TOGETHER AGAIN
rubble.
“Even I can’t understand what’s happening. It will take a generation to repair,” she says. “My life is just a memory. I carry it on my tablet.”
There is a little Syrian grocery store behind the language school, where she buys thick Syrian coffee, grape leaves, olives, spices, falafel mix. There were only a few Syrians in town when she arrived, but more seem to be coming all the time.
One of them is another refugee from Aleppo named Amar, a pharmacist, who wears a stricken and baffled look when he talks about what Syria has become.
On his smartphone he calls up footage of Islamic State militants beheading a man in the desert.
The victim was a family friend, he says, accused of working for the Syrian government. His throat spills blood into the sand. Sawsan looks away.
For her daughters, Cidra and Joud, the apartment in Istanbul is a kind of prison. It is plain, the walls bare. There is no air conditioning in the brutally hot summer months.
Their father does not let them out of the house unescorted. They aren’t enrolled in school. They play Candy Crush on the smartphone, and draw elaborate cartoons based on Japanese anime.
Her husband, a proud man, left the core of his identity in Syria. “My husband feels like a destroyed man,” she says. “He used to support the family, and now he can do nothing.”
He likes to say that it is all in God’s hands. “Whatever happens, we believe destiny has been written,” he says.
His temper is quick to flare. He buys cheap bags of hand-rolled cigarettes, 20 for a dollar, which he methodically deposits in an empty pack of Gauloises Blondes, the more expensive brand he smoked back home.
Fate in its mystery has somehow brought him full circle, from a poor man to a comfortable man to a poor man, now without even a country.
He carries a plastic bag full of butts and ashes from the living room to the trash can. This is what he does now, he says ruefully. This is his job.
Then there is Abdulsalam. He sleeps through the day’s heat and stays up late smoking and streaming “Agents of Shield” and other TV shows on his smartphone.
He is determined, somehow, to make it to Sweden. He’ll walk, if he has to. “It may take a lot of time, but I’m going there,” he says.
It is unwise to speak Arabic too loudly in public, he says, because there are enough people in Turkey who don’t like Syrians to make it dangerous. Once, he says, men attacked him at a train station and shocked him with a taser.
He reads psychology texts online, to understand human motivation. He thinks of it as a matter of survival, a way to protect himself. He has read that raising your elbows when you speak disarms people, as does a big smile, so he practices these.
“I give the friendly signs, so people don’t think of me as an enemy, so I don’t have to fight, because physically I’m weak,” he says. “Because I’m Syrian, I’m always in danger. My muscles don’t get enough blood, so I can’t fight.”
He studies psychology, too, because he knows he hasn’t recovered from the day the bombs hit his school.
“The light inside me is broken, and I need to find a way to fix it,” he says.
All day long she checks the migration board’s website for the status of her request to bring her family over. When she wakes up. At lunch. After school. Before bed. It is always the same: Decision pending. Decision pending. Decision pending. Decision pending.
She emails the United Nations refugee agency, writing “Save my family” in the subject line.
The U.N. refers her to the Red Cross, which refers her back to the Swedish Migration Board, which replies with form letters when she sends pleas to consider her children’s illness and expedite their cases. The letters send her into the woods on her old bike, pedaling furiously to outrace her growing desperation.
Her mind races. The war goes on and on. The deaths have passed 200,000. The news is full of Syrian refugees decomposing in trucks and vanishing in the Aegean and washing up on beaches.
She thinks of flying to Turkey and bringing her family back herself, by land or sea, whatever the risks.
“Maybe if I die, I could find peace,” she says.
Twice, she has been back to visit them, and it is terrible to say goodbye. But Sweden is where she lives now. It is where she is laying the groundwork for a future she is struggling, more and more, to make them believe in. It is where they are going to live together and tease each other about the difficulty of learning a strange, brandnew language. It is where, every Wednesday, she walks to the government building across the street from the downtown mall to see the migration authorities.
She waits amid wall murals celebrating Sweden’s pastoral glories: big farmhouses, picture-book fishing villages.
The young official who greets her today, Zlatko Powicevic, listens politely as she explains that she’s been here more than a year waiting for her family. That she keeps emailing the case officer, but gets no reply. “What shall I do?” “You can email her again,” he says, but seems doubtful that would help. Unaccompanied minors seeking asylum have been contributing to the backlog. “There’s a heavy flow of kids now, so they’re prioritizing those cases.” “I kind of lost hope.” This is Abdulsalam, his face appearing on her tablet one day this summer.
“After two years now, I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere,” he says. “That’s killing me.”
He speaks with a despair that she knows she cannot afford to surrender to, and so she sits at her kitchen table telling her son what she has told him many times before: “But I will win it. I will do it.” “You can’t win every fight.” “You don’t know what the heart of a mother can do.”
He is alive, he says, but not really living, because “only breathing doesn’t count.” He believes that if Sweden were going to approve their case, it would have happened.
“I just think this is going nowhere,” he says.
They talk for a while, and then it is time to sign off. “Hej da,” she says in Swedish. “Hej da,” her son replies. She covers her face. Her eyes are wet. She has always found shreds of hope where others couldn’t. Right now, it is in the language he spoke when he said goodbye.