City of Jasmine

by Olga Grjasnowa

  The next day, they take a slow train to the Hungarian border and get out in the last Serbian village. They stock up on bread, tinned fish and bottled water. Mohammed leaves a voice message for his wife.

  The border runs along the middle of a forest, where they’re told it’s easier to cross. But the forest has its dangers too – there are stubborn rumours of criminal gangs hiding in the woods to rob refugees and even remove their organs. Suffering is a hard currency.

  Hammoudi and Mohammed join a group of five friends from Damascus who grew up on the same street and have known each other all their lives. They have to pass through the forest alone – the smugglers are waiting for them on the other side of the border.

  Their only protection is the long sticks each of them holds. Dusk is already settling in. Hammoudi breaks out in a sweat.

  They move as quietly and inconspicuously as possible, but then they spot police officers in full combat gear running towards them, some way off. Not knowing what to do, the men run into the woods. The trees are tall and dark. They hope to blend into the thicket. They hear dogs barking in the distance; they must be police dogs. They see fallen trees giving way to a small clearing and they run to the darkest spot, taking care not to stumble over exposed roots. Hammoudi feels his own heartbeat. They have to climb trees, get as high among the branches as they can. Hammoudi’s hands tremble but he makes it up somehow. His arms are scraped open, his trembling gets stronger and stronger. The leaves rustle in the wind. He was never scared during the bombings in Syria. Instead, he’d try to estimate the number of victims brought in and pray there wouldn’t be too many hopeless cases. Here, there’s nothing to distract him from his own fate.

  The young man in the tree next to Hammoudi’s has a panic attack. He hyperventilates and his breathing is painful, but nobody helps him. They can’t even talk to him to calm him down, for fear of being discovered. Suddenly, the police call off the dogs. Mohammed whispers to the others, ‘Don’t climb down, it’s a trap.’ The forest grows very quiet, even the leaves no longer rustling.

  They spend another hour motionless in the trees, until Mohammed jumps down, followed by Hammoudi and then the others. They tread cautiously, creeping from one bush to the next, taking care not to leave their cover.

  Hammoudi thinks he hears dogs barking and he signals to them all to lie flat on the ground. They hear the border guards coming closer. Branches break and dogs growl. They’re surrounded.

  ‘Don’t move!’ voices call out.

  They don’t move a muscle. Hammoudi feels the barrel of a gun on the back of his head, sees dirty boots, even smells them and their dogs. The policemen have them encircled, laughing and yelling, and they force the men to their feet. When Hammoudi stands up a blow hits the backs of his knees and he collapses again. He hears a weak moan next to him, no doubt from someone in his group. Hammoudi tries to turn around but a policeman grabs his head and forces him to the ground. Another takes a step towards them, opens his flies and takes out his penis, which is small, red and uncircumcised. A warm liquid hits Hammoudi’s face; he clenches his eyes and lips shut and hears the other man holding onto him bellow into his ear, ‘You immigrant cunt.’

  Their group is led to the next clearing and lined up. A German shepherd is ready to pounce, its hackles raised in a furious growl. The highest-ranking officer accepts the money. He looks cheerful and inspects his prisoners with curiosity, as if to say, don’t take it personally, I like hummus too. Once he’s pocketed the cash all the policemen and the dog withdraw.

  Hammoudi, Mohammed and the others stay put in the clearing. None of them says a word. Eventually they set off to leave the woods as fast as they can. Shortly afterwards, Hammoudi and Mohammed find their smuggler at the agreed meeting place, change their clothes and cross the border with no further difficulties. They take their leave from the five friends, who don’t trust traffickers and don’t want to spend money on them.

  PART III

  By the time they arrive in Berlin it’s autumn. The leaves turn greenish yellow and then the yellow grows deeper, changes to golden yellow, orange, vermillion, carmine and finally crimson. People sit outside cafés and restaurants trying to catch the last rays of sun, though they no longer warm properly and everything will soon be immersed in drab grey. The days grow shorter again, the air grows colder.

  The waiting room at the central reception point for refugees is crowded and stuffy. People of all origins sit and wait. Children whine, babies cry, but their mothers barely have the strength to soothe them.

  Youssef and Amal have to wait. They don’t know what for, but the whys are gradually losing all meaning anyway. The German authorities’ waiting rooms, hopelessly overcrowded, the staff chronically overworked and shuffling exasperatingly slowly along the corridors, plunge the waiting people first into paralysis and then into agitation. They each expect their own number to finally light up on the LED panel at any moment, but this expectation is soon followed by the frustration of realizing that every number takes up at least half an hour’s processing, and then replaced by pure rage, strong enough to drive tears to the eyes of grown women and men. Amal and Youssef have waited outside and inside from three in the morning until late afternoon, from eight in the morning until closing time, and each time they were missing either a document or a piece of information, meaning they always had to come back again.

  They’re telling the authorities they’re a family. Amina is getting Youssef’s surname; only the missing papers are causing problems. Now they’re to take a language test to establish whether they’re Syrian. Ali tries to help them, assuring the authorities Amal is his sister, but he gradually withdraws, eventually only contacting them sporadically.

  Their tiny room in the asylum seekers’ home contains an old cot, and they spend the last of the money borrowed from Amal’s brother on a changing mat and more baby clothes, which Amina grows out of at an astonishing speed. They go to a paediatrician, who assures them the baby is healthy. Her new parents hope she’ll forget the crossing. Perhaps they also secretly hope she’ll forget her mother. All their attempts to track down her relatives have failed. There seems to be no one who knows Fatima or her husband. No one is looking for Amina.

  Amal feels guilty – the child she so coveted has become hers. She feels as though it was her longing that killed the mother, as if she’d robbed the child of her real mother through her insolent wish and now she’ll fail as a mother herself. She’ll always be just a poor substitute, she fears, will never be good enough for this child. Amal presses Amina closer to her chest.

  Youssef, Amal and the baby leave the office and go to a street café for a brief rest. They order only one coffee, which they share between them, and hot milk for Amina. They can’t afford more than that. Amal watches the women passing by on the street. Different women, well dressed and beautiful women, with long sleek hair or smart short cuts. Women in expensive dresses and high heels. Women on bikes, women with buggies, women with full shopping bags, women rushing somewhere, women stopping to look at shop windows. Suddenly Amal realizes she’s no longer one of them. Nobody takes any notice of her now. Where is her house? Her career? And her street that always smelled of jasmine? Where is the ironed and folded laundry from her chests of drawers? Where are her evening dresses and her father’s shirts, fresh from the dry cleaners? Where are her books and records? Where are her friends and relatives? The parties and summers around the pool? Where are the complicated film shoots and the exhausting rehearsals at the theatre?

  Amal hates moving around the city as a refugee – hesitant and frightened. She hates her entire existence. She hates not being able to speak German and the way no one in the municipal authorities other than the security guards is capable of speaking even basic English. She hates being seen as a Muslim and a scrounger and she hates herself. The world has invented a new race – the race of refugees, Flüchtlinge, Muslims or newcomers. The condescension is palpable in every breath.

  Suddenly, Youssef says, ‘The r
evolution was a mistake.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ Amal asks.

  Youssef starts speaking, hesitant at first and then faster and faster. ‘Even if Assad falls, nothing will change in Syria any time soon. The regime has inscribed itself upon us. You can find the next dictator every five metres in every prison in the country. There was only one mattress in my group cell and there was a fat man sitting on it and giving orders. Imagine it. Five men sat around him to protect him from the others’ lice. They had this chemical spray from somewhere, and they sprayed it on us every two hours. We, the ten of us who had lice, had to spend our days next to the toilet, although toilet’s an exaggeration for that hole in the ground. We had our own leader too, because we weren’t allowed to address the boss directly, we had to speak to our leader first and then he’d decide whether our words were worth passing on. Every group had one.’

  Amal stares at him, not understanding, and Youssef explains. ‘We were divided into five groups. The first one was the boss and his bodyguards, then came those who had someone in prison to watch over them, the third was the men who were vaguely clean and had money on them when they were arrested. Then came all the foreigners they couldn’t expel, Pakistanis, Algerians and so on. And then there was us, of course. We had to stand up whenever someone wanted to use the toilet. They’d beat us if we weren’t quick enough. In fact the boss’s gang was always beating someone or other. Once they brought a crack addict into us. He was trembling all over and in dire need of medication, but the boss ordered his men to beat him and put a plastic bag over his head. After two days of that, the crack addict went crazy and then the boss changed his mind – he wanted to keep him as his dog and pat him, and the bodyguards tripped over themselves to prove their love. They cut his fingernails, kissed his forehead, massaged his feet. How is democracy supposed to work with people like that, tell me? Remember how everyone in Syria dreamed of having power and joining the secret service? Just like we always tried to be friends with at least one government man, to be on the safe side? Like your friend Luna? We all paid our generals lavishly, gave them presents and did everything so they wouldn’t send us packing when we needed their favours one day.’

  Amal stares at Youssef in horror. ‘And what has Luna got to do with all that?’

  ‘Your best friend is the daughter of a man devoted to the regime! She is the regime! You still haven’t cut her out of your life!’

  ‘You want me to unfriend her on Facebook or what? What do you expect of me?’

  ‘Nothing. I expect nothing at all of you.’

  Amal gets up and goes to the window. It’s still raining. She wishes she could leave Youssef. But what would become of Amina? Amal is scared he’d take her away from her.

  ‘Youssef, we can’t go on like this, you and me.’

  ‘I know.’ Youssef joins Amal at the window. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says and puts an arm around her waist, but at that moment Amina wakes up and demands their attention.

  Not until they reached Germany did Hammoudi and Mohammed encounter the police. They were on a train, not far from Frankfurt am Main, where they were planning to part ways. Hammoudi was heading for France and Mohammed to Sweden, when two police officers set out to check the train. Hammoudi gave himself up voluntarily while Mohammed hid in the toilet. He actually made it all the way. Weeks later, Mohammed sent Hammoudi a Facebook message and thanked him for enabling him to continue to Sweden. He was now living in a refugee camp in the northernmost part of the country, waiting for his refugee status to be recognized so that his family could join him. He hoped it wouldn’t take much longer. He was trying to learn Swedish, he wrote.

  Hammoudi, meanwhile, embarks on an odyssey from the Frankfurt reception centre for refugees to a holding centre in Bavaria, then another near Düsseldorf and the next in Dresden, before landing up in Berlin because there’s no space anywhere else. There, he gets a room in a hostel, shared with five other men. Two of them are from Chechnya, two from Iran and one from Sri Lanka. They can’t even wish each other good night. They all snore. There are bags under their beds that haven’t been unpacked since they left their homes. They spend all day waiting for something to happen, enviously eyeing the tourists who are free, allowed to travel, study and work. The hostel is still running normally, except that the refugees aren’t permitted to eat their meals with the other guests. There’s one floor for tourists and one for refugees.

  The hardest thing for Hammoudi is never being alone. In the dining hall, in the bedroom, in the shared bathroom and even in the corridors there are people who don’t know what to do with themselves. He can’t sleep at night; that’s when the memories surface that he’s tried to block out.

  By day he explores the city on foot, sets off without a map or a plan, takes his bearings from the main roads, reconnoitres side streets and whole neighbourhoods. He thinks Berlin is ugly, everything flat, the architecture unimaginative and the people badly dressed. It’s a city for provincial teenagers with no cares in the world. Hammoudi has to stop himself from constantly comparing Berlin to Paris. He’s still planning to move on to France, but he won’t be allowed until his asylum case is closed. That’s fine by him. Picking up his old life in Paris seems impossible right now.

  It takes weeks before he finally gets an appointment for his hearing. He’s to turn up in an obscure place near the edge of town at eight in the morning.

  There, he finds a box-shaped building with a single waiting room that smells of stale air, poverty and sweat. Outside, men in tracksuit bottoms are smoking. Hammoudi joins them and asks them for a light. The sky is obscured by clouds. Someone new joins them every ten minutes. Hour after hour passes. The waiting room fills up, people spread out across the corridors, the stairwell and the courtyard.

  Hammoudi’s name is called at two o’clock. He follows a short woman into an office where two people are waiting for him, a huge mountain of a woman and a younger man. The caseworker gives him a gentle smile. She has framed pictures of her children on her desk, all three with dark brown curls and blue eyes. Hammoudi feels he can trust her.

  Through the interpreter, the caseworker tells Hammoudi she’s now ready to hear his story. The interpreter is Egyptian and despite all the Egyptian soaps his mother used to watch in the kitchen, Hammoudi has difficulty understanding his dialect.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ he asks the caseworker.

  ‘Yes, but not enough,’ she answers in an impeccable accent, and continues in German. The interpreter glares at Hammoudi and translates that he should start now, please. Hammoudi is suddenly uncertain and remembers nothing. His story suddenly seems to him like a fairy tale. Does he even have a story? He’s not sure any more. Where should he start? He remembers his parents’ house, surrounded by peaceful silence in the early morning. There was a teahouse opposite where old men used to play backgammon.

  The woman gives an expectant cough. He looks her in the eye and tries to gauge whether she’s capable of extending sympathy towards him.

  Hammoudi takes a deep breath and begins. ‘I was born in Saudi Arabia in 1980 – my parents had been working there as primary school teachers. I was ten when we returned to Syria. We lived in Deir ez-Zor.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘Not far from the border with Iraq. I went to school there. Then I started university but it took me a long time to find the right course. I ended up doing medicine.’

  ‘Did you study in Deir ez-Zor?’

  ‘No, in Paris.’

  The case worker looks surprised.

  ‘I had a grant and I wanted to stay there, but the Syrian regime withdrew my exit visa.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘2011.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then the revolution broke out.’

  He looks his caseworker directly in the eye for a moment. Then he goes on hastily, speaks for a whole hour, the caseworker taking notes and not interrupting him. It’s the first time Hammoudi has told anyone about the past four years of his life
, the first time he’s had an opportunity to order the events in his mind and reflect on them. After two hours, he’s free to go. He thanks the woman and closes the door behind him, quietly.

  Settling in takes a long time and isn’t easy. Amal and Youssef struggle through the asylum process and the German course, and then Youssef finds a job in an Arabic supermarket. The work frustrates him but he’s too despondent to look for anything else. Amal doesn’t have any work but she’s signed up with an acting agency. She applied without a recommendation, just with her CV, photos and a few video clips, and they put her on their books. When she signed her contract it felt briefly as though her life might be moving forwards, but no job has ever come out of it.

  One day her phone rings and the assistant to her agent, a man she’s never met, suggests auditioning for a cooking show. The assistant claims it’s perfect for Amal.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Amal answers.

  Still, she notes down the date and the address for the casting. The concept is apparently to present dishes from countries roughly grouped together under the term ‘unsafe third countries’. The working title is Refugees Can Cook Too.

  When she tells Youssef about the casting that evening he laughs long and hard. They’re sitting at their small kitchen table, both labouring over their German homework.

  ‘What would you cook?’ Youssef asks.

  ‘Hummus,’ says Amal, folding her arms.

  ‘No, seriously, what would your concept be?’ Youssef asks.

  ‘The concept’s already set in stone.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘They want exotic Middle Eastern food.’

  ‘Okay, then hummus.’

  ‘I’m not going to do the job. I still make so many mistakes in my spoken German.’

  ‘That could be the whole point.’ Youssef tries to provoke Amal, saying, ‘But I don’t know what they’d like about your cooking.’