by M G Vassanji
‘Yes, can we help you?’ They were standing not very close to him – at a little more than arm’s length – but he felt crowded and without meaning to he took a step back but ran into his own bag and stumbled. One of the men leaned forward and took from him the passport he held and flipped the pages, in the process now coming to stand quite close to him.
‘I am a refugee,’ Karim said.
They tried several questions including the one about work. He stuck to his guns: ‘I am a refugee.’
The two men spoke briefly to each other, then started walking away with his passport, and Karim followed. He put his bag down and stopped when he saw a bank of clearly marked immigration counters to his right some distance away. But his interceptors walked on oblivious. He watched their backs, their unforced pace. Then one of them looked behind, and the other turned, and they stopped and looked at him for a moment. They walked back to him.
‘I am a refugee,’ Karim said, somewhat defensively. There was a pause during which they eyed him reflectively. Then the man who held his passport smacked it with one hand against the other before, to Karim’s surprise, handing it back to him. The two went sauntering towards the place where they had picked him up.
An immigration official made out some forms for him, stamped his passport, and gave him an address to report to. He was through.
Then the ordeal began. The few pounds and dollars he had come with he managed to have converted. He had just one telephone number with him, which he had learnt by heart, but he could not make the payphone work. Several times he had to yield it to other, impatient travellers. Minutes passed, he panicked: surely it was not this that was going to undo him? His rejected money tinkled back; the phone buzzed angrily at him; an efficient-sounding operator said something unintelligible to him. Desperately, yet half-heartedly he searched for a face he could trust. But who?
A man walked up to him. He was tall with a greying brown beard, wearing glasses, and grinning with big yellow teeth. His clothes were casual, a tweed jacket over woollen trousers, well used.
‘You want to make a telephone call, yes?’
The boy was dumbfounded, alarmed.
‘Yes, yes?’ The man’s insistence did not sound unfriendly though the grin, and the glinting glasses, and the tilt of his head as he spoke gave him a somewhat sinister look.
‘I am a refugee.’
‘I know that. But you want to make a telephone call to a friend – perhaps a refugee like you – yes, yes?’
‘I am a refugee.’
‘You are a refugee from where?’
He told him.
‘Look, I have been to your country. Yes? I am not an immigration officer as you think. Nor am I a policeman.’
He would not give the man the number he had been trying to call. He had heard too many stories of betrayal, arrived with too many warnings. They sat down and the man bought him coffee.
‘I am waiting for someone,’ the man told him. ‘A writer, not a refugee. Yes?’
Karim nodded. He wondered what he should do. There was one telephone with instructions in English that he had barely tried before being ousted; surely he could make it work after a few more tries? Perhaps he could give someone – this man – a wrong number and learn how to use the phone! But no, if he made up another number he would forget the one he had learnt. That would finish him. He could go to town first … but suppose he got lost?
Suddenly the man looked up past him, intently, towards the arrival gate then got up breaking into a grin. Walking towards them was a rotund man with a beard, wearing a corduroy jacket. He looked like an Indian and he was carrying a small hold-all.
‘I’ve got all your information,’ said the German, ‘except your flight number.’
‘Sorry, I forgot. Did you wait long?’
‘No, no.’
Karim was introduced to the Indian as the refugee. After a while, feeling rather foolish, he gave the two men the phone number. They talked, had more coffee and the German helped him make the telephone call. It was to a man called Anand in the city of Bayreuth. He was told to go to Bayreuth and given an address.
The German gave him a phone card and told him how to use it. He bought him his train ticket and told him he would have to change at Nurmburg. The train to Nurmburg was 20 minutes late and he might have to go to Pegnitz first and change for Bayreuth. But he should check with the conductor.
It was late afternoon and dusky when the train lurched forward taking him yet deeper into the alien country. The German had found his seat for him, the Indian had waited outside. The few hours of getting to the train station, the looking up of schedules and buying the ticket had been a lively frantic experience. Now left all by himself he began looking around him in the train. It was not very dark outside yet, and superimposed on the fleeting drab scenery outside the window he could just make out the constant but faint reflection of himself on it.
There was a sombreness in the compartment in spite of its brightness, a grim quietude. When he heard a voice it seemed as if it echoed from a distance. It felt eerie because he realised that the train did not move silently but with a steady rumble, which he had to strain to hear through the loud silence. Around him, everyone else sat composed into this stillness, belonging to it, until their stop came and they got up and left.
A conductor came by and clicked his ticket. ‘Bayreuth,’ he said, pointing at the ticket in his hand.
‘Yes. Change at Pegnitz?’ Karim asked.
The conductor gave him his ticket, saying a lot of words including ‘Bayreuth’, and walked away.
Karim looked helplessly around him at the several people who had looked up, then went back to staring out of the window.
He felt strange, preoccupied by an anxiety that allowed no other thoughts, even of home. His one objective was to get himself and his two bags to Bayreuth. There, a phone call or a taxi.
A station came with a name in large letters and ‘Bayreuth’ in smaller. Obviously this was not Bayreuth. Why put two names to confuse foreigners like him?
Finally PEGNITZ in large letters and some people got up. But he had to be sure. He looked at his neighbour.
‘Excuse me, sir. Is this Pegnitz?’
He had to clear his throat and repeat.
The man leaned towards the window and gave a quick look outside. ‘Ja. Pegnitz.’
The boy hurried out, pulling his suitcase, the hold-all over his shoulder.
The train disappeared and the station cleared of everyone except him, of all sound except his shuffling. It was overwhelmingly dark. Not a soul, he thought, isn’t anyone else going to Bayreuth? … With a sinking feeling he realised that the train which had just pulled out was on its way to Bayreuth. That’s what the conductor must have said.
Wearily he put his suitcase down against a wall and sat on it. The night was thick with mist. Overhead a sharp silvery half moon sliced through scattered clouds. In the distance, the lights of a town – life somewhere far away – and cars. But not a sound. If something happened to him, if his throat were slit in this godforsaken place, if he met a ghost or a vampire, no one would know. How stupid, he thought, to venture out like this into the unknown. But he had been pushed out, ever so gently. From a sitting-room full of family in Dar into this utter, utter loneliness under an alien sky.
There was a time, not many years ago, when a bread cart would go creaking down Uhuru Street, pulled by one man in front, pushed by another at the back. It would stop at the street corners and boys or servants would run up and buy bread for the evening or the following morning. Hot steaming loaves huddled in the cart under a green tarpaulin cover. Often at his home they had bread and butter for supper, with sweet creamy tea.
Now there were daily queues for bread and sugar; milk came in packets from the new factory, diluted, sometimes sour. There were rumours that boys would be recruited to fight Idi Amin, the tyrant to the north. And others that Amin would send planes to bomb Dar.
The body of an Asian woman had been
found on a beach, mutilated, hanging from a tree. Another, an elderly widow, had been hacked to death by robbers in her flat.
Three times his family’s application for immigration to Canada had been rejected. For all three failures his mother and two sisters blamed their father. They were right, his father simply didn’t have the heart to pack up his life and move to a cold climate. At each interview he blurted out something that was obviously inappropriate, that raised the interviewer’s eyebrows and made the rest of them squirm. Each time though, he had a plausible explanation. After the last interview, when they returned home once more without ‘medicals’, there had been the biggest row. As usual they were in his parents’ bedroom that was also the sitting room. His mother was sitting on the bed, braced for the quarrel, his father – resigned to it – was fiddling with the telephone as if unsure whether to make a call or not.
‘You didn’t have to tell the man that you keep money ready for the robbers – that you joke with them: “Business is bad, next time there will be more” …’
‘I thought he would like it – think I’m good natured or something.’
‘Good natured. A fool more likely. You could see the expression on the man’s face.’
‘The young punk. Come to sit in judgement on us. You know why there is no bread? The Canadians brought a new machine for baking bread at the state bakery. Throw away the old ones they said. Automatic! Well, the machine’s broken and there are no parts. Meanwhile someone in Canada’s made a bundle. Canadian aid!’
‘You’ve been listening to that socialist again!’ His mother practically screamed.
‘Shiraz’s a clever chap.’
Once more Shiraz Uncle’s name entered the home like an evil spell bringing disruption. His father seemed to sense this as soon as he had uttered the name. Shiraz Uncle was his father’s educated sister’s even more educated husband, and reputedly a supporter of government policies. At the mere mention of his name, Karim’s mother’s face would contort with rage. Already she was getting flushed and breathless, bosom heaving, searching for words. Sometimes in such a state she got up and went to the kitchen where Karim’s two sisters would join her. This time she exploded, pounding her chest twice, saying ‘I die! I die!’ and weeping forcefully, at which point both his sisters started wailing. His father, who thought he had successfully waylaid his wife’s querulousness with good humour and a change of subject, was caught off balance.
‘What, now?’ he began in embarrassment, and looked towards his son to see if even he had resorted to tears.
It was then that the telephone rang, shrilly cutting into the scene, startling most of all his father who was standing next to it.
An operator at the phone exchange had been bribed so his mother could talk long-distance with her family. This was after she kept on complaining about how difficult it was for them to make long-distance calls and how easy for those in Canada. They had a television now, although there was no local TV station and they had to make do with poor reception from Zanzibar. His father even got hold of smuggled foreign goods like cellophane wrapping and soft ‘squeezable’ toilet tissue and Kleenex. And Avon beauty products for his mother and sisters who in mosque came to be called the Avon ladies.
‘Oh the hell we live in!’ sobbed his mother over the phone. Her face was wet with the copious tears dripping off her chubby cheeks. At the other end of the line a hushing, comforting voice was just audible. It was usually her brother who called, to whom she was close. After a while his father spoke on the phone, receiving a good ticking off, finally getting furious: ‘Call her back if you want to!’
Then surprisingly, like the end of a storm, calmness returned as if nothing had happened and that night they could hear their mother and father talking in barely controlled husky tones in the other room.
His sisters had studied shorthand, typing, bookkeeping and anything else available and were now simply idling, reading Mills & Boon love stories or helping around while waiting to be taken to Canada.
The happiest times in Karim’s life had been when one of his other uncles, his father’s brother, had returned with his family from Pakistan after a miserable time there. There had followed happy years, with two families, seven children, living together in adjacent flats. Then his uncle’s eldest son who was in Canada sponsored his family; it was only a year since they had left.
His intellectual uncle, Shiraz, had no intention of going to live anywhere else. In fact the government itself sent him abroad several times and Shiraz Uncle always returned, happy to be back, for which many regarded him a socialist fool. But it was Shiraz Uncle who, on returning from Germany recently, told his father of a way to send his son abroad.
‘If you want to send him, this is one way, but I don’t see why you want to or what’s the hurry.’
‘I don’t think I’ll do it,’ said his father. ‘Karim’s never been away. I don’t think he’ll want to go in that manner. What do you think, Karim?’
Karim was the only other person in the shop, and he said, ‘No, I don’t want to go like that.’ His father was right. He couldn’t bear the thought of separation. And his uncle spoke of an indirect route through Germany, where he didn’t know a soul
But that evening Karim mentioned the possibility briefly to his mother and sisters, as a novelty, an idea typical of his crazy uncle. But they jumped on it, never letting go for an instant, and he was overwhelmed.
‘Your father’s no good, you be the man now. God will preserve you. Think of your sisters. Do it for them.’
He had no choice. His silence – brought on by his mother’s tender words of solicitation, her trust, her hand on his brow, her quivering lips, her sweet Avon smell – was taken for assent, and they were joyfully discussing the details of his trip when his father entered the room. His mother looked up at her husband in triumph, his sister Yasmin said joyfully, ‘Karim says he’ll go to Germany.’
Karim looked at him, expressionless. For the first time his father looked beaten.
A warm bright light was shining on his face, making him aware of his unwashed face, sticky neck. ‘Polizei’ was a German word he understood and the light moved up to a spot above him as a kindness. After some moments he could see the two policemen who were looking at him, telling things to him and to each other. They were quite young and he thought one was perhaps even younger than him.
‘Bayreuth,’ he said and it seemed that they were walking away, leaving him alone, but they turned and spoke and the younger one came up to him and gestured for him to pick up his bags.
‘We go. Police station.’
His heart sank. So be it then. He had been so dispirited, and now, woken up from a dream about home into this bleak deserted train station, he felt terribly depressed. And a trace relieved even at the thought that he would be sent back home.
They drove him to a square brick building which was the police station, walked him to a room at the back that had a table in the middle and some chairs. The door clicked shut behind him and he realised that it was probably unlocked. He sat down on a chair, lay his head sideways on the table between his arms and slept as he had often done out of exhaustion in school.
He was woken up by the sound of a chair scraping the floor. A middle-aged plump woman was wiping the floor with a mop. He watched for a while in amazement. From time to time she glanced at him. After that chore, she began wiping the window panes meticulously. He thought he had never seen anyone wiping window panes before. The room was chilly, the woman was wearing a sweater. The sun was shining brilliantly outside, somewhere, but not entering the room.
When he stood up, uncertainly, the woman left the room in a hurry, closing the door behind her. A policeman walked in; not one of the two who had picked him up last night: this one was older and plumper, balding. The policeman accompanied him to the washroom. Karim did nothing but stare at himself for a while in the mirror: he felt dull, out of touch with the face looking at him. Not the face he woke up with each morning, excited about
the day, taking his time shaving and bathing despite his sisters’ pleas to vacate the bathroom, singing joyously … If the policeman standing at the door had told him that it was not his face but that of someone else behind him, he would have believed it. Wearily he went back to the room. Two men in civilian clothes were waiting for him. They gave him coffee, examined his passport, began questioning.
This time he readily relinquished the phone number in Bayreuth, and the address. He did not care any more: he did not want to lie, to resist, to stay whatever the cost. He would gladly go back knowing he had tried. The only thing that nagged at him was the thought he had betrayed the men in Bayreuth who had offered to help him. He asked the two officers if he could call Bayreuth to tell them where he was but they smiled.
The men drove him to Bayreuth. Clouds were in motion above, and it was intermittently sunny; the road was a clear grey ribbon in front of them, cutting through greenery in a scene that could have come out of a story book. He wondered if Heidi was set in these parts. Perhaps The Sound of Music? It all seemed unreal, he could very well be dreaming. They entered town and after a while parked beside some blocks of flats.
On their way to the eighth floor in the last building, Karim wondered if this was really the end, the whole immigration ring to be arrested thanks to him. With trepidation and curiosity and feeling above all like a schoolboy being accompanied to the headmaster’s office, he walked between the men who eventually stopped outside a door and knocked stiffly.
There was a short interval and the sounds of some fumbling at the door, after which it was opened, wide, releasing a blast of food smells that stunned him. Karim was gently pushed in by the elbow and had to step over a towel on the floor. There were three men and a woman in the flat. One of the men was an African, from Nigeria, and he was at the piano. The woman, in a mini-skirt, was German. Of the two remaining men, one was from Sri Lanka – Anand, his host – and the other from India. All with papers in order. To Karim the room exuded a homely warmth that was as comforting as an embrace. He wondered how the smell of the cooking had been kept inside, then saw the wet towel that had been used to block the space under the door. The two officers were invited to look inside in the bedrooms and they did. After a peek in the kitchen, they left.