Keleti Station, 6.05 a.m., Friday, 4 September 2015
He lay on his back, his sleeping bag tangled between his legs, the nylon damp against his skin. A loudspeaker crackled for several seconds, paused, fired a long burst of jumbled vowels and consonants, fell silent again. His mouth was thick and dry, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. Where was he?
He turned on his side, looked around and remembered. A thin-faced boy, twelve or thirteen years old, was curled up under a brown acrylic blanket, his dirt-stained hand holding a torn backpack. A mother and baby lay on a sheet of corrugated cardboard at his feet. The child whimpered softly while the mother snored, oblivious, her chubby features serene in her sleep.
Simon Nazir rested his hand on his wife’s back, felt her chest rise and fall, slid his fingers through her black, curly hair, felt the warmth of her skin against his, and closed his eyes. In his head he was still in Aleppo: he could hear the laughter of the shopkeepers in the bazaar, the siren call of the muezzin, smell the ancient dust, coffee and cardamom. He breathed in through his nose. The warm bovine reek almost made him gag. He opened his eyes, reached for his bottle of water and took a deep draught. The drink was stale and tasted of plastic. The sun was already up and the turquoise sky, streaked with fine white clouds, was about to deliver another day of heat and dirt and waiting.
Nazir tried in vain to get more comfortable, to stretch out without banging into another prone body. The human tide spread in every direction, filling the plaza in front of Keleti Station’s main entrance, spilling along the sides. A busy intersection in a European capital was now a giant open-air refugee camp. The ground was covered with discarded food wrappers, cigarette ends, half-eaten sandwiches, rotten fruit, empty bottles of spring water, pairs of shoes taken off for the night. The lucky ones had tents, donated by tourists and music fans who had attended Budapest’s Sziget Festival a couple of weeks earlier in mid-August. Half a dozen white vans were spread among the sleeping crowd, television network names emblazoned on their doors, giant antennae and satellite dishes pointing skywards. It was too early for the journalists but by ten o’clock there would be dozens of reporters here. Nazir watched a middle-aged man, an engineer he knew from home, twitch in his sleep, his arm around his ten-year-old daughter, a small suitcase in front of them.
The robo-voice was still droning in the background – the Hungarian language station announcements were a constant backdrop – but human sounds had pierced his sleep. A voice that he knew, one that he never wanted to hear again. Nazir glanced rightwards. Twenty yards or so away, there was movement, a male crouched, muttering.
Nazir told himself not to panic; to be calm, collected, clever. He was safe here. He was surrounded by people, police, reporters were coming. Nothing bad could happen, except more long days in transit. He and Maryam had been stuck at Keleti Station for five days, a halt in a journey that had lasted three weeks. They had fled Aleppo at night, crossing the frontlines, taken a taxi to Damascus, another to Beirut, flown to Istanbul, then travelled overland by bus and foot through Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary.
And here at least, nobody was trying to gas or shoot them, or even arrest them. They had made it to Europe, not quite the west, but certainly central Europe. The terminus’s yellow paint was fading, its waiting room was dark and gloomy, its roof cracked. But Keleti was still a symbol of empire, and Budapest’s place at the heart of the continent. A couple of days ago, he and Maryam had spent an hour staring at the departure board, dreaming of a new life in the west. On a normal day trains left here for Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Munich. But these were not normal times. Twenty-four hours ago the government had closed the western border to the migrants. All international trains were cancelled, although the local lines were still running. That didn’t matter to the migrants, as they were not even allowed inside the station building. A line of riot police stood in front of the entrance. Every few minutes they moved aside to let the early morning commuters through, then stepped back into place, their arms crossed, their faces impassive.
Nazir drained the water bottle, heard the man’s voice again, and then lay very still. The fatigues and pistol, his long beard, were gone. He was clean-shaven now, wore jeans, blue Nike trainers and a T-shirt, held an iPhone, could have been any one of hundreds of middle-aged men from Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan camped out at Keleti as they trekked through Europe. But it was him – the puckered scar above his right ear, a burn from an incendiary bomb, decided the matter.
Maryam stirred, as if sensing Nazir’s unease, muttered something, then returned to her sleep. Nazir slid deeper into his sleeping bag, hiding his face. He tried to listen, focusing hard, could catch the inflections of the man’s Aleppo accent, but not the words. Nazir watched through half-closed eyes as the two men to whom he was talking sat up and gathered their rucksacks. Where were they going? .
Nazir looked at the line of taxis that stood by the side entrance to the station. The ride to the Austrian border cost 500 euros. He knew three families who had paid. Two had been dumped in the countryside thirty miles from Budapest, picked up by the police and promptly sent to a holding camp. The third had been left fifteen miles from the frontier. They had also been arrested but were released after paying another 500 euros to the police and had made it across. Two days ago the elder son had sent an SMS from Vienna.
For now, there was nothing to do at Keleti except wait and watch. One of the taxi drivers, he saw, was also looking at the three men. Nazir had noticed her on the second day. Firstly, because she was a woman, and seemed to be the only female working the station. She was in her early thirties, Nazir guessed, tall, with shoulder-length dark-blonde hair, brown eyes and an easy smile. Secondly, because she never seemed to have a fare. Every time Nazir looked, she was there, smoking, laughing, chatting with the other drivers. And she was friendly, unusually so. Nazir had exchanged pleasantries a few times with her when he’d gone for a walk. Her name, she said, was Ildiko. Nazir had been a silversmith in Aleppo. The cheap jewellery – rings and bangles – that Ildiko wore somehow did not suit her. The last time they chatted he realised that she was also surprisingly well informed about what was happening at Keleti, the territorial divisions between the Arabs, Africans and Afghans and even the squabbles between the Syrian opposition groups.
The three men were standing now, rucksacks on their backs, he saw. Nazir reflexively brushed his left hand, touched the scar where his little and ring fingers used to be, felt the flush of fear. He watched them turn and start to walk out of the station concourse. He unzipped his sleeping bag, still lying on his side, focused now, no longer wondering about Ildiko the taxi driver, and put his mobile phone inside the pocket of his jeans. He leaned over to Maryam, quickly scribbled a note on a piece of scrap paper with a trembling hand, took a roll of banknotes from his pocket and placed them both inside her sleeping bag.
‘Simon,’ she murmured.
‘I’m going for some food. I’ll be back soon,’ he whispered in her ear, and quickly kissed her head. Maryam reached for him in her sleep. He embraced her through her sleeping bag, his chest against her back, her fingers entwining with his. Even now she smelled the same, of soap and lavender, her breath still sweet in the morning. All he wanted to do, all he had ever wanted, was to hold her and never let go. He kissed the back of her neck, then looked up at the three men. They were walking away from the station now, across Baross Square now, towards Rakoczi Way.
His heart thumped, his left hand throbbed. He closed his eyes for a moment, drank in the smell of her, swallowed hard, and stood up.
Thirty yards away, the blonde taxi driver dropped her cigarette, ground it out with a swift twist of her foot and began to follow him.