One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  The child welfare office conducted interviews with Anders and his mother in the new year and logged that the latter was concerned her son might be turning to crime. There was ‘genuine concern about his involvement in the tagging community,’ wrote the child welfare officer. ‘Such communities are known for activities and behaviour bordering on the criminal. The boy himself claims he no longer spends his time with any tagging community.’

  Anders was certainly right about that. He no longer had a community.

  The child welfare log ended as follows:

  02.02.95: Letter from Anders that he no longer wishes to cooperate with the child welfare authorities, as a result of ‘disclosures’ at school.

  07.02.95: Meeting scheduled with the boy at the office. Did not attend.

  13.02.95: Meeting scheduled with mother and son at the office. Neither attended.

  Not turning up to a pre-arranged meeting was an effective tactic for avoiding the spotlight of the child welfare office. The case was not pursued because it was ‘not judged serious enough to warrant intervention and support on the part of child welfare officers’.

  * * *

  ‘Morg’s squealed.’

  At Egertorget, the boys sat talking. Net wasn’t surprised when word spread. Nobody knew what he had said, who he had informed on, or whether anyone had been arrested as a result. It didn’t help. Once the rumour was out, you were marked.

  Backs were all that Anders saw now. No one wanted anything to do with him.

  School became an extension of the nightmare. As soon as Anders appeared, whether it was before lessons or in the evening, kids ganged up on him. And these were people not remotely connected to the tagging community. He had turned into someone everybody could trample on. His favourite phrases were circulated and mocked, and his big nose was caricatured.

  Anders started lifting weights, ideally twice a day. He developed quickly, from thin and weak to broad and strong. His classmates wondered if he was on steroids. At Ris, weight training was seen as far from cool; it was only years later that it became trendy.

  Anders was left sitting alone now. Well, not invariably. Sometimes he sat with a couple of others from the fourth group: the losers.

  ‘Outcasts stick together,’ laughed the cool kids.

  The class yearbook had a damning verdict:

  ‘Anders used to be part of the “gang” but then he made enemies of everybody,’ was the book’s summary for the leavers of spring 1995. ‘Anders has staked it all on getting a perfect body, but we have to say he’s still got quite a way to go. Apart from that, Anders spends a lot of time in Denmark getting materials for his “art”. In Year 7, Anders had something going with X, but now he’s got an admirer in Tåsen (with red hair and freckles). Anders often does stupid, unprovoked things, such as hitting the headteacher.’

  The piece finished by saying he now hung out with the losers in the class, who were mentioned by name. Nobody got off lightly.

  Anders was desperate to find out who had written it, so he could beat him up.

  The girl in the class with whom Anders was said to have had ‘something going’ was also furious with whoever had composed the entry. It amounted to bullying, because being together with Anders was the last thing anybody would think of. They would be outcasts themselves, then.

  It all came back, crystal clear, to Morg’s former friend Wick when the police put the yearbook in front of him sixteen years later.

  ‘Yes, that’s how it was,’ said Wick, the tall, dark one in the gang. Then he suggested a slight rewording: ‘Not enemies, it was just that he was pushed out. Not wanted in the gang any more.’

  As he sat in the sterile interview room trying to define why Anders was rejected, Wick recalled everything in minute detail. He remembered a pair of outsized hip-hop jeans, a make called Psycho Cowboy. The jeans were very popular, but disappeared overnight, after a few months of fashion hype.

  Then they were ‘one of the worst things to be seen in’, recalled Wick. ‘And Anders went on wearing his just a bit too long.’

  * * *

  Is there anything worse than being rejected by your friends?

  Yes, perhaps there is.

  Being disowned by your father.

  After his third arrest, Jens Breivik made it clear to Anders that he wanted nothing more to do with him. His son had broken his promise to give up tagging.

  The decision was final.

  Anders was fifteen.

  He would never see his father again.

  To Damascus

  There is fighting in the streets of Erbil. Blood wets the sand that covers the cracked asphalt. Rubbish is mixed with desert dust and the stench of war fills the alleyways and squares. Life has gone underground, and flickers over a low flame.

  It is 1996.

  The Iraqi army has withdrawn, and the war being fought is no longer for freedom, but between the Kurds themselves, for power and money. Erbil is a city where old rivalries are never forgotten, only intensified and mythologised by fresh killings leading to further years of blood feud and enmity. Kurdistan is ripping and hacking itself to pieces. The fighters occupying the city are choking it to death.

  Every night families are torn apart. Children are killed by other children’s fathers, or by young men who might become fathers one day.

  In the cellars, people sit in darkness for days, weeks, months, while the militias battle it out above their heads. Children try to invent a game down there, in the cellars, because children will always want to play. Fathers are nervous and restless; should they be taking up arms as well? Should they be choosing sides? Should they?

  * * *

  Mustafa chooses life.

  He is holding a four-year-old in his arms. Bano, his firstborn. With bullets whizzing through the streets above them and rockets landing God knows where, he wonders how to cope with everyday existence, how to find food for his family, how to get water, fuel and all the rest of it.

  ‘Why must we stay in here?’ whines the little girl. ‘I want to go up!’

  Not a single glimmer of light finds its way into the cold room. It’s a relief that their neighbour built a proper cellar.

  ‘Let’s go up and play,’ begs Bano.

  This little girl, conceived and born when snow was in the air, who wants to be part of everything, to have answers to everything – she is the apple of his eye. She learnt to walk at nine months, to put together long sentences when she was two; now she talks like a schoolgirl.

  Bayan is sitting with Bano’s little sister on her lap. Lara was born eighteen months after Bano. Bayan had wanted a boy. She comes from a traditional family, where a woman gains worth and status only once she has borne a son. Now she is pregnant for the third time, and the oppressive cellar atmosphere is making her queasiness worse. She groans. This isn’t how life was meant to be.

  Suddenly there is a huge bang. The house shakes, its framework creaks. Something shatters and makes a tinkling noise as it falls to the ground. The windows? The crockery?

  The children wail, and terrified shouts can be heard. The parents sit there numbly, ready to evacuate the cellar if they have to. Two girls who share the darkness with them start to cry. The elders recite from the Qur’an, a stream of mumbling verse coming from their barely open mouths. Sirens pierce the night.

  But the house stays standing, the cellar does not collapse or get filled with falling earth or plaster, no beams come crashing down. Is it over?

  Not for the children. Lara is too upset to settle. Bano is crying hysterically. She turns her head to her father in the darkness.

  ‘Why did you want children when you knew there was a war?’

  Mustafa sits in silence, rocking his daughter to comfort her. Then he hands her abruptly to her mother. He goes up the narrow flight of steps and opens the door onto the night. Something’s on fire, just down the street. Black smoke is rising into the air. A rocket has hit his neighbour’s house. One daughter is dead.

  * * *

&n
bsp; Before the next day is over, the neighbour’s twelve-year-old has been buried.

  That evening, once they had put the children to bed and mumbled an assurance that tonight they would be safe, Mustafa and Bayan sat up talking. Mustafa had made his mind up. Bayan hesitated. They took the decision before morning came. They wanted to leave Iraq.

  If only they could just have left, taken flight. But Iraq was one big prison. Without an exit permit they would get nowhere; the borders were closely guarded. Iraq was a land that was difficult to go to, hard to live in and almost impossible to leave. Mustafa, who was still a mechanical engineer at the water and sewage works in the city, tried to make contacts who might be able to help them. He offered bribes, he saved up and started currency dealing, looking desperately for a way out. His children should not grow up in fear of their lives.

  A son was born, and Bayan could finally call herself Umm Ali, mother of Ali. They celebrated; civil war or not, a child is still a source of joy.

  A year passed, then two, and in the third, Bano started school. Mustafa got her a decent pair of shoes; he bought a rucksack and a water bottle. Everything of quality, that was important now she was entering a new phase of her life, he told himself.

  School life suited Bano well; she was mature for her age and had spent a lot of time indoors, where she loved to read. Lara was less well behaved, and more daring, always getting dirty, clambering around the bombsites to discover things, playing at war in the ruins with her cousins Ahmed and Abdullah. Lara was always the boss. She was the best of friends with the two boys and played them off against each other whenever it suited her. As the middle child, she was left more to her own devices, and was more independent than her sister; Bano had grown accustomed to attention and admiration, and thrived when people noticed her.

  To survive the rampant inflation and be able to save up for their escape, Mustafa and Bayan both worked full time. The grandmothers looked after all the cousins while their parents were at work.

  To get passports, Mustafa invented a story involving a pilgrimage to Zeinab’s shrine in Damascus. Zeinab was the granddaughter of the prophet Muhammad. According to the Shia Muslims she was buried in Damascus, while the Sunnis claimed she was laid to rest in Cairo. Three summers after the fatal rocket hit their neighbours’ house and burnt the eldest daughter to death, the local authorities approved their application to make the pilgrimage.

  The parents didn’t tell the girls they would not be coming back. Their daughters could give the game away, as zealous intelligence officers at the border could be expected to question the children. They would only take a small amount of luggage with them, so as not to give away their plan to escape.

  * * *

  On the Thursday before their departure, Bano was chosen as pupil of the week at school. She received a little plaque, which she put up on the wall above her bed, and couldn’t make out why her grandmother was in such floods of tears. She was delighted with the award and hung her school uniform neatly in the wardrobe, ready for when they got back from the pilgrimage.

  The morning they were due to leave, there was a total solar eclipse. They had heard you could go blind if you looked at the sun before it disappeared, so the family stayed inside all day.

  The following night, Mustafa could not sleep. For decades, the nights had been the worst. Nights were the time when the Ba’ath party militias came for people, consigning them to torture and never-ending darkness in the dungeons of Saddam Hussein. The soldiers would turn the house upside down in their search for weapons or banned manifestos and writings. They would smash down doors or sneak in over the flat roofs where families dried clothes, stored junk or kept hens. No windows were secure, no doors, reinforcements or locks could keep out the forces of the state. The neighbourhood was sometimes awoken by the sound of men howling. They knew it was all over when the Ba’ath Party arrived.

  During the worst spells of political terror – the bomb attacks and street fighting – Mustafa would toss and turn, waiting for dawn. The days were safer than the nights. He lay there listening in the darkness. You didn’t need to open your eyes to know daylight was on its way. Daylight, even before the sun had risen, meant the sound of Primus stoves being lit, the smell of fresh bread, the first shuffle of footsteps down below, the click of the door handle as someone went out to get some flatbread before it ran out. Daylight meant the first call to prayer, while it was still dark. Only when the muezzin’s holy words had died away, when the real morning arrived with farmers offering freshly strained yogurt, white cheese with salt, tea and bread, only then could he relax and sleep.

  If you didn’t hear the lighting of the stoves or smell the fresh bread it was a signal that the city was under attack, or that there had been warning of an attack, and there was a state of Maneh al-Tajawel – a curfew.

  * * *

  That August morning they got up before daylight, before the heat arrived. They all squashed into a car, so tightly packed that none of them could turn and look back at the house with the flat roof where the line of clothes would soon dry in the sun.

  They drove out into the desert. Out here on the sandy plains, Abbasid, Moguls, Turkmens, Mongols, Persians and Ottomans had built their civilisations. They had all fought fiercely for Erbil – the four gods – as the city’s name means. Here Alexander did battle with the Persian king Darius, here the first soldiers of Islam fought for their faith, and this land was the original home of the Kurdish warrior hero Saladin, who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders.

  Over the centuries, the city had become increasingly difficult to seize, situated as it was behind high walls on a flat-topped mountain reaching ever closer to the sky. It was a man-made mountain, created by people rebuilding on the ruins of those they had conquered. Now only the old town still lay behind the walls; the settlement had overflowed onto the plain, where it lay unprotected from desert storms and militia feuds alike.

  Bayan was already regretting it all. There was no way it could end well. This was where they belonged. This was where they ought to live and die.

  Mustafa gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Everything will be all right in the end,’ he said.

  Though they had an exit permit from Iraq, they took a smuggling route as they approached the border because they had no Syrian entry permit. Half the money had already been handed over and a relation would pay the rest once Mustafa rang to say they were there. They had no idea where ‘there’ was. Nor did the smugglers, yet.

  The family of five was crammed into a little boat with many other refugees. The boat set off to cross the Khabur River, a tributary of the Tigris. The banks were patrolled by Iraqi and Syrian troops on their respective sides.

  Bayan cried throughout the crossing. ‘Imagine, I’m leaving my country! How can I leave my country?’

  Lara, now five, regarded her parents in bafflement. It was strange to see them unhappy. They were the ones who looked after her, Bano and Ali. Now she had her turn to comfort them. Why did they have to go on this journey if it made everyone so sad?

  Bano was uneasy too. Mustafa tried to hold her attention with a story about a girl who fell out of a boat into the water. That little girl fell over the side because she couldn’t sit still, and was eaten up by a big fish, a huge fish. Mustafa was groping for words, an enormous fish, and then she lived there, in the belly of the fish, with all the other children the fish gradually gobbled up. Mustafa was just talking away because he was afraid the soldiers on the bank would notice the boat and start firing. ‘And then the fish spat out all the children onto the shore,’ he improvised.

  Bano suddenly interrupted his story. ‘Daddy, we’re going to die now,’ she said.

  Her mother flinched.

  ‘I feel so close to God,’ Bano said to no one in particular. ‘It’s as if I’m in the clouds, looking down on you. The clouds are under me. I can see you in the boat, down below. I can see you all together.’

  Mustafa started to pray.

  God, There is no god but He, Livin
g and Everlasting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs what is in the heavens and what is on earth.

  The others sat motionless in the boat while Mustafa quoted from the prayer Ayat al-Kursi. This was the prayer he always turned to when he was lying awake at nights feeling frightened.

  He knows their present affairs and their past. And they do not grasp of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne encompasses the heavens and the earth; Preserving them is no burden to him. He is the Exalted, the Majestic.

  After this prayer he asked God to protect Bayan and the children, and, as is the Muslim way, he put his hands in front of his face, then held them out and blew, as if to blow the prayer up to God. Finally he turned his face out to the waves and blew for as long as his breath would allow him.

  The engine stopped. They slid in towards a sandbank and the boat made gentle contact with the Syrian shore. A waiting car took them to the Kurdish town of Qamishli, where they spent the night before travelling on to Damascus. In the Syrian capital, with its carved façades, beautiful palaces and spies on every corner, they stayed in a small room.

  Nobody bothered them, and they bothered nobody. Bayan felt as if the heat and dust were settling on her in a layer. She missed her kitchen, her cool living room, her sisters.

  After a month in Damascus, they were issued with Iraqi passports and plane tickets to Moscow.

  In the Russian capital, they were accommodated in an Aeroflot hotel at Sheremetyevo airport. A man came up to their hotel room and gave them an envelope with some new tickets in it.