The Ungrateful Refugee Page 24

  Pooyan wants to explain to the IND that some Iranian believers may stop going to Dutch churches because they are accustomed to dramatic, intense underground congregations. Dutch churches disappoint them. ‘They say, in those hidden churches, our faith was deeper. We felt it more.’

  I ask Forough for more about Maman’s story. She demurs. Her friendship with my mother is too complicated for one dinner. But she points out another lie. She says my first novel struck her as untrue. It was too far from the life I knew. I pushed my protagonist into false choices. Did I know her? Did I first believe? ‘Why didn’t you write your story, Dina joon?’

  As I ride the tram home, I think of honesty and my writing life. What is my story? Am I, like Houshiar, loudly defending a wedge that fails to represent my life? A decade ago, I thought my story was a refugee girl who toils and makes good, who wears coral dresses, holds safe passports, earns the good diplomas, doesn’t take shit from men and is loved and respected by Americans. I want to tell Forough that it is a struggle to be honest. You can only continue talking, crafting, weaving closer to the core of the web. A decade ago, I was at Harvard Business School, the biggest lie. Last month, I came across an old Word file called ‘Memoirs of a lucky girl’. It was horrifying: stories from my first year in Oklahoma paired with scenes from Harvard. It was supposed to show how far I had come. All I see now is two threads about extreme discomfort – a girl forever in the wrong setting.

  Readers always find the lie, even if everything around it is true. It’s easy, like picking the stone out of a pot of cherry rice, you either see it or it cracks your teeth. It’s reassuring to know that my work has been a gradual unmasking, that I’ve shed my cloaks on the road. Maybe truth is only a direction to aim for. ‘In talking about the past,’ says William Maxwell, ‘we lie with every breath we draw.’ As I fall asleep, I make a decision: I won’t reach out to the Armenian, or any of Maman’s doubters. I believe her story.

  In the morning, I walk around Amsterdam, visiting my old haunts. I drink a cappuccino at the Koffie Salon. Two for Joy is gone. Amsterdam was a waiting place for me, a hesitation before setting off on a long road. The heavy sensation of those days returns and I don’t know where to put it. I don’t have the right muscles any more. I scratch at my neck and keep walking. It’s tulip season; the cracks of the city are bursting with flowers; the air is saturated with the smell of food for tourists: pancakes with sugar and stroopwafels. I take a detour past the flat I bought and renovated with Philip. Months ago, he made a point of telling me he sold it. His name is still on the door. Maybe it’s a corporate rental now – it’s high design and sterile.

  Sam texts photos of new blossoms in our garden. In case you’re feeling nostalgic for your old life. I text back: The opposite. It’s dead here.

  Today is 6 April 2018, the seventh anniversary of the day Kambiz lit a final match. The confusion and quiet frenzy of that day returns. The passersby go about their day, eating ice cream, riding bikes. I make my way toward Dam Square – maybe there is a memorial – and toward the offices of Frank van Haren, the asylum lawyer quoted in the stories about Kambiz.

  At dinner last night, Pooyan’s wife showed me her drawing of Kambiz and her diary from the days after his death. The drawing is captioned, ‘Almost like he wasn’t flesh and bone’. Those words echo in my mind as I circle Dam Square; it really does seem like he was never here. There is no memorial. As I approach the place where Kambiz set himself alight, I hear Farsi. Two men are talking on the steps. I sit beside them and listen. They speak about death but don’t mention Kambiz. It’s as likely that their presence is a coincidence as it is a tribute.

  I listen for ten minutes. They talk about the sensation of death, the pain of passing. They talk about how best to live. ‘Life is like a film,’ says one man. ‘You can choose not to focus on any one thing, just float above it. Or you could zoom in somewhere and keep your focus there. If there’s pain, you’ll feel it more. If there’s joy, you’ll feel that more too. But if you stay high above everything, I guess you could avoid every sharp feeling.’

  ‘If you want to live, you have no choice but to zoom in,’ says the other man. ‘Each time, you breathe in and let yourself go. Then you’re in it. You’ve dropped down from the God view. Your film-director view.’

  It is all apropos of nothing, but I stay on that step for a while and listen to them circle in on a crude philosophy. When one speaks of listening for the music of life, I decide it is beautiful enough to get up and go.

  On my final day, I arrive at Schiphol Airport four hours early to meet the refugee whisperer. I choose a café. Here and there I see professional men approaching and I lift my head. Still, I miss his arrival. He appears beside me like a phantom and shakes my hand. He is dressed like one of the vagrants with whom he spends most of his life – I’m grateful; I look shabby too, dressed in the same clothes I wore on my inbound flight. There is something fundamentally honest about his choices. He eats with refugees, protests with them, with groups like Refugees on the Street or We Are Here. Sometimes he squats with them in open tents or empty buildings, squalid places like the ‘refugee garage’, an abandoned parking lot outside Amsterdam full of rejected refugees who cannot return home and are forced into destitution once the Dutch have washed their hands of them.

  I see now that Mr Pouri’s monologues are mellow and smiley. He doesn’t gesticulate or pace frantically as I had imagined when we spoke on the phone. He is warm. His ch’s and j’s are soft, almost z’s – this detail, too, didn’t carry by phone. In 2002, a few years after he began giving all his time to refugees, he tells me, his wife and children left him for America.

  During our talk, his phone rings again and again. He tells me his own displacement story. He was a communist and, in the 1980s, the Islamic Republic killed or jailed all of his friends. ‘One day I realised, if I die, nothing will change. I had to go. So, I climbed the mountains to Turkey.’

  He says he’s been vilified by the Dutch, who refuse to believe that he doesn’t take money from vulnerable refugees. He works one day a week for a lawyer and earns enough. Why shouldn’t he spend his free days on work he believes in? Is the world so cynical? No one who works eighteen hours a day does it for money – those are obsession hours. ‘I want to say that this government isn’t friendly to refugees. It sends them back into danger.’

  Yesterday, Frank van Haren told me a bit more about this man, whose role baffles me. ‘Ahmed Pouri is a volunteer,’ he said. ‘Not a lawyer, but close to a lawyer. He is a good man. He keeps fighting, but he’s not nuanced. The bad guy is always the government. The good guy is the poor foreigner.’ I know that I’m in for many stories, so I prepare to listen. Ahmed Pouri doesn’t even pause for his coffee. The stories pour out of him.

  ‘In twenty-four years the most shocking thing I’ve seen is the way they turn people into plants,’ he says. He tells story after story of raped women finding their way to PRIME, his NGO. One young woman became homeless and was taken in by a stranger who kept her locked in a room for three years. She was raped every night, by many. She never spoke up, for fear of being tossed into detention. She escaped and found Mr Pouri, but was too ashamed to go public. ‘She had no personality left.’

  Another woman was sleeping in Central Station when, at around 1 a.m., a policeman came to her and said, ‘It’s cold here. You can sleep at my house.’ There, she was raped for an entire night by three men. Pouri told her, ‘If you have the guts to say this on television, we’ll make them pay.’ But the woman didn’t want to be forever associated with that shameful moment – it wasn’t her story and she didn’t want to brand herself.

  ‘These things happen because they put you on the street,’ says Mr Pouri, ‘until you agree to dig your own grave and lie in it. They take away your dignity until you agree to help them kick you out. You see, the human rights standard is bed, bath, bread. But they keep those things from refugees until they help with their own deportation. The Iranian embassy won’t issue you a p
assport unless you request it. If you refuse to request a passport, the IND can’t return you to Iran. So, the Dutch say you can’t eat or stay at the camps unless you go to the embassy (of the nation that tried to kill you!) and ask for a passport. If you say no, you’re on the streets. From there, you could end up in detention for eighteen months at a time.’

  He tells me about a client who lived for twenty-six years in the Netherlands, eleven of those in detention. They kept catching him for minor infractions (sleeping in stations, squatting) and putting him into detention, sometimes for the maximum time, sometimes less. ‘Who would spend eleven years in jail if they could go back? At some point, is it so hard to believe that home isn’t an option?’ Even by strict Dutch logic, he has proved his case by his choices, because that eleventh year in Dutch jail is not preferable to requesting a passport home. It just isn’t – unless home wants to kill you. But by that time, he was a schizophrenic. ‘What right do you have to make a man crazy?’ says Mr Pouri. ‘Why should he come here looking for help and return mad? People kill themselves in detention and in the camps. In detention, they look in every hole in your body. It’s crushing humiliation and it retraumatises all the rape victims. There’s a rape victim screaming and four guards pour onto her, their hands everywhere. They have no sense of how a traumatised person behaves when touched. And for Iranian culture, you know this, there is nothing worse. And let me ask, why not use airport scanners? Because they want to humiliate; the law is designed to crush people from Eastern cultures.’ He takes a breath. ‘Imagine a life spent between the streets, the camps and jail, not because you’re a criminal or have no skills, but just because no country wants you!’

  In all these years, I’ve never met a more passionate advocate for the displaced. Several times Mr Pouri’s voice breaks. He tears up. We are at the epicentre of his own story. Despite my suspicious nature, I believe every word from this man.

  I ask him who calls him all the time – his phone never stops ringing. Everyone, he says, from lawyers to refugees to activists, police, professors, allies (later Frank van Haren, Forough and Pooyan confirm this). They call him for bridge jumpers and hunger strikers. Hardly anyone else will defend them. And the Dutch don’t know what to say. A man stands on a wall and the police say, ‘Don’t you care about your girlfriend? Why do you want to die?’ Pouri knows that the man has said goodbye to such concerns for a while now. Another is on a bridge; he has asked the authorities to phone Pouri. He wouldn’t ask this if he wanted to die, but Pouri doesn’t let him off so easily. ‘You climbed up there, dragged everyone out of bed. Now you need demands. People have faces to save. If you come down for nothing, you’ll be in jail for wasting everyone’s time.’

  Hunger strikers are a special case, because the authorities don’t like to have their arms twisted. ‘If it’s more than thirty days, I know they’re telling the truth. A person who can last thirty days is telling the truth. The first week is very hard. Most people stop then. After a week, you can go for three weeks. But by the fourth week, you feel death coming. A man called me from jail. He said, “I want to use my claws and eat the dirt off these walls. My stomach hurts so much.” In detention they put food in front of you every day. To refuse it for that long, you must believe you’ll die at home. The people who continue, they have something to say, some true reason.’

  ‘Showing someone the truth of your past is so complicated, Miss Dina,’ he says. Memories are full of inconsistencies. I can see why he despairs of this particular battlefield: memories. It’s like fighting on clouds. The Dutch, all they listen for is inconsistency: is the time or location you gave at the start of the interview different from the end? If you fumble and give two answers, this is proof of dishonesty, not human error.

  And human frailty afflicts both sides of the table. Officers can become power-mad and vindictive. A woman and her lawyer, one of the idealists who work extra hours for nothing, have prepared a perfect case: her infant son is Dutch through his father. The law says he is entitled to his mother. Her case is routine. The officer asks at the start, as an aside, ‘Where is your old expired passport? Did you leave it at home?’ She says yes. She doesn’t know where that old thing is stashed. Hours later, he asks, again casually, ‘So your old passport, it’s at the embassy?’ She nods. It doesn’t matter. It’s long gone. He says, ‘You are lying,’ and rejects her claim.

  Her lawyer says, ‘What does it have to do with you? It’s an expired passport from the country she’s denouncing. Pay attention to the relevant documents!’ She says, ‘Here’s the birth certificate, the child’s Dutch passport, the passport of the Dutch father. I can get a “yes” from a judge in five minutes if you want to waste more money. Why not end this now?’

  ‘Because it’s my decision,’ the officer says. ‘Here, I decide.’

  Often people come to Mr Pouri frustrated with Dutch logic, their strategic ignorance of the ways of brutal nations. No matter what happens, the Dutch say, ‘He was given his democratic rights.’ Three Kurdish boys were sent back to Turkey and killed. Both governments called the killings suicide, even after one family showed proof that the barrel of the gun was longer than the boy’s arm, that the casing was found twenty metres away. ‘We asked the Turkish,’ repeated the Dutch. ‘They say it was a suicide.’

  And then there is the problem of what people say on arrival day, before they speak to lawyers or Mr Pouri. As in Houshiar’s case, LGBTQ Iranians take a long time to believe that gayness isn’t shameful. They’re embarrassed. The same is true for rape victims. On day one, they stumble onto a half-baked story and they’re stuck with it. Once Mr Pouri was called to speak to a man who had refused to tell IND that he was raped in Iranian jail. He was religious, humiliated, desperate to forget. He kept saying, ‘My body is dirty. I’m dirty. I hate my body.’ He was sweating and crying as he spoke. He wept while Mr Pouri tried to calm him. ‘Son, do you know that you are a champion? Do you understand? You survived all that torture. You survived and didn’t give up any of your friends. Be proud of yourself! Your body withstood all that – don’t insult it! Don’t say stupid things. Rape is just a torture. Many of my friends have survived torture.’

  The man wouldn’t be comforted and so Mr Pouri brought in an old communist friend who was tortured after the Iranian revolution. He wasn’t poetic or emotional, like Pouri. He spoke in the language of brothers at war. He said, as fact, ‘All that matters is that you didn’t give up your friend.’

  As he finishes this story, Mr Pouri shakes his head. ‘When you finally bring the IND the truth in the second case, after you’ve worked through the trauma and self-hate, the Dutch say, “You went off and learned the system. You’ve been coached. You’re lying.” They don’t think, maybe you had some therapy. A raped Iranian man isn’t like a raped Dutch man. They will never understand this. And so, what happens? These victims of atrocities stick to that first generic story they told, they stick to the bullshit about becoming a Christian after their child’s miraculous healing.’

  Before saying goodbye, I ask Mr Pouri for his most splendid memory. He takes no time in answering. It is Zeinab, another Turkish Kurd. She was raped in a room across from her husband, who was also raped. When he discovered that she too was violated, he tried to kill her. She ran away, spent three winter nights in a phone booth with two toddlers. Finally, she found Mr Pouri. The case took years, with several rejections. One day, she arrived at the office as scheduled, to receive news from Mr Pouri. He said, ‘Zeinab, you got a negative again. What did you do in that interview?’

  Her shoulders dropped. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ she muttered.

  ‘Don’t look so glum,’ he said, giving her a sad smile. ‘Go get us some sweets from across the street.’ She frowned and stared at him like he was crazy. ‘To celebrate, because I lied. You got your papers.’

  He expected her to laugh at the joke, but she didn’t. She dropped onto the ground and wept for thirty minutes. As the minutes passed, one by one, the workers broke into t
ears. I imagine that Mr Pouri was the first one.

  ‘Her life was changing. And, do you know what, her story started to come out involuntarily. She sat there and named all of the houses she had passed through. All of the rapes. She listed every night she had run out with the children to escape a rapist. She named the men.’ Here Mr Pouri stops, his voice breaking. He wipes his eyes and apologises, but I’m crying too. We’re a couple of silly, idealistic Iranians on a hopeless mission, crying in an airport café, while a family glances over from the next table.

  ‘After thirty minutes,’ he says, ‘she got up from the ground, her misfortunes forgotten. She left them on that floor. She said, “Ahmed, I always thought that if you got me an answer, I’d dance for an hour on this table. And here I am crying.” It was the true, honest response of her body. There was no pretence. No awareness of her audience.’ Sometimes the truth requires drama to show itself fully. ‘It was the pure and beautiful and honest response of the human. She didn’t let them turn her into a plant. So, I took a photo. I thought I won’t ask. If I ask, I’ll lose the true moment.’

  VIII.

  For centuries, the civilised world has respected ‘the right of asylum’. It is an ancient juridical concept recognising the right of the imperilled to sanctuary. Historically, whatever criticisms arise, every Western government has respected and understood this principle – until now. In the new century, this simple, foundational belief is in question among the world’s freest, most comfortable populations. When they do internalise the obligation to make room, they do so grudgingly, or with arguments about the supplication and usefulness of immigrants. Most, still, call them liars, opportunists, a scourge. It is heartbreaking how many innocents run from their beloved villages or shanties or farms and whisper along the way, We only have to reach Europe. They will take us. The civilised world is kind; it has the Geneva Convention, a court of human rights. After meals, there is food to throw away. ‘They sell you the birds of the sky!’ says Mr Pouri.