After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  She let Saw Doh fall asleep on the couch, delighting in the pathetic image of a son waiting for his father to come home. She stewed beside Saw Doh for hours, determined to wait up. Eventually her foot tapping against the couch leg stilled.

  The next morning, she woke on the couch with a crick in her neck and a sour taste in her mouth. Her son was gone. She stumbled to the bathroom, checking the time on the clock in the hall. It was early, still plenty of time for breakfast and getting the kids ready. Saw Ku was not in their room; the girls slept, arms spread and mouths wide. She looked in the children’s room and thought for a few minutes that Saw Ku had not made it home at all, that Saw Doh had crawled into the top bunk on his own.

  When she went to get dressed, however, sliding the closet door open silently to let the children sleep, she saw that Saw Ku’s clothes were gone. Her heart lurched. She went to the children’s closet. They were there, hanging in the closet. His pillow on the bed held the indentation of his head. He had slept in the bed she had made for him, moved his clothes in acknowledgment of the end of their marriage.

  She realized the noise that woke her up was the sound of the door closing behind him as he left for the day, once again without seeing the children. She straightened her shoulders. Men left. Marriages ended. These were truths she never questioned, that she understood in the deepest parts of herself. She brushed her teeth, ran a brush through her hair, and woke the children up for school.

  Chapter 21

  HASNA

  IRBED, JORDAN, DECEMBER 2013–JULY 2016

  Jebreel’s wounds healed; he had more surgeries to move flesh and muscle from his right calf to fill in his left side. When the procedures were over, he could move his body with slightly more ease. Hasna got used to his new walk, to speaking where he could hear her in his right ear, to helping him with any tasks that required two hands. His sons took him to physical therapy.

  Khassem married the pretty girl from Daraa; they lived with her family because there was more room in their apartment. Yusef, Samir, and Khassem continued to work in whatever construction jobs they could find in Irbed and in small cities nearby, though the jobs were becoming scarcer as the numbers of refugees continued to surge. Rana thrived in school.

  Hasna tried not to notice that the supply of gold that they had saved for emergencies was getting smaller and smaller—when would they have more of an emergency than now, with Jebreel still recovering and the war continuing to rage? Once Jebreel was better, when Malek and Laila were able to join them, they would more than make up the difference. If she needed to, Hasna would be willing to work as well, though she was not sure what job she could find. For now, she watched the children.

  She made friends with some of her neighbors and sometimes they came over for coffee. Her granddaughters barely remembered their lives in Daraa and she told them stories about the house they would have grown up knowing had things turned out differently. Even to Hasna, some days those stories took on the sheen of fantasy; how ludicrous it felt to think that her family had once lived all together in a place of such harmony and peace.

  The war in Syria only worsened. The battles raged, plain as day, on YouTube and Facebook—incontrovertible proof that Assad was attacking his own people.

  The reality dawned on Hasna slowly. One day she realized she was no longer counting down the days until she could move back to Daraa. Another day, she argued with a neighbor that the US would never come, a position she had never held before. She wanted to hope that there was still a chance for international intervention, but she could not. The government was escalating its war on Syria’s children. The talk continued with no action. No one was coming. No one cared.

  * * *

  —

  By the time UNHCR officials called again, over a year after Hasna’s initial interview, she had almost forgotten about the idea of resettlement. The officials made a file for Jebreel and suggested that he be made the head of the family. Hasna argued about it for a minute—after all, he had not wanted to be a refugee in the first place, and she was the one who was handling all of their paperwork—but it was easier, the official said. Finally, she acquiesced.

  Yusef’s file was joined with theirs since they were in the same household. True to the word of the first official she had met with, who had told her that families were prioritized together, officials reached out to Amal and Samir as well. The officials told them their interviews would be separate but their files would be linked. Khassem was not called. When Hasna asked him to apply for resettlement, he told her they would wait: His wife’s family was all in Irbed. And besides—his eyes gleamed—they’d have to wait till after the baby was born. Hasna teared up and hugged him. And then she began to cry into the soft material of his T-shirt as she realized she might not even be here when this newest child of Syria was born in Jordan. Khassem chuckled at her, told her no country would ever want his stubborn father anyway, so not to worry, but she could see the tears in his eyes too.

  There were more interviews and they happened with greater frequency. Hasna expected after each one to be told that they were no longer in consideration. In one interview, Yusef, Hasna, Jebreel, and Rana sat down in one room all together; another time they were put in different rooms. They answered the same questions over and over, separately and together, while the officials made notes. The questions became more specific: about their family connections and the timeline of when their family left Syria and what had happened when the missile struck.

  As the official asked her about the loss of her house, Hasna felt, for the first time, that she was really a refugee. Somehow the balance of power shifted—as each interview passed, she realized she wanted to be resettled somewhere. She had heard the reports from friends whose family members had gone and brought them over later. Hasna tried to imagine that life and found she could not; she had no idea what American houses looked like. She always pictured some version of her own house in Daraa. But even if they had to live in trees or in holes in the ground, if her children could be with her, could have access to education, if Jebreel could have good health care, if they could work together, without the threat of hostility and with the possibility of a life ahead of them, perhaps she could envision this new future. The pressure in Jordan mounted every day and Hasna worried, in her moments of utter honesty, that life in a camp was only a year or two away.

  And then, after several interviews in a row, there would be nothing again for a while. Hasna would shove her daydreams about the United States or Norway or Canada to the back of her mind and try to imagine a future here in Jordan again. It would be better to be closer to Laila and Malek, anyway. Hasna rarely stopped thinking about them; five times a day, their names were the first she uttered in her personal prayer time.

  Laila and Malek continued calling, sending word through relatives, and trying to cross into Jordan at checkpoint after checkpoint. It became clear that Malek’s name was on some sort of blacklist. Laila could have passed by without him at first, but she refused to leave him. And with each time they tried to leave, her chances narrowed. One time they put Hamad and Laila at the front of a group of people, with Malek standing back in the middle, and the guards stopped Laila first, comparing her ID with their computer readout. Laila was now blacklisted too. There was nothing they could do but keep trying. They gave up their scruples about crossing the border legally as the war got more desperate, but by then all the open places along the border into Jordan were closed. Hasna always kept her phone on, even at night. Eventually, the calls stopped for a long time.

  Finally, after several months of silence, Laila got through late in the night. Her voice came in and out but Hasna understood two things: They had survived two more missile attacks and Laila was pregnant again. And then there was nothing. Hasna sank into the depression she had managed to hold at bay for years. Every day, she scoured her phone, afraid that in the pictures of bloody, dust-covered babies or bodies lined up in a row, she would
see their faces.

  Her depression spread to Jebreel. He had worked every day of his life since he was a little boy. To go to physical therapy while his sons struggled to support the family, to spend the day at home thinking of Laila and not to be able to help—Hasna could hardly live with him some days. Before, the house had been her territory while he was gone. Now, he criticized everything she did, commented on the times she took breaks from cooking. For several months, they had managed to live in a state of gratefulness that he was alive, to move past the fight that had exploded the last time she saw him before the missile hit their house. But as days and weeks without word from Laila wore away at their patience, their apartment became a crucible.

  * * *

  —

  Hasna pieced together shreds of news from neighbors, the truth and her imagination two sides of a terrible coin. The second attack Malek and Laila survived occurred at Malek’s sister’s house, in the months when the government had begun using barrel bombs on its people in Daraa. They would fill barrels with nails and explosives and launch them from helicopters—cheap explosives designed to cause maximum civilian damage. This barrel bomb hit the large, full gas tank on the roof of Malek’s sister’s house, exploding the top floor outright. Malek was temporarily paralyzed, unable to walk for a few weeks, from fear. As soon as he was able, they moved to other relatives’ houses in villages outside Daraa, hoping that staying out of the city itself might be safer.

  The third explosion was the same kind of surface-to-surface missile that had destroyed Hasna’s house. They were now not sure whether the weapons were from the government or other sources. In addition to the Free Syria Army begun in Daraa, Al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and ISIS all joined with or against other militia groups, as the country dissolved. Syrian citizens were targeted on every front. Malek, whose faith was the most important thing in his life, who had a heightened sense of right and wrong, found each of the groups suspect. He wanted to help the people, not usher in a new government loyal to Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or the United States, and certainly not ISIS or al-Qaeda. All he and Laila wanted was a place they could live in peace.

  For a while, they settled in the village of Nassib, on the border between Syria and Jordan, thinking that being close to the border might give them opportunities to get through somehow. Also, because Nassib was along one of the main routes for refugees escaping the country—and thus the focus of international attention—there was less violence. At least for a while.

  It was in that brief respite of peace that Laila got pregnant and told her mother in one of the few calls that made it into Jordan. Then the government began bombing Nassib. They barely made it out alive. That was the fourth bombing they survived.

  The next several months were lost in chaos and smoke. They hid in relatives’ houses, in shelled-out buildings. They made it back to the hospital in Nassib for Laila to give birth; the birth was complicated by her stress and she had to have a C-section. Five days later, with Laila still bleeding from her incision, the nurses came and evacuated the hospital, moments before it was destroyed by another bomb. Her wound seeped blood for days. She tried to call her mother but could not get through. It was weeks before Hasna knew the name of her newest grandson: Tawfiq.

  Tawfiq was a year old when the battle for Nassib began in earnest; anti-government forces, armed with weapons from outside countries, pushed back vehemently. The Syrian government, together with Russia and Iran, fought back. Syrian citizens died at everyone’s hands.

  * * *

  —

  Malek died in the fifth explosion. One day, in the apartment in Irbed, Hasna opened Facebook and saw her son-in-law’s face on her Facebook feed, with his birth and death dates.

  A hole ripped open inside Hasna that would never be closed. Obsessively, she called Laila’s phone—over and over. Nothing.

  She reached out over Facebook and WhatsApp to friends of friends, asking everyone she could think of: “Have you seen my daughter? Do you know where she is? Where is Laila?”

  Someone thought she had seen her and her two children with a group of refugee women trying to get to Jordan. Would she be able to make it out now that Malek was not with her? Hasna waited in eager expectation for the call from Laila that she had crossed the border, that she was in Zataari camp or at the Jaber border crossing, that she and the children were safe. She could not bear to think of the possibility that Laila and the boys had died. She dreamed of Malek at night, her tears anointing his dead brow, her hand holding his square jaw, his beard rough on her palms. She wept out apologies—she had sworn to him before he left that she would keep Laila safe. She should have tried harder, should have fought to keep Laila in Jordan. In her dreams, sometimes he was living and he had decided not to return to Syria after all, they were living next door to Amal and Samir, Laila was annoyed at her mother’s repeated questions, and Hasna’s heart rose in hope that dissipated the moment she awoke.

  She no longer kept up the pretense of normalcy. She fed her family and swept the floors, but she did not keep coffee ready for guests, did not visit neighbors, did nothing but the most basic tasks. Every fiber of her being leaned toward her daughter, lost and alone somewhere in Syria. Messages came from friends of friends—neighbors ran into Laila somewhere outside Damascus and, through the long grapevine set up now for people to communicate with one another, passed along her greetings and her love to her mother. There was no way to know whether the news was accurate or old, whether she was really alive or if they were confused. Hasna clung to each scrap of information, repeated it to the family again and again. She woke up in the middle of the night and sat up, sure she could sense something happening to Laila.

  She and Jebreel stopped bickering. Trauma and grief sometimes emptied their love for each other, sometimes filled it, like water in Lake Muzayrib dropping with drought or rising with rain.

  For the most agonizing year of Hasna’s life, Laila was a ghost.

  * * *

  —

  The resettlement process continued, intensive appointments spread out over two years. At each appointment, they were given a different colored piece of paper to bring with them for the next appointment, so that they could easily be coded by the UNHCR workers for whichever point in the process was next. All of the appointments were in Irbed. They met with different UNHCR officials, dressed in professional Western clothes that were also appropriate for the climate—short-sleeved dress shirts and trousers, pencil skirts without hose, ballet flats instead of heels. As the meetings wore on, Hasna found herself studying the shoes of the Western women who interviewed her—if by some miracle they ended up being accepted to resettle in a Western country, she would keep her modest clothes and hijab, but she would like to have shoes that fit in with the culture. Their shoes were always practical and walkable. She bought a pair of black ballet flats one day at the market in Irbed.

  The thoroughness of the interviews was almost eerie. They were clearly building a database of people who had fled Daraa. By the third visit, they asked Jebreel about things his cousins had done years ago that he had forgotten about. Jebreel’s favorite question, which he repeated as a joke to anyone he talked to, was one asked by a UNHCR worker at the end: “What did your mother think when she had you, her only son, and then only had daughters after that?”

  “I don’t know, you’ll have to go to the graveyard to ask her!” he had cackled, his infectious grin getting a smile even out of the young man with sandy blond hair whose professional demeanor never wavered. Jebreel was proud of himself for coming up with the quip in the moment. He laughed every time he told the story; Hasna stopped thinking it was funny long before he did.

  It was becoming clear that the United States was the country toward which they were headed. If they passed these last UN interviews, they would be asked to go to two orientations on a US military base outside town. The woman was speaking through a translator, a young Jordanian woman who did not wear
hijab and whose slicked ponytail pulled at her forehead. As they scraped back their chairs to indicate the interview was over, Hasna asked the question she had asked in every interview: “If we receive resettlement, no matter what, our children and grandchildren will be able to come?”

  The US immigration official nodded and the translator watched her before responding, her tone lighter: “Yes, if they are already in the refugee process, your children and grandchildren will be in line behind you. It should take six months or so for most of them to join you. It could be as long as seven or eight months, but the US prides itself on our Family Reunification Program. You can rest assured that you are doing the best thing for your whole family. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for all of you to have jobs and health care and a safe place to live. That’s what matters most: You will all be safe. And you will all be free.”

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, Hasna absently answered a call from a number that she did not recognize and heard Laila’s voice. The call was clearer than it had ever been from Syria.

  Laila was in Turkey. Someday she would tell her mother how they had arrived, Laila said. They were out. But they were not safe. She had a place to sleep for a few days and then she would call Hasna to tell her more, to figure out a plan. After a day of not hearing from her, Hasna tried to call the number back and it did not work.

  Two weeks passed with Hasna and the family seesawing between exuberance that Laila was alive and panic that something new and horrible had occurred.

  * * *

  —

  They were sent to a US military base in Jordan a few hours away; they had taken a nice bus with others being considered for resettlement. They had interviews—together and separately—in a warehouselike building. Hasna noted with appreciation that the bus trips were provided, and the meals were free and delicious. These seemed good omens for the resettlement process. They were searched before getting on the bus, at a checkpoint, after leaving the bus, and before entering the building, then given lockers where they could store their things for the day.