After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

The meeting did not stop Bob from coming, but it did make her neighbors less likely to open the door to him, at least some of them.

  Mu Naw understood why it was hard for refugees, who had always lived in countries where uniforms implied danger, to now trust that the police and their caseworkers were telling the truth. One of the white women explained that the detectives had arrested Bob on suspicion of child abuse—that was the picture they had shown at the community meeting, what they called a “mug shot”—but that the little boy who accused Bob was now no longer willing to tell his story. The detectives had called the white women and told them that, on the day they went to arrest Bob, they had found several Burmese boys hidden under the bed and in the closet of his home. But those boys were not willing to speak to the police either. Translators were working with the woman and the RST caseworkers and other volunteers, trying to convince the families to tell the detectives if Bob had ever touched their sons. The police knew that Bob had molested the children, but they could not prove it, and without proof, there was little they could do in a country where they were bound by civil laws. Bob could keep coming and the only deterrent was the will of the community, unless someone gave them the proof they needed.

  Two of the white women saw Bob leave in a pickup truck loaded with Burmese boys. They called the police and then went to Mu Naw’s house. Later that day, uniformed officers knocked on the doors of the families that had let their children leave with him. No one answered their knocks; the lights inside the apartments were all turned off.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later, a Karen friend invited Mu Naw to come over for another meeting with another group of white people. This time it was a man who was coming to tell the people in the apartment complex about new jobs. The pudgy white man sat in her neighbor’s living room and spoke loudly so that the people gathered outside on the porch could hear: He worked for a company that wanted to hire all of them, right now, to work in a meat processing plant. It was a good job—you did not have to speak English. Husbands and wives could work. The children could go to school and they had places where young children could go. The apartments were cheap. They would all be paid good wages. They just needed to be ready to go in two weeks. The company would send a bus to come get them; they would move all of their furniture, too, for free.

  When he was done, Mu Naw looked around and realized that she had heard something totally different from most of her friends. That night, she talked it over with Saw Ku. They felt that God had called them to Austin, and they were beginning to like it here, finally finding their way. And, as Saw Ku said, “Cheaper does not always mean better. In fact, cheaper is often worse.” His brother and sister-in-law felt the same. They would stay, they all agreed.

  Only one other family stayed too. For the next two weeks, Mu Naw watched in disbelief and then despair as her new friends packed up their houses to move. She could barely speak for crying when the couple next door—the ones who felt like grandparents to her children—told her they were going too. She begged them to stay, but the promise of good jobs for both of them was too tempting. Mu Naw helped them pack boxes, received lamps and desks and chairs that people did not want to take, cried and cooked and prayed.

  On the designated morning, when two charter buses pulled into the parking lot outside of her building, she woke her children so they could say good-bye and stood with Saw Ku, his brother, sister-in-law, and their children, and the other Karen family by the door of the bus. Each person filed by and hugged them or shook their hands.

  Two years before, she had been the one boarding the bus that would take her to the airport and then to the United States. She had hugged her mother and her relatives and Saw Ku’s relatives just like this. She had held her daughters out to be kissed one more time by their grandmothers. She had gotten on the bus, nervous but excited, preparing for a new life that was nothing but a promise, nothing but a whiff of hope.

  As the buses pulled away, the depression that Mu Naw thought she had moved past settled at once and immediately on her shoulders. She wrapped herself in it again, pulling it tight around her.

  Seeing a man in the shadows who looked like Bob only increased her despair. She cried for hours, days. She cried as she had when she first arrived. She cried for herself, alone again except for two other families, in this apartment complex that had been full and almost felt like home.

  Until now she had never considered what her mother had gone through when she had watched her daughter get on that bus that would take her to a new life a world away. She felt a rush of empathy.

  Her mother deserved to be here, to be out of the camp, to take showers, eat hot food from an oven, wear new clothes.

  Mu Naw made an appointment with a caseworker—she had not been a client of RST for years, but after the community meeting about Bob, she worked for them as a translator sometimes. The caseworker told her that her mother would have to apply for resettlement first.

  But when she spoke with her mother later that month over her Cricket phone, her mom balked. What would she do in a foreign country? She was glad Mu Naw was doing well, but her life was here in the camp. Mu Naw tried to convince her to apply for resettlement, but her mother was uninterested. Eventually they stopped speaking about it.

  Mu Naw and Saw Ku stayed until their lease was up in the apartment complex that felt gutted without her friends, then moved to another apartment complex for a year, then to another. They stayed near Jaw Jaw and Deh Deh, but the loss of their little thriving community—her found family—revealed a complex minefield of fears that Mu Naw had not realized still lay submerged beneath the surface of her life.

  Her fears did not go off all at once. But when the explosions came, her anger pocked the terrain of her family. She seemed incapable of stopping herself.

  She felt her mind divide—one part of her felt immense satisfaction at the results of these explosions, as if they were inevitable and it was better to have done with it. The other part of her lived with dawning horror, working to mitigate the damage, trying to stop it. The mental divide deepened as the destructive force of her anger found a target: Saw Ku. By the time they moved to their last apartment complex, it was hard for her to remember the sweetness with which they had held each other’s hand over their new baby just three years before.

  Ironically, in that last apartment complex, Mu Naw began to find the kind of community she had known in their first one. The women were not Karen like all of her first friends, but they were all from Myanmar, and Kachin and Karenni were not that different, it turned out. She was still friends with some of the white women from before and they began to start passing out looms and yarn again. Mu Naw connected them with people who wanted to weave; some of the women wanted to make jewelry and she helped with that too. She was at the center of things again, eager to help them all connect and make new lives but, this time, intimately aware of how quickly it could all evaporate.

  She continued translating for RST as well as Caritas, another agency that took care of refugees in Austin. She could translate from English now, not just from Burmese, which meant she was in high demand. The white women paid her to pass out yarn and looms and translate for them; they held English classes and artisan meetings and homework help in the evenings for the kids at an apartment they called the Village Center. Dr. Salai, an incredibly skilled Burmese translator in his eighties, whom the whole community revered and called “grandfather,” praised her work. Mu Naw shone with pride.

  Outside the doors of her home, her life appeared to be one of the success stories of the refugee resettlement program. The teachers at Central Presbyterian who taught English to refugees in Austin took a portrait of Mu Naw and her children on World Refugee Day. They mounted the picture on cardboard and it hung in their office for years. When new refugees arrived, they pointed to Mu Naw, grinning and wearing her traditional Karen clothes. You can be like her someday, they told the new arrivals. This
woman is now one of our translators. She and her husband both have good jobs. They are paying their bills. Their children go to school and they are happy. Theirs is a very happy home.

  Chapter 18

  HASNA

  RAMTHA AND IRBED, JORDAN, FEBRUARY–DECEMBER 2013

  Enough neighbors and friends from Daraa came to Ramtha over the next few weeks bringing news from home that Hasna was able to piece together a sense of the life that Jebreel, Malek, Laila, and Hamad were leading. Laila and Malek had moved in with Jebreel to help him protect their house; their own apartment had been damaged in the shelling. The government attacks ebbed and flowed—this she knew from observing the city from her rooftop perch.

  Occasionally, Laila or Malek would slip away to go stay with cousins for a few days in the rural areas near the Jordanian border, where they could occasionally get cell phone service to call Jordan. She lived for those days. The calls often dropped and they could not really say how they were doing in case their words were overheard, but to hear their voices—to tell Hamad she loved him, to send messages of love to Jebreel—was bittersweet.

  One of the phone calls carried news that devastated Hasna for weeks—while Malek and Laila were at relatives’ homes and Jebreel was working, looters had gotten into their house. They had taken all of Hasna’s clothing, all of the porcelain dishes, the Persian rugs, the paintings she loved from the walls, her table. Even though she was far away, Hasna felt violated. She could see every inch of those rugs, the pulls in the weaving, the stains from where her children had spilled things, the corners that were curling up slightly after years of use. She knew every curve of the porcelain, the dishes she only used for formal occasions. She could feel the clothes against her skin, the long black dresses that she had loved, with glittery edging designed to separate them from her everyday clothes. And the loss of her table felt symbolic—it was nothing special, just a plain table of dark, smooth wood, long enough for a dozen chairs, but every important conversation in her adult life, every meal with her children, every coffee or tea with relatives and friends, all of it happened around that table.

  Hasna tried to imagine what her city was like now and she could not. This lawless place Laila described had nothing to do with the city of peace and neighborliness that Hasna loved. All of the neighbors around her—Um Ibtihal, Um Ahmad, all of their cousins—everyone was gone. No one noticed, or at least they did nothing, when looters carried away her belongings in broad daylight.

  She recognized now that, of all the forms of grief she endured, this was the most agonizing: to be safe while her home and her family were not. It was a wound that could not heal, that was searingly fresh every day.

  * * *

  —

  One day, a call came to her cell phone from a number she did not recognize. It was a Jordanian number and she answered it at once, thinking perhaps Laila had found a way into the country. Instead, it was someone from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The woman on the phone introduced herself and asked Hasna if she would be interested in applying for refugee resettlement somewhere in the world. Hasna almost laughed out loud; the woman might as well have told her she could enter to win a free trip to the moon. Hasna had never been on an airplane and spoke no other languages. She only ever imagined travel in the more fantastical moments of her life, but even those dreams were in the Middle East—Mecca, of course, possibly Beirut, maybe Abu Dhabi.

  “Sure,” she responded. “Why not?” The conversation was short. She assumed the woman was misinformed or had gotten her file confused with someone else’s. She thought about the phone call a few times over the next several weeks but eventually forgot about it in the stress of the next few months.

  * * *

  —

  They moved to Irbed, Jordan. Changing cities felt like a further act of admitting that their life in Jordan was not temporary. But in Irbed, Amal could take the final classes to finish her computer science degree and Rana could go to a school that was closer than the one they trekked to every day in Ramtha. Most importantly, Samir, Yusef, and Khassem could find better work there than in Mafraq.

  They found a three-bedroom apartment full of white tiles and light. Hasna watched Noor and Maria while Amal went to classes and Rana was in school. When Amal finished her classes, Hasna spent the afternoons shopping for furniture to replace what the looters had taken. The apartment in Ramtha had been furnished with particle-board items and Hasna took some pleasure in buying things for their new home with a small portion of her gold—everything she bought in Jordan, she pictured in her home in Daraa. When the war was over, they would rent a truck, and she would come back from Jordan with a gleaming wood table and porcelain dishes that might not have the same sentimental associations as the ones she had lost, but that would still serve her loved ones.

  Her new kitchen was big enough for a large stove that needed six gas canisters, and Hasna cooked again for her family, gathered as often as they could around the table at night. They left Jebreel’s traditional place at the head of the table free; there was room at the end of the table where Malek and Laila would one day sit. Hasna tried to keep herself in a positive frame of mind. Either they would all find their way to this apartment in Irbed, which was not ideal but which was still much better than what most refugees in Jordan had—she still struggled to picture herself as a refugee—or, if Allah willed it, Assad would be overcome by the Free Syria Army or the UN would get involved, and she would take all of this furniture home. Amal, with her new degree, would get a good job; her sons, with the savings they were accumulating in Jordan, would start a business. They would rebuild out of the ashes of this war.

  Khassem came back to the apartment one day and told her that he had met a friend from Daraa whose little sister was at a marriageable age. His eyes gleamed and, when Hasna asked if she was pretty, he picked his mother up and twirled her around the kitchen. She swatted him until he put her down and they both laughed. He had asked his friend to see, quietly, what her parents might think of a potential match. Hasna grinned to see her taciturn son hopeful.

  Word came from Syrian neighbors around them that Assad had used chemical weapons in Ghouta, a suburb outside Damascus, against rebel forces. At first, Hasna was confused—had they not been using chemicals throughout the war? The white phosphorous grenades continued to haunt her dreams. She looked up the news on her phone—the ability to read news from around the world never ceased to amaze her—and was horrified. Her Facebook feed, made up of Syrians outside the country, was full of images of bodies of those killed in the attack. She could not bear to turn away; one of the pictures of a father holding his son looked so much like Malek holding Hamad that she burst out sobbing before she could stop herself, scaring Rana and the little girls.

  Fellow refugees told her about the president of the United States, who declared that Assad had crossed a red line. Hasna felt nervously optimistic—she was afraid of what would happen to her country if it became a pawn between Iran and Russia on one side and the United States, France, and England on the other. But she desperately hoped that the people in Ghouta had not died in vain. If the pictures compelled her, she could not imagine their impact on the people in the US—now they would finally do something to save the children of Syria. She began to pray that the coming war would be better for her country than the US war in Iraq had been, that Assad would leave peacefully without killing anyone else.

  After the chemical attack in Ghouta, Syrians spilled out of the country like water from a split barrel. Those who could not leave at least moved, so that eventually most of the rebels were concentrated in a few key areas—including Daraa. Suddenly there seemed to be many more Syrians in Jordan than there had been before. Hasna knew from listening to the stories that her situation was unusual. The fact that she had most of her children with her was a blessing she did not take lightly; Amal and Samir, Yusef and Khassem all worked together to pay rent while Hasna w
atched the children and kept their home. Syrians were still not legally supposed to work, but there were contract jobs for those willing to take them. Wages were lower and rent was higher for Syrians, but it was a life. And working in the city seemed infinitely better than receiving aid in the refugee camps blooming in the desert. Hasna could not fathom the degradation of having to live off handouts in a tent.

  Hasna remembered the story told by Scheherazade of the old fisherman who cast his nets only four times. That was how the options felt for Syrians. Each one worse than the next—a dead donkey, a pitcher of dirt, a netful of glass shards were like war or flight or a refugee camp or a precarious life in an apartment in Jordan that could be taken away at a moment’s notice. But suddenly, for Hasna, it was as if an improbable jinni leaped into the boat in which she sat, opened its own bottle and offered her the most outrageous thing she could imagine.

  A representative from UNHCR called her again, several months after the initial call, and asked her to come to the office in Irbed for an initial interview. She almost turned him down. Resettlement was of no use at all if peace in Syria was right around the corner. But he suggested that she at least come to the office and hear more—she did not have to take resettlement if she didn’t want to, but why not at least keep her options open? The process took at least two years; many things could change in that time. She agreed to come, but in a way that made it clear that she was humoring him. She hung up and left the house to spend a few hours shopping for throw pillows with her granddaughters before picking Rana up from school.

  * * *

  —

  Hasna went to the first interview alone. A Western man—American or German or Swedish—asked her questions in passable Arabic in a small room and jotted her answers down on white paper that he put in a file. He wanted to know when she was born and where, the year she was married, what her children’s names were, and when they had married. He asked about their schooling and some questions about her relatives—her sisters and Jebreel’s family. She was surprised that he asked questions about their parents and grandparents, about their family’s hospitalizations, even about the baby she had lost that she rarely spoke about now. When it was over, he repeated her answers back to her, and that was it. He told her a few things about the process—that there would be several more interviews, that there was no guarantee that she would be resettled anywhere, but that if she was, her family would be more likely to be resettled with her since most of the countries, especially the United States, valued family reunification.