Jeremy Frost
fastens them to the floor, but I slide the metal bar up and give the
doors a push. They move a bit, but don’t open.
“So now the problem is Suzy,” I say, because I know Inge
won’t leave her bike outside, but then Inge gives the doors a hard
shove and they open.
Inge goes to fetch her bike and I go to fetch my packs. We cross
the school grounds and we are aware that we are visible in the
waning light to any villagers who might be watching, so we quickly
and quietly get the bike into the school and close the doors.
Once inside we can hear a truck cruising slowly past the back
side of the school where the construction trailer is, and we see it
through the windows and we duck.
“Do you think they saw us?” Inge whispers. I shrug.
The truck stops and someone gets out of it. We hear voices, and
we hold our breath, smiling at each other with wide eyes, but after a
few minutes they get back into the truck and drive away.
I show Inge the room with the mattresses. For some reason she
flips a light switch, and it works—the lights come on—and then she
quickly turns the switch back off so as not to alert the village that
there are intruders in their village school.
“Maybe I can block the window,” I say, and for the next ten
minutes I arrange a mattress to cover the window and rags to fill in
the cracks.
I turn on the light and Inge creeps out the door to check it. She
can see the light shining through cracks in the window despite my
efforts but we use the light anyway when we need it. In the
meantime we have our headlamps.
In silence we arrange our kitchen on a table in the hallway. I
prepare the tomatoes and the garlic while Inge boils the spaghetti on
her cooking stove. After draining the hot water on the floor she adds
what I’ve prepared with some olive oil and she gives me half of the
pasta in my green plastic bowl and we have our dinner.
We then retire to our little room, where we each have a double
mattress bed. We stay up for a while chatting about our time
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