Kiss the Dust

by Elizabeth Laird

  Tara felt a slow, hot blush spread over her face. She’d never in her life seen people dressed so indecently, or behaving so noisily in public. And what were they doing now? Right here, where anyone could see them, the boy had draped his bare arm round the girl’s bare neck, and he was bending his head over as if he was going to kiss her! Tara felt too ashamed and embarrassed for them to go on looking.

  In any case, they were nearly at the head of the queue now. Tara looked at her parents. Kak Soran was holding his papers tightly. Tara saw him bite his lower lip. He was blinking nervously, trying to see what kind of a person the impassive woman in the dark uniform might be. Teriska Khan’s face looked calm and dignified, like on the night Rostam had come, and she’d thought the police were at the door. You could only tell how nervous she was because the jingling of her bangles showed how much her arms were trembling as she held the dead weight of Hero on her shoulder.

  The people in front of them went through the narrow gap past the immigration officer. Teriska Khan gave Kak Soran a little shove with her elbow.

  ‘Go on,’ she hissed.

  Kak Soran put his papers down in front of the official. The woman’s eyes flickered up from them to Kak Soran’s face. He’d rehearsed what he was meant to say.

  ‘Refugee,’ he said. ‘Asylum.’

  The woman didn’t say anything. She flicked through the papers in front of her. They were in Arabic lettering and she couldn’t read them. But she studied the photograph and looked over to Teriska Khan and Tara. She asked a question. Kak Soran guessed she was asking if they were a family, and nodded.

  The woman eased herself out of her chair and stood up. The people in the queue behind shifted and muttered. They could see there was going to be a hold up. The official beckoned to Kak Soran to follow her, and went across to a door. She opened it, and shouted to someone inside.

  ‘Mike! Got a nice Christmas present for you. Asylum seekers. Family of four. The man’s pretending he can’t speak a word of English but he looks a bit dodgy to me.’

  Then she jerked her head at Kak Soran, who guessed at her meaning and went through the door, and the others followed him into a brightly lit, bare room.

  24

  During the last few days in Teheran, and especially while she’d been on the plane, Tara had tried to imagine what England would be like. It was easier to picture than Germany because she’d once seen a film on TV which showed a lot of big famous buildings in London, like Buckingham Palace and Westminster. Everyone in the film had looked rich and comfortable, and they’d done all kinds of things you couldn’t possibly do in Iraq or Iran, like drink alcohol right out in the open where anyone could see them, and dance, men and women together, in public places, and walk out into the street at night. Tara had often been out after dark at home, but only in the car. Since the pesh murgas had started their activities no one would have been mad enough to walk round the streets of Sulaimaniya after night had fallen.

  London had looked like a beautiful city, full of happy, busy people. Of course, she knew it was cold and rained all the time, but then everyone lived in such big nice houses it probably didn’t matter much.

  English people, she thought vaguely, would be all blond with blue eyes and they’d be rather cool and polite, and have plenty of money and good jobs. And they’d dress rather like the Queen or Princess Diana, whose picture she’d often seen at home.

  What she hadn’t expected was that arriving in London would be rather like arriving in that first tiny village in Iran the night they’d ridden through the mountains.

  First there was the same long, long wait while nobody came. They were all tired and edgy, and the little room, which didn’t have a window, got very hot and stuffy. Every now and then the door would open and a big man with thin greasy hair would look in, and say something. Once a girl came with a tray of cups full of an orangey brown liquid.

  ‘Tea,’ she said, smiling brightly at them.

  Tara thought she recognized the English word.

  ‘I think it’s supposed to be tea,’ she said, picking up a cup by its handle and gingerly trying it. She was used to drinking tea out of little tea glasses, and the thick white china felt strange.

  ‘It doesn’t taste much like tea,’ she said doubtfully. ‘It’s very bitter.’

  Kak Soran opened a paper sachet that was on the tray and tested the contents with his finger. ‘Sugar,’ he said. ‘Put some in. We’d better try to drink it whatever it tastes like. We mightn’t get anything else for hours.’

  Eventually the door opened again and two people came into the room. One was the big man with greasy hair. He didn’t look at them. He sat down behind a desk and put a stack of forms down on the table. Tara noticed that his finger nails were dirty.

  There was a woman with him. She was wearing a navy blue suit with a short skirt that hardly covered her knees. She sat down beside the man, and Tara realized that she was an official person too, one of the immigration officers.

  Tara could hardly drag her eyes away from her. It wasn’t just the bold way she was dressed that was so surprising, it was the way she moved, so confidently and easily, as if she was in her own home. And she talked to the man just like another man would have done. She could have been his equal, or even his boss! Now she was staring at Baba, quite openly, in a way a woman would never have dared look at a man at home, and as she did so she crossed and uncrossed her legs as if she wasn’t even aware that her knees were showing.

  After a while the woman said something to the man that sounded like an order, and he got up and went out. He came back after a moment with two of the family’s suitcases.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness, here’s our stuff,’ said Teriska Khan. ‘I was worried sick they’d lost it, or confiscated it or something. Where’s the rest?’

  From where he was sitting Kak Soran could see out through the open door.

  ‘It’s all here, I think,’ he said, looking relieved too.

  Another man, darker than the others, came into the room.

  ‘Are you Kurdish? Which dialect do you speak?’ he said to Kak Soran.

  Tara jumped. The man had actually spoken in Kurdish!

  Kak Soran looked relieved. He smiled broadly and held out his hand.

  ‘Oh, yes, we’re Kurds,’ he said. ‘We speak Sorani.’

  The man shook his hand briefly, and looked away.

  ‘I’m the interpreter,’ he said, sitting down next to the woman, as far away from Kak Soran as he could.

  ‘What’s happening? What are they going to do about us?’ said Kak Soran hurriedly. Tara hated hearing the anxiety in his voice. It made her feel more nervous than anything else could have done.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the interpreter coolly. ‘You’ll have to wait and see.’ He looked towards the woman and nodded to her. Kak Soran understood. This person might look Middle Eastern, and speak Kurdish (though he had a funny accent as though Kurdish wasn’t his first language) but he was an official, like the others. There was no point in trying to make friends with him.

  The questions seemed to go on for ages and ages. Tara almost wished they were back in Iran. This woman interviewer was the hardest and coldest they’d ever had. Her questions seemed to pound at Kak Soran, as if she was trying all the time to trip him up, to make him say something incriminating. Tara could hardly bear to listen. Baba sounded so humble, and frightened, so unlike his real self.

  She leant back and looked at the wall above the woman’s desk. There were some cards stuck on to it with bright coloured pictures on them. There was one of a triangular shaped tree with decorations and lights all over it. Another showed a little bird with a brown back and a red breast perched on a snowy twig, and there were several of a big man with a white beard all dressed in red, with a sack over his shoulders.

  The searches, when they started, were much worse than they’d been in Iran. The two men doing it seemed to know by instinct where things would be hidden, and they went straight for them. Tara couldn’t he
lp gasping in dismay when first Daya’s heavy gold necklace was pulled out of a cunning cavity in the heel of a shoe, and then her diamond earrings were dug out of the jar of face cream she’d embedded them in.

  Teriska Khan turned a white face to Kak Soran.

  ‘We’re ruined,’ she whispered.

  Tara felt her heart drop into her boots, but then it lifted again. The searchers didn’t seem interested in the jewellery. They were actually putting it back into the suitcase! The only thing they seemed to want was a tin of white antibiotic powder that Auntie Noor had given Teriska Khan to dust over Hero’s foot, where there was a sore red place that was taking a long time to heal. One of them looked at it closely, and showed it to the other, who nodded, wrapped it carefully in a plastic bag and took it out of the room.

  At last it was all over, and they were left alone again. Teriska Khan’s nerves were reaching snapping point.

  ‘Are we going to be here for ever?’ she wailed. ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen now? At least in Iran there are other Kurds, and we had relatives there. But here we’re all alone! If we don’t get out of this room soon, I’m going to scream!’

  Her tension was catching. Tara began to feel a knot tightening in her own stomach, and her hands were clammy with a nervous sweat. Hero, who’d been amazingly quiet and subdued all this time, suddenly jumped up and banged her arm on the side of the metal desk. The pain made her scream, and once she’d started she couldn’t stop, and went on and on crying.

  It seemed like several more hours before the interpreter came back, though it was only forty minutes by the electric clock over the door.

  ‘Please, can’t you tell us anything?’ Teriska Khan pleaded with him.

  The interpreter’s face cracked into the shadow of a smile.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘They wanted to send you back to Munich on this evening’s plane, but it’s taken off now, so you’ll be staying tonight at least. It’ll give you a chance to see the people who can help you. There’ll be transport along in a minute to take you to the detention centre at Harmondsworth until they decide what to do with you. Don’t worry. You’re over the first hurdle.’

  He hurried off as if he was afraid of being caught talking to them on his own.

  It seemed to Tara as she picked up her share of the bags and bundles and trudged down the endlessly long corridor after her parents and Hero that she’d been travelling for ever and ever.

  There was a big glass window on one side of the corridor. Through it she could see some kind of a VIP lounge. There was a proper carpet, and she could see big potted plants, and tall well-dressed businessmen sipping drinks and reading magazines while they lounged on plushy sofas and chairs. It had the kind of comfort and the kind of furniture she’d always been used to before they left home. Once again, she was on the outside looking in.

  The strap of her bundle dug into her shoulder. She shifted it to the other side, and went on. At the end of the corridor a flight of steps led down to a door.

  It was cold outside, not the crisp, dry coldness of Teheran in winter, but an awful dank, seeping coldness that seemed to go right through you. And there, pulled up at the pavement, was a minibus, just like the one that had taken them from the border to the mountains, and from the mountains to Teheran.

  There wasn’t much point in trying to see anything of England out of the window. For one thing it was dark, for another it was raining, and anyway there wasn’t much to see except for roads, and car headlights, and a lot of modern airport buildings. And when they got to the detention centre it had that same prison feel as a refugee camp, with a barbed wire fence all round it, and uniformed guards at the door.

  The first thing Tara noticed when she got inside was the heat. She gave one last big shiver to throw off the cold, and felt the warmth go right through her. But the next thing she noticed was the smell. It was an old, tired, hospital kind of smell. The building seemed clean enough, although it was very plain and shabby, but it was as if years and years of cheap polish and disinfectants had ingrained themselves in the hard vinyl floors and crude brick walls that were covered with thick layers of cream paint. And on top of the hospital smell was a strong whiff of cooking, a kind of strange, foreign cooking that Tara didn’t like at all.

  A door opened at the end of the corridor, and through it came a group of people, a couple of young African men and a Chinese-looking couple. Tara stared at them. She’d never met anyone from the Far East before. She had no idea what they were like, or what kind of customs they had. And although she’d often seen black people in Iraq, she’d never met any Africans. These two men were talking excitedly in a language she didn’t recognize, and they walked in a free, dancing kind of way, swinging their arms. She tugged Teriska Khan’s sleeve.

  ‘Do you think they’re staying here too?’ she whispered.

  ‘How should I know?’ said Teriska Khan irritably.

  They’re probably not even Muslims, thought Tara with a sense of panic. We’ll have to be really careful what we eat here. That awful smell might be pork cooking.

  Everyone slept badly that night. The heat, which had been so welcome when they’d come in out of the cold, was stifling in the bare, comfortless rooms. Tara hardly dared to close her eyes. She hated the idea of being locked into this place with so many strange people. During the evening she hadn’t seen anyone else from the Middle East, except for a couple of sad-looking Turks who didn’t speak Arabic. All the others came from distant countries and nearly all of them were men. They all seemed strung up and distressed, as if they were desperately worried and living on their nerves. She knew what that felt like. She felt the same herself. She was scared a fight would break out, or that someone would break down, and lose control. She was scared she’d be attacked. If that happened she was sure the English guards wouldn’t be any use. In a way they were the most frightening people of all. They looked at you as if you weren’t there. Their faces were closed and disapproving. Tara hunted round for a way to describe them.

  ‘They despise us,’ she said to herself at last. ‘That’s what it is. They think we’re rubbish.’ It was a horrible thought. The soldiers in Iran had never been friendly, and they hadn’t shown the refugees much kindness, but at least they’d look at them as if they were human beings.

  The thought of spending days or even weeks in this place was so depressing that the whole family felt miserable the next day. Teriska Khan was worried about Hero, who was hot and flushed and seemed to be running a temperature. Kak Soran took to striding up and down the corridor like a caged animal, glaring at anyone who got in his way.

  Then suddenly everything changed. One of the guards, the only one that seemed to have a friendly side to him, put his head round the door of the TV room where half a dozen people were listlessly watching a Walt Disney cartoon.

  ‘Soran!’ he said. Kak Soran’s head jerked round.

  ‘Telephone,’ said the man, and mimed holding a receiver to his ear.

  Ten minutes later, Kak Soran was back, beaming from ear to ear.

  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it myself. That was Latif Karwan. You know, my cousin’s son. He’s studying here, doing a PhD in engineering. I thought he’d gone home months ago, but apparently he’s got another year to do.’

  Teriska Khan had sat up in her chair and was looking at him, astonished.

  ‘But how on earth did he know we were here?’

  Kak Soran chuckled.

  ‘That’s the extraordinary bit,’ he said. ‘Daban’s son, Rezgar, phoned Teheran from Paris last night, and Daban told him we’d left to come to London. Latif and Rezgar were children at school together. They know each other well. So Rezgar phoned Latif straight away, and Latif phoned the immigration people first thing this morning, and he finally tracked us down here.

  ‘He says he’s got a flat here! It’s quite small, but there’s only him in it, and he’s invited us all to stay with him for as long as we like, until we know wheth
er they’ll let us stay in the country or not! Then he’ll help us to get a place of our own, and all that kind of thing. And he says he’s got a friend in an international bank who’ll help me get my money out of Iraq. Isn’t that great?’

  Teriska Khan burst into tears.

  ‘But how can we go and stay with him, Baba? They won’t let us out of here, will they?’ said Tara.

  Kak Soran interlaced his fingers and bent the joints back so that they all cracked in the way he always did when he was enjoying himself.

  ‘Latif seems to think they will,’ he said. ‘He’s been through this asylum business with some other friends of his. He’s going to speak to the lawyers for us, arrange it all – oh, I can hardly believe it!’

  ‘Does that mean we’re going to be allowed to stay in England?’ said Tara.

  ‘It’s much too soon to say,’ said Kak Soran looking out of the window at a sodden patch of dusty grass between two shabby old buildings. ‘There’ll be all kinds of questions and interviews and court cases, but we’ve got a chance, Latif says.’

  Tara looked out of the window too. She supposed she ought to be glad and excited at the idea that their travels might be over, but all she could think about was that awful smell of foreign cooking that was getting stronger and stronger as the meal time approached.

  25

  Tara hadn’t really believed in Latif. It seemed impossible that here, in this strange country, thousands of miles away from home, a friendly Kurd would be able to come and help them, would actually be allowed in through the high wire fences and the locked doors, past the scornful guards with the big bunches of keys swinging from their belts, and would be able to just sign them out and take them away.

  It didn’t happen quite like that. There was a long pause while first one of the officials and then Kak Soran spoke on the telephone, and then the interpreter arrived and there was an endless wait while Kak Soran and Teriska Khan sat and answered questions in an airless little office, and Latif had to give all his details and sign a bunch of documents.