Cities of Refuge Read Online Free PDF Page B

to read. She couldn’t make sense of a letter presented to her by a woman named Rahel, who’d been sheltered by an Ethiopian evangelical church. She explained to Rahel thather application on humanitarian and compassionate grounds had been denied. The H&C had not been accompanied by persuasive, objective evidence that she would be in danger upon her return to Ethiopia. Kim had trouble grasping the words “lack of compelling risk material.” Because she spoke Spanish, Kim dealt most closely with the Latin Americans, but when explicating the subtleties of judgments or warrants without a common tongue, or when an interpreter’s English was incomprehensible, she felt worlds of desperation falling through her.
    But Kim couldn’t remember whether she’d left a message for Marlene about Rahel. How could a person’s fate completely slip her mind? She’d been making mistakes recently, losing details, moments. Losing numbers and names, mixing up words. Checking her burners thrice. It terrified her to think what was riding on her memory. There were worlds kept alive through Post-it notes. She would call Marlene after breakfast.
    The phone rang, too loudly. It was Sarah, the one volunteer doctor at GROUND . She had found an Iranian family to take Sadaf in for the indefinite future. Someone would come by around noon. Sadaf received the news without comment. Their few conversations ran with lurching assertions and half-statements. Kim was never entirely certain she’d made herself understood.
    “Where is your mother when you are young?” Sadaf asked.
    “She was with us. She raised me.”
    Sadaf wasn’t much older than she was, and her voice was young, but age had taken up in her hands and eyes.
    “And your father came home with the languages.”
    “Yes. I wish I knew more of them, though. How do you say ‘home’ in Persian?”
    “And your mother accepts the husband’s will?”
    “She sort of accommodates him.”
    Hearing herself, Kim wasn’t sure if she meant Harold or Donald.
    “And does she accommodate God’s will?”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Does your mother see God’s will is not the husband’s will?”
    “I don’t think she sees God’s will at all, Sadaf. Our family doesn’t really have God.”
    Again she evinced no response. There was a long silence.
    “Khona,”
said Sadaf finally. “The word is
khona
. It can mean home, or the house of God. For Sufis,
khona
is the highest state of … I don’t know the word. In the mind.”
    “Consciousness.”
    “Yes.” Were there words for what Sadaf had lost, and how she thought about her losses? “And
boshgah
means a place to be, a real place and a place beyond. And a place where travellers stay before carrying on with their journey.”
    A distance then passed over her and she was closed.
    Kim could only hope that she ran a good
boshgah
, here for this soul unexampled to her.
    You couldn’t read the prison narrative and keep free of certain pictures. What happens to a woman after she has grieved for herself in fear? Lost to trauma, then to exile, is the old self locked away? But then memory wouldn’t allow it. And the body would always go cold at the opening of a door. And yet Sadaf had gone out alone simply to buy herself tea.
    Kim knew next to nothing in her bones but she trusted her heart. Her heart was willing to imagine itself into the fears of others, but it was not always capable.
    The men came at noon. Rather than let them in, Kim wentinto the hallway to discuss the arrangements. Sarah’s assistant from the clinic, Colin, introduced her to an unsmiling man named Ramin whose family Sadaf would be staying with. He was in his thirties, Kim guessed. He wore an ill-fitting brown suit and had an air of dramatic impenetrability, a serious man on serious business.
    Kim left them in the hallway and closed the door.
    “Sadaf, my friend Colin has brought the man whose family you’ll be living with for a little while. His name is Ramin.” She