The Human Library

So we found our attention drawn to a more dramatic story. The family at the table behind us was now speaking to reporters. It turned out that they were refugees from Afghanistan, scheduled to be deported in four weeks, and were about to become the showpiece of a local socialist politician’s press conference. The family’s teenaged children all fiddled with mobile phones, except for the youngest daughter, who was in a wheelchair. Her handicap, coupled with her big brown Amélie eyes and Shirley Temple smile, would be a trump card, played to shame Rita Verdonk, the Netherlands’ Minister for Immigration and Integration and the face of Europe’s tightening immigration policies.

At 6:30 p.m., the family crossed the street to the square in front of town hall. I walked over with Krol, who guessed that only a few protesters would join in. But word had spread that afternoon, and more than a hundred people were now assembled in the cold. As we stood, waiting to see the family paraded before us, I couldn’t shake the question: what lesson did the human book teach its borrower?

Perhaps one isn’t meant to look to humans for the carefully crafted lessons that books provide. Or perhaps there were lessons to be found not in the human book I’d checked out, but in the library itself — in the sum of hopeful components gathered together to change the way their society worked. I slipped away from the still-assembling crowd, walking the perimeter of the square on the way to catch my train. Eight months after the family’s deportation deadline had elapsed, I inquired into their whereabouts. They were still in Almelo.