The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  Barthes describes waiting as both delirium and subjection. Illness and torture. My grandmother has become permanently delirious; a servant to her waiting. She could have stepped out of her marital dreams into London, a free city full of all the things she had once loved: poetry, stylish clothes, music. Instead, she found a way to extend the waiting.

  She took the name Emma, the first of a thousand small adjustments to make herself palatable to the English. She styled herself the English way, fine-tuned her accent – it isn’t Iranian any more, but something in-between and very fine – found a church in a well-to-do neighbourhood. Perhaps it wasn’t so well-to-do then. It didn’t have a lot of immigrants. She decided, then and there, that she wanted nothing to do with the past. She didn’t want to be defined by a divorce, or by displacement. Certainly, she didn’t want to advertise that she had been a child bride – to an almost-child groom, less grotesque, but no less traumatic. On the eve of Maman Moti’s wedding, she knew nothing of sex, not even that it existed. They told her if she got married, she could wear high-heeled shoes and that’s all she knew. When she felt her first baby moving, she thought it was a snake or a worm.

  She met Christopher in a singles group, or maybe it was a parents group. They prayed. He must have smiled, paid her a compliment. Maybe he took her hand and told her to be strong, not realising the frailty of her immigrant heart. Somehow in that hour, Maman Moti heard God’s voice, a promise. He told her that she would marry this man, that they would build a new life, that all her scattered children would be brought together again in a great house in London where she would serve the best Iranian dishes on antique Wedgwood, where well-heeled daughters, thin in elegant dresses, would serve tea, where granddaughters, still married to their first husbands, having not wasted their hard-won Ivy League degrees on middling writing careers, would sit at her feet waiting for wisdom, bring her melon and mint in a glass with a long spoon. In my fantasies, Maman Moti is always asking for a long spoon. Probably it’s just some broken fragment of a memory. I work it back in this way or that.

  All she had to do was trust. Trust and wait.

  Nowadays, like Barthes’s waiting lover, she sees Christopher in the street, in the faces of passersby. Later she cries, knowing that the man who glanced up from a newspaper in the park, or the man who held the door to the supermarket, was her betrothed waiting for her to acknowledge him. But she has forgotten his face and so she has failed; he is disappointed, heartbroken. Each morning, she sits in a park, stricken with unreality. She writes poems, letters, family histories. She signs them ‘Emma’ and mails them to him. He never replies, but the letters aren’t returned either. Someone is collecting them, these precious family stories, my inheritance. I wish I knew Christopher’s last name, so I could search for them. He is married now; maybe he has moved, or died.

  She has waited for him for roughly three decades. How many times has she fantasised about the house, the dinners, the return of the prodigal children? She experiences the waiting no less urgently than those in camp, though hers is invented. She lives in it, still. She is no less crippled by it. Every day life’s smallest choices (travelling, moving churches) are made unthinkable by the remote possibility that today an answer will come.

  Meanwhile, she craves drama, to heighten the sensations around waiting. Years ago, Maman Moti confided in the family that certain members of her church are offended by her certainty of her future. The church has divided into factions. There are political machinations afoot, much like the early days of the church. She prays. She asks us to pray.

  Arriving in London, she had a small bundle of money. She bought her flat. Prices rose. A few decades ago, her feet began to itch again, another symptom of the exile disease. But she didn’t recognise it as that. ‘They’ve hired the downstairs neighbour to drive me out,’ she told her daughter, my aunt Sepi, now grown into the very offspring she craved: a Londoner with a pale blond husband and three tall, handsome sons who dreamed in English.

  Now and then, friends from church came around, but all Maman Moti saw was that no one believed her.

  Each time Maman Moti sold a flat, she lost around fifteen thousand pounds, moving to a slightly less desirable location. Each time, after a few years, the neighbours began to conspire again, sending smoke into her home, vacuuming at night, sending children to scream and fight in the yard.

  She moved again and again, always writing Christopher with her new address. In each new flat, her hope returned for a time, the itch in her brain calmed. Maybe this would be the living room where Christopher would sit, where she would bring him a cup of tea, where he would take her hand and say, ‘I’m sorry you waited so long.’

  In 2011 when news reached the family that I had moved from my home in Amsterdam to some workshop in Iowa without Philip, and later when we decided to divorce, Maman Moti stopped speaking to me.

  For her, Philip was proof that, even though her daughters had fallen into exile, her granddaughter hadn’t. Philip was white and handsome. He made money (never mind that my earning power was equal to his, that we had met at Princeton, that I had better grades). His feet were rooted. What more could a silly immigrant girl want? And besides, Jesus did not allow divorce and she was a Christian now, so.

  In 2015, I became pregnant and moved to London. It took two years of living in her city before she contacted me. Maybe it was Elena, her great-granddaughter. Or kernels of news planted by my mother or aunt, telling her that my new partner, Sam, came from a good family, that he was an artsy version of Philip, much better suited to me. That he had graduated with a first from Oxford, so let him have his man-bun. God bless him for having those curls after forty. His mother was a faithful Christian, did you know? She was French, like Philip’s mother, but an artist too.

  When Maman Moti phoned, I was angry. I didn’t want to welcome her back. How dare she reject me for the very thing she did at my age? How dare she abandon us in Iran for an English life, then judge us? And how dare she refuse even to sponsor us out of Barba? We were in limbo – without an inkling of our future. We could have ended up in rural Australia, or deported back to Iran. No one speaks of this part, but Maman Moti could have brought us to England. Why didn’t she?

  Then there’s her casual sexism: to my grandmother, an unmarried woman is wasted and so she is in a perpetual in-between space, a time between marriages. Being man-less is the same as being stateless. If you have no husband, even if it takes forty years, you are only waiting for one.

  By February, the night I’m preparing for Greece, my first true return to ‘Barba’ (whatever that means now) after that false start in 2011, Maman Moti and I have had a handful of visits. We dream aloud about bringing our family together: maybe a reunion! What can we do to convince everyone? We scheme together. She is kind, but lives entirely in her own invented world. Sometimes she glimpses out at us from inside, but mostly she’s decorating the corridors and rooms inside her mind.

  I understand her more than anyone else in my family. She is me in old age. I can see her struggling with the itch in her brain. I can see it just as clearly as I see it in the mirror, or in my daughter when there’s an extra fold in her tights, or when one arm of a sweater is tighter than the other. When I’m my grandmother’s age, will the itch open up to reveal a fantastical universe full of church espionage and radiation guns? And when Elena is her age? Will she too invent a home for herself? Are there homes that I have rejected because the itch wants me to be ever on the move?

  At 9.30 p.m. we’re still waiting for Maman Moti to arrive. I am furious. This trip is full of small ironies. Our sofa will arrive while I’m gone, completing our home. It seems ugly to reach this final step now, after decades of wandering, just as I’m visiting the freshly uprooted. Elena is asleep. I expect that Maman Moti will call from the train station, but she doesn’t. Instead she gives my address to some strange man who walks her to my flat. She is at our doorstep at 10 p.m. I hear her chirping gratefully at him. I never see his face. We were robbed two m
onths ago. I grow nervous, then livid. ‘God sent me an angel,’ she trills as she takes off her boots.

  ‘Don’t give my address to strangers, please,’ I say, instead of welcome. Then quickly, I add, ‘Welcome.’

  We make tea for her. ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘They’re sending the waves again,’ she says with a long sigh, as if she were telling me the dishwasher is busted. ‘I can’t sleep. I can feel it poisoning me. They turn on the machine and I get headaches, nausea.’

  The downstairs neighbours are sending waves up through the floor of her flat. They are radioactive, or electromagnetic, who knows. But she feels them in her body, inside her head. It makes her heart flutter. She gets palpitations and shortness of breath. In the evenings, a low-grade buzzing starts up and keeps her awake until morning, or until she gives up and moves to a sleeping bag in the attic. If anyone visits, the neighbours know to turn off the machine so that they can make her look crazy.

  I ask if she’s seen the machine. She dismisses the question. It’s large, aimed straight at the ceiling through to her floor. ‘What if it’s not radiation but an allergy?’ I ask. ‘Or something else in your body?’

  ‘I’m not sick or crazy,’ she says, sipping tea. She’s said this so often.

  I ask her if I can come and see her flat. She says that they never send the radiation if someone else is in the flat. ‘What if someone else stays there with you for a while?’ I say. She perks up. Then I have the answer; how could I have missed it? ‘I can call a friend at Amnesty,’ I say. ‘Refugees are always looking for a place to stay. I can find someone young and strong. And you’ll have someone to watch over you. It’s a win-win!’

  Her face falls. ‘No, I don’t get involved with refugees,’ she says, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with any of that any more. No.’

  I remind myself that she was forced into marriage at thirteen. That she is old now, losing her grip on reality and has reason to distrust.

  We make her a bed in the living room. She thanks us and goes to sleep. In the morning, the flat is chaos. We make breakfast. We feed Elena and dress her for nursery. I pack my suitcase. I’m so nervous. Here I am about to visit people who have lost their homes and families, young mothers and lone travellers and elderly couples who live in metal boxes, people so displaced they can’t even imagine the landscape of their future. A majority will be depressed, some suicidal, or drowning in fantasy and I can’t even handle my grandmother and her inhospitable flat. And what a waste – she has a passport, a place to live. The doors were flung open for her and yet she made herself into a refugee.

  I’m late for my train to the airport. I decide to run ahead. I kiss them goodbye. We reach for our coats, our shoes. Elena says, ‘Bye bye, Mummy! See you next week!’ My chest tightens. She’s parroting see you next week, but she means see you tonight. Maman Moti chuckles at Elena’s English accent. ‘She’s darling,’ she says.

  As I’m leaving, I see Maman Moti struggling with her boot. She leans against a wall, taps her purse, checking for something. She says, ‘Dina joon, bring me a long spoon.’ I freeze. Then I run and fetch her a dinner spoon. She plunges it into her boot like a shoehorn.

  IV.

  ‘The complicated thing is that dignity changes as different needs are met,’ says Paul Hutchings as we drive on a pitch-black road, slick with rain, away from Athens. ‘When you arrive from Lesbos, dirty, tired, starving, dignity is that pre-packed package of shampoo, deodorant, eggs, coffee, bread. So we offer that on arrival. Then, when you’ve showered and slept and cleaned up, that package becomes humiliating. You want your tea, not coffee. You remember you hate eggs. That’s when you want choice. After you’ve lived in a camp for a few months, the store with fake money and strict friendship rules becomes humiliating too. Why can’t you befriend the clerk? There’s a shelf-life to this. We don’t want to contribute to camp becoming permanent for them. They need to be a part of communities.’

  I’m terrified of what I’ll see and remember. The rain is ominous and I want a thick piece of chocolate and Elena’s hot sugary breath on my neck.

  I have a sofa now. How enormous this seems. It’s a good sofa, handcrafted in a workshop. I also have a bed that I bought and this too seems like a wonder, because, like my grandmother, I like to set fire to my habitat. I don’t buy furniture. I’m addicted to resetting, to the in-between.

  We are driving toward Kyllini, to LM Village, the former holiday resort. I imagine a modern-day Barba. For Paul to accompany me is pure kindness. Refugee Support has left the camp and my Guardian photographer, Eirini, is scheduled to meet us at Katsikas – our assignment is there and the two camps are hours apart by highway. But I’m drawn to LM, to the shell it inhabits. I tell everyone I want to see the aftermath of the stores.

  Our hotel is rough. I wake up itching, convinced that it has bed bugs. Sam has texted that Maman Moti called. His message makes me itch more – that’s how I know there are no bed bugs. I have this survival trick: some nights when I’m afraid, I don’t brush my teeth. When I was two, my father operated on them. In an early memory, my uncle chases me around Baba’s dental office, forces me into the chair as Baba comes at me with a needle the size of my forearm. Now, when I don’t brush my teeth, they throb in the night. Fear makes them throb. When I wake up with no pain in my mouth, I know that it existed only in my mind. And if that wasn’t real, then I know that all the other nightmarish things that I saw weren’t real either. The toothache is a coalmine canary; when it goes, other pains follow. Without it, I wake up disoriented, unable to sift through my fears, or to soothe myself.

  I’ve also missed a call from Minoo, a refugee woman from Isfahan whom I have befriended in London. She is around my age and has two excellent children and a chronically ill husband. Minoo’s call will be about housing; she’s been brushed aside by the housing authority for a year.

  I dress for the camp in an old shirt and a loose black skirt that hangs down over my muddy boots. I am ridiculous, even to myself.

  The gate into the camp opens onto an office, then old, fenced tennis courts. They’re littered with dead branches and debris. A dog growls at us from inside the court. Clusters of tree stumps skirt the fences. The court isn’t surrounded by pavement or stone or grass, just raw ground. Beyond the courts the ramshackle village looms in muted yellows and burnt sienna, colours that may have once been cheerful. They blend down into the dirt. We walk through LM Village in the rain. It’s deserted, ominous grey clouds hanging over the complex. Scattered hedges line the walkways. People peek out of numbered buildings. They drift in and out, glistening with idleness. I want to knock on doors, but first, Paul takes me to the site of his old store. Though it’s not meant to be a residential space, it serves as a bedroom now. One wall is window, looking onto the man’s bed, his toiletries and books.

  We visit the clothing store. It hasn’t been shut but put in the hands of local workers, to sort and distribute donations.

  A Greek woman sits in a chair near the door, her eyes locked on her phone. Piles of clothing lie discarded on the floor, boxes overturned onto them. Children play in the piles. Bare hangers are strewn everywhere and rows of mixed winter clothing are jammed together on the racks. A boy and girl rummage through the piles, trampling the clothes. A toddler runs in. The worker doesn’t look up. I stare, transported to Barba, the donated clothing strewn in the courtyard. Paul walks from the racks to the piles, picks up a jacket. He shakes his head, shoulders dropping.

  We visit a recreation room, a big empty space with a television hanging in a corner, a toaster in another and a few scattered remnants of a game room. On a wall beside an empty shelf, a label says coffee, tea, sugar. Beside another empty shelf, glasses. A fire extinguisher leans against a painted sign: To be different. A teenager smokes hookah and watches football as a younger boy fiddles with the pipe, waiting for him to find some energy. The floor and the benches are soiled from months of dirt.

  Near an abandoned play area, a pool ful
l of twigs, the commander of the camp joins us. He follows us around, nervous. He speaks a lot, tells jokes, mostly for Paul’s benefit. I disappear into the background. The play area is a creepy mangled version of itself. No children play in it. It reminds me of something out of Stranger Things – this is a holiday village from the Upside Down. Paul tells me that the residents call it ‘a holiday from hell’.

  There are 219 people in this camp, most from Syria, and yet there’s nothing to see but dogs and children and naked gloom. Everyone has a foot in bed and I remember how very little there is to do in a refugee camp. You’re not allowed to work. You’re not welcome in local schools; native parents are forever nursing fears of foreign disease. We find our way to the nursery. The teacher tells us about the toddlers in her class, their fragile shaken minds. One girl, she tells us, refuses to remove her backpack.

  This girl, I know, is toeing a road without end. I’ve refused to take off my backpack for thirty years. Her teacher tells us that she won’t put the bag aside to sing or dance or play. The adults have tried every tactic, suggesting that she keep the backpack but empty it in her room, so it’ll be lighter. I chuckle. The backpack is about one thing: holding your diminished identity, the pieces of your life. The glossy pink receptacle is meaningless.

  Now the skin inside my throat loosens, my body’s crude warning sign from my schoolyard days, at first grating, like an unreachable flap of skin, then maddening. I don’t want to be here. I have a home now; why did I return to this wretched limbo? Why am I not living my life, grateful for every minute I’m allowed to come and go in the free world? What if I’m stuck at the airport? What if my passport gets stolen? What if I’m detained? Where is my Elena? I breathe in as deep as my breath will go, until my lungs are full and I force the thing in my throat back down into place.

  But I do know why I’m here – I’ve come because the world is turning its back on refugees, because America is no longer America and Europe is going the same way: these once-Christian nations have abandoned duty in favour of entitlement and tribal instinct. I’m here because I have a skill, born out of my own idle refugee days. I’ve watched people when they’re ordered to do nothing and I know just how life reasserts itself, like that first bubble in still water before the whole pot comes to a boil. I’m here to make a few stories leap out from the tepid simmer of information and to carry those stories to the West, a mother who once adopted us, the exiles and outcasts, and now needs us to intervene as callouses harden fast around her heart.