Portrait of a Nation

As I write, the artist is putting what may or may not be the final touches to a small portrait of her niece. It is screwed to the wall to the left of two larger, other pieces on the wall, and is like an appendix. Our children meanwhile have some friends here from school and I can hear their laughter and mock screams wafting without danger through the doors leading from the back garden. They are cheerful children, our three little guests, and I can well remember their parents when they first came to this country, though we did not know them at the time, only saw them from afar. They were refugees and the general area from which they had come I had visited a few years before. As I watched their severe expressions searching their unfamiliar way down the street at the time, I remember feeling familiar with their look, their haunted gaze. It was that same look of a lot of the young people from where they came - people who knew too much, too fast. Anyway, now their children are fully integrated and their father is working in a local bakery. The mother is a popular member of the community and her chief concern today is in sending sufficient funds to her family back home. 'They want bread, we have so much bread, from the bakery, but we cannot send it,' she says. We have all manner of refugees in this country. One man who hijacked a plane in order to get here not so long ago is now working at the country's leading airport. The artist is made exotic by being from here.