The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  In Venice we discovered that travelling isn’t cheap. We could barely afford a slice of pizza or an arancini rice ball, let alone hotel rooms. Maman negotiated her way around cities: if we arrive at midnight and leave at 5 a.m., if we sleep in the service room, can we have a room for next to nothing?

  Some Barba kids had enrolled in local Italian schools, but Maman insisted on English. Living in a remote village with no car limited our options, but she found an American homeschool that met inside a Roman church. It was over an hour away by bus. More importantly, we would miss lunch at Barba. So, Maman devised a plan that would enable us to join the homeschoolers but still get all three meals from Hotel Barba. She enlisted the help of the punkish staffer who would give our lunches to the Afghan grandmother, who in turn would wrap them up and save them for us to eat at night. We would save our fresher dinners to take with us for lunch the next day. No matter what was served for dinner, Maman would put it inside a sandwich (hard, crusty rosetta rolls came with every meal) and hang the sandwiches in plastic bags over the balcony where they might cool and survive the morning bus ride to Rome. I still remember the singularly satisfying texture of a rosetta made with pot roast and a layer of green peas, the roll finally soft enough after soaking in gravy overnight.

  And yet, the act itself was embarrassing and so very visible. The bringing in of the lunches, now cold, to the canteen at dinnertime, the packing away of the fresher dinners. We filled the bread rolls with strange things: mashed potatoes, pasta, chicken, slices of meat under carrot. To this day, whatever their quality, leftover sandwiches evoke survival for me.

  Because we joined the homeschoolers in spring, we didn’t have workbooks and we had fallen far behind our grade. Again, Maman spent days erasing hundreds of used pages, making sure she removed every marking so we could do our own work without the temptation of old answers peeking through. As the weather grew warm, we spent our mornings and afternoons in the courtyard, Maman erasing her fingers raw, while Daniel and I raced through the grades we had missed: fourth for me, first for him. It cut the tedium and soon our boredom died down.

  Then, one day, a drama erupted among the adults that captured the attention of every refugee in Mentana. A Romanian wife fled into the arms of a young friend, the only other Romanian living at Hotel Barba aside from her husband. I was captivated by their love affair. Why was this woman so unhappy with her husband? Why was she willing to risk her asylum, a life of every possibility, for a handful of sad, runaway days with her friend?

  Probably the couple had befriended their compatriot, a student with a guitar and a spasm of curly brown hair, before their sentence at Hotel Barba began. Maybe they met on the journey. Day after shapeless day, the three sat in that Italian courtyard, smoking and suffering quietly together, awaiting their release from this house of political outcasts. I imagined that they spoke of home. Mostly, they watched the children play.

  She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was flat, her eyes sleepy – but she had a sly smile, the look of a secret always on her mouth. She was tall with dark hair, wide hips and painted-on jeans. The couple had no children. The husband was clean-cut with sad eyes and a kind smile. He worshipped his wife. A few days after their arrival, though he was college educated, he found a cash job as a gardener so he could buy dresses for her. ‘So she doesn’t feel like a refugee,’ he said. Residents of Barba didn’t have jobs, though it wouldn’t have been unheard of to help the local builder lay some brick, or hold down a bleating lamb for the butcher, or deliver a few newspapers in the early morning. But this man laboured with purpose, every day, and it seemed that he craved to diminish himself to show her his love. What then – the adults wondered aloud – did she want?

  In the evenings, the husband returned from a day in the gardens, looking worn. He drank a beer on his balcony, too sated with work to engage in theatre. His wife pined and slinked. She whispered with her lover behind the hotel. One day in the sunny courtyard, with the husband just there, the student looked at her with a hunger so intense that I recoiled.

  Every night the three shared dinner. At mealtimes, we sat with our own tribe, slipped into our native tongue, complained in our own way. As a community, the residents of Barba had only a handful of rituals: gatherings around the mail cubbies, displays of affection for the boy who ladled the soup course with a singsong ‘Zuppa!’, morning stampedes for the strawberry jam and collective contempt for the grape which seemed to multiply and became a symbol of our many deprivations. And, of course, we gossiped. The women whispered about the Romanian wife, ‘She’s so foolish, so cruel.’ Once, in an attempt to teach me about reputation, wisdom and gravitas, Maman said, ‘Do you know how many strangers from all over the world got to know her only as that stupid woman?’

  Like Maman, I believed she was stupid. Soon, her husband was spending most daylight hours away from Hotel Barba, sweating outdoors despite the chill, to make extra money for her. He would return after dark and give her small gifts and kiss her and they would smoke together. But she spent her days flirting with her friend and talking to a Polish woman who became a repository for her breathless confessions.

  Maman told me that in Hotel Barba, no one really knew anybody else’s situation. Maybe the shabby old man at the breakfast table was a brilliant professor. Maybe the red-clad woman humming in the yard was an heiress or a housemaid or a doctor with nimble fingers. Maybe she had escaped political or religious persecution. All we knew was that everyone was bored, watching each other and why would you want to be their clown only to find out later that the squinting eyes fixed on you belonged to a president or a poet or a judge?

  For months, I watched the Romanians and tried to guess their story. As with all Barba guests, something frightening had happened and they had fled. Their rooms were on the same hallway as ours. An agile person could climb from balcony to balcony. Once I climbed to the couple’s room and knocked on the window and the husband gave me a sip of beer.

  Another time I wandered into the empty dining room. I found the wife alone with her friend, their heads almost touching. She looked up abruptly and offered me hot milk and sugar with a few drops of coffee. Later, in the courtyard, her husband held her hand and they watched me in that amused, longing way lonely couples look at other people’s children. I thought, ‘She loves both men, but she’s already married so it’s too late.’ I didn’t attach any heartache to the too-lateness of it.

  A few months into our stay news spread that the young woman had abandoned her husband and fled with the young friend to the Swiss border on foot, hoping to cross over illegally. She was tired of waiting for asylum, tired of the boredom, tired of her husband. She was withering. The rumours flared up again. The lovers had vacated Hotel Barba, becoming fugitives in Italy. I’m not sure if we were allowed simply to leave Hotel Barba. Yes, we left every day for school, but could a person just pick up their bags and move out? We were, after all, carrying flimsy documentation and were largely unemployable, un-house-able and without options. We were social cripples and Barba was our temporary guardian. What would they do alone in the inhospitable bowels of a foreign country with nothing but their passion and his guitar? ‘They’re just bored,’ the older women would mutter. ‘The days are so long here.’ I’m sure that these words were whispered in Barba’s many languages, though my gossipmonger of choice was the Afghan grandmother.

  The pair had disappeared in a delirium of spring fever and, for some days afterward, I had my first opportunity to witness heartbreak up close. The husband grew pale. He sat alone in the courtyard, or in his room drinking dark beers, his head in his hands, probably thinking he could have bought her more things. Some days he sat on his balcony, holding a frothy mug, looking out at the winding gravel driveway. He stopped working.

  What were they doing, alone in the open world? Did the student hold her hand as they walked? Did she lose her fingers in his curls? Did they pretend to be Italian and rent a room and share a bed? I imagine he strummed guitar for her on Italian roadsides,
spending their meagre lire (too few for train tickets) on pizza and Coke to share with her as he flagged kind motorists, shivered in his thin jacket and slowly noticed her flaws. Back then, I pretended they were visiting Pisa and Venice as we had done – I pictured him kissing her on the cheek and I blushed at the idea. At nine, I was curious and opinionated and I judged her. Her husband was the more handsome one anyway, I decided, and look how he suffered for her sake. I hated her and hoped God would punish her with perpetual wandering, her story never believed.

  In time, the runaways returned. They were caught at the border and sent back to the camp with their heads hanging. My memory puts regret on their faces. Only a few months more and they might have been welcomed into a new country, able to leave Hotel Barba with respect and warm goodbyes. Now here they were again, back in their old rooms, apart and enduring the silences of the man they had betrayed. Probably their recklessness delayed all three of their visas.

  They had no choice but to reconcile with the husband, to eat with him silently every night, to make chitchat about books, to smoke in the courtyard. Everyone watched the spectacle with awe and secret fascination. What gall! Where would she sleep? Of course, she returned to her husband’s room, since she was assigned to it. After that, the student spent his days in his single room – as in the outside world, it was his moment to fade away, leaving the couple to suffer alone. Still, at meals, they were the whole of Romania and they shared a table. Maybe soon a new exile would arrive and relieve them of the burden of three.

  As we watched stories unfurl wildly around us, our own unspooled quietly. We had interviews at the American embassy. A soft-spoken woman interviewed Daniel and me. She saw that we had been raised Christians and she believed Maman’s story. We were never accused of lying; we didn’t have to shape our story to make it fit their fancies, as others had done.

  We were told that things would go faster if we secured a sponsor, a connection to the United States. We didn’t know anyone. We had hoped for asylum in England, but Maman’s mother Maman Moti had, I was told, refused to sponsor us – she had left Iran before the revolution and wanted nothing to do with our post-revolutionary troubles. When I was six and we visited her in London, Maman had attended a church event for an American writer named Jim. She had taken his card. Now she wrote to him asking for help.

  Sometime in that turbulent season, when spring was blooming and our restless community was overcome by renewed desire for a country, we discovered why the Afghan grandmother was collecting bricks. One afternoon, as the crowd around the mail cubbies dispersed, someone saw her scurry up the stairs with a brick under her arm. The punkish staff member or Zuppa man or somebody followed her and insisted on seeing her room. Soon news spread around Hotel Barba that she had built a shower seat and was spending hours a day sitting happily under the stream, wasting the hotel’s water. They dismantled her seat. She threw an epic tantrum. Secretly, all of us cheered her on. The tedium had reached new heights of toxicity. We were drinking it now, mad with it.

  A year or two later, we visited that Afghan grandmother and her daughter in California. It turned out they were from an important family, a fact we could easily see when we met them in their own house. ‘Do you remember that Romanian woman who ran away with the younger man?’ the daughter asked my mother as she poured skimmed milk over my cereal – my first taste of the vile blue water. That detail was all they remembered of a woman who had shared their home for months.

  Even now, memories of the old Afghan woman (scurrying behind the hotel with a brick under her skirts, saving our lunches, kissing our cheeks) bring a fleeting smile to my lips. But I wouldn’t recognise her in a lineup of grandmothers. Funny, the daily nothings by which an entire person is remembered. Maman wanted me to learn this. The lovesick wife of Hotel Barba might have been smart and talented. But how many strangers knew her only as ‘that stupid woman’?

  Thinking back on this story, I wonder if Maman knew that I was watching, if she saw all that I committed to memory as she erased answers to math problems. I missed Baba, my aunts and uncles. I wanted to know why people leave each other. Maybe Maman was thinking about love too, alone as she was after a decade, with no comfort but Jesus. And weren’t we all obsessed with love? Despite the daily burdens of refugee life – unfamiliar food, hot buses, lack of school, the possibility of being sent back to face imprisonment and death – I believe that everyone there continued to function on that register. Even when first-order needs were in question, love was all for us, the only thing more basic than home or country.

  In May, I had a spasm of devotion and was baptised in Lake Bracciano. Days later I turned ten among my American friends from the homeschool and my fellow refugees. We celebrated with a guitar and homemade cake in the courtyard of Hotel Barba. That summer, in 1989, after sixteen months as refugees, after hours lining up outside embassies and sweating in interview rooms, we opened our letter to the delight of a roaring crowd around the mail cubbies. Maman cried. She received hugs and whispers from mothers and grandmothers. Daniel and I jumped up and down. On our last day in the American church, the congregation sang us a song: ‘Friends Are Friends Forever’. We said goodbye, packed up our little room. At JFK, we held our breath through immigration. We landed in Oklahoma City in time for the Fourth of July.

  III.

  In summer of 2011 I returned to Hotel Barba with my then-husband Philip. We didn’t know that this would be the last summer of our marriage and the twilight of a decade of travels, but one morning we woke up on holiday in Rome and craved to visit the refugee hostel where I had once lived, this place of personal legend – I remember that we both wanted to go. Maybe we sensed a coming exile. Soon I would become a wanderer again, setting off from Barba into a new life for a second time. Maybe that’s what drew us back there, the notion that Barba had the power to launch me. Philip had been more father to me than husband and at Barba I had once before learned that fathers aren’t necessary. I had learned to live without one. Now, having forced my husband into my baba’s empty seat, maybe I was here to make amends for my silliness, to re-learn my lesson and to give him back.

  We made phone calls but no one in Mentana remembered the hotel. We rented a scooter and drove to the town anyway, on a wet, hot day, through mist and drizzle, Rome receding behind us as we navigated woods and slick highways. I wore a green dress and flats, ready to pick through the rolling fields, to steal an unripe peach, to toe the narrow paths behind the fence. I wished I could buy a Cornetto with lire, so I could remember how it feels to give a thousand of something for an ice cream cone and still find it a bargain. When was the last time a sweet felt precious?

  Long before we arrived, I spotted the house on a hill from the road toward town. I didn’t need confirmation. I knew that hill, that manor on the horizon surrounded by valley. We roared up to the dirt path, our cheeks flushed and windblown. Pulling up that steep, meandering road to Hotel Barba, watching it appear, was a sensation I knew: a jolt of rescue, the feeling that I had been plucked by some unseen hand from a fire.

  I jumped off the scooter and ran the rest of the way. Philip parked. Were we in the right place? The building had been renovated, the courtyard converted to a parking lot and the canteen turned into a restaurant and espresso bar. The fence to the adjoining garden was gone. I imagined it disappeared with the refugees.

  If Barba’s bones were any more ordinary I would have doubted. But we hadn’t followed an address. We had spotted Barba and made straight for it, passing through Mentana (a confirmation) then up the same winding road that, seen from a government car in 1989, had promised new life.

  I entered the deserted lobby, my steps echoing dully as a concierge greeted me in Italian. Had I dropped into a parallel universe? ‘What the fuck happened?’ I muttered.

  ‘Welcome to Hotel Belvedere,’ he said in English. Barba, it seemed, had become a place for businesspeople to rest and eat forgettable meals between breakout sessions. Outside, Philip readied his camera, waiting to cap
ture me in my pretty dress discovering a tree, a bench, as if I were a child in a ballet or having a birthday photoshoot.

  I asked to see our old room. I didn’t know the number, only the view overlooking the courtyard (now parking lot). The concierge took me from room to room in search of it. It was a slow day. He promised to introduce me to the owner. When we found the room, I stood on the balcony where we had hung bags of sandwiched dinners. I remembered women picking through piles of clothing dumped in the courtyard just below. I said, ‘A Romanian man used to climb our balcony to get to that one, over there. He was in love with the wife.’ I had forgotten that detail, the student climbing.

  Later, I drank an espresso in my own familiar canteen, now with delicate curtains, tablecloths, while the grandfatherly owner patted my hand and offered me a wafer. I thought: years ago I drank milky coffee in this room, unable to imagine that one day I’d enjoy the taste. I thought of the Romanians. Why do stories repeat themselves in this way? How does love stop being love and how can I tell if it’s happening to me?

  ‘This room is the same,’ I said. ‘Those windows . . .’

  ‘It’s much nicer,’ the owner said; the concierge translated. ‘Big renovation. Do you like it?’

  ‘This room doesn’t feel as changed as the rest,’ I said, looking out at the leafy landscape below the dining room. ‘Maybe it’s the windows.’

  ‘Maybe your taste improved at the exact same rate as the renovation,’ Philip joked. I was so grateful for his presence. He made that first step (of a long journey into my past) bearable, though he seemed so out of place. We seemed out of place.

  My return to camp was unsettling, no return at all. The cappuccino machine. The tablecloths. The tea biscuits. This wasn’t Barba. Though we were both done up now to suit Western tastes, I couldn’t stomach Barba’s familiar frame tarted up for new uses. It felt like fresh homelessness. Barba had been more than a house to us, the exiles it sheltered.