After a month in Damascus, they were issued with Iraqi passports and plane tickets to Moscow.
In the Russian capital, they were accommodated in an Aeroflot hotel at Sheremetyevo airport. A man came up to their hotel room and gave them an envelope with some new tickets in it.
The destination was written in Cyrillic script – it had four letters.
Asking for Protection
‘They’ve all got fair hair,’ exclaimed Bano. Dressed in a bright green top and orange skirt, she was running across the pale wooden floor of the airport. Bayan had bought colourful clothes for the children at a market in Damascus. Lara was in a sunshine-yellow dress and Ali was in red. That way it would be easier to keep track of the children on the journey, Bayan had decided.
They walked along a corridor in the brand-new arrivals hall and Mustafa spelled his way through the notice Welcome to Oslo Airport. The soaring ceiling was clad in light wood and the dividing walls were of clear glass and concrete, while the floor was laminated wood or slate flagstones. Going along the corridor, they could see out on one side to the spruce forest over which they had just flown, and on the other they were looking down on the people who were about to board flights. They came to a kind of conveyor belt and the little girls stood wide-eyed as the floor carried them forward.
But most of their attention was focused on the people.
‘Princess hair, real princess hair,’ Lara whispered to Bano.
* * *
Their passports and visas were in order, so they slid through passport control. The luggage arrived and they walked out of the terminal building.
Outside, people were lightly dressed for the unusually warm September day. To the Iraqi arrivals it felt cool.
They had never seen so much greenery all in one go. Even the roadsides were a mass of green. Areas of green heath and fields sped by on the other side of the car window. The forest seemed to go on for ever.
Then they saw a few scattered tower blocks, then more, and soon they were down in the hollow where Oslo lies and they could see out over the fjord and all the little islands. Now they were driving along streets with pavements, there was a tunnel, and they were in the city. They went straight to the police station.
‘My name is Mustafa Abobakar Rashid. I am a Kurd from Iraq and I want to seek asylum for myself and all my family.’
They had their details taken and were sent to the Tanum transit and reception centre, where they were registered again and had interviews and health checks.
‘What an awful place,’ complained Bayan. The room they had been given was cramped and there were people everywhere, people crying and shouting and quarrelling in every language under the sun, all of them gesticulating wildly.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ said Mustafa. ‘Here we won’t have to worry about how to get fuel and food. Look, there’s water in the taps, clean drinking water, and heat in the stoves. And the most important thing is that there’s no war, and nobody who wishes us ill. We can sleep soundly here.’
A few days later they were moved to a centre for asylum seekers. Mustafa was optimistic. ‘You see, we’ll soon have a house of our own,’ he told Bayan. His wife was sceptical, and asked him to see if he could press their case and get things moving.
Bano started at the centre’s school and learnt to sing Norwegian children’s songs. She was given books and coloured pencils, while Lara was sent to the centre’s kindergarten with Ali. Mustafa dipped deep into their travel budget to buy a big dictionary at a cost of five hundred kroner. He pored over it every evening. ‘We’ve got to know the language if we’re going to get jobs,’ he said, learning lists of words by rote.
The months passed. They were getting nowhere. Perhaps they wouldn’t even be allowed to stay. They could be sent back. The atmosphere at Nesbyen asylum centre was one of gloom and despondency. Some of the people suffered mental health problems. Young men fired up with adrenalin and hope felt their lives were falling apart. Inevitably there was trouble.
How much Bayan regretted that they’d come! This is wrong, she thought. She felt worn to the bone. By their flight, by her fear, by all the things she had to cope with. In Erbil she had had a big house and her own place to cook. Here there were five of them in one room, and she had to queue up to cook their meals on the dirty electric rings.
Bayan clashed with the Somali women; she felt they did just as they liked and ignored the kitchen rules. Bano and Lara argued with everybody. Alinda hit Ali, so Lara hit Alinda, and that was how the children spent their days. Swearwords were among the first items of Norwegian vocabulary Bano and Lara picked up; some of the children had been in Norway longer than they had. Ali had his toys stolen, some of Bano and Lara’s things went missing. The dream of all people from every corner of the globe living in harmony with each other was severely tested in this place where everybody blamed and gossiped about each other. Who would be allowed to stay? Who would have to go? And why do they get to stay when we have to go? Grudges and jealousy, not unity and solidarity, were the hallmark of the Nesbyen asylum centre.
Of course things had been difficult back home but in this barren land, where all the leaves had abruptly fallen from the trees and all the colours had gone, Kurdistan appeared in a beautiful and rosy light. The ground froze solid and darkness descended. Winter depression set in long before the season truly arrived.
Bayan lied about it whenever she wrote or rang home. ‘Yes, it’s really nice here,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a good house, lovely and quiet.’ She felt guilty about lying, but she couldn’t face telling her family, relatively prosperous by Erbil standards, how far they had sunk.
‘Remember your dad’s an engineer,’ she impressed on Bano, liking to see herself as better than the others at the centre.
In one of his asylum interviews, Mustafa asked for somewhere else to live, saying how cramped it was for three children and two adults in one room.
‘So you thought you could come to Norway and get a house, eh?’ asked the interviewer, while Mustafa bowed his head.
* * *
In October 2000, just over a year after they arrived in Norway, the family was allocated to a local-council district – Nesodden, a peninsula in the Oslo fjord. They moved into a flat with three bedrooms, a green kitchen and a little living room.
They would have preferred to live with most of the other Kurds in the centre of Oslo, but the ferry over to the heart of the capital took barely half an hour, they consoled themselves.
Nesodden is a peaceful spot. In summer, the peninsula is criss-crossed by footpaths and tracks. Bathing places lie like pearls along the water’s edge. In winter, the cross-country skiing trails take over from the paths, and people can easily do without cars. This is the chosen home of those who want to escape the bustle of the city but still like to get quickly to the latest production at the Oslo Opera House if the fancy strikes them, the choice of those who want the best of both worlds and it is here, on Nesodden, that the Rashid family ended up.
In the middle of the school year, Lara was put in Year 1 and Bano in Year 2 at Nesoddtangen School.
Lara soon felt left out. Nobody wanted to play with her. ‘We can’t understand what you’re saying!’ laughed the other girls in the class.
Bano coped better. Suddenly the roles were reversed. Pampered Bano proved tough while her sister Lara, always the strong, independent one, seemed to lose all her confidence.
‘Don’t play with her, she’s really stupid,’ the girls said to their classmates whenever Lara came up. ‘This is a game for those who speak Norwegian.’
‘But I can speak Norwegian!’ objected Lara.
‘We mean speak it properly,’ they retorted.
The Rashid girls were different from the others in so many ways. For their school lunches their mother often gave them leftover portions of yesterday’s dinner. ‘Eugh, your lunches stink!’ someone said. ‘Don’t sit near us!’
The other girls had pink rucksacks with hearts or Barbies on, the Rashi
d sisters had cheap brown ones. They were endlessly picked on for those rucksacks, for their clothes from the second-hand shop, for their weird parents, their weird accents; they were even teased for having extra Norwegian lessons. ‘What do you two actually do in your extra lessons? You never seem to learn anything!’
So much for diversity.
Nesodden is known as an open-minded sort of place, one where advocates of alternative teaching methods and vegetarianism have more supporters than other parts of the country, and where the concentration of artists, both established and unrecognised, supplies the idyll with local colour. But for the two Kurdish girls, it was narrow-mindedness that dogged them at the start.
Bullying behaviour was not always picked up on at the after-school club, and every day Lara’s school bag would be hidden somewhere different.
‘Tell me where it is!’ begged Lara.
‘Eh? What did you say? We don’t understand what you’re saying!’
One day they poured milk into her shoes. She never said anything about the bullying at home. Her mother and father still hadn’t found jobs, and they were out of sorts and missing their former home.
But when a new gang of boys started hassling Lara, she finally told her mother. Bayan went round to see the parents of each of the boys and demanded they be made to stop.
‘Crybaby!’, ‘Telltale!’ were the names hurled at Lara the next day at school.
‘My mum took no notice of yours anyway,’ said one of the worst offenders. ‘She couldn’t tell what she was saying! Ha ha!’
And this was supposed to be some sort of paradise?
They had ended up in the wrong place.
* * *
At the after-school club, the sisters would often sit drawing. Lara always drew princesses with wavy, light yellow hair, blue eyes and pastel-coloured dresses. She could have wallpapered her room with all her versions of yellow hair and pink tulle.
Bano’s lines were rougher. If she drew princesses, hers always had dark skin and black hair.
‘That’s the wrong colour,’ a girl said to Bano.
Bano gave her a hard stare. ‘It’s my picture,’ she replied. ‘I’ll draw what I like.’
‘But it looks ugly.’
Bano just went on with her colouring. She made the face on the sheet of paper darker and darker. She added thicker strokes of black to the hair.
Then she held the picture up in front of her.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Now she’s exactly the way I want her.’
Bano found a drawing pin and put the dark girl up on the wall.
Lara kept her eyes fixed on her big sister.
That was how she wanted to be. Almost imperceptibly she raised her head, putting down the light yellow crayon.
A Place on the List
Get rich or die trying.
Progress Party Youth debate forum,
Anders Behring, 11 August 2003
He’s walking with the West End at his back, towards Youngstorget square.
Right after New Year he had received the invitation to the inaugural meeting. He had marked the date on the calendar and put on a suit to mark the occasion. He often dressed that way these days, in a perfectly ordinary suit, nothing fancy, but it had to look expensive. He was good at wearing things with flair so they seemed expensive; he’d got that from his mother. She often found cheap clothes in sales that could be made to look exclusive in combination with her cool, blonde appearance. From her he had also learned to treat his clothes with care. He always hung them up on hangers after he’d worn them, or put them back in the cupboard, neatly folded. He always changed when he got home to make his nicer, brand-name garments last longer.
He held himself upright as he made his way along the slushy street. His steps were a little cautious. He called himself metrosexual; he dressed up, wore make-up and used vitamin-enriched hair products. He had ordered Regaine from America, which promised to stop hair loss and trigger the follicles into new growth. He could still conceal his incipient bald patch with a good cut but his hairline was definitely receding. There was a great deal about his appearance that grieved him and he spent a long time in front of the mirror. Too long, thought his friends, who would laugh whenever he overdid the make-up. When he started wearing foundation, they teased him even more. It’s concealer, he objected. In summer he applied bronzing powder, and he kept a whole row of aftershaves in the bathroom.
His nose was new. An experienced surgeon had made a small incision, removed some bone and cartilage from below the bridge and sewn the skin tautly back in place. When the bandage was removed, his nose was just as he wanted it, as it ought to be: a straight profile, quite simply, an Aryan nose.
At secondary school they had made fun of his bumpy nose. The kink in the bone had annoyed him since his early teenage years. Later he complained to friends that the shape of his nose made him look like an Arab. As soon as he could afford it he booked himself in for surgery at Bunæs, one of Norway’s leading plastic surgery clinics. He also asked about a hair transplant, but was told the results were unpredictable and the transplant process could leave disfiguring scars, so he had not made up his mind yet.
He crossed the government quarter, where you could walk straight through the main building, past the reception area under the Prime Minister’s office. That was the quickest route; it saved some metres and several minutes not having to go round what was known as the Tower Block.
The government quarter was a fusion of functionalism and brutalism dating from the 1950s. The architect commissioned to design it, modernist Erling Viksjø, made so bold as to ask Pablo Picasso if he would design murals for the complex. Enthused by the Norwegian architect’s raw concrete, the artist agreed to produce some sketches. If he liked them, the Norwegians could use them. The project was kept strictly secret, under the code name Operation Pedersen. Picasso’s lines were marked into the concrete before the wall was pebble-dashed with rounded river stones and the lines were then sandblasted. It was Picasso’s first monumental work. The reliefs of his The Fishermen took up the entire end wall of one of the buildings, and if lucky enough to be invited to the higher floors you could admire several more of Picasso’s works adorning the staircase in the Tower Block.
The Prime Minister’s office was at the top of the building, on the seventeenth floor. On this unusually mild January evening in 2002, the incumbent was Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Democratic Party. For now, the office was empty because the Prime Minister was in Shanghai, where he had just enjoyed a fine array of fish dishes prepared by Chinese and Norwegian chefs using raw ingredients from the fish farms along the Norwegian coast. In his speech, the Prime Minister spoke enthusiastically about aquaculture and generously offered Norwegian fishery expertise to a billion Chinese.
One government building from the turn of the previous century was preserved when the old neoclassical quarter was demolished; its decoration was inspired by medieval motifs and incorporated dragon-style ornamentation derived from Snorri Sturluson’s history of the Norse kings. On the pediments flanking the main entrance were the opening words of the national anthem, ‘Yes, we love this country,’ with the line of music engraved alongside. These buildings which the young man was just passing housed Norway’s centre of power. The High Court was here, the Prime Minister’s office and the major government departments.
To get to the next seat of power – Youngstorget – you crossed Einar Gerhardsen’s Square, where the low, circular base of a fountain was empty for the winter. From there, a narrow footpath ran down to Møllergata. Just to the left was number 19 – the police station that the Nazis had used as a torture chamber during the Second World War. The collaborator Vidkun Quisling was arrested and held in the building after the Nazi’s defeat, until he was executed by firing squad one October night in 1945.
On the other side of the square stood an imposing red-brick building. High on the wall were a rose and a sign saying Labour Party. With its monumental air, the building was reminis
cent of one of Stalin’s Moscow skyscrapers – though on a more modest scale – a nod to the functionalism of the 1930s.
All the labour-movement organisations were based in this part of town. The House of the People, where the Confederation of Trade Unions had its headquarters, dominated one whole side of the square. In the corner between the two buildings stood a tall bronze statue – a worker with a sledgehammer over his shoulder, on his way to his factory shift. Every May Day a wreath was laid at his feet. It was here at Youngstorget that thousands of socialists, communists and Labour Party supporters rallied before setting out on their march through Oslo to mark International Workers’ Day.
As the man in the suit crossed the square, the area looked rather run down, with a number of shops standing empty. The district had acquired a reputation as the seediest in Oslo, a neighbourhood of strip clubs and little kebab shops. But things were about to change. The rockers would soon take over. Music nerds would open bars and cafés and hipsters would start heading down here to hear new bands and drink beer.
As for him, he preferred the established bars and nightclubs for the young West Enders with plenty of money to spend. He lived right by Frogner Park, in what he called the most prestigious district in Oslo. No matter that the flat he shared with some fellow students from the Commerce School was dark and uninviting, the address was exclusive.
Down here, on the other hand, was where the alternative, leftie types, the immigrants and the people on benefits lived. A quarter of the pupils at the school in Møllergata were from Somalia, and only a small minority were ethnic Norwegians.
Side by side with the Labour Party stronghold was a much lower building, painted in the pale pink of a marzipan rose. It had an unobtrusive entrance beside a fish shop. On its façade, shining letters announced Fremskrittspartiet – the Progress Party.
He opened the door and went up to the first floor. On the stairs he passed posters with slogans like ‘You are Unique!’ and ‘Born Free, Taxed to Death’. In the offices hung a large flag with the logo of the Progress Party Youth. The toilet walls were adorned with press cuttings of stupid things said by the Socialist Left.