by Tima Kurdi
While Hivron was making her escape and crossing from one world to the next, the political climate in Canada was heating up. On October 19, 2015, the Liberal Party, under its leader Justin Trudeau, won the election, getting almost 1.5 million more votes than former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. Even though Trudeau had made the refugee crisis central to his election campaign, I was worried that the transition would delay the asylum process. But when the reins of power changed hands, Prime Minister Trudeau held to his promise of bringing twenty-five thousand Syrian refugees to Canada.
Shortly after Trudeau’s government took power, the new immigration minister, John McCallum, called me to express his condolences.
“When Abdullah is ready to come to Canada,” he said, “don’t hesitate to contact my office.”
With only a few months to prepare for the arrival of Mohammad’s family, I did some renovations in our basement to accommodate their family of seven, turning it into a two-bedroom apartment with all the amenities. My neighbour volunteered to do the construction, and a Turkish client of mine did the electric work; both men insisted on working for free. Then we bought mattresses, furnishings, clothes, and some toys for the younger kids. We wanted it to be not just a place for them to stay but a new home.
At the same time, I prepared my new salon, which I called Kurdi Hair Design. I had put that dream on hold after the tragedy, but now that Mohammad was on the way, I pictured us working together there. Maybe one day I would be able to convince Abdullah to apply for asylum too, so that the three of us could work together under one roof. Those optimistic thoughts gave me some hope, but my mourning continued. When I returned from Erbil, I discovered that there were only three molly fish in my tank. I had neglected the fish since the tragedy, and many had died before I left for Europe. After I left, they kept dying, one by one, even though Rocco did his best to care for them. Maybe I was crazy, but I was sure the remaining three fish were the original namesakes of Ghalib, Alan, and Rehanna. One of the fish was larger than the others, so I called her Rehanna.
“I will not let you die,” I told those three fish. They were the only living beings that I was equipped to take care of. It was as if I had returned to an infant state. Depression and anxiety closed around me in a tight swaddle. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I tried to go shopping once, just before Mohammad’s family arrived. But going outside terrified me. The sky was too big and wide and somehow hostile, especially when it was so arrogantly blue. When I got to the grocery store, I just walked down the aisles, confused and even disgusted by all the choices. I came home with nothing.
At the same time, my old habits continued, as did the schedule I had adopted when Abdullah’s family left Istanbul to make the crossing. Every day, I woke up far too early, my heart pounding in my chest. I still rushed to the kitchen to check my cellphone as if the past months had been a terrible dream and my phone might ring to tell me they’d all arrived safe on the other side.
Since returning from Erbil, I called Abdullah every single morning. Our conversations were brief.
“How are you?”
“I’m alive.”
“What are you doing?”
“, Dikhan w shai. Smoking and drinking tea.”
“What are your plans for the day?”
“I don’t know.”
When I had any energy at all, it was fueled by bitterness and rage. I directed it mostly at the world’s power brokers. They had gone to the UN in Vienna to sit down at the table and attempt to negotiate peace in Syria. But those global leaders couldn’t agree on a peace treaty, and the war continued to rage across Syria as ISIS and the terrorist groups took an increasingly tighter grip on the rebel-held regions.
Worse, people’s fear of refugees seemed to be growing, alongside accusations that they were terrorists. I was again in the news, telling the good-hearted people around the world that refugees were peaceful people, that they were victims of war, that they were not terrorists, that they were trying to flee violence and terrorism.
I was nervous for Mohammad’s family’s arrival. I wanted them to feel safe and welcome. The government arranged for Ghouson and the kids to fly to Germany to reunite with Mohammad after more than six months of separation. The family arrived together in Vancouver on December 28, 2015. The media was at the airport to capture their arrival and broadcast our reunion. The family emerged from customs, carrying Canadian flags and teddy bears that a government official had given them. I must have hugged and kissed my nieces and nephews a hundred times, and I took baby Sherwan into my arms, holding him up so I could show him to the world to ask them, “Look, is this innocent Muslim baby a terrorist?” Once again, we were left to wonder where everyone had been when our family was most in need.
A reporter asked me, “Is this the happy ending you wanted?”
“No, this is not the end. This is the beginning,” I said. “I’ve walked through the tunnel to the end, but I have not found the light yet. I will keep walking until I find that light. I will keep telling the refugees to keep walking—to never give up.”
Rocco, Alan, and I had come to the airport in two cars. I took Ghouson, baby Sherwan, and the teenagers, Heveen and Shergo, in my car. During the entire hour-long drive to our home in Coquitlam, Ghouson and the kids kept saying, “Wow, it’s so green and clean and peaceful here. Are we dreaming? Are we really in Canada?”
We couldn’t wait until we got home so we could call Abdullah.
“I watched their arrival on the news here,” he said. “I was crying. It was very emotional. , Hamdillah ’ala as-salameh. Thank God they arrived safely.”
“Our hearts are crying for you right now,” we responded. “We wish you would come too.”
“I need to be close to my family,” he responded.
Our friends were waiting for us at home with a banquet of foods, including some Middle Eastern dishes. But the kids would only eat their mom’s cooking. I understood. It’s the only thing I had wanted when I transplanted to Canada almost twenty-five years before; even Syrian food in a restaurant didn’t taste quite right. If I felt that way, imagine what , al ghorbah, was like for my family since they’d fled Syria. They were still reeling from the trauma of the war, the grisly things they had experienced—from the violence that Shergo had to witness in Sham, to the torture by terrorists, to the scary border crossing (which had left a permanent scar on Rezan’s arm), to the chronic torment of the refugee life, and the many months of separation after Mohammad reached the German camps.
All the kids adored their uncle Abdullah, their aunt Rehanna, and their young cousins. “Auntie, we loved it when Uncle Abdullah came to visit us. He was so fun and he always made us laugh,” Heveen said. They had grown very close to Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan during their time of refuge in Kobani and Istanbul.
“Auntie, every day I wake up and the first thing I think about is Ghalib and Alan,” said ten-year-old Ranim. “I think, ‘Maybe it was a bad dream.’ ”
All my nieces and nephews felt the same way: one day, their cousins were there, and the next day, they had vanished. What can you say to that? “, Saaroo toyoor. They are like birds now,” I told them. “They are flying free.”
In the early days after my family arrived, they were my only joy, especially baby Sherwan, a lovely boy, just like Alan. I was so happy to have my nieces and nephews here in Canada, but it hurt so much to think about Alan and Ghalib. Whenever we had talked or Skyped, I used to tell Ghalib, “Inshallah, when you come to Canada, I will buy you everything you like.”
I still woke up early every morning. But now, instead of my spending entire mornings alone with only my three fish for company, Ghouson and the kids would eventually emerge from the basement to have breakfast with me. Baby Sherwan’s smile brought me back to the living.
“, Sabah alkheir. Good morning, sunshine,” I would say, and give his chubby cheeks lots of kisses.
“What does it mean, ‘sunshine’?” the kids asked.
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“It means the warmth of the sun. It means family.”
All I wanted to do was to sit and play with that baby, but there was too much to do. The kids needed new clothes, school supplies, and always groceries. And for the new salon, opening on January 2, I had to plan an open house. When I took the kids shopping, many people recognized them from all the media coverage. “Welcome to Canada,” they would say. A few times, people even offered to pay our grocery store bills, which in some cases were as high as three hundred dollars. One day, my wonderful neighbour took the kids to the mall to buy shoes. At one store, two ladies who knew my family’s story gave them a fifty-dollar gift card.
The kids started school a month later. The young ones went right into regular classes at the local elementary school; Heveen and Shergo were put in a special class at the local high school, along with about eight other Syrian refugees. Each school put up banners in Arabic saying, “, Ahla wa sahla—Welcome.” Many of my friends and clients were wonderfully kind and helpful. Three of them—Kim, Marie, and Helen—provided English classes for the whole family during the weekends and in the evenings. Another one of my neighbours would come over and read to the kids. And whenever the family needed anything, Kitt graciously took them to the grocery store; they would go straight to the international aisle to try to find ingredients that approximated those from home.
When I opened the new salon, the media came to report on the story. Many other curious locals visited too, some for haircuts, others just for selfies.
“This shop will do very well,” I said to Mohammad, as we watched all the people stream in and out of the salon. But within a month, it was just Mohammad and me. The supporters who showed up for the opening never came back as clients. It’s very difficult to be a barber—or anyone—starting from scratch in your middle years. Mohammad didn’t know anyone, and the salon in the suburbs attracted little pedestrian traffic. I knew that I needed to do all the usual things to promote the business, but my heart and my head were not in the mood.
The honeymoon period ended quickly after that. Mohammad and I went back to our old Tom-and-Jerry ways. He didn’t like “Tima’s rules.” When we came home to eat the dinner that Ghouson had prepared, Mohammad wouldn’t eat. He said, “I can’t breathe when I sit at your table and eat the food you and your husband paid for. I feel like I’m choking.” It pained me deeply to hear my big brother talk like that, but I understood that Mohammad had been through many years of trauma and heartache. Soon after, Mohammad stopped coming to the salon or the dinner table; he spent all his time in the basement. His entire family was stuck in the middle of our fighting, and naturally, they took his side. I didn’t know what more to do. Once again, in the dining room, it was just me, Rocco, and Alan, and in the big fish tank nearby, my three molly fish.
I cried to my dad about my troubles with Mohammad.
“The war changes people. Be patient,” he advised.
Abdullah was very disappointed too. “I talked to Mohammad,” he told me. “I said, ‘You’re with your whole family in a safe country. You have the whole world. , Difr wahad min wlaadak biyswa al’alam. One nail of your kid’s finger is worth more than the whole world.’ ”
I hoped there was a way forward for all of us. I just needed a sign to tell me how to find it.
Chapter 14
Nihna wala hada
We Are Nobody
Whenever my family talks about the tragedy, we always say, “, Tinzikir wama tin’aad. To be remembered, but not to repeat.” History is meant to be remembered but not repeated. Unfortunately, history does tend to repeat itself. Wars continue, making more tragedy inevitable. What is it about us that we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over? I know I must sound pessimistic, but when tragedy strikes, it’s hard to tame the fear that life could become even worse, no matter how much you fight off these dark thoughts.
I remained consumed with worry about Abdullah and also Baba, especially when Shireen finally decided it was time to leave Sham and seek refuge in Turkey. Shireen had asthma, but it was difficult to get refills for her puffer, and the youngest of her three sons had developed the same condition. I worried how they would all fare in Turkey and if they’d be able to find the medications they needed. Shireen couldn’t convince her husband, Lowee, to leave his disabled mother, so Shireen and two of her sons—Yasser remained in Germany—left on their own and went straight to Izmit to be near Maha. After Shireen left, Baba had no children or grandchildren within reach. All that was left of his family was his constant companion: that big photograph of Mama.
In mid-June, Mohammad’s family moved out of our home and into a townhouse nearby. I lost the daily sunshine of my nieces and nephews, but the family visited occasionally. A month later, Rocco and I celebrated our tenth anniversary. To be honest, the significance of that anniversary didn’t even register in my mind until my loving husband came to the salon for a haircut just before closing time and reminded me. We went out for a quiet dinner afterward. I tried to not talk about my family, but that was impossible.
Abdullah remained in Erbil through 2016. The KRG continued to host his stay in a hotel. They wanted to provide him with an apartment, but they were still waiting for the complex to be finished. Abdullah was grateful for the KRG’s continued support and hospitality, but the hotel had become a velvet prison. When he visited the refugee camps with a delivery of diapers or school supplies, he always sent me a photo. He was smiling; he looked as close as possible to his old self.
President Barzani was also true to his pledge to help fix Abdullah’s teeth. It was a long, slow process. It had started the previous fall, and every few months, Abdullah returned to a dentist in Istanbul who fitted him for implants. The visits were both physically and psychologically traumatizing. He called me from Istanbul after one of his appointments in early July, just a few days before Eid.
“I should be with my family, getting ready for Eid, taking my kids to buy new clothes,” Abdullah said. “My heart is bleeding. , Wallah ’am mout alf marah bilyoum. Oh God, I’m dying a thousand times a day. I want my family back.”
Abdullah was feeling sick in body and mind, so he decided to have a bath. He drifted off to sleep and had a terrible dream: he was back in that water, trying to save his family from drowning. He started yelling and flailing in the bathtub, so loud that hotel staff came to his door. Two days later, after he returned to Erbil, he called me, saying, “My whole body is so stiff, like wood. I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I can’t move.”
“Call someone to come and help you, please. Promise me you’ll go see the doctor. I don’t think you should be alone,” I said.
The next morning, Abdullah didn’t return my texts or calls. I panicked as I kept calling him, but the phone just rang and rang. Eventually, a relative of ours answered his phone. Abdullah had severe swelling in his limbs, and our relative had taken him to a local hospital. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him and they wanted to send him to a hospital in Turkey.
“What does that mean, that they don’t know what he has?” I asked.
“All they know is that Abdullah is in very bad condition. They are flying him to a hospital in Istanbul now.”
I immediately called my sisters. Maha let out a scream when I told her. “He just left. Why would he return here? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can you or Shireen go to the hospital to be with him?”
Luckily, both Maha and Shireen were able to rush to his bedside. Abdullah was diagnosed with sepsis. He was delirious with fever, so delirious he could barely talk, and my sisters couldn’t understand him even when he did. The medical treatments that followed confused them too. One day the doctors would put tubes all over his body. The next his legs would swell up so much that he couldn’t walk anymore. My sisters were afraid.
“Tima, we don’t know if Abdullah is going to make it,” Maha told me. “I told Shireen not to tell Baba. He can’t know how bad it is.”
Abdullah was a difficult patient. He would often tell his sisters and the nurses that he didn’t want to live, that he just wanted to be with his family. He was attached to his cellphone day and night, constantly watching his collection of videos of his wife and sons. He had lost many photos and images of them when the sea had taken his phone. But many of us also had copies, and while he was at the hotel in Erbil, he had tracked down the majority of lost photos and put them on his new phone, which he guarded closely, clinging to it like a life preserver.
One morning, my cellphone started to chatter. It was a text from Maha. I called her, and while she updated me, I could hear the now-familiar beep of Abdullah’s heart monitor in the background. It was too fast.
Along with the havoc of the sepsis on his body, Abdullah’s mind was consumed by the pain of the approaching anniversary of the tragedy. The boy that had always been so easygoing, the first to forgive, to turn his cheek, had become withdrawn, untrusting, and uncooperative.
Maha told me Abdullah kept bugging her to take him outside for a cigarette, but the problem was more than that: the doctors also wanted to put a tube down his throat to investigate what was going on in his heart. The very thought of that procedure so filled Abdullah with anxiety, that he would vomit or choke.
“He feels lost, so he’s like a kid bugging you for candy,” she said. “But the nurses keep telling him that if he smokes, they won’t give him the operation he needs; they’ll kick him out on the street.” I could hear Abdullah grumbling in the background.