As morning broke we watched the first boats go out. Two set off more or less straight but two were going in all directions. The boats didn’t have pilots – what happened was the smugglers let one of the refugees travel for half price or for free if he drove the boat even though none of them had any experience. ‘It’s just like riding a motorbike,’ they claimed. My uncle Ahmed was going to be driving our boat. I guessed he’d never driven one as we had never been to the sea and his old job was running a mobile-phone shop, but he assured us he knew how.
We’d heard that some refugees gun the motor to get halfway across to Greek waters as fast as possible and they burn out the motor. Sometimes the engines don’t have enough fuel. If that happens the Turkish coastguard catch you and bring you back. In Café Sinbad in İzmir we’d met a family from Aleppo who had tried to cross six times. We didn’t have money to keep trying.
Around 9 a.m. Uncle Ahmed called the smuggler, but he said we must wait for the coastguard to go. ‘We have chosen the wrong smuggler,’ said Nasrine. I worried we had been cheated again. We hadn’t expected to be here so long and were soon hungry and thirsty which was ironic as there was so much water in front of us. My cousins went to try and find water for me and the children but there was nothing near by.
The day got hotter. Though the smuggler had arrived with dinghies for us and the other groups, he said we couldn’t go until the coastguard changed shift. The Moroccan men were half naked and started singing. As the afternoon came, the waves started to get higher, making a slapping sound on the shore. None of us wanted to go at night as we’d heard stories of kind of pirates on jet-skis who board boats in the dark to steal motors and the valuables of refugees.
Finally, around 5 p.m., they said the coastguards were changing guard so we could take advantage and go. I looked again at the sea. A mist was coming down and the cry of the seagulls no longer seemed so joyful. A dark shadow lay over the rocky island. Some call that crossing rihlat al-moot or the route of death. It would either deliver us to Europe or swallow us up. For the first time I felt scared.
Back home I often watched a series called Brain Games on National Geographic which showed how feelings of fear and panic are controlled by the brain, so I began practising breathing deeply and telling myself over and over that I was strong.
PART ONE
Syria, 1999–2014
Before they are numbers, these people are first and foremost human beings.
Pope Francis, Lesbos, 16 April 2016
1
I don’t collect stamps or coins or football cards – I collect facts. Most of all I like facts about physics and space, particularly string theory. Also about history and dynasties like the Romanovs. And controversial people like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover.
My brother Mustafa says I only need to hear something once to remember it exactly. I can list you all the Romanovs from the first one Tsar Mikhail to Nicholas II who was murdered by the Bolsheviks along with all his family, even his youngest daughter Anastasia. I can tell you exactly what date Queen Elizabeth II became queen of England – both the day her father died and her coronation – and the dates of both her birthdays, actual and official. I’d like to meet her one day and ask her ‘What’s it like having Queen Victoria as your great-great-grandmother?’ and ‘Isn’t it odd everyone singing a song about saving you?’
I can also tell you that the only animal not to make a sound is a giraffe because it has no vocal cords. This used to be one of my favourite facts, but then people started calling our dictator Bashar al-Assad the Giraffe because he has a long neck.
Now here is a fact I don’t think anyone should like. Did you know that one in every 113 people in the world today are refugees or displaced from their homes? Lots of them are escaping wars like the one that has ravaged our country Syria, or those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Others are running from terrorist groups in Pakistan and Somalia or from persecution by mullah regimes in Iran and Egypt. Then there are ones fleeing dictatorship in Gambia, forced conscription in Eritrea, and hunger and poverty in countries in Africa I never saw on a map. On TV I keep hearing reporters say that the movement of people from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia into Europe is the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. In 2015 more than 1.2 million came to Europe. I was one of them.
I hate the word refugee more than any word in the English language. In German it is Flüchtling, which is just as harsh. What it really means is a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away. The year 2015 was when I became a fact, a statistic, a number. Much as I like facts, we are not numbers, we are human beings and we all have stories. This is mine.
My name is Nujeen which means new life, and I guess you can say I was unexpected. My mum and dad already had four boys and four girls, and by the time I came along on New Year’s Day 1999, twenty-six years after my eldest brother Shiar, some were already married off and the youngest one Nasrine was nine, so everyone thought the family was complete. My mum almost died giving birth to me and was so weak afterwards it was my eldest sister Jamila who really looked after me, and I always thought of her as my second mother. To start with, the family was happy to have a baby in the house but then I didn’t stop crying and crying. The only thing that would stop me was putting a tape recorder next to me playing Zorba the Greek, but that drove my siblings almost as mad as my crying.
We lived in a dusty neglected desert sort of town called Manbij in northern Syria, not far from the border with Turkey and about 20 miles west of the Euphrates river and the Tishrin dam which gave us electricity. My earliest memory is the long swish of my mother’s dress – a light-coloured kaftan which fell to her ankles. She had long hair too, and we called her Ayee and my father Yaba and these are not Arabic words. The first fact to know about me is I’m a Kurd.
We were one of five Kurdish families on a street in a town that was mostly Arab; they were Bedouin but they looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners. We had to speak their language at school and in the shops and could speak our Kurdish language Kurmanji only when we were at home. This was very hard for my parents, who didn’t speak Arabic and were anyway illiterate. Also for my eldest brother Shiar, who other children made fun of at school because he couldn’t speak Arabic.
Manbij is a folkish kind of place and strict about Islam, so my brothers had to go to the mosque, and if Ayee wanted to shop in the bazaar, one of them or my father had to accompany her. We are Muslims too but not so rigid. In the high school my sisters and cousins were the only girls who didn’t cover their heads.
Our family had moved from our lands in a Kurdish village south of the city of Kobane because of a vendetta with a neighbouring village. We Kurds are tribal people and my family are from the big Kori Beg tribe, descended from a famous Kurdish resistance leader Kori Beg, which seems to mean almost every Kurd is a cousin. The next village were also Kori Beg but a different clan. The problem with them happened long before I was born, but we all knew the story. Both villages had sheep and one day some shepherd boys from the other village brought their flock to graze on our grass, so there was a fight with our shepherd boys. Shortly after that some of our relatives were going to the other village for a funeral and on the way were fired upon by two men from the other village. When our clan fired back one of their men was killed. They vowed revenge, so we all had to flee. That’s how we ended up in Manbij.
People don’t know much about Kurds – sometimes it seems to me we are