The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  I remember the day when I was eleven, when I willed the tic in my neck away. Even if the itch threatens to make me faint, I will not move. I swore in my bedroom: I will never let an American see into my mind again.

  I say, ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’ And he looks at me with wide, watery eyes. All over the camp, people look at me the same way, like I am a pinprick portal to America. What an unnatural thing waiting is.

  Meanwhile their tea is brewed to a glassy amber. They quote Rumi. They talk philosophy. They talk about love.

  I ask Darius why he fled. He tells me the story of the woman he didn’t love, but could have loved: trying to date a worthwhile girl. He tells me about the outings, the beating by the moral police and his three-month coma. Their stories often go like this: caught in this or that small joy, they run. He shows me the marks on his body. Now, in camp, he’s found himself more woman trouble. He befriended an Afghan girl, angering the Afghan men. ‘It’s always about ladies with you,’ I say. He shrugs, eyes laughing. He’s not harmful to women. He doesn’t deserve his three-month coma or his banishment from home, his worried mother, or this forced inertia, his wasted hands. Despite the ban on work, he sews clothes for his friends at the camp. He’s just young, with charm and a skill and he wants to live.

  But Afghan–Iranian animosities run deep, not only at Katsikas. I imagine those boys have their own convincing tale: she was a misplaced thing, blown far from home and what could this young cad give her but a broken heart? At this age, every man wants to lay waste to a heart. What injustice for these underused boys to see it happen to a woman who is already suffering the waiting place – Barthes’s waiting atop the one doled out by a cowardly world; it can kill someone. I think of the Romanian wife; how did she survive? To fall in love as a refugee would be a nightmare.

  ‘It’s as if you’re playing with their sister,’ says one of Darius’s Afghan friends. ‘She needs protection. She’s foolish to go into a man’s Conex.’

  So, the Afghan boys broke in through the window. They cut Darius’s arm, broke his things. His Iranian friends came to his aid. To the neighbours it was a gang fight. There was drinking, maybe hashish. There was blood and glass and, for a night, they were all quenched.

  The next day I knock on a Conex door and stumble onto a morning gathering from decades ago. I peer into the window. Eight or nine Iranian and Afghan women sit around a worn rug, sipping hot tea from water glasses, gossiping, rolling dough on round wooden slabs, like chopping boards on legs. They’ve turned the Isobox into a rural kitchen from home. Now I’m looking into Maman Masi’s window in Ardestoon. Now I hear my aunt’s laughter, my grandmother’s reedy voice that sounds very much like it could be mine in old age. What rivers of memory flow quietly in the veins, waiting for a note, an image, a smell, so they can gush up to the surface.

  A hush falls when I knock. The door opens and every eye is watching me. When I greet them in childish Farsi, they wave me in, everyone at once. Two jump up to make a space on a cushion on the floor. ‘Bring cake!’ someone says. There’s cake? Peeking in, I spot a plate of white lemon cake, cut into squares, entirely possible from the ingredients in Paul’s store.

  ‘Are you making bread?’ I ask, glancing at the wooden kneading board that one of the husbands has made. The board isn’t for making bread. They’re turning everyone’s flour into thin noodles for Iranian noodle soup, a staple. I look up and see the oldest of the women putting the dough through a rickety pasta maker. ‘Where did you get that?’ I can’t hide my shock and they laugh. This grandmother doesn’t live in the camp. She has a flat in Ioannina. She and her family have Greek papers and her son, Davood, teaches the camp’s makeshift school without permission or pay. This mother and son come to the camp every day, because here are countrymen who need neighbours. And because they too need friends from home. ‘I found it in a market,’ she says, about the pasta maker.

  I start to ask where the noodles are drying. It’s raining outside; they can’t hang them on the clotheslines. She points to a small room. A mattress leans against the wall and thin ropes of dough are drying on the metal bars of the naked bedframe, enough for many families. ‘This is genius!’ I yell into the room. ‘Come, take a tea,’ someone shouts back.

  I can’t wait to tell Paul about the noodles. Here in this Isobox is everything he has been working for, people cooking their native food, providing for their community with their own knowledge and ingenuity.

  Amid the movement, I lose track of how the cup of tea got into my hand. ‘We heard about you,’ says Hajira, a great-auntie type, a sprawling woman with a rural skirt, a flat, sun-worn face, ‘the young lady writer.’

  ‘Not so young,’ I joke. ‘I’m thirty-eight.’ I have to say my age so they’ll take me seriously. The approval of Iranian mothers is my weakness.

  ‘I’m thirty-five,’ says Hajira. This time I hide my shock.

  ‘Do you have children?’ I ask. She does. They are grown. Her husband died when she was young and she raised them alone, because who wants to marry all those hungry mouths? She became a teacher of humanities. One of the other women says that she knows everything worth reading in Farsi. Hajira tells me that, a week ago, she married another man.

  ‘Married? Here in Katsikas?’ Why am I surprised? Everywhere people fall in love, they marry. Hajira tells me that he is a family friend she met on the phone, that he lives in France and came to the camp to marry her. Now she is applying to live in France, closer to her children in Germany.

  She shows me a wedding video on her phone. Men circling the empty recreation room that Davood uses for school. I recognise two of the Afghan men who served me tea. Hamid, the one with the cuts and burns, is dancing as others clap. The bridegroom sits in a chair, wearing a suit, accepting well wishes and congratulations. The women are celebrating elsewhere.

  ‘What did you wear?’ I ask.

  ‘A dress. You can’t get a wedding dress here,’ she says and I recall Paul’s complaint about the donations. Once we got a wedding dress. The irony almost knocks me onto my cushion. Later, when I tell him about Hajira’s dress search, he slaps his forehead. I wish she would have told us! Even if we didn’t have that dress, we could have found one. We could have found things for the reception. Refugees have secret lives; often that robs them of the vast stores of kindness people like Paul have to offer them. But camps have so many rules and asking for things could have consequences.

  Hajira tells me about her husband, Abdul. He is much older and kind. He is making a home for her. I ask again about the way they met. She repeats, ‘On the phone.’ And I say, maybe too girlishly, ‘No, I mean, what did he say to court you? How did you fall in love? What’s the story?’ She laughs and takes my chin. ‘Listen to you, you little devil.’

  I get comfortable on a pillow beside a shy woman at a kneading table. She has lost the use of her legs, something to do with the Taliban.

  Davood, the teacher, pops in just before school hour. I follow him.

  The children sit dinner-style at a table in the centre, boys and girls together, surrounded by their own hanging art and by a handful of parents at the periphery of the schoolroom. Davood writes Greek, English and Farsi pronouns on a worn dry-erase board. One of the mothers asks if she can add an Arabic row. He offers her the marker. Her son speaks no Farsi. He sits quietly beside another boy, squinting hard, trying to force himself to understand. Later I learn her row contains basic mistakes, but Davood has no way of checking this. He drills each student in front of the class.

  Afterward, I greet a nine-year-old Persian boy idling by the table. He asks, ‘What’s your card?’ He waits, smiling at me. ‘I have a friend who left,’ he says. ‘He got a German card.’ He tells me about football and winter in Greece and Davood, his new teacher. ‘Davood has his Greek card now. He comes and teaches us. What’s your card?’

  It’s difficult not to react. To this child traveller, the world is made up of cards of different value, each representing the worth of its owner.

/>   Another boy joins us. He tells me his name, Naser, his younger sister’s name, Nushin. They are eight and nine, both exceptionally beautiful. They have an older brother, sixteen, who wants nothing to do with school.

  Later, as I walk the Isoboxes again, Naser sticks his head out of the window. ‘Come to our house now, lady,’ he says. He disappears from the window and the door swings open to Nushin’s giggles. I glance back.

  There’s something serene and civilised about the rows of metal homes against the backdrop of the misty mountains beyond Ioannina. The savagery of Moria still haunts the place. During the day, Katsikas is still, children playing outside. At night, the adults share meals, a dozen women around a sofreh that covers the entire floor, eating, praying, reciting. The men drink and smoke, too. Both groups gossip, they dance. I imagine one unlucky teenager in an Isobox down the row, watching twenty children.

  Inside, a wheelchair is propped by the door. Hajira and Taraa are making tea. A man with a kind face sits cross-legged on the floor. He jumps up to greet me. Naser and Nushin settle on cushions to study. They ask their mother if they can make popcorn for everyone and she says yes. ‘These are your children?’ I ask Taraa and she proudly confirms.

  I chat with her husband, Valid, about the camp, the store, their journey here. How has it been, this in-between life? ‘It’s not new,’ he tells me. ‘We’ve been running from the Taliban, it seems, for fifteen years.’

  They launch into the story without fanfare. They don’t spare details and it feels wrong to hear it with the children just there, sitting with their books at their father’s side, hearing that they are divine replacement for their two dead siblings. Sometimes Hajira jumps in, reminding Taraa of details she has forgotten. ‘Did you know each other in Afghanistan?’ I ask. They didn’t. They met on the way, maybe in Moria, like everyone.

  They speak openly about Pooya, the sixteen-year-old smoking outside the community room, the toddler who was flayed, his small body tumbling down the mountain. ‘He’s a layabout,’ says Valid, eyes on his bare toes. ‘He has no education. His future is done. We’ve wandered too long.’

  I start to argue, but I stop. His eyes are drained of hope. ‘The most important thing is that the children are learning English,’ I say. ‘Use your time here. You don’t know when it’ll end and when it is over, you won’t want to have wasted it. The worst thing is to sit and wait.’

  Nushin draws closer to me. She shows me a book of English words she’s reading. It’s a book for infants. A single photo and word on each page – apple, car, tree. ‘Yes, exactly,’ I say, and give her a squeeze.

  Then Hajira asks the question I’ve been dreading. ‘Can you help this family? If you wanted to help anyone here, it should be them.’

  I say nothing. Do they think I’m going from home to home, choosing? The idea sickens me. I’m making their lives worse. I want Eirini, the photographer, to interrupt us. She knows how to handle this. She’s photographed every camp in Greece, even Moria. Hajira insists that I look at the scars on Taraa’s body. Taraa lifts up her shirt, shows me the long scars up and down her back, the place where her back seems to have been pieced together, badly, from spare parts. Her flesh grows around the cuts so that she looks like meat bound tight with string.

  I turn and look at her husband, his kind eyes. The children watch me.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor here?’ I ask. No one will give them an appointment. Every phone call takes hours and they need a translator.

  Taraa pulls her shirt back down. She shows me her mangled feet. We sit silently for a beat. Then Hajira says, ‘You should take Naser.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I say. Naser looks up. He seems unmoved.

  ‘Take the boy with you to England. He’s nine. He still has a chance to make a life, to bring his family later.’ I see now that she’s been considering this plan since the moment she saw me.

  ‘You want me to take her son?’ I’ve lost my filter. ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘What other solution is there?’ Hajira says. ‘They’ve been running for fifteen years and they’re stuck here. Do you think you’ll find someone who’s suffered more?’ I look around the room. Valid’s head hangs so low, I want to sit beside him and prop it up. Taraa is worrying the fabric of her shirt. Hajira grows more resolute. ‘If you don’t want him, drop him off in a camp in England. He will figure out what to do. He will learn English.’ His mother nods at the ceiling. His father pulls a foot close to his haunches and rests his chin on his knee. He stares at his toes. Naser watches me, his playfulness gone, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’ll make a good mother.

  ‘That’s not what will happen,’ I say. ‘The camps are the same everywhere. It’s worse there, if you end up in detention.’

  ‘They will take unaccompanied minors,’ says Hajira. ‘The state will raise him. He will have an English education and human rights.’

  My voice is feeble. ‘It’s a good plan, my friend. But I can’t smuggle a boy without papers into the country. He needs his own mother.’ Briefly, I entertain the idea. Do I adopt him? Do we take trains through Europe? Do I flash my own passport and claim that his is with his father? Do we pretend he’s unaccompanied and I watch over him from afar as he sneaks his small body through the pores of the English border?

  None of us speaks. A minute later, Eirini knocks, curls falling over the threshold as she reaches for her shoes, her breezy voice calling into the room, ‘Hello there!’ I am overcome with gratitude. I ask her if she knows Greek doctors, perhaps former classmates, people who will visit this family. She offers some ideas and the room breathes out. The women make more tea. I glance in the corner, where Naser and Nushin are sitting on tiny haunches, their backs rigid, huddled diligently over their closed books.

  I spend dusk wandering through the camp, trying to figure out what I’ve done wrong. Is it cruel for a person who’s come unstuck to return to another’s purgatory? Did they truly offer me their son, or is this Barthes’s loss of proportion – the desire to cut the waiting into pieces, to manage it? I decide to take it badly. How much worse could you take it than this?

  Someone told me (perhaps they read it somewhere) that refugees are forced into cement shoes and told, ‘Now you have roots.’ But being held down isn’t roots. They are told not to move, to build a life for a year, two years, to learn a culture they may soon leave behind. But the knowledge that you haven’t been accepted hardens the soil. This in-between country hopes you will leave and so do you. In the meantime, they keep you in holding pens. You aren’t meant to mingle with locals, to get by too skilfully in this land. You aren’t meant to take root through your cement shoes. Once accepted, you don’t wake up with feet unbound – you are still a foreigner who speaks feeble Greek, who lives in a bad neighbourhood, has darker skin, can’t find work. Perhaps that’s what draws Davood and his mother, who have a flat in Ioannina, to return again and again to Katsikas.

  Ioannina is a tourist town. A short walk from the barren lot of the camp (which Google Maps calls a ‘hospitality centre’) is a boardwalk with chic restaurants, cocktails, good espresso. But who wants to witness the spectacle of vacation when there is no work to give days shape or meaning? For the stateless, what is rest? Acting out a fiction. The vacationers too are acting in a play, a controlled wait with a known end. But tell them that their vacation is indefinite and watch them abandon all manufactured calm.

  Unknown waits combine dangerously with finite resources. Boardwalks don’t soothe the frenzy. Who wants to walk into town and risk the children pining for pastas and gelatos that cost a week’s budget? This too is a nightmare that won’t end with asylum. Each morning, for a long time, you will wake up a little taller, your sheets never covering your feet.

  Better to stay in your quarantine. The camp or the holding pen.

  ‘I forbid myself to leave the room,’ says Barthes. If he leaves the room, the lover might call. The hardest part of leaving Hotel Barba was drifting from the mail cubbies – what if our letter was
lost or stolen? Today’s refugees wait by their phones, hitting refresh. ‘To make someone wait:’ writes Barthes, ‘the constant prerogative of all power, “age-old pastime of humanity.”’

  I think of my grandmother, frozen in London, the way she recoils from refugees and their tales. I think of her decades of anticipating this one ordinary man, all the many times she has told her stories of sabotage and church politics, the theatre that enables her to survive the waiting. She has no more proportion, just the faint hope that one day, finally, she will be believed. Maybe it won’t come to that. Barthes, reflecting on a lover’s vigil, writes, ‘A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm and went away.’ The Romanian lovers of Hotel Barba defied the order to wait; they, too, got up and left. Will my grandmother’s vigil end? Will it drive her to madness?

  Is it a taunt for me to return here, as Davood does? Does every exile want to run backward after a time? I’ve moved every two-to-three years since I turned eighteen. That isn’t displacement any more. It’s a compulsion.

  As evening settles over the camp, washing the walkways between containers in pretty shades of orange, I hear music. Eirini has joined me and we stop outside a door and try to look into a window, but the curtains are drawn. The room is lit, though, and bustling. We knock. The door opens and a bolt of voices unfurls at our feet. I know almost all the women inside. ‘It’s a birthday party!’ says Farzaneh. ‘Come in, come in! Here you are again!’ says Hajira. She is back to her teasing tone from that morning’s pasta party. Taraa, too, looks relaxed. She is sitting on a cushion against the wall with her tea glass and she summons me in with her hands. She adjusts her skirt over her useless legs.