The Ungrateful Refugee Page 14

  They weren’t running from the Islamic Republic, whose interest is cold and finite, but from a brother whose rage could cross borders. In the morning, they changed their SIM card. Majid found a smuggler and prayed he wouldn’t leave breadcrumbs for his brother-in-law.

  They drove to the border at midnight. They waited in the dark, whispering to the girls to quiet their breathing while a guide crept ahead to await the shift change of the guards. The smuggler disappeared with his fee; he would go no further. When the guide signalled, they shuffled to him, keeping their heads low. The guide lifted the girls onto a horse, then grabbed the reins and gestured for Farzaneh and Majid to follow and they began climbing the Zagros Mountains into Turkey, to a safe border village. They walked for five hours in pitch-black silence, though that route takes a fit man half the time. They made stops, the horse treading quietly, as if it knew. With two children, they couldn’t risk being shot at in the night. The guide left them partway through; he wouldn’t cross into Turkey. A Turkish guide met them a few paces into the country to take them the rest of the way. The girls didn’t speak. The gravelly mountain wore through Farzaneh and Majid’s unsuitable shoes in a few hours. Only the guides, with their accustomed eyes, could see through the gluey black night. Majid and Farzaneh glanced back toward Iran; they had survived thirty-six years of a brutal regime to watch their home melt away behind a peak, into darkness.

  They reached the village just as the sun was rising. In a small room, they waited for the smuggler’s group to complete. The girls slept.

  In Istanbul, Majid arranged for another smuggler.

  Getting out of Iran was dangerous, but nothing compared to crossing the Aegean by boat, entering Europe illegally. What they had to offer the final smuggler would drain the family. Majid decided to settle for a less vetted one, in order to have money for another try. That night, they sat in an inflatable boat made for fifteen with forty-five others, held their daughters tight and watched as the smuggler turned on the motor. ‘You, over there,’ he said, pointing to a young man near the top of the boat. ‘You’re the captain of this boat. You hold this here. It works like the motor of a car. Those are the lights of Greece. Go toward it. Don’t turn. Don’t stop until you reach the lights.’

  Then the smuggler stepped off and they were in open water, forty-five unlucky runaways, with no sea training but no other choice, no country that would take them back. They were caught within the hour. The boat began to sputter and die out, then came to a complete stop in Turkish waters. A coast guard ship caught sight of them, shone a light on the boat, blinding the children and ending the journey for that night. For a moment, they dared hope the ship was Greek or English, but they hadn’t travelled far enough. And soon, the men yelling in Turkish ended all such hopes. The men loaded them onto the ship and took them by car to Izmir, in Turkey.

  In the car, Majid, who spoke Kurdish, befriended a young Arab Kurd. He told his story and was believed. ‘Sir, if you tell them you’re from Iran, you’ll spend three months in Turkish prison,’ said the man. ‘The prisons here are spilling with Afghans and Iranians. Syrians are released, God knows why. You must say you’re Kurdish Syrian. Don’t worry, I’ll register for you.’ He gave Majid Arab names to use. Then he said aloud, to those sitting near them, ‘No one will say this family is Iranian. They are Arab like us. Everyone here is Syrian. Understood?’ Some nodded. Majid paused and shook the man’s hand. The man leaned in. He whispered, ‘You’re lucky; no other Farsi speakers here. If the girls keep quiet, you’ll be believed.’

  In Izmir, they were fingerprinted. The man registered them as Syrian Kurds. They kept their gaze to the floor until he was finished. They were taken to a tiny windowless room in a caravanserai hotel. They counted the money for the next smuggler. Days later, they were back on an air dinghy, looking at the lights of Mytilene on Lesbos as the smuggler assigned a ship captain and explained that the controls are much like the ones in a car.

  The girls held hands as, once more, the shoreline receded. Soon they were on open water, headed for Greek lights. But the night was windy and waves rose up high around them, rocking the dinghy hard. It swayed from all sides, terrifying the girls, making Shirin cling to her mother. The boat took on water. Soon they were soaked through, their shoes waterlogged. Some wanted to turn back, screaming that their lives were worth another try, but others insisted it was rain, not seawater, filling the boat. Men used their clothes to drain the boat. Shirin wept. Someone vomited in the sea and Farzaneh wondered if it might all end here, in Turkish waters.

  Just as another wave crested, a searchlight tore through the dark, lighting up their faces again. Shirin’s grip on Farzaneh was so tight now that she barely had to hold her. The Turkish coast guard began yelling into the boat. This time, it seemed, someone had left their mobile phone on.

  An officer boarded the dinghy and ordered the refugees to mount the ship by rope ladder, one by one. ‘The children have to go separately,’ he said. Shirin clung tighter, gripping Farzaneh’s hair, her legs wrapped around her mother’s hips like a baby koala. Every muscle in her arms and legs had contracted and she wept on Farzaneh’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll take her myself,’ said Farzaneh, rubbing Shirin’s back.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ said the guard. He grabbed Shirin by the waist and tried to pull her off. Shirin screamed. Majid stepped in, whispering to his daughter to let go, to go up with the guard and Maman would join her. She wailed. Farzaneh tried to imagine those five minutes in her daughter’s life, when she waited on a different vessel than her mother, watching, imagining the two boats parting. Those five minutes would scar her for life.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ said Farzaneh. She put Shirin on her back and began to climb. ‘Hold on tight, azizam,’ she said. This is how monkeys transport their children, she told herself. Shirin’s animal instinct will make her hold on. Still, every step higher against the side of that ship, every inch between her daughter’s body and the sea, meant a more disastrous injury if she fell.

  Farzaneh tried to climb with one hand, holding Shirin’s bottom with the other. The officer kept yelling, ‘You can’t do that! The child can’t go with you! Trust us to take her up!’ But Shirin was glued to Farzaneh’s back, her breath hot with fear and Farzaneh had to release the other hand and climb the ladder, trusting Shirin’s arms and legs to hold her. Her grip wouldn’t loosen all at once, right? Farzaneh would feel it weakening.

  On the ship, Shirin continued to cry in Farzaneh’s arms – big breathless hiccups, fits of screaming, ribbons of tears. An officer approached and hovered over them. ‘Calm her!’ he said. ‘Do it now.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Farzaneh. ‘She’s scared out of her mind.’

  ‘What kind of mother are you?’ he said. ‘Calm her!’

  It was enough. Weeks of wandering in unwashed clothes, daughters wasting away, two failed sea journeys, with death waiting at her doorstep and this man was yelling at a crying child. Farzaneh began to scream. ‘You animal!’ she said. ‘You’re no human. She’s three. What does she know?’

  Now the captain rushed toward them. Majid tried to step in but the captain pushed past him. He pulled the officer away and slapped him across the cheek. ‘They’ve lost everything,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Shirin spoke one word before falling asleep. ‘Maman,’ she mumbled. ‘Maman, Maman, Maman.’ Then she nodded off on Farzaneh’s shoulder. She wouldn’t speak again for ninety days.

  In Izmir, they were fingerprinted and freed again.

  On the third trip, Majid stood up and told everyone to turn off their mobiles. ‘No silence or airplane mode,’ he said. ‘GPS sends signals. Switch off. Off!’ It was nine o’clock and the Greek lights were visible again.

  Today’s captain pressed ahead, straight toward the lights. No one spoke. Shirin hadn’t spoken for days, not since the rope ladder. Now she spoke in secret syllables when hungry or when she needed the toilet. After some time, they began to wonder if they had left Turk
ish waters. But land was still far off. They pressed on. The land drew closer. The refugees held their breaths and began to whisper about the journey on foot. Where were they to go to report themselves? Half a kilometre from Mytilene, the familiar harsh light appeared and Farzaneh released all hope. I can’t do this again. She looked up, despairing, whispering soothing words to Shirin. ‘Oh God, let it be,’ said Majid. The ship looming nearby wasn’t Turkish. Was it from an EU country? ‘I think tonight is the English watch,’ Majid whispered. ‘I think we’re in European waters.’ On board, Farzaneh listened to their words and tried to learn something from their uniforms, their hair and skin. Their talk was melodic, with clipped consonants giving way to long vowels, elegant, like the men and women in English movies.

  The officers held them on the water for hours, as the refugees were transported onto rescue boats three or four at a time, their flimsy life jackets exchanged for coast-guard vests and taken to the ship.

  They waited in a bus till morning, without food, water, or blankets. The girls shivered all night in their wet clothes. Their lips turned blue. A driver arrived and the bus set off. At eight o’clock, they were unloaded in Mytilene’s refugee camp, known to its residents as ‘The Hell of Moria’. ‘You won’t be here longer than a week,’ someone said as they were pushed into quarantine. In the distance, grimy travellers from Africa and the Middle East waited in lines for food. Toilets ran over and people bathed in buckets near them. Arab and Farsi men fought with broken glass bottles. The line for toilets was two hours; three hours for an undercooked meal.

  ‘I don’t know,’ muttered Majid. ‘I’m like Rostam. Everything seems to take me three tries.’ Only his wife chuckled at the dramatic reference to the poet Ferdowsi’s legendary Persian hero. They were given a mattress in a tented salon packed with bodies. No blankets; they’d have to bargain or fight for those. Like animals, thought Majid. He looked up, they were right below the Wi-Fi box. From then on, their sleep would be interrupted by men hovering over them, looking for a signal that would connect them to home.

  Moria would be their home for ninety days.

  VI.

  In Katsikas, I am walking by a row of Isoboxes, when I hear delighted shrieks in the language of my youth – children playing football outside. I say hello. ‘Are you police?’ a young girl asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m an Iranian lady looking for other Iranians.’

  ‘I’m Sarah.’ She points to her Isobox. ‘We live in that.’ I knock and Farzaneh invites me in. I struggle to strip off my boots. As I jump around, knocking into the table, Majid hears my accented Farsi and rolls out of bed. He seems happy to cut up the day with some talk. ‘Come in, come in, sit with us,’ he says. Farzaneh dashes to the kettle. ‘We’ll tell you stories that will make you grow horns.’ I laugh. My mother uses that expression.

  Majid is wearing pyjamas – the day has no shape or rhythm here, no reason to change clothes. Sometimes you shower after football. Sometimes in the morning. Farzaneh pours us Iranian tea in small glasses and they tell me about escaping from Iran; the boat disaster, the mute child, Moria.

  ‘The first thing we did when we got this Conex was to strip off everything and go straight for the shower,’ says Majid. His accent is deeply familiar. He’s around forty, a well-educated contractor. A long scar cuts across his eyebrows and makes him look angry even when he’s smiling. He picked it up in Moria camp in Lesbos, a place he compares to a Guatemalan prison. ‘That first shower was so nice. We just wanted to wash Moria off.’

  His wife nods, a tired smile blooming. ‘Then we made eggs and slept.’

  ‘Then, OK, yes, we asked about the Wi-Fi.’ Majid laughs.

  It takes no talent to coax out the stories. Everyone wants to share theirs, maybe to cut the boredom or in case someone knows someone who might help, or most likely as practice for that day when they will perform it for a jaded and sceptical audience – it is widely understood here that, in becoming an asylum officer, you relinquish all imagination and wonder.

  Just before Christmas 2017, 450 refugees from ten countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq arrived in the empty camp at Katsikas, near Ioannina. Awaiting them were residential Isoboxes, converted steel shipping containers in a gated field, each outfitted with kitchenette and bathroom, beds on metal frames. The Iranians call them Conexes. Almost everyone was arriving from Moria, the hell in Lesbos, and from similar inhospitable camps on the islands.

  Preparing for their arrival, Refugee Support store workers didn’t worry about chaos. They knew that when you treat people with dignity, they are dignified. Refugees – former doctors, teachers, craftsmen – browse the store. They choose olive oil or sunflower oil, the one they prefer. They don’t have to hurry away with a basket and barter half the items away.

  I work in the store and observe. The space is clean and whimsically decorated, cheese graters as light fixtures, small plants here and there, vegetables piled in neat rows. It looks like a section of a food cooperative in Brixton. An iPad is the sole point of sale. Volunteers fetch diapers and extra bags from the open storeroom behind the produce. No one worries about theft. Outside a long hallway features art by the camp residents, including a haunting sketch of a laden boat at nighttime, refugees on open water. Tables and chairs are set up where families wait their turn. Here are some differences between this store and any other: only one family can shop at a time. And no one, no matter how compelling their story, gets an exception.

  One afternoon, a pregnant couple returns after their shop. The husband has counted the items and he came up fifty points short. Nothing can be done. ‘It’s not a question of truth,’ says Paul. There can be no whiff of case-by-case judgments, the possibility of favouritism, in the camp.

  For most of my time at the store, I bag groceries, just as I did in Oklahoma. This time, I have no say in what goes into the bags. But after the second family passes through, I notice other peculiarities of this store: in a way, we do tell them what they can have, because we control the points. The envelope full of paper money is largely symbolic, since almost everyone spends all that they have on the first market day after the points are issued. They hand over the entire envelope and the volunteer keeps track of their shopping. At some point the volunteer says, ‘Only ten left,’ or ‘You’re ten over,’ and the family begins to make tradeoffs. Private discussions are had. Children jump in, biting their nails. Olive oil is traded for sunflower. Children beg for bananas. Juice boxes are sacrificed.

  The first time this happens, I realise I have bagged too soon. I have been over zealous. I have to stop, wait to see what will be put back. I have bagged the children’s bananas and now I remember how rare bananas were in Iran, how frantic I was for them and how that desperation lasted all through my teenage years, after bananas became ordinary. I want to ask Paul if we can just let them have it. I stand by, feeling useless and ham-fisted as the parents explain that the bananas will have to go back.

  A man pokes a soft tomato. Another claims the last medium onion is defective; are there better ones? I glance at the corner of the store, where a smile is creasing Paul’s temples – he loves it when people complain. ‘Please get real rice,’ says the tenth Iranian that day. ‘Basmati.’

  Later, as a young Syrian mother and I are trying to arrange her six sacks in a chubbily occupied buggy – the baby leans forward, accustomed to sharing his space – I hear the familiar, easy sounds of Farsi. An older Iranian couple enter, handing over their envelope (200 points, so no children). I listen as they speak in the language of everyday shopping. ‘How much’ is this or that? ‘Is the olive oil worth the price?’ Once, I hear them say ‘five Tomans’, tallying their purchases in Iranian currency. It is beautiful to enter this brief fantasy they share. For ten minutes, they are a couple in their own city, doing their weekend shopping.

  They go ten points over; the wife bites her lip. ‘The biscuit then?’

  The husband scans the items. ‘Yes, that’s the best thing,’ the
n he adds, ‘but we’d be five under.’ I imagine them back in their Isobox with their cups of tea, the cardamom they have smuggled from Iran. Butter cookies are just the thing with tea – but they put back the cookies, take a tomato paste and wait at the register.

  Then I do something stupid. I say hello in Farsi, wish them a good day. They stare at me, stunned, say polite hellos. I realise I have punctured the brief fantasy of a normal life that Paul envisioned; maybe this is the reason for the no-chat rule. My intrusion into their private negotiations makes plain that they are part of a charade, that this is a charity shop. I have heard and understood the cookie debate, the talk of ‘Tomans’. I know about their ten-point shortfall and can see the play money in their hands. I beg the universe to rewind, so I am not the same as those Thanksgiving volunteers in New York, the ones whose help came at such high costs.

  I start bagging their things, grateful again for my shabby clothes.

  When the store closes, I walk through the rows of Isoboxes, knocking on doors. I think about that pregnant couple. Did they lie? Were they believed? Refugees are always battling to be believed. As a white-skinned woman with an American passport and education, I am believed by default, and when I was pregnant no one questioned me, even when I was delirious. In a village in Italy, people crossed themselves as I passed. But to be pregnant in a refugee camp – what a curse. When you’re pregnant, you agonise over details. My obsessions and tics were at a peak during pregnancy and I would have gone back for a miscounted fifty pence. If the couple returned for their points, I believe them, though I also believe that they might have miscounted, because pregnancy also makes you imprecise.

  Knocking on doors is intimidating and thrilling. Who will answer? Will they speak Farsi? Will they invite me in? I have a list of the Farsi households and soon I memorise their door numbers. Word spreads about the American-Iranian woman walking the Conexes like a ghost. They stick their heads out and say, ‘Come over!’ ‘Come to ours.’ An Afghan boy says, ‘Come to my house, lady!’ and I go. For hours, I am a wanderer in a strange land, a lapsed countryman and everyone wants me in their home. One afternoon, as I walk the field of Isoboxes, a Syrian boy approaches. It’s raining. He takes my hand, but by now I’m used to these strange overtures; I am learning that displaced children change in different ways than adults. They fixate on anything concrete and their responses are almost entirely physical. We walk. The boy stops and reaches for the hem of my Refugee Support fleece, zips me up with great care. He says something, maybe a mother’s advice about zipping up. Then he takes my umbrella. I let it go, thinking he must be getting wet. He gets on tiptoes, struggling to hold it over my head. I duck a little. We walk. He says more things in Arabic. His tone is polite and careful, as if I were his elderly aunt visiting from afar.