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72

About seventy asylum seekers who did not fall under the general pardon were left in the ASC. For years, it was a place of waiting and wailing, silence and screams, birth and death, suffering and succor—and now, strangely enough, it seemed incapable of near-emptiness. But it was. The emptiness was unbearable. The quiet in the rooms was hell. I have never experienced such a wretched feeling of loneliness and abandonment as in that desolate place. Every morning, I had to adjust anew to the deafening silence. Sometimes the silence was so overwhelming I couldn’t really tell if I was asleep or awake.

When my roommates Malik and Salih got their residence permits under the general pardon, they both were also given a place to live. Salih in Groningen, Malik in a village in South-Holland. I stayed behind alone in O-139. Finally, a room to myself: this, too, was a kind of general pardon. But I found out I no longer slept as soundly as I once did. Something inside me always stayed awake. I used to think that this was because I had to share a room with others, but apparently that wasn’t it. It was because I shared my inner mind with others: with Reception, the IND, the Foreigners’ Police, Social Services, and all those other asylum seekers.

In the end, I too fell under the general pardon. Don’t ask how, I still don’t really know myself. It doesn’t matter, because it proved that my asylum request had never really been taken seriously. I had seen so many mistakes already that it was hard to take the IND’s decision seriously either.

I couldn’t get to sleep, my last night in O-139. So I paced through Yellow with its yellow walls, Blue with its blue walls, Green with its green walls, and Orange with its orange walls, from wing to wing, over and over, until the colors of the walls all faded and became gray. Everywhere I went was accompanied by memories and feelings. Every brick was a piece of history. On that last night, the building made me think of a sinking ship. I heard a violin coming from O-101. It was Levon, the Armenian. I stood outside listening, as I always did when he played, but this time I knocked on the door when he finished and asked the name of the piece.

“Dle Yaman,” he said, and wrote it down for me. He promised to play it for me as often as I wanted, but I told him I would be leaving the next day.

Before I left, I returned the two blankets, three sheets, towel, pillow, and pillowcase to the storeroom, and brought the receipt to Social Services, where Anneke gave me a day pass for the train and wished me a good life.

I went back to O-139. I had packed my things in a bag Abdulwahid had left behind when he went to London. I picked it up and looked out the window one last time. I opened the door, took one last glance around the room, and left the ASC by the back door.

“Samir, Samir, wait!” someone shouted. I turned and saw Abdulsalaam. “I was just at Reception and they told me that even you got a letter. But not me,” he said. “Do you think I’ll ever get one?”

How I wished I could give him an answer.