The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  Every day I walk and I accept invitations, sick with shame for my adopted countries, my neighbours, safe in their homes, born in prosperous countries, crying out for walls. Soon I don’t even have to knock any more, or remember who lives where. The residents know me. People offer meals, familiar smells wafting from their windows. They offer tea. It’s the other side of the looking glass, a village dropped whole into the bleakest desert.

  VII.

  VALID AND TARAA

  Valid married Taraa so young that they could have raised a family twice. Maybe they made this joke too often. Maybe that’s why fate forced them into it. After they married, Valid got a clerical job in the Afghan government. They had two sons in 1992 and 1993. Then, in 2002, a third son, Pooya, completed their family while they were still young and energetic. Taraa was plump and beautiful, with light hair and a fair complexion; Valid’s mother saw her in a bathhouse and promised him as much, and after they married she delighted him in a thousand ways. She was fun, wittier than his friends and brothers. She could cook, sing and dance. And when she laughed she threw her head far back and clapped her hands. She worked hard to make him laugh, too, and this moved him. She said she couldn’t bear that the edges of his eyes turned down, grieving even when his heart was at peace.

  They lived in a big square house that Taraa painted blood orange and mint green, in a mountain village in snowy Parwan Province, north of Kabul. In the Salang Mountains, the air was always crisp and one might forget the history of the place, the thousand and one ways Afghanistan had conjured to kill you. They found small joys; Valid kept his own turmeric blend. He fried aubergine and tomatoes. He stewed lamb.

  September 2001 brought a new war to their doorstep.

  But Valid never thought of leaving. He had a duty to his country and his family. He had his snowy mountaintop and his tiny sons to protect.

  In 2004, Afghanistan prepared for its first presidential election since the ousting of the Taliban after 9/11. Taliban fighters, however, had vowed to disrupt these ‘sham elections’ and to target anyone who supported them. This included workers, security personnel, poll-takers, even voters. The Taliban vowed to dispatch their mujahideen to foil the Western invaders at any cost. Valid, a government worker, soon became a target of a local Taliban operative. When men showed up threatening death and dismemberment, he knew he didn’t have much time. The Taliban don’t quibble or dither. Still, he didn’t expect them to act so soon. And he expected a confrontation: men with guns.

  The next day, Valid and Taraa, along with their three sons and Valid’s father and sister, loaded their car and started toward Bamyan Province, where they often travelled on Fridays. Two-year-old Pooya sat on his aunt’s lap. The mountain roads were covered in bright powdery snow. Though the family had often travelled this path, everyone hushed near Shibar Pass, a winding road feared for its deathly drop-offs, steep curves and rocky terrain. Famous as one of the world’s most dangerous roads, it had killed many and yet it was often clogged, though no barriers separated the narrow road from the deadly cliffs. At 3,000 metres above sea level, the road was an icy, rocky thoroughfare braved only by experienced drivers.

  Taraa had crossed it many times. That day, she drove as the family quietened down to allow her to concentrate. Partway through the mountain, a ball formed in the pit of her stomach. The car felt unstable, like the reinforcements on the tyres had been adjusted.

  She whispered to Valid. Only a few words, but enough so that he knew. They had tampered with the car and now they were navigating death pass with their children on wheels fit only for city streets.

  Maybe she would have made it if her confidence hadn’t been shaken. Maybe knowing made her more agile and determined, enabling her to get past the cliff sides. At a sharp turn inside the mountain, the tyres gave, the car veered, then flipped, turning again and again down a hillside. The screams of the children rang out in Valid’s ears as he lost consciousness. Somehow, he was sure, his family was alive. He would wake and find them. If that patch of road had been any steeper, everyone would have died.

  A while later, Valid woke. He pulled himself to his feet. He found his sister’s and father’s bodies first. When he found his older sons, dead at eleven and twelve, Valid fell to his knees and wept, pressing their faces to his. How far from the car they had fallen – in their final moments, they had almost flown, birdlike. He could hardly bear to search for his wife and youngest son. He wept and bled and stumbled along the rocky terrain, slipping on patches of ice in torn shoes. Why didn’t they just shoot him or cut off his head? Why remove the reinforcements from his tyres? They had wanted him to suffer. Perhaps they wanted help from someone in the government. What fools to think he would crave anything but death now.

  Just as Valid was considering stepping off the edge of the nearest steep cliff, he saw her. Her skin was shredded, but she was moaning. She kept pointing to something a few paces away, behind a pile of stones. Valid rushed for the rocky patch. Pooya lay there in a pool of blood, unable even to scream. He moaned, his tiny lips trying to call for his mother. Valid lifted him into his arms. The meat of his leg had been shredded clean off. His face was bloody. So many jagged pebbles had dug into his face and legs that Valid didn’t dare try to pick them out. He dragged his two living family members to the road, where someone picked them up.

  Taraa was in hospital for weeks. Metal rods and clamps were inserted into her spine and on both sides of her pelvis. A line of stitches, thick like a suitcase zipper, bisected her back. For days, Valid collected X-rays in a file. Her foot was mangled at the ankle; she would spend her days hovering near her wheelchair; trying to walk a few paces further from it.

  Years passed. Pooya healed and grew. Scars lost their terrible sheen and Valid and Taraa became accustomed to Taraa’s new body. One leg was completely without feeling, limp from the pelvis down. Her ankle folded in on itself as if someone had hammered the ankle-bone and stapled it shut. Scars crisscrossed her legs. She grew plumper around the enormous stitches up her spine, but this new fat tissue didn’t obscure the scar or push it away from her bones; the zipper sat taut against her spine, dividing her back into two distinct pockets of flesh.

  Valid and Taraa had their second family. When Pooya was seven, a son, Naser, was born. A year later, their first daughter, Nushin. The new children clung to each other like twins. They were big-eyed and stony-faced and watchful, like children in Persian films.

  For years Valid battled with Taliban leaders, staying their hand in whatever way he could. They lived in a war-zone, each night preparing for death and the death of their children. One afternoon, Taraa was sitting in her chair, lost in thought as she unravelled an old sweater, when a hard knock startled her. The knocks grew louder and more urgent. Then, she heard commotion on the roof. Someone was stomping around above her head, trying to get in through the roof. She struggled to get up, to tell them that Valid wasn’t at home. Outside, she heard them yelling. ‘Valid! Come out now!’ She heard a window shatter and as she moved toward the noise, she saw the barrel of a gun entering her house through the window.

  Before she could run, they shot her through the shoulder, just inches from her heart. Then, seeing she was alone, they left.

  Valid moved his family to Iran, where they lived in hiding for years. Though they had torn her body apart, Taraa was serene, if no longer joyful. Valid could fit a finger in the bullet wound in her shoulder. Then a letter warned that he had been found. In 2017, Valid and Taraa took their children to Turkey. They were eight, nine and sixteen, able to walk long ways, to help their parents. Though they had already lost two sons, they put their replacement family on an inflatable dinghy to Moria. The Aegean seemed on that day as murderous as those winding mountain terrains, whose open maw was, at least, the devil they knew. When they reached Lesbos, Valid kissed the ground. ‘I’ve been running for fifteen years. Finally, we’re done with escaping.’ Over the coming months people would ask, ‘How long has it been?’ and he’d begin the story with post-
9/11 Taliban plots to stifle democracy. Often, he’d find that they meant how long has it been starting from this day, the day his foot touched European soil.

  In Moria, Pooya fell in with thugs from home. Valid worried. Once, he tried to intervene. But he was too weak to quarrel with young men. He only wanted to endure this phase and find a roof in some forgotten corner where he could fry aubergine in turmeric and care for his broken wife.

  One morning a cheery, stout-legged widow appeared behind Taraa’s chair and started chatting. Hajira looked decades older than her thirty-five years. Back home she had taught literature. ‘I raised my children with the power of my pen, under the eye of the Taliban!’ she said and Taraa smiled and said, ‘You are a brave woman, my friend.’

  VIII.

  ‘We are abandoned,’ says Majid. ‘But they’re telling everyone this is paradise. It’s maddening.’ He tells me that a senior official from Amnesty or UNHCR visited the camp. A school was hastily set up and passed off as part of an improvements programme. It was in session for a day and never returned. A doctor visited too, that day. This seemed less a lie. A pop-up clinic can achieve a lot in a day, but a school cannot. Still, the residents played along. They sent their children. No one dared complain. They didn’t know who was responsible, or whom they would anger if they made a fuss.

  Besides (everyone always says) this isn’t Moria. Thank God, this isn’t Moria. That hell is over. Now we don’t sleep in mud, or bathe our children while wading in sewage. We have linoleum planks below our feet. We sleep in beds. We might waste away without work, study or any purpose at all, stuck in this shapeless, colourless half-sleep, but we don’t wither in the rain waiting for our food, no one hurls rocks at our children in the night.

  Before I leave, Majid shows me videos of Moria, toilets overrun by sewage where people also bathed, tents on raw ground, children begging to leave. He tells me how he got his scar, a stone to the head during a routine night-time brawl between Arabs and Iranians. He huddled over his daughters in a tent erected atop the mud and, when he stuck his head out to beg for quiet, the rock struck him, cutting a gash over his eyebrows.

  ‘The fights are terrible,’ says Majid. ‘It’s because they give everything to the Arab-speaking refugees.’ He means Syrians. ‘The media is watching them. If you’re from Iran, you have nothing, no one.’

  ‘Can I come back tomorrow?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ says Majid. ‘Actually, you’ll come back thrice. Things happen to us in threes. Three boats to Moria. Three tries to get here. Always three.’

  ‘Is there anything you can do to speed things?’ Majid asks. He means the asylum claim. I don’t know what to say – his mobile videos are scenes from a nightmare and I feel cruel and silly for having revealed my own asylum story, my impossible passport. Paul keeps his face neutral. ‘I’m sorry, we can’t help. We don’t know asylum law. But we’ll look into basmati rice.’ Later he tells me that it’s a mistake even to provide reassurance, because when you’re staring at years of waiting, you grasp at every hope to circumvent it. You want to act, to cut through the void. I tell them to be patient. They won’t be here for ever. Recalling my hand-erased workbooks, I say, ‘Don’t let the girls miss school. Teach them to read in English.’

  From here on, the videos and pleas will greet me in every Isobox.

  Outside, I find a few moments of solitude. It’s chilly and wet and most of the adults are in their Isoboxes, cooking or reading or playing on their phones. Many are visiting neighbours – since arriving in groups from island camps, cliques have formed by country and gender and age. A few children play in the distance. Laundry lines connect metal boxes. Bags of garbage await the next trip to the dumpsters. Heavy sacks hang from flimsy doors, to keep them from slamming open and breaking windows.

  A young man approaches me. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks. I tell him I’m collecting stories. He offers his. ‘I’m Darius,’ he says. I follow him to a room full of single men from Afghanistan and Iran. Each Isobox holds four adults, but several of them, like this one, have become social hubs. On seeing me, the men jump up, offer me tea. They are young and polite and deferential and they receive few female visitors. Still, I am something of a novelty and they allow themselves to ask questions they would never ask another woman: What is your passport? How old are you? What’s your accent? When I tell them I’m from Isfahan, the Iranians start joking in Isfahani accents. I haven’t heard it in so long, I burst into laughter.

  I’m dying to hang out with these guys, but Paul has rules. I text him. He joins us in half a minute and works on a laptop as we chat in Farsi.

  Their window is broken. Darius tells me that, a few nights ago, there was a fight between a group of Afghan men and Iranians. He shows me a knife scar on his arm. Pulling up his sleeve, he reveals much older scars. In camp, midnight battles are routine. Idle youth grow restless, factions form. Earlier, Majid told me about disturbances by ‘the layabout boys without families’. He heard the Afghan raid at Darius’s Isobox – the shouting, the windows shattering. ‘These boys are the source of every problem. They drink, smoke, fight. They disturb the single women.’ And most damningly, they are economic migrants. They had no trouble at home, so why did they leave? If you’re a man, you can tell the Islamic Republic or the Taliban whatever they need to hear, right? ‘Don’t tell me about ethical or religious stirrings,’ he says. ‘Those are luxuries. These boys are bored and underused and they think they’ll have a better time in Europe.’ What he means is that if you were born a Muslim man in these countries, you are already privileged. You’re not a rebel woman. You’re not Christian or Bahaii. If you’re gay or an apostate, you can hide that – you shouldn’t go looking for problems. If you’re here in the camps, either you left a good life for a better one, or you stirred up trouble on purpose. ‘They are lying!’ Majid says. ‘They make it hard to believe those who had real trouble in Iran.’

  He is choosing to forget mandatory service, a deadly requirement that traps primarily poor young men, the ones who can’t pay their way out. Military service aside, though, shouldn’t wanting a better life be enough on its own? Isn’t being ‘underused’ in your twenties the greatest tragedy for the mind and the spirit? I would have considered it so, when I was studying at university and falling in love for the first time. Why should these men have to spend their lives idle and mediocre with no hope of accessing their potential? Isn’t a wasted life also a life that is in danger?

  The men tell jokes and prepare a bowl of fruit for me as the water boils. Their eyes sparkle with intelligence. These are no layabouts. I wonder what they might have done, if they had the privileges of the average American, even the poor ones. Would they be engineers or writers or dancers or chefs? Darius was a tailor in Isfahan. Would he own a New York atelier? As I wait for my tea, I imagine what they might have become if they had, say, the same opportunities as the Trump children. My mind conjures Pulitzers, heart surgeries, books of poetry and philosophy and history. There is no logical or just reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world’s resources under the guise of meritocracy. Meanwhile, these clever young men are offered no country, no home, no right to work or study, no basic right to health care, no future. They are shunned from every society, their talents wasted – why? If they are offered charity, they are told exactly what they will eat, that it cannot be the luxuries of the more deserving.

  Asghar has been a refugee for a decade, since he was a teenager. He keeps smuggling himself out of Afghanistan, making his way through Iran and Turkey, sleeping in roads and under bridges, finding menial work until he reaches Italy or France. There he finds friends, earns enough for a flat, buys a couch, gets a girlfriend. Within months, he is deported again. It’s these tendrils of root – the address, the girlfriend – that give him away. Suddenly he’s seen, investigated, tossed onto a plane. He visits his mother. He escapes again. The last time Asghar was deported, he left behind a baby.
Now, he must get back to her. Now, he has a specific destination, not just a better life, but that French town, that building, that small room with pink curtains. This has been the work of his twenties, staying fastened to France.

  Hamid has spent nearly a year in Moria, the longest of anyone they know. In one year, he has aged a decade. He is scarred up and down the arms, neat rows of cuts and cigarette burns. ‘It’s the only way to remember that there are worse pains than living like an animal,’ he says. ‘You need to feel something. To try to change things.’ It’s common among the men, to try to release energy they should be using for work, for falling in love and caring for families. I know that, privately, Hamid hopes that the burns will make someone take notice, but that’s not how Westerners think. I want to shake him, to tell him what I know. They don’t like the damaged, I want to say, especially if they think the disease is in your mind. Trust me, the Americans and the English, they like triumphant stories. They want to be a part of the stories. They want to find excellent people, luminaries, pluck them out of hell, knead them flawless. They want to congratulate themselves for something remarkable. Keep yourself undamaged.