She was born in the last of the colonial years, old enough to automatically become French at a later time in her life when she would have nowhere else to go. She was a teacher, worked at the Alliance Française in Saigon for seventeen years. She left the country, with her family, in 1981; they risked their lives on a leaky boat, more afraid of the victorious regime than of the pirates in the south China sea. There is a certain resonance in French to the English words “boat-people” that is lost in English, because it is reserved for that time when to leave Vietnam meant to survive, somehow, the terrible aftermath of a lost war. And when she says it, in her voice that is soft and questioning with a quiet humor, there is a resignation and dignity that comes from somewhere inside her, a place we can only understand intellectually.She spent seven years in France, then her family wanted to be reunited with her brother, who had made it to America. They never questioned the opportunity, and the United States welcomed them. They had nothing, but they were together. She did odd jobs, then finally got a position with the French embassy in Washington. She’s been there for sixteen years; she’s only three years away from retirement.

I’ve never met her, but I’ve often heard her voice on the telephone. She lives with her sister, and has never married. I imagine a modest, quiet life, routine and secure. She has been slowly trying to put money away for her retirement, but she doesn’t have much; only what she has been paying to the French state. And she lost all the years she’d been putting money by at the Alliance Française. Still, she’s been thinking that perhaps with her family they can pull together, pool their resources, enjoy retirement and begin to live in the fullness of every hour being one’s own.

Or that is what she might have been thinking until a few months ago, until the IRS pinpointed this quiet, model employee as the model victim for their cynical retroactive reinterpretation of the tax laws affecting consular and embassy employees (cf. my earlier blogue, Liberté, égalité, fiscalité). She tells me bluntly, as if it is just another blow of fate, “I will owe four months of salary. What will I do? How will I live?”

Four months of salary…is it relative? I don’t know how much she earns, or how much she has put aside. But she implied that she does not have enough to live on for four months without salary. Another model employee might have that money invested and earning interest, might not be so hurt by the loss. A third might criticize and say it’s her fault, that she should have put money aside for just such eventualities. Cold figures pierce like knife blades when they’re your own, whatever people say, whatever their situations. For me, the mere fact that she is from Vietnam, that she suffered through the war and the aftermath, risked her life to end up in Washington DC only to be fingered by some bureaucrats as if she were a tax evading criminal (as we all are, the way things stand at the moment), is deeply unjust, and in her case, somehow immoral.

Of course that same third employee, or anyone, might argue that the US government can’t make exceptions for refugees…there are plenty of employees from war-torn countries, they don’t have a greater moral right to tax exemption or anything like that. This is, yet again, part of life’s deep unfairness. Unfair that it is always the same countries which suffer, and the same ones which get off easy; perhaps you can apply that to people, too. And go home with your conscience tranquille, your guilt-free conscience; after all, you don’t work for the IRS.

But something troubles me deeply in her case. Perhaps it’s symbolic of all the things wrong with the world, and it is my deep (Libra) sense of life’s injustices that make me want to urge her to chain herself to the fence outside the White House in protest. She didn’t make it here all the way from a war and trauma and whatever else she does not say in her quiet voice to have this slap in the face.

She tells me she went up to the woman from the IRS who was informing all the miscreant local-hire employees of the French government on how to pay their taxes, went up to her and said with honest concern and distress: “I owe four months of salary, my accountant says. What am I going to do? I don’t have that money. I don’t have it, how can I pay it?”

The woman from the IRS turned and looked at her and said, “Unfortunately, it’s the law.”

And that IRS woman must have gone home that night with her guilt-free conscience because she had remembered to say Unfortunately. As if to say, Yes, lady, I hear your pain but there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, that is the excuse of all the people who stand behind the law when they know they are deeply, morally wrong. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, we’ve just napalmed your village. Unfortunately, Zainab is a refugee from Baghdad living on a pittance in Jordan. Unfortunately, your son has been wounded in Afghanistan. We’re all guilty at one point or another of saying things qualified by Unfortunately without one thousandth of the portent of those three sentences I just made up.

Money, at the moment, is the law, and there’s no unfortunately about it. My friend at the Embassy says she is praying, praying for all of us. And we need it.