The Turk Who Loved Apples (27 page)

Neither Ahmed nor Roshan had the aid of organized trafficking mafias, and neither had any money. They were trapped in Calais, and life in Calais was hell. They shared a donated tent in a wooded area known as “the jungle,” and survived on donated meals (two a day, if they were lucky) and donated clothes. Another aid organization handed out tickets for showers—but with hundreds of refugees needing to bathe, this was at best a once-a-week luxury.

“Dogs don't live like this! Cats don't live like this!” Ahmed told me. Then he laughed bitterly as he told me about his attempt to win asylum: He'd been rejected because, without access to an embassy, he was unable to prove his story—and yet France also refused to deport him, saying Somalia was too dangerous to go back to.

Despite their miserable circumstances, they had not lost their basic humanity. If anything, it appeared their deprivations had made them more human. When Roshan had arrived in Calais, he had no idea what to do, or even where to go to find food, but Ahmed took him under his wing and showed him how to survive. They were both the sole representatives of their countries, both calm and intelligent (each said he spoke at least six languages), and they'd bonded deeply.

Once, Ahmed said, he'd been invited to join several other refugees on a midnight truck to England, but when he'd asked if Roshan could come, too, the others said no. They were Muslim, as was Ahmed, but Roshan was not. And so, faced with the prospect of freedom in the U.K.—or at least slightly better living conditions and a community of Somali expatriates and refugees—Ahmed turned them down. He stuck by his friend, stuck in Calais. Could I have done that? I wondered. Would anyone have done that for me?

The second day I met with them, I brought sandwiches—chicken, tuna, cheese—and cans of Orangina. But when I arrived at the empty lot, I found Roshan and Ahmed already in line for their free meals and didn't have a chance to remove what I'd brought from my bag. Nor did I want the other refugees to see me giving them anything, for fear it would upset the equilibrium of the larger group. So the three of us sat near the canal, under a warm, early-summer sun.

Ahmed and Roshan opened their lunches: platters of canned tuna, mini-baguettes, cheese, fruit, yogurt. And as they were getting ready to eat, they noticed that I had nothing. Immediately, they started dividing up what they had, handing me a can of tuna and half a baguette. I tried to refuse, insisting I wasn't hungry and preparing for the waves of horrific guilt to wash over me. How could I take what they had when they had nothing? But they, too, insisted. If they were eating, I should as well.

So I accepted. I broke off pieces of bread and dug them into the shallow can of tuna salad, and I ate slabs of cheese that reminded
me of what had been served on the flight over from New York. We shared our bottled water, and we ate, and we talked.

And the guilt that I'd imagined never quite materialized. I think I understood what was going on—that their instinct to share was so strong, so ingrained, that they would let nothing block it, not even the fact that they had next to nothing. Sharing food—with friends, with strangers, with the needy—was what they had done at home, was what had sustained them during the months of hard travel that had brought them to the jungle of Calais, and it was what they would continue doing in order to preserve what dignity remained. It was a way of asserting their equality—they didn't have much, but they had enough to give away—and of reminding me that I was not so far removed from them. I, too, was hungry. I, too, felt gratitude in the depths of my soul for this act of kindness. For half an hour, we could simply be three people from different parts of the world, lunching as friends together in this place we'd never expected to wind up.

I don't know where Ahmed and Roshan are now. In 2011, a representative of La Belle Étoile confirmed for me they were in England—“but we don't have anything more precise,” she wrote—and my further attempts to locate them failed. Instead, I have to make the assumptions one makes about refugees in the abstract: that they survived the journey; that they found asylum, or government aid, or community support; that they continue to live and try to maintain some semblance of dignity, despite the hardships. Or: La Belle Étoile was wrong; they died en route; they were discovered and deported—to another limbo, to a newly pacified home, to certain death.

But the truth is I hate to have to think this way, to lump them in as mere members of the group of refugees, with typical histories and typical destinies. As with Lina, I want to imagine them as individuals, as unique human beings with personalities and families and quirks—with stories that separate them from the mass of stereotypes and
statistics, that prove they were alive and that for a few minutes or hours we shared a can of a beer or a can of tuna, the same slab of concrete or mosquito-buzzed balcony. And while I wish we could have shared more (and, yes, that I could have honored Lina's humanity by accepting her offer), I also know that I don't know where we'll all be tomorrow. Our paths might cross, our situations reverse. I've wandered enough, and worried at the future, and sketched out in my head what I'd do if it all went to shit, and I hope that when it comes time to split my last soggy baguette with a stranger, I'll act as they did—without hesitation, as an equal, as if I had all the bread in the world.

________

*
The rumors were not entirely well-founded, it turns out. While many Thais believe Cambodian mafias run the child-beggar racket, a UNICEF study in 2007 showed that most beggars were independent operators who'd come to Bangkok with their mothers.

T
he first Émile Zola book I read was
The Beast Within
, a novel of lust and murder on the railroad line between Paris and Le Havre. I'd found the book during my research stint in Phnom Penh—it was lying around the house I was staying in, and, having nothing else to read, I picked it up and was immediately absorbed into its twisted, violent world. The story concerns a railroad station manager, Roubaud, who discovers that his wife, Severine, had as a child been sexually abused by the president of the railroad, whose house she'd grown up in. In a fury, Roubaud forces Severine to help him kill the president, and then, believing their crime has been witnessed by Jacques, a railway engineer, cajoles his wife into romancing Jacques so he won't turn them in. Only Jacques, too, has a secret: Any time he's sexually attracted to a woman, he gets an uncontrollable urge to kill her, savagely, and drag her naked corpse through the streets. Now that's what you call dramatic irony!

I loved the darkness of the novel, as well as its suspenseful plotting, but perhaps more than anything I loved its setting, which turned out to be the setting of all Zola's dozens of books: France in the late nineteenth century, a time of not just social mobility but literal mobility as well. Railroads had tied the country together as never before, and now people from Provence were moving north to rebuild Baron
Haussmann's Paris, while folks in Le Havre could take day trips to the capital and come home in time for dinner. Travel was remaking people's lives, challenging the traditions of the past, and inviting the ambitious to start anew wherever they could imagine.

Over the course of my own travels, I read many more of Zola's novels:
Nana
, about a hustling concubine in nouveau riche Paris;
L'Assommoir
, about Nana's mother, an aspiring laundress tempted by booze;
The Belly of Paris
, about the intersection of politics and gourmet cuisine at the city's famous food market, Les Halles. I read these books at home, sometimes, but mostly I read them while traveling. They attuned me, I felt, to the way travel changes the world, and the hyper-precise language allowed me to fantasize that I, too, might one day be able to describe my own adventures in such crystalline detail. The stories took me out of myself, into a strange and fascinating and startlingly complete universe—a place so distant from my own life that I wished I could stay there forever.

Which is why it should have been no surprise that one evening in the spring of 2007, as I was reading Zola in bed, I looked up from my book and realized I didn't know where I was. Not the city, not the country—I was nowhere at all. Terror hit me like a locomotive. My heart slammed in my panicky chest, and I was seized by the fantastical fear that at any moment a government official would storm into the room and demand I reveal our location. What would I say?

And why hadn't this happened more often? At the time, I was on the road months out of every year, visiting a dozen or more countries, and yet never in one longer than two weeks.
Veni, vidi, fugi
. Just a couple of months before, I'd spent seven days flying from Geneva to Prague to Copenhagen to London (via Berlin) to Fez to Paris to Budapest to Geneva, and moving so speedily that in London I didn't bother to get a hotel room—I just walked the rainy streets all night. My personal velocity was accelerating every day, and I half-expected to get confused, to mistake Budapest for Prague or
forget what had come after Copenhagen.

But that didn't happen. I'd always known where I was, where I'd been, where I was going. Not that I'd ever felt
stable
, as if I truly inhabited any of the places I happened to be passing through. I'd speed-walked through Kafka's Prague, tipsy on nettle beer, and I'd spun unthinkingly through the alleyways of the Fez, and I'd never come close to losing my way. Movement was my natural state. My orientation was forward. I was in the zone. I could go on like this forever.

So why had I come unsprung only now, while reading in bed? And why was I so terrified at the prospect? And most important of all, where the hell was I?

I tried to think. I scanned the room, hoping I'd find in its décor the hint I needed. Wooden four-poster bed. Antique desk sticky with air-conditioning. Sponge-washed peach walls. Framed prints of blue gods with many arms. I knew this, I knew this!

India! I was in India, and, and . . . in the former French colony of Pondicherry! I'd arrived a few hours ago, and I'd leave in five days. Next up: Darjeeling, then Mumbai, then Brooklyn.

Relief welled up inside me. I read my book and fell asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I was still in Pondicherry.

In the weeks and years that followed, however, I began to regret my quick thinking in that Pondicherry four-poster. Why couldn't I have held on to that feeling of lostness that had invaded my body? Why couldn't I have savored it, rolled it around my mind, tried to enjoy for a few more minutes the sensation of utter disconnection? It was there, I'd had it in my psychic grasp. For the first time since I was seven years old, I'd been lost! And yet it had slipped away so quickly I was left with nothing, only puzzlement and a lingering aftertaste of fear.

Fine, then, I'd have to rely on what had happened in Denmark, twenty-five years before.

A
fter the adult bookstore, after the bad hamburger, after the restorative french fries, there was at last Tivoli Gardens, the amusement park. Rides and shows, lights and the legs of towering Danes. My father had learned a fireworks display was imminent, and we hustled through the crowd. I remember a metal fence as high as my own not quite four-foot head, and I remember being unable to see as well as I wanted to. I scooted this way and that, darted around bodies, squeezed through gaps, and caught only glimpses of sparking pinwheels and cannons of flame—earthbound pyrotechnics, not the Fourth of July skyrockets my family would watch, unblocked, on the UMass campus.