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32
The hope of requesting asylum in a country other than the Netherlands was rekindled by the story of three asylum seekers—two brothers and an acquaintance of theirs—who had gone to Germany. The friend, Kawan, had been sent back because they could tell from his fingerprints that he had already requested asylum in the Netherlands. But not the brothers. The reason for this, said Kawan, was that the brothers had used cement to harden their fingertips, which made the fingerprints undecipherable. You applied the cement, let it dry, and then peeled it off. So the computer did not recognize the brothers’ fingerprints, and therefore did not discover they had already been in the Netherlands. Kawan was unlucky. Because I had trained as a civil engineer, and cement was part of my study and job, I knew this could work, in theory. Cement became my ticket out of the Netherlands.
From that moment on, life in the ASC became tolerable again. I talked to various asylum seekers who had tried to claim asylum elsewhere, but were sent back because of their fingerprints, so I knew where your chances were better or slimmer. London would be my first choice, because they rarely deported asylum seekers. I also heard that it was possible to get casual work to support yourself, even before you had a residence permit. And I spoke English. But getting to London was complicated: to fly, you had to have a passport; to travel by boat required a smuggler; and to go by bus without a passport you mostly needed luck. So I scratched out London and moved on to the other possibilities: Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin. As for Norway and Sweden, I had heard mostly awful things about the snow and the dark. That if you spat on the street, you could hear your frozen spit clatter over the asphalt. And the only way to travel there was if you had either a tiptop passport and an ID card or bank pass with the same name, or else a reliable smuggler. The trouble with smugglers within Europe was that they never take the risk of traveling with you. All they do is provide forged passports, and these are expensive. So that left Germany. I only had to get information about the border, two hundred guilders cash for the trip, and a handful of cement. I sold my guitar for forty guilders. A hundred and sixty to go.
I enjoyed those days, while I was busy saving that 160 guilders. My hope outweighed the strength of the IND and the Justice Department combined. As I walked down the halls of the ASC I thought: not much longer and I’m out of here. Then I’ll turn the “Netherlands” page and never look back.
I bought the smallest possible bag of cement, poured out a handful, and mixed it with some warm water. I stuck my hands into the pan of cement, and repeated this a few times a day. My skin began to change. I took sample fingerprints with an inkpad to see how it was progressing, and despite my inexperience in reading fingerprints, I could see that it was going well. The lines had become thicker—and the pain of the dry skin more acute.
After doing a lot of research, I decided it was best to go via the Dutch border city of Enschede. From there, you switched trains to Germany, where you could ask for asylum. There, I had heard, the asylum procedure is much quicker and more thorough than in the Netherlands.
I wanted to say goodbye to Tamara, Kadhem, and Zainab before I left, but when I found Kadhem he said he would see me off from Enschede. The next day I was surprised to find him carrying an overnight bag.
“What’s that bag for?” I asked.
“Man, this place is terrible. I’m going to Germany too.” He hurried down the hall and called to me over his shoulder, “Come on, or we’ll miss our train. Germany’s far, man.” I ran over to him, so the whole ASC wouldn’t hear where we were going. He looked up at me. “I haven’t sat here all this time just to let you go alone, you know. And now we’ll go to Germany together. Fantastic, man. Bye-bye, Social!” he called out and waved as we walked past the glass partition. “Bye-bye, Foreigners’ ass!” he said as we passed the counter. “Bye-bye hallway, bye-bye Reception!” Outside, he took a deep breath. “Jeez, man, how did we survive this place for so long? Man, man, man. It’s just like Saddam Hussein’s asshole.”
“But listen here,” I said. “I don’t want you to come with me.”
“Quit wasting time, man, the train will leave without us.” We walked toward the station. “So why don’t you want me to join you?”
“Because I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’ll do. I’ve got an idea … How about if you stay here, and I’ll write when I get there, and fill you in.”
“But I’ve said goodbye to everyone. I can’t go back to the camp, man. I told everybody I was going to Germany, and this was the last time I’d see them.” Half an hour later we were sitting in the train.
In Enschede we bought tickets to Germany. Not two minutes after the train crossed the border, two policemen entered our coach and started walking down the aisle. One looked at the right-hand seats, the other at the left-hand ones. I nudged Kadhem.
“Don’t worry, they’re just conductors,” he said. “Ticket-checkers.”
“Oh really? Checking tickets with guns and handcuffs? They’re police.” Kadhem glanced their way.
“Hm, you’re right, man, they’re police. And you said to me: Come on, let’s go to Germany! Didn’t occur to you that they might check the trains … Man, we should have walked. There are no land mines along the border.” For once, I was not irritated with him, because I had other things on my mind, like what to do if we got caught.
“Tell them we wanted to go to Amsterdam but got on the wrong train,” Kadhem said.
“And bought the wrong ticket? Are you crazy?”
At the next station, the two policemen led us out of the train, and escorted us back to Enschede, where two Dutch policemen were waiting for us.
“Traveling without a passport?” one of them said. “Why’s that?”
“We have no passports,” I said.
“Asylum seekers?” We had no choice but to say yes, and were taken to a police station. Everything we had with us was photocopied. They told us we were lucky we got caught immediately, otherwise things would have been complicated. Now they could just let us go, so we could return to the ASC on our own. One of the policemen gave us a lift back to Enschede station.
“See that one, just pulling in? It’s the international train, they nearly always check it. But that other one is a local heading to Germany. It stops in every town. Good luck.”
Kadhem and I looked at each other. We couldn’t believe our luck, but soon enough we were sitting in the local train the policemen had pointed out. It made a brief stop every ten minutes or so. At first, most of the passengers were Dutch, but after a while it seemed like more Germans were getting on, although without speaking to them, we couldn’t be sure. We looked out of the window. All you could see were trees, but once we rode parallel to a highway we could tell from the license plates that we had left the Netherlands. Station by station, that Dutch police officer gradually transformed from policeman to angel, with wings instead of a gun.
“Look, Germany! And without a smuggler! Great, isn’t it?” Kadhem exclaimed. “Maybe we should become smugglers. What do you say?” He roared with laughter.
The German train stopped and pulled out, stopped and pulled out, and we waited until it arrived at a big station. At each slightly bigger station, we decided to hold out for an even bigger one. But suddenly, two policemen came walking toward us.
“Throw your ticket under your seat,” I whispered to Kadhem, and did so myself. Kadhem rifled through his pockets, patted his entire body, as though he had pockets everywhere, or as though the ticket could jump from pocket to pocket.
“Where’d I put that damn ticket …” he hissed, without realizing the two German policeman were already standing there looking at him.
“May we see your bags?” one of them asked in English. I thought maybe he was only searching for drugs. I nodded. “Passport or ID card first, please.” When they figured out we didn’t have any, we had to get off the next station, where they searched us and our bags. From head to toe and back, from right to left and left to right. The German police should take a course in the difference between frisking and boxing.
“When did you leave Enschede?” one of the officers asked.
“We didn’t come from Enschede, but from Copenhagen,” I said.
“Denmark?”
“Yes, Denmark, and we were on our way to Enschede to ask for asylum there, but we decided to do that tomorrow. We wanted to go to a bigger city, so we could find a cheap hostel.”
“Are you traveling together?”
“Yes.”
“But his ticket,” the other one said, pointing at Kadhem, “says you got on in Enschede.” He held out the ticket he had found in Kadhem’s pocket.
“What did he say?” Kadhem asked in Arabic.
I told him to shut up.
“Sir, we want to go back to Denmark. We only want to pass through Germany. We’re not after anything here.”
“Not without a passport.” Then they escorted us on the express train back to Enschede. This time there were no policemen to meet us on the platform. The two Germans waved and got back on the train. We stood on the empty platform and first decided to find a shawarma joint before coming up with a good excuse about why we hadn’t signed in that day.