8 hours don’t make a day

A story about the art of disappearance

Before Sara showed me how easy it was to alter documents, I was merely a social worker on probation at the Emergency Shelter for Women in Berlin. I remember the first intake I handled alone: a woman with two plastic bags, no socks, and an expired visa. She handed me a folder fraying at the edges, thick with documents, some printed, some handwritten, most of them creased like she’d slept on them. The woman kept pointing to a page stamped Aussetzung der Abschiebung (Temporary Suspension of Deportation), asking if it was still valid. I told her I didn’t know, even though I did. It wasn’t.

In those first weeks, the hardest part wasn’t the job itself, but the break room. The fluorescent-lit normalcy, my colleagues’ boxed lunches and chatter about their weekends. It all felt like a language I had no access to. There was another language I wanted to be fluent in: the one the residents developed in their distress — their own gestures and codes for surviving a world intent on erasing them.

So, my real community was forming among the residents, amidst the chaos, tending to the sporadic stream of crises and makeshift plans. Their hive of constant crisis, with its overlapping traumas and contradictory paperwork, reminded me viscerally of the women from my Turkish childhood, the ones running the textile shops, who had so much potential eclipsed by necessity. For them, work wasn’t a career; it was survival — sweat, debt, uncertainty. Back then, I was powerless to help them. The women in the shelter were living that same truth, just in a different country and under a different system. At this stage of my life, I was filled with a displaced benevolence for every soul who walked through our doors, yet my job was one of cold limitation: filling out the forms that could decide whether or not they disappeared.