Witness

3 - A Million Pieces

For fourteen hellish days, I clung to my sister's journal and tried to heal. Isidoros kept my wounds clean and well tended when he was present, but for most of the day, he was out with Agathe, running water to the protestors on the barricades and providing basic medical attention. They would stagger in again at dusk, when Linos and Marko took over.

Every bang of the door sent me diving to a hiding spot still, but Agathe promised me that we were in a safe space.

My little sister's words cut me deeper than the rubble had. I saw her so perfectly clearly in ink, wounded by the situation they had forced us into, incensed by the injustices stacked on us like millstones, but fueled by a fire of an optimism I could not understand. I turned it over and over in my head, trying the idealism on for size, but it failed.

I know we can be more than what we are. We are proud people beaten down, that is all. We can pick ourselves up and wipe away the blood, we can stand beside any people in the world as equals again. That has to be the end: everyone is equal with equity.

I was jaded to the idea that we could ever be equal. They enshrined our inability to have our own voices in law. Our numbers on the census never translated into representation that meant anything except lectures on 'pulling our weight' and dropping 'a culture of hyper-sensitivity'. Our interactions with the Ieró were rigidly defined by the courts, enforced with the full power of the State.

I will not be silenced by the violence State or its polizí. Let them wither on the vine as the people taste free air and support each other. One day, Astera will be a very different place, a home for all, not a home for some and a prison for the rest.

How could Endeis write so gushingly of freedom if she had never experienced it? How could she reach beyond the bare scraps of dignity afforded by some to this divine, all-encompassing virtue? How could she shed the shame like an outgrown shirt? How did she know it was possible?

The world is ever-changing. We see the leaves bloom, the grapes swell, the grey appear in hair. People die, stone erodes, even metal loses its integrity to time. Someday the universe itself will end, with a bang or maybe a whisper. Why should we look at these skeletons around us, these cages, and assume they are eternal?

I pressed my eyes closed as those words, in her familiar sloping handwriting, burned into my brain. Whatever the horrors, I wanted to take her place. If anyone could make a difference, it was Endeis. Now jaded, bitter Karsa was holding the bag, figuratively and literally.

Agathe trudged in with Isidoros at her heels, both exhausted and funereal from the march. "Karsa, I have some news for you."

"Endeis?"

"There's going to be a trial, but the news is everywhere. They say she and all the others confessed in writing and signed the confessions."

"The polizí have had two weeks to beat the words out," Isidoros went to the sink to wash the residual teargas off his hands. It stuck on sweaty skin, burning for as long as it was there.

"When?"

Agathe chewed her lip thoughtfully. "Tonight. Everyone will be watching. The bar down the street has a vdaní if we want to use it."

I shut the journal and tucked it away in the hiding spot under a bedroom floorboard. My body still ached and stung as I followed Agathe out onto the street, but no amount of pain would dissuade me from seeing my sister. I covered my hair with a scarf. I could pull the wide fabric to hide my face if we passed near a camera. Not that there were many in this district, particularly so close to a bar. People hurled bricks at them or stole them.

The Referee was our destination, a squat and ugly sports bar. It reeked of alcohol and nicotine smoke when we entered. Never before had I been inside and seen so many people. Everyone in the neighborhood had shuffled in to stand like sardines in a can. Agathe used her sharp elbows and authoritative glare to get us close enough to see well.