water, and then, when she vomited,

the vomit was all yellow.

and then danait shows me, me pictures of women

and men on the luminous rectangle of her phone,

she shows me pictures of mothers and children,

of boys and girls, she shows me people,

who until recently had dreams and now lie drowned

somewhere in the sea.

and i looked at the young woman

and was completely without language

and didn’t really understand

anything and now in the evening comes the sadness

and an inkling of what is,

and an inkling of how it could all be,

for this woman,

who lives in this tin container,

on her cell phone pictures of dead people

and the silence of her sister inside in her head.