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.