The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘you have it wrong. I didn’t claim asylum in Turkey. I did it through UNHCR. That makes a material difference.’ When had he learned this? He hardly knew; one of the many long nights of reading and obsessing. When a senior solicitor insisted on the same error, an instinct said to move on. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s better if you don’t take my case.’

  When Kaweh returned to his room, he learned that his roommate’s brother had arranged a London solicitor for him. Kaweh asked for the solicitor’s phone number; maybe he would take Kaweh’s case, too.

  He borrowed money and took a bus to London, where the solicitor’s interpreter met him at Victoria Coach Station and took him to his own home for the night. That night a more senior interpreter, another Iraqi Kurd, heard Kaweh’s story. ‘Your case is complex and this solicitor is busy,’ he said. ‘Let me prepare it for you tonight. We’ll take it to him to complete.’

  The next day, the solicitor read the statement and asked a few clarifying questions. In two hours, it was signed and sent to the Home Office.

  Christmas in Dover was just as he had imagined it from childhood cartoons: twinkling lights on wintry trees, shoppers in bright colours, the smell of pastries. He read for hours and walked the streets.

  He called his friend in Turkey for his documents and for a letter confirming his party membership. For fifty days, he lived in the temporary hostel, awaiting word from the Home Office. On 10 January 2005, Kaweh gave his asylum interview. It took six hours, with two breaks. The asylum officer was a Muslim in hijab, the interpreter an uncovered Persian woman.

  He presented his papers, his photos at KDPI headquarters, articles he had written, his acceptance by UNHCR. They asked a thousand rapid-fire questions: What is your name? Date of birth? Who are your parents? Siblings? Where did you grow up? How much schooling do you have? Why did you leave Iran? What did you do for the party? Why did you leave the party? What did you do in Turkey? Why did your asylum claim fail there?

  ‘Why didn’t you move to another part of Iraq?’ the officer asked.

  Tired and frustrated, Kaweh said, ‘By another part of Iraq, do you mean the territory controlled by Saddam Hussein?’ She nodded. ‘If Saddam Hussein is such a nice person,’ Kaweh snapped, ‘why did you attack him?’

  The interpreter paused. ‘Are you sure you want me to say this?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kaweh. ‘Please translate.’

  But the interpreter made a slight change. ‘If Saddam Hussein is such a nice person,’ she said, ‘why did the United States attack him?’

  Kaweh broke in, speaking English now, ‘And the UK.’

  Years later, he would think back on this day and regret his arrogant Iranian style: answering a question with another to highlight its absurdity. A wiser, older man would have reminded the officer that Saddam was a brutal dictator, that Kaweh wasn’t an Iraqi national and might have been branded a spy, that many Iranians died under Saddam’s torture.

  Later, the interpreter tried to call out an inconsistency. ‘You said before that the Iranian authorities promised to send you to Sweden if you spied for them,’ she said, ‘and now you said Canada. Are you lying to us?’

  In fact, the Iranian intelligence officers had contacted him many times, each time with new promises. Instead of clarifying this, Kaweh said, ‘You’re only an interpreter. Please just interpret what I’m saying.’

  Maybe it helped that Kaweh made no effort to ingratiate himself to the two women. He knew that this was a game of logic, not emotion. He told a story in great detail, clearly, in his own way. He didn’t perform hysteria.

  He was moved to Cardiff, into a house with three other men. He was given ninety pounds for necessities and a card (bearing his broken name) that he could use to collect a weekly allowance of thirty pounds from the post office. With their first small sums in hand, the four men stopped at Lidl to buy food. ‘We should eat together,’ said Ali, an Iranian. ‘It’ll buy more.’ They agreed, each giving him five pounds. He bought chicken, salt, tea, a few vegetables. Kaweh wondered if they could have ice cream. Ali made the purchases and produced a receipt – a very un-Iranian gesture, but comforting among poor strangers. It seemed this arrangement would work.

  For a total of about thirty pounds at Peacocks discount store in Cardiff, Kaweh bought a jacket, two shirts, socks, underwear, a pair of jeans and a pair of shoes so ugly that he repeatedly refused to describe them. Later, he discovered Primark, an even cheaper store, to much regret. For years, Peacocks, Primark and Lidl were the only stores he entered.

  Every week the four young men walked twenty-five minutes to Lidl, carrying their purchases on foot. Penniless and forbidden to work, they busied themselves with household chores. His roommates were younger and Kaweh did all the cleaning. He spent his days in the public library in Cardiff city centre. They went to parks, fairs, markets – free places. In the third week, Kaweh bought a football – this is how the men befriended their neighbours, kicking their ball into yards and bashfully knocking on doors. Kaweh enrolled on English courses. One day at the Sunday market, he bought a television for fifteen pounds, which he carried for an hour and a half. ‘I need a television,’ he said. ‘I have to learn English.’

  He read Penguin English readers for eight hours a day, working his way through the levels. He wore through his dictionary, memorising twenty words a day. Each time he finished a book, however simple, he felt the possibility of making a life here, of becoming someone new, maybe even the person he would have been, had he lived in a free Iran.

  Within three months, Kaweh was reading letters for his housemates and handling all that required English: shopping, correspondence, house maintenance. The housemates no longer allowed him to do the cleaning. After a while, they chipped in for a DVD player and danced to happy Kurdish songs, remembering Kurdistan together.

  When he was fluent enough to attend college four days a week, he bought a Walkman radio to listen to the BBC, because the fifty-five-minute walk was a waste of time and the Walkman was a smarter purchase than daily bus fares. He was eager to understand news and politics. He listened to everything – news, commentary, music, debates. He caught words. Then, he discovered Friends. Here was a show about everyday things, full of familiar words and the opportunity to learn new ones. Every few minutes, an invisible audience laughed (how completely bizarre, this intrusion into the fantasy). He didn’t understand the jokes and he felt an affection for Chandler, who was, even in his own country, so misunderstood. One day, watching with dictionary in hand, something magical happened.

  An ecstatic Rachel hung up the phone with her mother. ‘Emma just said her first word!’ she said (or something like that). The friends gasped, eager to hear the word. ‘She said “gleba!”’ Everyone went back to what they were doing. ‘Gleba isn’t a word,’ said Ross. ‘Of course it is,’ said Rachel. And when Ross asked for the definition, she said, ‘I don’t know all the words!’ When Ross asked her to use it in a sentence, Rachel said, ‘Emma just said “gleba!”’ Then she stomped off to look it up in a dictionary and Ross shouted after her, ‘While you’re at it, why not look up ppttthhhhhhh.’

  It had been a while since Kaweh couldn’t stop laughing. Was it that he understood an entire American scene? That he got his first Western joke? Or was it the pleasure of watching someone else, a native New Yorker, struggle with a dictionary, try to divine the meaning of a word, admit that she doesn’t know all the words? Whatever the reason, it delighted him.

  The next day he asked his English teacher, ‘Bella, do you know what “gleba” means? It is the fleshy spore-bearing inner mass of certain fungi.’

  And so, Friends became a crucial part of Kaweh’s language studies.

  Sometimes the housemates called home and listened as their families worried. One family didn’t believe their son wasn’t allowed to work and kept begging for money. He would hide in his room, dreading their calls, desperate to work but afraid to jeopardise his asylum application – people had been rejec
ted for doing charity work out of boredom. ‘You worked,’ the Home Office would say. ‘You broke the rules.’

  One day Kaweh used a discount phone card to call home. His brother picked up and started to panic. ‘Why are you calling from Tehran? It says you’re calling from an 021 number.’ Kaweh spent half the call convincing his brother that he hadn’t been caught and thrown into prison, that this wasn’t a forced call, that the caller ID had his location wrong.

  Kaweh lived for twenty-one months in that house. Within six months, all three of his housemates were gone. Rejected by the Home Office, they returned home or lived illegally on the streets, or in homes of friends. The next three were gone in five months. Twenty housemates passed through the house during Kaweh’s stay. All were rejected and left. Kaweh never saw most of them again. Now and then he heard of a death or a return home.

  In September 2006, one year and nine months after his arrival by lorry, Kaweh was granted asylum and recognised as a refugee. His acceptance meant that in twenty-eight days, he would lose his home and his allowance. In four weeks (minus the time the Home Office takes to provide new identification), he had to secure a bank account (which requires proof of address), a new address (which often requires a bank account) and income. Thanks to this impossible window, refugees often spend their first weeks after being welcomed into English society sleeping on the street. Kaweh was lucky. In January 2006, having passed the IELTS English exams, he had applied (speculatively) to university. He had been accepted in April for a foundation course. If his asylum hadn’t come through a week before the start of classes, he would have lost his place.

  The moment he had his papers, Kaweh applied for student loans. He was rejected. He borrowed from a friend, a butcher, and begged the university for an instalment plan. When they agreed, he secured a room and a night job at a Peacocks factory, cleaning and loading clothes, five nights a week from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m. Mondays were gruelling as classes met right after his shift and carried on all day. But the numbers worked and that was enough – his weekly pay from Peacocks paid for his rent, tuition instalments, food, bus fares and basic necessities.

  Years later, after he had changed the name on his ID cards back to Beheshtizadeh, after he had an office, a home, a wife, he would stumble on a tabulation of the allowances the British gave him during his twenty-one months as an asylum seeker. It was an official document with his name still broken at the top, a figure in the two-thousands at the bottom. Now he paid many multiples of that in taxes each year. Not everyone survives – you can tell yourself, I’m never eating out, never buying a bag of chips or a bus ticket, but you can’t deny your pleading child. You think you’ve made it to England. Your pain is over . . . until the first time your kid begs for Nando’s.

  Kaweh thought of the twenty men who had passed through the Cardiff house, all turned away, sent back into danger or destitution. Many such men and women had died, lost inside brutal regimes or to despair. One man, he read, had set himself on fire. How close Kaweh had come to that fate, how unlikely to sit here, in this office, believed, waved into a free civilisation, able to throw back his tie and join in the great public work of sustaining a neighbourhood, a city, a nation. It felt right to toil alongside the British, whose language came easily now. And it felt right to use his talents to help the next hungry, unwashed traveller picking through the mountains.

  It was satisfying, too, the day the British called him one of their best . . .

  III.

  KAMBIZ

  If Kambiz had an Iranian passport, he tore it up and flushed it before going to Ter Apel for his first application. A man named Hadi had a home in Almere, near a camp, and sometimes Iranians gathered there for dinners or tea. Kambiz arrived there in 1999 for a dinner. A dozen or so legal and illegal Iranians from nearby ate chickpea cookies and broken pieces of sesame candy; they dipped sugar cubes into their tea and sat against cushions and talked of home. Hadi slapped the newcomer on the back and asked what he could do. ‘I can do electrical work,’ said Kambiz. ‘I speak Turkish and Arabic, a little English, too.’ Hadi said that he could easily find building work for him if he was any good as an electrician.

  The women had brought dishes from home: Iranian chicken salad, meat cutlets, herb frittata. Kambiz offered to make something next time.

  ‘Where are you living?’ asked Hadi.

  ‘At the camp,’ he said. ‘I’ll have papers soon, then I’ll buy a house.’

  ‘God willing,’ said Hadi and he sipped his tea. ‘First you need money.’

  Kambiz let a chickpea cookie crumble on his tongue – the taste of every Persian childhood. He missed his older sister, whom he had promised to call even if he didn’t call their mother. His sister was a lawyer, the child who had fulfilled their mother’s hopes. Maybe now, Kambiz would too. Maybe he’d bring his younger sister to study. She was a child. She could still learn perfect Dutch and English and be a Western lawyer – imagine that.

  ‘What case are you giving?’ someone asked. It was a man named Parvis, an aspiring restaurateur whose own case would soon be settled.

  Kambiz considered the question, as he had done for days – there was the woman he had befriended, her angry husband, the menace always at his door. ‘I’m part of a circle of journalists,’ he said. ‘We’ve had arrests.’

  ‘Are you a journalist?’ someone else asked.

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m just part of the circle. It’s been unsafe for us.’

  ‘That won’t be enough,’ said another voice from the sofreh. ‘You should say you’re Christian.’

  Kambiz shook his head. ‘I’m Muslim,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you should say—’

  ‘I’m Muslim,’ he repeated into his cup. ‘I won’t lie about religion.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’ll meet a Dutch woman, then,’ Parvis joked.

  Kambiz sipped his tea. ‘It would be nice to have a family. A kind Iranian woman.’ Uncomfortable laughter followed. They thought he didn’t have a chance at asylum. Regardless, he wouldn’t claim to be Christian, or gay – he feared the regime; claiming apostasy might endanger his mother and sisters. Surely having a Sepâh come to your door and threaten your life is enough for the Netherlands’ immigration authority (the IND)? Surely, the Dutch don’t turn away the able-bodied and the eager who want to light their homes and cook their food?

  Over months and years Holland stamped his hopes into a manageable size. He learned Dutch. He didn’t fall in love – sometimes he talked in bars with tourists or Eastern European women he suspected were sex workers, but a respectable Iranian marriage eluded him. He told his asylum interviewers about his journalist friends, his woman friend, the moral police who came to his door. The IND dismissed his story once, then again, and his status fell from asylum seeker to ‘illegal’. Without a passport, the Dutch couldn’t send him back. They demanded that he request one from the Iranian embassy. He refused, as many do. The IND informed him that, with his case now closed, he was no longer welcome at the camp. Hadi offered him a room and steady electrical work. He made a decent living on the black market and easily paid his own way. Still, he couldn’t purchase a phone plan, rent his own home, or carry proper ID.

  After a while, Kambiz had a stream of steady cash clients and he went in and out of their homes, the homes of their friends and family. He excelled at his job, priced fairly, spoke softly. Sometimes he overcharged the rude ones, the entitled ones, and undercharged the poor, the honest, the sorrowful. Dutch culture drained him – what a lonely country he had landed in. ‘You know this about the Dutch,’ Parvis said, when they were both fluent (Kambiz’s fifth language) and Parvis had his papers and a plan for a restaurant. ‘You can’t expect friendship from them. A Dutchman’s mother calls, you know what he does? He checks his appointment book and says, “Tuesday at 4 p.m.” He doesn’t go to her, because “she lives all the way in Utrecht”. What do you, random Iranian asshole, expect from that man?’

  Kambiz laughed. Such behaviour was unhea
rd of in Iran – there, you visited your mother daily, even if she lived three hours away. There, if a lost friend called in the middle of the night, you threw on a jacket and got into your car. You’d never think to say, ‘Call a taxi’, as every last Dutchman would. Kambiz had never been invited for a dinner or a tea in the home of a Dutch person. He was thankful for the Persian community. He would say sometimes during dinner at Hadi’s, ‘I can’t wait for the day Parvis’s sons are doctors and I have my own. I can’t wait to be proud of the children.’

  The waiting began to take its toll. ‘It’s a terrifying place,’ he said to Parvis. ‘Pressure from the past, pressure from the future. They say too much of either is a mental illness.’ Parvis nodded. This was a common complaint among refugees: the future brings anxiety because you don’t belong and can’t move forward. The past brings depression, because you can’t go home, your memories fade and everything you know is gone. ‘I’m standing on a thin border between the past and future, waiting for madness to come.’ Kambiz missed his big family, all noisy and living on top of each other in a small house. He missed his sisters running around, making a mess of things. He even missed his mother’s daily moaning about his aunt.

  Some days, Kambiz worked twelve hours. He sent money to Iran and soon his family believed that he had made something of himself – he told them he was studying. This satisfied them. One day, about a decade into his stay, he decided he had had enough. ‘I’m tired,’ he told Hadi. ‘I can’t stand this waiting. I want a family. I have to get my answer and start my life.’ He planned to present himself again at Ter Apel or to the police, this time with more details about his affairs in Iran.

  ‘It’s a watery story,’ said Hadi. ‘They don’t kill people for unwitnessed affairs or friendships with journalists. You know Dutch logic. They pretend the Islamic Republic is clean and by-the-book, like the court in The Hague. Do you really want to do this?’