And just when you think you’ve found solid ground, that the hard times have passed, and that you’re getting closer to achieving your goal (what is the goal, really?), a knock comes at the door.
And when the door knocks at dawn, it’s never a good sign. After all, no one there expects visitors. No relatives or friends exist within a radius of many kilometres. They live like ghosts.
Eleven in one room, wire on the door for a lock, eleven unhappy souls, imprisoned in one room, like rags, like trash, eleven hopeless souls, in a half-baked room, who to call and what to say. (Who knew when Akis Panou wrote these lyrics that seven souls would become eleven and the half-baked room would be fully paid for).
So, a little past six in the morning, the door knocks.
And from the first knock, you know it’s the police. Caught between sleep and wakefulness, without much thought, you say, “I haven’t travelled so many kilometres, I haven’t risked my life playing letter and crown in the sea to go back defeated. I’ll fly like a bird to finally find freedom. A world where there is no distinction between legal and illegal.”
My defeated little rebel, as the poet would say, times don’t change, there’s no such world.
Goodnight Kemal (whose real name we’ll never know to avoid imagining that the lifeless body on the ground was a person, a 24-year-old whom some loved and hoped would return to his homeland having realised his dream or managed to live somewhere happily).
The police say it wasn’t a raid but a census process.
At 6 in the morning?
Perhaps a census of despair.
A record of what a person can do to become part of another world, better than the one fate brought them into.
Initially, this world might not seem much better, living in an apartment that looks abandoned with ten or more others who come and go like ghosts, working clandestinely in construction and farms, but eventually, it will get better.
They promised him, he dreamed it, he believed it. He will leave this place where the boat and the smuggler left him behind, and another smuggler will take him elsewhere, to the real Europe, the paradise they promised him.
Even by flying.
However, often you can’t escape fate, despite the glimmers that make it seem possible, it’s nothing but an illusion.
