I’m glad you went, was all she said. It sounds good.
Then he asked her about her refugee division and what they were doing. He said to her, There’s something like 140 million of them now, and growing all the time. That’s like the entire population of France and Germany combined. It’s as bad as it’s ever been.
I know.
You have to work up a plan all the governments will agree to, he told her. Have you looked at what happened at end of the world wars? There were millions of refugees wandering around starving. They put Fridtjof Nansen in charge of the problem after World War One, and he came up with a system they called Nansen passports, which gave refugees the right to go wherever they wanted to, free passage anywhere.
Is that true? she asked.
I think so. I’ve been reading around, not very systematically, but you’ve got a team to throw at this. There should be Nansen passports again.
She sighed. There’s a lot of countries won’t accept such a thing, I’m afraid.
Do like you did with the central banks. It’s a plan or chaos. The camps, I know you’ve visited them, but what I see there is that it’s like this jail here, but worse, because they don’t have any sense of how long they’ll be held, and they never did anything in the first place. Europe is just punishing the victims. Sudan takes care of more refugees than all of Europe, and Sudan is a wreck. People come to Europe and they get called economic migrants, as if that wasn’t just what their own citizens are supposed to do, try to make a better life, show some initiative. But if you come to Europe to do it you’re criminalized. You’ve got to change that.
She shook her head. It isn’t just Europe.
But you’re in Europe, Frank said. He stared at her. She was looking at her kafi fertig. They were falling back again into the pattern of their first night, probably not a good idea: he hectoring her to do more, her resenting that.
On the other hand, here she was, so many years later. It was strange. He didn’t know what to make of it. But suddenly he realized it was important to him. He wanted her to visit. That represented something he couldn’t name. But he needed it, whatever it was. This Irish woman was kind of crazy, kind of ominously interested in him, really, and quite often a bit vengeful and harsh, pushing him around in ways that bothered him, very irritating; but he had gotten used to her visiting. He needed her.
You should go to the Alps, he said. Remember you told me that, and you were right. Now I’m telling you the same thing.
She nodded. Maybe so.
80
I’ve had to push him every step of the way. He’s just like one of his oxen, that’s why he likes them so much, also why he doesn’t like me. I’m like one of the birds standing on the oxen poking them in the back. He’d be so much happier if I were an ox. Instead I’m his wife and it’s a stupid fate but I have no one to blame but myself, and truthfully, I love him; but I don’t want to starve for that.
So he inherited the butt end of his father’s property, two hectares as far from the river as his family’s land got, which meant it had been used as a dump for many years, and first we had to dig through a thick layer of various kinds of crap, even pay to get some of the worst of it carted off, at which point we had a triangle of dirt hard as a marble floor. First job was breaking up the hardpan surface, second was getting an irrigation channel cut over to us from the cousin’s property upstream. I drove him to drive his brothers and nephews to help us, and eventually that all got done and it was time to amend the soil. Here his stupid oxen were of some help, as we could rent nearby pasturage for them and collect their manure and turf it into our land. Of course the water from the ditch just ran over our property at first, carrying everything loose to the river, so we had to deal with that, berm, terrace, channelize, polder, whatever. I did most of that, being the only one who could work an hour straight, also read a level. Progress was slow.
Then we heard the rumors that the district council would be giving out money for carbon retention. Given the state of our property, this would be getting paid for what we had to do anyway to keep from starving, so I told the ox to get registered right away. He dithered and mooed as always, why waste my time, he complained, those things never work. Quit it! I said. Get down there now or I’ll divorce you and tell everyone why. He went and got us registered.
That meant a team that came through the village dropped by our place for about an hour, and took samples to get a benchmark figure. One of them was looking around at our place with an expression that made it clear we were obviously going to be setting a good low benchmark. Our daughter was pestering him as he worked, and he took some of our soil and put it in a glass of water, swirled the water, then stopped and showed her how at the moment he stopped moving the glass, the water in it cleared almost immediately. All the grit and mud floating around
