Live from Cairo

by Ian Bassingthwaighte

  “It landed, at least.” Hana took beans by the heap. The idea being to cure or at least bury her hangover.

  Margret stabbed two meatballs with a fork, then took great pains to cut them evenly. “You almost look like you’re from here. Pretend you are and you’ll get hassled less. In the street, I mean. Not much less, but some.”

  “My parents are Iraqi.”

  “That’s right.” Margret raised her index finger to excuse her chewing. “Assyrian.”

  There’d been a background check. Hana had gladly signed the consent form when applying for the job, for it relieved her of the duty to explain who she was and where she came from. Her life story had been distilled into a series of facts. Her father was blown up in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1980, a few months before Hana was born, when an Iranian missile dropped like a shot bird. Her mother fled to America. What other choice but to run? The war had compounded a more historical danger: the persecution of Assyrian Christians at the hands of the Baathists. Not that Hana could remember what she hadn’t witnessed. The pain her mother told was just a story.

  “Mm,” said Hana, finally setting in on her beans. “The ful is . . .”

  “Tastier than it looks? I know, it looks disgusting.”

  Margret looked relaxed as she was eating. Hana found this impressive—Margret’s ability to eat and talk and look relaxed at the same time, and to simultaneously be a boss with authority and probably a rule book. If you crossed Margret, she’d hit you with the rule book so hard you’d wake up years later having learned how to follow orders. Impressive. Also, frightening. Hana was impressed and frightened and happy. Frightened because she was finally in Cairo and had to prove she deserved to be. She had theoretical, but not practical, experience—what Hana thought of as “too much school.” Could she do the job? Could she do the job well? Could she do the job well over time? The job would be reading and evaluating resettlement petitions, filed by refugees on the run. On paper, a plain duty. But in practice?

  “Well,” said Margret, eyeing her half-cleared plate with conflicted interest, “I’m probably fuller than I think. I better stop.” She cast her plate aside, but not into the trash; maybe her decision wasn’t final. The pause in conversation was thus filled by the sweet feeling of discovery. Margret wasn’t just a boss, nor just a leader. She was an actual person with insecurities that leaked out at weird times. Hana counted her discovery as one more reason she was happy to be in Cairo now, in the thick of it. Summer was coming and the revolution was still a spark suspended over a pool of gasoline. The office was air-conditioned, the employees were curious, and the boss was more human than most.

  “I might as well get on with the spiel I give new hires.” Margret cleared her throat to make way. “Your goal, like mine, is to send every refugee to a safer place. Sound about right? Sadly, that won’t happen. Not now. Probably not ever. There’s not room, politically speaking. Not in any country. We’re talking about an onslaught. Tens of millions worldwide. Worse still, not every person who petitions to resettle is even a refugee. Insofar as that word is officially defined. Egyptians or Jordanians will pose as Iraqis. They’ll say their houses were bulldozed or bombed. They’ll burn themselves with a lighter and say it’s really a bullet wound that hasn’t healed yet. No matter how sincere a story sounds, or what it makes you feel, remember that tears don’t qualify as evidence. We need proof of origin, proof of trauma, proof of flight. That means source documents. Identity cards, medical records, pay stubs, death threats, even the envelopes in which the death threats were sent.”

  By not talking, Margret allowed the background noise to assert itself. People wrestling with the copy machine; phones ringing; cold air blown in by old fans. The noise made it easy for Hana to remember what she’d learned in law school. The truth paled in comparison to the paper trail. With paper, you could prove anything.

  “Something else,” said Margret finally. “Most resettlement cases are filed by nonprofits on behalf of refugees who don’t normally apply for resettlement themselves. Not everyone knows English or has a computer. Or even the right forms. Information is surprisingly hard to disseminate. You’ll be dealing with a few resettlement lawyers, most of whom are foreigners and all of whom are a pain in the ass. My ass, especially. One is gifted in that regard. Charlie Wells. He calls and e-mails relentlessly. As soon as he figures out we’ve got a new hire, he’s going to zero in.”

  Hana believed herself to be a hard target. Evasive by nature. Calls could be ignored. E-mails could be deleted. “He can try. But I’m very . . .”

  Margret didn’t appear to be listening. “The last thing that you need to know . . .” She paused as if her own speech had sped ahead of her. “Ah! I remember. Feel free to stop by my office whenever my door is physically, actually open.” Her smile suggested her friendliness had a limit. “Just don’t knock on my door if it’s shut.”

  “I will. And I won’t, ever. Not even in an emergency.”

  Margret laughed, a little. “Go find Joseph.” She finally slid her plate into the trash. “He’ll show you how to do your job. Or at least where to do it.”

  Hana shook Margret’s hand with what she hoped was a firm grip. But not too firm, lest she seem eager. Then she cruised the halls in search of Joseph, whom she eventually found in the kitchen eating lunch by himself. At one time he must’ve had company. Several empty chairs were pushed back from the table, giving the kitchen an abandoned look. More like Chernobyl than a ghost town in the Old West. It wasn’t as if people had moved out over time as the town died. Something had made people run.

  “Folks here take their jobs very seriously.” Joseph turned and gestured to the chairs with his foot. “Badr, Fadwa, Noha, Hend. The list goes on. We’re all victims of a collective office ego, which has run amok. Who can do more work faster? Who can eat lunch in two minutes without choking?” Joseph lifted his applesauce; he’d been irrevocably changed by his environment. “Recently I discovered I’m less happy than I want to be. I want to be more like Yezin. He’s the only one who eats lunch at a normal speed. He gets more work done than the rest of us combined. An infuriating paradox.”

  “Yezin.” Hana recalled each of the faces she’d seen. “He’s got . . . big eyebrows?”

  “One giant eyebrow, actually. You’ll see him around. Or hear him, more likely. Humming while he cleans lint off the hard drives. I think it’s some kind of Zen-like activity—polishing, the way he does, with the cloth.”

  Hana felt as if she’d entered a world that had existed for a long time without her. She relished that and imagined, months from now, being invited into the fold. “Margret said you’d show me the ropes.”

  “The ropes. Of course. One second.” Joseph made quick work of his applesauce before pushing his chair and every other chair back under the table. Then he led the way down the hall. “The office is an assembly line. You’re at the beginning of it with me and Yezin.” Joseph pointed through a doorway as they breezed past; Hana caught a glimpse of Yezin waving. “We read and evaluate testimonies, which are the narrative portion of each refugee’s petition to resettle. There are thousands of these documents in this office at all times. They never stop coming. We keep them over there and over there.”

  Joseph pointed at two lines of filing cabinets, which in no way hinted at the catastrophes they contained. Then he gestured through another doorway to Hana’s desk: “All yours.”

  Hana walked in and sat down in her chair. The memory foam had already forgotten whoever had last sat there.

  “How does it feel?”

  “Pretty comfortable.” Hana thought she could sit there all day and feel no pain.

  * * *

  Refugees came like dust blown from other deserts. Iraq, Sudan, Somalia. The men had survived abduction and torture. The women had survived abduction and torture and rape. Aggravating circumstances included missing relatives or children, various psychological disorders, and a high rate of arrhythmia. The average heart, it seemed, was unable to normalize after the s
hock of learning what people could do. Testimonies arrived in stacks, but Hana moved through them one page at a time, so slowly that she never had to lick her finger. She knew the UNHCR processed hundreds of thousands of resettlement petitions each year, but only a fraction were approved and even fewer were actually resettled. Her burden, then, was to choose carefully.

  There were two categories of reading. The good kind and the other kind. The good reading contained electricity, causing the hair on Hana’s arms to stand up. Such as when she read about an Iraqi family whose story was awful and true as far as she could tell. Not only did the timeline add up, but the case had urgency. The mother’s terrible heart condition satisfied that requirement. Not just arrhythmia, but a severe prolapse requiring surgical replacement of the mitral valve. The supporting documents proved everything, and Hana got to pass the case along for further review. Maybe the family would be vetted, approved by the American embassy, and flown to Philadelphia or Boston or Detroit. A hard life would await them, but so would physical security, which the family hadn’t known since before the war. Plus, the mother would get her surgery. Her fear of death would be replaced by other, lesser fears. Would she miss hearing the call to prayer so much that she’d hear it spontaneously—a kind of muscle memory, but in her ear? Would she find a job? Would her son make friends? Would he be happy?

  The other kind of reading had a less tactile, more insidious effect on Hana’s mood and overall happiness. Such as when Hana revoked a Sudanese woman’s refugee status after reviewing her case. Not by choice, thank God; by mandate, which slightly reduced the considerable feeling of guilt. That woman, named Rita, was from southern Sudan and not Darfur. The United Nations had declared the region safe for repatriation even though there was no peace or even cease-fire. Now Rita’s petition to resettle would become a one-way plane ticket home. The worst part? Her village was still controlled by the militiamen who’d stormed into her life on horseback while she and her boys had slept all those years ago. Time had a way of sharpening bad memories. The rape, the theft of her livestock, the burning of her hut. Most of all, the murder of her children. The facts were in plain English on white paper. The children had tried to flee, but there’d been nothing to hide behind. The children had been thin, but not thinner than the grass and the trees. The sound of gunfire had drowned in the sound of horses galloping.

  * * *

  It was, all of a sudden, two weeks since Hana had arrived in Egypt. She’d done nothing but work. Hana interpreted that as a good sign. She liked her job. Or saw how she might like her job one day after her skin thickened. The process had already begun. Now she could read testimonies without crinkling the paper by gripping it too hard. A marked improvement. Not that Hana could enjoy the feeling of having changed. Not today, at least. Today she was late for work. Ten minutes late, to be exact. She burst through the office doors out of breath and off-balance, causing a racket by steadying herself against the wind chime. Why would Margret hang a wind chime by the door if not to know when it opened?

  “There you are,” said a voice from down the hall. Margret’s head appeared from a doorway, followed by the rest of her body. “Exactly who I needed to see.”

  “There was a jam on the bridge.” Hana was still new and felt she had no right to be so late. Ten minutes was too many. “The army was shooting protesters with water cannons. The weird part? Protesters ran toward the water—”

  “To indicate they’re not scared,” said Margret coolly. How could anything surprise her after such a long career in the conflict business? “By the way, do you want to conduct a resettlement interview? You’ve been here . . . uh, a while. I think it’s time.”

  Hana didn’t ignore the question. She placed it in the queue of things to process. Other questions came first. Such as, why show the army you’re not scared? Wouldn’t that compel the army to change tactics? Wouldn’t water become rubber? Or even metal? Not to mention, Hana’s lunch, her coffee, and her work—a stack of testimonies, thick as a phone book—were slipping from her grip. She couldn’t hold everything much longer. How to decide what to drop? Not the coffee, for the carpet’s sake. Nor the stack of testimonies. How long would that take to clean up? That left only her lunch, which she let slip from her fingers. “Ugh,” said Hana when the bag fell. She set the testimonies and the coffee on the filing cabinet, then set about collecting her lunch. Hana hoped the yogurt’s seal didn’t break when the bag landed. The yogurt offered relief from the heat, the pressure, the stress. In the afternoon, when Hana felt like a dead dinosaur being compressed into a fossil fuel, she escaped to the kitchen, ate her yogurt, and played Tetris on her phone until she achieved the high score. If the high score was too high, she reset it to zero. That way she could forever best herself. But if the yogurt’s seal had broken, she had no way to carry out her ritual. Hana peered forlornly into her bag, where a gruesome murder scene lay in wait. A quarter strawberry, aloft on her baguette, looked like a tiny heart with a yogurt coating.

  “About the interview,” said Margret. Her calmness alerted Hana to the absurdity of the situation. The yogurt didn’t matter. The protesters were none of her business.

  “By ‘interview’ you mean . . . ?”

  “The other half of your job description,” joked Margret. Or maybe she wasn’t joking. With Margret, it was hard to tell. “You can’t just read, not forever. You’ll burn out if you keep reading.”

  “I love to read,” said Hana. Should she describe exactly how much she loved reading? How her mother used to work in a library? How Hana had spent every day after school in the stacks? How she’d taken home Kafka, Woolf, and Mahfouz? How she’d lingered so long in the pages that her mother was reprimanded for excessive use of the blind eye? The blind eye was library lingo for refunding the late fee, an off-the-books employee benefit.

  “Variety is related, I think, to job satisfaction,” said Margret.

  In a last-ditch effort to avoid the inevitable, Hana finally confessed. “I’m not ready. Just knowing the names . . .” Hana thought suddenly of Rita. How blessed she felt to have never met the woman.

  Margret gave Hana a sorry look. Also the testimony. Just printed and still warm to the touch. “Joseph offered initial approval. My feeling? The case isn’t dire enough. Either the interview will change my mind or it won’t. It’s scheduled for three o’clock. I trust you’ll be ready by then?”

  “Yes,” said Hana without believing it true or even possible. The UNHCR handbook described what the interview entailed from a mechanical standpoint, but suggested no tips on how to maintain poise, distance, and objectivity in the face of traumas that were technically in the past but lived on, even grew, in the memory. Hana was, she realized, totally alone in the task of becoming reticent. And had only hours to change. She sped-read the testimony and took notes—Dalia, thirty-four, fled Baghdad—while pacing her office, but the wind of her own movement failed to blow away the feeling that she was about to jump off a cliff.

  When Margret reappeared that afternoon, her presence automatically drew Hana into the hall. A kind of tractor beam. “Follow me,” said Margret. They walked to a sparsely furnished conference room, which neatly presented an oblong table, matching chairs, a fake plant with waxed leaves, many of which had detached from the plant—the illusion of wilting gave life to the room—and two framed pictures of Gandhi. Technically one picture of Gandhi and one picture of his possessions at the time of his death. Two pairs of sandals, two bowls, a wooden fork and spoon, three porcelain monkeys, his diary, his prayer book, a spittoon, a watch, and two letter openers. What couldn’t fit in a single pocket could be carried in a single hand. Margret said she loved the photo because it depressed the hell out of her. “Not in a bad way,” she’d said. The photo clarified what possessions had true value—time, family, home, and health—and served as a reminder that every refugee had lost at least one, often several.

  Hana and Margret sat across from Dalia, who sat by herself. Hana knew the no-lawyer rule—people trained to obsc
ure the truth were not welcome—but it seemed now like an extraordinary caution, and patently unfair. Especially unfair given the size of the table, which could’ve sat ten people comfortably. “Do you need a translator?” asked Hana, irked by her paltry offer. Yet she had to ask. “Also, nice to meet you. My name is—”

  “No,” said Dalia, somehow interrupting without seeming rude. “My parents taught me English when I was young.” Her skin looked the right age, but her eyes were much older. “I studied in college, too. And taught my husband. That’s how he got the job with the Americans. Not only did he work hard, but he could speak their language.”

  Hana didn’t want to disturb what she hoped was a happy memory—Dalia had shut her eyes and seemed to withdraw from her body—but Margret, tapping her watch, threw Hana a stern look. Hana said, “Ahem.” Then, “Excuse me. Ahem.” The silence grew until it draped the table. Hana had no choice but to jolt Dalia from her pensive state. “What happened in Baghdad?” blurted Hana. “Why did you flee?” Sensing her questions had accomplished their task, Hana added, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be . . .”

  “The war,” said Dalia. “It wasn’t safe.”

  Hana saw now that doing her job—extracting Dalia’s horror story in its peculiar form—would be difficult and, by nature, unkind. Hana hoped she’d be able to forgive herself. “That’s what happened to your country. I’m asking what happened to you.”

  Dalia’s hesitation was so slight Hana wondered if she’d imagined it. “We were walking to our home. From the market. We carried bread and vegetables. On the walk, Omran asked if I thought we’d have electricity that night to cook food. The electricity came and went with the water. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘The potatoes will be washed, one way or another. If I can’t wash them in the sink, you can rub them clean on your shirt. I will find some way to cook them.’ What I really meant was that I loved Omran, but it came out that way about the potatoes. Then a truck pulled up to the curb. The brakes screamed. A man screamed out the window. Another man flew out the door. He hit Omran in the head with a rock. Omran fell over.”