Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
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that now. It has been nagging away at me all the time I’ve been here, the razor-wire fence the government has erected more than a hundred miles south of here to stop Syrian refugees walking across the border from Serbia; the thought of crowds moving slowly north-east as the cranes move southwest. Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety. I love the flock not simply for its biological exuberance, but for the way it has prompted me to pick similarity out of strangeness, for the way its chaos was transformed, on reflection, to individuals and small family groups wanting the simplest things: freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep.
There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket. They’re set in a line that speaks of concern, not for yourself, but for the woman who is paying the fare. I wave through the window and you turn and see me and smile hello.
This is a borrowed house that we’re talking in. It’s not my home.
We sit at the table and I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t know anything about you.
It is hard to ask questions.
You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story. I don’t want to ask you questions, because I think of all the questions you must have been asked before. But you want me to ask you questions, and so I begin with: when did you get here? And you write, in careful Persian numerals, 12, 2016. December. And I ask more questions, and you answer them, and when the English words won’t come, you translate using your phone, and this takes some time, and the sun slaps its flat gold light upon the table and the bowl of grapes and the teapot, all these quiet domestic things, as I wait to know what you might mean. Here are the words you look up while we talk: Apostate. Bigoted. Depraved. Hide.
You are a student of epidemiology. Epidemiologists study the mode of transmission of disease, the way it runs through populations from person to person. You tell me that back in your country you used to meet with your friends in your restaurant at night so you could talk of Christianity and read the Bible. There were Christian signs in your restaurant. You knew that you might be arrested for doing this. Secrecy is paramount, but faith is also faith.
This is what happens when you are denounced as an apostate. The authorities speak of you as if you were one of the agents of disease that you have studied. At prayers one Friday they denounce you, by name, in five regions, two cities and three villages. They said that a woman at your university had depraved you, by which they meant she had encouraged you to become a Christian. They said that you had changed your religion. And that now you possess this faith, you spread it to other men.
They see your belief as a contagious disease. They want to isolate it, contain it, and like all such malevolent metaphors that equate morality with health, the cure is always extinguishment. You know what happens to apostates, to those who have changed their religion, in your country. Even I know what happens. I am holding my breath just thinking of it.
When the intelligence services came looking for you at your grandmother’s home she called you and told you that these men were your friends even though they spoke the wrong language for the region and they were wearing distinctive clothes that made it obvious, really, who they were, and why they were there, but she was old and you couldn’t blame her for expecting friendship when what was offered was its scorched obverse. Your uncle knew better. He told you to flee. Your life is in danger, he said. Truth. So you fled. You left everything.
You drove from city to city and, in a city more distant, met two friends of your uncle. They told you they could take you to Europe with others by car. And once you were there, you wondered where you should go. Your uncle said, The UK is good, and he offered to pay the smuggling agents to get you here. The car unloaded you all in an unkempt garden and you had to hide there until the middle of the night when the truck came, and you got in.
Days in the darkness inside a lorry on its way north. A freezer truck. How many people were in there with you? I ask. And you laugh, and say, Ten? I don’t know. It was dark! And I laugh too, a little ashamed, and wonder why I want to press you for these little details. None of us want to know what this is like. We don’t want to know how it feels to not eat or drink or sleep for five days and nights, to be sustained in terror and darkness merely through the hope that there is light the other side. None of us wants to know what it feels like to be threatened with a knife, as you were threatened. To be held at gunpoint by people you have paid to bring you to safety.
You say, It was the worst feeling. Then you say it again. The worst feeling.
Several times, you tell me, I see my death.
Then you say it again. I see my death.
The hardest things, I realise, you are saying them all twice.
And what I am thinking, as you say sorry into the silence while you wait to be able to once again speak, is this. I think of how scientists have only just found out how our brains make memories. They used to think that we record a short-term memory, then archive it later, move it to a different part of the brain to store it long term. But now they’ve discovered that the brain always records two tracks at once. That it is always taping two stories in parallel. Short-term memories, long-term memories, two tracks of running recollection, memory doubled. Always doubled.
Which makes everything that ever happens to us happen twice.
Which makes us always beings split in two.
You are an epidemiologist. You are a refugee.
You were one of the best epidemiology students in the whole country.
You are also an asylum seeker who has seen detention-centre inmates cut themselves with razors, lash out in violence, numb themselves with Spice.
The government wants to send you back to the European country where you first arrived, but that would be dangerous because of people there who know who you are, who have threatened you, who have contacts with the authorities back home. So now you are in a hostel, with four hundred others. You have to sign in once in the morning and once again at night. You are a student, a brother, a son, who manages to speak to your family back home through Telegram, through WhatsApp, and you are also a man who asks the receptionist for help when violence or sickness breaks out in the hostel and watches the receptionist shrug dismissively and no help comes. All the things you see between refugees, you tell me, are harmful for brain, for mind, for spirit. You say, of the hostel, in the quietest, gentlest voice, that there, nothing is good, really. Nothing is good. It is a very nasty place. You tell me, twice, that some people have not even any clothes.
In December you’d called the police from the frozen dark inside the lorry. The police opened the doors and took you to a cell, questioned you, detained you for seventy-two hours. And when you requested asylum they moved you to an immigration detention centre. You were there for eighty days. I have heard a lot about the conditions there, this place that is known as a hellhole. So it is a mark of your kindly reticence that all you can say about it is, The situation in detention was very bad.
You are a refugee who sings in a talent competition in a detention centre where people are held indefinitely and you are also a man sitting at a sunny dining table laughing