Every Country Gets the Refugees It Deserves

Although I’m not as much a gossip lover as you—what was it you wrote, gossip is the fuel that stokes the fire of your soul?—I do love a good story. You had chatted with the same Syrian family the evening before, and as I did, you had to translate their dinner order since they did not want anything on the menu. Across tables, the man regaled you with the family’s story, replete with violence and valor, with ardor and adventure, narrated with no little glee. The master jeweler part of the tale was the same as mine, but yours had the Armenian himself threatening the man because the perfidious owner wanted to rob his own store to collect insurance. No policemen in your story, just three Armenian thugs who beat him up, threatening his wife and daughter. You told me you thought at first he might belong to the Syrian regime’s secret police, sent to spy on the refugees, but then you realized that couldn’t be the case. The Mukhabarat, like all state terror organizations, was evil and stupid but not dumb enough to have one of its agents improving his cover story with each telling. If he and his family were an undercover anything, they would be staying in the camp, mingling with other refugees, not calling attention to themselves by staying in a hotel, as reasonably priced as it was. No, you realized he was lying without having to compare his stories. And you decided that he was running not from stray bullets, not from falling bombs or fighter jets. He was the one who robbed the Armenian jewelry store. Rasheed came to the same conclusion.

I wish we could have asked him. Did he rob the store himself? How much was the haul? Did he hide it in their suitcases? Was he terrified when they went through customs in Istanbul? Did he sleep with one eye open while waiting to board the dinghy to Lesbos? I should have asked. Not having answers at the ready bothered me. In one of your essays, you wrote that a novelist had to be able to “sit with the not-knowing,” which was not something I was comfortable with.

You had a conversation with the wife, whom you found more bearable than her husband, though not by much. You were trying to find out whether any of the refugees cared to immigrate to the United States. Not one refugee cared to, not one on the entire island. All of them wanted to go to Germany, to Sweden, to Denmark, and that was before the imbecile president of America was elected. You asked her where she hoped she would settle. She said she didn’t much care. It could be Berlin, Paris, Frankfurt, or Copenhagen, but definitely not Athens. She’d already told the United Nations people that she didn’t want to go to there. She’d told them that she didn’t leave Damascus and Beirut to end up in a place like Athens.

What happened to that family? Where were they? Unlike you, I tried to find out. A couple of months after I returned to Chicago, I asked you if you knew, then I asked my contacts, Emma, the other doctors. Nothing. Of course, I didn’t know their names because I hadn’t asked. I would describe them as: “you know, the jeweler and his wife, two young boys and a teenage girl, stayed at our hotel.” But then Rasheed knew their name. He found out through a friend where they were living a year later. The family had ended up in Florida, Tallahassee of all places, which seemed appropriate for some reason. Of all the refugees you and I talked to, that family was the only one that immigrated to the United States, as if the reputation of Syrian refugees needed more damage in America.

At least the family settled somewhere. They were lucky, as was Sumaiya’s family. They arrived in Lesbos while Europe was in a quandary as to what to do with them or, more accurately, while European nations were trying to figure how to stop the refugees from entering without appearing monstrous for doing so. The November 2015 Paris attacks increased the influence of the anti-immigrant factions in Europe, but those forces had yet to mature into their full fascistic power. During a brief window, Syrians, particularly families with children, were allowed to trickle into Western European countries. Processing was difficult when we were on the island but would become next to impossible not too long after. Within a month after we left, the European Union began to smother refugees in more and more bureaucracy, the empire’s most effective weapon. We were there a few weeks before Europe all but closed the borders. I understand that these days families wait for months to get a red stamp and then wait for many more months to get a blue stamp, more for yellow or green, if they’re lucky and aren’t sent back because they turned out to be color-blind. You and I were lucky. We were in Moria before it morphed into a callous prison camp, before the riots and arson, before the refugees had to be forcibly returned to Turkey, returned to whatever home the authorities deemed was theirs. With the dumb tenacity of moths the refugees kept coming, and from behind the cold pane of Moria, they longed for the unattainable warmth.

Lesbos was a somewhat humane mess when we were there. Shortly thereafter it became an inhumane one.