The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
he let them hang him from a crane to soothe a vengeful husband. In the early 2000s, crossing into Turkey was simple enough. A few nights in the mountains, or, if you’re lucky, a tourist visa. You didn’t take your life truly in your hands until you made that second choice: enter Europe by land or sea?
•
At night, the smuggler packed twenty-one adults into the first truck. The driver gave them instructions for the road: “Remain silent. At stops, don’t breathe unless I open the door to give you food.” Toilet stops were thirty seconds on the side of the road every ten or twelve hours. Nights passed in silence. Now and then, when they were on a quiet stretch of highway, they could hear the driver talking on the phone with a smuggler.
They slept for two nights in a destroyed factory, a big, musty ramshackle space. A smuggler brought food enough to survive, and new refugees. After two days, the original group walked to a caravan. They rode for a long time, twenty-one squeezing in, filling every foot-space and armrest with their bodies. It was risky riding in a van, and they had no idea where they were now—but they were on a quiet road and had no other option. By the next stop, they had been traveling for six days. They hadn’t bathed or changed their clothes, and they had only been outside at nighttime. They had no papers, and they still had no idea where they were.
Another truck unloaded them on a road in a wooded area behind a gas station. They hid among tall, thin trees that would have given them away in daytime, and they waited for the smuggler to call them. They were Iranians, Afghans, Kurds, Pakistanis, even African refugees. Kaweh heard the chatter of other drivers going in and out of the station, saw the signs and the advertisements, and decided they were in France or Belgium. Before this stop, the smuggler had always spoken to the driver, and the driver always offered his own instructions. “You must be silent,” he would say. “If you say anything, we could be discovered.” But this time, the smugglers were watching the station from a distance, sneaking between vehicles and waiting for the drivers to leave their trucks. They signaled each other from the truck stop and the trees, but neither entered the station. Now Kaweh realized that they would attempt this final leg of the journey without the knowledge of the drivers. A single word could give them away.
A smuggler called seven names (all Kurdish), including Kaweh’s and a child’s. None had traveled with him so far. In two or three minutes, they were swept into the back of a truck, the doors were 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 gray 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 truck 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 recognize—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 November 24, 2004, with epic dreams. He had been traveling 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 center 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 truck 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 truck, 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.”
(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