‘Do you like reading?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘What was the last book you read?’
‘A book about the crystallisation process of honey.’
‘Do you read political books?’
‘No.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘What does your wife do for a living?’
‘She is a painter. Was.’
‘What is the current situation in your country?’
‘It’s heaven on earth.’
‘Mr Ibrahim, I understand that these questions may seem to be a bit unnecessary to you, but they are an important part of your screening.’
‘The situation in my country is complete chaos and destruction.’
‘Who is your president?’
‘Bashar al-Assad.’
‘When did he become the president?’
*
And the questions continue in this way. Do I have any association with the president? Where is Syria? What countries does it share borders with? Is there a river in Aleppo? What is its name? Eventually he begins to ask me about my journey here, and I tell him as much as I can remember in a straightforward, linear, coherent way, just like Lucy Fisher suggested. Except it’s harder than I thought, because when I try to answer his questions he replies often with a question that I wasn’t expecting, something that throws me and takes me to another part of the journey. I tell him as best I can about how we reached Turkey, about the smuggler’s apartment, about Mohammed, and the trip to Leros, about Athens and all those nights we spent in Pedion tou Areos. I don’t elaborate. I don’t tell him about Nadim. I do not want him to know that I helped to kill a man, that I am capable of being a murderer. And finally I tell him about how we made it to England. But I don’t tell him what happened to Afra before we arrived – I wouldn’t even be able to say the words out loud.
He tells me the interview is over. The voice recorder is turned off and the files are closed. A bar of light from a rectangular window close to the ceiling falls across his smile.
When I stand my legs are numb and I feel that I have been robbed, somehow, of life.
Lucy Fisher is waiting for me. Afra and Diomande haven’t yet finished. Seeing my face, she goes to the vending machine and returns with a warm cup of tea.
‘How did it go?’ she asks.
I don’t reply. I cannot speak.
‘Please,’ she says, ‘don’t lose hope. That’s the thing.’ There is a tone of resignation in her voice and she is pulling at the strand of hair. ‘This is what I always tell people, you see. Never, never, never lose
was fading, dwindling like the fire in the night. I needed to find a way out. So the next day I ventured out of the park. I asked passers-by for directions to Victoria Square. The square was cluttered with people and litter, those who had nowhere else to go sat on benches beneath the trees and around the statues. I recognised a few faces from the park, some of the drug dealers hanging around by the station or outside the cafés beneath the canopies on the square. There were stray cats everywhere, scavenging in the bins. A dog lay on his side on the concrete with his paws outstretched; it was hard to tell if he was dead or alive. I remembered the wild dogs of Istanbul and standing on Taksim Square with some hope in my heart. Hope existed then in the unknowability of the future. Istanbul felt like a place of waiting, but Athens was a place of stagnant resignation, and Angeliki’s words played on my mind: ‘This is the place where people die slowly, inside. One by one, people die.’
This was the city of recurring dreams, with no way of waking up: a string of nightmares.
A man held up a bunch of worry beads. ‘Twenty euro,’ he was saying, ‘very beautiful stone.’ His voice was full of desperation and grievance, the sentence sounding like a demand, but there was a manic smile on his face.
‘Do I look like I have twenty euros?’ I said, and turned away from him.
I looked up at the buildings that lined the square and the streets running off it. There were balconies with canopies and a feeling that a better life had once existed here; in their shabbiness and fading beauty they told a story of abandonment. There was graffiti on the walls, angry slogans that I couldn’t understand, and coffee shops, and a flower stall and book stall, and people trying to sell tissues or pens or SIM cards. These people were like flies buzzing around the entrance of the Metro, following people as they stepped off the escalators.
The man with the worry beads was still standing beside me, the same infuriating smile on his face.