CHAPTER FOURIt was three-thirty in the morning and Michael couldn’t sleep. Three-thirty in the morning didn’t seem that different from three-thirty in the afternoon. Imprisonment didn’t only mean the loss of freedom; it meant the loss of meaning: everything you did was just serving time and if you weren’t careful, and Michael wasn’t always careful, it would be easy to feel that nothing mattered anymore.
The bed was the wrong bed; the room was the wrong room. The morbid shadows that existed at night time in the corners of a prison cell unnerved him. They made him think of the first few nights away from home after his mother left his father, that same feeling of temporary exile that turned out to be not quite so temporary after all. He drew a breath in as he found himself back in the emigra
