The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby

Author:Emma Jane Kirby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141985237
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

It was too windy really; the palm trees were painfully contorted and a white plastic café chair that someone had forgotten to tie down was hurtling along the street on its back, but the optician had to go running all the same. He had to clear his head.

That morning in the shop, after he had returned from having his coffee, he had sat in front of the computer pretending to do paperwork, but instead had looked up every article he could find about Italy’s former colony, Eritrea. The whole place, he’d learned, was run like a military garrison: every sixteen-year-old had to join the army and apparently the poor kids were stuck in it for life. The girls as well as the boys! He wasn’t quite sure why he was being so secretive about what he was doing, but each time that he felt Teresa approaching, he had flipped the screen back onto his anodyne spreadsheets.

He’d read about the traffickers too, in the shop. He’d read the wretched testaments of migrants who’d fled through the Sahara and he had learned what the traffickers did to those desperate people who dared to dream of Europe. They stole their money and their mobile phones and beat them. As he tied his laces he remembered the proud-looking woman they had rescued yesterday, the woman in the turquoise T-shirt who had not cried. Did she have anyone to whom she could tell her story, someone who could comfort her? How was it possible that these people were so alone?

He picked up the photograph he kept on his desk and smiled ruefully. It was a picture of his sons when they were adolescents, roaring with delight on a garish merry-go-round with their mother, radiant with joy at doing something so wonderfully childish, completely carefree. The optician closed the shop door behind him and winced at the buffeting wind. He thought of the faces on Galata’s deck. Some of those guys he’d pulled from the water had been so young – children really.

He hopscotched his way through the flying ice-cream pots and crisp packets that were freewheeling across the street. What family life, what kind of future could those kids have, he wondered, scattered all over their country in training camps, far away from home and forced to dig the fields or mend the roads? They were barely paid anything. He hadn’t been able to finish the article about what happened to those who were caught absconding; reading about the brutality of Eritrea’s prisons had made him nauseous.

Mind you, he snorted to himself as he ran past the sheltered terrace of a small café where a dozen or so carabinieri were installed sipping fruit juice, Lampedusa had started to look like a damned police state itself. Everywhere you went these days on the island, you were greeted with uniforms, truncheons and guns. It didn’t exactly give an image of welcome.

A police siren began to wail in the distance and two squad cars came speeding over

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