Paul
In Syria, even those who would kill us, love us. But now I know that you love like this here, too.
TRYING to go over to the other side was my big mistake. Although that’s not exactly right. Why? You mean ‘why not’? Why it’s not right? Because, because… it didn’t start there for a start. I don’t think it will end there either. Although it might.
Where then? Where will it end? Can we take it more slowly? It started in Damascus. Or was it Paris? No, it was definitely Damascus. For me, it began in Damascus. Got that? I’ve never been to Paris. Although I sometimes feel Paris has been to me. On the road from Damascus… you like that? I thought that you might.
And now I suppose you’re expecting a tale of hammams and souks in the evening? Or of Aramaic tripping off the clucking tongues of grandmothers flogging their wares? Or maybe of the head choppers stringing spool after spool of Bach and Mozart over the telephone wires? Or drilling holes into the eyes of Moses and Ephraim, Cecilia and Macarius on the church frescoes? I’m sorry, but no.
What I want to talk about is you and here. Maybe even of us if you would allow me to. How, you ask? How will I talk? How did I get here? With great difficulty is how. Difficulty. This is a circumstance which seems to follow me everywhere.
You see, the first decision which had to be made in me getting here was who to leave behind. There was my wife. She had to stay. I mean, how can a refugee transport a grave? You can’t hide something like that in the lining of your coat or up your back passage, even if the shrapnel did helpfully cut her into many smaller pieces. And the one who had me. I left her. It still hurts to call that woman ‘mother’, even if it’s only to myself. She doesn’t know where I am, that would be too cruel, for her to know that all my running was no use.
I took the boy. Just the boy. I’ve taught him to run also. I’ve taught him to run from his grandparents’ kisses after a cruel thing called hope, which is crueller even than the smell of upturned soil or burning skin. In Syria, even those who would kill us, love us. But now I know that you love like this here, too.
How do you tell a child to count his breaths because they are a thing we cannot afford? That your feet bleeding is not a good enough reason to stop walking? That the girl who forgot her medicine and finished in the sea could not be saved?
And where are we now, exactly? I ask one who says we’re there and then another, who says we’re here. And yet, we haven’t moved. Wherever it is we are, you love to talk about the weather, so I think I’ve perfected my speech. ‘Where would we be without the rain,’ I ask when someone complains, ‘everyone would be running from the desert then, with nowhere left to run to.’ And they sort of laugh, or choke, or choke a laugh at this.
We could have stayed somewhere warmer. But then that would remind me too much of where I’ve come from. And there’s a lot about that I would like to forget and the rest to remember on my own terms, when I choose to, and not just because the smell of food rotting in the sun reminds me of it.
What’s that you say? Why not go somewhere really cold, the better to forget? Because I’m not fanatical about it.
Now, about the rotting food… While we waited in Athens – on patches of dead yellow grass above underground train stops, glassed off from ancient mud walls where the tourist signs say democracy began – something else had to be found, something more than I had already given, if we were to survive. There was no point in asking for help.
The smallest children used to go from café-to-café asking for potatoes and meat off the tourists’ plates. Sometimes they would get, other times they wouldn’t. Sometimes they would get their cheeks pulled gently, other times they would be kicked away by waiters, tiny bits of bread falling from their blistered lips. Sometimes they would be ignored, other times the tourists, usually couples, would press their heads closer and whisper about what conspiracy it was they thought the children were being used for. It never occurs to them that maybe they are the conspiracy.
I had to do something to put an end to the begging, even it if it was just that of my own stray son. The streets were so littered with bottles, cans, nappies, condoms, pizza boxes, socks, shoes, leaflets, advertisements, political propaganda that I decided to clean them. I found a brush in one bin and a dustpan thrown out the back of a nightclub and began my work. I got a sign translated into Greek by a Red Cross worker which read in black marker ‘I am trying to integrate into your society by cleaning our streets’ and placed it beside my useless coat, so citizens would know I wasn’t pleading with them. I wanted to be paid. And I was: small coins mostly, with engravings of Europa being abducted by Zeus and a Liberty Tree looking as though it was being electrocuted in a dungeon. Some would even clap and call ‘Bravo!’
Soon, I had a gang of comrades around me and I gave them streets to clean. Mine was the big avenue leading to the archaeological museum. No matter how many times I swept it, there was always more to do. Bins overflowing with tomatoes, eggplant, spinach, cucumbers were always lying by the side of the road, clogging your nose and the back of your throat with their decay. It was perfect. But when the white men in the black shirts began to take an interest in us, I knew it was time to move on. ‘We don’t want Arabs to clean our filth,’ they told the world, ‘the Arabs are the filth.’
My son – whose name you can’t have, not yet – he speaks with your accent now and plays your games, he’s always in the street with his stick; he’s even picked up some of your language – no, not this one, which I think he speaks even better than a lot of you, but that other one, the one they say is useless like us. What was it some of my neighbours used to call me? ‘Cara’? Not here though. There are no ‘caras’ here. I tell them this and that about how I got here but not about the boy. That would be stupid. It’s for his own good. And mine. And perhaps even yours, in the long run. We agreed this, the two of us, knowing that some day it would happen.
In here, they call me Paul. I don’t know why. If I have the time, before they come, I may ask Jude. Or I may not. It would mean trusting him to be quiet. Out there, back then, they called me… Well, I don’t feel like telling you that either just yet. Some of them are friendly. The ones who guard me that is. Jude takes the time to talk about your – or should that be their – football teams with me and ask me about mine. I don’t have a team, I always tell him. But he doesn’t listen.
What Jude and I do share is an occupation, a vocation. Two, in fact. Back there, I was a nurse in a home for old people. Jude tells me he was one too, until they decided they had calculated it all wrong and that one man could do the work of three. And he wasn’t the one.
The work is long and requires you to be strong but gentle even when you’re tired and you’ve lost your patience and you want to be rough, but I couldn’t wait to learn from your old. The stories behind the names of towns and streets, their great loves and their big mistakes, and where it is we actually are.
The first home I worked in, back home, was especially for Armenians. It was built to let them feel at home with each other in their old age. Many of them were blind because they were orphans. That’s a stupid thing to say. Let me try again. When they were children, they suffered. Probably, you know about it. It was decided, due to their untrustworthiness, the Armenians had to go. Who decided? An empire, who else decides these things? So they were tied together in big circles of young and old and in between and placed at the river’s edge. When one was shot, they would all collapse under the weight of the lucky one into the water and drown. Who else but an empire could be so efficient?
Those who survived were usually children, taken in by Kurds or Arabs. Some found themselves alone in Beirut or Damascus or Aleppo, where they were sent to orphanages and bathed in water that was used ten, twenty times over. Here spread the glaucoma and the blindness. There were old men and women I looked after whose last sight of the world had been the scum on the side of a tin drum. I used to cry over this.
You tell me you mostly look after your old at home here and we tell ourselves the same back there. But what happens to them when you can’t even look after yourself? When those who have done everything for you are now too far gone even to teach what you should have learnt long before now.
Do you know how I got caught? Trying to reach your highest mountain. All one thousand and thirty-eight metres of it. In Syria, we have Mount Hermon, which stands at… but that doesn’t matter, we can’t go there, not now. No, you don’t understand, even before now we couldn’t go there. It’s a ski resort, but for you not us. ‘You’, I’m sorry. I need to stop this. All this mixing everyone else up in the same dirty bag. You see, Mount Hermon was taken from us some time ago. I’ll leave it at that for now.
But I do love mountains. There’s an ecstasy I find in them, when your knees wobble and your teeth chatter when you reach the top and it’s all you can do to keep on breathing. And then, when you allow your knees to give way and your bare arms and the palms of your hands feel the earth. I could cry thinking about it. But I won’t. What good has crying ever done anyone? On my way here; in Turkey, in Greece, in Serbia when we were waiting, I would find mountains, hills, steep streets, whatever wherever I could to escape, to breathe, to feel like a man, to forget the black walls of the container.
Do you know, approaching the Turkish border, there were twenty-two of us in the one car? Can you imagine how that works? Where each hand goes and each foot? How to reassure your son when there are two men lying on top of him?
On my way back from that mountain in Kerry, I was going to follow your famine trail, even if it took me out of my way home. I wanted to feel that ground beneath my feet, maybe even to kneel and run my hands over it. I think it may have allowed me to understand you better. To feel the same hunger and fear and what is less than those but that doesn’t go away, even with death – the want, that bottomless bottomful feeling. You see, your mountains are like you: half-formed things or whole things made half. But you don’t see, do you?
Anyway, my attempt to live here, with you, was to end just like my attempt to live at home, badly. I didn’t know crossing your line would put me in this danger. On the road where the mountains part to let you into the north, our coach was pulled over by a grey man in a navy uniform. Behind him was a red minibus poking its nose from the top of a gravel track and I knew it was for me. When he stepped onto the coach, he shook the driver’s hand and gazed up the aisle. There were nods for some, quick questions for all, but when he came to me he began to tap his long fingers on the empty headrest in front of mine.
I leafed through my Walks of Ireland guidebook the better to look the tourist – a banlieue dweller from that Paris which has been to me, the son of a small businessman who had made good in England, a naturalised Arab-American who had studied under Edward Said at Yale even. But it was no use, he knew what he was looking for. He had seen me on the news in Calais, in Sicily, on the Mediterranean, in Tripoli, on Lesbos and Aegina, in Aleppo and Homs, Kirkuk, Budapest and Vienna. He had seen me coming in his daydreams and now I was here.
‘Where are you coming from? Stop that, now. Where are you really from?’ These were the first demands. But never ‘where are you going to?’. That is in their hands. They’ve already decided upon that. To be processed is a thing I will never get used to. ‘Papers, please.’ Documentation. Passport. Fingerprints. Photograph. Date of birth. Address. Extent of your fanaticism. Nature of your danger to others. All of this without looking you in the eye.
They say that they have me now and that they won’t let me go and that they are going to send me back. ‘Back to where?’ I ask. ‘From where you came.’ ‘Damascus?’ ‘No, not there, that would be too dangerous.’ And I have to laugh at this. Their concern for my wellbeing. Send me to Itos, I say, there I can work and send my family some money, and it’s their turn to laugh. They refuse to believe such a place exists. They think I’m making it up. If not the place then certainly what happens there, the idea that I might be useful. Am I making this up? I don’t know anymore.
You… No, sorry, I was about to make you all the same again… We’ll go for ‘They’ instead. Savvy? I so love that word… savvy. Vous savez. Do you comprehend? I would have fitted in so well in Paris. We learned their language so perfectly in our schools.
So they say that the word is dead. That we now speak in pixels and moving images and emojis. But if we do, I’m not sure we’ve learnt this new tongue well enough or perhaps it is just that we’re not listening. Are you still listening? Were you ever? Was I ever doing enough to make you? Because there’s something else I need to tell you before I go.
It’s about that second trade Jude and I share, or shared. I was a guard once too, in the military police. I worked for Assad, both Bashar and Hafez. Father and son. I was a soldier in the Syrian Arab army. In Lebanon. On the dividing line with the mountain that was taken from us. I guarded those whose loyalty had been called into question, whose appreciation for father and son or one of the two seemed less than appropriate. Until the Mukhabarat arrived for them. I had already left to become a nurse in that old people’s home by the time the war began. When it did, they asked me to go back, at least into a militia. But I knew that I couldn’t, not because I loved Daesh, or that I wasn’t angry they had cut my wife up with shrapnel. But because I didn’t want to die. Cowardly, isn’t it? At least now I know what it is to be both the guarded and the guard. Maybe that’s the lesson I was supposed to learn all along.
If you have been listening this whole time, without your mind wandering elsewhere, you might have questions. How could he have worked for those monsters? What exactly did he do for them? Or maybe you are noting that I haven’t expressed any regret, which is what those who are sending me back have also noted. Or maybe you’re wondering do I really hate Daesh? Am I really a coward? Am I not an Islamist? Who really killed my wife? Or do the answers really matter now that I can’t be trusted? Was I ever to be trusted? Are answers even what you want? Are answers even possible? Don’t be ridiculous, of course they are.
But I still like to think that I have some control over what I say and what I don’t say – to contribute to my defence or my prosecution. To help, or not, with my conviction.
Jude is in the corner of the room, the laughing emoji pin with the big fat bright blue tears running down over chubby yellow cheeks shining against his black jumper, looking at me – terrified – as I write this on my prison issue toilet roll with his prison issue pen, thinking I’m one of them after all and wondering when I’m going to slit his throat. Thinking, I can tell, ‘You’re not fucking Paul after all’. My dark green tie my old neighbour gave me for job interviews is stuffed into his mouth. The thin tip with the black lining is hanging out over his bottom lip, making him look faintly like a confused salamander. To try and distract him I tell him of how Sisyphus imprisoned Hades with his own handcuffs and how, ultimately, it was of no use… and already I can hear the rest of them banging on the door and demanding that the natural order of things be restored.
I must stop now, before they break the door down and it is too late; too late even to take Jude’s utility belt from around his waist and make it finally do some useful work in this place. Which I may or may not do. Let’s be honest, I won’t, I’ve come too far to stop going now. Even if going means backwards. But I know I’ve been rude in not introducing myself or my family properly.
And I don’t want to leave it like this between us. So I’ll give you their names, but since you are so good at giving identities and characteristics and cause and effect to all of us, I’ll leave it to you to decide who is who. There’s Ahmed and Leila, Mohammed and Mahmoud, Abu and Saeed, Ibrahim and Hussein, Moussa and Amal, Ragheb, Mariam and Nora. And I am in there somewhere among the marked, willing not to be registered or documented or saved, willing to be left alone.