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The last chapter before the next chapter

A Well-Founded Fear of Persecution

December 2016

By Aida Abedi with Patrick Lee

Most of us never think about the power of waiting. We’re told it is a virtue, a strength, an admirable quality we should all strive to master. We don’t think about all the ways it can destroy you: swiftly, without warning, because you’ve left it a moment too long, become too complacent or hoped against hope that perhaps they wouldn’t come for you. Or slowly and deliberately, chipping away at you molecule by molecule, at your bones, your mind, your soul, because a wait with no end is truly unbearable.

How do you pick the time for action? Must you wait until the moment inaction becomes a death wish, or do you call fate’s bluff early? How do you time the unthinkable? Make the choices we make when there are no others possible? When ‘I do not want to leave’ becomes ‘We must in order to exist’. And how do we bundle the unfathomable into one coherent sixty-page document for review by an unknown person sitting at a desk who wasn’t there and didn’t experience it and will never know the tears and sweat and adrenalin of clutching onto that choice?

In the life I lived long before this waiting game, I was a journalist. I sought out these kinds of stories and presented them with what I thought was an abstract eye. As if I could be removed from the words that flowed from my fingers. As if I wasn’t a part of it all. And then, unexpectedly, I was, much more than I could ever have imagined, and suddenly my life veered drastically from where I always planned for it to go. Forced onto a pathway I never contemplated having to take.

Perhaps for me it was easy. When the gun is to your head, flight is a logical option. I had a loophole – pure luck – because the police cells were too full to hold me in the days before my court date and my passport was not yet cancelled. A tiny window of urgent opportunity. For others it is like alchemy, weighing up the ingredients of probability and chance. Every day calculating their own risk matrix and trying to determine the mythical point when fleeing becomes acceptable. Because this is what we are judged by – a clinical external assessment of each of our fight or flight mechanisms.

Take my friend Elham. She could have waited for her husband to kill her. Could have weighed up his words with the potential for action and hoped for the best. But picture the columns shifting in her head – in Iran she had no right to divorce, could no longer work because her husband forbade it, and the child growing inside her would be his property in the eyes of the law. She could have waited for the beatings to get worse, for the prison around her to shrink its walls ever closer, and for her husband to draw the energy to tell the authorities that she was banned from leaving the country. Perhaps she could have waited.

Or my colleague Massoumeh. Her husband praises the ground she walks on, abhorring our country’s unequal laws, and perhaps this is what brought him to the attention of the local paramilitary forces. Too vocal in his political discussions with other bazaaris, his stall soon became the target of repeated vandalism by Basiji. Massoumeh and he waited, though, sweeping up the shattered glass each time. Soon it was their apartment too, yet they continued waiting, scrubbing the graffitied threats from their walls. Then it was their bodies, bruises blossoming like flowers by the light of the morning. And when it became their children, who cried at night from fear after being followed home from school by terrifying men, then they could no longer wait.

And so many others, who had the wrong politics, the wrong religion, loved the wrong person or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so their life was sent shuddering rudderless when for others it was not. Each of them forced into the unfathomable decision to prolong or end the waiting. Though who among us realised that all we would be doing was exchanging one waiting game for another?

Before I left Indonesia I collected the stories of others waiting for their boats, pooling them together into a recipe of pain, sorrow and defiance. I collected these stories in case anything happened to them, so that there would always be a record of who we’d all once been, not who we were in that moment. Who we were before the waiting started and our lives progressed in this strange holding pattern like a forgotten bag on an airport carousel. I asked them to tell me the memories that made up their life, to choose the version of themselves they wanted to be remembered as. Not as statistics or tragedy, not as case studies or cautionary tales. About everything they were and everything they would be – the first and third acts – not the horror and harrow of the here and now. And each time I asked them to share with me the warmest memory they possessed so that this would become their legacy.

And soon I will be writing them, one by one, week by week. This project, Stories of Ordinary People, will appear each week on the pages and website of this newspaper, written by myself and my colleague Patrick Lee. You will have the chance to meet us all, transcending the bars and barriers constructed by governments to keep us from each other. And perhaps this may make the waiting less unfathomable.

But before we introduce you to the others, it is only fair I share my own story first – my warmest memory – which pulls me along through each hour of the long dark night. The history I want to reclaim:

For me, it is a moment, simple and pure. It is me, hurrying down the street, dodging the harried pedestrians and erratic motorcycles, anxious not to be the last to arrive. Slipping through the front door of my parents’ home, pulling off my scarf and shaking out my hair as I shower my family with kisses and hugs. It is Nowruz, our new year, and I assure my mother, like I always do, that this year her Nowruz table has truly outdone itself: apples, hyacinth from the garden, coins, sumac and vinegar. My father’s prized Hafez instead of a Qur’an, already open and waiting for us to read aloud to each other as the evening stretches on. The sabzeh I planted the previous week is green and perfect, its shoots alert and ready for the year ahead. My family is already gathered, my mother and her sisters busy in the kitchen, my brothers and cousins joking with each other while my father pretends not to laugh from his perch on the couch. Even my uncle Asadollah is here; though blighted by a cough he sits on the daybed shouting commands in his pyjamas like Mossadegh. The house aches with the smell of sweets and pastries, fish and rice with dill wafting from the kitchen, and my father sharpening his claws in anticipation of wresting the tahdig from us all.

We eat, our bellies full of the tastes of our past, the walls dense with our stories and laughter, and above it all, hope for the year to come. From behind his teacup my father’s hand emerges, halting us mid-conversation, and he commences his philosophical treatise, my mother mouthing along like prosaic karaoke. It’s not what history makes of you that matters, but what you make of your history.

We hold our breaths – watching the countdown on television – and at the exact moment of equinox the room is a sea of bodies, hugging and shouting and laughing. My mobile buzzes with messages of love and goodwill. And we are weeping, all of us, because we are together and we have lived another year, and before us lies a whole new year that we will struggle and laugh and love through together. And from deep in his memory my father finds a well-loved story and clears his throat for silence.

I know what you are thinking. What is the use of this story? What is there for you to do with it? It’s nice, sure, but there’s hardly a headline in it, hardly anything to shift the hearts and minds of the great story-hungry masses. And perhaps you’re right about that. Perhaps it is the wrong story for me to leave you with because it doesn’t serve the purpose you want it to. But it is the story I choose – the one that I want to be remembered by. And next week it will be someone else’s. Week by week, story by story, until we seep into the everyday from our current home in the shadows. Ghese ma be sar resid, kalaghe be khoonash naresid: Our story has finished but the crow has not yet arrived at his house. This is how all Persian stories finish, and I am finished writing my stories – for today.