Kiss the Dust

by Elizabeth Laird

  When Kak Soran came home that night he was pale and drawn. Teriska Khan took one look at him and silently filled a plate with hot tasty stew from the pan that was perched precariously on the tiny paraffin stove. It was obvious that he had bad news. She was in no hurry to hear it.

  He ate without much appetite and handed back his plate half finished. Teriska Khan started to clear away the food, but he put out a hand and stopped her.

  ‘Leave that till later,’ he said. ‘Sit down and listen.’ A year ago he would have nodded to Tara to leave the room, but now it was different. It wasn’t only that there was no other room to go to. He wanted her to listen too. She got up from the corner where she’d been taking up the hem of Hero’s new dress and sat down beside Teriska Khan. The light of the oil lamp cast a strong glow on her parents’ faces.

  They look older, she thought with surprise. Kak Soran pressed his hand against his forehead as if he had a headache.

  ‘You’re not going to like this, Teriska,’ he said warningly, ‘but I might as well tell you straight. We’ve got to leave Iran now, at once.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No, listen. I was talking to Ali and some of the pesh murga leaders today. You remember Hussein, Zhen’s brother?’

  Teriska Khan nodded impatiently.

  ‘He came over here before we did. The Iranian secret police picked him up last week. They’ve forced out of him details about the factory he worked in, its location, output – all that kind of thing. They bombed it yesterday. The whole place went up in smoke. Dozens of workers were killed. Ali says it’s only a matter of time before they get on to me. My factory was a lot more important. Just the sort of vital installation the Iranians would like to destroy.’

  A moth had got into the little room. It was beating its wings helplessly against the glass shade of the oil lamp. Tara could hardly bear to watch it.

  ‘Well, but Soran,’ Teriska Khan was saying, ‘even if they did ask you . . .’

  ‘Ask!’ he laughed shortly. ‘They wouldn’t be so polite, believe me. Just think about it. Think what it would mean. If they bomb my factory it’s not the government of Iraq that would suffer, it’s the people. Our own friends and neighbours. We may have taken refuge in Iran but we’re still Iraqis. I’m not going to help Iran bomb our country – betray all the people I’ve known and worked with all these years.’

  Mr Mahmoud, thought Tara. He’d be killed. He risked his life for us.

  ‘We must leave now, at once,’ Kak Soran said.

  Teriska Khan was speechless. She couldn’t take it in.

  ‘Leave Iran at once?’ she said stupidly. ‘What do you mean? Where can we go?’

  ‘I’m seeing Daban first thing in the morning. He said his son was going to phone tonight from Paris. He thinks he might be able to help us get temporary visas for France.’

  France! Tara shivered. She was feeling numb. The familiar knot of fear was tying itself inside her stomach again. It had been awful in Iran, but at least she’d felt that Baba was safe. But now they were on the run again. There was to be no stopping here after all. They’d have to pick themselves up and go on again, to somewhere even stranger and further away.

  But France! It sounded so cold and foreign and distant. She tried to imagine France, but she couldn’t. Now she’d lived in Teheran she could see the rest of Iran quite easily in her mind’s eye. She could guess what kinds of shops and houses and mosques there’d be, and what the people would be like. And she could imagine other countries nearer home like Turkey and Syria and the Gulf States a bit too. She knew lots of people, Kurds and others, who’d lived there. But she couldn’t imagine what France was like at all.

  Next day Kak Soran came home earlier than usual. He sat down heavily on a cushion and stretched out his hands to warm them at the tiny paraffin stove.

  ‘Daban’s boy Rezgar did phone last night,’ he said wearily. ‘France is out of the question. They’ve tightened up on refugees. I’ve heard the same story all over the place. It’s going to be incredibly difficult to get in anywhere. Germany, Sweden, Norway, Britain – they take a few, then they bring the shutters down again.’

  ‘What about Canada?’ said Tara anxiously. She’d spent hours listening to Daya who’d been talking all day to the other women in the camp, discussing every possible country in the world that could be a new destination. Of them all, she’d liked the sound of Canada best.

  ‘Canada?’ Kak Soran shrugged. ‘Forget it. It’s almost as hopeless as the United States, and you might as well try to get to the moon as get in there. We’ll just have to get our exit papers in order, and get on a flight to Europe, and claim asylum wherever we can.’

  ‘But we can’t do that!’ burst out Teriska Khan. ‘What about Ashti? He’d never be able to trace us.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Ashti. I’ve arranged all that with Daban. We’ve sent a message through to him telling him we’re going out. Once it’s safe for him to come through to Iran Daban will look after him. He’ll get him any money he needs, and be our contact with him. It’s the best I can arrange.’

  Teriska Khan was looking more and more agitated.

  ‘But we can’t go to any European country just like that! They might refuse to take us, or send us on somewhere else. The stories I’ve heard! People sometimes go travelling round for weeks, from one airport to another, not allowed to stop anywhere!’

  ‘What on earth do you want then?’ Kak Soran was obviously losing his patience. Tara could see his teeth were clenched. ‘Do you want to go to the desert camp in the south? Do you want the Iranian police to torture information out of me and bomb my old factory and everyone in it? Or perhaps you’d like them to send us back to Iraq, where I’d be executed straight away, and you’d be sent to prison! Wake up, Teriska. This is the only thing we can do. We just haven’t got any choice.’

  It was funny, thought Tara, when she woke up the next morning, how quickly a new idea became an old one. Last night the thought of going to Europe had been so strange and scary she hadn’t been able to take it in at all, but this morning her brain seemed to accept it, and she had to start bracing herself to face a whole new life, an extraordinary, unfamiliar future.

  The next few days dragged by. Every moment was filled with tension. When Baba went off to Teheran each morning, Tara never knew if he’d come back that night. And every evening, when he did come home, he’d be fretting and fuming at the time it was taking to get their papers sorted out, and the huge sums of money he was expected to pay to get them all safely away.

  By the time they were actually ready to go, with their papers in some kind of order, their exit permits for the camp arranged, and air tickets to London booked and paid for, he was looking thin and haggard. Every last penny of the money they had so carefully smuggled over the mountains and through the camps had gone. Nothing remained except some pieces of jewellery.

  Uncle Daban drove them to the airport. They’d been discharged from the camp the day before, and had spent the night in their cousins’ flat. There had hardly been time to go to bed. They had to be at the airport by six o’clock in the morning. They sat in silence in the car, except for Hero who was excited at the thought of going on a plane.

  ‘Will it bump when it hits the clouds?’ she said nervously.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Tara, but she didn’t feel as sure as she sounded. She couldn’t imagine flying through clouds.

  Kak Soran and Teriska Khan were under such strain that Tara could almost feel the tension radiating out from them. Her own stomach was churning too.

  ‘This is our one and only chance,’ she’d heard her father say to Uncle Daban. ‘Our tickets are only valid for this flight. If they arrest me at the airport, or if we miss our plane somehow, we’ll lose them and all the money, and I’ll never get enough together to try again.’

  Tara tried not to think about it. She tried to look at the beautiful buildings and gardens of Teheran as they flashed past in the half-light of dawn. It was sad to say
goodbye.

  We could have made a good life here, she thought. We could have settled down and made friends and been happy.

  The airport was very crowded. It was obvious here that a war was going on. Soldiers were everywhere and security was very tight. Uncle Daban nudged Kak Soran.

  ‘It’s not the ones in uniform you have to watch out for,’ he whispered. ‘It’s the revolutionary guards.’

  Tara clutched her chador even more tightly under her chin and looked round nervously. She didn’t need anyone to tell her which the revolutionary guards were. You could pick them out at once. They were all young and looked stern and humourless. Most of them had beards and they had their shirts buttoned up to the neck under their dark jackets but didn’t wear any ties. Some carried radios, and kept talking into them. Some were armed. But the most obvious thing about them was their arrogant self-assurance. They could do what they liked here. They could stop and search anyone. They could confiscate papers and money. They could hold you up and make you miss your plane if they decided they didn’t like the look of you. They had power, and they looked as if they were enjoying it.

  ‘Do whatever they tell you,’ Kak Soran said quietly to Tara and Teriska Khan. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself, and try to keep Hero quiet. Thank God we have plenty of time before the flight leaves, so if there is a hitch . . .’

  There wasn’t. To everyone’s huge relief they were checked out through the official desks, their luggage was only lightly searched and after a tearful farewell to Uncle Daban and hours of tension and boredom in the departure lounge, where everyone looked like a secret policeman in disguise, they found themselves on the plane at last, strapped into their seats, and were taxiing on to the runway.

  The plane was due to make a stopover at Munich.

  ‘It’s a good place to go to,’ Uncle Daban had said. ‘If they don’t let you into Britain they’ll probably send you back to the last place you came from, and you’ve got a better chance of getting asylum in Germany than in most other places.’

  Kak Soran had agreed with that. He had several Kurdish friends in Germany already, and his pocket book was stuffed with their addresses.

  The plane roared up into the air. Tara had never flown before. She liked the comfortable seats and the meal in its neat little tray, but she couldn’t sit back and enjoy it. The uncertainty was too awful. This journey was like going into a long dark tunnel, not knowing where the other end would come out. Where would she sleep tonight? In which country? In what kind of bed? Or would it be on the floor in some impersonal airport lounge? And once in London, would they be allowed to stay there, or would they be put straight back on to a plane, to Munich perhaps, or back to Teheran, or even worse, to Baghdad?

  For a while she managed to doze, then at last the flight attendant spoke over the aircraft intercom. He gave the message twice, once in German and once in Persian. Tara picked out a word or two of the Persian, but she couldn’t really understand it.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ she said to Kak Soran. He’d often flown in an aeroplane before and he could speak quite good Persian now, after his months in Iran.

  ‘I wasn’t listening,’ he said, ‘but the plane’s going down. Can’t you feel it? I think we’re about to land.’

  There was a jerk as the wheels were lowered, and a few minutes later Tara saw the ground outside rushing up to meet them. She craned her neck to see past her parents and look out of the window. She couldn’t see much. It was a cloudy day, with a little sunshine straggling through in patches. The airport buildings looked dull and official, and there seemed to be miles of flat tarmac runway. It looked rather grey and impersonal.

  Nothing much happened at Munich. The officials looked closely at their papers, and there was a nasty moment when one of them summoned his chief to check through them more carefully, but the tickets were in order, and Kak Soran’s Iraqi passport, which dated from long before the war, was still a few months short of its renewal date. They only had to spend a few minutes in the transit lounge before they were called to go on board again.

  Quite a few of the original passengers had gone. Their places were mainly taken by middle-aged men with briefcases, who wore smart dark suits and carried winter coats over their arms. They kept looking impatiently at their watches as if every moment was tremendously important. None of them seemed to see the tired family in foreign clothes. They looked right through them.

  The flight from Munich to London took no time at all. The flight attendant barely had time to bring round the trolleys, hand out the snack trays and clear them all away again. Tara ate some of the plastic wrapped food but she saw that Teriska Khan and Kak Soran pushed theirs away unopened.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry, Daya?’ she said, suddenly worried in case Teriska Khan was going to be ill again.

  ‘No, I couldn’t eat a thing,’ said Teriska Khan with a shudder. Her voice was high-pitched with tension. It gave Tara a jolt and she suddenly found that she wasn’t hungry either. The next few hours would be critical for all of them. Their fate, one way or the other, would be decided and they would be powerless to do anything to help themselves. The decision would be made by strangers, English people, who knew nothing about them and couldn’t even speak the same language.

  Kak Soran had reset his watch to London time, and though it only said 5 o’clock it was quite dark outside.

  ‘Are you sure it’s so early?’ said Teriska Khan, peering out of the window to the long lines of lights that marked the runway at Heathrow airport. ‘It’s completely dark already.’

  Kak Soran didn’t answer. He was too busy folding his little table away. The plane was about to land.

  It was a long time before the plane stopped moving, but as soon as it did people started getting up from their seats and pulling their coats and bags out of the overhead lockers. There was the usual cheerful buzz of chatter. Everyone was glad to be back on firm ground. Tara started to get up too.

  ‘Don’t hurry,’ said Kak Soran quietly. ‘Stay where you are for a bit. We’re going to take as long as we can. If they look at our papers straightaway they could send us off again at once in this plane. This flight goes on to New York in half an hour. If we hang about till it takes off they’ll have to let us through, at least for tonight.’

  It wasn’t difficult to go slowly. Hero had fallen asleep, and had to be carried. It seemed quite normal to wait until everyone else was off the plane so that she wouldn’t be jogged awake.

  When they eventually got out into the airport corridor, they were at the tail end of the crowd of passengers, who were hurrying towards the immigration controls, keen to get through and out into the baggage hall to collect their things. Tara looked at them curiously. She’d forgotten how bright and different women looked without the scarves and dull, long, button-through dresses and chadors that covered them from head to foot in Iran.

  ‘Go slower,’ said Kak Soran, looking round. They were moving too fast. They needed to take much more time if they were to give the plane a chance to take off before they got to the immigration desk. But they looked conspicuous, dawdling along an empty corridor, miles behind the other passengers.

  Just then some doors behind them opened and a clatter of feet came down the corridor. Another plane had landed and the passengers were pouring off it. Kak Soran and his family kept moving very slowly, feeling protected by the crowd milling past them, stopping all the time to put down their hand luggage as though it weighed too much. The stream of passengers seemed never-ending.

  ‘Must have been a big plane,’ muttered Teriska Khan. ‘Do you think it’s safe yet? Can we go on?’

  Kak Soran shook his head.

  ‘The longer we leave it the better,’ he said. ‘Just go on looking as if you’re walking, but move as slowly as you can.’

  It was a busy day at Heathrow. Planeload after planeload of passengers seemed to be landing. Tara could see that they came from different countries. Some people were obviously from the Far East. There were women wea
ring saris and men with turbans. There was a group of Chinese or Japanese people, and another planeload from somewhere in America.

  It was a good thing, thought Tara, that they had so many passengers to hide among. The lights overhead were dazzlingly bright, the floors hard and shiny, the walls bare and straight. Not even a fly would have found a place to hide here.

  A man in uniform came slowly down the corridor. He looked hard at Kak Soran and said something in English. Kak Soran spread out his hands to show he didn’t understand.

  ‘I suppose we’d better go on now,’ he said to Teriska Khan. ‘I think that man came past here a while ago. He’s probably watching us. I should think there’s quite a queue waiting to go through by this time. There must be a plane landing every few minutes. Anyway, ours must be taking off again very soon now.’

  In the immigration hall the queues looked encouragingly long. Kak Soran made for the longest. It moved slowly towards a high desk at the end of which a woman in uniform was sitting.

  Tara’s heart was thudding. What on earth would happen to them now? Would they be allowed through? Would they be sent off on another plane? And if they did get through where would they go? How on earth would they get started in this strange country when they couldn’t even speak the language?

  She looked round the big hall. There were some large bright advertisement posters lit from behind. The slogans in huge English letters screamed to be read. She could pick out a few words, but she couldn’t understand the meanings.

  I wish I’d tried harder in English lessons at school, she thought.

  She heard a burst of laughter and turned her head. It came from the next queue, where there was a group of young people. They were making a lot of noise, shouting and laughing. They all seemed to know each other, as if they’d been travelling together. Tara stared at them. They’d obviously been to a hot country, because some of them were still wearing summer clothes although it looked cold and wintry outside. One boy was even wearing shorts. And the girl behind him had next to nothing on – a really short skirt and a blouse that showed her shoulders and plunged right down back and front.