“Borders” by Pia Swainer, London

topic: BORDERS medium: TEXT

photo submitted by Lorenzo Burlando

The first page of the exercise book returned her stare, blank and insolent. Little squares, plotted with indigo lines, challenged her with their tiny white spaces, pregnant with possibility, daring her to fill them with the pen on the desk. It was still capped, unused.

The teacher’s voice was a kindly, weary drone, navigating its endless course. The speech swooped up and down, surging and waning like a radio being tuned in, then out, then static…then…back. The sounds were more familiar to her now. Still, tuts and rasps jarred at times; words caught in her ear like liquid poured too fast into the top of a bottle. She understood half, at most.

“Nation, and what constitutes it…” the teacher underlined the first word twice, with yellow chalk. It sent a fine, soft spray of lemony powder onto her blouse. Was it a history lesson? Or that other one, the one that she thought would be so different – places, not people, wasn’t that the idea? – but it was often about people, too, that one. People and their countries, how they marked them, sculpted their surfaces like icing on a cake, fashioned towns and buildings and roads, banging nails into the ground and staking their claims to dollhouse utopias.

The teacher switched on a machine on wheels; its lamp threw a watery gold square onto the board. Pastel-colored shapes glowed into view, outlined and annotated by black lines and characters. Yes. It was the other one, the lesson with the maps. People drawing lines around regions and countries, slicing them like cakes. Little portions, triangles and squares of place. Like the empty grid in front of her. Still white, with linear, lilac smirks. The pen hadn’t moved. Last time, the teacher had asked them: “What is a map?”

Amid a sea of waving hands, she’d sought out the long, dark fringe, the dirty sweater.

“Nicoleta, what do you think?” she smiled.

Nicoleta’s head dipped, a fringe of hair obscuring her eyes. She chewed her thumbnail. For her, maps were stories. You heard them: directions, warnings, and cautionary tales. They were decorated and embellished with smells and weather forecasts. Scale was measured in human fatigue; when footfall dragged and slowed, and nightfall drew a line under the distance covered. Maps were words, translated into visions behind closed eyelids and then beamed onto gravel-paved car parks, fields, canal towpaths.

When she arrived at the school the social assistant had given her new clothes – “Well, new to you!” – and told her that literacy had nothing to do with nationality or lifestyle and it was a child’s right, whatever their parents’ culture. Her classmates tried to welcome her with chatter, questions, crumbs of wordy welcome. When this failed, they led her to the big, multi-colored map tacked to the wall and swept their hands over Eastern Europe, encouraging her to plant an illuminating forefinger.

But for Nicoleta, it was just a picture, abstract and beautiful. It was like the ones her brothers produced with crayons while they waited inside the motor home, while her mother spoke to the men outside. When they drew until the dogs stopped barking and her mother came in and started to wash the pots with a ragged sigh.