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.