The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  A smuggler called seven names (all Kurdish), including Kaweh’s and a child’s. None had travelled with him so far. In two or three minutes, they were swept into the back of a lorry, the doors shut and silence and dark swallowed them. Kaweh worried about the child. Could he keep silent? Could he hold in his tears long enough for them to reach England?

  At one or two in the morning, everyone sat shivering and red-eyed. The truck was reinforced in metal, a frightening shiny grey space. The passengers remained watchful and listened, though none dared to look out the small window in a high corner. ‘When do we make ourselves known to the driver?’ whispered one man. ‘Or should we go with him to the end?’

  ‘We’ll sense the ferry to England,’ said another. ‘After that.’

  ‘Long after that,’ said another. ‘It’s risky to get out near the border.’

  ‘And we can’t wait till the final stop either, when they unload the cargo. If we make ourselves known somewhere remote, the driver will let us go. He won’t want hassles and then we have a few hours to think before we present ourselves.’ It turned out that some had families in England that they wanted to telephone before being arrested. So, it was agreed. They spent the night interpreting the motions of the truck.

  These long nights in trucks didn’t bother Kaweh – they were physically brutal but they would end. He relished the forward motion, the assurance that nobody knew his whereabouts. Every minute spent in a rest stop or in that hut in Turkey, waiting to be kidnapped, killed, or rescued, was like five hours in the truck. There is nothing worse than waiting for someone else to act. Tonight, though, they were only vulnerable when the lorry stopped. As long as it was moving, they were safe.

  Still, the metal box took its toll on the mind. ‘What if the traffickers try to kill us?’ whispered a younger man, choking on his anxiety.

  ‘We’ll overtake him,’ a man said, as he shivered inside his thin jacket.

  The ferry was easy to recognise – locked wheels, the roll of the water. An hour after the wheels began moving again, someone stood up and peeked from the window. ‘The cars are driving on the left.’

  Tiny gasps rang out inside the metal box like musical notes. Every lip was quivering, everyone smiling madly. Tears were shed, hands squeezed.

  ‘We’re here,’ whispered someone’s hoarse voice.

  Kaweh arrived in England on 24 November 2004 with epic dreams. He had been travelling for over a week. He was unshaven and dirty; his body itched. He was freezing and hungry – without a complicit driver the final leg included no food. His mouth tasted like iron. I’ll be English then, he thought. How comforting finally to know into what life he had been reborn, to glimpse the version of himself that waited down the road. What is the people’s party here? How long will it take to perfect this language? Briefly he wondered at his own gall and yet, why should he shy away? Why should anything be impossible? The intelligence service of a brutal dictatorship, one of the most brutal in the world, wanted him. He must have some value. I have talent, he thought. I have ideas. They can call it what they want – opportunism or undeserved ambition – but I will make something good of it. I will go to university. I will help them be better.

  Six hours after Dover, they began knocking and shouting. After days of devoted silence, they thought the smallest noise would give them away. But their cries were muffled by the reinforced walls and it took an hour for the driver to hear them. Then the truck slowed and pulled onto a quiet road. The driver flung open a street-side door and said, ‘Just get out.’

  It was daytime now and they could see a town in the distance. They set off toward it on foot, arriving in the city centre twenty minutes later. Some went to call their families, asking passersby, ‘Hello, telephone please?’ Within minutes someone called the police and they were arrested.

  Kaweh exhaled as an officer approached him. He spoke almost no English, but he knew the words for this moment: ‘I am refugee,’ he said.

  Kambiz crossed Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Belgium, but his lorry didn’t head west toward Calais as Kaweh’s did. It took him north to Holland. On the journey, a kind Iranian gave him the name of a man in Almere who had work for any Iranian with a skill, papers or not. All his tinkering meant he could do basic electrical work. He tucked the number into his pocket. He would need Iranian friends, a community.

  Once safely off the lorry, he broke from the group. He cleaned his body with a bottle of water in a hidden patch of wood. He had a little money. He bought a ticket and rode a train to Amsterdam. There, he wandered past flower-lined canals. He stared at the ancient gabled homes, like cookie houses in a storybook, and at the happy blondes on bicycles and he thought, I’m here. Iran is over and the journey is over and I’m in Europe – only good things lie ahead. I’m young. I have talent and a good mind. I will make it here. I’ll find my family. I’ll find my work.

  He went to asylum offices in the village of Ter Apel, to which all asylum seekers are required to report, and said, ‘I am a refugee.’

  PART TWO

  CAMP

  (on waiting and in-between places)

  I.

  On the plane out of Iran, all we did was marvel in whispers about what we had just done. I kept verifying it with Maman. ‘Is it over now? They won’t follow us? How do we know those things were miracles?’

  For years Maman’s ‘Three Miracles’ became our identity, the story of our resettlement and therefore the story of our lives. Long after I shed that narrative, my mother held on; she still defines her life by it.

  ‘Because they were very unlikely,’ Maman said.

  ‘Will there be Smarties there?’ Khosrou asked. For three years since London, my brother had held on to the promise of more Smarties and also Divist-jib or ‘Two-hundred pockets’, which was how his toddler ears had heard Digestives. I imagined a portly Briton with a chef’s hat and a small fork tapping exactly two-hundred dents onto the chocolate side of each cookie.

  ‘How unlikely?’ I asked – I wanted to know the numbers. How often did stories like ours end badly? I knew I shouldn’t doubt, that doubting would show the frailty of my belief and dry up my future blessings. And I did believe. But I was also a mathematical kid and I had questions that, for lack of a statistical vocabulary, I couldn’t articulate then. Instead I asked about my toys and books again. ‘You promise no one will go in my room?’

  Miraculous or not, the manner of our escape meant that we didn’t land in the United Arab Emirates as refugees. We had a three-month sponsored visa courtesy of Baba’s wealthy relative, Mr Jahangir, miracle number three, the man who had surfaced during our weeks in hiding. But Maman knew that soon we would become refugees. Or worse, illegal immigrants. We had no intention of returning to Iran when our visas expired. The day after we landed, Maman requested European asylum from the United Nations office in Abu Dhabi and hoped for a response before our visas ran out and the Emirati immigration authorities found out we had blown through our welcome. We told Mr Jahangir nothing of our plans.

  ‘It smells,’ I moaned into Maman’s lap in the hot, sweaty car ride to Sharjah, the city outside Dubai where we were to settle. ‘I can’t breathe with this smell.’ She held my head in her long denim skirt as she had done hundreds of times before, on desert trips to our village house in Ardestoon, through a fussy, motion-sick chafe of a childhood. Unfamiliar smells made me crazy, but I was learning how to alter them with pleasant mental associations, an early hint of how much I could change, if I really focused, inside my faulty, itchy mind, which Maman playfully compared to Morvarid and other grumbling old village women I had loved. Smells of other humans, though – never. They made me want to scratch off my skin.

  Maman rented a single room in a hostel populated by other runaways who didn’t qualify as refugees. I hated our building, a smoky industrial stack of studio apartments with paper-thin walls, a lobby encased in glass like a holding cell, where the manager, a Korean student, sat watching television all day. We paid by the
month from Maman’s life-and-death satchel (the cash, the passports), shared one bed and tried to ignore the cockroaches and mice. The night I saw the first cockroach I jumped on the bed and held my arms and legs and rocked until I stopped imagining it crawling all over my body. Maman jumped onto the bed too and the three of us held each other, until it became a game. Now we were in a boat. Now the seas were churning and sloshing. ‘Keep your legs in!’ Maman warned and we squealed, delighting in the fear. ‘Don’t let the sharks get your toes! Here comes a big wave!’

  ‘Oh no! Shark!’ I shrieked, and burrowed under my mother’s arms and torso. ‘It’s under the boat! We’re going to die! We’re dead!’

  ‘Who’s the strongest rower?’ said Maman, as Khosrou jumped up and down, panting and puffing out his chest. ‘Don’t overturn the boat!’

  ‘We may have to sacrifice one of us to the shark,’ I said, eyeing my baby brother and his juicy limbs.

  ‘Dina!’ said Maman. She pulled us close to her, under the covers, so that soon we were breathing in her soft powdery daffodil smell and we quieted down. We were finally alone, Khosrou, Maman and I. We had a small bathroom, a mini fridge, a hotplate and bare walls; and we were safe.

  ‘What do you think Baba is doing now?’ I asked, burying my face in the soft spot under her arm. I imagined my playful baba with no one to play with, or sneak ice cream with, or read poetry to. Baba had no sense of proportion or appropriateness or any of the parental senses at all. When I was two, he would routinely wake me from my bed at midnight to eat ice cream with him. When we were alone, he would ask me things I couldn’t fathom, like ‘Where’s the olive oil?’ or ‘Was there mail today?’ I was three.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Maman. ‘Maybe he’s pulling a tooth or doing a root canal? Maybe he’s gone to Ardestoon and is having some nice ghorme sabzi right now . . . Ouch, don’t do that!’ I had picked a scab off her arm.

  ‘It was ready!’ I said, as Maman rubbed the raw skinless flesh I had exposed. I nuzzled back under her arm again. ‘I want ghorme sabzi.’

  ‘I want Smarties,’ said Khosrou, from under Maman’s other arm, ‘and chicken schnitzel!’ We pronounced it shehnee-sell.

  ‘We’ll never eat chicken schnitzel again,’ I said. ‘Only Hotel Koorosh makes that and Hotel Koorosh is in Isfahan.’ I thought of our special-occasion dish, so tasty with its lemony skin separating from the slim chop.

  ‘They have chicken schnitzel in other places,’ said Maman.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ I said. ‘Only Hotel Koorosh has schnitzel. Everyone knows that. I miss Hotel Koorosh. Do you think Baba is there tonight?’

  ‘I miss Babaeejoon,’ said Khosrou – years later he still mourned that toy sheep, disembowelled by airport guards looking for contraband.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Maman, ‘maybe we’ll find Smarties and schnitzel and you can write Baba a letter.’ She yawned, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms, where we would sleep every night for sixteen months.

  The UAE was a strange country where Middle Eastern unrest collided with Western decadence. The Persian Gulf beaches were dotted with fancy resorts, but if you dared wade past their beachside pools into the waters of the gulf, crude oil stuck like black tar to your legs, suggesting some nearby oil spill, or a bombed-down plane. In Dubai, an entire mall was devoted only to gold, and secular and religious alike spent obscene sums on trinkets. Burkas, chadors and headscarves glided up and down streets, while Western women sat bare-headed in cafés beside Arab millionaires in crisp white robes that added bridal grace to their movements.

  Maman and I threw away our headscarves like so much dirty tissue paper. I wore my hair in ponytails or loose, even in the streets, and she cycled through a tiny wardrobe of Western staples. After three years sweating and itching under Islamic school uniforms and the extra-tight academic hijab, the Emirati heat was nothing – I had never felt so free.

  And yet, for the first time, the management of money became urgent and visible for us. We didn’t have much and Dubai was expensive. Any Iranian we might find there would be obscenely wealthy. Iranian refugees rarely go through Dubai; Turkey requires no visa and they can get there in the back of a truck. But Maman had, more or less, panicked into Dubai and we would soon know if straying from the herd was foolish or wise.

  Most mornings we sat inside our grey boxy room to avoid the suffocating heat (you could cook an egg on the sidewalk) and tried to utter the new sounds and syllables Maman remembered from university English classes. We found a beachside public pool, but evening admissions prices were too high; everyone wanted to swim at night. During the day, the water was near bubbling, but the prices were low and the pool was entirely ours. Maman wore tights under her one-piece suit, out of modesty and as protection against the relentless sun, and taught us how to float.

  One day we wandered away from the pool, toward the gulf – it was only a few steps away. And Maman didn’t say no. Despite her conservatism and piety, she liked to instigate adventures with us – she had only just turned thirty-two, escaped a bad marriage and she wanted to live. We ran in heedlessly, stupidly, considering the beach was deserted and mottled by something black and gluey. In the water, our toes sank in and we wriggled them and laughed. When we emerged, our legs and feet were streaked with sticky black tar. Our toes were stuck together. We peeled and scrubbed, but the stuff refused to come off. The pool staff scowled and pointed to the gas station where the attendant showed us how to wash our legs and feet with gasoline. That night we slept in a fog of gasoline fumes.

  On evenings and cooler days, we explored Dubai. We window-shopped, imagining the items we might buy once we had our new home, wherever that might be. I would buy a My Little Pony bedspread. Khosrou wanted a set of Transformers. Dubai was alluring in its Westernness and I still associate certain items with those first fugitive days. Playgrounds featured giant exotic fruit – banana slides, pineapple swing sets, see-saws like a pair of cherries. I liked the alligator slide, the way you emerged from its open jaws, uneaten. Rotisserie chickens turned behind foggy glass doors, the birds on the top rows red and juicy, dripping onto the paler ones below. Maltesers and bananas constantly beckoned. Dubai had supermarkets with long aisles, shopping carts on wheels, mountains of Western snacks. Vanilla Wafers. Cornettos. The deceitful promises of a tin of Spam. Kentucky Fried Chicken with salty, minty yoghurt soda (a magic pairing). And Corn Flakes: in a city that drew out your sweat within minutes of waking, crushed corn soaked in ice-cold milk was a revelation. It cooled your mouth like a summer dip in the Caspian. And yet, it wasn’t sweet enough to satisfy us.

  Then, we found Frosted Flakes and were busy for weeks – eating it, waiting to eat it, walking around remembering the taste of it.

  ‘Why don’t they crumble in the milk?’ I asked one day, randomly, as we walked. ‘Why do cookies crumble and not Frosted Flakes?’

  ‘Don’t talk about food all the time, Dina,’ Maman said. She wiped her brow. ‘Do you want people to think you’re some nadid-badid?’ This was a primary concern, it seemed, after the loss of one’s entire life: to be recognised as someone who has seen, done, eaten as much as the next person. Nonchalance in the face of displacement – that was our strategy.

  Those first days in the hostel thrilled us because we were alone in a wonderland. Nothing seemed real here; we were only passing through, or acting in a play, and for a while we let the days slip away. Briefly, life narrowed to three in a bed (or a capsising boat, a desert island, an enchanted castle), on the run, having broken free. However briefly, we lived in a land of Smarties and real KitKats and Big Macs. We had no school. Maman never had to leave for work. We walked a lot, trying to tag each day with a marker for future memories. The days blurred anyway.

  Then we had an invitation from Mr Jahangir, our sponsor. We took care with our hair and clothes. ‘It’s impossible to stay clean in this heat!’ Maman said as she dressed us. ‘You step out looking like doctors’ children and by the time you arrive, you look like you’ve crossed
the Sahara.’

  ‘We can take our clothes and change there,’ said Khosrou, big sincere eyes on Maman. He lived to protect her and his plans were always serious.

  ‘We’ll just change in their front yard,’ I teased. ‘No problem.’

  Maman tossed her head back and laughed – a triumph for me every time. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, ‘if you just give us a minute with our plastic bags, you’ll see we’re very respectable people, not dehati at all.’

  ‘May we just use your shower, please?’ I said, giggling.

  ‘Can we play your Nintendo?’ said Khosrou, jumping up and down.

  ‘You can ask that,’ said Maman, stroking his cheek. ‘That one’s OK.’

  We played this game all the way to the Jahangirs’ house.

  Mr Jahangir lived in a huge house with his beautiful wife and a pre-teen son and daughter who I assumed were twins. When we arrived, they eyed us like defective merchandise. The girl’s sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes gave the impression of simultaneous boredom and a kind of patient, blueprinted treachery. They were beautiful people, all four of them. And the first time we stood in their foyer, waiting to be invited in, Khosrou and I shuffled around, speechless, graceless, like children of the help.

  Outside their enormous door, the jokes we had made mortified me.

  The twins spoke three languages, listened to Michael Jackson and drank Pepsi. Each had a bedroom draped in music posters. The girl wore rock star pins on her jean jackets and a tight Speedo racing suit. She knotted her t-shirt at the waist and undid it theatrically as she prepared to dive into their private pool. Then she swam laps as her father kept time. We paid them a handful of visits over ten months; each time the girl eyed me with a disdain I had associated, until then, only with the British. How did she learn to make that face, I wondered, when she isn’t even blonde?