A Passage - The New Yorker

Time had stopped in Calais. The Albanians in Paris who had helped me plan my crossing had said that the train would remain at the station for five minutes, ten at most. Then it would enter the tunnel, and the passage would be over. England would be next.

But I’d been holding my breath for far longer than ten minutes and we still hadn’t moved. I was sweating through my suit and through the Acqua di Giò my cousins had pressed on me a week earlier in Milan. A whole bottle, very expensive, they’d said. Everyone knew undocumented Albanians couldn’t afford that kind of cologne. I hadn’t much cared for cologne before, but I had used it liberally—sprayed over the cheap suit, some behind my neck, a dash on each cheek. Now, as my anxiety climbed, the smell was becoming inseparable from the fear. This was twenty-seven years ago—March, 1999, about a week before my twenty-first birthday—but to this day a whiff of Acqua di Giò brings back the nausea.

The trip had started as normally as could be expected. I had embarked at Gare du Nord, in Paris, and, as the city disappeared behind us, the conductor came through to check tickets. He worked his way down the car, examining them with the studied expression of a policeman at a border crossing. When he reached my booth, he seemed to linger on my ticket and on my face, as if he were filing them away, preparing for the moment he would kick me out. I had spent all my savings on acquiring a Schengen visa. Calais, the last stop in France, was the farthest point I could legally reach. I planned to stay on the train past it.

The conductor handed me my ticket and turned to a family across the aisle—a young African couple and their daughter—with the same efficient attention. I suspected that they were doing the same thing as me—trying not to be noticed, hoping to make it into the tunnel, and to England. The mother wore a long beige dress that covered almost her entire body, a head scarf of the same color framing her round face. Her dark eyes were mostly cast down or toward her daughter. The father was young and thin, with yellowing teeth he showed often, playing with the child, making her laugh, putting on a brave face that I wished I could myself. He wore a white shirt and gray trousers, seemingly careful not to attract attention.

The child was a year old, perhaps a little more. She sat on the table between her parents, perfectly settled. Her flowery dress was the brightest thing in our corner of the car. She played with her mother’s scarf and her father’s collar, reaching around and chewing on a biscuit. She made sounds continuously, happy chirping that settled my breathing.

From the moment we had departed from Gare du Nord, I had been preparing to change seats. The question was when to do it. Too early and the conductor might pass, recognize me sitting in another part of the train, and kick me out at Calais. Too late and there would be no time to switch. The flat northern French landscape passed as I ran the calculation over. I was thankful for the baby’s joyful babbling, but I didn’t know what her family’s presence meant for my case. If the conductor came back through, would they draw his eye away from the now empty seat or toward the whole area, the anomaly of a missing passenger? I couldn’t resolve it.

When the timing felt right, I took off my jacket, picked up my small suitcase, and walked toward the front of the car unhurried, unremarkable. Just a young businessman changing seats between stations.

I had studied the front of the car and settled on what I thought was a group of three young Brits. With an awkward smile, I slid into the booth beside them. None of them reacted. I gestured at one of the magazines on the table. One of them nodded. I picked it up and leafed through it, seeing nothing. I did not dare glance up to check whether anyone had noticed. The man next to me shifted slightly to make room. I kept my eyes on the page.

At Calais, the conductor went past me and directly to the family. Heart in throat, I watched out of the corner of my eye, not turning and not lifting my head fully. The mother said something, her voice carrying a frustration and misery I thought I could recognize even in a language I didn’t understand. The father sounded already resigned, yet did his best to take his time getting up and waving off her questioning. The child kept making her sounds, completely unaware, reaching up again for the edge of the mother’s scarf.

They rose and gathered themselves while the conductor stood guard. The father picked up two enormous bags and walked outside. The mother adjusted the child on her hip, the long dress catching the light as she stood. On the platform, the father looked around as if lost. The mother kept looking down. I still wonder where they ended up.

I sat among the oblivious Brits. I tried not to think about the platform. My face felt pale and bloodless, my stomach sending heat up through my chest. The conductor passed by more than once and didn’t notice. Maybe he was still looking for me. Or maybe there was a problem with the train. We sat for fifteen minutes. Then twenty. Then thirty. I started to feel numb.

I kept thinking of my grandmother Arshime and wished that she had given me a black thread. She had done it once before, when I was seventeen and trying to cross from Albania into Greece—took a thread from my grandfather’s old Flying Man sewing machine and chanted words over it, which made my grandfather laugh. “She doesn’t know what she is doing,” he scoffed. “Filli i zi të çon në shtëpi,” she whispered as she handed it to me. Black thread takes you home. It did. I was travelling with a few other boys from my home town, Fier, when a soldier stopped us at a bus stop near Ioannina. He looked barely older than we were, and Greeks waiting with us shamed him into letting us go. I made it onto the next bus and past a police checkpoint later, sitting next to an old Greek woman, sharing her Bible—clutching that tiny bundle of thread in my pocket all the way to Athens.

Four years later, Greece felt untenable. I wasn’t able to enroll in school and couldn’t bear being a high-school dropout forever. I tried to make it to Italy on a fake Greek passport, but a policeman at the port in Patras tested me by asking me to write my name. I spoke Greek well enough—after years of work at cafés and construction sites—but I didn’t know how to write it. I still remember how he laughed at me—you can’t spell your own name—and kept the passport. To sell it, most likely. I had a Greek girlfriend, a college student, who found out about my attempt to leave and told her parents. Her mother offered me their family kiosk to make me stay. The offer was kind. It made me want to leave even more. I went back to Albania, secured a Schengen visa, and flew to Milan. I took a slow train to Paris, and then boarded the Eurostar.

Filli i zi të çon në shtëpi, I repeated in my head. Arshime had given me another blessing before I’d left for Milan, and I kept trying to find comfort in her words. After we’d had our coffees, she turned my cup over, let it dry, and looked at the grounds. “You will get there,” she said, holding my hand. “Look at the cross, a great sign.” Her words, soft and slurred since a stroke took half of her face, her finger tracing the cross shape in the grounds.

And yet, impossibly, we were still in Calais. The conductor kept prowling back and forth. He won’t move the train until he finds me, I told myself, my heart hammering against my ribs. I’ll be caught just as I’m about to make it. Patras port all over again.

The train moved. There was a small jerk at first. Another shift. Then, unmistakably, forward movement, the car pulling itself back to life. Ever since I was a child, I have hated the lurch of departure. I still get motion sickness, especially if I am not looking straight ahead. Not this time. This time, it was pure relief. I must have been tensing every muscle throughout the whole wait at Calais, because as the train shot onto the tracks it felt as though I finally, truly sat down. Now I sank deep into the plush upholstery, completely spent.

I didn’t have long to rest. The Paris Albanians had been clear. The moment you enter the tunnel, go to the bathroom, tear up your Albanian passport, and flush it. Only once it’s gone do you come out—Kosovar birth certificate ready. I had bought it in Fier for fifteen hundred lekë, about twelve dollars, from a man who filled in my name and the birth date I gave him. I told him to write that I was seventeen. I was almost twenty-one. Minors had an easier path, I had heard—I could get some social support, and go to school, and might have a better chance at asylum.

When we were well inside the tunnel, I pulled on my jacket, picked up my small suitcase, and walked toward the toilet at the end of the car. I passed my old seat and the empty table across the aisle. They already looked like they belonged to someone else.

In the bathroom, my fingers fumbled in the inner pocket of my jacket, searching for the passport. When I finally got hold of it, I couldn’t tear it. The pages, soft paper, ripped easily enough. But the cover, thick and clothlike, wouldn’t give. Those old Albanian passports were relics of Communism, built to last. I felt my heartbeat hasten again.

I was taking too long. My hands shook as I tore off small pieces and flushed them away. The cover required teeth—corner by corner, bite, rip, flush. I don’t know how long it took. But finally it was all gone. I worried that someone would check a main tank under the train, piece together all the shreds, and present them to the police. I told myself to stop being paranoid.

Then I looked in the mirror. There I was. Frightened, stinking of expensive cologne, clutching a piece of paper that said, in Cyrillic, that I was someone else.

I worried that there would be a queue outside the bathroom. There wasn’t. The empty corridor felt like another small victory. I started to smile, but before I could enjoy it my body began to shake. I was suddenly freezing—maybe the sweat cooling on my skin, maybe the adrenaline from Calais draining away all at once, leaving me hollow and weak. I needed somewhere warm, I kept thinking, as I walked into the next car.

Ahead, a stripe of sunlight spilled in from the left side of the train—we were out of the tunnel now, into England—lighting up one small patch of seats. Three empty and one occupied. I could see only the back of the occupant’s head—small, with blond hair cut short. Immediately, I knew I had to go there. I walked over and sat down opposite her, taking in the warmth from the sunshine that seemed to illuminate that particular booth alone.

The woman across from me had pale skin and fierce blue eyes behind thick glasses. I guessed that she was in her fifties. She barely filled her seat, yet took up a great deal of space around her. Notebooks were spread across the table between us, her elbows planted at angles. She was writing furiously in one of them and at first didn’t register my presence. When she finally looked up and noticed me—exhausted but strangely content, like a man who had just finished a marathon—she smiled courteously, said sorry, and gathered her things to her side of the table.

“No problem,” I said in English, deliberately stressing the second syllable: prob-LEM. I’m not sure why I did it. To signal that I was foreign, hoping it might spark her curiosity? I don’t know. But looking back it feels almost inevitable, as if the conversation had already been written. Arshime believed in kismet. On that train, I was starting to think Arshime might have been right.

She looked at me with open curiosity. I smiled back, hoping my expression read as warm rather than desperate. She began asking questions slowly. Her brow furrowed with what looked like genuine concern when I explained in broken English, with a few Italian words thrown in, that I was from Kosovo. That the Serbs had killed many Kosovars and that many families, including mine, had fled to Albania. I talked of my sisters and my parents, drawing on everything I had learned from a Kosovar man I had met two days earlier in Paris. He had been hanging out with the Paris Albanians, after having been expelled from England.

He looked starving when I met him. I bought him a sandwich, and we spent the afternoon at a café table, near Rue de Dunkerque. My conversation with him set my identity. I added the detail of the two sisters because he said that stories of violence against women would help with my asylum application. We discussed whether the document I was carrying was even a birth certificate; it might have been a death notice. “It doesn’t matter,” he said emphatically. “The Brits won’t know or care.”

I had rehearsed the story many times since, but this was the first time trying it on a stranger. It came naturally with her—unlike in Greece and Italy, where mentioning Albania drew barely hidden contempt. I could still be an Albanian of sorts—after all, most Kosovars are ethnic Albanians—without worrying about being judged. For the first time in years, a stranger was concerned about what I had been through. That it wasn’t entirely true didn’t make it feel any less real.

She seemed to know instinctively to let me talk, to ask and then listen without filling the silence. She offered me water, then half of her sandwich. In Albania, we say, “bukë, kripë e zemër” (bread, salt, and heart). To offer your bread to a stranger is to offer them care. I smiled and said no, hand placed over my heart, the traditional Albanian way of saying thank you. The refusal seemed to make her more curious still.

I explained, slowly, that I intended to approach the first policeman I saw at Waterloo Station and ask for asylum, and that, if they let me out of the immigration office at the station, a friend would come to collect me. She told me that she was a journalist. She handed me her business card and said to call her when in London, pointing to her number. Then she looked at me steadily, as if she wanted to be sure I understood that she meant it.

As the train pulled into Waterloo, I sat back and watched her gather her things. I wished I could leave with her. She caught my eye and smiled—warm, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world. I held her business card in both hands.

Waiting for the train to empty, I thought about a film I had watched as a boy—one that I recall as one of the few Hollywood films that the Communist regime had permitted, perhaps because it depicted the brutality of American capitalism. I loved it for entirely different reasons. There is a boy with a boxer father, who dies after a fight. The boy goes to live with his mother, a kind-looking blond woman with sparkly blue eyes. I had been happy for that boy who didn’t have to struggle any longer. I found out later that the film was called “The Champ.” But on the train I didn’t know any of that. I just thought of the boy, and the woman, and the card in my hands.

I remember lingering on the train, likely the last person to leave. I took out the Kosovar certificate and, holding it up, approached a man in uniform, whom I assumed was a police officer. I said, “Political asylum,” but I didn’t know how to pronounce “asylum,” so I said “azil,” the Albanian word closer to French than to English.

I have no memory of how I got to the immigration office. I do recall that the door to the office opened into a spacious area, with a desk to the left and benches in front of it. There were two or three people on those benches. The policeman at the desk was white, a little portly. He wore a crisp white shirt with official insignia—the type of uniform that had terrified me for years. Somehow, he still managed to look kind. He worked with practiced patience—speaking to people brought in by other officers, asking which languages they spoke, and pointing to the waiting area. After I said Albanian, he directed me to a seat and made a call. To arrange a translator, I assumed—but he might also have tried to reach a man I’ll call Beni, whose name and British phone number I’d handed over, along with the Kosovar certificate. Beni was a distant relative of my cousins in Milan.

And then I waited, looking over at the policeman occasionally, hoping he would wave me over and say that my friend was outside. Instead, he disappeared into a back room and returned a few minutes later carrying two sandwiches. He set one on his desk. The other, he walked over and handed to me without a word. It caught me completely off guard. My first instinct was to refuse. In Albania and Greece, I had never had a positive encounter with police. “No, no, thank you,” I repeated several times, hand over my heart. “Take it,” he said flatly, and turned away, leaving no room for argument.

I held the sandwich and felt something give way inside me. I don’t know what caused it—whether it was that simple act of decency or the crash after months of planning and years of dreaming—but I bent forward on the bench, hands over my face, shoulders shaking, the sandwich warm in my lap.

When the crying passed, I felt clearer. For a moment, I thought about telling him the truth—the certificate, the age, all of it. Guilt, I suppose. But I had come too far to unravel now. Whatever happened next, I would see it through.

I finished the sandwich, then went to the bathroom to clean up. The policeman had given me directions with a look that suggested I probably needed them.

I glanced in the mirror and entered the toilet stall. Inside, someone had drawn a detailed map of Kosovo on the wall: main cities, rivers, and borders, carefully rendered in pen. I stared at it longer than I’d stared at any map before. Other Albanians had warned me—the interviewers ask you where things are, which city, which river. The map showed me how to answer. Someone had been here before me, had understood exactly what a person in my position would need. A fellow Albanian speaker, almost certainly, stretching a hand across time and distance.

Several hours later, I was called into a small room, where an interviewer waited. She was a tall, light-haired woman with an I.D. card on a lanyard around her neck and a large folder under her arm. She looked mildly irritated—working late, I guessed. Beside her sat an interpreter, who spoke Albanian with a Kosovar accent. Of everything I had worried about, the interpreter weighed on me the most. It is easy for a Kosovo Albanian to spot the accent of Albanians from Albania, especially southerners like me—slower cadence and softer consonants. I had heard of Albanians trying to fake a Kosovar accent and making fools of themselves. I wasn’t going to attempt it. It seemed far wiser to be honest with the interpreter and trust him, rather than insult his intelligence.

Every time he translated my words to the interviewer, I searched his face for some sign that he knew, that he was deciding in that moment whether to help or to burn me. He gave nothing away. I think about him still. He must have faced that dilemma daily. Whether to look the other way for people like me, or to flag us to insure that there were enough spots for those who genuinely needed them. People like the Kosovo Albanians, his own people, whose suffering I was borrowing to save myself. I was hoping—willing him with my eyes to believe—that there was room enough for all of us.

The interviewer asked many questions, including how I had come to be at Waterloo. I said something vague about being put on a train by others and not being entirely sure of the route. I knew from the Paris Albanians that the British tended to refuse asylum to those who had passed through France. She had largely stopped taking notes and looked ready to be done. When it was over, she handed me a document—a Standard Acknowledgement Letter, I think—and explained through the interpreter that I could remain in the U.K. while my case was being processed. I sat for a moment, holding the paper, hands slightly shaking.

When I returned to the room with the policeman, he caught my eye and gave a small nod. I nodded back and took the longest, slowest breath I could manage. In my hands, I now held Beni’s number, the journalist’s business card, and the official notice. A small, improbable pile of documents that together meant I had made it.

I had never met Beni before and had no idea what he looked like. But I recognized him the moment he walked in. The weathered face, the hair parted neatly to the side, and that stance—shoulders back, chest forward, hands loose at the sides—typical of men from his home town of Vlorë. Albanians joke that they walk as though they have a hollow in their chests.

Beni spoke to the officer at the desk without a trace of hesitation, even though I could tell that his English wasn’t much stronger than mine. He shook my hand. “Welcome to England, brother,” he said. I wanted to embrace him. Instead, I grabbed my suitcase and followed him out. I managed a “thank you” to the policeman, who was already dealing with someone else—a Black man wearing a Barcelona soccer hat. You’ll be attacked in the street for that, the policeman appeared to be telling him.

Beni didn’t talk much—I would come to learn that that was simply who he was. He asked after my cousins and their families and how the journey had gone, as if this had been the most normal of trips. I was thankful for simple questions and gave simple answers, happy to stare out the window of the Underground and then the bus, unable to get enough of the well-lit streets, the red brick shops, the people dressed in careful layers of coats and scarves moving through the wet dark.

Beni’s place was a single room in what had once been a hostel. Two beds, some shelving, a small table with two chairs. Beni slept in one bed, his sister—whom I’ll call Mira—and her young daughter in the other. The kitchen and bathroom were shared with other residents—mostly foreign families, other asylum seekers. Until I found my own place, I was to sleep in the same bed as Beni, head to foot, as Albanians say.

While her daughter slept, Mira offered to make me a sandwich—white bread, ham, mayonnaise. “English style,” she quipped. I told her I’d already eaten at the station. That made them both laugh. “They were kind to you,” Mira said, sounding surprised. “Maybe the suit, maybe the baby face.” I shrugged and said nothing, thinking of the policeman.

She told me that life in England was not quite what people back home imagined. She and Beni worked long hours, Mira cleaning houses and working at a fish-and-chips shop, Beni in construction, and, even so, a flat of their own remained out of reach. But Mira’s daughter was thriving in kindergarten, already speaking English perfectly. It was all that really mattered.

It was late. We needed to sleep. Beni had to be up in a few hours for work. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling of that small room, Beni’s calloused feet next to my head. Soon everything would change, the way it only does in movies—the Hollywood films I had watched in Albania, dreaming myself into them. Language classes, grammar school, A-levels, and a place at St. John’s College, Oxford. Then, before I could attend, my asylum claim was denied. I came clean and returned to Albania—no more lies, I resolved, though it felt like stepping off a cliff.

But that night, in that room gone quiet, with only a faint light coming in from the street, I thought of the journalist and her business card, still in my jacket pocket. The map of Kosovo drawn on the toilet-stall wall. The interpreter who must have known, yet gave nothing away. The boy in the film whose father died after a fight. Of Arshime, hair covered by a white shawl, pointing to the cross shape in the coffee grounds. And of London, wet and beautiful even in the dark.♦

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