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....
