‘That’s in Scandinavia, in northern Europe. That’s where we come from. We are writing a series on people without faces, refugees who are desperately trying to enter Europe. We want to tell your story. We want to give you back your face.’
‘I already have a face. What is he taking pictures of if I have no face? Can you smile without teeth, without a mouth? I don’t need a face, I need a door.’
‘A door? You mean somewhere to go where you will be welcome? But that’s just why we came down here. We want you to find somewhere to go.’
Tea-Bag strained to understand the words that reached her ears. Someone was trying to help her? This tall man who was still gently swaying must have access to a secret door that he was not showing her.
‘We want to tell your story,’ he said. ‘Your whole story. As much as you remember.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we will print it in our newspaper.’
‘I want a door. I want to get out of here.’
‘That’s exactly what this is about.’
Afterwards Tea-Bag never understood what had made her trust him. But somehow she sensed that door was actually opening for her. Perhaps she had been able to follow her intuition because her feet were firmly planted on the ground, just as her father had taught her, the only thing he had been able to give her. Or perhaps it was because the man asking the questions had seemed genuinely interested in her answers. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t look tired. In any case she needed to make a decision and she decided to say yes.
They went into Fernando’s office where the dirty teacup that had given her her name still sat on the desk. But she said nothing of that. She started by telling them about her village, somewhere in a land whose name she had forgotten, about her father whom she had not forgotten and who was one morning led away by soldiers, never to return. Her mother had been harassed, they belonged to the wrong kind of people, the kind of people who were not in power. Her mother had urged her to escape, which she had done. She skipped parts of her story and said nothing of the Italian engineer and how she had sold her body to him in order to get the money for passage on the ship. She kept as many secrets as she told. But she was still swept up by the emotion of her story and she saw that the man in front of her who had turned on his tape recorder was also moved by it. When she came to the part about the terrible night in the cargo-hold when the ship began to sink she started to cry.
She had been speaking for four hours when she reached the end. Fernando had appeared in the doorway from time to time and she always weaved in words about ‘compassion and humanity’ when he appeared. The reporter seemed to accept this as a kind of secret code.
Then it was over.
The reporter who packed away his tape recorder had not in fact provided her with a way out of the camp. But she had still found her door. She had the name of a country far away where people actually wanted to see her face and were interested in hearing her story: Sweden. She decided that that was where she was headed, nowhere else. Sweden. There were people there who had sent out someone to watch out for her.
She walked them to the front gates of the camp.
‘Is your name just Tea-Bag?’ he asked. ‘Nothing else? What about a surname?’
‘I don’t have one yet.’
He looked at her curiously but smiled. The photographer asked one of the guards to take a picture of the three of them.
It was one of the last days of the twentieth century.
It started raining again in the afternoon. That evening Tea-Bag sat on her bed and pressed her feet against the cold floor for a long time. Sweden, she thought. That’s where I’m going. That’s where I have to go. That’s my goal.
Jesper Humlin, one of the most successful writers of his generation, was worried about losing his tan. This fear easily surpassed his other anxieties, such as the fate of the impenetrable collections of poetry he published every year on the sixth of October, which happened to coincide with his mother’s birthday. This morning, a few months after his latest book had come out, he was looking at his face in the mirror and noted to his satisfaction that his tan had an unparalleled evenness of tone. A few days earlier he had returned to a chilly Sweden from a month-long sojourn on the South Seas, first in the Solomon Islands and then on Rarotonga.
