The ferry to Athens was going at 3 a.m. and the terminal was full of other refugees waiting. Some people had put up small tents and were sleeping. Nahda and her kids huddled together on the steps of the customs building. Just as I was about to doze off in my chair, once again a swarm of dogs appeared, maybe twelve or thirteen of them, all snapping around. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like these wild animals follow me.
Nasrine tried to quieten me. ‘Calm down,’ she said. ‘Look, there’s a beautiful puppy.’
‘It’s not a beautiful puppy, it’s a monster!’ I snarled.
Then we saw the ferry gliding in with shiny green lights. It was so big, like a multi-storey building, I couldn’t imagine how it would enter the port. I thought we would have to go to it on a small boat, but it came right on against the pier.
Finally at 4 a.m. the police told us we could board. They took me to the front of the queue, so I was the first one on. The ferry had five decks – our seats were on the third deck and for once there was a lift up.
I could hear the hum of the engine, then we felt the ferry moving. Nasrine went up to the top deck to watch the sun rise over the terracotta roofs of Mitilini as we sailed away.
I was excited. It was my first time on a ship. And we were going to the birthplace of democracy. But I was exhausted. We weren’t even out of the port when I fell asleep.
13
Through the Beautiful Gate
Athens to Macedonia, 10–15 September 2015
I stared fixedly at the angel on the wall of the hotel room as if I could make it fly. Maybe it sounds crazy, but more than anything I wanted to do the journey like everybody else.
The rest of our relatives had all headed north to the border with Macedonia, fearful that the police would close it because there were so many thousands of refugees massing there. Uncle Ahmed, Aunt Shereen and all our cousins had set off even before we got to Athens.
Nahda’s in-laws had waited for us to arrive on the ferry, the day before. I was excited to land in Athens but the port of Piraeus was huge and confusing and so reeked of fish it made my throat gag. As Nasrine pushed me down the ramp, we saw a miserable encampment of refugees in makeshift tents on the dockside. We could also hear shouting – a group of port workers protesting against it being sold off. Then, like bloodsucking flies, the smugglers appeared, asking, ‘Want to fly, go by land, need a passport?’ We tried to get a taxi but they were charging triple what we had been told to pay. Luckily one of Nahda’s in-laws took us to catch a train, which was a bit complicated to navigate with the wheelchair but much cheaper. Sometimes it feels as if everyone is trying to cheat refugees.
Nahda’s in-laws were staying in an apartment in Athens with greasy walls and no windows arranged for them by the smuggler they had paid to get them to Macedonia. They cooked us eggs and tomatoes while Mohammed went to find us a hotel room near by as they would be leaving the next morning, catching a bus at ten o’clock to take them to the Macedonian border. It’s not so easy booking hotels as refugees. Often they turn us away or charge more because we don’t have papers. It’s like they think we are dirty or criminals – we are just the same as everyone else but we have lost our homes. Where we were staying was called the New Dream Hotel. Our room had blue lights and a painting of an angel over the bed. Nahda stayed with her relatives as she would be leaving with them. They bought us some bread and halal salami, and we hugged Nahda goodbye and wished each other luck.
So it was just me and Nasrine, the two sisters, if not the three musketeers. It was the first time we had ever had to fend for ourselves on our own, let alone in a big foreign city. I turned on the TV, an old black and white one, and clicked through the channels with the remote looking for something in English. Finally I found one – an MTV show called I Used to Be Fat. I lay on the bed and was transported back to the old days of being on the fifth floor in Aleppo.
From the bathroom I heard water running and singing. ‘Hot water!’ shouted Nasrine. ‘It’s so nice to be clean!’ It was the first time in the eleven days since we had left İzmir that we could properly wash. All we needed now were clean clothes. We were still using the ones we had got when we landed on Lesbos.
Our family hadn’t just abandoned us to our fate. Shiar was flying in and the plan was for him to arrange fake passports for us which were supposed to be easy to get in Athens, and use those to buy a plane ticket straight to Germany so that we wouldn’t have to do the overland journey. Everyone thought such a journey was too arduous to do in a wheelchair. Maybe they thought we would slow them down.
I was sad. ‘Do you know what, Nasrine?’ I said. ‘I want to do it like everyone else. Do you know what that means?’
‘Yes, I do too,’ she replied.
Soon Shiar arrived, as usual full of talk. He told us to stay in the room and keep the curtains closed. This was very annoying as I was desperate to see the Acropolis. I couldn’t believe we were in this ancient city, this birthplace of democracy and philosophy and Aristotle, and we would just hide behind curtains. But Nasrine said we shouldn’t go out. There had been attacks on refugees from members of a party called Golden Dawn which might sound innocuous but they are ultra-right and have kind of swastikas on their flags.
We kept hearing sirens. Athens looked wealthy to us with its coffee shops and trendy bars, but we had noticed lots of homeless people. The debt crisis had left half its young people unemployed and those who could were leaving the country. Greece was in such bad shape it had had to be bailed out twice by international institutions and had just had a third bail-out with tough conditions imposed by the Germans. Banks were closed. There were daily protests in Syntagma Square in front of the parliament with police using teargas to disperse the crowds. I watched all this on TV in between some of my old favourite programmes. I was trying to overcome my aversion to watching news as we needed to know what was happening on the migrant trail.
Only once did Shiar and Nasrine take me out. Of course they didn’t take me to the Parthenon, just to a Turkish restaurant for a kebab. The city looked so old and more Eastern to me than Western. We noticed a lot of old men playing with dice. On the menu, the Greek alphabet seemed strange to me, like Hebrew. It was dark when we came out of the restaurant, but there were people everywhere. It was the first time I’d seen a city so alive at night, but it reminded me of Aleppo. I tried not to think about what was happening there. I know Nasrine looked on Facebook.
Every day while Shiar went to Victoria Square to deal with smugglers, Nasrine and I studied maps of Europe on our phone and checked Facebook groups for migrants such as ‘The Safe and Free Route to Asylum for Syrians’ which gave tips on what refugees need and advice about the best routes. In between I kept staring at the angel and begging please, please, let me do it in the normal way.
Sometimes God answers your prayers. After a few days, Shiar told us it was proving very hard and too expensive to arrange the passports and he didn’t know what to do.
Nasrine and I looked at each other. ‘You know what,’ she said. ‘What if we just go by land?’
Yes! From a total jail to total freedom. I knew this would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. I thought, I will have something to tell my grandchildren, just as my parents talk about 1973 when we had the war against Israel – they used to say that was a bad year, the year of the war. It would be hard for Nasrine pushing me but lots of fun.
And for once I would be like everyone else.
We took the 4.30 p.m. train from the main station to Thessaloniki, a six-hour journey. It was my first time on a train. Even though most refugees go to the border by bus as it is cheaper, the platform was crowded with other refugees, many of them with small children; there were also lots of tourists in shorts and T-shirts with big backpacks. When the train came, it was covered in graffiti. Everyone surged forward and I wondered how we would get on, but someone helped us and we found seats. All the seats looked worn. Someone told us that the Greek railway was losing so much money that if they gave
all their passengers the taxi fare instead of running the trains it would have cost them less. I watched the scenery flash past – sun-baked fields, green mountains, black swallows slicing the sky, reddening sun – it was transfixing. The train was going so fast compared to everything outside it made me think about relativity theory. ‘What would happen if the train goes at the speed of light?’ I asked Nasrine. ‘What would we see?’ She said because of something called time dilation, the time will be fixed and you will get wherever you are going without witnessing any time passing for anything not moving with you. So the sun we could see as we sped by would always look red like the sunset. I didn’t really understand, but I would do my research later. Then she said it wasn’t possible to go at the speed of light, anyway. In other words she wanted me to shut up.
She went to fetch some drinks, and my imagination began running away with itself as it likes to do if I don’t control it. I couldn’t stop thinking about movies where the train falls off the cliff. If that happened and I lost Nasrine, how would I get to the border on my own?
Fortunately, it didn’t happen. It got dark outside and we tried to sleep. A rumour went round that Greek police were throwing refugees off as our papers didn’t let us travel so far north. Some people locked themselves in the toilet, but no police came. Finally, it was our stop, Thessaloniki. The buses on to the border had stopped for the night, so people began negotiating with taxi drivers outside. ‘We’re not tourists,’ we heard one man complain at the high prices. Some of them decided to spend the night at the station and find the bus the next morning, but we wanted to get on our way so we paid the 100 euros and took a taxi.
We knew from the Facebook groups that you couldn’t cross the border at night, so our taxi driver drove us 55 miles to a town near the border called Evzonoi. There we checked into the Hara Hotel – the last hotel in Greece. Or the first, depending which way you are coming. A sign in the car park had a Greek man in white pantaloons holding out a red fez and saying, ‘Welcome to Greece’.
The hotel was a kind of rundown place just off the motorway that had been about to close down until it was saved by the refugee crisis. Now people were coming and going non-stop. Some like us were staying, but the hotel had also turned its bar into a mini-market, selling refugee food like tinned sardines and biscuits as well as nappies and baby wipes. We were starving and went into the restaurant. The room had striplights like the hospitals I had been in and everything looked yellow. We ordered a pizza and it was the first time I had ever used a knife and fork. It was very awkward as it is haram for us Muslims to eat with our left hand so I was trying to use both the knife and the fork with my right.
In the distance we could see the lights of Macedonian casinos where Greeks go and gamble at night even though they don’t really like Macedonia and think it should be theirs. That’s why they claim Alexander the Great as Greek when he is really a Macedon. They don’t even call it Macedonia but refer to it as FYROM – Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Even so they could just cross the border normally. We had to go through a field.
The next morning there was a WhatsApp message on Nasrine’s phone from Nahda. ‘Made it!’ it said. They were already in Germany, having made the journey in just five days. ‘See, how hard can it be?’ I asked Nasrine.
Before we could set off on our journey we had to sort out a problem with my transport. There was a rubber band holding up the footrest of my wheelchair, but as we had come down the ramp at the ferry the band had snapped and the footrest had broken. This just left my feet dangling which was very uncomfortable. Luckily we found a nice man with a black hat and a pet bird who fixed wire round it for me to rest my feet on.
Nasrine pushed me along the main road. The sun was just coming up and everywhere was very green with forested hills all around. I’d never heard such a chatter of birds, but it was freezing cold. Ever since my asthma days I always feel the cold and am the first to get sick. Nasrine says I am a virus magnet. We weren’t sure if we were going the right way, but then we came to a disused railway track like Nahda had described where crowds of people were waiting, held back by police clad in black like Ninjas. Other police watched on from vans on a ridge overlooking the tracks.
Evzonoi used to be a small town but now it was packed with thousands of refugees like us. A temporary transit centre had been set up and there were some Greek women handing out nappies and biscuits. Macedonian police with guns and truncheons made us get into groups of fifty to cross. We were put into one of three groups of what they call SIA – Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans – who were allowed to cross. Bangladeshis, Moroccans and so on had to go an illegal way. We had to walk about half a mile but the path was OK, though we were slower than everyone. The Greek police even helped us get my wheelchair over the railway line. There was nothing marking the border, just the black line on the GPS on our phone. Later we heard they put up a makeshift border point called Stone 59.
Once we were into Macedonia, the way was rocky and more difficult. The wheelchair kept getting stuck in the stones. Luckily some Macedonian guys selling biscuits saw our plight and helped. They turned my wheelchair back to front and pulled it.
There was a stream of people all heading the same way. Some were carrying babies on their backs or shoulders – Nahda must have done that a few days before. One man was limping, maybe wounded in a bombing raid. No one really spoke. Everyone looked desperate. I was the only one smiling. People were in a hurry because we had all heard that the Hungarians were starting to fence off their border so we needed to get there fast.
Eventually we came to a beautiful field of sunflowers, just as described on Facebook, with a well-trodden path through the middle. Either side was a mess of discarded water bottles and plastic bags and shoes and sleeping bags and other migrant litter, which was a bit sad as we didn’t want people to hate us, but there was nowhere else to throw things.
It was all going very well until we suddenly came to a steep ditch and a stream which we had no means of crossing. Fortunately, some Afghans helped us get over. I stopped smiling then as the bumping really hurt with my back hitting the back of the wheelchair. I made small noises, and Nasrine hissed at me to stop. Being carried makes me feel so weak and I hate it. Soon they put me back down. Some summer rain started falling and I could hear frogs croaking like they were happy and church bells ringing. After travelling for about an hour through the fields we came to the first Macedonian village, Gevgelija. How on earth do you say that? I wondered. We followed a sign marked ‘Humanitarian point of the government of Macedonia supported by UNHCR’ to an area with lots of white tents and trailers, and a line of smelly Portaloos. UNHCR is the United Nations refugee agency. Crowds of people were gathered waiting. Every so often a man came out with a sheaf of papers and read out names.
When refugees first started pouring into Macedonia, they weren’t allowed on public transport, so they had to jump on freight trains or go with smugglers, but some had been mugged by gangs which didn’t look good for Macedonia. As a result, in late June the parliament had voted to give SIA refugees three-day visas enabling them to pass through legally and get a train all the way to the Serbian border.
It didn’t look like the little police station where we had to get these papers could cope. I guess it had been a very quiet place before. Had we arrived a couple of days later, we would have got completely stuck: because of this bottleneck, the Macedonians ended up blocking the border and firing on and teargassing refugees to stop them coming. We had got through just in time.
Also, because of my wheelchair, we were taken to the front of the queue. We were a little scared about heading off alone as we had been warned about bandits in the forests, and I was saying that Macedonia was the country of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan (I confused it with Mongolia). Other people think Alexander is a hero, but in my opinion he was a dictator who killed lots of people. Some refugees called the country Mafiadonia and said that it was better to travel in groups for safety, definitely not just two
sisters.
Other people were being packed into old trains covered with graffiti. We couldn’t imagine getting the wheelchair on. The Macedonian police told us not to worry. After registering us they called a taxi to take us to the border with Serbia for 200 euros, then let us out of the gate at the transit centre. To me this was the Beautiful Gate. We were on our way.
14
Hungary, Open the Door!
Macedonia–Serbia–Hungary, 15–16 September 2015
Macedonia wasn’t a big country – we crossed all the way from the south to the north in just two hours. This was just as well because everyone was saying the Hungarians had finished building an enormous fence along their border and at midnight were going to close the gap they had been allowing people through and make it a crime to cross. It was a race against time, like one of those TV shows I’d watched.
First we had to get from Macedonia into Serbia. The taxi drove us about 125 miles and dropped us in the border town of Lojane in the mountains of northern Macedonia. The driver told us that the hills were full of old smuggling routes used for cigarettes, drugs and weapons and it was these that refugees were now using.
Lojane was a village of red-tiled houses with a couple of tea houses and a big white mosque, and the inhabitants were mostly Albanians who had themselves fled from war in their own country in the past. That didn’t mean they liked migrants. Some locals were happy because they know we bring in money – they always charge us inflated prices for food and drink – but others complained that we bring crime and infectious disease and frighten their women and kids.