The Ungrateful Refugee Page 20

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ said Kambiz. ‘I won’t say I’m Christian.’ In a few months Kambiz’s cheerful demeanour had vanished. He had taken to self-pity and long bouts of complaining. He knew his friends were tiring of him. ‘You have a wife, kids, a car,’ he said. ‘I’m not allowed to have anything of my own. I want to restart this damn process and become a legitimate human. Is that too much to want? Am I asking for so much?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Hadi. ‘You deserve those things. But you must say something new for the case to be reopened. At least go and see Pouri.’

  Ahmed Pouri was an activist, a translator of cultures. He helped Iranians understand Dutch logic, to present themselves the European way. One day Kambiz accompanied a friend to Mr Pouri’s office. He listened for a long time as his friend took Pouri through his case. Then he left.

  Soon after, he presented himself to the police, explaining that his case was closed but he wished to tell his story again. He was thrown into a cell.

  Kambiz spent nearly a year in detention. After a decade in the Netherlands, after all the waiting, the toil, the aimlessness, the anxiety, he was idle now, with nothing to do but sit and suffer. He was confined to a box, except for a daily hour or two outside. He heard from no one. He became depressed and began to dream of death. Why should he go quietly and unseen back to a country where he would wither and die anyway? What a waste of a life that would be. Night after dark night, he considered the ways. Each time, he put it out of his mind, chastising himself for indulging in drama and fantasy.

  In late 2010, some months into his imprisonment, word reached Refugee Aid about Kambiz, that he was alone, without family or proper legal aid, and that he had been held in the Schiphol Detention Centre for a long time. Fearing he might be lost inside the system, they asked Frank van Haren, an asylum lawyer, to visit him.

  The detention centre is a huge, boxy building near Schiphol Airport. On approach, it gives the sensation of a white boot ready to stamp down. Van Haren endured the usual entry theatre, though he was a regular visitor. After security, a guard brought him to a room with a phone. He dialled a pre-booked interpreter and waited for Kambiz to be escorted in. He introduced himself, asked if Kambiz would like to discuss his options.

  ‘I want to re-open my case,’ said Kambiz.

  ‘I’m happy to do that,’ said Van Haren, ‘but you need something new to present to the immigration officers. You need evidence, documents you didn’t have before. If you can prove your case, we can possibly win.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ said Kambiz.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Van Haren. He noted Kambiz’s quiet misery.

  Kambiz had heard this before. Van Haren wasn’t his first asylum lawyer. But two months later, he asked to see him again. He looked worn, as if he had spent his nights agonising over their talk. He had nothing new to offer, only the hope that he had missed some vital detail and if he heard Van Haren’s advice again, he would find the solution hidden in the words.

  What else was there to do? Any ordinary person, if instructed to wait five hours, will find something else to do. But for ten minutes, most people sit and wait. If that ten minutes becomes twenty, they might still find it pointless to try to accomplish anything substantial. In this way, a rational person can be made to squander those five hours, minute by minute. This is the life of a refugee. Madness in increments, by an ever-shifting endpoint.

  A few months later, on a Friday around five o’clock, Kambiz showed up at Van Haren’s office with a hopeful stride and papers in hand. He had been released from detention (having refused to obtain an Iranian passport) and had dug around, calling old friends and acquaintances, until he had found new facts and documents linking him to various journalistic circles in Iran. He asked Van Haren’s assistant if he could see him without an appointment. ‘It’s urgent,’ he said. ‘I have the new documents he wanted. They’re good enough to start a new proceeding.’

  Van Haren stepped out from his office. ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Roustayi,’ he said. ‘I have a client and I have work till seven o’clock. I can’t see you now. But you can come back. Shall we make an appointment for Monday?’

  On Monday, moments before his appointment, Kambiz called the office in tears. ‘What’s the matter, Mr Roustayi?’ asked Van Haren.

  Kambiz wept, his sorrow and confusion carrying through the phone line. ‘I swear, I’m cursed. I put the papers in the carrier of my bike and I forgot them there. I went back outside in the morning and they were gone.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Van Haren. He believed Kambiz, remembering that Kambiz had carried those papers in with every intention of having them examined right away. Whatever he had held in his hand wasn’t a prop. ‘I understand your panic. But we’re back where we started. If you lost your new proof, we have nothing. I can’t take your case.’

  Kambiz decided to appeal to Ter Apel one more time, to start proceedings on his own behalf. The legal aid lawyer on duty sat with him. She explained that his case had no chance. Still, he remained there for several days, crossing paths with other refugees. ‘If I get another negative,’ he said to whomever would listen, ‘I think I’d like to die.’

  In the long, grey days following detention, he stayed up with Parvis late into the nights, letting his tea go cold. ‘Maybe it’s better to die.’

  ‘Go back to Iran,’ said Parvis. ‘It’s not worse than this. Your spirit is destroyed. It won’t get better here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Kambiz, dropping his face into his hands.

  ‘Come now, let’s go talk to a new lawyer. Say you’ve lost faith with Islam. Apostasy is enough,’ said Parvis. ‘You don’t need a Christian case.’

  ‘I can’t say that,’ he said. ‘I’m Muslim.’

  ‘Kambiz jan, you have to do something about your mind.’

  ‘What can I do?’ he said. ‘They put me in a cage like an animal.’

  ‘But you’re out now! Do something. Go to Germany or England. Go start over with a new story. Kambiz jan, are you hearing me?’

  ‘It was a year of hell,’ said Kambiz. He was speaking to himself now. ‘You sit and think and the answers don’t come. Everything gets dark.’ Parvis sat back and listened as his friend tried to piece together his thoughts. ‘Do you want to know something? They try to get a passport for you from the Iranian embassy, but the embassy says no, because you have to request yourself. The only exception is if you’re wanted by the regime. Then the Iranian embassy helps the Dutch deport you. So, it’s a trick. If the Dutch request a passport for you and the Iranians say yes, that’s proof you’re in danger. Otherwise, to hell with you. Go die on the streets.’

  ‘God forbid,’ sighed Parvis. ‘What a world.’

  ‘I think I’m going mad,’ said Kambiz.

  A few days later, on 6 April 2011, Kambiz left Hadi’s house in a fury. He slammed the door behind him, ignoring Hadi’s call. He jumped on a train to Amsterdam, stopping at a shop to buy a box of lighter fuel. He stood in the centre of Dam Square, the fast-beating heart of the city, surrounded by cafés, watching tourists and local workers pass by. A family of pigeons pecked at the ground near his feet and he thought, even the birds have a corner of this city to make a family. He lifted the container over his head, dousing his hair and clothes. He didn’t wait long enough for anyone to notice or question him. He said a prayer, and when he was clear of bystanders he said goodbye to his mother and sisters and lit a match.

  Parvis was at football practice with his younger son, listening to the radio, when an announcer said that a madman had set himself on fire in Dam Square. The manner of the death made him uneasy. He phoned Hadi. ‘Where’s Kambiz?’ he said.

  ‘He got angry and left,’ said Hadi. ‘Why? What’s he done?’

  ‘Turn on the radio,’ said Parvis. ‘He said a dozen times that he’d kill himself. What if he did it?’ Parvis took his children home and went straight to the police, who were in the process of identifying the victim. ‘If it’s hi
m,’ said Parvis, ‘he wasn’t mental. He was a refugee.’

  ‘There are a lot of people in this city,’ said an officer. ‘It’s probably someone else. But we will call you.’ The police took Parvis’s name and address. It’s him, thought Parvis. It’s a death only a refugee would want.

  That night he got a call – the police wanted him to come to the hospital to identify the body. As he entered, Parvis tried to think of other places Kambiz might be. No, he thought, it’s him. It’s him. The man in the bed was wrapped in bandages, his face so swollen its features were an indistinguishable mass. And yet, it was Kambiz. Parvis nodded. An officer held Kambiz’s papers in one hand. He went to call Ter Apel for fingerprints. ‘You must call the embassy so they can notify his family,’ said the officer when he returned. ‘We need to know what to do with him.’

  Parvis looked at his friend. He was attached to a catheter, but the liquid pooling in the urine bag wasn’t yellow, or even red. It was black. It was ash. His face had ballooned and oxygen was pumped into his body through artificial lungs that inflated and deflated beside many other machines. He was burned from so far inside; nothing worked any more. People had tried to stamp out the blaze with their jackets. Did Kambiz know that he was buying a liquid that couldn’t be extinguished? Or did he hope someone would save him? Now the doctors said that, even if he survived, he would never be human. He couldn’t live without the machines doing his body’s work. His last natural functions were gone.

  The next day, the police called again. Kambiz would be taken off life support. ‘The team has said he has no chance for a life.’

  Kambiz Roustayi died at thirty-six, having wasted twelve of his strongest, hungriest years, the years when people crave to build and to give of themselves to each other, to their communities – years for work and family. Why did he choose to die this way? Maybe he wanted to remain in the country’s psyche, to be a part of their news, to appear in art installations and writings, to be remembered each April for a time. He had been so forgotten. In his darkest nights, Kambiz had grappled with those who had cast him off. Is it so hard to imagine that he wanted to burn his image into their memories?

  After Kambiz was buried, his family called Parvis and asked for his belongings. Parvis packed a small bag of clothing and Kambiz’s mobile and shipped it to Iran. When the bag arrived, Kambiz’s brother-in-law phoned. ‘Is this all?’ he said. ‘This is all he has after twelve years in Holland?’

  ‘What do you expect?’ said Parvis. ‘He was illegal, living in a rented room.’ It was painful to say to this family that their son’s life had amounted to nothing. Iranians believe that Europe is all villas and wine. To think that after a decade, a man would own a sack of work clothes, full of dirt, an old phone and some underwear – that is the tragedy for them. Kambiz’s life in Europe was small. He visited two homes. He confided in two friends; he socialised with five or six. After prison, back at Hadi’s, he had no one.

  The day after Kambiz’s death, Parvis spoke to the radio station. ‘Don’t call him crazy,’ he said. ‘That is the wrong word. He was a refugee.’ And despite the media’s many mistakes in reporting Kambiz’s story (calling Van Haren his lawyer, claiming he met Parvis in an asylum centre, that he was homeless on the streets), from then on, at least, they called him a refugee. The IND never did even that: Immigration and Asylum Minister Gerd Leers called Mr Roustayi’s death ‘very tragic’, but says all the procedures were followed correctly and that the man was given proper legal assistance. Soon, talk died down and the story was forgotten.

  But some people couldn’t shake Kambiz’s memory. An Amsterdam artist named Sara, my cousin by marriage, began drawing his face. She made a notebook for him, saving every news clipping. Amsterdam Iranians gathered in Dam Square to sing songs and to remember him. Many Dutch people also came to pay respects. ‘It wasn’t right,’ they said. ‘He was part of this society now. After ten years, he should have been believed.’ No one stays in limbo for so long if going home is a safe option. People asked about his life in Iran – no one knew much. He kept his stories private. My research turned up only a grainy image of that time.

  That spring, Ahmed Pouri organised protests. He asked the mayor, ‘Do you question your system at all?’ The mayor replied, ‘What could be done? He used his democratic rights.’ He had moved on from Kambiz.

  Ahmed Pouri raged. ‘Living without perspective, like a worm. Waiting for Godot. Who can live like this? Humans need meaning. Kambiz broke because he needed purpose and family and progress.’

  Some mornings, Frank van Haren looked out his window at the spot in Dam Square where Kambiz had set himself alight. ‘He passed by my asylum practice, without leaving a clear trace, only a very sad feeling. He died three hundred metres from my office. I was in the office when it happened. I will never forget.’

  IV.

  The day Kambiz set himself on fire two kilometres from my apartment, I was planning my second escape. It was 6 April 2011, only about a month after I had heard from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that I could take refuge in a small cornfield town, far away from Amsterdam.

  Back in February, my husband and I had been spending a rainy Sunday afternoon in our favourite café, Two For Joy. He read Monocle. I read Ishiguro. We wore matching Lacoste shirts without irony. We held hands. The instant before the phone rang, I was staring at our fingers and thinking of the many intersecting uses of the word ‘sterile’, how it is good or bad but always frightening. Old age. Hospitals. Fire. Our fingers were a little older and thinner now than those early college days of chewed-up pink nail polish and review session times penned onto palms. We had grown up.

  Then my phone lit up. An Iowa number (I had been waiting for that area code for weeks. 319 still registers as rescue, literary outings, cheap wine on a Tuesday night, real friends, freedom). I ran out into the rain and listened to Samantha Chang offer me a place. She spoke about the long arc of a writing life and about the peace of living for a time in a small creative town, but I only heard half her words, the ones I recognised from my asylum-seeking days. Freedom! (to imagine and create), refuge! (from the grind), support! (the writing kind – simmer down, Dina).

  For six months, I had suffered a desperation so profound and all-consuming that I was always winded. I battled the metal bar, my Sisyphean boulder, and I kept struggling to push it down. The physical symptoms of the OCD returned. I stopped writing. I lost fifteen pounds – one day I woke and they were gone from my bones, like a misplaced earring.

  As in Iran, a necessary part of me was stifled. I felt it shrinking. What if I let it disappear, this thing I couldn’t even name or articulate?

  I was mired in ennui and narcissism and boredom, itching to get out of my marriage and Amsterdam, but too cowardly to pack a bag and go. I was married to a decent, kind man, but the prospect of escape plunged me into psychotic fantasies. I imagined him caging me in the basement, or calling embassies and having my citizenships revoked. My heartbeat quickened at these thoughts, as if my body believed them – I would spend my mornings looking through our documents, taking my passports from our filing cabinets and hiding them in my underwear drawer.

  In early April, I was searching for an apartment in Iowa City when I heard the news. An Iranian man, an asylum seeker who had been knocking on doors for a decade, had set himself on fire in Dam Square. His name was Kambiz Roustayi. It seemed that in an instant, my obsessions and fears had a place to go: who was this man? I read everything. I asked around. I dragged Philip to a vigil for him in Dam Square. I watched the video of Kambiz’s death almost every day, until I knew its morbid choreography. I imagined myself in the square, part of the spectacle. What if I was there with a blanket or with one of the rain-soaked towels Philip kept in the scooter to wipe the seat? What if I had known Kambiz and could have talked him out of it somehow? I wondered if he had someone to cook for him – Iranian men had no clue how to cook. I kept returning to the core of the mystery: why did nobody believe him?

  I asked Phil
ip. He said, ‘Stop worrying. You’re adopted by us French.’

  I asked my aunt. She said, ‘It’s so often the translator. Did you know they pay more respect to translators with English and American accents?’

  I asked my mom. She said, ‘Only God knows.’

  I asked someone in the Iranian community. She said, ‘The Dutch are racist! Haven’t you heard Wilders warn about Nether-Arabia and fire up all their vilest nativist instincts? They treat this man like a real candidate; they give him legitimacy when he should be slithering around on the fringes.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said a Dutch finance man at one of Philip’s company parties, ‘that opportunistic migrants give the same stories as the true refugees. Real ones are rare. How is the IND to tell them apart?’

  I thought of how I would soon board a plane to Iowa City – my own opportunistic escape, the one in which I finally have agency and power and ambitions. In a few months, I would become a wanderer again, but definitely not the same kind as I had been when we escaped. I was so tired. ‘I don’t think opportunism is the right word,’ I said. ‘Escape from a shitty life is still escape. They’re not coming here to run pyramid schemes.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the man. He took my empty glass and put it on a tray. He was very kind. ‘I mean those leaving for economic reasons. The ones whose lives aren’t immediately in danger. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I was too tired.

  ‘Dina’s family were refugees,’ said Philip. I didn’t add that I was a refugee too – it didn’t happen a generation ago. It wasn’t forgotten. But that didn’t feel right. These were kind men. And I was wearing too lovely a dress; that night, it was my passport to joy, all that burnt coral silk.

  Shortly before I left, I had another shock.

  A friend in the Persian community told me that she didn’t believe our escape story. She spoke tenderly, as if she were telling me that she had seen my mother shoplifting at the Albert Heijn market. She said that someone cast doubts on it: a talking head of sorts, a man, in the Armenian exile community. My mother wasn’t a publicly known minister, he argued, like the one who had been shot in the streets. She was a wife of a savvy Muslim who had purchased plane tickets under the nose of the Islamic Republic. She was being melodramatic. Maybe she was lying to get out of Iran – for a better life. An economic migrant, that’s what she was. Where were her arrest papers? The records showed that we boarded a commercial plane out of Iran, that we had a visa, a sponsor. How could this be if she was about to be executed? Why wasn’t she sent to Evin, the larger, more terrifying prison in Tehran? How could she have boarded that first cargo plane? Surely an educated lady in Iran wouldn’t be reckless enough to distribute tracts in city streets? Surely no dentist inspires such loyalty that a patient would risk his job and freedom to smuggle his fugitive family?