Exile and closed center...
In Robert's room two other guys were sleeping. They were lying peacefully and snoring. He thought to himself that these guys did not appreciate their conditions as pre-extradicts to countries they had fled long ago.
One had left his country seven years ago and the other ten years ago. He knew what it was like to be extradited. He had been forced back twice. Tortured and humiliated for months, he threw himself into exile and took the high road, the Sahara. He had returned to Belgium, and now he was pondering how he would return to Belgium. He did not expect the judge to be lenient. His crime was not only being undocumented, but the theft he was committing in the city centre of the capital, the chic district of the European Union. He had been arrested stealing Boss suits from a shop on the new street.
He had a whole suitcase of stolen designer suits with him. In order to steal, you have to have a wife, otherwise the man stays quiet. The rulers who are corrupted, the civil servants who pay for their services, the petty thieves and the delinquents, all have women waiting in the corner to empty their pockets. Robert also had his own wife. He pilfered from department stores and the woman who waited in the corner, he called her "second office", emptied his pockets. He emptied her pockets. The snow had just stopped. The white grass fascinated him wonderfully. It had been a long time since he had enjoyed the beauty of nature. Seeing the snow in the middle of the night, what magic! It made him dream and he went back to his childhood. In primary school, when he leafed through school books, such as Alice in Wonderland and other comics about snow in Europe, he was excited. He thought where heaven and earth meet is snow. When he got home, he would throw himself into these books and fall back into his reverie.
To leave, to leave, was the only word that nagged at him. But he couldn't leave because he was a little kid who knew he was vulnerable. But now, as he recalled those distant memories, he smiled inside. Ironically, when he arrived in the snowy countries he was turned away. In the closed centre, people were sleeping, others were awake. They could not sleep. That evening, when Robert was combining his situation as a prisoner with his memories of the past, a twenty-year-old girl was hanging herself and other women were saving her in extremis. Arabs sitting in the corridor chatted sadly. Two young Russians did not know how to sleep and looked at the ceiling. He had just remembered his lawyer's own words: "You know, Robert, it's back to you because your embassy has agreed to issue a safe conduct.
He was forty-two years old, he had spent more than ten years in Belgium. Without papers, the foreigner had no choice. Either he worked in the dark, which made the bosses happy; they could exploit this person without rights to perfection. Or he had to steal at the risk of being caught and deported from Belgium. In any case, said Robert, you are at the mercy of the police for a forced return, so why work for a small crooked boss. You should have robbed the department stores and made money. During all those years of pilfering, he had an idea to build himself a house in the country to show the locals that if they saw him back he was a successful guy. As he was tired of staying in the white man's country, he decided to settle down in his own house.
The first time he stole a Volkswagen Golf car, he sold it and invested the money back home. He bought a piece of land. And every time he stole something and managed to sell it, he sent the money to his trusted sister. His sister received help from him every month. She liked him. The good girl built his house little by little and one day she announced that the construction was finished. She sent him pictures. He couldn't believe his eyes. A villa with its own pool and garden. The height of joy. By stealing, pilfering, he had achieved this. Dreaming, he fell asleep.
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