From Erbil to Amsterdam

By Taleb Ibrahim

This novel is about asylum in Europe, everything that a refugee might face while trying to seek a different life through asylum. Love, sex crimes, abuse, drugs, fanaticism, etc. On his journey from Erbil to Amsterdam, Sabah Khalil goes through and witnesses all kinds of experiences that asylum centers know in Germany, the Netherland, Belgium, and Sweden. It is an asylum seeker’s story from A to Z; a novel that has no political or ideological agenda. The Details you read here are things that you have not heard before, and no one has written before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taleb Ibrahim
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463960509

Taleb Ibrahim

Taleb Ibrahim was born in Hama, Syria, 1969. He studied physics and chemistry at Tishreen University, Lattakia. In Syria, he published three books: -A Sun Beam, stories, Dar Albalad, 2001. -Questions, stories, Dar Hauran, 2004. -Contaminated Words, Poems, Dar Albalad, 2002. He immigrated to The Netherlands in 2009, and holds now the Dutch citizenship

Book preview

EUROP.. SEASONS OF WOMEN AND REFUGEE DREAMS

I am Sabah Khalil from Kurdistan. When I had finished my university studies at Erbil University, Faculty of English Literature my father gave me fifteen-thousand dollars, and said:

Either get married or go to Europe.

The word Europe rapidly slipped off my father’s mouth, but my sensitive ears picked it up and gave it legs.

Oh, father! Europe, all at once!

Europe had already entered my dreams through Hajji.

For a long time, Hajji would meet us, almost daily, to narrate to us the details of his colourful life in Europe.

Every night, he would talk of his adventures with beautiful women, about the nature that was created by another god, the varieties of food where the China painting of the plates blends with the delicious aromas and flowing tastes, the catering of cooks, attendants and waiters, of his continuous travels by trains stuffed with women, the cars that he bought one after the other in

different colours and models, the parties decorated with beautiful women or people of the third-sex, yes the third-sex.

In his talks and numerous stories, where dreams were mixed with reality, Hajji would assure that people are of three genders: males, females and the third-sex.

I was still a high school student, when a classmate invited me to spend the night at his house as a young man had just returned from Europe and had a lot of stories to tell.

He invited me to spend a night of dreams, to laugh, have fun, and listen to the fabrications of someone who had returned empty handed, but insisted that he had won.

On the first night, Hajji greeted me warmly.

He said that I was young and that he would equip me with every idea that would qualify me to enter the dreams. .

That same night, my classmate said that a relative of theirs was about to die as doctors had discovered that he had cancer.

Cancer was Hajji’s cue to that night’s speech.

"Cancer is rare in Europe. Cancer enters the body slowly and calmly.

If doctors diagnose it early enough, it is not dangerous at all. In Europe, the doctors know the histories of all citizens. Each citizen has a personal record and regular tests. Even if it is cancer, the doctors would diagnose it and timely give the patient the appropriate remedy.

In Europe, no one dies unless his lifespan is over. Cancer! No way!"

Hajji uttered his last sentence laughing. He sipped his tea and asked for some sugar.

Before leaving, I asked my classmate: Is Hajji insane?!

I could not believe a word of his, but, next day, I listened to him.

I felt that his chatter was full of fabrications, still I attended on the third day; and

then, I became a permanent attendee.

In the wake of Hajji’s prattles, television acquired a different taste and food a different flavour. So did our lessons, trips, words, sleep and pleasures. Hajji, the loser, had awakened our hopes, us in Al-Dara Al-Kabira, one hour away from Erbil.

Hajji sits on a chair and we sit around him as if he is the colourful European apostle in our grey country.

He orders a glass of burgundy-coloured tea, his trademark, in his words, in all the countries that he has visited; he lights a hand-rolled cigarette because he has gotten used to it and no longer likes Marlboros or any other cigarettes.

Hand-rolled cigarettes are the Western world’s insignia and his passion. A hand-rolled cigarette requires time to be made, time and skill, for that he likes to smoke it: he, who spreads the tobacco on the paper, smoothes its soft circles, and wets the edges of the paper with his saliva.

Rolling a cigarette would take away moments of his life, but in smoking it he would recapture the fruit of those moments in pure pleasure.

Drink your tea! Lads, Hajji says.

One sip of tea wets the cigarette’s course, and instead of one pleasure, you will feel two.

Life is a pleasure, says Hajji.

"Life is a pleasure and you have to live it before age occupies you and you lose your pleasure battles to it.

Smoking is a pleasure; tea is a pleasure, Europe, which you don’t know, is a pleasure… no, no, no, Europe is the pleasure of pleasures."

I do not recall exactly when the erotic stories of Hajji entered our life.

I do not know when that started. He, none the less, satiated my thoughts and inflamed my repressed feelings.

I doubted the veracity of a lot of his stories and a lot of his adventures, but I believed that he was a talented young man and a brilliant storyteller, that he excelled in narration in spite of his failure in life.

That was what I thought, and that was what motivated me, on a rainy day, to befriend him.

For me, Hajji was no longer that young man who chit-chats during moments of leisure. No, no, no, he became the indispensable young man, the young man who coloured my dark life.

Hajji was like the rain I had left watering the earth, outside.

"Today, I’m going to recount to you one of my topmost pleasures in France. I’m going to tell you my tale with Matilda, the French. She was from Nice, but lived in Paris. She was a supervisor in a department for assembling aero plane lights (F.A.L). I was on a visit to the manager of the factory, William Proute, to whom I was referred by an acquaintance while searching for a job. It was enough for me to enter into the factory with the manager to attract the attention of all the girls working there, but my heart was seized by Matilda’s eyes. Her French eyes were two windows from the revolution’s days. Her eyes were two revolutions that have come of age behind a blue desk at the F.A.L. Her eyes were the wings of a French plane whose fluttering put on the air an oasis of warmth.

Words and names flow from Hajji’s mouth in an amazing smoothness, one with which an outright lie sounds like glaring truth.

That night, Hajji went out with Matilda. They drank wine and ate French Roquefort cheese, the kind that we cannot stomach, but he loves, especially with a glass of red wine, as red as Matilda’s lips.

Hajji licked his lips, as if recalling the scene of that Parisian night, but tonight, he was around the corner of Al-Doura Street, one hour away from Erbil.

Matilda’s hair was very long; it annoyed him while trying to suck her. It fell like a cascade on his chest and on his and her shoulders. It covered all the places Hajji wanted to see.

She laughed, and gathered the strands of her hair in her warm hands and scattered them behind her neck, but the long fair hair rapidly rebounded to disrupt his Parisian night tour around the details of Matilda’s body.

Hajji tries to explain the details of that body, but he only remembers the long hair and its twists and thick intermingling with the combined sweats of their bodies.

Before the night is done with its seconds, Hajji ends his European tour in our Erbil night, in the details of tea and Kurdish tobacco, in our twisting around our bulges and erections in a mass of dreams awakened by each Hajjic sentence.

Hajji, why have you returned?

A stranger asked, a stranger who was keen on spending his night listening to Hajji’s stories.

He came from another village, where the stories of the homecoming Hajji had arrived.

"I love Kurdistan, I adore her. I want to spend the rest of my life among the Kurds to tell them that beyond these mountains there is a beautiful life going on.

I have returned to tell you that there are treasures in life that should be in your hands. When I know that my mission has been accomplished I’ll go back to Europe, but not before I transmit my experience to your ears."

Hajji occupied a large portion of my heart. He occupied others’ hearts as well. Later on, the older men of my village started to spend their nights in his company. We were not allowed to join them.

I wondered if Hajji had narrated to them the stories of Matilda, the Frennch, or Anna, the Belgian woman whom he had met at a bar.

How the two of them went back to her place, and next morning, when they got up, after a Belgian night replete with kisses, she asked him who he was and what he was doing in her place.

I wondered if he had told them about Fatima, the Moroccan, whom he had undressed in the Dutch Hilversum Forest when it rained and drenched the two of them along with their clothes, which were lying on the fresh tresses of grass.

I wondered if my father had listened to Hajji’s stories!

Had he listened to them?! Had he believed them?!

Had Hajji become the inspirer of the men of my village?! Had he inspired my father as well?!

My mind was troubled by my father’s financial present. The word Europe that had not unintentionally slipped off his mouth, made me think that my father had believed Hajji.

It came to my mind that that large amount of money would be the key to my future life, but how could I choose?

A wife, a house and children, and you go on with your life quietly. You’re the first teacher in our family; a graduate of Erbil University, said my mother.

She wished for me to marry her niece, because she was beautiful, well brought up, and a perfect housekeeper. My sister wanted that as well.

My mother and sister had never heard Hajji’s stories.

Europe is beautiful women. Europe is life. Whatever your dreams were made of, you cannot imagine a young man’s life in Europe. Sabah! Europe is a real paradise; a paradise on earth, said Hajji the Kurd.

I stayed there for seven years and I can say that those days passed like seconds. I have visited every corner over there. I had lost my life in my country, but I gained those seven years. Don’t waste your life here, Sabah. Now, you have a chance to escape Erbil and its repugnance and boredom. You have a chance to see Matilda’s and other women’s hairs. I would not hesitate if I were you.

Hajji returned because he had missed Kurdistan. He yearned to inhale her air and drink her water; he felt that he had a mission to carry out in Kurdistan and then go back to Europe that he yearned for as well. Yearning is Hajji’s main motive. Yearning is also a pleasure if one can steer its rudder.

Thus spoke Hajji.

Yearning was Hajji’s motivation, but what is mine?

Boredom! Boredom solely will motivate me to leave. Boredom will lead me towards change.

If ever I happen to be overcome with yearning, I will come back.

Oh, mother dear! I am the youngest of the family and their servant, but I am their beloved one as well.

They reasoned that my payback is this amount of money, one which will open a door to the future and shortcut years of hard work. I, alone, have to decide what to do with that amount.

Oh my dear mother! I will leave.

This large amount of money will take me to Europe, far beyond the mountains of Kurdistan... to a world that is completely different from these present arrangements, ones that I know as I know the palm of my hand, something different from this deadly routine… Europe is something else. My dear mother, I will leave.

Europe! Countries of images of beauty and beautiful girls that Hajji’s stories have showered me with. I will leave.

To Europe, then! I’ve made my mind up. I will go to Europe and get married there.

I will go to Europe. I said.

That day, my father smiled as if I had realised a long-awaited desire for him.

To be a Kurd and to have a son living in Europe is the best attribute that a Kurdish father might have in Kurdistan.

I met Abu Mannan, the smuggler, through a long series of friends.

The smuggling journey to Germany costs 12 thousand dollars, said Abu Mannan.

"If you agree, you will have to deposit the money with a person known to both of us.

When you arrive in Germany, you will call that person to tell him that you have arrived safely. Then, he will give me the money."

Abu Mannan is very short, shorter than me, even. I am sure he does not belong to the Median civilization; our civilization, us Kurds.

This is obvious from his plain Kurdish language. He does not get involved in any discussion. He speaks a little. You want to arrive to Europe, this is the main point. He does not care about anything else.

Depositing the money with a man of Abu Mannan’s acquaintances, I put my whole future at stake. I did not know the man, but a classmate of mine knew him. Check everything, said my father.

Check everything!!

Oh, father! How can I check?

The gates of the dream don’t stop at the doorsteps of anxiety.

My dreams are now suspended at the thresholds of an anxiety that almost bends me in half: a smuggler, whom I don’t know and know nothing about, is the sole one to lead me to my well-known dream. Abu Mannan is now the route.

I told my father that I had checked everything and that everything was going well.

When consumed by anxiety, I would try to visit Abu Mannan through my friend, but Abu Mannan would refuse to speak, assuring me that everything was going well and that I had to calm down and wait.

You are not the first Kurd to leave Erbil through my hands and you will not be the last, he would say.

He was not in the habit of telling his clients about his plans, and would not give them the details of transit. He would utter a single sentence in summarizing the trust that binds unknown smugglers with foolish clients: calm down and wait.

Every night, anxiety would burn my eyes. I would leave my bed and repack my bag.

I would delude myself that Abu Mannan might show up that night to give me the map of transit to Europe and bid me Goodbye! I would rearrange my clothes in the bag; take out some clothes, only to pack them in again next day.

Every night a dream of betrayal would attack me, a dream that the smuggler had run away, and that my future had faded away in tunnels of illusion.

Next morning, I would realise that nothing new had happened: no running away, no smuggling, and no illusions.

On a dreary night, as anxious as my other nights in Erbil, Abu Mannan asked me to travel to Istanbul.

Just as I knew of him, my father said goodbye with no smiles, no crying, and no hugs.

Only my mother cried, and my sister hugged her. My brothers smiled and asked me not to worry as they would always be my resort and the brothers whom I knew well.

It took me two days to arrive in Istanbul. Shoro, Abu Mannan’s friend, received me there and led me to a quarter on the outskirts of Istanbul, a quarter that lives off Istanbul’s refuse.

The name of that quarter was Sultanbeyli. Apart from its name, it had nothing to do with Sultans.

However, in terms of the details of life and population, it is closer to the miserable lives of peasants in the Sultan’s farms, or of the homeless who stay alive only because the Lord is otherwise busy, or because history has forgotten about them.

Shoro led me through the alleyways, among children dirtied with chaos, among women wandering about under loose headscarves.

He warmly greeted a shopkeeper and bought some food and drinks He talked to the shopkeeper who was watching me and recording my features in his visual memory.

I watched the vegetables in their baskets on both sides of the door, and the fruits suspended in ropes; inside the shop, the shelves were crammed with colourful goods.

After a long walk, we arrived at a poor dwelling in Sultanbeyli. When we entered, five dwellers stood up to welcome us.

Shoro gave them the stuff that he had bought from the shop. He asked them to welcome me, told them that travel was imminent, and left.

I stayed in that dwelling for six days. Neither I nor the other men ventured out.

I was from Turkey, as Shoro had instructed me.

Upon Shoro’s request I hid my real identity from the other men and, I think, they did the same.

An Iraqi man, two Afghan brothers, and two other men who did not say a word.

We practiced silence, much more than talking. We feared each other.

Each one was folded upon his secrets.

Each one was folded upon the white lie offered to him by Shoro, a tall tale that each one of us came from a country other than his homeland; in fact, each one of us knew exactly that the others were lying.

Shoro came to see us once a day, bringing food, and exhorting us, the silent ones, to keep silent and not to annoy the neighbours, promising that the journey would come soon, just as he had done the day I arrived.

All that we had to do was to just keep calm and wait.

I approached him once and talked to him in Kurdish, which I had learned at Erbil’s schools and university.

I told him that I wanted to go out of my prison; I wanted to see the real Istanbul before leaving.

I wanted to see the city that our geography book at school, Geography of the World, described as an old-modern masterpiece, the most beautiful city in the world as it holded in its palms the past with its beautiful expressions and the present with all its arts.

I wanted to tell him two things that I thought were important to get his consent and permission for me to meet Istanbul.

First, that I was a Kurd from a country that was building its Kurdish identity step by step, and second, that I was a university graduate who knew a lot, and was different from the other unknown dwellers. But he rejected my request calmly, but decisively. When I asked him again, he got angry and shouted at me, warning me not to repeat my request.

I had read about Istanbul’s markets, its clean streets and beautiful girls, but I saw nothing of that save for a miserable dwelling in Sultanbeyli with its group of dwellers who were disguised under Shoro’s appellations, and who wanted to reach Europe through Shoro’s fat fingers, the fingers that had swollen because of carrying food sacks every day to the pitiable Sultanbeyli.

I tried, many times, to draw back the curtains that shut out the windows; I wanted to see a street where a young woman would walk down, or an alley where a group of young men would gather around, but the others objected. They showed more care than me to abide by Shoro’s orders.

I was frightened of everything, though I had told my father that I had checked everything.

I was afraid that the smuggler might leave us in the dreariness of Sultanbeyli or in the throng of Istanbul.

I was afraid of running out of money, or of what was left of it, or of having the money stolen by my silent companions and that I would be unable to return to Erbil. I was afraid that the smuggler, Shoro, might run away.

I was afraid of being arrested by the Turkish police, along with the other refugees, residents of the canned dwelling in Sultanbeyli that has nothing in common with Sultans save in name.

My fears came to an end, when, in an Istanbul morning, Shoro told us that we would leave that night, reminding us to carry our things with us. He asked us to clean up the place and to wait for him.

It was a moony night, similar to those nights of Erbil where the barking of foxes breaks through the distances; the beautiful nights of September, the onset of active autumn with the weary summer packing to leave; the nights inflamed by Hajji’s stories.

That night was like an angle of the great hope that had just squeezed through the gate in the narrow Beyli.

We left the dwelling calmly, one after the other, Shoro led us to a small car. We hardly managed to squash in.

It had room for three persons, but we, the six dwellers of the canned dwelling, sat inside it.

In the late hours of that night, the car carried us across the Turkish-Bulgarian borders. It was small and we were stuffed inside it like sardines; a canned car carrying canned refugees from a canned dwelling in Sultanbeyli.

Before boarding the car, the smuggler had taken our bags and threw them into a nearby valley, saying We have agreed that I’ll transport you, but not your stuff.

He seized our ID cards and hid them away. I objected at first, but, later, I gave up.

I reckoned that Europe would not need my ID card, a card to prove that I’m a Kurd from Erbil, a Kurd in a photograph showing my features and my short hair in front of a white board, a photograph that had once been taken by a Kurdish photographer in a secluded studio at the edges of Erbil.