Two_Blankets_Three

On my first night in the ASC I was up until the first blackbird began singing. The ASC was like a faraway world where I had landed, floored by jetlag. The difference being that jetlag from air travel is over in a few days, but jetlag from the ASC has lasted to this day.

Imagine a building with five hundred people inside. Some of them have become exhausted or crazy from the endless waiting. The interior of this building then becomes an enormous grave, in which time is buried. In my years there, I never slept more than an hour or two without waking up, because there was something in my body that always stayed awake. The hallways were the worst: a constant stream of people anxiously milling around, as though they had been committed against their will. Especially after ten at night. From that part-slumber, part-waking, I began to feel sluggish when I slept and sluggish when I was awake. A bit like what you see in the faces in the doorway of an Amsterdam coffeeshop.

I shared room O-139 with two other asylum seekers. Fouad was from Yemen and had been in the ASC for five years, while Walid was a Palestinian whose procedure had been going on for some thirteen years already. Sometimes they mentioned “the Fourth,” and gestured at an empty bed. When I arrived, he had been gone from nearly two months, and no one knew where he was or when he would return. The Fourth’s procedure, I heard from my roommates, now stood at seven years. Fouad, Walid, and I all spoke Arabic. Usually they put asylum seekers from the same country together in a room. Women and girls were never assigned to a room with men. There were hardly any women or girls on their own here anyway.

The first conversation between Fouad and Walid I heard that evening, one that I would continue to hear over and over for years to come, began with a discussion of the lengthy wait for a residence permit. Then it turned to the other residents of the ASC, then it was about their families, about asylum seekers they had met over the years, and especially about the asylum seekers who had gone crazy or committed suicide. What surprised me was that they would burst out laughing when the subject of crazed asylum seekers came up, as if they were telling jokes. They showed little respect for failed suicide attempts. Their take on it was that the person did it to attract the attention of the Immigration Services, in the hope of shortening the procedure. But when they talked about asylum seekers who successfully committed suicide, their voices became subdued and earnest.

“There are asylum seekers who kill themselves?” I asked.

“Sure. During the first five years of the procedure, people hardly think of suicide, but after that, they do.” Walid paused to count. “Let’s see, I’m in my thirteenth year. So, ripe for suicide eight years now.” He roared. So did Fouad.

“I’ve only just ripened,” Faoud said, at which point they brought up an Iranian asylum seeker who had committed suicide a year ago.

“Who’d have thought that he, of all people, would snuff out his own life,” Fouad said. “He was so positive and optimistic. The children loved him, because he spent half of his food money on candy for them. But one day he got a letter from the IND that he would be sent back to Iran within twenty-eight days, and—”

“It was from the Justice Department, not from the Immigration Service,” Walid interrupted. “That kind of letter comes from the Justice Department.”

“No way, it was Immigration. I know for sure. You might be here for thirteen years, but my Dutch is better.” He got up, pulled open a drawer from under his bed and took out a thick stack of papers fastened with a rubber band. Instead of bringing out the relevant proof, he started thumbing through the hundreds of sheets of paper he had received from the Justice Department, the Immigration Services, his lawyer, and his family. Then Walid opened the drawer from under his bed, too, and produced a dossier more than twice as thick as Faoud’s. In this way I learned how thick a dossier is for someone who has been in the Netherlands for five years, and how thick it is for someone who’s been in the Netherlands for thirteen years. Within a few months I was able to guess from the thickness of a person’s dossier how long their procedure had been going on. After a while I could even narrow it down from years to months. I got up quietly. Not letting on that I was upset, I walked into the hallway and hurried to Reception, as though the door could slam shut at any second and I would be stuck here.

No amount of cheerful activity from a big, lively city could dispel the somberness of that building. I went outside and, as though I had escaped from a prison cell, strode to the street that I’d heard led to the small city center, hoping to vanish into the bustle. After a while I asked an old man the way to downtown, and he answered me in English.

“You are downtown.” I looked around and saw a few shops, all of them closed. Yes, I had seen other dreary places in my life, but never anything quite as dreary as a Dutch town. You feel as if time has long stood still. Through the windows you see elderly, solitary people sitting under soft, elderly light, and at their feet an elderly dog. Solitude more solitary than all solitude. Only the gas heaters and the furnaces give off warmth; don’t expect an ounce of warmth from a face. I walked from the town center to the sea. There, I watched the waves. Ah, I believe that whoever understands the sea never needs a psychiatrist. Those endless waves and the distant horizon. The sea is the only visible eternity on Earth. I breathed deeply. The sea air—washed for thousands of miles with blue, freedom, and sails—entered my lungs.

In wartime 1991, during the bombardment of Baghdad, when heaven and earth had become one great hell, I once watched a father try to convince his frightened child of about five that what he saw was really just fireworks. Instead of reassuring the child, he actually reassured me. In thorny situations, the way you look at things is sometimes the only chink through which you can escape from reality. Ever since that day, whenever I experience difficult situations I think of that father, of that trembling child, of the quaking ground and shattered windows, and in my mind I alter what is happening in my life at that moment. So there on the beach I shut my eyes, smelled the sea air, and changed the ASC into a free hostel. My breathing gradually returned to normal, and I felt better as I walked back to spend my first night in the ASC.

From that day on, whenever possible, I would go every day to sit at that very same spot on the beach.