Iranian refugee who lived in an airport, inspiring an opera and a Spielberg film
Acouple of hours in an airport is as much as most people can take. Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Englishspeaking Iranian refugee known as Sir Alfred, who has died from a heart attack aged 76 or 77, spent decades in the noisy Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, listening to announcements over the public address system and watching as travellers rushed for their flights, all the time waiting patiently for his own elusive boarding call.
His story began when he was exiled from Iran as a student activist, lost his papers in Belgium and somehow ended up in Paris in 1988. He tried to reach Britain, where he had once studied, but was turned back at Heathrow and was then refused entry to France.
Out of ideas and money, he settled into life at Terminal 1. Immigration workers nicknamed him Albert, but he later insisted on Sir Alfred, a name adopted from a British bureaucrat’s letter that began ‘‘Dear Sir, Alfred’’.
For the first 11 years he was stranded on his bench by the fast-food outlets and shops, but he was not lonely. ‘‘All the staff know me and the police are friendly, too. People bring me coffees and food,’’ he said.
In the summer of 1999 Belgium granted him refugee papers and he was free to leave the departure lounge – but he opted to stay on, demanding a promise of citizenship and permission to ‘‘work in Britain or an Englishspeaking country. I want to live in a free democratic system. When I obtain a certificate of citizenship I will be free to move,’’ he told The Times in a grave, quiet voice while sitting in a pizza joint. Then there was a flash of humour. ‘‘Perhaps I might take a flight for the pleasure of it, but I would come back here.’’
Neat and dignified, even if his pallid, gaunt face was testimony to many years on a diet of airport food, he was bald on top with frizzy wild hair on the sides, and four missing teeth. He smoked a gold pipe. This self-appointed castaway, who rarely strayed far from the alcove with the Seventies-era red bench and table where he slept under an airline blanket, spent his days reading the British newspapers and writing his diaries in English. Around him sat cardboard boxes and bags stuffed with the possessions of the man who, with echoes of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, lingered for official documents that never came.
Sometimes he made a trip to the bank upstairs, where he had a savings account. Mindful of the persistent warnings that ‘‘Passengers are reminded to keep their personal luggage with them at all times’’, he persuaded a friendly shopkeeper to watch his possessions.
The journalist Michael Paterniti visited in 2003 for GQ magazine and found him rising between 6.30am and 8am, shaving at his bench
Mehran Karimi Nasseri
Iranian refugee b about 1945 d November 12, 2022
‘‘All the staff know me and the police are friendly, too. People bring me coffees and food.’’
Mehran Karimi Nasseri describing his early years living in Charles de Gaulle airport.
and completing his ablutions in a choice of two bathrooms. ‘‘He preferred the smaller and quieter of the two because it was closer to his bench and had a shower,’’ Paterniti observed.
Nasseri’s decision to remain in Terminal 1 eventually moved him from the category of cause celebre to nuisance. He lived on handouts, but celebrities and humanitarian organisations gradually stopped trumpeting him as a symbol of bureaucratic folly or to highlight the plight of refugees. Airport staff who had once befriended him lost patience and saw him as a pest. Medical officials gave up on attempts to persuade him to accept the care and benefits to which he was entitled.
The anxiety of life in unfulfilled transit was the inspiration for Jonathan Dove’s opera Flight, which was presented by Glyndebourne in 1998. In 2004 he published a memoir that was described by The Sunday Times as ‘‘a profoundly disturbing and brilliant book’’.
He was also said to have received US$250,000 after inspiring Tom Hanks’s character Viktor Navorski, who becomes trapped at JFK airport, New York, when his home country collapses into revolution in Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal (2004).
Yet no-one, not even the man himself it seemed, knew the full story of ‘‘Sir Alfred’’. What appears to be the case is that Mehran Karimi Nasseri was born in the city of Masjed Soleiman, in the oilrich south of Iran, possibly in 1945. He was one of six children from a well-off family: his father was a doctor and his Scottish-born mother was a nurse. He studied psychology before arriving at the University of Bradford in 1973 to take a course in Yugoslav studies.
There were accounts of him being photographed taking part in protests against the Shah, his stipend being cut, falling foul of the Iranian authorities and being jailed, reaching Belgium and losing his papers.
Nasseri eventually left Charles de Gaulle airport in 2006, when he was taken to hospital, at which point the authorities dismantled his ‘‘home’’ in Terminal 1. A few weeks ago he returned to the airport, now taking up residence in Terminal 2F, where the band U2 filmed their video for the song Beautiful Day. – The Times