CHAPTER 14
When Rachel gave me a farewell embrace before my departure to Amman, the plan was this: She would not accompany me to Jordan. Instead I would travel alone, hoping that my inability to get a Jordanian visa would not hamper my entry. After all, I had been waved through in Germany, and I knew there was a possibility that I could just pay a fee if I was stopped at the border. Once in Amman, I would meet with my family and buy them two sets of tickets to Malaysia, one set in their Kurdish names on the fake Iraqi passports that would enable them to leave Amman, and one set in the names printed on their fake Spanish passports that would allow them to enter Kuala Lumpur. I booked myself on the flight to Kuala Lumpur, which was to make a stop in Abu Dhabi. That was where we were to meet Rachel, who had flown from London to Abu Dhabi and also was booked on the flight to Kuala Lumpur. Although she was insistent on coming, I could not tell her the details of my plan because I did not want her to be a party to the risks I was taking. I felt sick lying to her, but it was, I calculated, the only way to keep her safe.
It was complicated and finely tuned, but I figured that I had done it once before, so I could do it again.
Miraculously, I entered Jordan without any difficulty whatsoever. Again, one look at the words “Great Britain” afforded me politeness and expedited my passage in such a way that I would have thought impossible a few years previously. I paid a sum equivalent to ten pounds for my visa and was ushered into the country, all the while mindful of the treatment I had received when I last tried to leave. As I walked into the main arrivals area, it was buzzing with people. I scanned the crowds, trying to spot my family, and for a moment I felt a curious tingle of dread, as I thought they were not there. But then I saw them. They were standing in a far corner of the concourse, huddled closely together and looking around nervously, concern etched on their faces, ignored by all around them and emanating an aura that seemed to beg everyone not to pay them any attention. Never did three people look so uncomfortable and out of place, and only then, I think, did the full impact of what they had been through finally sink in. Having seen them before they saw me, I almost tripped up over myself as I hurried over in their direction, but I gradually slowed down as their faces became more distinct. They looked haggard and drained. The way their clothes hung from their bodies spoke loudly of their malnourishment, and you would have been forgiven for thinking, from the black circles around their eyes, that they had been fighting. They looked as if they hadn’t slept in weeks. It cut me to the quick to see them in that state.
And then they saw me. As one, their faces broke into smiles that only seemed to emphasize the pitiful state they were in, but I couldn’t help smiling back: it was so wonderful to see them. Silently we hugged, oblivious to the crowds around us, our bodies absorbing the sensation of one another’s presence as though we were thirsty and drinking deeply from a cup of cool water. There were smiles and there were tears, and I remember thinking that even if everything went wrong from now on, it would be worth it just for that first moment of reunion.
The smell of their clothes reminded me of Iraq, and other things too seemed somehow to speak to me of a difference between us, a gulf that had emerged in the time I had been in the West. As we walked away, the three of them stayed close together, their eyes darting around nervously just as they would have done if they knew they were doing something illicit on the streets of Baghdad. I wanted to tell them to look more confident, but then I remembered how I too had felt when I first arrived in Amman, how I had run from shadows and had wanted nothing more than to blend into the background. They spoke to me humbly, almost diffidently, and of matters that seemed to me to be somehow simplistic. Occasionally I caught my brother and sister looking at me with undisguised awe—a flattering yet painful experience. I suppose that in some way it made me feel superior: I had so much to teach them about the life that, inshallah, awaited them in the UK. But then I forced myself to remember the realities of what they had undergone in prison and since, and I reminded myself that there was in them both strength and worldliness that comfortable Westerners with their Nintendo machines and expensive Reebok sneakers could never know. So I fell in beside them, listening to the minutiae of their conversation as we left the airport.
How many times I had pictured this meeting in my mind’s eye. Now that it had arrived I realized I was unprepared for how beautiful yet horrible an event it would be.
We went straight to my hotel, where I debriefed them about the plan. “As soon as you leave Jordan,” I told them, “you are Spanish citizens. You need to be able to hold your head up high and tell people that. Rachel will meet us in Abu Dhabi. Whatever you do, you can’t let anyone think that you don’t believe your own story.”
They nodded diffidently at me, and I secretly wondered whether they would be up to the task ahead of them. But they had come this far, through Turkey and Syria, so I had to trust them.
Four days remained until our flight to Kuala Lumpur. Ever since I’d known I would be in Amman with my family, I had been looking forward to showing them around, taking them to my old haunts, and I did this. But somehow the place seemed shabbier to my eyes than it had the last time—so far removed from the new me that I felt I was giving my family a guided tour of someone else’s life. We saw the company building where I had worked, the gym, and the road where I had lived, but none of them seemed to hold much meaning for me anymore. I pictured myself walking down the street with Shireen, besotted by her, and I couldn’t help but smile at my own naïveté. I’d come a long way since then.
My family and I ate together in restaurants I knew—more because I wanted to ensure that they started eating proper food than out of any misplaced sense of nostalgia—but the rest of the time was spent in preparation for our journey. I took my mum and my sister to a hair salon to have their hair straightened and blow-dried in a Western style, and I bought Western clothes for them all, along with electronic gadgets for my brother, such as a personal stereo and state-of-the-art headphones. I knew that presentation would be crucial to our success: they could have the most convincing passports in the world, but if they looked like poor Iraqi refugees, they wouldn’t fool anyone.
We waited. We went over the plan. We didn’t talk about what would happen if we failed, because it didn’t bear thinking about. We waited some more. Then the day for our departure arrived.
I didn’t expect any problems leaving Amman, and I was right: we sailed through passport control with hardly a glance and took our seats on the flight to Abu Dhabi, which passed without incident. And, as we had arranged, Rachel was waiting for us there in the transit lounge. If ever there was a sight for sore eyes, Rachel was it: she embraced my mother as though she was her own and instantly won over my brother and sister. I hugged her too, but we didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say: we both knew what she was risking by traveling with us. In the transit lounge we showered, Rachel took my mum to have her hair done again, and we waited some more. I grew increasingly agitated because the more I saw Rachel with my family, the more it became clear to me that you can’t just put new clothes on people and expect them to change who they are. Rachel had an aura about her, a confidence that my family lacked. Of course they did: they’d had it beaten out of them.
Then we boarded the flight to Kuala Lumpur.
The Malaysian airport had changed beyond recognition since I had last been there—all marble walls and gleaming floors. It seemed more welcoming somehow. As we disembarked from the plane, I held back a little. I wanted to see my family get safely through passport control. That way if there was any problem, I would be around to help sort it out. From a distance I watched them present their passports. I held my breath. Moments later they were allowed through.
My entry was more complicated. I had hoped to be able to pay for an entry visa at the airport, but it was soon made clear to me that this would not be the case by the team of task-force officers, heavily armed, who arrived to take me away for interrogation. I used my mobile phone to make a desperate call to Rachel.
“They won’t let me in,” I whispered urgently. “They’re saying they want to send me back to London.”
“Don’t worry, Lewis,” Rachel’s soothing voice said calmly. “We’re through and we’re safe. Leave everything to me—I’ll deal with it from here.”
I clenched my eyes shut. “No,” I told her. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I was always going to be on hand, ready to absolve Rachel of any blame should something go wrong. Now it was looking as if she would have to shoulder all the risk.
“I’ll be fine, Lewis. Don’t worry. We’re at the hotel now. We’ll just keep our heads down and get on the flight to London in a couple of days. We’ll see you then.”
She hung up.
Minutes later I was being interrogated again, by unfriendly Malaysians and apologetic airline staff whose responsibility it had been to check my Malaysian visa situation when I had left Amman. I argued with them; I begged them; finally I accepted the inevitable—that I was to be deported to London. And it was only then that they decided they would issue me a three-day transit visa. I felt suddenly as though all my cares had been lifted, and I hurried into a taxi to have a relieved and joyous reunion with my family at our hotel.
Stage one was complete.
Stage two was always going to be more difficult, but the fact that the fake Spanish passports had so easily fooled the official when my family entered Malaysia filled us all with confidence.
We spent the two days before our flight to London visiting around Kuala Lumpur—more to fill the time than out of a genuine desire to go sightseeing. We were all too excited and nervous for that. As we sat down together at mealtimes to eat, I forced my family to practice the few words of Spanish that Rachel and I knew between us, and we repeatedly went over the cover story that I had constructed for them until they could recite it with confidence. My mother had married a Spanish man living in London, which was how they had gained Spanish citizenship. She had brought Ahmed and Marwa to visit Malaysia because it was a Muslim country. They had long wanted to see Malaysia because they had heard how wonderful and modern it was, but they were looking forward to getting back home.
Every time I heard them repeat the story, I smiled. It sounded convincing; the passports were good; we were going to be okay.
The morning of our departure the tropical rains came like a constant waterfall, purging the streets of crowds and cleansing the grayness of the city. We checked out of the hotel and piled into a taxi, the pouring rain messing my mother’s neatly groomed hair as we did so, then traveled the short distance through the torrent to the airport. Once we arrived, Rachel and my family checked in separately, and I waited behind, watching them go through immigration. This was the last hurdle: as soon as I saw them go through, we would have succeeded.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The official looked at Rachel. He looked at my family, each in turn. He examined their passports with agonizing slowness. And then he let them through.
I smiled inwardly; on the outside I did my best not to let any emotion play on my face. I walked confidently toward passport control, knowing that now that my family was through, I should have no difficulty. My papers were scrutinized, and they were scrutinized once more. The official tapped something into his computer, and I started to feel the familiar sense of dread that I remembered from my last illicit journey. Why I was kept waiting there, I don’t know, but kept waiting I was. I heard the final call for my flight being announced, and I looked at my watch. Five minutes and still I was being held. Eventually, without any explanation for the delay, my papers were stamped and I literally sprinted toward the gate.
The corridor that took me there twisted and turned, and I attracted a few curious glances as I tore around the corners until finally I found myself at the seating area at the entrance to the gate. And there I stood still, desperate to catch my breath but unable to do so on account of what I saw. There, before me, were three task-force officers, bulletproof vests on full display and U.S.-style machine guns gripped firmly in their hands. With them was an official-looking British woman in a brown business suit. And by her side, sitting down and looking more dejected than scared, were Rachel, my mother, my brother, and my sister. Apart from them, the area was deserted.
The brown-suited woman approached me. “Can I see your passport, please?”
I handed her my travel document, and she gave it a cursory glance.
“Are these people with you?” Her face and voice were expressionless.
I felt everyone’s eyes on me. What could I say? “We’re traveling together, yes,” I replied quietly.
“Are they your family?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She turned to the task-force officers and gave them a nod. We’ve got them all, it seemed to say. One of the officers disappeared, and it was obvious that he had gone to tell the airline staff that the flight could now depart.
There was a heavy silence, which the woman broke with her monotonous voice. “Walk with me,” she addressed us all. My family looked at me for guidance, but there was little I could do other than nod to indicate that we should do as she said. They stood up and followed us, the armed guards walking behind with their fingers still on the triggers of their guns. As we walked, I suddenly realized that in my pocket I had my family’s Kurdish-Iraqi passports, documents that I on no account wanted to be discovered now that we had quite clearly been caught. If there were no Iraqi passports, I reasoned in my panicked mind, there would be no deportations back to Iraq. They would have to use the Spanish passports, which I knew looked authentic. I stopped and said to the woman, “I need to use the toilet.”
She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and pointed at a door a little farther down the corridor. “Okay,” she said. “Toilet’s over there.”
I hurried through the door. The room was empty, so I shoved one passport into each of three toilets and flushed them away, this time not bothering to shred them as I had done to my own passport several years before. There wasn’t time for that, and as a result I watched in horror as the toilets backed up. I couldn’t worry about that, though, so I took a couple of moments to regain my composure, then headed back to my family and their armed guard. We walked on in silence.
My mind was churning. Surely there was something I could do, something I could say to get us out of this mess. Eventually I turned once more to the woman and said, “Look, please, I need to talk to you alone for ten minutes.”
“All right then.” She nodded and took me to one side.
We took a seat together by a large observation window, through which I could see planes taking off as if to taunt me. “What’s the matter?” I asked the woman. “Why are we being held?”
She indicated the Spanish passports that she had in her hand. “Do you speak Spanish?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Then why does your family have Spanish passports?”
“My mum married a Spanish man.” I recited the lie as smoothly as I could. “She has citizenship.”
The woman acted as if she had not heard what I’d said. “Where did you get these passports from?”
“I told you,” I insisted. “They’re naturalized Spaniards.”
“No they’re not,” she almost spoke over me. “These passports are counterfeit. They are very, very bad copies. I see them all the time—they’re made mostly in Thailand. How much did you pay for them?”
She looked me straight in the eye, and I saw in that moment that I wasn’t fooling her. But I couldn’t bring myself to answer.
“Did you pay a lot for them?” she insisted.
I nodded.
Her face assumed an expression of something approaching pity. “Well let me just tell you,” she continued, “that these things are produced in Thailand for between a hundred and two hundred dollars. They are the worst I’ve ever seen, and you are unbelievably lucky to have come through immigration with these.”
As I listened to her words, my blood ran cold. How could I have been so foolish? Within seconds my plan to rescue my family had been revealed for the ill-conceived scheme that it really was, and I had no idea what would happen to any of us now. The woman stood up, smoothed down her suit. “Come with me,” she said abruptly as she walked back to where the others were waiting, a look of expectation on their faces that I had to dash with a single glance and a shake of my head.
We were led to a processing area. Full of desks and computers and phones, it looked more like a call center than anything else, and quite out of place in the environs of the airport. Each desk was covered with piles of passports and other documents, and we were given seats and told to wait. We remained there for a couple of hours, our hearts heavy, the knowledge that we had failed bearing down on us like a crushing load. Overcome by emotion, my mother started shouting at me, and I argued back but only half-heartedly because I knew that what she was saying—this was my fault, I had been too hasty, didn’t I know what was at stake here?—was right. Rachel calmed us both down. How she did so I can’t think, because she must have been as sick with nerves as the rest of us. But I thanked God that she was there to exert her calming influence on us all as we fell once more into oppressive silence.
We were searched, our luggage was claimed as evidence, and then we were led around the corner from the processing area. I had noticed a few people being taken that way and the guards who accompanied them returning alone. As the same happened to us, I realized why.
In front of us were two enormous cells, one facing the other. Fronted by thick iron bars, one of the cells contained men, the other women, and between the two cells, sitting down, was a fat but threatening Malaysian guard. Along the back wall of each cell was a series of doors, and in the corner was some sort of receptacle that I assumed was the toilet. Around it was a thick, dirty puddle that encroached into the main area of the cell, contaminated with something I could not quite make out, though the stench of human feces and urine gave me a good idea what it was. The part of the floor that was not wet with water and human excrement was black with dirt and covered with a ghoulish human kaleidoscope of prostrate bodies, perhaps three or four hundred of them in each cell. There was not enough room for them all, so they overlapped each other as they lay there, unmoving. None of them seemed perturbed by the flies that were swarming around the room. Maybe, like horses on a hot day, they were used to them.
I couldn’t bear to look at Rachel or my family. Suddenly, from behind, I heard screaming. It was my mother. “La! La! Bidoun Sijan! No! Not prison!” she shouted hysterically. I watched helplessly as two guards dragged her toward the prison doors; she collapsed herself onto the floor to make it more difficult for them, then continued her terrible weeping. The faces of my brother and sister were stricken too. To have escaped the horrors of Baghdad prisons and undergone all the dangers they had put themselves through only to end up in a stinking cell in a strange country: I couldn’t imagine what was going through their minds. Wordlessly the women were segregated from the men.
I could think of nothing to do other than try to get a message to somebody, to let people know what was happening to us. The only people I could think of were Rachel’s parents: it would devastate them to think of their little girl in such a horrific situation, but they had the right to know, and maybe they could help. I had placed my mobile phone in one of my bags, but these had been checked in. Suddenly, however, I saw them arrive and be placed a few meters away from us. Quickly I moved toward my bag to get the phone; but as I did so, one of the officials saw me, a Sikh man wearing a turban. As I lunged for my bag, he grabbed me by my arms, pulled me away, thrust me against the wall, and lifted me up by my neck. He made as if to punch me with his free arm but clearly thought better of it at the last moment.
“Who do you think you are,” he spat at me, “doing all this hero business? You think you’re Robin Hood?”
I hardly knew what to say. I had only been there a few minutes and already I had marked myself out in their eyes as a troublemaker. Shocked into silence, I looked him up and down as he held me there against the wall. On his jacket he wore a badge with a grotesquely happy, yellow smiling face and the slogan “Service with a Smile.”
Eventually the unsmiling official put me down, but his eyes stayed on me. I didn’t try to grab my phone again.
I watched as Rachel, my mum, and my sister were pushed into the cell, somehow retaining a sense of dignity—despite my mother’s tears—as they stepped over the carpet of human traffic to find themselves somewhere to sit. Rachel turned and managed to force a smile at me that I could not reciprocate as my brother and I were forced into the main cell.
Silently we picked our way to the back of the cell, receiving grunts of discontent from a few of the people whose limbs we accidentally nudged against but who otherwise treated us with complete indifference. We examined the three doors at the back of the cell. Scrawled into the dirty paint on each door was a label: “The Turkish Embassy,” “The Iranian Embassy,” “The Iraqi Embassy.” I opened the Iraqi door and looked around the corner. The room was no cleaner or more welcoming, but it was filled with Middle Eastern faces who as one looked up to see who the new arrival was.
“Salam,” I nodded at them.
They greeted me in return, so I gestured to my brother and we both walked inside.
The Iraqi Embassy was no more than three meters by three meters. Right away I could tell that its eight or nine occupants were shady characters—no doubt they thought the same of me and my brother—but they were welcoming enough, given the circumstances. We found ourselves an empty area and sat down, shocked into silence with disbelief at what had happened to us. There were single sheets of newspaper on the floor, the only protection between us and the hard, cold concrete. The strip lighting above us was intolerably bright, and the air conditioning was on full blast, no doubt to battle feebly against the disgusting stench, though in reality all it did was make the place uncomfortably cold. No matter how many cells you’ve been in, you never quite get used to being treated no better—and often worse—than animals; but my brother and I did our best as we settled down and started waiting.
After a few hours, we were given food. Its arrival was announced by the sound of someone shouting outside the main cell, followed by a melee as some of the inmates scrabbled to get their share. My brother and I were hungry, so we stood up to go and claim our food, but one of our fellow Iraqi prisoners told us to wait. “There’s always enough to go around,” he said, “but it’s filthy food. You probably won’t want to eat it even when you get it.”
He was right. When our turn came, an official handed each of us, through the bars, a small polystyrene box. We opened it up to find a mound of crusty, dried-out rice with a suspicious smell—the remnants, I later found out, of what they had fed the Malaysian staff at a previous meal. Laid on top was a pile of fish bones. There was no meat attached to them, just the skeleton, as if we were being presented not so much with a meal as with an insult. The fish was enjoyed, the carton seemed to say, by important people. The bones are for you. We also were handed a nylon bag full of lukewarm water to drink.
The agonizingly slow minutes turned into hours, which turned into days. Indeed it was difficult to keep track of time in that terrible place. In the main cell, where people had been languishing for who knows how long, certain individuals had become so ill from the conditions that they were hallucinating, shouting out at shadows, laughing hysterically, or causing violent fights because of an imagined slight. Back in the Iraqi Embassy we fell into conversation with our fellow Middle Eastern prisoners—Syrians, Palestinians, Iranians, a true melting pot of Arab culture—and I was astonished by the lengths to which some of them had gone to get themselves to a place of safety. A couple of them had had huge tattoos drawn on their arms and backs in an attempt to make them seem Westernized. Many of them had been trying to get to Australia, New Zealand, or Japan—Japan in particular, because at that time, I soon learned, a large mafia organization there was dedicated to the dirty business of people-smuggling. These people asked me questions about the UK, awed that I had made it there and astonished that I had risked coming back. To kill the tedium of the passing hours I told them about the geography and history of Britain, drawing crude maps in the dust on the floor and even at one point telling them the story that Rachel had told me about how William of Orange had fought in Ireland. It was a surreal moment, seeing these rapt Middle Eastern faces being taught British history in a Malaysian jail by one of their number, their faces a picture of concentration like a group of children hearing a fairy tale.
Occasionally I went to the front of the main cell, treading over the human carpet of Bengalis and Sri Lankans, and Rachel did the same in the opposite cell. The first time we did this, she smiled across the corridor that divided us and, as cheerfully as she could, called, “You take me to the nicest places, Lewis!” Then she removed something from her pocket: it was the restaurant menu from the hotel where we had been staying. “Now then,” she called, “what shall we have for lunch? Lobster?” And so we carried on, doing our best to crack jokes, to make light of the situation and raise each other’s spirits; but we knew it was an almost impossible task.
Neither Rachel nor my brother mentioned it, but we were all aware that the long-term consequences for us all could be very severe indeed. And I felt responsible for everything. I had no idea at this stage what would happen to my family, but I suddenly felt a renewed sense of fraternal responsibility for my younger brother. I remembered how I felt when, not much older than he, I was cast into that Iraqi jail on the road north from Basra; I remembered how I felt when I heard that my mother had been imprisoned in Al-Haakimiya. He would be having the same feelings now, albeit with his brother by his side, and I suddenly felt the urge to give him some words of advice for the difficult times ahead.
“Ahmed,” I said, “I need to tell you something.”
“What is it, Sarmed?”
I searched for the words. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you need to be strong, for your mother and your sister. Remember, this life is a test of your strength. There will be people you encounter who will try to beat it out of you, but you must never let them. You can’t fold and give up. So we’re in prison. So what? It’s just going to make you stronger. At least we aren’t dying. Hold your head up high, puff out your chest, be strong, and don’t let anyone treat you badly.”
He looked straight into my eyes. “I know what you’re saying, Sarmed,” he replied. “And I’ll try. I really will.”
As the time ground slowly on, we became aware of how the place worked. We couldn’t bring ourselves to eat the food, but thankfully in my back pocket I had a little money, which I would dole out to one of the less ferocious guards outside the cell. He would go and buy food at McDonald’s in the airport—skimming a little money off the top for himself, of course—and deliver the food back to us. I had to buy enough to hand around something to everybody in the Iraqi Embassy, but it felt good occasionally to have some hot food in our stomachs.
Time passed. Other prisoners arrived; a few left. After about three days, an Oriental-looking man, reasonably well dressed, arrived in the cell. Something about his demeanor suggested to me that he was a bit different from the ragtag collection of unfortunates whom he had joined, so more to pass the time than anything else I went up to talk to him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him after we had made our introductions.
“I don’t know,” he said, his face a picture of innocence. “I’m an American citizen and my girlfriend is American. I don’t understand why we’ve been stopped.” Even then I don’t think I believed him, and I was right—sometime later he let his cover story drop and admitted that, even though he really was an American citizen, he had been trying to smuggle this girl to New Zealand. More important, however, he had managed to sneak his mobile phone into the cell so that he could phone the U.S. Consulate in Kuala Lumpur and alert American officials to his presence. But he didn’t know the number and had no way of finding out.
I grabbed my opportunity. “I can help you,” I told him. “Let me borrow your phone, and I can call people in England to find the number of the UK High Commission for me and the U.S. Consulate for you.”
By now we had attracted the attention of certain others in the cell, and I became aware of them eyeing the American’s phone. No doubt everyone would be wanting to use it, and as he handed it over, I noticed that the battery life was limited. We couldn’t let any of the others get their hands on it and use up the precious time that was left. I just had to hope that nobody would be so desperate as to try to wrestle the thing away from me.
I used the phone to find the numbers I needed, and then called the High Commission. I explained to the woman who answered what our situation was, and she promised to see what she could do. “But I doubt we’ll be able to do anything for the Iraqis in your group,” she told me. “They’re out of our jurisdiction.”
I had known it was unlikely that they would be able to help my family, but hearing the words spoken so firmly made my heart sink. Still, if I could at least get myself out, perhaps I could do something for them. I was useless just stuck in there.
We waited some more.
Eventually, after we had been four days in that stinking cell, I heard my name being shouted: there was a call for me outside the cell. I was allowed out, with the eyes of all the other prisoners boring into me, and taken to a telephone. Someone from the British High Commission was waiting to speak to me.
“We can’t guarantee to influence what the Malaysians are doing,” I was told. “We can only try.”
“But what about my family?” I asked.
“There’s nothing we can do for any of them,” the British official stated with what sounded to me like a note of boredom in his voice. “They will have to stay here and wait for the Iraqi representative to come.”
“There must be something else we can do,” I pleaded.
I knew from my conversations with the Iraqis in the cell that the representative came only once a month. And when he did arrive, all he would do was take names and reprimand the inmates. “Why did you do this?” he would demand of them. “Don’t you realize what a reputation you are creating for Iraqis in this country? They’re not impressed back home with what you’re doing…” And then he would disappear; what would happen to my family was anyone’s guess.
When the call finished, I put my head in my hands and tried to fight off the feeling of furious frustration that was surging through me. Suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the task-force officer who had led me from the cell: he had been standing close by while I had the conversation and clearly understood what was going on. I prepared myself to be told to get back into the cell, but I was surprised when he spoke. “Your family,” he asked me softly in faltering English, “did they have any documents other than the passports they were stopped with?”
I looked around nervously, unsure whether this was a trap; but I was in a corner and had no option other than to tell the truth.
“Yes,” I admitted. “They had Iraqi passports.”
“Where are they now?”
“I shoved them down the toilet,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Listen to me. You have to get those passports back; otherwise your family will rot in a Kuala Lumpur prison. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen before.”
“How can I?” I asked desperately.
“Leave it to me,” the guard said. “I’ll have to take you back to the cell now, but I’ll try to call you out later.”
He led me back to the cell, where I continued my wait—even more scared this time, and more frustrated at the thought that in getting rid of my family’s Iraqi passports I may have ruined any chance they had of getting out of this place. In any case, the likelihood of the passports still being there was vanishingly small. What was more, my opinion of the Malaysians was at rock bottom, and I didn’t expect this guard to be true to his word.
He proved me wrong. A few hours later he let me out again and led me to the toilets down which I had stuffed the passports. When we arrived there, I stepped into the first cubicle and gave thanks first that I had caused the toilets to overflow and so remain unused, and second that nobody had seen fit to fix them for four days. Without hesitation I plunged my arm into the water and felt inside the U-bend. Something was there. Persistently I teased it out and with something between astonishment and relief pulled out a document. It was saturated, of course, and smeared; but the photograph was intact and it was clear what it was: my mother’s Iraqi passport. Quickly I retrieved the others, which were in the same condition. I shook what water I could from them, then dried them off underneath the electric hand-dryer on the wall. The task-force officer took the passports from me and placed them in little plastic bags as evidence.
Then I was led back to the cell.
With mixed feelings I sat down again next to my brother. In handing the passports over to the Malaysian guard, I knew what would happen: my family would be deported. My gamble was this: as there was no direct flight back to Iraq, and as they had entered Malaysia from Jordan, I hoped that the Malaysians would deport them back to Amman. At least then they would be on Middle Eastern soil, where they could speak the language and hopefully persuade—or bribe—the Jordanians to let them stay. The alternative was, as the Malaysian guard had made so plain, rotting here in a putrid jail. I couldn’t let that happen.
Before long, Rachel and I were released. We were informed that no charges were to be brought against us and that we were free to go back to London.
“I’m staying,” I told our captors defiantly. What else could I say? My family was still here, and I couldn’t desert them. We took a room at the airport hotel, where we cleaned ourselves up; but every time the water splashed on my skin or my eyes glanced at the soft, fresh bedding, great anger welled up in me. How could I be here while my family was in those squalid, cramped, and stinking conditions? They were people too—surely it was time they were treated as such. I visited them four or five times a day, bringing with me the hotel food that I didn’t have the stomach to eat and begging the guards to give it to them.
After a couple of days, I was told they were to be interviewed. I was allowed to act as their interpreter but was forbidden from having any other kind of conversation with them. One by one they were taken in front of Malaysian officials and instructed to make statements. They told the truth: about their imprisonment, about their journey through Kurdistan, Turkey, and Syria, about the fake Spanish passports. And then they were told what would happen to them. They had a choice: either their case would be taken before a Malaysian judge—which would take weeks and would probably result in a further spell of imprisonment, as there was no asylum in Malaysia—or they could pay a fine and be deported back to Jordan. The fine amounted to $750 each. Money they didn’t have.
I needed to find $2,250. I was stuck in Malaysia, and all I had was a debit card, a credit card, and the ability to withdraw £200 a day. Immediately I got on the phone to my bank in England and begged them to increase my overdraft and my withdrawal limits. Rachel and I cobbled together all the money we could—it took two days—and in the end we just about managed to put our hands on the amount we needed. We took it back to the cells and handed it over to a sneering official. He sat at his table, handed us a receipt for the money, put on a pair of latex gloves, removed the Iraqi passports from their bags, and stamped them. Then, having placed them in a plastic bag, he held them out to us at arm’s length as though they were diseased. His aloof silence spoke with an eloquence that I’m sure he could not have managed with mere words: So it’s come to this for you people,he seemed to say. Your lives have come to this. There was no sympathy, no indication that he knew what my family was running from or what they were being sent back to, and there was no point trying to educate him. I simply took the passports from him and left him to his delusions.
And so, finally, the time came for my mother, sister, and brother to be deported. Still we weren’t allowed any direct contact with them. All Rachel and I could do was wait behind a glass screen at their gate so that we could see them one last time, even if we weren’t allowed to talk to them. When they arrived, the sight pierced my heart. My mother, brother, and sister were handcuffed like criminals and led by armed officials to their gate. The Western clothes that they had worn for their journey now looked like a cruel, ragged parody. My mother looked even more bedraggled and beaten down than when she had first arrived. As she passed us, she refused to look me in the eye, and I didn’t blame her as she shuffled past. I hung my head, and Rachel put her arm around me. My sister saw us and managed a half smile. “Good-bye, Sarmed,” she mouthed. “Good-bye, my brother.” She followed her mother.
Finally I saw Ahmed. He was walking slowly, and when he saw me, his tired and worried face struggled into a broad smile. Don’t worry about us, it seemed to say. We’ll be okay. And then, just as I had told him to, I saw him hold his head up high and stick his chest out proudly. He nodded at me, I returned the gesture, and he walked on, disappearing from my sight as my mother and sister had just done.
Walking into whatever the future held for them, without me.