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10

What surprised me in the Haarlem RC, and later in the ASCs, was that asylum seekers were warned not to discuss their refugee story with anyone. When I brought the reports from my first and second hearing to Social Services and asked one of the staff to translate it for me into English, because my Dutch wasn’t good enough to read it, they said, “Are you kidding? No way—that’s personal!”

This kind of reaction led many asylum seekers to conceal their reason for fleeing, and unnerved those who had already had their reports translated.

One night, the snoring in my room was so intolerable that I wandered the halls of the RC until 3 a.m. In one of the hallways I saw a small man looking through the glass partition at the empty office of Social Services. Another insomniac. He asked me in Arabic if I spoke his language. From his dialect I could tell right away he was Iraqi. It was an immediate and strong bond: he spoke the desert dialect of my mother, the dialect that had brought shame on our family when we fled the south of the country for Baghdad after Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, because it made us sound like bumpkins who didn’t know the difference between a camel and an air conditioner.

“Do you know if Social Services will be open today?” he inquired anxiously. His voice betrayed little hope that this would ever happen. He was short and skinny and had an energetic face that had not yet found an outlet in the world.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s a weekday, so they’ll be open.”

“Oh, I hope so.” He stared at the computers. “Look there. Say we pick the lock or break this window … we could sneak in and put ‘Hollander’ next to our names and we won’t have to wait for a residence permit. Then we’d be Dutch, yeah?”

“Why are you still awake?”

“Man,” he said, “it’s impossible to sleep in that room.”

“How come?”

“I’m afraid.” He fell silent. I looked him over, thought of his small stature, and presumed he was afraid of his roommates, that they might beat him up, or something else, but he kept looking at me and said, as though he’d read my mind, “I’m afraid I’ll kill someone if I stay there.” He opened his eyes wide, so that I could see the fire in them.

“What do you want from Social Services?”

“Someone translated my report, and now I hear that that’s not allowed. And I want to change rooms. Even sleeping in the gym would be better than this. But the cow at that desk there, the one with the computer …” He pointed to the desk. Behind it, tacked to the bulletin board, was a photo of two white puppies.

“Elly?” I asked.

“Beats me,” he said, as though she didn’t deserve to have her name remembered. “Every time I find somebody who can translate for me, I come here. And then she sees me and says right away, ‘No room change, no room change.’”

“I speak English, don’t worry,” I said. “When they open, I’ll take you to Sara.”

“Who’s Sara?”

“The woman who sits over there, with the short hair.” I gave him my room number. He told me his name was Kadhem, and went off to bed. He knocked on my door at eight thirty. I had just managed to get a few hours’ sleep.

“Come on, man, we’ll be late,” he said. As though he’d hired me to be ready for him at the designated time, he beckoned me, turned, and without even checking to see if I was following him, he marched down the hall. So off I went, still in my pajamas and slippers. I translated his words for Sara, explained that he wanted a different room because one of his roommates stank of old socks, another of hashish, and the third of dead pig.

“Let me see if there’s a spot,” she said, and turned to her computer. He kept looking anxiously at the door. When I quietly asked him why, he said he was afraid that “that other woman”—he meant Elly—would show up. I pitied him. He seemed quite paranoid and that didn’t strike me as a pleasant state to be in. A short while later, Elly did come in, and sat down at her desk. She thumbed through some papers. Sara told us there was no place free, and that the only solution was to swap with someone. I thought this would be an excellent solution for Kadhem, and that he would be glad, but when we were back out in the hallway, he said, “Did you see that? She was looking for a place, but that other bitch came in and then she quit looking and said there were no free beds. I swear it, it was because of that cow.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “And besides, I’m sure you can find someone to trade places with.”

For me, Kadhem was like having a cold. Not unbearable, but irritating. His problems did not all come at once, but rather one by one. So he was always struggling with one particular problem, and as soon as it was solved, the next one cropped up. That same day I returned to the Social Services office with him, to translate. We ended up with Henk.

“Tell him a volunteer translated my interview. And that I didn’t know it was forbidden. I really didn’t know that nobody could see it except the Immigration Services and my lawyer. Have I blown my chances at a residence permit?” I translated for Henk, who looked at me as if to say, “Is this a question?”

“That’s not correct,” Henk said, and I translated this for Kadhem.

“Why not? I know for sure I asked a volunteer to translate my interview. So I could understand what it said. He translated it from Dutch to English, and then an asylum seeker from Jordan translated that into Arabic.” Kadhem was vexed that Henk did not seem to understand.

“I mean,” Henk said, “that he hasn’t ruined his chances at a residence permit by having his report translated.” I translated this, but Kadhem refused to hear it.

He told anyone who would listen that Henk did not want to believe him, because he was a racist. Nothing I said could change his mind: he insisted that Henk hated asylum seekers.

What amazed me was that Kadhem turned out to have a sixth sense. Only later did I discover that he was often right. He didn’t react to what people said, but read between the lines. Before I left the Haarlem RC and moved to the ASC, I learned that Henk was indeed a racist and that Sara was on her guard around Elly, and that this determined everything she did. What also surprised me was that Kadhem—that small, skinny man—was never afraid, except for one thing: that he would murder someone.