After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  The children and grandchildren coming would help immensely. Perhaps he could stay with them while she worked and the children worked too—more income would be better for all of them. Jebreel at home with the babies, Hasna out all day . . . she wondered if she could convince him to cook, and smiled—that was a funny thought.

  Her wages from the salon and their refugee stipend coming from RST only barely covered rent. They had four months left before they had to pay back the government for the plane tickets and the money from RST was over. Hasna fervently hoped that the disability checks would help.

  Natheir came as often as he could and brought them a few pieces of better furniture, usable dishes, groceries for several weeks—all gifts from Syrian Americans, he told them. Hasna kept a new list in her head of everything they received, so she could pay them back, or at least help them pay for someone else in the future. When Amal and Samir got here, and then Yusef and Laila after that, they would work together to dig their way out of the debt they were accumulating.

  Even if they could break their six-month apartment contract, Natheir told them there was no place in Austin they could afford. The city was built like a target and the closer you were to the center, the more expensive the apartments were. The buses in Austin were not designed for real people with real jobs—it took eight minutes for Hasna to drive to the salon when she could get a ride with a neighbor in a car, but it was an almost two-hour bus ride, depending on whether the buses were on time or not.

  The sheer difficulty of navigating their lives left no room for the English she desperately wanted to learn. Hasna could not make the words stay in her brain. Her mouth formed and then lost them again. She tried writing them down, even phonetically in Arabic, but it didn’t help.

  She kept depression at bay only by focusing on her children. She and Amal talked almost daily over WhatsApp about what they were packing—she requested several items, including clothes, because she had not brought enough—and what they would do when they arrived. Khassem and his wife were expecting another baby; he regularly sent pictures of his daughter.

  Yusef and Laila spent weeks trying to apply for refugee status in Turkey. The country was openly hostile to Syrian refugees and it felt as if every interaction took ten times as long as it should have. Their bureaucratic nightmares put into perspective for Hasna and Jebreel how long it took to get anything done in the United States. Their apartment was not what they might have wished, but at least they had a place—Laila and Yusef were in a constant state of flux waiting for their documents, staying with relatives’ friends.

  At every call to prayer that sounded—now from their phone app rather than ringing throughout the city—she prayed faithfully for each of her children and grandchildren by name. They were the most pressing thing in her heart.

  * * *

  —

  With the help of a translator from RST, Hasna and Jebreel met with an immigration lawyer, a young woman in a suit and heels, who confirmed what Hasna had heard in all of the other meetings: Family reunification was an integral part of the US resettlement program. Her children would be given priority. They gave the lawyer Amal and Samir’s names and information, as well as those of Khassem’s family, even though they were not as far along with their paperwork. They also told her Yusef’s and Laila’s information in Turkey. The lawyer told them she would make the calls she needed to so that their names would be attached to Jebreel’s case files; the situation for Yusef and Laila in Turkey might take longer than Jordan because they had not been there as long, but there was no reason to think they wouldn’t be able to make it as well. The US was one of the top destinations for refugees from Turkey, the lawyer told them. It could be as early as seven months after Hasna and Jebreel arrived, maybe as long as twelve, for Amal and Samir and their girls, since they were in the system already. The lawyer gave them the paperwork they needed to fill out in order to get their green cards and told them how to file the papers.

  The next day, she started writing in the green card application. Several days later, she mailed it off with as much hope as she had had for weeks. She was Syrian and her heart would beat for Syria until she died. But this was one small step she could take toward permanently reuniting her family.

  * * *

  —

  Hasna had been at the hair salon for two months when Nawal pulled her aside and told her that there was a problem. The woman who owned the salon had discovered that Hasna did not have the correct certification to work there even as a hairdresser’s assistant. Nawal was sorry, but she was going to have to let Hasna go. Hasna asked if she could stay through the end of the day, to finish sweeping and to clean everything up. She tried not to let Nawal see her cry while she straightened the bottles of shampoo one last time. Nawal avoided her eyes.

  Hasna was not sure where to go that afternoon after she was done at the salon. She ended up taking the bus to the grocery store and buying a cake. As long as she had money, she would buy this cake. It was creamy, soaked in milk with icing between the layers. That night after dinner, she sprinkled pistachio nuts on top of it and served it with Turkish coffee and cardamom. After they had finished eating, Hasna told Jebreel about getting fired.

  She spent two months without a job and Natheir Ali raised money to help her pay for the rent. Jebreel smoked cigarettes. Hasna cleaned. Rana studied. The apartment felt small and cramped and yet Hasna was desperately afraid that they would lose it. Where would they go? What happened to people when they could not pay their rent in the United States? It was not something she had ever considered, even though they had had some lean months in Syria; in Jordan it had loomed over her as she watched the dwindling supply of gold and saw how many more refugees arrived every day to compete for the scant jobs that kept their family afloat. Natheir told them that he would not allow them to be on the street. The thought that they were living on other people’s charity was a heavy blanket on her shoulders, one she could never take off.

  One of her friends told her that there was an opening in the hotel where a few of the women in the apartment complex worked, the Hyatt Downtown. They were looking for an entry-level person to join the housekeeping crew. She asked whether Hasna would be interested in the job. A few months ago, the idea of working for the cleaning crew in a hotel had seemed like the worst possible fate. Now, Hasna was grateful for the chance. In Daraa she would have felt it was beneath her station. Here she saw many other people doing whatever they needed to do in order to survive; she respected them and resolved that she would have to view this job as admirable rather than shameful.

  The next morning, she was able to speak to Amal’s daughters over video chat. Just to see their little faces brought her joy. She wished that she could pull their hair back again; it kept getting in their eyes. They kept grabbing the phone and reaching toward her, asking her to come play with them.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, Hasna pulled the cart out into the hallway to begin her day. She yawned. She had to leave the house by 5:30 in order to be on time for her 7:45 shift. She ended the day at 4:00 and was able to make it home in time for dinner most days. Rana had taken over most of the cooking, which was a relief to Hasna. The twelve-hour days wore on her. She noticed that her muscles were getting stronger, but every day her feet were swollen by the time she got home.

  In the morning, she filled up the cart with everything she needed to clean the rooms for the day: sheets, towels, shampoos and soaps, hairdryers, toilet paper, ice buckets, glasses, cleaning supplies. She had to appear professional but also to blend in with her surroundings. She was allowed to smile pleasantly, but not engage with people unless they asked her questions. No one ever asked her questions.

  Every morning, she received a list of rooms to be cleaned. At first, she cleaned like a Syrian. She used buckets of water with soap, scrubbing down everything, including the walls. Her Arabic-speaking shift manager, a woman with beautiful
eyes from Iraq, had not been angry but had laughed and told Hasna that here in America, they used disinfecting spray and did not scrub very much. She showed Hasna how to spray and wipe down the bathroom in a few minutes’ time.

  Now she could clean each room quickly. She refilled the coffee station, laying the tea bags out nicely and placing the wrapped paper cups facedown beside the coffee pot. She made sure to tuck the clean sheets tightly around the mattress as she had been taught. After she put the blankets and the pillows back on the bed, she vacuumed the room well. Then she dusted, placing the pad of paper with the hotel logo at right angles with the edge of the desk. The pen went diagonally across the pad of paper.

  Then she tackled the bathroom. Shower, toilet, sink, mirror, new soap, folded-edge toilet paper, fresh towels, new glasses. She took out the trash last, checking to make sure that there was an extra trash bag underneath the empty one. Finally, she would spray the room with perfume. In Syria, they did not use perfume. They just used plenty of soap.

  That night on the ride home from work, as the bus started and stopped in its long winding route to her apartment, Hasna overheard two people talking about the election. She recognized the words “president” and “Donald Trump.” She had known that the US was electing a president but had barely paid attention to the process since she could not listen to news in English. They received their news from Arabic sources over their phones and through their friends’ posts on Facebook or WhatsApp—she knew much more about what was happening in Syria and Jordan than here in the United States. Like all the Syrians she knew, Hasna wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Secretly, Hasna liked the idea of living in a country with a woman president. Mostly the headlines in the Arabic-speaking news agencies were full of the things that Donald Trump had said about Muslims. Hasna liked the people that she had encountered in the United States. She assumed that they would not support someone who said the kinds of things that Donald Trump said as their leader. Or—as seemed likelier to someone who had lived most of her life reading between the lines of the Syrian media—the reports were greatly exaggerated. Surely no world leader talked that way.

  But she heard the two people in front of her say the name Donald Trump several times in disbelief, looking at their phones. She pulled hers out and checked the news in Arabic. The headlines talked about the presidential election, but no one knew the winner. She went home that night and ate the simple dinner that Rana had prepared. She slept. When she woke up, she checked the news again. It was true—Donald Trump was the new president. Hasna felt sad for the people she knew who really wanted Clinton to have won, but really, what did it have to do with her? The president of the United States felt far away from her daily life. She hurried to shower before praying and running out the door to catch her bus.

  Chapter 28

  MU NAW

  AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, MARCH 2016

  Mu Naw walked up to the door of her new house. The papers were signed, the fees all paid. For the first time in her life, she was a homeowner. She would have to water the front lawn; she would have to buy a lawn mower. She had seen people with small buzzing machines trimming the grass around the edges—she supposed she would have to buy one of those too. The list of things she would need—washing machine and dryer, curtains and blinds, lawn care equipment—just to make it through the next few weeks felt daunting. There were entire rooms to furnish, blank cream walls to hang pictures on, drawers and cabinets to fill.

  Smoothly, without fiddling at all, she unlocked the door of her new home. She could have opened the garage door with the new remote—she pressed a button and an entire door rose at her command—but she had not. She had wanted to walk into her new home by the front door. She stood back to let the children spill in first, racing each other, all arms and legs and shouting voices that echoed through the empty rooms. She took a deep breath and looked behind her.

  The moving truck was parked haphazardly in the driveway, loaded with almost a decade of life in a new country. She was in awe of everything she had, grateful for her new home, although leaving had been incredibly difficult—dinner the night before had been full of tears and prolonged good-byes.

  Saw Ku came around the corner. He put down the box he was holding and looked at Mu Naw for a long moment. Then, without warning, he walked up to her. He grinned, the lopsided smile of complete happiness that he reserved only for her, and kissed her. She knew that he was thinking back to that lock on the door in their first apartment.

  Just before she walked in the door, Saw Ku tugged at her hand. His voice was quiet, meant only for her. “This is because of you, my love.” He leaned in to kiss her forehead. “This house and everything we have is because of you.”

  * * *

  —

  Everything had changed for Mu Naw on the night she found out her mother had died. The overwhelming grief that still came in waves did not dilute the clarity she had felt. She had seen herself as her mother saw her, as she could imagine seeing her own daughters years from now, and realized that she and her mother had both done their best to love and support each other, that she and Saw Ku loved each other but were not sure how to find each other again through the pain of their past, that all of them had made the best decisions they could with the information they had available at the time.

  The epiphany was simple, but the ramifications were profound. Mu Naw knew she did want to be like her mother—like the best sides of her mother. She had within her the strength to make it on her own. But she wanted to fix things with Saw Ku.

  She stepped out of that closet with a new resolve to save her marriage. It was not easy. The damage they had done to each other was deep. It would take years to undo their way of communicating, the arguments and the stinging comments that always seemed to be their go-to. But in the first few days after her mother’s death, it was clear that he had been struck by the same resolve. He came home from work earlier, took on more of the chores around the house, played with the children as he had not in months. He was tender and kind; he gave her time for herself and let her go to bed early on days when she could hardly function without crying. He hugged her more; he held her hand in public. He went to church with her several Sundays in a row. And, one day, he asked if he could move back into her bedroom.

  At church, Mu Naw began asking the older Karen women for marriage advice. One of them handed her a magazine published by a Karen Baptist press with an article in it outlining how to have a family devotional. The woman told Mu Naw to keep the magazine and she took it home and read the article until she almost had it memorized. The author suggested that reading the Bible and praying together as a family was the single most important thing she had done—it was clear the article had been translated from English and that the woman’s ideas were perfect for an American context. Mu Naw wasn’t sure how the article would go over in Karen communities in Thailand, or in Myanmar—did it seem ludicrous to plan for family mealtime after work when everyone lived together, all day with no jobs, in one tiny hut? How would the chipper tone be received in Karen families where Dad wasn’t just distracted, he was off fighting in the jungle with the Karen National Army? What did a family devotional look like for the life she had once led?

  But it fit her life now. It gave her a plan and a way forward.

  She left the article with a bookmark on Saw Ku’s side of the bed; she noticed when she came in from washing her face one night that he was reading the magazine. She did not say anything; she did not even act as if she noticed. A few days later, she told Saw Ku that she and the children were going to begin to have a family devotional on Wednesday nights. She did not ask him to join. She mentioned it only in passing.

  The first night they had the family devotional, she prayed first that her heart would be right. She found the passages that she wanted to read aloud in the Bible, in both Karen and English so that her children—who now read English better than Karen—would truly understand. After dinner, when the dishes were
put away and the children bathed, she called them into the living room. Saw Ku turned off the TV and went into the bedroom; he was not tense, he was just uninterested. She tried not to be disappointed. She decided to say nothing. She had the girls, first Pah Poe in Karen and then Naw Wah in English, read aloud: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God. And the peace that passes all understanding will guide your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” She felt that peace infuse her. She wanted that peace in her home. She wanted to feel that peace every day.

  She began praying every day for peace between her and Saw Ku. The older woman who gave her the article gave her more magazines and Mu Naw read them voraciously, finding nuggets of wisdom in each article that talked about families, serving one another, and speaking to each other with love. Mu Naw was not sure if God—or how God—worked on Saw Ku, but she knew that praying for Saw Ku increased her own awareness of his life.

  Saw Ku worked hard every day at a job where no one talked to him but his brother; if his coworkers did speak to him, he barely understood them. He was drained from the hard physical labor of cleaning hotel rooms—moving the sheets in and out of the laundry piles, pushing large furniture around to clean, hauling carts up and down the hallway. It was often disgusting work—it was shocking to both of them the things that people would do and the messes they would leave in an anonymous hotel. And it was mindless work—it was not the kind of work he loved. What he loved was providing for his family; and he loved to play the guitar, one of the few times a week when he could let his mind and body go, when he was confident in the way his fingers flew on the strings, when he knew who he was and what he was doing.

  Mu Naw began asking Saw Ku if he would like to go with the guys on Saturday nights to play video games and jam together. The first time she offered, he squinted at her suspiciously—he wanted to see what she hoped for in return. But he went and she asked for nothing and a week later, she suggested he go again. That night became habit and she made sure to ask him before scheduling translating gigs after work at night. In turn, he asked her before he left the house, or called when he thought he would be late.