When we were finished with our tour of the photographs and Nana was back in her chair in front of the TV with a blanket over her legs, Torsten came and said he was done for the day and that he was going to be leaving now but that he would be back on Friday. I was disappointed and wanted to say something but I didn’t dare. Nana patted him on the cheek and then he left.
‘He’s a good boy,’ Nana said and ran a hand over her hair. ‘I never knew before that a man could be so good at combing hair.’
I saw then that Nana’s hair had been brushed so it gleamed. She has long hair that reaches all the way down her back. I couldn’t understand how Nana who is so afraid of everything in this country could let a boy like Torsten comb her hair. I wanted to ask her more about him, where he came from and how they had found him, but I didn’t because I was afraid she would get angry.
Suddenly Nana grabbed my hand and pointed to the screen. There was a programme on about a refugee camp in Africa. A little black girl — so very thin — was walking around in a desert landscape dotted with low bushes. She walked slowly and hesitantly and then she pointed to something on the ground. Suddenly crushed skulls and white pieces of bone appeared on the TV screen. The girl cried and she was speaking a language I couldn’t understand but I could follow the subtitles that said her parents had been killed here by soldiers who had been crazed by alcohol and blood lust and she had seen everything and everyone had died except her because her mother fell on top of her when she died.
We sat completely still and Nana was holding my arm so tightly it almost hurt. She forced us to watch that girl who wandered around and cried among all the dead and all at once both Nana and I started crying. Suddenly the girl turned towards the camera or the people operating the camera and it looked as if she were turning towards us, as if she had heard us crying. Then the programme ended simply by cutting to a black screen and then — without even a moment’s pause — a programme came on about cultivating tomatoes in a cold climate.
