Somewhere in the Unknown World

by Kao Kalia Yang

  * * *

  In that hotel room, equipped with three beds, we waited for five or six weeks. At first we stayed only in the room until the man came to pick us up for meals. Then we got a little braver and started to walk around the area outside our hotel. Our pockets were empty so we could not buy anything, but we looked at price tags and saw that everything was expensive. We’d return from our excursions and pray, asking for patience, for strength in our hearts, for the lives of the people back home in our country. Each time, we ended prayers with a call for peace.

  I knew then that leaving my country was not a solution to the problem of war. In Kandahar I had left not just my family but my heart. How can a man make his way in the world when his heart is tethered to a place he may never see again?

  Somewhere in that long wait, one of the men told us he was leaving, that he had to return home. He could not wait with us anymore. There were people waiting for him. The two of us tried to stop him. I said, “We’re only at the beginning of this journey. If you leave now, you’ll destroy our morale. Please stay.” The other man said, “You have to believe, you can’t go.” His answer was, “I cannot stay.” Short of holding him back physically, which we would not do to our friend, we watched him leave the hotel, knowing he’d broken the contract we signed.

  Soon after he went, our connection brought in another Afghan man who had worked for the United States.

  Every day, we asked the connection when we would leave.

  Every day, he said, “Tonight.”

  Every night, we waited for him, teeth brushed, shoes on.

  Every night, he kept us waiting.

  We began to think that we’d never leave. We stopped trusting the connection, so we stopped gearing up to leave. Then one night, there was a knock on the door. I woke up to open it.

  The connection came into the room with urgency.

  “We’re leaving,” he said. “Bring nothing but your backpacks.”

  It was midnight. We clamored into the bathroom to brush our teeth. We put on our shoes and grabbed our bags and followed the man outside. It was a hot night. I imagine that the night was full of stars. It was November or December. My birthday had come and gone. I was now twenty-four. I thought of that on the drive to the airport.

  At the airport, the connection handed us tickets to Serbia. He told us that we would leave using our Pakistani passports.

  * * *

  We got on a plane headed for Serbia, bringing us closer and closer to the free world, farther and farther from home. I had expected to arrive at another big, shiny airport, but to my surprise the airport in Belgrade was small. Our plane landed quite late. After we deplaned, most people left, met by family and friends. We, the three of us, found a row of seats outside the gate and sat down in a general area. It was not long before we drew the attention of the people behind the walls of the airport, the police officers monitoring the cameras. We were surrounded by police, equipped with guns. They spoke in English, asking us who we were and what we were doing in the country. We said nothing, pretending not to understand them. As they tried to talk to us, we took turns going to the bathroom. In the closed stall, I hid the Pakistani and Afghani passports in my underwear and took out my Spanish passport, just in case. After some long minutes of us raising our hands to our sides and looking at each other with confusion, they left us alone to calm our fears.

  The gentle light in Belgrade entered the waiting area slowly as morning dawned and men and women arrived in uniforms to stand behind kiosks and passengers began streaming in. We were exhausted from our long night. When a Serbian man walked slowly toward us, we all tried to look normal. We took turns stretching and looking comfortable. He sat down beside us casually and made some small talk. His eyes were still and steady.

  As he asked us how the morning was going, he handed us three plane tickets. We answered him, our eyes scanning the tickets. He nodded at our answers and got up to continue his casual journey through the small airport.

  We were going to Sweden—not Stockholm, instead a place none of us had ever heard of called Karlstad. We knew of Sweden for its international reputation as a place that cared about human rights and freedom. We knew of it as part of the free world. It would be our final destination.

  * * *

  The flight was short, only two hours. In that time, we decided in a frenzy of whispered conversations that it would be best if we destroyed all three of our passports. We would enter Sweden as refugees of war. We would slowly build lives in this place where none of us had ever been. How do three men each destroy three passports? What was our best option? We could think of only one plan: we had to take turns going to the bathroom during the flight. Each time, we’d rip two to three passport pages into tiny little pieces and flush them down the toilet.

  Our plan wasn’t a great one. We took turns getting up, lining up, going to the bathroom again and again. People started giving us weird looks. No one else had an opportunity to use the bathroom. Even the flight attendants wondered whether we were all right. Yes, yes, we were all right. Still, we kept on lining up and flushing the toilet and it was all getting very suspicious.

  When the captain announced that we were landing and told us all to go to our seats, one of my friends whispered that he had not managed to destroy his third passport, the Spanish one. We could only feel sorry.

  * * *

  The plane landed and we entered an airport the size of a medium coffee shop. The flight crew and the other passengers were all wary of us. The airport staff sensed their wariness. They asked all the European passport holders to stand in one line. My friend who had not managed to destroy his Spanish passport went into that line. I and my other friend waited in a corner with no idea what to do next.

  When my friend’s turn came to speak to the official, he was clearly nervous.

  “Is this your passport?” the official said.

  “No,” he said.

  The official looked at the picture of him, and said, “If this is not yours, is this your photo?”

  “I don’t know who the passport belongs to,” my friend answered. He was so nervous by now that he could not look at anyone.

  “If this is not your passport, how did you get it?” the official asked.

  The truth came spilling out in a jumble of a story that was filled with tears and stutters and regrets and the people he’d left behind in Afghanistan and the reasons why he had to leave and how he didn’t know what would happen next.

  The official stopped him and calmly called over another official, who had already contacted the police. Soon enough, the border police arrived and took him to a small room off the main terminal.

  Now all the passengers were looking at us in our corner. The suspicion on their faces made us feel even more pressured and I had a bad feeling. The friend with me bowed his head and went over to another official.

  He said simply, “I don’t have a passport.”

  I was now hiding behind a table, crouching. I know they must have cameras. I know the airport is the size of a coffee shop. I’m twenty-four and I’m so scared that I’m hiding in view of everyone looking at me.

  A few of the border police came out of the small room to take my friend away. Meanwhile, everyone is looking at me and I’m still hiding.

  Then I heard on the loudspeakers: “The person hiding behind the table in the corner, come out.”

  They spoke in English and I understood every word. I had to come out.

  Officials surrounded me. They said a lot of things. I said nothing. They said more things. “I am not going to tell anyone anything,” I managed to say.

  They took me to another small room off the main terminal.

  We were all separated now and there was no more knowing what each would say. I said that I was illiterate and that I didn’t speak English or Swedish. They said, “No problem.” They got an interpreter on the phone, a woman’s voice speaking without emotion, just like a computer.

  For the next two to three hours, th
ey questioned me. One police officer offered me something to drink. He played the good cop. He said, “I want to help you.” Another one, someone who looked like an immigrant himself, was the bad cop. His feet knocked my feet under the table. He said, “If you lie, you go to jail.” I grew very confused. What did they want from me? It was December. I had no jacket, just a T-shirt. I sat shivering and I told them everything I knew, but it was not enough. Every time I told them a truth, they asked me the same thing again in five or six different ways. I recognized that they were interrogating me and using different techniques, and that it was not about them being mean or kind, they were just poking into me, pulling me apart.

  As they asked and asked, I started thinking, I’m not going to remember my responses. I’m not going to be able to repeat myself any longer. I felt sorry for myself, so sorry. I was not a criminal and yet I was being treated like one. I started getting angry, too. Who is responsible for my situation? What had I done? What makes them better than me, the ones asking the questions, the ones with the power to make me shake and quiver? What was going on in this little room in the middle of Sweden? What was happening to me? I started to cry. I could feel that I was giving up, giving up on me, on my story, on my life in my country, on the chance of my life anywhere else.

  I started asking the questions. What is the difference between you and me? What is the difference between you and the people with the guns? The exhaustion was hitting me. I hadn’t slept in a long time. I felt a terrible exhaustion expressing itself in teary hysteria.

  I tried to control myself. It was better to keep asking the questions than to let the answers come from the actions and words of those around me. I thought, I know what real humanity is, and it is not this. I thought, Is this how you would want people to treat your family and your children? But the tears would not stop falling. Without being able to respond to their questions, and trapped in the thoughts that came to me in my despair, eventually all I could do was chew my lip.

  At long last, they said that I had cleared security and the interview was over; however, the government of Sweden was not yet satisfied with my presence or my story. The officer who played kind gave me a bus ticket for the Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, for another interview scheduled at eight the next morning. He opened the door to the little room, and I saw that the main terminal outside was empty.

  It was a dark night. It was a long night. The bus stop was right outside the airport. I was wearing only a T-shirt. So I waited inside as long as I dared before I chanced the cold. I had no other options before me—no money or paperwork, no connections. The traffickers had fulfilled their duty. The colder I got, the more I thought. What are all these white people doing in my country talking about humanity when this is how they receive the lost human beings? I looked into the darkness of that night, trying to find answers in the clean sweep of white snow.

  The bus came in the early morning with its white headlights shining bright. Inside, it was already full of people. There was an empty seat close to the driver. I sat there. At each stop, I asked, “Where is the destination?” in English. The driver was nice enough. He answered quietly, “Your destination is the last stop.”

  No one on the bus spoke to each other for the two-hour trip. Everyone sat alone, huddled in the warmth of their clothing. The silence on the bus, after the commotion of the past few days of my life, was eerie. I did not want to look at anyone because none of them were looking at me—despite the fact that I was not dressed for the weather, that my face was stained with tears, haggard, and fearful. I saw how beautiful the country outside was. I saw men and women standing at the street corners, speaking politely, behaving respectfully. The lovelier it was outside, the more lost I felt inside.

  I remembered the final ride to the airport in my country, the broken mud walls and the holes in the streets, the hunger of the people, the desperate men trying to patch the walls, find some security in what remained. More than anything, seeing no children that morning traveling to Stockholm, I thought of the many children in my country, the helpless wandering orphans. How was it possible that we lived in the same world? How was it possible that they were living like this and we were not?

  I settled into the warmth of the heated bus. As it rolled along the street, making its hiccupping stops and starts, I started wondering, Will this be my new home? Then I was embarrassed by the thought, because where was my family, my siblings? How were they all?

  I don’t know what would have happened to me had I learned then and there that shortly after I left the country my father had disappeared. He was on his way to the grocers and never returned. My family waited, and when he did not come back, they went in search of him. But there was no sign or trace of him to be found. It was not hard for them or for me to guess what had happened to him, but to guess would be to accept his fate and mine, connected as they were. Had I known that my leaving would mean his disappearance, I would not have done it. I would have died an honorable man in my country. I did not know, though, so I had left hoping for the best. Sheltered from the truth by distance and opportunity, I met my fate as bravely as I could.

  Arlanda Airport was huge. While it was not as opulent as Dubai’s airport, the scope and the scale of everything made me feel very small and poor. I couldn’t figure out where to turn, to the left or the right, to go forward or hold myself back. I asked person after person, “Where is the migration office?” They gestured with clean hands. I followed those hands. Finally I found it. There were two other people ahead of me sitting in the waiting area. I waited for four or five hours before my name was called. I should have been hungry but I wasn’t.

  In another little room, I sat with two officers. They were not the men from the airport in Karlstad, but they played the same roles. In the maze of their questions, each asked from five or six different directions, I quickly became a fumbling mess. They asked me for my date of birth. I could not manage. I did not remember, but instead of saying that, I made up a birthday. What? When? How? Is that what you said yesterday? I started crying again, and I could not stop. The voice on the phone, again a woman interpreter, was void of emotion as she waited for my tears to cease, and when they didn’t, she waited some more.

  After the second or third hour, they said, “The interview is done.” They handed me a bus ticket once more, and told me to go outside and to wait for another bus. This one would take me to a place where I could stay, a refugee holding center in the middle of Stockholm. All I could do was hold the ticket in my hands and nod.

  At the bus stop, it was not long before another big bus came. Inside, there were lots of other refugees from around the world. I could tell by their clothing that many were from Eritrea and Syria. They, too, were scared, but they traveled in groups and appeared more confident. At the time, Sweden was offering 100 percent residency to Syrians and Eritreans. I looked at the family groups, children and men and women, and thought, who had been bombing us for forty years? Was it not Sweden, the United States, England, and their Western allies? Are these other refugees better than me? I was assaulted by my own sense of inferiority and anger. I felt so bad and hurt so deeply that the feeling lives on inside me, even now, in this moment. I thought, I need a certificate of my humanity.

  That bus ride felt like it was two to three hours, but it was actually no more than thirty to forty-five minutes. The migration office in Stockholm was a big building right in the heart of the city. It was a temporary refugee camp, a holding center, they called it. We were put in a waiting area where I sat for two to three hours more before they called my name. I remember thinking the whole time: You cannot think of your hunger or the cold. You cannot.

  When at last I was called into another interview room, I faced the same interview, different people using the same techniques, the woman interpreter’s voice on the phone, waiting patiently for my tears to clear and my voice to emerge. At the end, they handed me a heavy bag filled with toiletry items, a blanket, a pillow, and a change of clothes. The official said, “Ch
oose a last name?” I was dazed but I would not be anything other than what I was. “I am Afghan,” I said. The official waited for me patiently, then repeated, “Choose a last name.” I chose mine. My last name. Achekzai. He typed this into a computer and printed an identification card. He gave me a piece of paper with a room number on it. Someone led me to the assigned room.

  Inside the doorway of the room, I saw three beds. A man was lying on a bed with his hands over his face. I stood for a moment, then said, “Are you my roommate?” He lifted his arm off his face and turned toward me. It was my first friend, the one with the Spanish passport.

  He leaped from the bed, and I ran to his side, and we cried and embraced like brothers, like countrymen. Still caught in our great reunion, we heard the door open again. We turned to see that it was our third friend, clutching an identical bag of toiletries. All three of us held each other and talked in a rush of our miseries since we were parted.

  At five in the afternoon, we were called to a large cafeteria. Everybody in Sweden eats dinner at the same time. Suddenly, the hunger came over us. The food was good. It was great. We all eat Halal and were not sure if the meat was prepared accordingly, so we ate salad and potatoes and we were happy, thinking this is perfect.

  Back in the room, my friends and I spoke more calmly, even began thinking about what might happen to us next. Finally, we were all in Sweden, a part of the free world, and we were together in the same room. We shook our heads, overwhelmed by the strange feeling of not being able to place ourselves. Were we dreaming? Is Sweden a dream? Is Afghanistan a dream? Were we real? Too exhausted, we fell asleep quickly in our beds.

  At eight a.m., breakfast was served. It was just like a restaurant in a hotel of refugees. There were Syrians, Eritreans, Russians, Serbians—much of the world was in that cafeteria, so much of the world, and then just us three Afghans.

  One of my friends said he wanted to go out and walk around and see Sweden. The two of us were weary, so we retired to our room. We were talking quietly when there was a sharp knock on the door. An official stood on the other side.