Three bedtime stories

Well, I was almost in bed. I was supposed to be. It was just that I was suddenly overcome with a strong feeling of Saharan thirst that would often strangely coincide with an ever too early command to go to bed. I had always felt that I would miss something while I was sleeping. So as I was tiptoeing barefoot through the corridor on my way to the kitchen, with the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something that momentarily rooted me to the spot, blinking in disbelief. Two people were pushing the heavy freezer in the direction of the front door. For a moment I thought that somebody wanted to rob us off our food supplies. However, that was only until I realised that the door was closed and that the reckless robbers forgot to pull stockings over their heads so that I could clearly see their faces. They were my parents. Before I had even had time to ask for an explanation, I was sent back to bed in a tone of voice that I knew very well meant “No more information available, only more trouble. Retreat and ask no more.” When I got up for school the next morning, the freezer was sitting back in its corner, mysteriously silent as if nothing had ever happened.

 

A couple of months later I was alone in another bedroom, far away from home, wide awake late in the night. I was preparing myself for an important conversation. It had to be done properly as much depended on it, actually my whole life. Normally I would have found comfort in a gentle stroke of Mum’s hand or sitting on my Dad’s knees, yet that was not an option any more. Not after days of seeing them nervous and distracted, wandering around aimlessly, only occasionally exchanging glances instead of words, as if they expected that one of them would come up with some miraculous solution to a situation that got completely out of control. It was them who needed comfort. The whole world was upside down obviously. How was I to fix it?

Was I supposed to get on my knees? Introduce myself? Apologise for my stubborn denial, scorn and mockery of anybody who had ever attempted anything similar before? I recalled all the endless arguments with other kids on the subject and thought that I had little chance of success in this conversation considering everything I had previously said. Yet, that was my last hope so I cleared my throat and did my best.

 

I sprang up in bed on the sound of an explosion roaring like a thunder through the canyon whose steep walls surrounded the miniature town in which I lived with my aunt and her family a year later. (Obviously my conversation didn’t go all too well). I could see a myriad of stars dancing before my eyes as I jerked my head a little bit too hard and hit the side of the bed. My cousin sleeping next to me seemed to be more alarmed by my moaning than the explosion and a few moments later was back in horizontal position. I stayed up with my ears pricked expecting to hear some commotion coming from the outside but there was nothing much going on. A few quiet voices and a couple of steps perhaps. The town slept undisturbed. An explosion here or there, who cared? Even the kids played with dynamite on the New Year’s Eve competing whose bundle would shake the town better. I expected to see some parts of the canyon missing on January the first. So after a while the pain in my head subsided, the stars dissolved and I retreated to my side of the bed thinking that I would rather miss whatever was going on and sleep it all over.

Crossroads

When I turned 10, a new girl came into my class and soon became one of my best friends. We would walk back home together for a while and then stand for a long time talking at the point where our roads separated. Two years later it looked as if our roads would never cross again as at the outbreak of war we didn’t have time to say goodbye. Her mother was of an undesirable nationality so I knew that they all had to leave. Yet, I had no idea of where they might have finally settled.

One year later I was in a different town, attending a different school and sitting in a different class when a new refugee girl from a far away place joined us and filled in an empty spot on my right side. I was relieved. I felt less stared at and whispered about. To other kids I was a “black sheep” and after discovering that my head became a habitat for a family of lice that had probably migrated from some of my constantly scratching classmates, I started feeling that sheep and I really do have something in common. I cut my hair short and sat for hours out in the sun like a chimpanzee with my mum working with her fingers through my hair until she would get tired saying “I’ll never exterminate these nasty bastards”. After all the smelly powders, shampoos and special extermination techniques she finally did succeed and I returned back to school, again relieved. And there, my new fellow refugee was waiting for me impatiently, eager to ask me a question “Do you know a girl whose name is… ?“ and just like that, one after another the sound of a name I hadn’t heard for a whole year and a half rolled out of her mouth. I was paralyzed for a few seconds before I answered with “Yes, but how do you know her?”. What followed was a bout of joy, clapping and hooraying on her side, before my curiosity was eventually satisfied. She told me a story of a letter that travelled for months determined to fulfill its mission.

Miles away, in a different country my crossroads friend wrote down “I’ll hope this letter will reach you…” , put it in an envelope and set it sail to my grandparents’ village with only my name and my father’s name on it. That was all she knew. There was no address. The letter reached the village but ended up in the wrong hands of a girl with the same name, surname and father’s name. So my double opened up the letter and was struck with this bizarre coincidence. However, the girl decided to try to help out and find the missing person so she searched high and low, all to no avail. Some months later she told the whole story to her newly arrived refugee cousin who was accidentally placed in my class to sit right next to me. By the time I answered the letter and sent it back to my friend, many months had passed. She later told me that she had almost given up hope on ever receiving it so when it finally arrived she jumped all around like crazy.

I’ve never stopped wondering whether this strange sequence of events was just a coincidence or something more than that? Can it be that when two people long for each other miracles can happen? Or perhaps future knew that we had some pretty hard challenges before us and so decided to make it a little easier for us? I leave all the options open, but I believe that in the years to come, our long conversations that moved from the street onto the paper meant a lot to both of us. There was somebody out there for whom you were not an alien, a connection with the world familiar to you that at the time seemed as if it had never really existed.

The two of us still keep in touch. Not as often as we used to but there is always this air of familiarity and closeness whenever we meet, even after a long time of no contact. I visited her a couple of days ago and she told me she still hasn’t been back to the old place. She doesn’t want to go alone and is looking for a chance to travel with somebody. I was later thinking of how it would be nice to do this adventure together. We would probably end up walking to that same crossroads together and just stand there talking for hours.

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. 

The music of a war child

If you are a teenage refugee, lucky enough to be able to continue your education in the exile, you’re likely to be confronted with some or all of the following questions and comments:
 

So, what sort of music do you like?

What’s your favourite band?

Fancy a smoke?

You don’t smoke?!

(After scanning you from top to bottom) “Interesting” shoes, where did you get those!?

How about plucking your eyebrows?

Where do you go out?

Why don’t you go out?

Got a boyfriend?

What did you say? You’ve got such a funny accent!

Why are you so quiet? 

And the thoughts usually never spoken out loudly but commonly simplified into  “hm, well, no, I don’t know...” would be: 

It’s hard to tell about my music preferences after a year or more of living mainly without electricity or otherwise having a priority of listening to the war field reports and how’s the enemy progressing, which was occasionally interrupted with war chants that were supposed to encourage people for the fight, boost up the moral and the like. At night I would often fall asleep listening to the guns and cannons roaring and thumping here and there. 

When I last went to a normal school we were still kids. How come everybody is now wearing make-up, peeling off all the traces of hair (except for those on the scalp) and smoking? Did I miss a decade? I feel like Sylvester Stallone playing a frozen cop who wakes up after 20 years or so. 

Well, I don’t have any clothes of my own. I didn’t have time to pack it up with me and I have no money to go shopping. Especially not for branded ones that are a must have around here. The shoes belonged to my older relative and the sweaters and T-shirts to my brother or again relative. A few have been kindly tailored by my aunt (such as a silky tracksuit made of an enemy flag).

I don’t really feel like going out in a weird looking clothes and wouldn’t have money for drinks anyway. 

You happen to speak in a funny way too, you know. But you were lucky not to be uprooted and displaced to a place where you’d be a minority. Can I finish a sentence without somebody repeating words after me, if you mind? Oh, I guess it’s easier not to speak at all or only when I have to.

Not having a boyfriend is quite self-explanatory in the above mentioned circumstances.

In fact, at the time, having a boyfriend was the last thing on my mind. Namely, the differences between me and other non-refugee kids were not only in the appearance. Even greater discrepancies were obvious on the inside. 

An average teenager detests school and looks for every possible way to escape it, spends minimum time with the book and most of the time with friends. According to what I’ve seen, an average refugee teenager usually reacts to school and education in one of two very opposite ways: 

             They either completely give up on everything in life including school, thinking “What the  hell it matters when everything is falling apart? Why bother with school, only criminals and war heroes prosper.”
             Or they more clearly than their peers see education as a means to help them out of a life they don’t like, the only tool left for realisation of their future dreams.

So you can imagine my misery when I heard that I might not continue my school semester because of the war escalating, and nothing made me as horrified as the possibility of missing a school year. What a teenager!? After the experience of losing everything over night, school seemed like the last tiny straw of future hope and I hang on to it desperately. 

Unfortunately, the majority of refugees falls into the first category and nobody is there to set some values back into their heads. There is nobody to encourage these kids to fight for themselves and not to give up, not to waste their talents and spend the rest of their lives in bitter disappointment and despondence. To make it worse, such hopeless attitude is often encouraged by equally disoriented parents and the society resembling the Titanic crowd concerned only about saving their own lives, even if it means stepping over dead bodies. In such circumstances, you are a nuisance to everybody. 

One of the most moving and convincing confessions I have heard of a refugee struggle and the importance of education was given by Emmanuel Jal, a war child refugee speaking at one of the TED conferences. He was lucky enough to get some education and smart enough to realise the importance of it.