When Laila is scared she starts counting. If she is walking outside, she counts how many birds she spots or how many trees. In the car driving through the city, she counts the light poles they pass. At home she stares at her mother’s bookcases and counts the books. She has only recently learned to read, so the contents of the books don’t appeal much to her, but counting them makes the waves of pin pricks in her stomach go away. Her mum often jokes how she loves books and can always remember what she reads, but she is useless with practical stuff. Laila thinks that means her mum is not good at sports.
Where she is now there are no books and no light poles. There are straw mats on the ground, also rugs that used to lie in people’s sitting rooms, some are very beautiful, but a bit dirty. Kids are sleeping on them. So now she counts the kids.
There are 18 of them. She counts them three times. She’s the only one who’s awake. She gets up. She wants fresh air and she needs more items to count.
The sun has just risen. It surprises her how it can be so cold and then so warm so quickly in this place. She starts counting the tents. Then she counts the plumes of smoke. She has to remind herself that the women who’ve started boiling water are creating those. No bombs. Those plumes of smoke look different. Bigger, wilder. There would be more sounds, more screaming. There are no buildings here for the angry men to bomb.
An old woman is using orange peels to make a big kettle of tea. Laila had a sip of it yesterday and it tasted like something her mum would tell her not to drink if she doesn’t want to have a tummy ache.
Her mum isn’t here now. Her mum is looking for Rashid. Rashid is younger than her. He can’t read. He doesn’t know how to get to school alone. No wonder he got lost.
They had left their apartment in town. They were walking towards the coast. The leaflets the angry men dropped from the sky had told them to.
Many left. Many people started walking. On the third day they were walking along a highway. Shots had rung out. She saw an old man fall. People started running in every direction. Her mum had told her to hold Rashid’s hand as tightly as possible, but in the crowd he had slipped away. Or maybe she had let go, because the loud bangs made her lose control of her body. Her mum shook her. The shaking made her forget the bangs in the distance. Mum wanted to know where Rashid was. Laila didn’t know. She cried harder than she had ever cried before. Harder than that time she had broken mum’s favorite vase. This was worse than losing a vase. She tasted blood. When Laila feels really bad about something she’s done she bites her lower lip. She never realizes until she has the taste of blood in her mouth.
Laila doesn’t know exactly what happened next. Her mum picked her up from the ground in a way that felt different from all the other times.
They had run around yelling Rashid’s name. Then mum had put her down, almost thrown her down, and then she had given Laila to a man and a woman in car with four kids huddled together on the back seat. There were not many cars on the road these days. Laila doesn’t know why mum did this. She remembers how her mum kept yelling ‘I have to look for my son, I have to look for my son.’ Her mum scribbled her phone number on Laila’s arms, on her dress and on the back of her neck. She also wrote a different phone number. Her mum said ‘just in case something happens.’
Laila wonders what mum meant by that. Her mum hugged her and kissed her and called her ‘soul of my soul’ and said she would come to the coast to be with her as soon as she could find Rashid.
Laila felt a lot of pain in her throat. That always happened when she forced herself not to cry. She felt that crying in this moment would be very bad for her mum. She had never seen her mum this scared. There was something weird about mum’s eyes. She didn’t know mum’s eyes were that big.
She misses mum. She misses mum so badly it feels like something invisible is wrapped all around her body and is squeezing her until she will burst open.
Laila wonders if she should start walking back. Maybe she can find Rashid first and then they can look for mum together. But Rashid would be useless and would probably cry all the time and instead of finding mum she would have to tickle him all the time to make him forget why he is crying and that would be so exhausting, they would never find mum.
Maybe her father will find her. If the angry men let him go. He took the car to a different town to get flour and didn’t come back. A neighbour said the angry men had blocked a road. They had made all the men get out of their cars. They had made them take off their clothes and had led them away.
Laila wondered if the angry men had come here, because they needed clothes. Maybe they don’t have enough clothes at home. She knows stealing is wrong, even if you don’t have something and someone else does. Yannah, a classmate, has a Frozen style pen case. It’s the most beautiful pen case of all, Laila often dreams of having it, but she would never steal it. If you steal your hand could fall off. ‘He who steals an egg can steal a camel’, says her grandmother. Her grandmother is in the south. The angry men said it’s safe there. Here at the tent camp she’s heard the old men say it’s really bad now in the south too.
Laila is hungry. What is good about being hungry is that she is too hungry to be scared and too hungry to miss her mum or to think about how she made Rashid dissapear. When she’s really hungry she can’t wonder if mum maybe gave her away to punish her and isn’t planning on coming back to look for her at all. If she walks around a bit, someone may offer her something to eat.
She counts the tents she passes so she can find her way back later to the tent with the familiar faces. There are two girls there she’s become friends with.
After nine tents two women ask her where she is from. When they ask her about mum she shrugs and feels that pain in her throat again. The women give her apricots and dates. Enough of them to share with her friends.
She starts walking back and then it’s very windy. First no wind and then a storm and then nothing again. The air smells strange. For a moment everything is quiet and then the screaming starts. Laila realizes she is lying on the ground now. She knows the stories about children losing arms or legs. She frantically touches her body everywhere she can to check if everything is still there. She’s praying out loud and begging for everything to still be there. Everything is still there. Her apricots and dates are all over the place so she starts picking them up. People are running. More screams.
She wants to get back to her tent. She looks for the tents she needs to count, but some are gone. She hopes she will get there if she just starts walking. She would want to walk faster, but her legs are not cooperating. It’s like the world is filled with jelly and she needs to wade through it.
She knows she’s reached her tent, because she can still recognize the car that took her here. Even now that it’s burning and covered in flames she knows it’s that car.
A man puts a hand on her shoulder and stops her. ‘Don’t go closer, habibti, this is not a good place for you.’
She already knew that.
She counts six little bodies strewn about. Black and smoking.
‘They were running around like torches’, she hears someone saying. She’s never heard a voice crack like that before.
Laila wonders what happened to the other 12. She can’t see much. Too many people are blocking her view. The man is holding her back.
Did her two friends run around like torches? Laila isn’t sure what torches are, but it sounds like something very bad.
‘This one is still alive!! Oh, dear God, oh dear, God, why didn’t she die, why didn’t she die? Oh dear, God, her skin is falling off. Dear God, let her die, let her die. Why isn’t she dead?’
Laila is shocked. Why do the people want the one that is alive to die? And why is her skin falling off?
Why do impossible things keep happening?
Laila feels something wet on her chest. Her first thought is that it’s blood. But it’s the apricots. She has hugged them so tightly against her body that they’ve turned to mush.
Some of the people around her are pulling their hair out. Some are on their knees, sobbing. Some men are lining up little bodies. Pieces keep dropping from them. She hears a woman scream: ‘How will we ever know who they were?’
Laila says: ‘I know all their names.’
But as soon as she’s said it she realizes that isn’t true. She knows maybe half of them. Still she hears herself say:
‘I can tell you who they are, just let me near them. I have dates and apricots.’
She knows she no longer has apricots, but she hopes to persuade the people to let her go near.
There is no reaction.
It’s then something snaps in Laila and she frees herself from the man’s grip.
She starts walking. She feels very strongly that this is what she needs to do. She can walk. She is going to walk all the way back. It can’t be that difficult. She will walk and walk and walk and never stop walking until she finds her mum. And Rashid.
She walks for two days. She knows because it was night twice. At night she slept by the side of the road, covering herself with whatever she could find. She eats the dates. She gets so thirsty she licks her dress that still tastes like the crushed apricots. Her nails are black with dirt. A paste of dust and sweat sticks to her arms and legs. It’s on her face too. She checks again and again if the numbers mum wrote are still visible. She memorizes both of them and repeats nothing else than the numbers for hours and hours.
When the sun comes up on the third day she feels something else than sadness. She feels rage. With both fists she bangs the ground, again and again until both her hands are bleeding and several nails are torn. And yet she feels better.
She starts walking again.
When she spots her mother with Rashid walking towards her she is afraid she is dreaming and they will vanish into thin air as soon as she reaches them. Her mum falls on her knees and kisses her and doesn’t stop kissing her. Her mum is hugging her so tightly she thinks her ribs could break. Rashid is distracted by a stray dog. ‘A doggie, a doggie, mum, a doggie!’
Her mum is saying something about how she found Rashid immediately, but how her phone had no battery and something about miracles and how clever Laila is.
She wishes her mum would be quiet for a moment so she could ask her what the word ‘torches’ means.
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The Confessor 