Saturday, September 18, 2010

A page from a refugee diary

It was an extremely intriguing morning of exploring the bonds of my mind and consciousness, a morning of revealing a part of myself which has long been buried under the pressure of a turbulent time that was behind me.

I was walking down the streets in no particular direction, just enjoying the sun and filling in my lungs with the healing smell of pines and the sea. It was amazing how quickly and spontaneously faded pictures restored their hues and I felt as if my steps were falling dominoes evoking one memory after another with accumulated speed and energy, all rushing into unknown direction.  

Step by step and I finally reached the sea. I decided to cross the canal, a narrow gap of water which isolated the ancient core of the town situated on the miniature peninsula from its modern, onshore offspring. Normally I would choose a bridge, yet that morning I desired to feel water under my fingers and bask in still mild, early sunbeams. So I took a place in a small rowing boat together with a group of cheerful and eager-to-talk tourists and we soon swayed in the rhythm of oaring. 

It was strange, but looking at them I realised that I was like one of them, just a passerby, a random traveller. I did not really comprehend the words which poured into my ears but their melody, the atmosphere which surrounded me and a mesmerising motion of the boat and sea were so familiar. And then I saw faces of my classmates and heard their lively voices over teacher’s. We were having a history class and were on our way of touring numerous churches in the center. The boat floated through the impenetrable mist and fog and everything seemed ominously grey and dim. Only the voices were louder and I could clearly distinguish that the boys were discussing politics, if a twelve-year-old child is capable of it at all. However, they took it seriously and I could feel the growing fury and hate in the words as their florid cheeks were drawing nearer. The next moment I heard a shout “You don’t belong here!” and a splash of water and panicked screams of all the present.

The boat jerked as the tourists stood up in order to get off. I stood up too and joined them sightseeing the town I knew so well. 

Sunday, September 12, 2010

A survivor


Believe it or not,  this smiling face has been through a couple of wars, lost a son and a husband, had to flee her home with nothing more than a bundle of clothes and travelled for days on a small tractor-trailer, some years later ended up in a hospital with a broken hip and was quickly sent back home because the patients who make it over eighty are here considered to be too old for surgery. The doctors said she had a few months left to live so they sent her home to die. Boy, were they wrong! She is over ninety these days.

Unfortunately, not many people manage to smile themselves out of depressing lives (as described in the previous post  How to survive escaping a bullet? ) so I became intrigued with this rare phenomenon. What makes my only surviving Granny beat all the  medical statistics and common fates?

Is it hours on end of a hard field work in the scorching sun dressed in her black mourning clothes, tiring herself to sleep? And when the night finally comes, sleeping in the open on a bare land to protect sheep from wolves with her tiny body? Living next to a son she adores and  keeping a motherly eye on him and his family, even today when he is over sixty? Being under constant care of her daughter and son-in-law until her hip healed and she learnt to walk again with a stick? Settling in a place with lots of grannies in the neighbourhood and having coffee sessions with them on a daily basis? Making long walks to return the visits or just to stretch her legs and breathe in some fresh air? Living in her own separate space, free to set up her own daily rhythm? Doing her own cooking, cleaning and washing with an occasional help from the outside? Knowing that there is always somebody she can count on in case she needs it? Accepting whatever life brings her way without too many whys? Being a believer? Making jokes about everything, including death?

When after five years of living in the exile my Granny was finally told that it is safe to return home, she decided not to. The reason she gave was that she could not live without people. Her village was almost empty as some of her former neighbours died in the exile while others had gone who knows where in search of better and more promising future for their children.  So each summer Granny travels a distance of 500 miles to spend a month in her home village, but always returns. The only one-way trip home will be when she dies. She has been saving up all these years to be buried next to her dearest.

In the meantime, Granny needs people to live. The photo above was taken at a friends and family gathering late in the evening after she refused to be taken home to take her usual medicine. She explained it in her simple, straightforward manner: “Medicine? What medicine? This is my medicine!”. She was the last to leave the party.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

How to survive escaping a bullet?


In one of his nineteenth century novels, Balzac complains that doctors have come up with so many new specialised terms for illnesses that on hearing them you have no clue as to their origin and cause. As if these names live a life of their own, alienated from an individual and the possible complexities of his of her life. In the old days, people would say that one suffers from unrequited love, envy, worry or disappointment and today you have technical terms like irritable bowels, dementia, cancer, stroke. They used one of these to explain my grandfather’s death when he collapsed on a cold winter day in front of the house while collecting some wood for the fire.

I don’t remember what was the exact word except that it sounded irrelevant and even misleading. If anybody had bothered to know why his big generous heart failed I would have told them that after four agonising years of living in the exile it received its final blow just a month earlier when his wife died and was overwhelmed with immense grief. And even though many people concluded that living up to your seventies is not that bad, it didn’t comfort me much. I was sure both he and my grandmother would have lived to see many more sunrises if life hadn’t been so hard on them at the very end. During those four long years there was not even the slightest glimpse of a chance that they would ever get away from the dirty ugly urban suburb of a big city where they lived entrapped between four gray walls and return to their home that was miles away in the countryside. With their family and friends being scattered to different corners of the world and the busy locals keeping at a safe distance, there was not much comfort for the aching hearts and weary minds. And even though my grandpa was a man of strong constitution and even stronger will, I had seen him crushed.  

© UNHCR/Zalmaï
Only four years earlier, we were all relieved when after a couple of days of waiting by the phone we finally got the news that they had escaped the cruel death that befell some of their neighbours who stubbornly refused to leave their homes. Little did we know at the time that this immediate death was only to be replaced with slow dying.

However, my grandpa wasn’t the last victim. Four months later, their eldest son, my uncle, followed the same road, again exhausted with disappointment, disorientation, hopelessness, desolation and quiet suffering. They were like falling dominoes, yet nobody considered them casualties of war because they did not fall by the bullet or knife. Nobody keeps a record of these slow deaths in the exile. Perhaps because it would be terrifying to hear the number. Rarely anyone acknowledges them and takes them for what they really are. It is much easier to tag them as cancer, heart failure and diabetes. As if they weren’t ignored enough at the end of their lives.

I wish the society as a whole had paid more attention. I wish people close to them had shown more understanding. I wish they had had somebody to talk to. I wish they could have made themselves talk. I wish they could have accepted the injustice as one of the life’s tricky ways to challenge us. I wish they had been just a little stronger to live to return only a couple of years later. 

Related post:
A survivor