The young boys from the line were sitting by the entrance to the hall, in a circle around a pot, like it was a campfire. Each of them held their own cup.

“Tea?” one of them asked me in English as we walked past.

The other two snickered.

Maybe it wasn’t tea in the pot, maybe they were drinking something else altogether. It was too dark for me to be able to see their eyes, whether they were under the influence.

“Do you all live in here?” I asked.

“We were assigned places here, yes,” the first one said.

“He has to sleep on the floor,” the other one said, pointing to the third.

The hall had become crowded over the past couple of days.

“We can take turns. Every third night,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” the first one answered.

They had a good laugh about that. A little listless. A laughter that lingered.

They were my age, but nonetheless younger. They only had themselves.

And were they drinking something? Warmth in the stomach, the gradual heaviness, lightness, the thoughts obliterated. The taste of alcohol on the tongue, in the body. It had been a long time.

But Lou was standing beside me. Lou, whose eyes were rolling with drowsiness, who said nothing, but whose presence was strong nonetheless.

I wanted to push her along with me into the hall, but the first guy grabbed hold of my shin.

“C’mon, have a seat,” he said.

“Have some tea,” the other one said.

“Mint tea,” the third one said. “Found it in a garden along the way. It’s been hanging from my knapsack, drying out.”

Mint tea? Was it only mint tea?

“I just have to put the little one to bed first,” I said.

Their names were Christian, Caleb, and Martin. They spoke to me quickly, in broken English, just as bad as my own. Christian and Caleb met in a camp up in the mountains farther south, a camp from which everyone had fled. They had picked up Martin along the way.

They came from southern Spain, all three of them, from the desert. Nobody could be bothered to say much about the time before. But they had many stories from the road and from the last camp. All the stories ended in laughter, as if the things they’d experienced were from one long road trip with the boys. It was only when they talked about the guy in the line that they changed, the hardness came over them again. They called him a bastard from the north, a water bastard.

“They have the Ebro, so they think they have everything,” Caleb said.

“A tiny corner of Spain that wants to isolate itself from the rest,” Martin said.

“They criticize the water countries, but do the same thing themselves, in their own country,” Christian said.