“Let’s start with your parents. You note here that you don’t know where your parents are. When did you lose track of them? When did you last communicate with them?”
“When I arrived in America.” Amina hadn’t adjusted her posture, but her hand clenching tightly around the strap of her bag broke the veneer of calm.
Jessica double-checked the application. “But that was well over two years ago. You haven’t been in touch with them at all since then?” Even Jessica spoke with her mother more frequently, though her mother didn’t live in a war zone.
“No.”
Jessica really needed to stop asking yes-or-no questions, or this would take forever. “How have you tried to reach them?”
Amina pulled a napkin from the center of the table and centered it flat in front of her. “I spoke with them by telephone when I arrived. But their number stopped working. I have not heard from them.” She seemed to be talking to the napkin.
“Where were they living when you left?”
“Aleppo.”
Amina’s last address in Syria was in Aleppo. The images Jessica had seen of the city showed bombed-out shells of buildings, first responders tending to the injured, and dead victims of Assad and rebel attacks. “Did you live near them?”
“Yes.”
“How long had they lived there?”
“They lived there my whole life and before that.” She folded one edge of the napkin, pressed the crease from edge to edge, then folded it again.
Jessica tore out a piece of yellow paper and slid it across the table. “Can you write the address on this?”
Emotion flashed behind Amina’s bold eyes. But it didn’t last long enough for Jessica to tell if it was anything other than impatience.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“To be honest, I’m really not sure right now. But when I’m pulling together evidence, I might need it. We need all the documentation we can get to support your case.”
Amina eyed her warily but wrote out an address and handed the paper back to Jessica. Jessica noted the elegant swoops and heavy straight lines in the script. It was as if the handwriting had a Middle Eastern accent.
“Can you tell me about your mother?” Now Jessica did feel like a therapist, but she hoped she might find an opening here in which she could get Amina to make an emotional connection.
Amina’s hand went to her jade scarf, her fingers moving slowly along the edge that draped across her shoulder. “She is traditional.”
Is. That could mean hope. “Traditional? How?”
“Everything she does is a testament of her commitment to her faith.”
“You mean in clothing? Like hijab?” Jessica made a slight gesture toward Amina’s scarf as if Amina needed to be reminded what a hijab was.
Amina ignored the gesture. “Everything. Raising the children. Keeping the home. Honoring her husband.”
“How about your father? You note here that he’s an economics professor.” And that’s why he was arrested and tortured. “Where is he a professor?”
“He taught at the University of Aleppo.”
Taught. Jessica took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Please tell me about his arrest. Who arrested him? Why? What happened to him in custody?” She set her pen down and folded her hands together, leaning toward the table. “I know this can be difficult, and I’m sorry we have to talk about it.”
Amina adjusted in her chair. “He taught global economics. There was an uprising in 2011.”
“Yes, the Arab Spring. Was your father a part of that?”
“No. ‘An economist cannot be a politician,’ he said. Assad’s soldiers detained him and questioned his teachings. My father thought they were...” Amina seemed to be grasping for a word. “They were ignorant. He did not think they understood his teachings.” Amina leaned forward, placing her hands on the edge of the table. “My father was proud of Syria. It is an ancient country that has faced both terrible times and times of peace and prosperity. After the Arab Spring, Assad said the government would make changes.” Amina exhaled and shook her head slowly. “My father believed him.”
Jessica endured the abrupt silence, hoping Amina would continue.
“My father believed that he was helping our country by teaching his students how Syria’s changes would allow it to regain its promise and sit among the powers of the world. An informant in the class reported my father to the regime. We didn’t see him for five days.” Amina’s fingers pushed into the table, her knuckles whitening.
“Do you know who took him?” Jessica asked.
“The Mukhabarat.”
Jessica repeated the word in her head, attempting to hear her own voice say it. She had read about Assad’s secret police and the state terror they’d perpetrated, though she hadn’t heard the term spoken aloud.
Amina continued. “After he returned home, the bombs came. Assad, our president”—Amina almost spat the title—“he sent bombs to our city, to his people. I believe that hurt my father more than the beatings he endured. My father never again spoke of our country rising as a world power. He no longer wrote. He stopped teaching.”
“Do you have any kind of record of this? An arrest record or any affidavits?”
Amina’s squint reflected her incredulity with the question. “The Mukhabarat does not provide documentation other than the scars they leave on your back.”
Amina’s phone buzzed, breaking a brief but uncomfortable silence. After hanging up, she placed her phone in her bag and straightened as if to leave. “I must go to the restaurant. The hostess called in sick.”
Jessica regrouped. “A couple more questions if it’s okay. I’ll be quick.” Jessica checked her notes. “You said you spoke with your parents right after you arrived here but you couldn’t get through after that. Have you tried to find them online, Facebook, a refugee locator site? How about your brother?”
“I see pictures on newspapers, on the television. It is never their faces. I look at some websites, but I have been careful. We could be tracked and targeted.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Tracked and targeted?”
Amina pursed her lips. “It is best that we not bring attention to ourselves. Too many communications with Syria or too many Internet searches might make the American government think we are terrorists.”
That was something Jessica hadn’t considered.
Amina stared at some unseen image over Jessica’s shoulder. There would be no unexpectedly abrupt exit today. There was no question the conversation had reached its conclusion.
Jessica couldn’t help but feel the boat hadn’t even left the dock yet.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AMINA
The door jingled as it closed behind her, and Amina walked away from the restaurant without a backward glance despite another offer of a ride from the lawyer. It was enough to hire IAP, answer the lawyer’s questions, and work with them until this was over. She didn’t need to add the complications of anything beyond that. She’d had enough complications.
Amina slowed to avoid bikes chained to signposts along the sidewalks and fell in with the pace of the other pedestrians. Stopping at a crosswalk, she looked up above the brick buildings surrounding her and closed her eyes, letting her hand rest on her bag.
Life had seemed uncomplicated, even charmed, before the conflicts. Her father had traveled to economics conferences outside of Syria, sometimes bringing Amina. He’d never brought her brothers. She and her father had shared a special bond, talking endlessly about economics, world affairs, and the rights of women. They were conversations that had occurred only abroad or in the cocoon of their home. Not because they’d advocated rebellion or opposition, but because, in Syria, one limited conversations to pleasantries when outside a trusted circle. Later, Amina had learned that even trusted circles weren’t always safe. But alone with her father, anything could be said, and anything had seemed possible.
The memory was as vivid to her today as it was in
2000. She’d stood, an awestruck teenager, with her father at the top of the Sears Tower, marveling at the city of Chicago below. The sun bounced off the glass buildings, illuminating a view so new and so vast. The reflective structures rose like great swords from the ground, promising strength and progress.
“Amina,” her father said, waving his hand in a grand gesture over the city below. “This is beautiful, but it is not our Syria. We have a richer past, and our new president will bring a brighter future. Keep studying, and you will be a part of it. That is what will lift our country,” he’d said. “Education.”
She missed her father, misguided though he had been that the son of the former cruel dictator would not follow in his own father’s footsteps. Her father loved Syria, and for that, she could not fault him. It was her country, too.
She opened her eyes and turned to a window to see a reflection of a scarved woman with blank eyes, standing at the base of a low brick building in a country that wasn’t hers.
The walk signal turned white, and Amina headed toward the bus stop on the next block. Her shift started soon, so she would take the bus today.
The MTA signpost hosted a disconnected party of three, or maybe four if the jittery woman shouting short bursts of expletives into her phone was waiting for the bus and not just stopping to assure full focus on her argument. Two African-American men, one wearing a cap, the other with loose hair and a wispy beard that he stroked mindlessly, spoke in low tones. An older white woman, plump and tired looking, guarded a large, bulging plastic bag at her feet.
The man wearing the cap swiveled his head in Amina’s direction, catching her eye for a split second before his gaze shot beyond her shoulder. Amina turned to see the arriving bus just as her phone buzzed, the vibrations tingling the fingers that held her bag against her side. She pulled out the phone and saw an unfamiliar but local number on the screen.
Since the day her phone had taken off on a bike, Amina hadn’t recreated her full contact list. She hadn’t had a lot of contacts, just the restaurant, the boys’ school, Fayiz, a few others, plus some that no longer existed. That could have been why she hadn’t taken the time to create a new list. She preferred the old list.
She answered and heard a woman’s tinny voice, one unconnected to any of her lost numbers.
“This is Julie Meyer from KLP. I’m calling about your application for the internship program.” She had the lilting voice of a twentysomething-year-old American. Each sentence ended as if it were a question. Amina heard this cadence when she occasionally waited tables, always wanting to respond to “I’d like the kabab?” with “Yes, you would like the kabab” but thinking better of it.
Amina hadn’t expected to hear from the program so soon, and her heart accelerated as the bus in front of her slowed to a stop. She asked the woman to hold a moment as the brakes screeched and her heart pounded. Two people exited the bus, and the two black men climbed on. The older woman struggled with her plastic bag and followed them. The jittery woman hadn’t broken from her argument but held a hand over her free ear to drown out the noise. The bus driver raised his eyebrows at Amina and the arguing woman. Amina waved him off. He closed the door and pulled away, dark-gray exhaust leaving a trail along the curb.
Amina turned from the street before taking a deep breath. “Thank you for holding, Ms. Meyer. I am glad to hear from you.”
“Ms. Hamid, thank you for sending in your application. We are super excited to see that you would like to be part of our diversity leadership program.”
Amina squeezed the phone. Professionally a step down or not, the possibility of getting this position thrilled her, almost enough to take her mind off the things she and the lawyer had discussed.
“All we need from you to complete the eligibility review”—the woman managed to add a question mark mid-sentence as she paused—“is a copy of your college transcript. You reference your accounting degree, and we need the transcript to confirm course completion and satisfaction of our requirements.”
If it had in fact been a question, Amina would have responded, “No. No, you don’t need the transcript.” Instead, she said, “You need a transcript from my university... in Syria.” It was not a question, coming from her. She spoke as if she were reciting an item from a to-do list, not as if she were suppressing a primal scream, which she was.
“Right! We require the college to send it directly to us. They can send it to the same address you used for the application. Do you need that?”
“No. I... I do not know that I can get a transcript sent. There’s a war.”
“A war? Oh, hmm, yes. Maybe we can make an exception if you already have a copy of your transcript. We don’t usually accept that. Potential fraud, you know. I can’t promise.”
I didn’t travel with my transcript. Her father had been smart not to include anything that would arouse suspicion when he sent her away. Future employability in the event of an extended civil war had not been on his mind. “I’m afraid I do not have a copy. Thank you.” She clicked off the phone. She didn’t want to hear any more questions.
“Education will lift our country.” Amina mouthed her father’s words and laughed out loud, drawing a glare from the jittery woman. In fact, she thought ruefully, machetes could cut off the head of an educated man, and a single barrel bomb could kill a school full of children. And since she hadn’t traveled with a transcript, it was as though her education had never even happened.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jessica hustled about the kitchen, chopping, preheating, and setting out condiments, while Danny relaxed, feet up on the coffee table in the adjacent family room, reading the paper. The law school graduate in Jessica tried to argue that this was criminally old-fashioned. But after all these months of Danny working late, she was the one who wouldn’t be home for dinner. Playing the happy homemaker assuaged some of her guilt. It also distracted her from worrying about how Amina would respond to the meeting they would be attending together that night at the IAP offices.
Amina had been visibly agitated at the end of their last meeting. Talking about her parents must have been a trigger. When Rosalie had called yesterday, asking Jessica to bring Amina to the IAP offices to join in discussions about incoming Syrian refugees and maybe even talk about her own experiences, Jessica had predicted that Amina’s answer would be a hard no. The fact that Amina had not only said yes but also seemed eager to attend placed pressure on Jessica to ensure the meeting didn’t serve as another trigger. She felt a growing need to protect her Syrian client, who not so long ago seemed to be someone from whom Jessica thought she might need protection.
“What’s this meeting about?” Danny didn’t look up from his paper.
Jessica set the timer on the oven and opened the cabinet to remove a stack of plates. “There’s a group of Syrian refugees coming to the US at the end of the year. Rosalie led the efforts to open the way for Maryland to take some of them in, so the governor reached out to IAP to assist with resources. Rosalie invited me to the meeting about how the process will work. It’s not a huge meeting, just a few people from housing and employment resources.” She shrugged. “Should be interesting.”
Danny snapped the newspaper open, spreading it wide so he could fold one side over as he moved to the next section. “I wonder if it’s a good idea. Opening the way.”
“What do you mean?”
He let the paper fall back on itself, exposing his bay blues. “Seems to be inviting trouble, letting in people from a country full of zealots who want to kill us all.”
“I’m pretty sure the goal is not to let in those particular zealots.”
“It’s not just that,” Danny said. “It’s an inefficient use of resources. There are, what, hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians—”
“Millions.”
Danny raised his eyebrows. “Supports my point even more. The cost to resettle and support a single refugee must be, I don’t know, tens of thousands of dollars when you figure in social services, edu
cation, food stamps, and housing assistance. That money would be better spent on humanitarian aid in the region. Services cost less over there, you have economies of scale, and people get to be closer to their home, families, and culture. People don’t get to feel like do-gooders here at home, but we end up helping more people.”
His analytic tone, absent of political tinge, was far too clinical to come off as reactionary. He sounded entirely reasonable, in fact, though it stung to hear her efforts deemed frivolous and self-serving.
He added, seemingly as an afterthought, “And we don’t have to worry about terrorists claiming to be refugees so they can infiltrate our country.”
Jessica set the plates around the table, continuing her happy-homemaker routine, resisting the urge to get argumentative and instead adopting her own analytic tone. “The review process is pretty intense. Multiple government agencies do extensive background checks, biological screenings, and detailed interviews. It can take twelve, eighteen, even twenty-four months to get cleared to enter the US as a refugee. I doubt many terrorists are going to make it through that review or even be willing to wait that long.”
Danny pushed the paper down. “It’s happened before. Don’t you remember those al Qaeda guys from Iraq in Illinois? They came in as so-called refugees. You think they’re the only ones?”
“The process has improved.”
He waved away her statement. “We don’t need the process if we focus humanitarian efforts over there. I know there’s a lot of suffering, but we just can’t trust them.”
“Them? That’s quite a generalization. I’d expect you to be more nuanced than that.” She hadn’t told him about Amina. She couldn’t recall making a conscious decision not to, and he had never asked. It seemed normal, a throwback to her days at the firm when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was the house rule about clients. She had originally withheld the information—after Amina had fired her and she was filled with relief—out of concern that she would betray her own bias. And here it was Danny who was biased. She shouldn’t judge, though, recalling her own initial reaction to Amina.
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