1
The image of the hotel haunted him. He saw it when he closed his eyes on a well-deserved cigarette break or during a rare shower on the road. He saw it clearer each night when he laid his tired head down in a new encampment along the trek from Syria to central Europe. The hotel’s white stones were always clean, cleaner than anything his waking eyes had ever seen in his young life. But its black front door beckoned him—like a mystery where somehow he was the key to unlock it.
He’d hated the visions when they first sneaked into the narrow confines of his teenage mind, playing and replaying like clips from someone else’s favorite movie.
Later, he tried to keep the strange visions of the hotel locked in his mind so that he could study every detail of the beckoning building. He would back away from the front door to see the complete structure, and then down the cobblestone driveway to the narrow side street, and then back farther to see the snow-covered, needlelike church spires of an unknown city that held the hotel like a secret. And then sleep would come to his weary body once again.
the young syrian refugee loaded crate after crate into the back of the yellow commercial truck, the kale greens and tomato reds barely visible in the thin predawn light. He didn’t mind the work. The mindless labor reminded him of carrying artillery shells in a remembered war or of working alone in empty and doomed warehouses—the labors of other men that he somehow knew.
He had befriended every driver that visited the farm, and he learned that each one serviced a different route of farmers’ markets. He chatted with each one in his broken German to learn their destinations. This truck he loaded, the yellow one, was Kurt’s.
“Basil or Bern?” he asked as Kurt passed with a mug of fresh coffee steaming into the cool morning air.
“Zurich,” Kurt barked back without turning.
The refugee laborer loaded the last of the heavy onion crates and then crawled into the cargo box of the truck where he restacked the open vegetable boxes to create a hidden space to sit. He stepped back out of the truck, grabbed the small backpack that held everything he owned, and lit one of his last four cigarettes. He ran his thumb over the military lighter and remembered how the occupying Russian soldiers had laughed at him when he had traded his father’s gold ring for it. But the lighter reminded him of something before his father, something that he needed to get back to.
He drew in the warm smoke and looked at the other men loading trucks in the dark—men from Africa, men from Iraq, two from his native Syria. These were men with fractured pasts and focused futures. He had traveled with several of them to get to this sanctuary of a farm they had heard about on the road. It was a place that would work you to exhaustion, but would take you and feed you and not report you.
He flicked a long ash onto the dark earth and studied each stern face in the pale light of a promising dawn. He saw hard faces that had forsaken families and homelands to make it this far. He saw faces that he had shared stories, dreams, and lies with. He had held the wire open for several of them to cross into some already forgotten frontier that lay behind them now. Each of them had their own dream destination beyond this farm. Stories of Paris and dreams of Amsterdam and distant London filled the conversation around every makeshift evening campfire. But he was headed for Zurich, back to a past he was beginning to piece together.
He wanted to say goodbye to these men who had been his companions and fellow dreamers on their shared migration, but he knew he could not. Goodbyes are too common a currency to have any value among refugees. He drew on the cigarette and said a quiet farewell to each face in turn as he watched them in their darkened labors. Then he climbed into the back of Kurt’s truck, took his hiding place amid the fruits and vegetables, and fell asleep.
the doors of the truck swung open to reveal blinding sunshine as the young man sprang to life and picked up the apple and pear cores that had been his stolen breakfast. He grabbed and placed heavy crates on the back deck of the truck, as though every farmers’ market load came with a prepacked porter. Here, Turkish and Albanian immigrants did the lifting. When Kurt returned with another coffee, the refugee had stepped out of the truck and became another bending back in the buzz of premarket activity. He unloaded the last of the carrots, grabbed his pack, and looked for a street sign he might recognize from his jumbled memories of this city. The sign at the edge of the plaza read
“Helvetiaplatz.”
Find the train station, he thought. He could probably figure out how to get there from the train station. If he really had been here before, perhaps he had arrived by train. He had planned this a hundred times in his head, planned how he would find the white hotel, what he would say, who he might recognize, how they might welcome him. It had been over a year since he had begun to remember this place, a place he had never been to, yet felt he had visited before. He stopped to look at himself in the side mirror of Kurt’s truck and wiped smudges of farm dirt from his dark, sunbaked skin.
His teachers back in Syria had all marveled when he had picked up English in a matter of months, but he hadn’t learned it so much as remembered it. It would certainly help him here. He straightened his back and stood tall as he started walking with the confidence that he would need to fit in here. In Zurich, with his perfect American English, he would be just another dirty, weathered backpacker moving from coffee shop to youth hostel, and not a young veteran of caravans and clandestine border crossings.
He saw two backpackers a block away and practiced the lines in his head before speaking. “Hey, man, do you know how to get to the train station?”
from the bustle of the station, he saw his first remembered landmark of this city. The twin spires of the central cathedral stood against a blue sky as though they protected some promised kingdom. He had definitely seen them before. From their base, he thought he might remember the way to the white hotel. Corner by corner, the avenues narrowed, and black asphalt gave way to gray cobblestones as the streets became more familiar to him.
Turning down Augustinerstrasse, he saw it. The hotel was smaller than he had remembered, but the brightness was right. It gleamed pure white like a proven truth. He stood on the sidewalk opposite it and studied its every detail. He lit his last cigarette and recalled the countless times he had imagined himself standing right where he stood now, ready to walk up and enter a half-remembered world. His legs barely obeyed him as he took his first nervous steps up the cobbled drive toward an envisioned new life that was tied to a dispossessed past.
The sign, Hotel St. Germain, stood in bright gold letters beside the large black front door, and a smaller weathered, hand-painted plaque hanging under it read Voll belegt in German and No Vacancy in English. The imposing entry door offered no doorknob or handle—just as he knew it wouldn’t. He looked to the side and saw the golden decorative rope pull. Again, it was right where it should have been. He
ran a rough, calloused hand over it, feeling its welcoming smoothness. The farm dirt under his fingernails curled as dark crescents as he grasped the cord and pulled. A bell chimed deep inside the mysterious white building, and he felt as though an hour passed before he heard the bolt move on the other side.
The refugee tried to recall the faint feelings of how the men and women on the other side of this door had once accepted him. Hazy visions of smiles, embraces, tattoos, and banquets had fueled his fantasies about what he might claim on the other side of this black door after they would throw it open and welcome him.
A man in his late twenties wearing a dark suit slowly drew the door open to reveal an entryway with a marble floor and the carved stone walls of a larger lobby behind him. The man had wide shoulders and a thick neck that hinted at a background in athletics or military service. He asked a question in German, but the young traveler couldn’t understand it.
He stood there, shaking, as he repeated the opening sentence he had been practicing for over a year. “Hello, you don’t know me, but I had to come here,” the young Syrian said in English. “I cannot explain it, but I have traveled a long distance and I feel like I belong here in this hotel.”
The doorman stepped forward into the open doorframe to get a closer look. “It might be that we do know you,” he said in English with a clipped German accent. “But my first question to you is, do you remember your name?”
The young man stood stunned. He hadn’t practiced anything beyond his opening, “I am Yousef, but also not Yousef—I mean, I think I am more than Yousef. I think I had another name . . . from before . . .”
“Tell me that name, if you please.”
Tears welled up in the young Syrian’s eyes as he grappled with the crowd of strangers’ memories running through his head. He could see their actions and could even recall images of their faces reflected in mirrors of a distant past, but he could not remember their names. He only knew from the last one that he should find this place. “I, I,” he stuttered, “I try, but I cannot remember his name. But I can see him here, in this hotel.”
The doorman narrowed his eyes for a moment before stepping back to close the door. “I’m sorry, but we are full. I would need a name in order to check the hotel reservation log.”
Yousef’s heart pounded in his chest as this mystery world started to slip away from him. “But I belong here,” he protested as the doorman’s hard face withdrew behind the narrowing crack in the door. “I came all this way to find you. Please listen to me,” he pleaded as the door and his future began to close in front of him.
“I’m sorry, but we have had a lot of impostors recently. Feel free to come back when you remember the name that your reservation is under. I wish you good travels, sir,” the man said through the crack as he closed the door and slid the securing bolts back into place.
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