I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  “Plane’s gonna leave in three minutes!” another passenger called out.

  I started rocking methodically from side to side and muttering. The policeman rolled his eyes, snapped the passport closed, and handed it back to me. He waved me through to the jet bridge, where I kept it up, bumping into the walls and babbling incoherently, until finally a kindly stewardess helped me to my seat, as if I were a lost child. When the plane door closed, I relaxed back into the seat and waited for my pounding heart to resume its normal tempo. Now all I had to do was wait for the man next to me to fall asleep, so I could destroy the passport.

  When his snores fell into a rhythm, I pretended to read the airplane safety card. I hid the passport inside it and tried to rip out the pages. I don’t know what they make passports out of these days, but some sort of plastic was mixed in the paper, so that sucker wouldn’t rip no matter how many ways I tried to tear it. I cursed under my breath. The stewardess appeared to check on me, and I slapped the safety card closed. She smiled sweetly and said something in English that I didn’t understand. She was gorgeous, but I really needed her to go away. Now.

  “Beer?” I asked, holding up two fingers.

  “Bottle or can?”

  “Can,” I said.

  When she returned with two cans, I held out a fistful of Canadian coins so she could pluck the correct amount from my palm. I’m certain she took only the correct amount because no one that beautiful steals. I pulled the tab off the first beer, gulped down half of it, and looked out at the clouds, waiting for inspiration to strike. I would figure out how to dispose of the passport; I just needed a drink first to relax. As I set the can down, I nicked my finger on the edge of the curled pull-tab sitting on the foldout tray. And then I laughed out loud.

  With the tab, I sliced out a page of the passport in one swift stroke. I rolled the page and dropped it into the nearly empty can of beer. I added a second page and then crushed the can in my fist. You could almost hear the James Bond music playing in the background as I did this. I drank half of the other beer and concealed two more pages in it. That left sixteen more passport pages to go, plus the cover.

  I was going to need more beer.

  I ordered two more beers and repeated my steps, hiding the crushed cans in the pocket of the seat in front of me. As you can imagine, it didn’t take long before I had to pee. On my way down the aisle, I passed through a small galley and spotted the boxes of beer. After I finished in the bathroom, I swiped one of those boxes and returned undetected to my seat, the proud owner of four free beers. When I was down to just the passport cover, a litter of squished cans at my feet, and a pretty nice buzz, I dug my heel into the number printed on the passport cover until it was unrecognizable. Then I ordered two more beers and got rid of the cover and drank the last beer, all to myself, to celebrate my genius. Then I fell into the most gorgeous sleep.

  I dreamed of Alyaa, with streaks of gray in her hair, standing with me on the second-story balcony of our enormous house in the forest, as we watched our posse of children running in and out of the trees. I knew every board and nail of that house, because I’d built it for us, to the exact specifications we wanted. There were ten bedrooms, to fit all the kids, and an enormous farm table where we all gathered for dinner. There was even a special room for watching movies, with a huge screen and theater seats.

  I woke to an announcement over the speakers, and a cup of sobering coffee from the same stewardess who was keeping a special watch over me. Out the window, orange afternoon light blazed over the tops of the tallest buildings I had ever seen, and a network of waterways, like snakes, twisted through the land. I collected all the crushed beer cans and put them in the now empty beer box, and as I walked off the plane, I slipped the box into the recycling bin as I passed through the airplane kitchen galley. I stepped off the plane and into a skyway, where four immigration officers were blocking the walkway, standing elbow to elbow with their feet hip-width apart. They let everyone pass by but kept their eyes locked on me. I was ready with my rehearsed word.

  “Sir, may we see your pass . . .”

  I smiled and, with upturned palms, pleaded my case: “Refugee!”

  I was waiting for handcuffs, or at least someone to yank me by the arm or something, but then the strangest thing happened: the officers treated me with respect.

  “Welcome to Canada. This way, please.”

  One held my hand, like we were a couple, and guided me to a nearby room with a couch and a television and a table, upon which was a tray with oranges and cheese and crackers. They asked me to empty my pockets, and I showed them the coins and a crumpled Kleenex and a scrap of paper with my sister’s phone number on it. They emptied my small sack and examined my one change of clothes, then they checked the rest of me, patting me down in great detail, until they were convinced I had nothing more with me.

  “OK, sir. Wait here. Help yourself to a snack. Coffee?”

  As far as interrogations go, this one was starting off on an exceptionally high-class foot. I declined the coffee but held up an unlit cigarette, and one of the female officers lit it for me. I exhaled with a long, steadying breath and decided this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. They couldn’t feed me and give me cigarettes and call me sir if they intended to torture me, could they?

  Over the next two hours as I waited for something to happen, I practiced finding the one good thing again, to calm myself down. It was good that I had made it all the way to Canada. It was good that I had family on my side. It was good that I had food, water, and cigarettes. When an officer finally returned with a phone and an Arabic interpreter on the other end of the line, the first thing they asked me was why I came to Canada. My answer took three hours. I told them about Bruce Lee Restaurant, the war, the child soldier who saved me, and prison. I told them Iraq was in shambles, my family had scattered, and I had no more life there. That I had a sister in Canada who was going to let me live with her. I told the absolute truth, except for the part about how I got on the plane. I said I paid a smuggler ten thousand dollars to get me out of Iraq.

  “How, exactly?”

  “I paid him. He brought me to the plane in Jordan. I boarded. He left.”

  “You boarded without a passport?”

  “He had connections.”

  “What language did he speak?”

  “He was Lebanese, or maybe Syrian.”

  The Canadian officials took my picture and my fingerprints, then handed me a refugee claimant form with my photo on it. They tried to give me twenty-five dollars, but I said no thank you; I already had money. They welcomed me again to Canada, wished me luck, and then shook my hand and let me go. I walked in a daze until I found a pay phone at the airport and called my sister Fatemah.

  “I was just talking about you with my girlfriends,” she said.

  “Fatemah, I’m in Vancouver.”

  “Yeah, right. Seriously, tell me, do you need anything? Can I send you more money?”

  “Look at the number I am calling you from.”

  She paused and then screamed so loudly that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.

  “Is this for real? Where? Where are you?”

  “At the airport.”

  “Grab anyone you see around you and hand them the phone.”

  I saw a tidy-looking Canadian man in a polo shirt and khaki pants nearby and held out the receiver to him.

  “Talk. Talk,” I said.

  He looked puzzled but curious and decided to take the phone. I heard him say “OK” a few times, and then he returned the phone to the cradle.

  “Come,” he said.

  The man walked with me to a taxi, said something to the driver in English, then closed the door and waved as we pulled away. Canadians, I decided, were astoundingly friendly.

  Vancouver was like a tape on fast-forward. As the taxi driver careened through downtown, I saw that every living thing was moving at warp speed. People drove actual race cars in Vancouver, Italian things that were fla
t like stingrays, in neon colors with howling engines that ricocheted off the mile-high apartment buildings. And the skyscrapers stretched so far up they made permanent shadows on the ground, so it was always dusk on some streets. Bicyclists in tight shiny pants whipped through the commute backup like traveling bullets, swerving just in time to miss pedestrians run-walking in the crosswalks. Was everyone in Vancouver late for something? I noticed immediately that there was some sort of organization behind the speed. Cars took orderly turns moving through intersections, and people crossed the street in marked places. Even the flowers on the medians were evenly spaced apart. Where I came from, it was like a still lake, and people moved in any direction they wanted to, making one big mess of things. Vancouver was a rushing river, and you either got in the right flow or you got knocked over by it. We drove over bridges and overpasses and yet more bridges. I looked down at a huge bay and saw a pod of rowers on skinny toothpick boats, racing one another like it was the Olympics or something. Along the shore, more people were running. Such an urgent place, Vancouver.

  So when Fatemah opened her front door and I smelled falafel and samoon bread, I wept with relief. I had told myself I wouldn’t get emotional and sloppy, but to see her face with features like mine, to know that I could rest under her wing until I learned to fly through the city solo, was overwhelming. Scent unlocked a sense of family that I’d had to forget to survive.

  “It’s OK now,” she whispered. “You’re safe.”

  I felt safe. But security and survival are two different things. I could stay with my sister, but I didn’t want to become anybody’s dependent. Could I reinvent myself, could I start over as a new man?

  “We have to call Jasem,” I said.

  Fatemah dialed, and when she connected with my brother, she rather melodramatically let him know that “the package has arrived.” And ten days later, Jasem landed in Vancouver with a temporary travel document issued by the Canadian consulate in Jordan. Shortly after that, he made space for me in his small apartment. Fatemah’s husband found me work at a recycling plant. With my siblings’ help, I figured out how to navigate the public bus two hours each way to get to and from my new job, where I worked from five in the evening until three in the morning, unloading trucks that came in with bottles and plastics and other recyclables, putting the cargo into huge compactors, and crushing it down into raw material.

  My coworkers thought I was odd because I always showed up thrilled to be at work. My body ached for movement after so long in prison, and my pride ached to bring home a paycheck again. This was my second chance, and I worked full-throttle, which pleased the manager but made the crew a little ticked off, like I was making them look bad. But I didn’t need friends. I needed a second chance.

  My chance came a year later, when my refugee hearing finally came. I went to the Immigration and Refugee Board offices next to the big library downtown with my brother and an attorney, and told my story through an interpreter whom I liked immediately because he had a Buddha smile and a soft manner of speaking. This time, I told no lies. I started with the Iran-Iraq War, being saved by that child soldier, and described life in five prisons, the police interrogations when I returned to Iraq, and the truth about whose passport got me to Canada. I showed them my document from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which confirmed that I was a prisoner of war for seventeen years. The tribunal needed only thirty minutes to decide my case, as opposed to the typical three or four weeks. They declared on the spot that they believed me and that I could stay and work in Canada as a “protected person,” and later apply for permanent resident status and, eventually, citizenship.

  Next I got my driver’s license, so I could drive my sister’s car to the recycling plant, cutting my commute in half. I got my first cell phone and spent a long time choosing a ringtone, finally settling on the chicken because whenever it squawked it reminded me of my old neighborhood in Basra. I was getting used to strangers smiling at me as they passed me on the street, and remembering that it was polite to smile back and say hello. I still shied away from people because I didn’t speak the language, but I was beginning to build on my early English vocabulary lessons in Sang Bast, and after venturing into a few shawarma shops, I had discovered there was a sizeable Arabic community in Vancouver. I was adapting to this cosmopolitan city, learning how to move swiftly, and starting to feel like my own person again. And my own person was getting a little testy that after a year I was still the lowest-paid employee at the plant, despite being constantly praised as the hardest worker. When I asked the boss about it, he made this puffing noise with his lips and turned his palms up and shrugged, like he was in a bind of indescribable proportions.

  So that’s why, when a load of bottled soda with six months remaining before its expiration date rolled up to the compactor, I got a business idea. I convinced a coworker in security to shut off the closed-circuit monitors for fifteen minutes, and liberated a few boxes of perfectly good, about-to-be-destroyed soda and stashed them in my sister’s trunk. The next day, I drove to a few downtown restaurants with Arabic names and found owners who were quite pleased to buy the soft drinks at my reduced rate. Over the next months, I continued to pinch a few boxes of commodities here and there to supplement my income, and then one day I hit the mother lode when we got a huge shipment of mislabeled gin from England. All the employees were warned not to touch the alcohol, but this was too good to pass up, for personal as well as economic reasons. I bought a van. It was a wheezing old jalopy with rust spots and a tendency to pop out of gear now and then, and it was nothing to look at, which was exactly the disguise I was going for. That month, my income doubled.

  Not long after, I discovered this wonderful thing called a flea market. I could expand my wares beyond drinks, eliminate the need to deliver my product all over town, and simply put out a table and let the customers come to me. With my own flea market stall, my skimming blossomed into full-scale stealing, and my side job became so lucrative that it surpassed my plant paycheck, requiring me to hire an employee. I even organized my vacations around particularly appealing inventory that came into the plant, so I’d have enough time to unload it all. One day my niece and I were making such a brisk sale in large plastic planters, the kind that you put trees in, that I told her to hold down the fort while I drove a friend’s truck back to the recycling plant for a second load. The green and brown pots were from Seattle and were supposed to be ground up at the plant and returned to the customer as raw material, but they were commercial grade and hard to find in retail stores in Vancouver, so that’s why they were selling for fifteen dollars a pop.

  When I returned to the flea market, I weaved my way through swarms of bargain hunters, and it seemed every third person was carrying one of my garden planters. I inched toward my stall while doing a little giddy math in my head, multiplying the number of pots times fifteen, subtracting what I would pay my niece and spend on gas and our lunch, when in the distance I saw the recycling plant manager in a heated discussion with my niece. I sidestepped behind a taco truck and peeked around the corner. I saw my boss take out a camera and snap pictures of my van with its back doors open and the pots inside, then squat down to get a clear shot of the license plate. I waited until he was gone, then ran to my niece.

  “What did he say?”

  “Who the hell was that guy? He was totally rude.”

  “That guy was my boss.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  This conversation was revealing no information. I tried again. “What did he want?”

  “He asked where the pots came from.”

  “And?”

  “I said the auction.”

  “And?”

  “Then he called me a liar. Then he took pictures and left.”

  I plopped down in a folding chair and put my head in my hands. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”

  “Uncle?”

 
I was going to be fired, that was for sure. That didn’t worry me; I’ve always been able to figure out a way to earn money. But if the boss reported me to the police, I might lose my special status as a protected refugee. I wasn’t sure Canada considered thieves all that special and might want to deport me. I had just started to put a little money away, always with Alyaa and Amjad in mind so that I could one day afford to go looking for them, maybe even bring them back to Vancouver with me. And now I’d thrown it all away for a few effing garden pots.

  “I gotta go before he sees me,” I said. “Sell them for five bucks. Or whatever you can get for them, and keep all the money for yourself. They all have to be gone by tonight.”

  On the way back to my brother’s apartment, my cell phone chicken-squawked and I almost swerved into a parked car as I fumbled to wrest it from my pants pocket and flip it open. Of course, it was the company manager.

  “Your vacation is ending early. I want to see you first thing in the morning.”

  He hung up before I could answer.

  All I could think when I showed up at work the next day was that shame felt worse than fear. Never before had I been embarrassed to be me. All through prison I’d refused to submit to “reeducation” by my Iranian captors specifically because I couldn’t live with the shame of turning on my country just to save myself some pain. Life was full of shortcuts, but it took the most brave to ignore a devil’s bargain. But look at me now, so weak that I had succumbed to quick cash. I was so far behind men my age, men who already had careers and stability, that I justified cheating a little just to catch up. Now, I couldn’t even look at my manager, the one who once praised me for being so diligent, so hardworking, so trustworthy. He knew bits of my story and felt genuine compassion for me. Why couldn’t he have just fired me on the phone?

  “Najah.”

  His words were stripped of feeling, like they were computer-generated.

  “Listen, don’t lie; we know you stole those pots from the company and sold them at the flea market, so there’s no use denying it.”