Human Cargo (40 page)

Luis met Helen Bamber on a bus. They traveled the same route in the mornings and they began to talk. In her immediate, forthright way, she told him that he looked terrible; he told her that his left side ached unbearably, where the muscles had been torn by the torturers, and that his nights were filled with dreams of the people he had left behind, his dead wife and comrades, tortured and now dead, whose faces he saw in the darkness, smiling, alive, sad, asking him questions about why he had lived while they had died. In Chile, he had often beseeched his torturers to kill him; now, during the few empty spaces in his crowded life, he thought often of suicide. Panic attacks engulfed him, black holes in which he lost all sense of what was real and what was not. For several years he stayed at home; he gave up the studying and he cleaned people’s houses only when sheer financial necessity drove him. He brought up a daughter he had fathered by another Chilean refugee, and her daughter by an earlier relationship, and he enjoyed the safety and happiness of being at home with the small children, pushing away thoughts about himself. That is, until the day when, like Lamine, he could push them away no longer.

With Helen’s help, he found a therapist to work with; and, very slowly, he opened the past and began to reshape the present. His girlfriend had begged him to talk, saying that she was afraid at night of what was happening in the part of his mind that he kept shut. Now he could not stop talking, week after week, to a therapist in Brighton, though it was many months before he stopped imagining the moment when he would jump from the cliffs of Dover, stopped remembering continuously the heavy shadow of the dead, those who had been alone when tortured and “alone, their bodies mutilated, abused and broken, defeated when they died.”

In a passage of a memoir that Luis wrote, when he decided that he should record his experiences for others, he used Helen’s words: “I know their last words and their last sounds, because I was there too, because I accompanied them to the threshold.” He thought that he would never survive the day one of his daughters was taken back to Chile; he had fought to win custody but was told that as an exconvict
he had no hope of keeping her. In time, he stopped denying the past and knew what it felt like to be angry. In time, too, he became a therapist working with refugees himself, and was able to return to Chile to give evidence at a trial of his torturers, confronting them at last, terrified that he would fail, shaking, sleepless, but elated. When he came back to London, he felt himself a stranger once more, with nightmares and memories he could not control, and which only more therapy helped put behind him. In his memoir, Luis wrote about the torture, the beatings, and the threats to the three-year-old first daughter he had by his wife in Chile, the mock executions and the solitary confinement, and the day when, like Lamine, he found a gate somewhere within his mind that the torturers could not enter. “‘Here,’ I said, pointing to my head, ‘you will not enter. The rest of my body has been all yours and you have violated it, abused it, humiliated it and tortured it. But this is mine, only mine, and when I am gone, after you kill me, it will go with me, with all the secrets and my secrets and all the secrets before me.’“ And then, much in the same way as Lamine had laughed aloud at his torturers, Luis had told his tormentors: “You can leave the room.”

Almost a quarter of a century later, as we talked in a cafe in Victoria Station, where he is about to catch his train home to his new wife and their two young sons, with the sound of the trains and the clatter and din of a large station drowning some of his soft words, what Luis wants to talk about is loss. “The loss of all the people I loved. I want to be with them, the people I met in the camps, the ones who disappeared, the two who were machine-gunned in front of me in their car, those’ I heard screaming day after day in the torture center of Villa Grimaldi. I don’t feel guilty. I wasn’t a perpetrator and I begged them to kill me and they wouldn’t. But I remember, and I think always of the loss. I keep company with the dead.”

•   •   •

TESFAY IS
ERITREAN,
a tall, very thin figure with graying hair cut short and glasses that give him a distinguished, professorial look.
He is neat and trim. Tesfay never imagined, in all the years of his childhood and adolescence, that he would live outside Eritrea. On the contrary, he knew that what he liked best about his life was the sense of community that came from his large family, many relations, and small village. He would tell friends, when they talked about the world outside Africa, that perhaps, when he was old, he might visit Europe.

In the winter of 1995, as a twenty-six-year-old teacher and occasional political activist, Tesfay realized that unless he acted quickly he would be arrested and possibly executed. He had already been taken into custody on several occasions, sometimes along with his father. He had lost two brothers, and seen a sister wounded, in the long war with Ethiopia. Now, on this bright, sunny winter day, Tesfay decided to flee. He told only his father of his plans. He said good-bye to no one. Late one night, on foot, taking nothing with him, he followed a smuggler through the hills and across the desert. ‘They walked for six days. In Sudan, he was put on a plane, still in the company of the smuggler. He thought he might be gone two years. By the time I met Tesfay, in a cafe near his small council flat in Hammersmith, he had been an exile for eight years, and there was little prospect of his being able to go home. As he told me his story, he kept stopping, to breathe deeply and steady himself. “You see,” he said when he could breathe again, “whenever I talk about it, my chest becomes too tight to speak.”

Like Lamine, Tesfay knew no one in London. It was January and, like Lamine, Tesfay remembers best the gray and the debilitating cold, after the light and sun of the high plateaus of Eritrea. The smuggler, who accompanied him all the way into the city, left him on a street corner in Finsbury Park, toward the north of the city, telling him that this was an area frequented by Eritreans. Tesfay walked around the streets, stunned by the feeling of unfamiliarity, terrified by the chaos in his mind. But many of the stories that refugees tell about themselves are lit by sudden episodes of luck and generosity: so something unexpected and good happened to Tesfay. Looking into a shop window, he saw an elderly woman who seemed
to him unmistakably Eritrean in appearance. He went in and spoke to her. It turned out that her family came originally from his father’s village in the mountains. She took him home with her, to the flat in Finsbury Park where she had lived since becoming a refugee herself in the 1970s, and she let him sleep on her sofa while he found a solicitor and applied for political asylum.

Because his flight had been so precipitate, Tesfay had not had time to prepare himself for London, to visualize what it might all look and sound like. He wandered the streets, fighting off panic, trying to understand what people were saying. He felt very cold and very lost; sometimes, overwhelmed by memory and desolation, he fell over, and lay under a car or along the pavement. Passersby assumed he was drunk. Although his Eritrean friend did her best to make his life tolerable, although the Home Office eventually granted him asylum and gave him a hotel room in which to live, his sense of loss and isolation grew stronger. His first hotel was inhabited by prostitutes and drug dealers, whom he found terrifying and strange. The shared kitchen was very dirty. He stayed in his room. One day, he bought a kettle and sometimes, when he felt weak from lack of food, he boiled pasta in it, switching the kettle on and off until the pasta was cooked. On several occasions, he came back from walks to find his room ransacked, his few possessions gone. He moved back to spend the night on his friend’s sofa, but spent the days in his hotel room, in his pajamas, remembering the past, going over what he had lost and the life he would have been living, had he stayed at home. “I felt everything as a shock, a pain, a loss,” Tesfay says now. “At home I had always felt safe. I was respected, popular, I had friends, I had money in my pocket. Here, I knew no one. Days went by when I did not speak to anyone. The more time I spent alone, the more I needed to be alone. I dreaded having to tell my story again and again, to lawyers, to the doctor, to the Home Office. The only place I could find to live was the past.” He grew thinner. Constant agonizing stomach pains and feelings of nausea sent him to see doctors. Some, he says, treated him well; others were impatient and callous, and he left them feeling that he was not good
enough to receive their care. From time to time, a new doctor would wonder whether some of his pains might not be psychological in origin. “I thought they were telling me that I was mad. I became defensive and insisted that they simply try to address my symptoms.” In time, he says, his hotel room came to look like a little pharmacy.

It took almost two years for Tesfay’s life to improve. Slowly, he learned English and began to make friends. The Eritrean woman went back to Asmara for a visit; she took letters to his family, and brought back replies. Now he knew that they were alive and well, and they knew that he was alive. I asked Tesfay if he had ever been able to speak to them. He said that his village had no telephone. He moved, first to a better hotel, then to the room in Hammersmith he now has, where the kitchen is clean. And the day came when he was referred to the Medical Foundation, and though he kept telling everyone that he wanted to forget, not to talk, he did begin to talk about himself, very slowly, often having to leave his sessions to vomit. “The therapist would say to me: ‘How do you feel?’ And I would say: ‘I feel terrible, I have a headache and a stomachache and I feel sick.’ And then I would quickly begin to generalize. Tike everyone else, I…’ And the therapist would say: ‘I don’t want to know about everyone else. I want to know about you.’ Then he would ask me why I thought this or that, and I found this terrifying. I felt silly.”

As Tesfay began to talk, he began to remember his dreams. He dreamed about police and soldiers coming to get him, and about the president of Eritrea arriving in his village by helicopter; he dreamed about his family. He felt bad all the time, and whenever anything upset him, he vomited. He gave up drinking coffee or tea or eating anything but the blandest food. He still cannot tolerate cigarette smoke. But, bit by bit, session by session, he began to grow more aware, to anticipate what gave him pain and made him sick. He learned to control it. And, after some time, he trained to become a counselor himself. Working with others, whose sense of shock and alienation he felt to be part of himself, “changed my frame of reference,” he says.

But Tesfay, like Lamine, is alone. When I asked whether he had a wife or a girlfriend, he pulled a bowl of sugar lumps that was sitting on the table between us toward him, picked up a single lump, and threw it, almost violently, to one side. This, he said, was what his life was like: apart, not in a group, not close to anyone. “At home, you meet someone like you. To have a relationship, you need a network or a group, and there you find someone who shares your values and understands you. I want someone who can communicate with my mother. Here, I never know the extent to which people understand me. I have friends, but I have to work hard to communicate with them. I have to think, very carefully, about concepts. It is very, very hard work.”

For Tesfay, for Lamine, for Luis who accompanies the dead, for Mary, who is shocked by her sense of aloneness, home has become an elusive idea, haunting and dangerous. Home was what defined them, and what they were forced to abandon. The image of home is always an image of abandonment—their abandonment of others, others’ abandonment of them. And home, in a place of exile, rarely exists. It is a thought most find too frightening to dwell on. But Tesfay thinks about it often. “If I were to play with words,” he says, “1 would say that I was homeless. Even if I go back to Eritrea now, I will not belong there. I will be strange to people, and they will be strange to me. Eritrea does not now have everything to satisfy me: I have acquired new habits and manners. But here, I lack what I need to feel at home. Wherever I am, for the rest of my life, I will never be entirely at home again.”

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I
n July 2002, with the Taliban not long gone, and the Americans still pursuing Al Qaeda in the high southern valleys, I went to Kabul to talk to refugees returning to their country after many years of exile. I decided I needed to see for myself what return meant to people who had been gone so long that they remembered little of their country, who were going back to a country petrified in time a quarter of a century earlier, and what it was like for a country so new and so fragile to welcome and absorb so many expectant people who were bringing with them so many new skills and foreign ways, and so much hopeful memory. I wanted to learn what it felt like to travel backward, in great number, all at once, and about what people who had spent their lives—in many cases all their lives—in refugee camps expected and hoped for.

Dubai, in the summer of 2002, was still the gateway to
Afghanistan from the West. Ariana, the Afghan state airway, owned a single elderly jet, which had been coaxed into service by foreign engineers, but it had as yet no booking system. Getting on a flight was a matter of turning up and waiting. At midnight, Dubai’s modest second-string airport was humid, quiet, and very hot. Along one wall, with its single row of plastic seats, gathered the passengers hopeful for Ariana’s dawn flight: a German television crew, with furry booms and metal boxes; foreign women aid workers, incongruous in Afghan dress and neat Western haircuts, leaning on their suitcases, reading fat paperbacks; a group of bearded Afghan men, standing apart, talking to one another. And there was Nasir.