LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      Tarifa

      Wednesday, 24 September

      ‘He wants to know what you were doing on the beach in the middle of the night.’

      Terese slid further down on the hard plastic chair they had provided for her. It felt as if they could read her mind, as if everything were clearly visible even though she had showered for hours and changed clothes and slept seventeen hours and then taken another shower after that.

      The policeman sitting at the desk leaned forward, twirling a pen between his fingers. His nails were stubby and ugly, grimy with dirt underneath.

      ‘Why does he want to know that?’ she whispered to her father, who was sitting next to her. ‘What difference does it make?’

      ‘You have to answer his questions,’ said Stefan Wallner. ‘I’m sure you realize that.’

      Terese rubbed her ear. He was talking to her as he had when she was a child. She regretted agreeing to have him act as her translator during the interrogation. ‘But we don’t need to call it an interrogation,’ he had said. ‘They just want to know what you saw on the beach.’ Maybe it would have been easier to be surrounded by strangers, she thought. People who wouldn’t be ashamed of her, or disappointed.

      ‘I just went for a walk,’ she said.

      ‘In the middle of the night? Before dawn?’ The policeman gave her a thin-lipped smile. It looked like a straight line below his moustache. She noticed an upper tooth was missing. His eyes were fixed on her breasts.

      ‘I was drunk,’ Terese said in Swedish. ‘I didn’t feel good. I may have got lost.’

      Stefan translated.

      ‘Was she alone on the beach?’ asked the officer.

      ‘Yes, I was.’ She swallowed hard. Her throat felt tight. ‘I already told you that.’

      ‘Alone on the beach, a young girl, in the middle of the night.’ He shook his head. On the wall behind him hung a picture of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Her father didn’t translate what he’d said, but she understood. She had studied Spanish for three years in high school, and she knew enough to order food in the restaurants. That was why her father had invited her along, so she could practise her Spanish. He wanted to show her the places he’d visited in his youth, when he was hitchhiking through Europe. She gave her father a sidelong look. His hair was blonder, so the grey was hardly visible, and his skin was suntanned. They’d been in Tarifa for a week when their holiday was disrupted.

      ‘Why isn’t he asking me anything about the body?’ said Terese. ‘Why is he only asking about me?’

      The officer leaned back in his chair, his legs wide apart. He was tapping the pen against his lips.

      ‘I know exactly what the likes of you get up to on the beach,’ he said. ‘You come here and hang about in the bars, ready to take off your clothes for anybody. My cousin has worked on the beaches. He had to pick up after people like you. You have no idea what he used to find on the sand in the morning.’

      He leaned towards Terese, and she gave a start when his eyes again fastened on her breasts. She wished she had put on a sweater. A cardigan over the camisole that was so tight it revealed half her tits.

      ‘That’s enough,’ said her father in Spanish, placing his hand, heavy and warm, on her bare shoulder. ‘My daughter has been through a terrible ordeal. You need to realize that she’s in shock.’ He glanced at Terese and then back at the police officer. ‘She told you that she was alone.’

      The officer smiled wryly, again exposing the gap in his teeth. Terese lowered her eyes.

      ‘Who was the dead man she found?’ Stefan went on. ‘Do you know anything more about what happened to him?’

      ‘An immigrant. From the sub-Sahara,’ said the officer, standing up. He went over to a map of Europe hanging on the wall. It also showed the northern part of Africa. Terese knew that boats went there from Tarifa. The crossing to Tangiers took thirty-five minutes and cost twenty-nine euros per person. Her father had picked up some brochures at the tourist office. Terese wasn’t particularly interested, but she hadn’t told him that. She didn’t want to upset him. When he’d suggested the trip to southern Spain, she’d pictured Marbella and sunny beaches and nightclubs. In Tarifa the wind never stopped blowing. She’d tried swimming on their first days here, but ended up feeling panicked when she was tossed about by the waves as the rip current dragged her away from shore.

      ‘When they come this way, they’re mostly fleeing from the countries south of the Sahara,’ said the officer. He pointed at the map that hung on the wall of painted brick. ‘Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone. Several years ago we were bringing in overloaded boats every single day.’ He moved his hand over the sea, out into the blue of the Atlantic. ‘Later more people started taking this route, via Senegal to the Canary Islands, then through Libya, of course, it’s a total chaos there, and then the Turkey route … The smugglers know we have coastguard boats patrolling the straits, with cameras and radar. But that still doesn’t stop some people from trying.’

      Stefan Wallner translated for Terese, who relaxed a bit. She was already familiar with some of these facts. When she was lying in bed yesterday, wanting only to fall asleep and die, her father had gone out to talk to the police and the Red Cross. He came into her room every couple of hours to ask whether she wanted anything to eat. He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair and told her about all the unhappy people who were fleeing poverty and possibly war as well. The head of the Red Cross in Tarifa had shown him pictures of people who had died in the sound during the past few years. He’d had an entire binder full of photographs. Whenever Terese closed her eyes, she saw the body of the black man and thought to herself that she was looking at death. And then she’d felt the old sorrows well up, from her teenage years in high school when she’d realized how meaningless everything was, and that it didn’t matter what she did because she was nobody. Could anyone love a nobody? No one would notice if a nobody died. ‘There’s nothing I want to do, Papa,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t know if I even want to go on living.’

      The policeman went over to one of the windows and used his whole hand to point outside. Terese shivered when she saw the barbed wire and seagulls. She looked at the island out there, the surging waves and the lighthouse. She never wanted to go down to the sea again.

      ‘If we catch them, they end up on Isla de las Palomas,’ he said. ‘A few years ago the place was packed, but these days we keep them only twenty-four hours, at most. Then they’re sent to the detention camps in Algeciras. If we can’t get them to tell us where they came from, they’re released out onto the streets after sixty days. After that, they’ll be picking tomatoes.’

      The officer came around his desk and picked up a document. A flimsy piece of paper.

      ‘But I’m talking about the ones who make it here alive, of course.’

      He sat down, again spreading his legs wide, and gave a sharp slap to the paper in his hand.

      ‘This arrived by fax from Cádiz early this morning. They’ve found two more. A man and a woman. Pregnant.’ He picked up another piece of paper and held it up. ‘The Moroccan authorities have reports of a rubber dinghy that set off in the early hours of Sunday morning. It managed to slip past. Maybe somebody was bribed. Who knows? These smugglers will try anything.’ He used two fingers to smooth his old-fashioned moustache, which turned up slightly at the ends. ‘They tell the passengers to jump into the sea when they get close to land so the smugglers can turn

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