CHAPTER 11
As I scrambled onto the plane, I received a host of evil looks from my fellow passengers—the flight had been delayed and it was clear to them that it was on my account. I found my seat and stared blankly out of the window waiting for takeoff, my natural fear of flying overwhelmed by the excruciating need to get off the ground. Not until we were in the air would I feel as if I had put enough space between me and the passport control official who had nearly thwarted all my plans. As the flight attendants walked up and down the aisle, I avoided catching their eyes, my paranoia having convinced me that they seemed to be looking at all the passengers with suspicion, as if searching for someone. Only when Jordan was far behind us did I begin to relax, and then only slightly. My satisfaction at having made it onto the flight was mixed with a sense of anger at the passport official, and trepidation: I may have been out of Jordan, but I was by no means safe.
My trip would take me first to Muscat, the capital of the kingdom of Oman, where we would wait in transit for six hours before changing planes. That didn’t worry me too much, as I doubted officials would check my papers while in transit, but I still felt uncomfortable with the two counterfeit passports in different pockets of my jacket as per Abu Firas’s advice. Abu Firas had told me that at some stage, on the flight between Muscat and Kuala Lumpur, I should dump my Iraqi passport: that way I couldn’t be deported back to Iraq if my UAE passport was spotted as a fake. But it was too early yet—I might need that document before I got on the flight to Malaysia.
The transit lounge in Muscat was as faceless as such places always are. Bored- and tired-looking passengers sat around, some of them reading, some of them chatting, most of them simply staring into space as they waited for the connecting flight. For me, though, the wait seemed to distill my panic, and I hadn’t been there long before the familiar pains in my stomach started to make themselves known again. I winced as I felt the stabbing in my abdomen, not because it was bad—not yet—but because I knew how debilitating it could become if I couldn’t get it under control. Relaxation was the key—the pains always seemed to be exacerbated by stressful situations, so I made my way to the airport mosque. Perhaps a short period of prayer and contemplation would help me refocus my mind.
The mosque had a comfortable carpet, so I prostrated myself in prayer and then found a quiet corner away from prying eyes where I tried to sleep. But sleep would not come, and the pains grew increasingly bad. They had never been this intense—terrible, excruciating pangs that bent me double and made walking a near impossibility. I did my best not to let the pain show in my face, but before long I was sweating, my dark skin pale and my eyes screwed up in agony. I needed help, so I went to find a flight attendant.
The woman who took me under her wing was like an angel. She sat me down, put her arm around me, and cared for me as solicitously as if I were her own child. Once she had established what was wrong with me, she called a doctor in central Muscat. It took him the best part of an hour to get to me, an hour that passed as slowly as a day as the pains grew worse and worse. Once he arrived he led me to a sofa in the far corner of the transit lounge and laid me out flat before starting to ask me questions about the pain. Where was it? Had it happened before? I tried to answer him as best I could, but I immediately found myself distracted not only by my condition but also by the group of airport officials who had crowded around and were looking down at this well-dressed young man who seemed to be attracting so much attention.
After listening to my responses, the doctor shook his head and turned away from me. “I can’t diagnose him here,” he told the officials. “He needs special care, in the hospital. I have to get him into Muscat.”
I remember the officials shaking their heads as one. “He needs a visa,” one of them said slightly apologetically. “I’m afraid he can’t leave the airport.”
The doctor shook his head in disgust at this display of red tape, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He knelt down in front of me. “I’m going to give you a quick fix,” he said. “Something to relieve the pain. You’ll need to remove your jacket so that I can give you the injection.”
I shook my head to indicate that I was not going to remove my suit jacket. Despite the pain I was still acutely aware that I was carrying two fake passports on either side of my suit, and there was no way I wanted strangers to get their hands on them. Instead, the doctor rolled up my sleeve, and before I knew it he was approaching me with an injection.
Almost as soon as the needle punctured my skin, I started to feel drowsy.
“What was that?” I heard myself mumbling.
“A tranquilizer,” his voice told me, sounding curiously disjointed from his body.
The doctor’s face became blurred, as did the faces of the officials standing around him. I became overwhelmed with the desire to close my eyes and succumb to the blanket of sleep that was billowing over me, but I desperately tried to fight it. I’d had no idea I was going to be tranquilized, and although the drug had had an immediate effect on the pain in my stomach I knew I had to combat sleep. I had already attracted attention to myself, and if I was unconscious there was nothing to stop the crowd of officials around me from removing my jacket and discovering the illicit secret it contained. I forced myself to sit up. There were still people hanging around, so I folded my arms so that if I did fall asleep it would be a bit more difficult for them to remove my jacket.
Gradually the crowd of airport staff started to melt away, leaving just the doctor and the flight attendant beside me. Stubbornly I continued to fight off the urge to sleep, much to the surprise of the doctor. In my wooziness I heard him say, “It’s not having the right effect. I need to give him a stronger dose.”
“No,” I muttered, feeling crushed by the effort of speaking.
“But you need to sleep,” he insisted.
I shook my head. “Give it to me right before I get on the plane,” I managed to ask. “That way I can fall asleep when we’re in the air.”
The doctor and the flight attendant looked at each other nervously.
“You don’t want to have to carry me on,” I muttered.
“Why won’t you take my advice?” He sounded a little annoyed now.
“I don’t want to fall asleep. Not yet.”
The doctor shifted uncomfortably, aware that he couldn’t force me to be injected but clearly worried about me nonetheless. “Okay,” he agreed finally. “We’ll do it your way. I’ll stay with you until it’s time for you to board; but when I say so, no arguments. Understood?”
I nodded my head and spent the next couple of hours desperately trying to remain awake. Then, just as exhaustion threatened to overcome me, my flight was called. I rolled up my sleeve once more for the doctor, received the injection, and then stumbled, accompanied by the flight attendant, toward the plane. As I boarded, I was practically unaware of anyone else. I didn’t know if the plane was crowded or empty, or even if there was anyone sitting next to me. I slumped into my seat and instantly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When I awoke, it was dark outside. Confused by the drugs that had been injected into my veins, I was momentarily surprised to be waking up somewhere other than in my little apartment in Amman. Even when the reality of where I was and what I was doing came rushing back to me, it took a while to shake off the chemically induced drowsiness. Gradually I became aware of someone sitting next to me. She was perhaps a couple of years younger than I and looked to be of Asian origin. She was extremely pretty.
“Am I keeping you awake?” she asked with a smile as I yawned rather rudely next to her.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I was very tired.”
“You must have been,” the girl replied. “You’ve been asleep for more than three hours.”
I looked at my watch. She was right—we were well into the flight. The tranquilizer had done its job well, and I was relieved that the stomach pains had subsided; I even found that I was hungry.
“Have they served any food yet?” I asked my companion.
“Not yet.” And as if summoned by our conversation, a flight attendant started rattling a cart of plastic meals down the aisle. I ate mine hungrily while the girl and I fell into easy conversation. She was traveling back to Kuala Lumpur with her family, who were elsewhere on the flight, having been to Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. I told her that I was visiting friends in Malaysia.
“Where are you from?”
“The UAE,” I lied. She seemed to accept my story without question.
“And what do you do for a living?”
“I’m studying to be a doctor.” That at least was half true, and it made me feel good to be able to say it.
She told me her name was Khadija, and she started asking me about my family. In my hand luggage I had a small envelope containing some old photographs that were very precious to me. She would not know that they actually had been taken in Baghdad or Mosul, so I showed them to her, pointing out my mother, Uncle Saad, and my brother and sister. She seemed genuinely interested in them, and I found the process therapeutic. I had not talked to anyone about my family for such a long time that to do so now made me feel closer to them even if I was traveling thousands of miles away from where they were.
After a while the overhead lights dimmed and the hubbub of conversation in the plane ebbed away. We fell silent too, and I suddenly became aware that the girl had rested her head against my shoulder. I could hear her breathing deeply. “Are you okay?” I whispered.
She sat up again, nodded, and smiled. There was a momentary tenseness between us, something unspoken that made me want to break away from her wide-eyed glance, but I couldn’t. And then, spontaneously, as though by some prearranged signal, our lips touched and we gently kissed.
We stayed in that embrace for several minutes. When she pulled away, she looked sheepishly at me, her cheeks faintly rosy and her big eyes blinking just a bit too much. Once more she put her head against my shoulder and we sat there in silence, our fingers interlocked, while everybody about us fell asleep, lulled by the calming hum of the plane’s engines. It was a comfort to me to feel her warmth against my shoulder, and it allowed me to relax and collect my thoughts.
My encounter with Khadija lightened my spirits, but my Iraqi passport still felt like a weight in my jacket and I needed to get rid of it. That way, if I had any trouble entering on my UAE passport, the officials would not find it on me if I was searched, and with no Iraqi passport I could not be deported to Iraq. But hiding a passport on a crowded plane would not be easy, and in any case I wasn’t entirely sure that the document wouldn’t come in useful at some stage in the future. I needed to do something quickly, however. We would soon be in Malaysia, and I couldn’t have the thing on me. I glanced down at the girl, whose head was still on my shoulder. There was no doubt in my mind that she would help me if I asked her to, but it would not be right of me to let her know the truth about what I was doing. What she didn’t know couldn’t incriminate her.
But what if she could help me unwittingly—safely? An idea started to form in my mind, and with it my justifications for acting on it. Looking back, I have to say that I am not particularly proud of what I did next, but it was the only way I could think of achieving what I needed to do.
Surreptitiously I placed the envelope containing my family photos into my pocket. Then I excused myself and walked up the aisle to the lavatory. Safely locked inside, I took my Iraqi passport out of my jacket, slid it inside the envelope with the photographs, then sealed the envelope before walking back to my seat. Khadija and I started talking again in hushed voices, and I waited for an appropriate moment in the conversation before making my request.
“Do you think you could do me a favor?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied. “What is it?”
“I’m not very familiar with the Malaysian postal service. I want to send these photos to my uncle in England, as he was asking for some pictures. Would you send them for me?”
For a moment she didn’t reply, and I silently cursed myself. As I spoke the words, the plan sounded a lot less probable than it had in my head. But I needn’t have worried.
“Sure,” she said.
Thanking her, I wrote the address on the front of the envelope and handed it over. She placed it with the rest of her hand luggage, and the matter was not mentioned again. I comforted myself with the thought that, as a Malaysian coming back to her home country, it was unlikely that she would be searched; and that even if my Iraqi passport was found on her person, it would probably cause her only some small inconvenience, whereas for me it could spell deportation and the horrors that awaited me back in Baghdad.
And then we landed. As the wheels touched down on Malaysian soil, the familiar feeling of sick apprehension reintroduced itself in my gut, and I found myself wishing to be anywhere but where I was.
“Are you all right, Adel?” the girl asked me. I nodded. “Well, I guess I should say good-bye. It was nice to meet you.” She gave me her phone number and address in the area of Petaling Jaya and then flashed me a coquettish little grin, which I struggled to reciprocate. As the plane came to a halt, she stood up and went to join her family.
In the airport terminal I held back at passport control as I wanted to make sure that my Iraqi passport had made it safely through before I presented my documents. I saw the girl and her family waiting to pass through the control booth, and it was with a sense of relief that I witnessed them being waved through without any difficulty. They were Malaysian, of course, but it didn’t seem as if anybody was being questioned in any great detail—not that that did anything to allay the panic I was feeling at what I was about to do. I felt my stomach churning and droplets of sweat dripping down my back; out of the blue I realized how much more crumpled my appearance was than when I had put on my suit the previous morning. It wasn’t long before my turn came.
I stepped confidently up to the booth and fixed the border guard firmly in the eye as I handed him my forged documents. He leafed through the pages of the passport, stopping only briefly to glance at Abu Firas’s phony Jordanian entry and exit stamps. As he turned the page to examine my photograph, I silently said a prayer of thanks to my architect friend and his dexterous skill. The border guard stared at my photograph for a moment, and then at me. I saw his eyebrows crinkle into a frown as he looked back at the photograph, and I stopped breathing momentarily as he began to examine the document a little more closely.
“Where have you come from?” he asked politely.
“Jordan.”
“How long are you staying, sir?”
“A week, maybe two.”
“And where will you go to then?”
“Turkey,” I said confidently—it was another country UAE passport-holders didn’t need a visa for.
He continued to look through my documents as he appeared to mull over the answers I had given.
“How much money have you got, sir?”
“About a thousand dollars.”
“Okay.” He continued reading for a moment, then looked me up and down.
Suddenly, he stamped the passport, slammed it shut, and handed it back to me.
“Welcome to Malaysia, Mr. Ahmed,” he said with what almost passed as a smile.
I couldn’t wait to leave the airport, and having collected my luggage I practically ran across the concourse to the exit doors, which slid open with a satisfying hiss. Immediately when I stepped outside I hit a wall of humidity that soaked my skin practically on impact—a very real and tangible reminder of how far from home I was.
I took a taxi into the center of Kuala Lumpur. The driver made a few attempts to coax me into conversation, but I didn’t speak his language and in any case my thoughts were too much of a whirlwind of relief for me to have been able to talk sensibly to anyone. I kept pulling my UAE passport out of my pocket and looking at it: it was such a small thing, yet it had got me so far. Fifty percent of the way. A ticket to freedom.
I found myself a shabby hotel in a backstreet in one of the less salubrious quarters of the city—it was all my meager budget would allow. Dirt cheap, my room was little more than a couple of meters square, with filthy bedding and cockroaches as roommates. Sleep would be difficult, as the constant clatter of Malaysian families washing their dishes in the courtyard of the shabby tenement block opposite rang through the air seemingly twenty-four hours a day. But the squalor didn’t bother me in the least. If all went according to plan, I would be there for only a few nights before I managed to book my passage to London. Of far greater concern was the fact that I had to leave my precious passport at the reception desk. I wanted to guard that little document with my life—it was my life—and I had tried to argue with the hotel owner, to persuade him to let me carry it with me. He was adamant: the rules were there to be obeyed; and if I wanted a room, the passport would have to be stashed in the open pigeonholes behind his beaten-up desk. Anyone could have taken it—I knew from my experiences over the past few months how vibrant the market in stolen passports was—and this guy had no incentive to keep it safe. And so, several times a day, I found myself wandering back to the hotel to glance at the pigeonhole and check that my passage to freedom had not been stolen.
The following day, I scoured the local travel agents and, having begged the receptionist to let me have my passport for an hour in return for my room key, bought my ticket to London. That, at least, I could keep with me, and it didn’t leave my person while I spent the next few days until my flight wandering the streets, taking in the sights and sounds of Kuala Lumpur. It was such an alien place to me—four thousand miles from home, and a culture that could not have been more different from Baghdad or Amman. I made calls home, speaking once more in my roundabout way so that my family would know that I was safe without learning anything that would incriminate them. When the time came to eat, I spent my money on cheap fast food from Western-style restaurants because the local food was too strange for me to enjoy. And at night I lay on my small, uncomfortable mattress, listening to the scratching of the insects under the bed, waiting for the time when I could board my plane to England.
When the day arrived, I donned my suit once more, reclaimed my passport with an overwhelming sense of relief, and made my way to the airport. Having checked my luggage in, I strode confidently to passport control—my previous success had invigorated me, and I knew nothing was to be gained by a diffident approach—and handed my documents to the officer. As he began to check my papers, I looked around properly for the first time. All around me were armed policemen, thick, bulletproof jackets protecting their torsos and evil-looking weapons slung across their chests. One of them caught me looking at him and returned my gaze with a flat, emotionless look. There was a certain swagger in his stance, as though he took sinister pride in his position of authority, and I remember wondering at that moment how much different my life would have been had the same sense of pride been instilled in me when I had joined the military. No doubt this man would have nothing other than contempt for a deserter like me, because although the world had branded Saddam a criminal, it would no doubt scorch me too if I was caught escaping his terror in this way. The gun and that flat stare were harsh reminders of how unwelcome I was.
“One moment, sir. Wait here, please.” The passport control officer broke me out of my daydream by addressing me. He turned and walked to a side room, leaving me with a line of people behind shaking their heads in disapproval at the unwanted delay. But I was well used to this by now, so I simply held my head up high and did my best to bristle with confidence. A few moments later the officer returned, tapped the keys of his computer, then handed me the passport and nodded me on. I was through.
I waited at the gate, for some reason more nervous than I had been at passport control, and started muttering prayers under my breath. I knew that Malaysia was a hub for people-traffickers trying to smuggle people from the Middle East out, mostly to Australia and Japan but also to Europe. I wouldn’t feel safe until I was in the sky. It was with huge relief that I boarded and felt the now-familiar press of gravity as the plane took off. This time there was no pretty girl to distract or help me—just a faceless businessman who spoke not a word to me for the entire flight. He did not notice, as our airline meals were cleared away, that I held back the plastic serrated knife and secreted it up my sleeve; or if he did, he didn’t mention it.
I knew that I had to destroy my UAE passport to avoid any chance of deportation once I arrived in London, but in my youthful naïveté I supposed that it would be better to do this once I was in European airspace in case I was somehow discovered while we were in the jurisdiction of some place less friendly. It was foolish of me to think, of course, that the plane would be forced to land on account of one stray Iraqi soldier, but I wanted to play it as safe as possible. The hours until we were cruising over the West ticked slowly by, but eventually, as we were flying over Germany, I excused myself and made my way to the toilets. Once safely locked inside, I took out my passport and my knife and proceeded to shred that precious document into indistinguishable ribbons. It took an age to slice my way through the laminated paper. When I was finished, I was left with an unrecognizable mass, which I dropped, slightly regretfully, into the toilet bowl and flushed away. Those bits of paper and plastic that had afforded me safe passage so far disappeared in seconds. I then made my way back to my seat and did the only thing that was left for me to do: wait.
Gradually I began to feel the familiar sensation of the plane losing altitude. It bumped and wobbled its way through the cloud cover, and as it did so my hand gripped the arm rest tightly. The sudden turbulence was making me nervous, certainly; but I could not separate the vague sense of panic I was feeling because of the juddering from the increasing apprehension that seemed to saturate every cell in my body now that I was nearing the very end of my journey. In the next hour I would find out if all the advice I had received, from Abu Firas and others, was sound; in the next hour I would know whether or not I was to be sent back to Iraq; in the next hour I would know my fate.
Suddenly the plane burst through the clouds. I looked expectantly through the small window at the scene below. It was a bleak December day, misty and gray, the sort of weather that I remembered with a nostalgic vagueness from my childhood, and that I never would have hoped to see in the arid dryness or torrential rainy seasons of the Middle East. Fields stretched out like patchwork blankets, their shades of green and brown seeming strange to my Arab eyes. There was the occasional town, gray and sprawling, and long lines of traffic, the car lights on high beam to brighten the way through the foggy atmosphere. It was a bland, chilly, uninviting scene; but I wouldn’t have welcomed that sight any more had all the golden palaces and riches of the East been spread out before my eyes. It was breathtaking. Impossible. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing.
Twenty minutes later we were thundering down the runway. Through the drizzle I could see the sights and sounds of the airport as the loudspeaker crackled into life and made me jump. “Ladies and gentlemen,” spoke the voice of the captain that I had heard but not listened to at any point during the flight, “welcome to London.”
I felt my eyes fill with tears, and I continued to look resolutely out of the window so that my neighbor could not see that I was crying. I had made it. I had arrived.
As we passed through the gates, there were immigration officials standing by. I held my breath as I walked past them, knowing from hearsay that my life would be made a lot more difficult if I was stopped by one of them. Fortunately they were simply chatting among themselves, so I joined the line at the official booths of Heathrow Terminal Three passport control. I watched with amazement the ease with which my fellow passengers were ushered through—their British passports seemed to give them genuine authority that was unavailable to me.
And then my turn came.
I approached the booth with a sense of expectation—excitement, almost—and a smile that was not reciprocated by the surly uniformed woman who received me; but after the aggression I had experienced in the past week, that was not going to worry me. I took a deep breath and, with a slight crack in my voice, spoke the words that I had been practicing in my head for days and days, the words that I knew, hoped, would finally mark the beginning of a new life, free from the tyrannies of my homeland.
“I want to claim political asylum,” I said.