So, a day came when I stood outside the doorway of our hostel. Green alps rising all around, gray mountains above them leaping to the sky. Like living in the bottom of an immense roofless room, or even at the bottom of a well. But a quick creek in a drainage channel ran right through the middle of the village, making a cheerful sound. The air was clean and cold, the sunlight on the rocks above a thick yellow. A real place, despite its unreal look. And we were here. Here, after twelve years in a Turkish camp, two years on the move trying to get to Germany, very crazy years, very hard; then fourteen more years in the Swiss camp north of Bern. Now we are finally somewhere.
And yet now I find I am seventy-one years old. My life has passed. I will not say it was wasted, that’s not right. We took care of each other, and we taught the children. They got a good education in that camp. We did what we could with what we had. It was the life we could make.
And now we’re here. And the SEM awarded us a small lump sum based on how long we had stayed in the camp, and that being so long for us, it wasn’t all that small. We could combine it with the savings of the Jordanian family new to Kandersteg, and together we rented an empty space in a building on the main street between the train station and the cable car terminus. The space had been used as a bakery, so it was not too difficult or expensive to change it into a little restaurant. Middle Eastern food, we were told to call it. Kebabs and falafel, and other things people already knew about; then, when we got them into our place, we could have them try dishes more interesting. Six tables and we would be full. It seemed possible, and it was interesting to try. Well, who am I kidding— it was exciting to try.
Of course I am old now, but there is no changing that, except by death. At least I have this day, and these days. All that happened before seems now to have happened to someone else. It’s like remembering a previous incarnation. Especially home itself. I remember when I left Damascus I looked around and promised myself I would someday come back. Damascus isn’t like any other city, it’s old, the oldest capital left on Earth, and you can tell that when you’re there, it’s in the streets and the way it feels at night. And when we were released from the camp, I had the chance to return. I even got a plane ticket. I went to Kloten thinking I’ll just go back and see it. The family didn’t want to go, but I did. But then in Kloten I had a kind of a, I don’t know what— a kind of a breakdown I guess. Who was this going back, and why? I tried to put it together, all the pieces of my life, and I couldn’t do it. I concluded that the person who thought of going back was not me, that I was no longer that person. The years in the camp had taken me, day by day, the same day every day, to another person. So at the last minute I said no to myself, and went back down to the train station under Kloten and returned to the camp. My family greeted me curiously, unaware of this shift, this fact that a different person had returned to them. Are you okay? they asked, and I said yes, I’m okay. I just don’t want to go anymore. I didn’t understand it, so how could I explain it? Who can tell the riddle of their own true self?
So all right, a new person. Old but new. I think about what I have now, as this new person in her life, not quite my life, it seems, but I’m trying to get my head around it. We work all day to prepare a meal. It’s a fixed menu for those who want the whole supper, and we take reservations, which sometimes happen and sometimes not, but by eight or nine the restaurant is mostly full. Easy with the six tables. It’s almost like hosting a dinner party at home, except instead of friends coming over, it’s strangers. Or let’s call them acquaintances. Many are there for the first time, but some have been before and come back. We always greet those ones with a smile, and they often talk to each other. Swiss German is such a funny language, it is sometimes hard not to smile. It’s maybe like the sound of their medieval life, chopping wood and clanging cowbells and the nasal toot of their alphorns, and maybe rocks falling off the sides of their awesome mountains. This compared to the fluid birdsong of Arabic; it would be funny to have both in the same room at once, but we don’t usually speak Arabic around them, we speak high German, Hochdeutsch, and they speak it back to us, slowly and clearly, with what I am told is a strong Swiss accent, but I don’t hear that, it’s the only high German I know. It was a tourist from Berlin who told me that, he said, in Berlin you would be taken for a Swiss woman, your German is that good, but with the Swiss accent. If it weren’t for the color of your skin
