Day Forty Seven

Amartia’s Adventure - Part One

Amartia was determined to gain the summit of the mountain and with head bowed, continued upwards.

After a while, she stopped and turned on the narrow path, putting one trembling hand to her chest which lifted as she drew in the cool, sharp air. 

Below her, the town looked toy-like, with lights beginning to come on in the gathering dusk.

Her house though, would be dark. 

House; that’s was what it was, just a house, not a home.

Home was a thousand, maybe ten thousand miles away?

 Light years away.  Ten, dark years away.

Amartia had never really known the true reason for the conflagration; only that the first faint flickerings of unease in the country had built to a blaze of resentment and jealousy. 

Fanned by radio and newspaper stories, which spoke of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ the hatred had taken hold like a bush fire.

 

What an odd phrase that was.  ‘ Cleansing’ meant getting rid of dirt. Had they changed overnight from good neighbours to bad rubbish?

Families with whom they had laughed, danced and talked; people they had loved, yes, loved for decades, suddenly turned upon them and acted as if they were sworn enemies. 

Why? How could this be, Amartia and Berkit had asked - and the replies had torn out their hearts.

When the soldiers came, Amartia had been sure she would perish from the sheer terror of it.  Forced roughly from their home, to the sound of gunfire and dangerous malice, she had clutched her youngest child to her breast and fled. 

With Berkit shouting for her to keep going, and urging along the other two terrified children, they had feared all the time that the machine guns would open up their backs as they fled.

They had run until they could run no more and fallen, exhausted into a drainage ditch, knowing they were still not safe.

Eventually, it had become obvious that this was ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a monstrous scale.  A whole, terrorised community had made their dumbfounded way to the border -  their only chance of escape.

Unable to see in their survival, any glimmer of optimism, they were too shocked to help each other, too devastated even to think.

In the refugee camp they had been given the basics, a blanket, a place to sleep, access (if one was prepared to wait, and many were not) to inadequate toilets.

All day, for weeks, they lay beneath the canvasses of the tent city and tried to will life to stop.  

Some of them succeeded.

Amartia found she was incapable of any feeling; her skeleton lived in a void in which emotion had been totally suspended.  

She did not know how to sleep any more, it was as if this knowledge had been taken from her along with everything else.  She would lie immobile, her face to the sky and not one single word in her head. 

Eventually her eyes would close mechanically and she would become unconscious but this was not sleep.

One day Berkit explained they were to move, begin a new life in a new country,  and the abandoned shell that was Amartia walked with her husband and children to a plane and after a few hours of flying, walked off again into an alien land.

They had been in The New Country four months before she left the new house.  

The interpreter from the refugee agency had taken her to an orientation class,  where someone had shown them how to use the telephone, pressing the three numbers which were vital in an emergency.

‘If you need fire, police or ambulance urgently,’ they were told.

Amartia had raised her hand and asked:  ‘If I do this, will the people who answer speak my language?’  The class had laughed but Amartia had known they all shared her fear.

The following month, her eldest son persuaded her to accompany him to the supermarket.

‘You must try Mum,’ he had said, ‘we live here now, you’ve got to try.’

On the way there, the signs made no sense.

In the shop, there was not a tin or packet or label she could read. 

The conversations all around her could have been dogs barking for all she could comprehend. 

When, momentarily, she lost her son down a crowded aisle, she panicked, almost collapsing from dread,  realising she could not ask for help or directions,  she had no idea where she lived.  She could not even explain who she was. 

She wasn’t sure she knew who she was anymore.

All the way back, as her son tried to comfort her and explain she would soon get used to things, she trembled with a sort of bleak hopelessness.

Then, as they turned a corner, she saw, rising high above the town, a mountain of such beauty the breath was taken from her and she was suddenly still with joy. 

It was a mountain from her childhood, the guardian of her dreams.

Part Two tomorrow....