The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  The flat where she lives with her father is fifteen minutes’ walk from the station, on the second floor of a redbrick building, with bicycles in the hallway and flowers on the window sills. It’s all spick and span, radiating provincial German middle-class order. Most of the names on the doorbells are German and slippers are arranged neatly beside welcome mats. Her dad is out at his German classes. He’s at beginner’s level A1, learning the alphabet and basic grammar, which he will need before he can restart his profession as carpenter and tailor. Haneen has already completed her B2 language exam. When we met in Hungary, we spoke English. Now she would prefer to speak German. She finds the two languages confusingly similar, after her native Arabic.

  Her mother Maha is still in Damascus with her older sister Ranim, twenty-three, and younger brother Nour, thirteen. She misses them hugely and hopes they will soon be able to join them in Germany. But Germany no longer has an embassy in Damascus, so, in order to apply for a visa to join her husband and Haneen in Germany, Maha must travel to either Lebanon or Jordan. Both countries, already overwhelmed by Syrian refugees, make travel difficult. Maha has an appointment soon in Amman at the German embassy, but it is not yet clear if she will get permission from the Jordanian authorities to go. If she does, and her application for a family reunion is successful, the process will take another six months. It would be easier to travel to Beirut by car from Damascus, but the queue for an appointment at the German embassy there is much longer. She has still not received a reply to her letter sent five months earlier. Judging by the experience of other refugees, her mother and younger brother will get permission to come, eventually. It’s just a matter of time, patience, Bashar tells me later, when he gets back from his German course.

  Together, we look at photographs I took of her and their group in the cornfield at Röszke, on the Hungary–Serbia border. She points out other people she recognises from the group she was travelling with. Her friend Rama was given refugee status in France, after many months on the island of Corsica. She is still hoping to go to England, to visit her aunt.

  Haneen’s uncle, her father’s brother, is also here in Bargteheide, in a flat on the other side of town. A young Palestinian man and his father are living in Hamburg – they’re still in touch, occasionally. And that Syrian woman, travelling alone, she last saw in the transit camp in Dresden.

  Haneen is grateful to Germany for their flat, and a room of her own which she has painted in white, pink and purple. She and her father were recognised as refugees in February 2016 – just five months after they arrived in Germany. They get €360 each a month, which is just enough to live on, as the Job Centre – the German institution which manages asylum seekers – also pays their rent.2

  Bashar’s carpentry workshop in the Zamalka suburb of Damascus was completely destroyed in an airstrike in 2014.3 She remembers running for cover as she walked home from the school where her mother teaches religion. After her father lost his livelihood, his business and all his tools, the family first moved to another flat, nearer the centre. Then they decided that Bashar and Haneen should go ahead to Europe, and the others would follow. Two things discouraged them from travelling together – the cost, and the danger of the journey.

  The worst part of the journey was the nine-hour trip in a hopelessly overcrowded rubber dinghy from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Samos. The engine failed, and the boat was sinking when a Chinese cargo ship spotted them and alerted the Greek coastguard. A police launch took the soaking refugees aboard. Four days later, after only two nights of sleep, and a final 30-kilometre walk from Serbia into Hungary, they reached Röszke.

  After Damascus, she’s a little bored of Bargteheide, she confesses, so we take the train to Lübeck. She loves window-shopping there, strolling through the old town, looking at its old churches and municipal buildings with their spikey Hanseatic spires. The ancientness of the place reminds her a little of Damascus.

  She wants to study architecture at the university in Lübeck. Even before she left Syria, she dreamt of becoming an architect. It’s Ramadan, so she and her father are not eating or drinking anything till the sun goes down. We sit by the river in the sunshine. The language is the hardest thing for her to get used to. Most of her friends are fellow refugees, for the time being. There’s still a loose network of Syrians and Iraqis she got to know in various camps. She’s impatient for the day when she can meet young Germans too. She finds them friendly and welcoming, but reserved.

  The only time she experienced fear or hostility was when she was in eastern Germany, in a camp in a basketball stadium in Dresden. Even now she sometimes notices children staring at her headscarf. But she has not considered giving it up. ‘It’s part of who I am.’ She likes many things in Germany but she needs to stay herself and the scarf is part of that. ‘Germans accept that. They have no problems with people from another culture. There are people who don’t like the refugees but most accept us.’

  Walking back to the railway station in Lübeck we pass a statue of Otto von Bismarck on his horse, the bronze turned green by the salt in the north German rain. Who was Bismarck? she asks. A predecessor of Angela Merkel, I say, and of Helmut Kohl. This figure with his spiked war helmet and bushy moustache. The unifier of the German states through war and diplomacy. The man who created a Germany large and strong enough to help so many refugees today. And the absurd thought crossed my mind that, today, in the early twenty-first century, Bismarck would be a great name for a dog. A servant wiser than his master.

  In Haneen’s room in Bargteheide there’s an array of the little pins she uses to pin her scarf up, and a small arsenal of perfumes and lipsticks. Pictures of her fellow students, and of her German teacher, Anna, her first friend in Germany, line the walls. She’s reading an American thriller, Dead Girls Don’t Lie, and the Turkish author Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love.

  Are Germans interested in her, for who she is, or are they just waiting for her to become like them? She finds the question amusing.

  ‘I’d just like to be like me. I can’t just decide to be German. I don’t think anyone can be another person! Nobody can be someone that they are not, but there are many good things we could learn from this culture, like their attention to time. They are so . . .’ – she struggles for the word – ‘pünktlich. Punctual. I think that’s great.’

  On the radio she mostly listens to rock music. Her favourite station is Radio Hamburg. ‘Just music, no news. I don’t like news.’ While we were out, her father was preparing the Ramadan meal for us. They share the cooking and the housework, depending on which of them has German lessons that day. Bashar has cooked flat Arab breads with sour cream, grated cheese, dotted with black cumin seeds, a large salad, and a cucumber and yogurt salad with garlic and mint, like a Greek tzatziki. It’s all vegetarian, out of respect for me, their guest. There is also a large bottle of brown liquid, mixed by Bashar from water and tamarind, a traditional drink for the breaking of the fast.

  Bashar says a short prayer, thanking God for his bounty, his help to people in need, and the sacrifice they have made to him, by not eating during his holy month. We slowly chew on our dates, then tuck into the main course.

  Cologne

  Tariq is late for our meeting at the main station because he has an appointment with his bank-manager. It’s not easy having a bank account under a false name, but life for him in Germany is easier that way.

  His real name has become a burden because he first registered as an asylum seeker in Austria and gave his fingerprints there. When he reached Germany, he applied for asylum again, under his real name. But Moroccans stand little chance of getting asylum in the EU because Morocco is classified as a ‘safe’ country. The only chance, unless they can prove persecution, is to say they come from the western Sahara districts, close to the border with Mauritania, where a territorial dispute still flares up occasionally. In fact Tariq is not a refugee at all. He’s an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Marrakesh, sp
ecialising in building power plants, and he came to Europe to seek his fortune. Under the rules in force, there was little chance for him to apply for work in his own profession. So he had to go through the performance of claiming asylum even though he’s not running away from anything – apart from low wages, few prospects and boredom in his home town in western Morocco.

  The square in front of the station looks the same as it did in the photographs from New Year’s Eve, 2015. The dark cathedral, rearing up like a horse, the lenses in the second-hand camera shop at its foot, the faces of the policemen in their booths in front of the station entrance all brood on the same questions: what does it mean to be German today? And was it wise to let so many non-Germans shelter beneath our huge Aquiline wings?

  Tariq arrives, wearing a flowery black and white shirt, and mirror sunglasses. His hair is longer than when I last saw him, curling black over his collar. He’s too thin, I think, starved by the years of illegality, but handsome with it. When he takes off his sunglasses, his brown eyes are surprising gentle and vulnerable. He would need a good dentist, and then he could apply for any job, hold his own with any official.

  We walk down to the shore of the Rhine to talk. The day is hot, scantily clad girls sunbathe on the grass, while the tourists sip away the summer afternoon at a row of expensive cafés. Poorer or freer souls like us, sit in the shade of the trees and watch the world go by, with our bottles of fizzy apple juice.

  ‘If you come to Germany and ask for asylum the government gives you a place to sleep, and pocket money,’ Tariq explains. He gets €287 a month, plus a free bed in the former classroom he shares with twelve others in a school in the Cologne suburb of Troisdorf. ‘With this money you can survive but you cannot make anything for your future. You can also get work on the black market.’ He does this too, one day a week, for €5 or €6 an hour – well below the minimum wage. Washing up in a restaurant, working on a building site, some painting and decorating. He knows people who have done this for years. He’s a comparative newcomer to the game.

  There were a lot of other North Africans who came at the same time as him, in 2015 or 2016, he says. Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Egyptians. Some of them were already in Europe, in Spain or Portugal or Italy, working illegally. Others were new, like him. The refugee crisis gave them another strategy to survive in the EU, the asylum card. The hard thing for illegals, is their illegality. The danger of being stopped by the police without papers, of going to prison, of being deported. The refugee crisis gave them a way to apply for papers and find a free place to stay. To get just legal enough to survive a few more months, then disappear with another name.

  If you look at this from the point of view of the police, in a time of terrorism, it’s a nightmare, I suggested to Tariq. He scratched his head. He wasn’t exactly used to looking at things from a police perspective. He saw the issue more in terms of poor travellers struggling for survival in an often hostile Europe.

  ‘You can give any name you want. But it also says on your ID card that it is not based on original documents. So it’s easy. I know some people who used five names. Sometimes they ask you, which is your correct name? So you can choose any name.’ Such uncertainty about their identity worked in their favour, he explained. If you had genuine documents, and the police knew for certain who you were, they could prove this to the authorities of your own country and arrange for your deportation there.

  Each asylum seeker also gives his fingerprints, so the authorities can identify him with all the other people he has tried to be. They just don’t know which of the names he has used, if any, is the real one. He did know Algerians and Tunisians who had been deported, however. The police came for them at two o’clock in the morning and took them straight to the airport in Frankfurt. A few hours later they were home. And a few months or years later, one way or another, they were back in Europe. There was less pressure on Moroccans.

  ‘Without a passport they don’t believe you anyway. Even if I give my correct name.’ He tore up his own passport on a small boat crossing the Aegean, when he first saw the lights of Mytilene on Lesbos. But no sooner had he thrown the bits of paper in the water than the outboard motor broke down. They were rescued by the Turkish coastguard and towed back to the Turkish coast. So then he was in Turkey with no documents. On the third attempt to cross to the Greek islands, he succeeded.

  He was still in Athens when the Cologne events of New Year’s Eve 2015 happened, but as a North African living in Cologne, he feels ‘the Cologne effect.’ If he goes into a supermarket, the security guards follow him. If he heard a fellow immigrant talking about how much he hates Germany, or even planning an attack, what would he do? ‘First I would sit down and talk with him, like a friend. But if he didn’t listen to me, I would go to the police. I would lose a friend, but I would save many people – children, women, the elderly.’

  We take a train together to Troisdorf, the quiet suburb of Cologne where he lives in a former primary school with a shifting population of around fifty fellow asylum seekers. Troisdorf is twenty-five minutes from the city centre, a strange mixture of middle-class German inhabitants and many waves of migrants. There are Russian shops, Asian supermarkets, Turkish cafés and Iranian taxi drivers.

  Tariq is not a strict Muslim – we drank beer together in Athens – but many of his fellow asylum seekers are, so he invites me to share the Ramadan meal together with him and his room-mates that evening. First we go shopping together. I buy the ingredients: frozen pizzas, feta cheese, yogurt, falafel, cucumbers and tomatoes. He already has a chicken in the fridge. The supermarket is full of fellow Muslims with similar plans, families of head-scarved women, bearded men followed by a gaggle of children, the grown-ups a little strained after not eating or drinking all day, the children playful in the luxury of not having yet reached the age where fasting is encouraged. I’ve hardly eaten or drunk all day either, in order to better understand the people I will spend the evening with.

  The playground of the school is still decorated with wall paintings of underwater scenes – giant octopuses, sharks, rainbow fish, with crazy divers and small ships resting on the surface.

  In the middle of the playground are three large concrete table-tennis tables. Some people are sitting in doorways, some are already hard at work in the former kitchen. Tariq shows me to his room, a former classroom which still has the words ‘Frau Pieper, Klasse 9–10’ on a little piece of paper next to the door. The room is divided into several living spaces with blankets and metal rods. There are three beds in his corner, with small, messy piles of possessions; men living alone, in limbo. Other classrooms, where families with children are living, are more homely. Many are from African countries, Guinea, Nigeria and Eritrea. The Eritreans have a good chance of asylum, the others little chance, but they are all cooking together, laughing together in the kitchen, preparing to eat for the first time that day. One of the Guineans is cooking fish, he tells me. Sea fish or river fish? River fish! He laughs, as though the idea of sea fish were ridiculous. Another Moroccan wires up his phone to a loudspeaker and starts blasting out what sounds like a North African rap artist. Onions and minced meat sizzle in one pan, our falafel in another. Two Algerian men chop potatoes. Most of the cooks here are men, and there’s a loose camaraderie, linked by their Islamic culture. As I chop the cucumber and garlic, and mix it with the yogurt for a salad, I want to taste whether it has enough salt, then suddenly remember no one is allowed to eat today till 21.45.

  The last hour passes very slowly. Everyone is putting the finishing touches to their meals. Finally, the time comes. I sit down with a man from Eritrea who has been here eight months. He was born in Somalia, to parents who had already fled Eritrea. He has never seen his own country. Another Moroccan, Ahmed, says he has been in Europe thirteen years. He started in Italy, and has only been deported once, from Belgium, last year. Then he made his way back to Germany. Each time he applies for asylum, in order to get the papers needed to stay temporarily. He lives off his a
llowance, and like Tariq, a day’s work here and there, in the kitchen of a Turkish restaurant, or picking fruit on a rural farm where no one cares too much where the labourers come from, so long as they work hard and don’t need to be paid too much.

  These are people on the edge of a world, in transit. Some are registered elsewhere in Germany and have just come for a visit. Some have been living here in the school more than a year. Two security guards in black shirts, an Iranian and a Kazakh, patrol the corridors, but there is no order to keep. The Iranian laughs and jokes with everyone, asking about the ingredients, the herbs and spices in each dish. The Kazakh is burlier, unfriendlier, hardly blinks when I smile at him. Tariq tells me he was a refugee himself and has been in Germany for fourteen years. He lived many years in a small room with ten people, Tariq says, and suffered a lot in his life, that’s why he never laughs, but he’s not a bad man.

  Tariq is waiting for news from his cousin in Sweden, from whom he got money on the journey, when his own ran out. His cousin will come by car to fetch him in the next few months, he hopes. He has heard that the police checks on the Øresund bridge from Denmark to Sweden, introduced in 2015, have been stopped. Trains and railway stations attract the police, but the motorways of Europe are the best way to travel, he knows. There he can fit in more easily with the crowd. If he makes it to Sweden, he won’t apply for asylum there. He’ll just live quietly with his cousin, who can find him work in the black economy. Sweden was, after all, the original goal of his journey. He walks me part of the way up the street, towards my hotel. At thirty-six, he’s older than most of the immigrants I’ve met. What does he miss most about Morocco? He grins, shyly. ‘My Mum.’

  Ansbach

  The railway line from Cologne to Ansbach leads through peaceful, hilly countryside, glides past orderly German towns and villages. The roofs of long medieval German barns slope sharply down towards the track, from an earlier era when winters were still winters. After the flat north, and the industrial faces of Cologne, I feel as though I’m in the Shire in Tolkien’s classic The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.