The Ministry for the Future

105

After we were given our passports we put our names on a few lists, and waited some more. Of course those were the days that felt longest of all. Finally we got lucky; our names came up on one of the Swiss cantonal lists—for Canton Bern, in fact, where we had been all along. We were invited to move to Kandersteg. A village up in the Oberland. On a train line, where the line ran into one end of a tunnel which cut under the mountain south to the Valais. Said to be quiet. A bit of a backwater. Room in a hostel for us, and apartments being built. We said yes. My daughter, her husband, their two little ones.

Once there we moved into the hostel, and got on the waiting list for an apartment building soon to be finished. Kandersteg turned out to be a very Swiss village, like a set from a movie, a rather clichéd movie, but fine, we were there. A family from Syria. There were five other refugee families living there, from Jordan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Mauritania. We said hello to them cautiously.

Of course we all knew about the SVP, the Schweizerische Volkspartei, the Swiss People’s Party. They do well in the mountain cantons, and they don’t like immigrants. People in the Fremdenkontrolle and the SEM, the State Secretariat for Migration, were often only marginally helpful to us, or even unfriendly, but the SVP are actively hostile. It’s best to avoid attention. Part of that means not gathering in groups with other refugees, looking together so dark and strange. Unheimlich. We all knew that. When we met, at first, it tended to be privately.

So, a day came when I stood outside the doorway of our hostel. Green alps rising all around, gray mountains above them leaping to the sky. Like living in the bottom of an immense roofless room, or even at the bottom of a well. But a quick creek in a drainage channel ran right through the middle of the village, making a cheerful sound. The air was clean and cold, the sunlight on the rocks above a thick yellow. A real place, despite its unreal look. And we were here. Here, after twelve years in a Turkish camp, two years on the move trying to get to Germany, very crazy years, very hard; then fourteen more years in the Swiss camp north of Bern. Now we are finally somewhere.

And yet now I find I am seventy-one years old. My life has passed. I will not say it was wasted, that’s not right. We took care of each other, and we taught the children. They got a good education in that camp. We did what we could with what we had. It was the life we could make.

And now we’re here. And the SEM awarded us a small lump sum based on how long we had stayed in the camp, and that being so long for us, it wasn’t all that small. We could combine it with the savings of the Jordanian family new to Kandersteg, and together we rented an empty space in a building on the main street between the train station and the cable car terminus. The space had been used as a bakery, so it was not too difficult or expensive to change it into a little restaurant. Middle Eastern food, we were told to call it. Kebabs and falafel, and other things people already knew about; then, when we got them into our place, we could have them try dishes more interesting. Six tables and we would be full. It seemed possible, and it was interesting to try. Well, who am I kidding—it was exciting to try.

Of course I am old now, but there is no changing that, except by death. At least I have this day, and these days. All that happened before seems now to have happened to someone else. It’s like remembering a previous incarnation. Especially home itself. I remember when I left Damascus I looked around and promised myself I would someday come back. Damascus isn’t like any other city, it’s old, the oldest capital left on Earth, and you can tell that when you’re there, it’s in the streets and the way it feels at night. And when we were released from the camp, I had the chance to return. I even got a plane ticket. I went to Kloten thinking I’ll just go back and see it. The family didn’t want to go, but I did. But then in Kloten I had a kind of a, I don’t know what—a kind of a breakdown I guess. Who was this going back, and why? I tried to put it together, all the pieces of my life, and I couldn’t do it. I concluded that the person who thought of going back was not me, that I was no longer that person. The years in the camp had taken me, day by day, the same day every day, to another person. So at the last minute I said no to myself, and went back down to the train station under Kloten and returned to the camp. My family greeted me curiously, unaware of this shift, this fact that a different person had returned to them. Are you okay? they asked, and I said yes, I’m okay. I just don’t want to go anymore. I didn’t understand it, so how could I explain it? Who can tell the riddle of their own true self?

So all right, a new person. Old but new. I think about what I have now, as this new person in her life, not quite my life, it seems, but I’m trying to get my head around it. We work all day to prepare a meal. It’s a fixed menu for those who want the whole supper, and we take reservations, which sometimes happen and sometimes not, but by eight or nine the restaurant is mostly full. Easy with the six tables. It’s almost like hosting a dinner party at home, except instead of friends coming over, it’s strangers. Or let’s call them acquaintances. Many are there for the first time, but some have been before and come back. We always greet those ones with a smile, and they often talk to each other. Swiss German is such a funny language, it is sometimes hard not to smile. It’s maybe like the sound of their medieval life, chopping wood and clanging cowbells and the nasal toot of their alphorns, and maybe rocks falling off the sides of their awesome mountains. This compared to the fluid birdsong of Arabic; it would be funny to have both in the same room at once, but we don’t usually speak Arabic around them, we speak high German, Hochdeutsch, and they speak it back to us, slowly and clearly, with what I am told is a strong Swiss accent, but I don’t hear that, it’s the only high German I know. It was a tourist from Berlin who told me that, he said, in Berlin you would be taken for a Swiss woman, your German is that good, but with the Swiss accent. If it weren’t for the color of your skin of course, you know what I mean. I agreed that I did, with a smile.

So what we have now, I would say, is not money (very short), nor freedom (we are still registered as Ausländer), but dignity. And this is what I think everyone needs. After the basics of food and shelter that we need just as animals, first thing after that: dignity. Everyone needs and deserves this, just as part of being human. And yet this is a very undignified world. And so we struggle. You see how it is. And yes, dignity is something you get from other people, it’s in their eyes, it’s a kind of regard. If you don’t get it, the anger rises in you. This I know very well. That anger can kill you. Those young men blowing things up, they’re angry because they don’t have dignity. Which is something other people give you, so it’s tricky. I mean you have to deserve it, but ultimately it’s something other people give you. So the angriest of our young men blow things up because they aren’t given it, and mostly they blow up their own people’s chances in this world.

Take the Chinese. Chinese tourists who come in tell me, in English of course, that for a century they were oppressed by European countries, they were humiliated. They had no dignity anywhere on Earth, even at home. But who can imagine that now? The Chinese are so powerful now, no one can criticize them. And they forced that to happen by standing up for themselves. They didn’t do it by killing strangers at random. That is so wrong I can’t even express it. No, if it’s going to happen, it has to be done like the Chinese did it. Possibly Arabia with its new regime will change, and the wars end and the rest of our suffering countries change in ways that force the rest of the world to give us the respect we deserve. It will take changes all around. It will take the young to do it.

Meanwhile we fill our restaurant, night after night. We are legal permanent residents of Switzerland. The years here will pass faster than in the camp, that’s for sure. That the boredom of the camp made time go slow, so that I must have lived a very long life by that protraction, is an irony that I don’t find all that funny. Better to have it all go by in a tearing rush. That I am sure of.

To get by here in this country, I’ve become a different person, and more than once. But this new person standing here now is not so bad. And there are things about the Swiss you have to admire. They are so punktlich, so punctual—this is funny at first, but what is it but a regard for the other person? You are saying to the other person, your time is as valuable as mine, so I will not waste yours by being late. Let us agree we are all equally important and so everyone has to be on time, in order to respect each other. Once we had the restaurant reserved by a single group, we decided to do it on Monday, our usual night off, so as not to inconvenience any of our regulars. So we were cooking away, fixed menu, pretty easy but had to be done right, and my daughter looked out the door and laughed. Look, she said, the invitation is for eight but some of them got here at quarter till, so they are waiting outside until it turns eight. Here, look at the clock, you’ll see I’m right. And at eight there was a knock on our door. We greeted them with huge smiles, I’m sure they thought we were a little tipsy. Then also in the train stations, this I like to watch, the clocks over the platforms show the time, and whatever your train’s departure time is, if you look out the window of the train right before, you’ll see the conductor of the train also has his or her head out the window, looking at the clock; and when the clock hits the very minute and second of departure, the train jerks and off you go. That’s the Swiss.

These people will accept us, if we aren’t too many. If we are too many, they will get nervous, that’s pretty clear. I think it’s the same in Hungary or in any of these little European countries. They’re prosperous, yes, but there are only a few million of them in each country. Seven million Swiss, I think, and three million Ausländer among them; that’s a lot. And it’s not just the sense of the nation, but the language. This I think is the crux. Say only five million people on Earth speak your language. That’s already far less than many cities hold. Then another five million come to live with you and everyone speaks English to understand each other. Pretty soon your kids speak English, pretty soon everyone speaks English, and then your language is gone. That would be a big loss, a crushing loss. So people get protective of that. The most important thing, therefore, is to learn the language. Not just English, but the local language, the native language. The mother tongue. Their culture doesn’t matter so much, just the language. That I find is the great connector. You speak their language and even when you’re messing it up like crazy, they get a look on their face: in that moment they want to help you. They see you are human, also that their language is a hard one, a strange one. But you’ve taken the trouble. The Swiss are very good about that. Their language classes are free, and besides they have four languages among themselves, which they hack to bits with each other every day. Take the tunnel under the mountain from this town to the town at the other end of the tunnel, and they don’t speak the same language they speak here! You go from weird German to weird French, and really, we speak German better than many Swiss who live just twenty kilometers from here. It makes them more tolerant, maybe. They joke about each other in that regard.

When everyone jokes like the Swiss do about each other, when everyone in the world has their dignity, we will be all right. In the meantime, here I am, an old woman, my life mostly lived in refugee camps, out on the street outside our little restaurant, early sunset as always here, in the shade at 3 PM. It’s a shady town so deep in its hole, a calm town, a sleepy town. Whatever happened in the past, whatever happens after this, today is today. In a little while I’ll go back inside.