Somewhere in the Unknown World Read online

  Father said that Minnesota was colder than anything we had ever known back home. In response, we assured him we were prepared because Konya was freezing during the winter. Father talked about sheets of snow that formed on the earth for months on end, reaching the ankles, the knees, right up to the buttocks of a grown man. We shivered hearing his words. There were no such sheets of snow in Konya.

  In all those conversations, Father never told us about how hard he was working or what he was doing. He sent money on the promised dates so we could pay for our room and the food we ate. We did not tell him about the lack of privacy or how bored we were. We told him that we were together and we were fine and taking care of Mother. We all kept telling each other: there was a plan in place and adjustments had to be made only to ensure our safety, our eventual reunion.

  Mother grew sick in our time in Turkey. With the stress of our situation and our living conditions, her legs swelled up and caused her tremendous pain. She hid it from us at first but the pain became unbearable. In the cold mornings, she could barely move her legs. When we asked what was wrong, she refused to talk about it, waving away our questions. She insisted that her faith and her strength would carry her through. I knew she needed medical attention. None of us spoke Turkish, but I was the oldest so I spoke of our concern until she agreed to find help. I became her interpreter, using my body to speak where I had no words, and assistant as we made appointments with different doctors to find out what was wrong. Even more than the war, Mother’s sickness made me into an adult. I learned how to navigate Konya’s public transportation, its streets, and its medical systems. I was sixteen years old when I became the strongest person I knew how to be. I could feel myself growing older each day.

  In the space of those years, it felt to me as if I had lived different lifetimes, but I saw no room in my life for an identity crisis. Instead of being uncertain about myself, I called on everything I had learned from Father’s judo lessons, to become more certain in the worlds we were living in. I thought of the different waza, the techniques Father cultivated in us. I practiced them in our everyday life.

  For Mother’s health, I steadied myself using the katame-waza, grappling techniques. I coached my sister and brother, and together we comforted her with our love and devotion. We supported her when she needed help but did not offer our assistance in loud words or actions. I made it a point to be where I was needed.

  For my education, I practiced the ultimate judo move, the nage-waza, the throwing techniques. In Konya, if I wanted to get my high school certifications, I had to do an independent study and pass a test. I knew that my education would be an advantage later in life. So I found the energy inside myself and channeled it into studying whenever I could in that little room we shared—in between doctor’s appointments, making dinner, cleaning dishes, and all the other tasks ensuring we stayed alive and healthy.

  When I turned eighteen, I was qualified to take the high school exam. There were twenty-eight eligible refugees from the Konya area, and we were to travel to the exam by bus. The trip took four to five hours each way. I had never traveled so far by myself but I knew that a grounded spirit and a willingness to push myself to the edges of what I knew was necessary if I wanted to pass the test. On the bus ride, I began to focus on firmly holding my center of balance. At the test site, I prayed to Allah to help me. I took my seat and proceeded calmly from one problem to the other until the test was done. I learned that I was one of ten students to pass. Passing the high school exam gave me the confidence for a life where the plan must continually be adjusted.

  Instead of six months or even a year, it took our family three years to be reunited with Father, in Minnesota. It took him that long to process our paperwork and find sufficient documentation for the family to come as refugees of war. In the end, after all the adjustments, our plan worked—we were together again.

  In another apartment, in a faraway city with no scent, we gathered in our line before Father. As the oldest, I stood first. No longer a child. I was a young woman. My sister stood beside me, somehow still bright-eyed and innocent. Our teenage brother was last, now the same height as Father. The fortress of the man we once knew had crumbled. In the years away from us, Father had suffered for us. He’d taken on hard jobs. He was now a worker in a warehouse. He needed surgery to correct the discs in his back, but he couldn’t afford it; all the money he earned he’d sent to take care of us in Egypt and Turkey. His eyes were clouded by unshed tears. I told myself: Yara, your father is only a man, a man who has done everything he possibly can for his family. He is stronger than he was.

  Our mother, her limbs heavy and hurting, sat on a brown sofa behind our father. Her hands, no longer slender, thick with veins, massaged her knees as she looked at us. Her dress, a coarse fabric that matched the dark scarf that covered her head, framed a face that remained soft despite the hard years. She smiled at me, happy that her family was together again.

  My brother, sister, and I mirrored Father’s old form: his straight shoulders, his chest pushed out, his loosely bent arms, his hands in soft fists held away from his body, his feet planted firmly on the ground.

  The right corner of Father’s mouth lifted, just a hint of a smile, enough to let us know he was proud.

  —YARA HASSAN

  4

  Up Close, It Is Different

  I BOARDED THE PLANE, against the better judgment of my mother and father, for Nyala, the capital of the state of South Darfur in southwest Sudan, not knowing what to expect. I was twenty-three years old at the time. I had just started working for the American Refugee Committee. I was not the team’s first choice to go on the trip, but everyone else’s visa had been denied. I was a recent college graduate and my résumé was clean. Mine was the only visa approved.

  My task was to see what the one hundred thousand people in a refugee camp in South Darfur needed in terms of humanitarian relief. At ARC, we were interested in three primary areas of camp life: water management, health, and nutrition. My family had lived in a war zone; to return to one was the last thing that my parents had wanted for me.

  I found myself in the middle of the Sahara Desert, wind and sun and sand bearing down on me. I was thin and six feet tall, so immediately I stood out, a white girl with pale skin, brown eyes, hair pulled back in a ponytail. I saw the people looking at me with wild eyes, bodies tense. The little children who clung to their mothers in the doorways of the camp tents looked upon me with uncertainty. I was swept with a sense of nostalgia so powerful and familiar, I reeled from the unintended blow.

  An older man, the cultural leader in the camp, was the first to formally greet me. I held my notebook and pen in my hands and bowed my head respectfully as he addressed me. He held his head high. His eyes were the color of brown glass. His wrinkled lids drooped over the tops of his eyes. His voice was deep and windy and old.

  He said, “White girl, let me tell you…”

  I listened quietly as he told me everything he wanted and needed. When he was done, I looked him in the eyes and said slowly, “I, too, am Muslim. I, like the people in this camp, also come from a history of war and displacement.”

  The old man listened to my words with grave interest. I could see a dawning understanding grow in his eyes. Then a smile emerged on his face, revealing a set of strong teeth that matched the set of his jaw.

  He said, “Yes. Why else would a white girl who was comfortable in one country choose to go to a new country to learn of the discomforts of other people?”

  He added, “I understand your empathy and your connections to this place now. Even though we look different, every refugee feels for another.”

  We became friends. He became the cultural translator for me in the month I stayed in the camp to assess the needs of its most vulnerable families.

  I talked to the women who would not look me in the eye, who pulled their garments over exposed arms and legs and sat curled tight into themselves. I asked them things that the men—in positions similar to mine
—had never asked: “Why do you feel unsafe at the camp hospital?”

  In that first trip and in all the trips that followed, I found in the different countries and people memories of my life in war-torn Bosnia. I found versions of myself, my mother, and my father, and I got to ask them what they needed and to do things that made their lives easier, better, and possible. In every trip I’ve taken, I’ve affirmed a promise I made to myself: I want to be the kind of person that I had needed in our time of instability, in the worst years of the war.

  * * *

  I was in the apartment by myself again. It was no longer safe for Mama to take me to my grandparents’ several blocks down our street. Since the senseless shelling had begun, there were no more safe places in Zenica. All the mothers agreed: it was better for children to be indoors than out. Although there was nothing for Mama to do at work, if she didn’t go to work, we wouldn’t get our rations of bread and powdered milk.

  The lights in the apartment had been turned off for a long time. The only light we had during the day came from the windows with their curtains pulled close. At night, Mama lit a single candle on the dining table so we could see our way around the apartment and not hurt ourselves crashing into furniture and walls.

  I was only four when the war began. For four years, I lived in the war. Those are my memories of my childhood.

  In the apartment, Mama kept the candles in a box where I could reach them, but told me, “Don’t touch the candles when I’m not home. You will burn down the apartment.”

  Despite her words, she’d shown me several times how to light a match and put it to the wick of a candle. Each time, she placed a long finger in the air to make sure I understood how serious she was. “Majra, just in case something happens in the night and I can’t help you.”

  I liked the smell when the match lit and the smoke rose into the room.

  I loved our apartment. On the sunny days, I wanted to open the curtains, but didn’t because Mama said that the curtains were one more layer of protection in the event of any outside explosions. The apartment kept us safe. Its walls were thick. They kept the cold out and the rain away despite the fact that they could not hold the bombs at bay.

  Last week, there was a missile strike on our apartment. Mama and I had snuck out to visit our aunt and uncle’s house in a small village on the edge of the city, so we were not home. We were all sitting in the aunt and uncle’s living room when we heard missiles flying overhead. My uncle, a man with a sense of humor even in the worst of times, looking out the window at the streaks of red flashing toward the city in the dark, said, “This one right here is coming for you guys.”

  We all laughed.

  Later that night when Mama and I hurried back home in the dark, we came to find that the missile had indeed hit our building. The seventh floor apartments were in ruins. Thankfully, our neighbors were safe. The sirens had sounded in time. The grandmother who lived upstairs came down to tell Mama the story of how they all escaped to the basement and to let her know that the families had already moved back into their apartments.

  Mama said, “How are the apartments still livable?”

  The grandmother said, “We covered up parts of the broken walls with furniture and patched up the roof with tarp.”

  She said, “It is still safer than being on the streets.”

  Mama agreed. She offered our apartment if the family wanted to sleep elsewhere for the night but the grandmother said that the families would be all right. When the sirens sounded, we would all end up in the same place: the basement.

  After the grandmother left that night, Mama slept with me in her arms, pulling the blanket high up on my shoulders each time it slipped, as if the piece of cloth could protect me. Neither of us slept very deeply.

  When Mama left for work in the morning, she laid out my coloring books and crayons on the dining table. She said it was the safest place in the apartment. She wanted me to color and draw and practice my numbers and letters. Mama wanted to register me for school. She had learned from a friend at work that a camp for all the people who’d lost their homes had been set up several blocks from our building and that they had a school on-site.

  Whenever we ventured outside, Mama gave me lessons on how to walk on the streets, how to look out for snipers, and how to hide at sudden sounds. Once she registered me for school, I would have to walk there by myself in the mornings and back in the afternoons. I was excited about the possibility of being with people again during the day, especially other children.

  We practiced how to walk on the streets when we needed to go get water from a neighboring apartment building that still had a working pump in its basement. Mama and I played a game of hide-and-seek with the snipers who perched in the windows of the high buildings waiting to shoot. We walked, our bodies beside parked cars and the walls of buildings, or quickly inside the bombed-out remains of the houses of old neighbors and friends, never in plain sight. Mama carried the empty gallon containers for the water, two in each hand. I held on to her shirt and moved as if I were a part of her body, like a tail. We always felt like winners when we made it safely to the apartment building with the working pump. The lines were always long, full of other women and children waiting to fill their buckets. On the way home, much slower because the water containers were heavy, Mama jumped each time there was a noise around us, a pop, a rock thrown, a voice from somewhere. My poor heart pounded in my chest cavity so hard that I kept a hand against it the whole way home. Once we returned to the dim apartment, Mama used pages from the coloring books to draw paths for me to take to go to and from school.

  Mama taught me how to read and write early. She used different colored crayons to write out the alphabet for me to repeat after and trace. I practiced until I knew the alphabet and then practiced some more until I could read my letters and write simple words. Whenever I grew restless, we played quiet games together. Mama hid little toys around the apartment for me to find. We raced each other, fingers to our mouths, as fast and as quietly around the rooms of our apartment—the bedrooms, the common area, the bathroom—as we could. Sometimes we played a game of Do you remember?

  “Majra, what do you do when the sirens go off?”

  “Get the key from the hook. Lock the door. Go down to the basement. Wait there until the sirens go off. Stay there until the neighbors leave the basement. Follow them. Return to the apartment. Unlock the door. Put the key back on the hook. Sit, color or draw until you come home.”

  “Mama, what do you do when you come home?”

  “Race up the stairs and call out, ‘Majra, Majra, Majra!’ on the landing.”

  We laughed when we played the game but we never laughed when Mama came home in real life. She was always out of breath. I was always out of breath. Our hearts pounded in our chests in each other’s arms.

  “Majra, do you remember Papa?”

  On the day Papa joined the army, the sun was warm and bright in Zenica. Papa came home in his usual fashion. Once the greetings were done, he moved to a chair in front of the television. His long musician’s hands clasped and unclasped beneath his chin. He looked into the dark screen of the television, studying his reflection. Mama was in the kitchen. I was at the table with my coloring books.

  In a careful voice, Papa called Mama and me to him.

  Mama picked me up at the dining table and held me in her lap on a chair by Papa’s. Papa cleared his throat before he said, “I have news. Today the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina came to my workplace to do a draft. I was not drafted but our dear friend was. As you know, he is Catholic. As you know, the army is entirely Muslim. As you know, he would not survive the war in the army as a Catholic man.”

  I turned up my head toward Mama. Her eyes were on Papa’s face. She studied him, her brow furrowed.

  “What?” she asked.

  Papa cleared his throat; his large hands now capped his knees. He leaned toward Mama and me and said, “I could not live with myself if I let my best friend die. I
have volunteered to go in his place.”

  Mama’s body became stiff where moments before it had been soft.

  She said, “You volunteered to join the army in order to save your dear friend?”

  Papa nodded.

  She repeated her words, “You volunteered to join the army in order to save your dear friend.” Mama shook her head, but she said, “Okay.”

  That evening we sat at our square table, around the light of a single candle, and ate quietly. We each had a piece of bread. Mama and Papa drank water. I had a glass of powdered milk. Mama and Papa each took only a few bites of bread; then they piled the leftovers on my plate as they did every night.

  They both said, “Majra, eat up so you can grow up.”

  Mama and Papa sat on either side of me, their arms resting on the table.

  In the candlelight, Mama looked pretty with her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, her eyes large and shiny, her face thin and smooth. Papa looked very grave, his hands clasping and unclasping on the table. Mama said that when I was born, they were only twenty-three years old. Papa was afraid to hold me. He was scared of being my father, of breaking my small body. It took Papa two whole months before he actually held me for the first time.

  I stuffed pieces of bread into my mouth. I allowed my cheeks to grow big with chunks of bread. I opened my eyes very wide. I turned my head from one side of the room to the other very slowly, like a puppet. Both Mama and Papa rewarded me with a laugh. They shook their heads at my game, finished their waters, then got up and walked toward the side of our apartment with the windows facing the street.

  Papa opened the window and took out cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one for Mama and then one for himself. They looked toward the gray skies of evening and talked in low voices.

  Once I swallowed the bread, I asked from my place at the table, “Why do you smoke so much?”