…of émigrés

‘There,’ says my father. He locks us into the room. ‘Now either she’ll bring masses of food, or else she’ll be back with the police.’
Then we stand there in silence and look at each other. All of a sudden my father looks terribly pale and tired. He sits my mother down on the bed, and then he falls down. His head is on her knees. My mother lays both her hands on his hair.
There is silence. The room is small, cold, ugly, with no carpet. On the brown floor are some squeezed-out tubes of paint - blue, green, red. On a tiny wobbly table is a bunch of roses, and everything smells of dust and cellars. Under the roses there are seven little booklets. Hey, those are passports; we’ve got seven passports!

[Child of All Nations, Keun, I.]