Dreams and Legends: Aim To Engage Event Entries

I Can Find Anyone - Day #19 - The Journal

Let's get out of the city, Emad said. He forgets what an ordeal it is. He gets to drag the chair onto the train—the manual one, ugh—even though I can walk pretty well today, who knows about tomorrow. Here's hoping I don't have to get up on the entire six hour trip to Mar Del Plata, but drinking all this water to avoid feeling faint, it's probably a lost cause. I'm still a little mad at Emad even though I'm actually having fun.

I lean on his side to nap. There's something under my bottom, in the gap between the seats. It's a pocket journal, spine cracked, pages battered. Someone must have forgotten it here.

I flip it open to the last page with writing. Anything good?

"Voyeur," says Emad.

My Arabic and his Spanish are spotty, so we speak mostly English to each other. It's nice to hear my mother tongue in Argentina anyway.

He's not wrong, either.

"Information broker," I correct teasingly.

"Oh, that's why you're reading that."

"I'm reading it because we've still got two hours to go to Mar Del Plata."

24 May 2018

The journal is in Spanish, and the last entry is only a couple of days ago. It says:

Bury me in Mar Del Plata, where they took my son away.

She must have been one of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. That organization of women had succeeded in at least seeing some of the government torturers punished. The Mothers' children were the Disappeared, who had been kidnapped, tortured, murdered, lost to the pages of revisionist history books.

I don't even have his bones to bury.

I start reading aloud to Emad, flipping around in the journal to find context. This woman's name is not in the journal, but her son's name is Noa Rus. He shares my given name, unusual for my gender, common for his. Other-Noa's mother had survived Birkenau and moved to Argentina, fallen in love with a Spanish Gentile, and birthed a son, who was kidnapped by the military dictatorship. That was back in 1977, and she still doesn't even know if he's dead. If he were alive, he would be 54. Surely he would have come home.

"I want to find her son for her," I tell Emad.

"We have rules. We don't piss off the Argentinian government, and if we hunt governments, we get hazard pay."

"We're not after the government. This is easymode. I can find anybody." I pull my laptop out from under the seat—and instantly regret it, super dizzy, but I lay back on Emad's shoulder, tether the laptop to my phone as a hotspot, and search. A woman old enough to have survived WWII, surname Rus, married 1959 or close, recently moved to or currently visiting Mar Del Plata...

"She probably can't afford us," says Emad.

Here we go. Her name is Margalita, and I have an address.

"We'll do a pro bono. We're already on our way there."