After Flight

The refugee is an object. A problem to be solved, a number, an expense. A full stop, never a comma. Since the refugee cannot be willed away, they must remain a thing. They are their own category of human.

At the detention center, seeds of words are distributed among eighty minors. An “A” is flung at them. Be thankful, as this is the most noble, the most primal of sounds, ringing from chest and throat, that the child learns to bring forth first and most easily.¹

First day of school: He and his mother have a few word scraps between them. They stand before the principal’s door. They are late. Class 1b, says the principal, on the second floor. She points up. A wide staircase. As they turn into the hallway, a door slams shut. The mother knocks on the door. Come in! A room full of children his age. His mother’s speech is broken; he can do no better. He starts to feel shame.

No, no, no, the teacher fends them off with both hands, I already have four Turks in my class. And she shoos away mother and son. The staircase has more steps on the way down. He knows what will happen. They will have to go to the principal again. He feels even more shame. The principal rises. She marches up the steps and down the length of the upstairs hallway to the classroom door. She pulls the door open and says something brief. He sits down in the last row. Because he understands so little, he looks about furtively. Who, then, are the four Turkish kids?

As he mispronounces a word, the other students grimace. The words roll from their mouths with the alacrity of marbles. That might have been the day he resolved to learn the strange language so well as to never again feel shame. He has no inkling yet of what his parents have known from the start: to command the alphabet means to defend oneself.

How can you allow a foreigner to do better than you? The British teacher levels the accusation at most of the class, children of sundry origins. Foreign are those who have learned the language only recently. He failed to understand the very first question directed toward him at boarding school. When his classmates laughed, he didn’t think to ask: What are you all laughing at?

Root: a metaphor, false. Trees don’t move, their vegetative migration is the drift of pollen. Whoever talks incessantly of roots identifies far too much with birch and ash. If a person has other roots, should we take that to mean that only their leaves turn German?

An African courtier in eighteenth-century Vienna commanded the most important languages of the time, the knowledge of his enlightened epoch. He taught the sons of noblemen, married a local, and kept company with the most renowned of composers in one and the same Freemasons lodge. After he died he was skinned, stuffed, and displayed in a cabinet of curiosities. For in the end, it was not Viennese blood that coursed through his veins to the tempo of a waltz. As the saying goes, my blood is my heir.²

Once his status is legitimized, his diploma recognized, his driver’s license converted, he has, ineluctably, shed his skin. Whether armed with a wallet full of new IDs (and a few crisp bills) or sans papiers, forever the abandoned skin/the orphaned skin thereafter & never to be translated/the adopted tattoo &/the dissolving grammar of the senses.³ As he works to fit in, cramping with the concentration it takes to stay in line, he longs for arrival, the utopia of all those who have fled.

Some who have fled may trim a few consonants from their names. Arrival requires him to devise an easy way to pronounce his. Or to resign himself to a different pronunciation. To get used to it, so as not to lose it altogether. Until one day the old pronunciation sounds strange to him. Wrong, almost.

All those who flee arrive in their own way: some the morning after, others when their naturalization papers are handed over. Some arrive over and over, others never. His mother arrives the evening on which she first receives guests in the new country. Not others who fled, who exchange stories like cigarettes, but locals whom she has come to know without prejudice or expectation. She can hardly bring herself to invite them; she scrapes together the money for the most modest of meals. She gives herself over to the occasion. For a few happy moments she forgets the mistakes that slip into her painstaking banter. She serves up her arrival with a dazzling smile.

The question Where are you from? will cease to be suspicious only when the question Where are you going? is asked just as often.

Edward Said: I am from there.
Mahmoud Darwish: I am from here.
Said: Actually, I am neither from there nor from here.
Darwish: You have two names…
Said: …that meet and diverge
Darwish: You have two languages…
Said: …I forgot in which one I used to dream
Darwish: Point.
Said: Counterpoint.⁴

His tailor is called Elias and is from Alexandria. Every time he seeks Elias out, Elias tells him the same story. A dapper gentleman visiting the metropolis orders a bespoke suit, but it doesn’t fit correctly because the apprentice wrote down the wrong measurements. The gentleman is going to the opera that night; his other suit is at the cleaners. We’ll find a way, the tailor assures his client, showing him that with a slight stretch of one arm and a bend in one leg, the suit fits passably. He demonstrates, the client mimics. During the intermission, the gentleman hobbles past two finely dressed operagoers in the foyer. Oh, poor man, what a fate to be so deformed, says one. But look, what a splendid tailor he must have, replies the other.

Every escape plan is a conspiracy, its details withheld from those at home and divulged to chance companions along the way. In flight groups take shape, alliances are built, nourishment and information traded. Swallows fly along. A community in flight, an individual thereafter.

At times he is stalked by a sense that his childhood is trapped in his mother tongue, and that he must translate it into a foreign language—without a dictionary. He watches himself under a bell jar, on a swing. It snows, the flakes melt on his hands. In another language it seems to him that this is not his childhood but a dance of mute ancestors.

At other times it feels as though the languages, unable to march side-by-side on equal footing, are at war with each other. They stick out their elbows, pushing and shoving, babbling turns of phrase at him as a pitying sutler might press one with life-saving provisions. Each language, with its hulking body, tries to drive the other into the shadows. If only he could reassure them that they could all speak from him.

Anyone who has learned a language till they no longer hesitate feels liable for it, tends to it with care. It may have come to them by chance, but they have made it their own. This has rendered them a stylist, whether they like it or not. When they wake they are astounded by its thereness. Under pressure it sometimes fortifies their tongue; at other times it flees from their sputter. In this language, at once so solid and fragile, rigor is synonymous with a furrowed brow.

Flight tends to be narrated from stillness. Just as those who settle will never understand nomads, the supposedly settled are bound to misunderstand the fleeing. Flight can only be understood in motion. It is hard for those who have fled to remain still, even when held in place.

Having fled, he is compelled to translate. He not only translates between the languages of origin and arrival, between the dialects of childhood and present—relatively easy tasks—but also smuggles the essential from motion into stillness. Mostly it happens in fits and starts. He cannot escape this task, there is no more suitable intermediary between the poles.

Once he is in motion, stillness seems to him an imposition, an unreasonable demand. A state of irrevocable decisions, of being walled in. He has nothing against walls, so long as they are soft as wax.

Letters home are tall tales worthy of Münchhausen. I solemnly swear to serve the lie, to tell only the whitest, so help me pride. Mother, it’s wonderful in this country. Father, we’re well provided for here. Mother, if only you could see how we’ve set up our new home. Father, what I wouldn’t give to drive us up into the mountains in my brand-new Passat. Mother, thank God, we only want for your presence.

Earlier the condition of those left behind was deciphered from their handwriting. Today one listens, as with a stethoscope, to the voices behind the words. Earlier the phone conversation had to be registered; it might never happen at all. And if it did, the voices were sequestered by the static of that intimacy. The letters they received had always been opened, the censors resealed them hastily with yellow glue, a lurid announcement of control. Letters crafted in anticipation that they would be read by treacherous strangers. Little gifts for special occasions, fingered by the authorities, who sometimes kept them. Or arriving in shards and tatters. Once a Christmas chocolate bore the bite mark of a customs official.

He fled from the land of his birth but did not leave it behind. Even if he claims he no longer cares. Even when he ignores it completely. Even though he has sworn to never again set foot in it, not for the briefest visit, because he is done with that country, has absolved himself of it, disowned it. Even as he maims his mother tongue, betraying who he once was.

Before he fled, he knew why he was so unhappy.

As long as there are raw materials, memories will be manufactured: town squares, people, an avenue, a stadium, a courtyard, the scent of cutlets, the view from a veranda, the chime of church bells. To remember is to update in the past perfect. Having fled and lost the organic link to his past, he contrives for himself a room to which only he has the keys. Like an abandoned castle, visited from time to time by its erstwhile inhabitants. No one is allowed to touch the armchair or escritoire, their contours blurred by accumulated dust. Please look only.

The refugees sit on the lower bunk; the windowpanes are stickered over with ads for a local beer called OPTIMIST; the volume on the little device between them is turned up. Roaming costs apply during a civil war too. They talk all at once, or individually, or sometimes fall silent together. The crackling voices of those left behind deepen their fears. Outside the days spool, like the endless credits of a film they have never seen.

A stateless student is thrown out of the train at the Brenner Pass. Grabbed by the collar and taken to the dark hole of a police station for interrogation. He has no visa for Austria, he didn’t know he needed one. (An exceptional rule: other Western countries allow the stateless, if they have refugee permits, to arrive, travel through, and depart.) A visa can be obtained only at the consulate in Milan. He has no money. That is of no interest to them. It’s Friday night. Not their problem. But he doesn’t even want to enter the country, only travel through it by train. This fails to convince them.

He tries to sneak onto the next train and is apprehended by a shadow with a dog. Both bark at him. This time in the hole the police get rough. They put him on the next train in the direction of Bozen. He rides back to Brenner, goes to the truck parking lot, and tells one of the drivers his story. The man listens carefully and lets him in without comment. Nobody checks the truck driver and his human freight. They rumble over the border.

Flight leaves little opportunity to attend funerals. When his grandmother died the Iron Curtain denied him entry. When his grandfather died he could not return, because he had been called to military duty. When his mother died his residence permit denied him exit. To date he does not know if his father lives.

Some see it as incarceration, others as liberation. And one of them thinks: I’ve been released into a prison. For some, life after flight shrinks and disappears. In this strange land I die, and you don’t notice…⁵

Anyone who has fled carries a ledger in which they record their debts of gratitude to the new country. To individuals. For a glass of water once handed over. For a barn in which they were permitted to sleep. For accompaniment on visits to the authorities. For a doctor’s intervention. For that one day, so free of commotion or tension, soothing like a balm. Those who offer help and solidarity, as if his tribulations mattered to them too, have come to find the laws of their own country incomprehensible.

The father is losing his authority. Whatever knowledge he could impart to his children is no longer essential. He must regain his bearings, fumble about in the dark, not the one who knows, but the one who is lost. His daughter is the best in her class. She must translate her teacher’s praise. The father struggles with his fall from power. So he pontificates, more strenuously still, despair in his booming voice.

Thanks to a dictum of “mercy before you die,” Grandmother comes to visit. She stands in the kitchen, varicose veins bulging through woolen socks, rescuing everything Mother trims off the meat. You people throw the best parts away, she says, with mild reproach. She buys back bacon and relishes the fatty strips. You all forget, at home, we eat everything but the pig’s squeal.

On special occasions the family apartment is transfigured into a wax museum of customs. The curtains are drawn shut, the doors sealed. Richly decorated clay vessels are extracted from the farthest recesses of the kitchen cabinet. The longest version of the holiday prayer is recited. The dishes are tallied three times over to ensure there is no mistake. All unresolved questions are melted down and thrown in cold water. Everyone enjoys the leaden figures that emerge.

In retrospect nostalgia appears to him the highest form of ignorance. An obsession, hazardous to the memory, which he has barely escaped. Self-satisfaction. In Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, the exiled protagonist wades through canals of his longing, slick with mud. The images of this film cause him physical pain. He escapes it once more.

The sight of the fleeing disquiets the settled. The fleeing haul their possessions in a suitcase, a backpack, a plastic bag, a pushcart. All their worldly belongings, as they say. But it is not all their worldly belongings. It is a farce, everything reduced to a single, transportable unit. The possessions that surround the settled, everything for which they toiled, gone, at once and forever. The refugee’s journey lays bare the excesses of excess. 

On occasion, the refugee encounters people who fear him. He would like to touch them, take their hand, or place his on their shoulders, and whisper: but I am the one who is afraid. I fled a fear from which there is no escape. Not even your assets are as endangered as my life.

The refugee is a victim who will inevitably make demands; a ravenous child whose appetite will only grow. If only refugees were not victims, they would seem less menacing.

Refugees who have established themselves observe the new arrivals with a certain reserve—at times even disgust. They have forgotten that years ago they too had to wipe themselves with a single square of toilet paper. Nobody helped me, says a former refugee. Why should they have it easier than we did? His memory deceives him (or rather, his comfort stamps the lie onto his memory). He too was once helped, half a year of accommodation and food, irrelevant whether appetizing or not. He survived flight only by drinking from the milk of human benevolence, only thanks to the compassion of those along the way. Someone like that old man, in the deep south of the country, who took the refugees into his car upon seeing their outstretched thumbs. He let them in, offered them nuts from the console between the two front seats. Dusk, the thrum of the motor. He will never forget the taste of those salted almonds.

Since the state, supposedly, is the highest expression of civilization, it is often suspected that refugees—who, by their very existence, question His Highness the State—are barbarians. It takes an eternity to dispel this suspicion.

I am your Lord, the State; you shall have no other State before me.

The mayor dreams of a cosmopolitan metropolis, a New York of the Hansa. But without refugees. He yearns for a gala of pluralism, unmarred by those with the wrong papers. A tea ceremony. Orderly fraternization. The longer this debate drags on, the more tightly the mayor, now morally shipwrecked, clings to argumentative flotsam. An old saying goes: Beware those who wish their hearts in heaven with their asses on the couch.

Nationalists have no regard for the essence of homeland. They dress their own bond with the world in the dunce cap of uniformity. They offer individuals an identity that might not get them through the day but will lead them into war. An identity with the convenience of easy disposal. Day-before-day-before-day-before-yesterday Prussia, day-before-day-before-yesterday the German Reich, day-before-yesterday FRG/GDR, yesterday Germany, today Europe, tomorrow again Germany. And then?

Suggestion for an amicable compromise between a nationalist and a cosmopolitan: Homeland is your own smell.

The open city, the global port, is the ideal of those who have fled. Where anyone can land, and anything be loaded, because nobody knows in which bale, crate, or container something precious awaits discovery. Where, at high tide, seawater invades the land and, at ebb, freshwater flows out to sea.