The murmur of men's voices. The curtain doesn't go up but parts. I'm looking down from ‘house right’, not exactly from the gods but, shall we say, from the second circle.
I recognize the men. They are standing in a circle in the middle of the street fifty yards away. I have exchanged nods with each of them and spoken to two on several occasions. And yet something about their appearance pierces me. Their faces are grey and serious, and perhaps because of my angle of view their circle seems compressed, despite their efforts to self-distance. The two I know are Romanian, but I hear them speaking German. The others, I must suppose, are not Romanian. I do know they all work on building sites. I've heard people say they work long hours for less than the minimum wage, pay no tax, no medical insurance, make too much noise, have no registered place of abode.
I know people who have said this. I also know that the same people know the men in the circle to be among the most vulnerable, in danger of deportation, uninsured work injury, denunciation, physical attack, and that they don't work cheaply for fun. They know all this. But they still say these things. I'm saying them now. All of us, including the men in the circle, are united in realizing something is terribly wrong. But whatever it is appears to belong to silence and the required order of things.
