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Photograph by Amber Schmisseur
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Image of Sara and Meikel
In the fall of 2002, I was renting an attic room in a turn-of-the-century house in northern England, working on a master’s degree in medieval studies at the University of Leeds. Late one night, weary of my research on St. Lucia, I surfed the Internet and found an incredibly cheap plane ticket to Greece. Desperate for a holiday, I bought it.
The next morning, before scurrying down the 32 steps from my attic room, I called my parents, who live in Illinois, and told them of my plans. My mother advised me to wear the passport pouch she had given me, but the manila-colored pocket-on-a-string seemed unnecessary and uncomfortable, not to mention unflattering. I tossed it onto my bed, put on my Gilligan hat and walked out the door.
Hours later, I arrived at my hotel. It was a bit seedy, with a buzzing blue neon sign out front, but from my balcony I could look over the azure waters of the Piraeus, the largest port in Europe. The gentle boom of the boats’ horns ricocheted off the water and up toward me, and I felt as if I’d been transported into a dream.
At nightfall, I took the Metro, and after several stops the massive white marble pillars of the Parthenon jumped into view. I hopped off the train and made a quick lap around the Acropolis. The next day, I visited museums, toured ancient sites and window-shopped on the Plaka. Then I took a shoddy coach to the ancient city of Corinth, where St. Paul had carried the Gospel 2,000 years ago. Corinth looked just as I had imagined it would; its columns stood proudly, supporting the February sky. After hours there, I returned to the hotel exhausted.
That Friday night, I packed up my souvenirs, postcards and some baklava.
Then I took out my plane ticket and set it on the nightstand to prepare for my departure the next morning. I was going to do the same thing with my passport—but it was gone! After ransacking my room, I notified the hotel manager, who kindly called the American Embassy in Athens. A receptionist on the line asked whether I was in danger and what my problem was. When I told her that I was a U.S. citizen, my passport was missing and I could not leave the country, she told me that my predicament did not qualify as a national emergency. I would have to contact the embassy during “normal business hours”—and the embassy would be closed on Monday to celebrate the birthday of a certain George Washington.
Stranded in Greece, unable to leave the country and with little money, I began lamenting my whole trip. I checked out of the hotel and began searching for a hostel to save money. Feeling so despondent that even the entreaties of the men in the market to buy some olives or fresh hog didn’t raise my spirits, I walked for several miles until I reached a wall overlooking a marina boardwalk. I couldn’t walk on the water, and I wasn’t desperate enough to walk into the sea. So I sat down on the wall and opened my journal.
Preoccupied, I hardly noticed the palm trees, the warm sunshine and the boats roving over the cobalt waters. Wondering whether this was how it felt to be in prison, I scanned an English newspaper for a glimmer of hope, but the headlines screamed something about America and Iraq and a search for weapons of mass destruction.
Two young men walked by. One looked back at me and smiled.
I smiled back, feeling awkwardly alone.
“Ahem,” I heard a moment later. “Hallo.”
“Hello. How are you?” I asked nervously.
“Good, good.”
We sat a moment looking at each other. He had the most perfectly round eyebrows I’d ever seen.
“And you?” he asked.
“Oh, fine. Fine, thank you.”
“My name is Meikel,” he said, and smiled warmly.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Sarah,” I said, and nodded.
“Where you from?” he asked. He was evidently struggling to speak English.
“England. Well, actually, I’m from America, but I’m a student in England.” My voice was unsteady.
“And you?” I asked politely, expecting his answer to be “Greece.”
“Germany. I am Germany, but originale from Iraq.” I covered up the newspaper with my journal.
“Oh, Iraq,” I said, as nonchalantly as if he’d said Ohio. “I thought you were Greek.”
“I can speak Greece.”
There was a long pause.
“I am a tourist. Actually, I come to see my brother. Thirteen years I don’t see him. Thirteen years.” He whistled. “He is big now!”
“Wow. Good for you.” I didn’t stop to think about what it means for brothers to be separated for 13 years, what it means to be a thirtysomething Iraqi outside the borders of Iraq.
“Today we come for coffee. You like coffee?” he asked.
I looked back at this Iraqi man and closed my journal; maybe someday I could write a story about him.
“OK, thanks. That would be nice,” I said, and went with them to an outdoor café, not a hundred feet away, because I was alone and didn’t have anything better to do than enjoy a frappé on a sunny Greek afternoon.
* * *
Meikel and his family are Iraqi Christians. Originally from Baghdad, Meikel left Iraq in 1991, escaping into mountainous Kurdistan. Fearing that the government might kill his parents if they knew his whereabouts and refused to tell the government, he had not told them of his plans to leave. He would call from Kurdistan to say goodbye.
In the mountains, Meikel walked by night and slept by day. When he and six other men dared the escape, he had already endured eight months of imprisonment under Saddam for refusing to fight during the invasion of Kuwait. He had been dressed in red and placed on death row for “treason” (disobeying Hussein’s war directives). Then he had been released, because Saddam had decided that his defectors would be reintroduced to the army. Rather than fight under the banner of Saddam, Meikel left Iraq.
From Kurdistan, he traveled via the black market to Istanbul, where he worked as a welder. Afraid that he was still too close to Iraq, Meikel then moved to Greece, where he cooked at a swanky restaurant at which Michael Jordan was rumored to have eaten.
For three years, Meikel saved money. Then he dyed his hair blond, put on Bermuda shorts and carried a guitar as he took a ferry into Ancona, Italy. Eventually he made his way to Germany by rail and declared himself a refugee. After eight years in Germany, he became a German citizen. He is fluent in Chaldean, Arabic, Greek, German and English.
I learned these things little by little over several days. From what little he said about his past when we met, I suspected that Meikel had suffered under Saddam, although I would not learn until months later, as our relationship grew, just what he had endured at the age of 18: beatings with a wire cable, electric shock and starvation. In the meantime, however, I was drawn to this loving, laughing Iraqi whose eyes were the same color as mine, even though we’d been born half a world apart.
* * *
The American Embassy in Athens was on a long straight street, and, checking addresses, it took me a while to finally find it. Meikel accompanied me. The building was an austere concrete compound surrounded by an iron fence. There was an American flag out front and a mob of people. Were they demonstrating, protesting the impending war with Iraq? I wasn’t sure until we got closer. Then I discovered that it was not a demonstration. These people were trying to get inside the embassy for refuge, for asylum, for papers to visit their families in America, for visas to study at American universities.
From the looks of the sterile complex, we could tell that Meikel wouldn’t be able to go inside with me. This I had to do on my own. But he said that he would wait for me across the street, no matter how long it took.
I was to enter the fortress and regain my passport, which had been reported found. With my heart pounding, I pushed through the crowd, and, because I was already an American, I was given precedence. Once inside the entrance, I surrendered my coat, my backpack and my sweater, so that they could be searched for guns, bombs, explosives. I gave the guards my driver’s license and entered the citadel.
I went through three locked glass holding areas before the security guards allowed me onto the embassy grounds. Inside these iron bars, I now had a precarious freedom. I walked up a few concrete steps, then turned to look through the iron fence at the world waiting outside. And there—smiling, waving victoriously at me from across the street—was the Iraqi who, I would find out later, had bought his own freedom with false passports in a thousand dark nights.
Catching sight of our flag, flying high above the compound, I momentarily turned away from the confident Meikel. Suddenly the weight of freedom felt too heavy to bear.
* * *
We were married on February 15, 2004, just one year after we met. Our families in Illinois and Iraq held simultaneous receptions to celebrate, although the festivities in Iraq took place considerably later in the evening.
Meikel told me once that his great dream in life was to be able to see his family again, to say the goodbye he could not say when he had left them in 1991. We thought that it could never happen, but in the spring of 2004, Meikel obtained a job translating for a company in Baghdad with building projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. I urged him to go.
Three months after we were married, he boarded a plane and traveled to his homeland. We both knew that he could lose his life. Times were uncertain there. It was especially dangerous for him, for he had fled military service under Saddam while other Iraqis had been forced to serve in Saddam’s army as part of an unjust war.
While in Baghdad, Meikel was reunited with his family. For safety, Meikel’s parents met him in the lobby of a hotel in the middle of Baghdad instead of in the family home. When his mother and father saw him approaching, they almost burst with joy. The men kissed each other and wept. A moment later, in sheer exuberance, Meikel’s mother sat in a plush burgundy chair and bid Meikel to sit on her lap. Then she playfully kissed him all over, crying, “Habibi, habibi!”— “my dear one.” After nearly 14 years of separation, he was still her little boy.
Although our separation was difficult for Meikel and me, so newly married, I rejoiced in his reunion with his family; if anything, I only wished that I could have been there to meet my in-laws.
Several months later, Meikel came home for good. In Baghdad, he saw that his homeland had been ravaged by war. Meikel left his parents and birth country for the last time a year ago, when it was in shambles as a result of the work of insurgents and car bombers. They came from countries outside the Iraq border, and their families were more often than not well paid for their sacrifice.
These problems persist.
When Meikel left Iraq, however, he brought back with him pictures of his family. Not only were there snapshots of his grandparents’ and parents’ generations, but there were also pictures of Iraqi nieces and nephews—our nephews and nieces—smiling.
For me, the pictures were not just proof of Meikel’s family’s existence; they were evidence of hope for the future of Meikel’s homeland. They showed me people in a world that was so distant from my own—yet not unlike my own.
In the world of Iraq, too, families eat together, play together and pray together, while, universally, time marches on.
* * *
Meikel now attends the International Institute on Grand Boulevard and works at a Greek restaurant in South St. Louis, and I am a graduate student in English at Saint Louis University.
That’s the joy of losing a passport.
