The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  To this day, the name Hotel Barba fills me with dread and nostalgia: that first lick of a Cornetto, the crunch of unripe peaches stolen from the garden, the tinny taste that filled my mouth in embassies. After my second visit, it also conjures images of me as the unhappy wife of a good man, in a green summer dress, trying to find the tree whose peaches I had stolen, the bench where I taught Russian men a few words of English, the sound of a Romanian student climbing over my balcony with his guitar. For years, the characters in Hotel Barba have appeared unbidden in my fiction. Young heroes arrive with milky scars white-washing half their face. Menacing lovers carry guitars and have curly hair – fingers are lost in it. Grandmothers in chadors hide little indulgences under long skirts. Idle women with sleepy eyes make themselves silly with yearning. Back then, the worn-down paths seemed new to me. But I watched people and I began to learn the stories: All Love ends. Without a country, a fire is quenched, another flares. Limbo is temptation itself – the itch to make life happen.

  People think of the refugee camp as a purgatory, a liminal space without shape or colour. And it is that. But we kept our instinct for joy. We made friends and we studied and made a community, as we had every day in Iran. Journalists and aid workers who visit camps often comment on this aspect of the psyche – how can these people carry on with their gossip and petty dramas and daily pleasures? How can they endure the limbo?

  Since Hotel Barba, all waiting has been agony for me and I’ve been obsessed with the idea of it. Why does it feel like an insult to wait for anything? Why does patience seem like one of those manipulative, sinister virtues invented to debase and subdue, like chastity or poverty? Who waits least in the world? I look for answers in A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. Barthes says that waiting robs you of your sense of proportion. It plays out in scenes, in outbursts and calm, like waiting in a café for a lover to arrive. It is the ultimate indignity, to be made to wait; and power is to impose it. ‘I decide to take it badly,’ Barthes says. The implication of choice strikes me as a clue: I could decide to behave instead. At Barba, we sensed the expectation as we waited: the unspoken chides of our native-born rescuers. The inconvenienced. Your life is no longer in danger. You could be more patient. You could behave. The primary sin of the Romanians was their ingratitude, their inability to sit still and revel in their physical safety.

  Maman rebelled too, by not waiting. She worked and roamed Italy. Perhaps the joys and dramas that arose at Barba were our collective sigh of refusal. To take it well would be gracious. To take it badly, though, would create a sequence of events, heightened sensation: drama and distraction.

  In the imagined café, Barthes searches for ways to disrupt or explain away the wait. Then he stops writhing; he watches those who are not waiting and slips into a kind of fog. ‘The anxiety of waiting is not continuously violent; it has its matte moments; I am waiting and everything around my waiting is stricken with unreality . . . Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.’

  My defence against unreality in those unmoving Barba days was the movement of other people. Atop that pretty hill, I saw a universe of others, with personalities, secrets, dramas as rich and consequential as mine, battering parallel walls that extended out to the edge of the earth. I learned to care about their stories and the aftermath of those stories. I learned that some stories are a joy to embellish and recreate (as in literature or gossip) and in others, the facts are vital (as in fights with little brothers, or asylum interviews) and that to believe or not believe, the ‘how’ of the story matters in both cases. Sometimes invented stories are true in more important ways – though, despite the allure of fiction and the instinct to create, this wouldn’t present itself as foundational for me for decades. What was clear then: by watching I could choose who I wanted to be, or seem to be, and I could be believed. I could tell my own story convincingly, by convincing myself, by making it true. I could put an end to every wait. That’s the allure of the Romanians’ story – they decided simply to stop waiting; they defied the orders not to move. They remade themselves, deliberately. Is a true thing less true, if you have consciously made it so?

  Those were early days in my chameleon life.

  Some places travel on with you. They grow up with you, at the same pace. Though in 2011 I was disappointed with my return to Mentana, and though Barba’s assimilation made me recoil (perhaps making my own suddenly palpable), I left with a promise from the owner that I could return one day, maybe with a translator, to dig for details from those two years when the hotel served as a refugee camp. This was a comfort and I knew that Barba would always tempt me back.

  In 2017, the craving returns, not for Barba the brick and glass rooms on a hill, but for Barba the liminal space of my youth. A new obsession forms. I decide to try to find it another way. In retrospect, searching out Barba’s carcass was foolish, I think. I need the residents, its spirit. I call my mother. She sends photos. She tries to remember names.

  I’ve just moved to London, had a baby girl. I look around for a community. I worry about my daughter, her Iranian face. I watch the new American president and I try to remember how we thought of America back then, in our refugee days. Reagan was dignified; he made us feel safe. Back then the American government was our saviour, an incorruptible Christian nation unlike our own, a nation of free people looking to share their good fortune. I write essays. I contact refugee organisations.

  Then one day Paul, an aid worker, tells me about LM Village. A UNHCR story from June 2016 says, ‘A Greek summer resort that closed over five years ago as a result of the financial crisis has been turned into a haven for more than 300 refugees.’ The word ‘haven’ strikes me as untrue. Still, I am moved. Here is Barba reincarnated. A refugee camp in the hollowed-out carcass of a holiday retreat; a purgatory inside a play-land.

  Paul Hutchings is co-founder of Refugee Support, a charity that goes from camp to camp erecting stores with their own currency to distribute donated food and clothing – to give refugees their familiar neighbourhood grocery. He has just left LM Village. He talks to me about dignity, about the humiliation of accepting charity. I listen, realising that we have both lost sleep over this specific shame. There have been days, months, when I’ve eaten meals provided by charities, governments, good people. In total, these days have made up a sliver of my life and yet, after decades of eating well and returning favours, I struggle to accept a cup of coffee. At such times, my behaviour is correct (I mean Western) and I accept, but a fingertip to my neck would give me away. There are private things only the pulse can verify: love, pain, illness.

  Paul met John Sloan in October 2015 while volunteering in the Calais ‘Jungle.’ The two men noticed that the act of offering food and clothing, these undeniably first-order needs, had become so urgent and frantic that ‘the how’ was forgotten. The only people who seemed aware were the refugees; Paul saw it in their eyes, in their gait. Though they had already lost so much, they were losing more with every jacket tossed from a truck-bed and every ill-fitting pair of trousers they would have to barter away. In Calais, provisions were handed out from the backs of vans. One day a van would arrive with, say, large jackets and park in one part of the camp. Another day, a van with men’s jeans, or t-shirts, would park in another corner. Refugees lined up as a volunteer tried to keep order, another asked their size. They received one item and were asked to go. Some tried to negotiate, claiming a sick friend, a parent too weak to stand in line. Others fought and yelled and grabbed. Items were trampled. Some went away empty-handed. No one felt good about what had just happened.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ says Paul about the early days of his charity, ‘if we could give people food and clothing without taking away their dignity?’

  We’re meeting in a London café for a long talk over coffee and cake.

  ‘Why is that so hard?’ I ask.

  ‘Because people want every hour and dollar they give to be stretched thin.’ Paul tells me that his biggest problems wer
e the volunteers, donors and their lofty expectations. Many donors want to assign criteria to how their food is given out. They want their money feeding as many as possible, to make sure that you spend it only on eggs and bread. They want to police. They don’t care about ‘the how’. Paul tells me that there’s a spectrum of usefulness for donations. Money without strings, then other money, then high turnover items like unexpired eggs, oil, flour, diapers, small men’s clothes and shoes. But people don’t donate these things. They donate worn clothes. Large sizes. Expired things. ‘Once we got a wedding dress.’

  ‘Do they give much strawberry jam?’ I ask. He gives me a look.

  As for volunteers, even the most good-hearted want to feel thanked. They have come for that silent look of admiration that’s free to most, but so costly if you’re tapped for gratitude by everyone you meet.

  Refugee Support began its work in April 2016 at Alexandreia camp near Thessaloniki, Greece. Paul and John set out to open a food store, then a clothing store, a well-designed, peaceful marketplace where a person of note wouldn’t be ashamed to shop. At first, residents made appointments and collected prepared baskets of food. Everyone received the same thing, regardless of allergies, habits, or taste. But people didn’t have the same needs and soon there were grumblings, barter, waste. Outside the camp people don’t get baskets. Everyone knows how a store works: with money.

  They decided to display the goods and give people the respect of choosing. The store’s currency would be points distributed weekly to residents like income – 100 points per adult, 50 per child, 150 for pregnant women. Store prices would be pegged to market prices in euros (20 points per euro). Sanitary items would be free. The camp residents could visit the store Monday to Friday. If they wanted to spend all their points on chocolate spread, they had that right.

  Paul has store designs for Katsikas in Greece, the newest camp, on his phone. He spends time thinking of the aesthetics, whether people will like it – he cares that they like it. He has sales data too and a list of what he needs to stock each week. Yes, the customers (his word) buy some butter biscuits, but they don’t sacrifice milk for it. They make nutritious choices for themselves and their children. People don’t steal. They don’t starve.

  When Paul finishes speaking I can barely contain myself. He has articulated so much that I know: the quick dread before donated meals. I want to tell him about Barba’s glass canteen, how we sat with our tribes, prayed before or after, gave our pork to the Russians and argued over who had better tea and caviar (Iranians do). The communal meals, complaining about hard bread, cheering for Zuppa man, made us a community.

  In Oklahoma, after I fancied myself an American (enough) teenager, I began volunteering at a local food bank. My friend and I were assigned to the storeroom. Poor mothers or single men would arrive in the front, they would sign in at the desk, tell their stories to more experienced volunteers and we, the teenagers in the back, would receive instruction about which category of grocery bundle to make. Everyone got the same things, with a few extras for babies, some substitutions for allergies. They never saw our faces, the silly adolescents who flirted and sang while we chose their food: tuna or chicken, white or wheat, pulp or no pulp. I gave away all the chunky peanut butter first, thinking I was being kind. I was grateful that I didn’t see their faces, that I could avoid the downcast eyes as I loaded their bags into open trunks. My choices inside those paper bags seemed a small tragedy.

  Accepting charity is an ugly business for the spirit. It rubs you raw, especially if you were once someone with pride and lofty goals, someone who shook hands and locked eyes. My mother and I used to talk about the irony of so many of the world’s refugees coming from the Middle East – we are such prideful people and a refugee is the most abject creature of all, stateless, homeless, without control over her own food, education, or health. Asylum seekers is so mild a phrase – we weren’t politely seeking, we were ravenous for it, this creature need for the safety for our bodies. Even as we learned English and swam and erased workbooks, we thought of nothing else. How do we survive the memory of so much wanting?

  In my thirties in New York, I volunteered to help a friend, a well-meaning finance type, and his singles group serve Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless shelter. I showed up in a stained t-shirt and old jeans, my hair in a ratty bun. I stuck ten dollars in my pocket and left my wallet behind. There was no question of what to wear; I knew that tonight I would offer food to a stranger and that stranger would, for a moment, be humiliated. She would look at my clothes, my posture, for a reason to say, ‘Who cares what she thinks?’ And it was part of my job to give her that reason quickly.

  But Manhattan do-gooders don’t know the quiet bargains that the poor make in the space of a glance. When I arrived at the shelter, my friend looked me up and down. ‘Are you depressed?’ he joked, eyeing my stains. Behind him bankers and lawyers in Chanel shoes and white silk shirts, leather purses still on their arms, dished out mashed potatoes and uneasy smiles to tired men and women wearing the grime of the city. Later on, when the residents invited the volunteers to join their table (a plea for dignity), the volunteers declined out of concern (‘Will there be enough?’). They dashed off to Momofuku instead, ordered pork belly and cocktails and congratulated themselves for leaving (‘It would’ve been overstepping’). They complained about the tourists crowding the door. I confess that I ate a few bites of that turkey dinner that may not have been enough and I ate the pork belly too and I let my friend pay. I hated him that night, but I was also grateful to be in his company. I went home and threw it all up.

  Now, more years have passed. In 2017, I am starting another new life, trying to make sense of the places that made me. Am I still a refugee after decades spent transforming? I know now that Barba was a ‘low-hardship camp’. Both parts of that term seem dishonest. Yes, it was something other than hell – it wasn’t Moria in Lesbos, with its raw sewage and midnight wars, its five-hour food lines and shared tents on open soil. And yes, it was officially a refugee camp. But it wasn’t low-hardship. And it wasn’t a camp. It wasn’t a hotel, either. I call it a hostel. The difference between each pair of words is subtle, a private calculation of shame and place and dignity.

  ‘You know what I love?’ says Paul. ‘When they complain about the selection. Because that means that they’ve forgotten they’re in a camp. They’re briefly transported and they’re just people in a store, with money in hand, complaining about yoghurt.’

  ‘I want to go,’ I say.

  ‘We have rules,’ he says. ‘We need to keep absolute equality between people. No hint of special treatment. We don’t allow socialising. Volunteers can’t even accept a cup of tea or enter the private rooms.’

  This is to avoid requests for favouritism. It’s also to create a micro-economy as similar to the one in the outside world as possible. In the outside world, your store clerk doesn’t look at you with eyes that say, Don’t you appreciate what I’m doing? He expects you to come in, pay, go. He expects you to complain about the lack of whole milk or the staleness of the bread. In the outside world, there is an equality between service provider and customer that doesn’t exist when people are doling out charity.

  ‘Are there Iranians there?’ I ask. ‘Or Afghans that speak Farsi?’

  ‘There will be at Katsikas when it opens,’ he says. ‘Probably not at LM.’ He explains that Refugee Support will have left LM altogether by then. Still, I know I’ll go there, that I will convince Paul to go with me. This feels like a truer return than my visit to Barba’s bones.

  ‘I want to go without that rule,’ I say, remembering that long-ago turkey dinner that everyone turned down. If this is about pride and especially with Iranians, I have to be able to accept a cup of tea.

  The night before I fly to Greece, my grandmother, Maman Moti, calls. She tells us that she has no place to sleep. Her apartment in south London is no longer a refuge. The neighbours are trying to drive her out. I don’t have to ask what they’re doing. I
asked the first time, thinking they are making too much noise, or smoking, bad behaviours that may have nothing to do with my grandmother, but are, nonetheless, believably annoying. ‘It’s the waves again,’ she says. ‘I’ve started sleeping in the attic. It’s very cold.’

  My grandmother and I only reconnected a few months ago, after a seven-year silence. She is an immigrant too, having taken my mother’s sister, the youngest of four children and run away to London before the revolution of 1979, before my birth, when my mother was in her early twenties. The family story is that she left my grandfather, who had never been faithful, to join another man, my mother’s teacher. She planned to start a new life with him in London.

  In a grimy corner of the city she found a flat, a school for her twelve-year-old daughter. She had brought a little money. She was young. Married off to my grandfather at thirteen, she had given birth to my aunt Soheila at fourteen, then to my mother, Sima, at sixteen. By twenty-seven, she had my uncle Saeed and aunt Sepideh too. By thirty, her older daughters stood as tall as she. She competed with them for clothes, for admiring looks in the street. In the year I was born, as she sat by the phone in that London flat, perhaps looking up English words she had seen on a billboard or in a magazine, she was thirty-nine. I was her second grandchild.

  For weeks, Maman Moti waited by the phone, by the door, suspended between two lives. Had she left after the revolution, she might have waited with her countrymen in a camp. He didn’t come. He didn’t call. She waited. Maybe she called her family in Iran. I’m not privy to the details. I do know this: after any hope of his arrival was gone, she continued to wait and, after that, though she wasn’t a refugee, she succumbed to the habits of one: she became addicted to waiting, to hope of rescue. She gave her mind up to it.