The Ungrateful Refugee Page 13

  And there is another reason too. Now that I have a daughter, it’s time I made sense of my own story and identity so she can be certain of hers.

  I’ve been told that refugee work is harder for former asylum seekers. It’s easier to volunteer at a homeless shelter or hospital ward; going back is anathema to instinct. My grandmother isn’t the first Iranian to want nothing to do with her countrymen. And plenty of immigrants would shut the door once their own family is through, out of survival instinct (what villain will follow them out?). The ground is never as solid beneath the feet of the displaced. You are told that the good and the honest will get out somehow, that looking back will turn you into a pillar of salt, that now you must put your energy toward building, belonging, repaying. No one needs you to return to camp and stir up futile hopes with your presence.

  I long to find Barba. Not its bones, but its residents, the locals, the staff. What miracle to find them all prospering – if I can just locate a few names, a few heartening stories, proof that we were worth the trouble.

  Greeting passersby, we find an aid worker who speaks Arabic and English. He has an open wound below his lip and claims not to have permission to translate except to and from Greek. Still, he agrees to help. He suggests a family whose space, he promises, will surprise me.

  Amina from Aleppo opens the door. She is built like my mother, round and petite, with bottle-red hair and a neat blouse. Her intimate movements are like Iranian aunts; their welcome warms the limbs. She takes my shoulder and pulls me in, puts on tea without looking away. ‘Come in, come in. Sit. Have tea,’ she says in Arabic. When her daughter runs in with her pleated skirt over tights, a fuzzy star on her shirt, it’s as if I’m sitting across from my former self, my young mother.

  We kick off our shoes on the mat. Inside, all sign of camp is gone. What am I seeing? The translator explains that this couple takes great pride in their space. The husband is a furniture maker. The first thing he did was ask for a paint roller. He repainted the rooms, fixed all the peeling parts, nailed down the broken boards. She scrubbed for days and decorated with whatever she could find. ‘And now look. Beautiful.’

  Above the midnight-blue laminate of the kitchenette hangs a yellow floral curtain, calling out the yellow of the turmeric in a jar. Big yellow serving spoons hang on the wall beside a ladle shaped like a sunflower. The dishes are washed. It seems heroic to me, every scavenged and scrubbed item, the toil to keep her family’s dignity in this wasteland. What stores of willpower it takes for this couple to commit to making these rooms a home. The very air in a camp is heavy, making you listless, pushing you into your bed. Their refusal to sit and wait is a daily resistance, a gift to their daughters. These childhood days at LM will not be marred by poverty and anticipation for them. LM Village will be just another chapter of their lives. They might have their next birthday here. They might learn to read here.

  Then my eyes are drawn to the most peculiar feature of the house: teddy bears of all sizes are mounted to the walls, in the kitchen, above the bedroom doorframes, on the bannister to the lofted space above our heads. Teddy bears are nailed to every wall. An enormous one hovers above me. The bears are funny and sinister. Over the coming days I will see many rooms with mounted teddy bears, both in the brick and mortar of LM and the metal Isoboxes of Katsikas. They overflow from donation bins. Americans and British well-wishers apparently are always sending bears.

  What can I accomplish here when there is such distance between good people? When a heartfelt gift can twist into a gruesome reminder of all that you still need? When you’re forced to make use of it anyway? Why weren’t the bear donors told to send calculators or tablets or English workbooks, dictionaries and box sets of Roald Dahl and Beatrix Potter and Julia Donaldson? No one wants a bear. In Iran, bears (like sheep) get decapitated in airports. Here, they get hung on walls.

  As Amina prepares tea and a plate of boxed cookies, I crane my neck to see into the bedrooms. Everywhere there are touches of yellow and blue.

  Unlike us, today’s refugees have smartphones. This woman knows that blue and yellow are fashionable now. What tantalising self-harm to google ‘house décor’ and be confronted with London showrooms, to see that the decadent world outside gorges while complaining that you exist, that you might come too near. Outside, they scream for borders. You might take what is theirs. You might forget your place, grow entitled and bold, accustomed to rich yellows and blues. And what about death breathing on your cheek . . . that is a guilty puzzle.

  Mustafa arrives wearing a neat button-up shirt and a houndstooth newsboy cap. Their younger daughter flings herself at him. I like them, how they refuse to relinquish their spirit after nearly drowning in a smuggler’s boat, dressing their clever daughters like British school children.

  Mustafa is losing his sight. The keratin in his eyes is destroyed and he needs injections that cost over a thousand euros. ‘I tell them, just make me glasses. They say, we can’t make you glasses.’ Syrians come into these camps, all claiming health problems. They want care for their teeth, ears, backs. They are not believed. ‘I just want to fix my eyes,’ mutters Mustafa, who has papers from his doctors in Syria. I wonder why they think a person would lie about their keratin. Do they want a needle in their eye for sport?

  Later, I follow Shiva, a speech therapist, to her cabin. Her family is tightly packed, three, maybe four, twenty-somethings and an elderly mother. No one cares about making a home here or creating a semblance of a life. No one wants to take pride in this temporary space. No one has tiny memories to protect or childhoods to shape. The space hasn’t been cleaned for a while. Now I see the state of the cabins before Mustafa got his paint roller and hammer. A pot boils atop an old hot plate splattered with sauce. Other pots caked with yesterday’s meals wait beside the sink. The counter is chipped and cracked, broken in places. Mould peeks out from every corner of the walls. The cupboards and walls too are chipped; a chunk of wall is gouged out, as if with an ice cream scoop. The mould enters my sinuses.

  Shiva’s mother sits on a bench between the kitchen and the stairs, at a small table where the family eats. She is a sprawling woman wrapped in a chador, cleaning runner beans. She could be Maman Masi. She stares, then breaks into a smile and welcomes me. They don’t get many visitors here.

  I learn that she was once mother to eleven. One died, maybe recently, and her ten living children, ranging from forty-four to twenty-one, are strewn across Europe and the Middle East. Her youngest has brought a handsome fiancé who refuses to acknowledge me. I hear him in the loft, bubbles popping in his water pipe, the throaty murmur of Syrian music.

  We sit looking at each other. Without a translator, we communicate in gestures. They bring tea. Syrians, I’m learning, like their tea migraine sweet. They think I’m refusing sugar to be polite and stir a full tablespoon into my tea. It’s hot syrup. I sip and look around, trying to place myself. If Amina was fiery and determined like my mother, this lady is like my brick-laying friend, the Afghan grandmother. I watch her hands work quickly as she glances up at the ceiling, gesturing that she is praying for her children to be reunited with her in a single country.

  The commander breaks our silence. He knocks, enters, sits without invitation. Our few interactions have shown me that this man’s ego is intertwined with LM. He reminds us again and again that he has been here every day for two years. Still, he doesn’t have the experience to run the camp and there have been problems. He shows favouritism, enters homes, fights with refugees. People are afraid of telling the truth when he’s around.

  He takes a cup of tea. We chat with single words. He tries to translate.

  During a silent beat, Shiva’s mother looks up, says an Alhamdulillah for her absent children – it is a tic. The commander bursts out in English. (Is it for my sake?) ‘What do you want me to do? Should I go to Syria and get them?’ It’s a bizarre display. Shiva rubs yoghurt on it, as Iranians say.

  I text Paul the cabin number and he appears in minutes.

>   But when I get up to go, Shiva’s mother begins shaking her head, as if something unfathomable is about to happen. She looks around, sees my backpack, then grabs it and hugs it tight to her breast.

  And here’s another memory from camp: you become dramatic. You mean to scold, you shout. You mean to tap, you punch. Waiting amplifies your responses. Maybe this explains the commander’s outburst too; he’s lived here all this time, catching the symptoms. Now I remember that at Iowa, a famous writer told us that we must taste life more than we write about it, that we shouldn’t publish while in this preparatory bubble. When you’re waiting for life to begin, you’re prone to spectacle, to theatre and, as any asylum seeker who has looked into the cold eyes of an immigration officer knows, no one believes melodrama. In life and in fiction, hysteria is the ultimate lie and the waiting are most prone to it.

  I want my backpack. It’s not that I think she’ll open it. But it’s my bag; it goes with me everywhere. I can’t eat an entire meal while it hides under her chador (where she’s stashing it now). Shiva whispers to her mother and they agree to put it on the bench beside the old woman, within my sight, and to lock the door instead. They’ve gone mad with boredom.

  Now I find something else to worry about. With the commander happy to stay, they have taken on three extra mouths. I can’t bear to eat up their food, bought with precious euros now that Paul’s store is gone. I try to refuse again, but now I’m insulting them. Shiva frowns. I’m bordering on ‘this isn’t good enough for me’ territory. And yet, this isn’t like that New York Thanksgiving, the well-to-do fretting over the shelter’s rations. Shiva’s family needs this food. After we’re gone, the fiancé will come down from the loft and expect a plate. But pride wins and we stay.

  Shiva’s sister, the twenty-one-year-old, perhaps preparing for marriage, has made the entire meal on the hot plate. Lentil soup. Chicken with mushrooms. Watery rice. A small dish of yoghurt. They serve us first and too much. I’m embarrassed for us and for them. I know the competing instincts. They want us here; they long for guests. But they will be hungry before bed. No adult can be satisfied on a few tendrils of a chicken thigh. Shiva’s mother has put an entire drumstick on my plate. No one else has a whole drumstick. To distract from the serving, I ask for the recipe.

  Shiva’s sister beams. She starts listing ingredients and when she’s lost for the English word, she gestures. She shows me an empty can of mushroom, points to the chicken with a laugh (chicken, of course!), shows me the peppers. She searches for a word, then opens the fridge and shows me an open tin can of tomato paste. The sight of an open can in the fridge rouses my every itch. Words I learned in pregnancy return now and they’re all I can think about: listeria, metal poisoning, what else? No. Stop. This isn’t about the can. I’m not one of those local mothers who think refugees are carriers of disease and vermin. I’m looking for an excuse to leave because the camp is bearing down on my heart. I feel trapped in the waiting place. I want to grab my backpack, unlock that door and go breathe in a field.

  I eat a big spoonful and tell little sister it’s very good. For twenty-one, she is a skilled cook, though she needs to be more patient with her rice. If she were my sister, I would teach her to lower the heat, to measure the water up to the first segment of her finger, to wrap the lid with a tea towel. I’m fascinated by this quiet, dutiful little sister, the haughty young man she keeps upstairs. There is a physical mismatch between them and I’m interested in that too. She smiles shyly and tucks in.

  I’m sitting beside the mother. Now and then she touches my left hand, which is resting at the edge of the table. Her fingers are warm, filmy and wet, like almonds soaking in hot water. When she touches me, I feel her skin sliding off bone. I like her attention. She reminds me of Morvarid and Ardestoon. Then, as I’m talking to Paul, the length of my left pinky touches something cold and slimy. I glance over, recoil. Shiva’s mother has built a mountain of tiny chicken bones outside her plate, a centimetre from mine. My pinky is mingling with the debris, touching a discarded chicken skin. She sees me looking. I grin madly, squeeze her hand and look away. She smiles at me with childlike curiosity, even affection, then licks the rice off her spoon, plunges it into the chicken bowl and serves me another piece.

  There is absolutely no fixing this. My every reaction is American, urban, obsessive-compulsive. This is who I am. Her manners aren’t so much Syrian as they are those of a village grandmother of a huge family – my own Maman Masi would behave exactly the same way. She would kiss my cheek with her mouth full, leaving a ring of oil. She would use her dress to wipe my mouth and cheek. She would serve me yoghurt from her plate, use her own spoon as a serving utensil. She would get into a bath with me. Maybe on her way out, if her boot stuck, she would ask for this same spoon.

  It’s in my head. It’s in my head. It’s in my head. I remind myself that Sam’s aunt, a French film director, once served us hummus using a spoon she had just licked. The woman has won a César, but she’s a villager too. Her habits are the same, but her village is in Europe. Why should this help? And yet it does, because I have internalised all the biases that were once used against me. European heritage neutralises dirt and germs. So do wealth and education. I remember believing as a teenager that if I got into Harvard, I would erase the traces of the refugee life from my body.

  I recall something else: days ago, I got into a bath with Elena. There is no chance she didn’t pee in it. My queasiness wanes, like toothache in a dream. The itch lives inside my mind; I banish it and eat my chicken. If you are a mother or ever had one, you have shared in another body’s grime.

  I drive as Paul searches for music. The road to Katsikas is new and pristine and empty. The cellular networks are patchy, so instead of music, we talk about our shared obsession with shame – no, not shame, which is entirely contained within. We’re obsessed with the public manifestation of it for some knowing or unwitting beneficiary: humiliation.

  ‘I’m afraid to hear their stories,’ I say. ‘The way Iranians tell stories is so vivid, so slow and detailed, you get dropped into the nightmare.’

  When the music blinks on again, we talk about our phones, how everyone in the camp has one. The number one request when they arrive to any camp? Wi-Fi. The number one complaint: bad connection. You can get a phone for almost no money and yet hostile natives often use the presence of phones as a sign that refugees are pampered, wanting and taking too much. Back at Barba, we kept an eye on our mail cubbies; we watched each day for the postman. We didn’t think of our mail as a luxury.

  I tell him that I read that the Trump administration is proposing a plan to replace a large portion of food stamp benefits for the poor (SNAP) with a pre-packaged box. The box is the same for everyone, a humiliation. It will reduce choice, efficiency, dignity. It reminds me of other measures in recent years limiting what the poor can buy with food stamps (no shellfish, for example). To some, help must always come with a slap on the wrist.

  ‘They don’t care what happens to these people’s spirit,’ sighs Paul.

  V.

  MAJID AND FARZANEH

  ‘It was just casual talk. People talk,’ said Farzaneh, frantic, when the Sepâh came for her. It was 2017. The girls, three and nine, watched their parents pace and fret.

  ‘What were they wearing?’ asked Majid.

  ‘Street clothes,’ said Farzaneh. ‘It’s Sepâh. No one else does this. Mohammad must have sent for me.’ She was shaking. Farzaneh’s brother was high up in the revolutionary guard – he had a ‘thick neck’, they say in Farsi – and he had decided she was an apostate and a brazen, unreligious woman who must be broken. She didn’t pray. She was mouthy and lax with hijab. Now and then she asked questions: Should faith be a prison? Why must I hunger for thirty days? Why can’t I choose my own clothes? Her brother called her godless, a Christian, a Jew.

  ‘If they come in street clothes,’ said Majid, ‘it’s serious. If you go, you’re not coming back. Then they’ll take me and the girls will be orphans.
’ Farzaneh started biting her thumb nail. ‘We have to run.’

  Their street was at the dead end of an alley. The window in the back looked out over a parking lot that opened to the next street. The family snuck out onto the terrace. On her way out, Farzaneh grabbed her purse and a flask of cold water. They took nothing else. No clothes; no toiletries or treasures. The girls left their backpacks, their toys. Sarah, the older one, watched stunned as her mother put three-year-old Shirin on her lap and slid down the fire ramp into the parking lot. Majid put Sarah on the slide, sat behind her and pushed off. When their feet hit asphalt, they ran.

  They drove to Urmia, a city bordering Turkey. They rented a room, tried to sleep. Farzaneh bought tooth-brushes and a new neck brace; she had suffered from neck sprains for years. As the girls were preparing for bed, washing socks and underwear in the sink and hanging them up to dry overnight, Majid stepped outside to make a call.

  ‘Your brother went to see my parents,’ he said, when the room was dark and humming with girlish sleep. ‘He said he’ll find us and kill us. He said, even if the government lets you go, he’ll never let you go. Farzaneh joon, he’s a two-fire revolutionary. We have no future together in Iran. Let’s not doubt. Let’s get out together.’