Escape from Saddam

by Lewis Alsamari

  “They’re fine,” I told him. “They send their love.”

  Faisal took me under his wing. He found me a place to live with two other Iraqis. He showed me around, and he helped me to integrate. Without him, I would have been flailing in the dark.

  One day I received a call from Faisal. A letter had arrived at his house, addressed to me. I assumed that it was from Baghdad, secretly sent by my mother or Saad, and as I clung to any small contact I could have with them, I hurried over to read it. When I arrived, however, I was surprised to see something somewhat weightier than what I would have expected from Baghdad. Intrigued, I opened the envelope. As I did so, a sheaf of photographs fell out, along with my Iraqi passport. And with them, in exquisite handwriting on a piece of expensive paper, was a note: “I hope you had a safe journey. Good luck with your new life in the UK. Inshallah God will guide you and assist you, and keep you from danger.”

  I had not told the girl on the plane anything about my plans to travel to England, for fear of incriminating her. I had not told her that I was illegal. I had not told her that I was making her an unwitting accomplice to my plans. Curiosity must have got the better of her, urging her to open up the package. Either that, or I wasn’t as clever as I thought, and she had seen through it all.

  In Baghdad or Amman, if you stopped someone in the street to ask for directions or for the time, the chances were good that the conversation would lead on from there. Perhaps you would end up going for coffee; you might even be invited back to your new friend’s house, where he would offer to cook food for you. It is the Arabic way: hospitality is prized above almost everything else. And although in Iraq you had to be constantly on your guard for civilians who had the ear of the security forces, constantly aware of the subtext of these impromptu conversations, you nevertheless accepted this friendliness as a way of life.

  How different it was in England. The last time I had been here, I was a child, unaware of social subtleties; now I was in the thick of a cultural landscape that could scarcely have been more different from the one I had left. I was lucky, though. At least I spoke the language, and I had a genuine desire to learn everything I could about the country I had set my sights on for so long. For the first six months I was not allowed to work, but the government funded asylum-seekers to study at the local college, so I started working for my English and business studies A-levels—subjects that I thought would help me acclimatize. I also spent a great deal of time simply walking the streets, filling my eyes and ears with the sights and sounds of my new home, looking with wonder at how people were living.

  I found English people somewhat colder than their Arabic counterparts—not unfriendly, just not that interested, unwilling to forge immediate relationships with a young Iraqi refugee who must have looked like any number of other foreigners walking the streets. And so, to start with, I spent most of my time in the Middle Eastern communities. Large portions of my day were spent at the local mosque, praying and socializing with people around whom I felt comfortable and, more important, who felt comfortable around me. Mostly these were young British Muslims of Iraqi, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian origin, simple, genuine, good-hearted people who had no need to ask me why I had fled Iraq or what horrors I had endured. They understood. Day by day they taught me about the way of life in the UK, how I should act, how I should talk, how I should behave. They cared for me more than anyone and became like the family that had been denied me by my escape.

  Except, of course, they weren’t my family. My family was two and a half thousand miles away in a small compound in the shadow of the communications tower in Al-Mansour. My family was still living under the regime that would have me imprisoned, beaten, or even worse if I dared to return to see them. I felt in some strange way as if my soul had been split: half of me reveled in the joy of having made it safely to England in the face of so many dangers and difficulties; half of me ached to see my nearest and dearest again. I could speak to them on the telephone, of course, but that was unsatisfactory to say the least. Calls out of Iraq were limited to ten minutes each, but even when I called Baghdad, we always had to assume that the conversation was being listened to and recorded. On occasion you could even hear the heavy breathing of the silent eavesdropper. We all knew it would have proved deeply unfortunate for my family if they let on that they knew where I was, and so our brief conversations were carried out in a kind of code language that allowed us to establish that we were all safe, but we could never speak the things that we really wanted to say or hear.

  As soon as it was allowed by the conditions of my entry into the UK, I started at college. My plan had always been to study medicine, to become a doctor and so give something back to the country that had granted me asylum. But I suppose, in my enthusiasm and naïveté, I had not given proper thought to the realities of such a dream. Any qualifications I had achieved in Iraq were worthless in the UK, and the small exam I had taken when in Jordan was insufficient to get me into a medicine course. Moreover, I would have to pursue more than a decade of study. It would be impossible, not because I wasn’t willing, but because I knew now I was here that I had to get myself a job. I would have to wait three years before I could be funded at university; but in any case I had no desire to live off the state, and besides supporting myself I had to be able to send some of my earnings—through convoluted routes—back to my family in Iraq. I hoped that one day I would be able to help them get out. But that would take money—money that I had to earn. Of course it could never be mentioned during my phone calls home, but every time I heard Saad’s quiet, calm voice I remembered the words with which he had left me: the genuine man never forgets his family.

  I did not neglect my studies entirely, however. In February 1996 I enrolled in an English course, then a business studies course, and in my spare time I earned money painting houses. It was humble work, but I relished it. Whenever I grew disconsolate, I thought back to the grim realities of the Iraqi army, or to the danger I had faced working at the heart of the Hussein family’s operations in Amman. As time passed, I grew my hair long. I discarded the Western clothes that I had believed to be trendy when I was living in the Middle East—T-shirts with the insignias of heavy metal bands like Metallica and Megadeth. I even took an English pseudonym—Louis—in an attempt to appear more Westernized and so that I could travel undetected back to the Middle East if need be. Later I changed it to Lewis. Gradually I became more and more integrated. Although it would be a while before I was granted a travel document that would let me leave the country and return, I even started to have fun. After several months I found myself a more permanent job as a payroll clerk for a big company, and I moved out of my shared accommodations into a small one-room apartment. I spent almost every waking hour working: I had my day job as an accounts clerk, a Saturday job in a department store, and a Sunday job with a real estate agent. The pace was relentless, but I was determined to make the most of all the opportunities that had been afforded me.

  Despite the hard work I was doing, my physical health began to improve. The stomach pains I had been suffering were diagnosed as a stress-induced ulcer and I was given treatment, but the fact that my life was now distinctly less traumatic must have played its part in the condition clearing up. Even so, I still found myself afflicted by what I had endured.

  Nightly I would awaken from sleep, troubled by dreams of Red Berets, desert wolves, and flat-eyed immigration officials; I would relive my spell in the pit as the sneering arif looked on; I would find myself in the cramped cell on the road from my unit to Baghdad, excrement smeared on the floor and no hope of escape. When I woke up, my body would be shaking, my bedding damp with sweat, and I would spend the rest of the night wide awake, waiting for first light, with sleep just a distant and terrifying memory. Panic would overtake me, and I would fret about my family back in Al-Mansour. The military police seemed to have forgotten about me and them—but how long would it be until they remembered or their bribes ran out? Those lonely nights were filled with
a series of horrifying what ifs. The doctors diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder: a fancy name for what amounted to an uncontrollable fear of my own past. I was referred to a therapist, who spent eight months working with me to try to conquer the PTSD. In the end he judged that it was so severe that I needed medication. I was prescribed maximum doses of an anti-depressant and remained on the drug for the next six years.

  To try to forget my troubles, I threw myself even more robustly into my work. In the small amounts of spare time that I had left, I started trying to mingle with groups of young English people, and even though I gradually started to feel a greater sense of acceptance on their part, I never quite managed to feel comfortable, never quite managed to shake off the feeling that I was an outsider in a strange world that had started to acknowledge me but to which I would always be an alien.

  Until, that is, I met Rachel.

  We met in a local bar. It was the sort of chance encounter that you wouldn’t expect to lead to anything serious—a glance across the room that led to a relationship that would change both our lives. We fell into an easy, friendly conversation that made us both feel comfortable, and from that night on we spent almost every spare hour we had with each other. I was transfixed by her long, Titian hair and by her modest smile and sparkling eyes that betrayed a vitality and fiery determination that I had never before encountered. She was older than I and had a good job, and I was attracted by her confidence and poise. What she saw in me I can’t say, but gradually, as we became closer, I opened up to her.

  Since arriving in England, I learned to push my past into a far corner of my mind. My story was different, I knew that, but I wore it like a comfortable suit of clothes and refrained from revealing it to anyone. If people knew what I had endured, perhaps they would treat me differently, and that was not what I wanted. But now, with the stark honesty of two people who were falling in love, we revealed all there was to tell about each other. The look of wide-eyed amazement mingled with horror and pity that I saw on Rachel’s face as I told her everything I had gone through was a sudden, brutal reminder of my own past, and a signal that I would never really be free of it.

  “What about your family,” she asked me. “Don’t you miss them?”

  “Of course I do,” I told her quietly. “More than anything. But one day, maybe, I’ll be able to see them again.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  I smiled gratefully at the offer. “Nothing,” I told her. “Not at the moment.”

  Rachel and I moved in together, and after about six months we started talking about marriage. My uncle Faisal was a very religious man, well respected at the local mosque, and he did not like the idea of the two of us living together as man and wife without the sanctity bestowed on our relationship by a wedding ceremony, so he started to pressure us into getting married. Even if his influence on me had not been so great, however, we would have considered it.

  Our wedding day was not huge or lavish—neither of us had the money for that. We had a small civil ceremony, witnessed by a somewhat surprised-looking couple whom Rachel had dragged off the street. Yet, for all its simplicity, the words we spoke could not have been more heartfelt and meaningful. We were devoting our lives to each other, along with all that that entailed. Making the whole event even more potent was the fact that Rachel was of Jewish extraction: her marriage to an Arab seemed to me to symbolize something particularly harmonious.

  In the Hollywood movies to which I had become addicted, young couples in love promised the world to each other. They would do anything, they said. They would follow their loved one to hell and back. Little did I know that Rachel would end up doing exactly that for me.

  Not long after I moved in with Rachel I received a call from Saad. Instantly I could tell from the sound of his voice that what he had to tell me was of great importance, so I restrained my usual effusiveness and listened to what he had to say. “Habibi,” he greeted me cautiously with the traditional Arabic term of affection, which served the double purpose of his not having to say my name. “How are you? How is your health?”

  “Fine,” I replied. “And you?”

  “We’re okay.” He emphasized the word to make it clear that they were very far from being okay but he could say no more.

  Soon afterward I received a letter from Saad, sent covertly by way of Jordan because he knew that Iraqi authorities had teams of people reading regular mail. Its contents chilled my blood. The military police had interrogated Saad. The moment I read those words, a sick feeling rose in my stomach. It had been a long time since Al-Istikhbarat had questioned Saad, and I had come to believe that they had given up on me.

  I could not have been more wrong. Saad was put into a room by himself, where his hands were cuffed behind his back. His eyes were pinned open so that he could not blink, and the light from a large projector was shone onto his face. When he could stand no more, he was taken from the cell and either beaten or interrogated. This was repeated about every four hours for three days, during which time he was given no food or water.

  He steadfastly refused to admit that he knew my whereabouts.

  When the three days were up, he was released, but it was made quite clear that he, along with the rest of my family, could expect worse than that if they did not comply with the intelligence service’s demands.

  When I finished reading the letter, I banged the wall in frustration. I knew I was going to have to remain calm if I was going to be any help to them. I knew anger would get me nowhere. But anger was what I was feeling—anger and an intolerable impotence at being so far away when all this was happening because of me. When Rachel returned home, she could tell from the look on my face that something was wrong, and though she begged me to tell her what had happened, somehow I didn’t have the heart. I looked around with distaste at the comfortable apartment we shared: the smart furniture, the carpets, the pictures on the wall, all the trinkets of the affluent West. They seemed ridiculous to me now. How could I surround myself with such comfort while my family was being beaten and threatened on my account? I felt sick to my very soul: despite all my hard work since I had arrived in England, I was no nearer to being able to get them out. I had failed them, and they were paying the price.

  From that moment on, my every waking thought was with my family. I would go into fits of panic, unable to sleep and desperate to speak to them. I would spend hours trying to get through on the phone, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. Poor Rachel, when she learned the stark and brutal truth of what was happening in Baghdad, did her best to comfort me, but it was in vain.

  Not long after I first heard the terrible news, I received another call from Saad.

  “Those people I was telling you about, Habibi,” he said before I had a chance even to inquire after his health. “They want a bit of money.” His voice was abrupt with what I imagined to be a tinge of genuine trauma, and I understood what he was saying—he had to pay another bribe.

  “I’ll send as much as I can.”

  “You must, Habibi. Otherwise they can’t do what they promised. It’s too much for me.”

  I quietly understood what he was saying: the amounts I had been sending home were not enough. Not now.

  “I hope you’re not enjoying yourself too much,” he continued. I didn’t know what to say. “You should be thinking of us now. Of your family. Remember what I told you.”

  Each word he spoke was like a bullet. I knew I had to do something to help, but I didn’t know what.

  That night I dreamed about my mother. Curiously I did not picture her at home or suffering in the clutches of Al-Istikhbarat. Instead I remembered her in England, when I was a child, huddled over the phone with tears in her eyes, speaking to her family in Baghdad. There had been raised voices behind closed doors between her and my father. I had hidden in my room until they died down; and when I next saw my mother, she looked like a broken woman. In my dream she looked at me, her sad eyes seeming to pierce through me, and I
awoke trembling and sweating. For a moment I wondered where I was, then was instantly reoriented by the sound of Rachel breathing deeply next to me. I quietly slipped out of bed and moved to another room, where I sat and looked out the window and into the night sky. It was clear, and the crescent moon looked back down at me—the same moon, I remember thinking, that was looking down at my family in Al-Mansour, on the Bedouin desert by the Jordanian border, on the café in Amman where Abu Firas used to sit. I thought of all the people who had helped over the years, who had got me where I was. Safe. Comfortable. Free. I would be repaying their kindness to me poorly if I did not now direct all my energies into helping my family, into granting them the same security that I now enjoyed. What else could I do?

  The next day I started making calls. I spoke to my Iraqi friends, and to friends of friends, to ask whether they knew of smugglers based in the UK who would be able to arrange for my mother and siblings to disappear from Baghdad. There were a few vague leads, rumors of people who could help, but most people said the same thing: it would be difficult and expensive. Everyone wanted to come to England, the routes were full and being watched, and the smugglers had more business than they could handle. Much better, they said, to arrange something from inside Iraq. But how could I do that? The only person I could think of who might be able to help my family was the father of my friend Hakim. He was a Kurd and, unusually, had been appointed to a governmental position because he was loyal to Saddam. Not so loyal, however, that he wasn’t prepared to arrange for people to be smuggled through Kurdistan and into Turkey. But as usual there was a price tag. Even if I suggested to my family that they speak to him, I knew they would need more money than they had. They were saving everything I sent them, but the sums involved would be far more substantial.