The Imaginary Bus: Khalo Who Foresaw His Own Death in a Dream — Volume One
Things I Could Hardly Believe
Nobody had spoken for a few minutes. After all that talk of art and history, a little silence was no bad thing. The bus moved gently through the wet street. I had decided simply to drive for a while.
No Marx. No history. No art. No revolution. Even if the donkey had an opinion, he could keep it to himself.
But when had this bus ever managed five minutes of silence?
I looked in the mirror. ‘I have a suggestion, everyone.’
‘When you say that, I get worried,’ said the woman in red.
‘This one isn’t dangerous.’
‘Go on,’ said Lena.
‘We’ve talked so much about history, society, migration and exile. For a few parts, let’s start with ourselves instead of books and theories.’
‘How?’ asked the newcomer.
‘Each of us tells one memory from our experience of seeking refuge. Not a life story or a speech. Just something that has stayed with us after all these years. Then we’ll see why that particular thing stayed.’
The donkey suddenly brayed.
I eyed him in the mirror. ‘Quiet, you. You still haven’t established whether you’re a migrant, a refugee, an exile or simply travelling on my bus without a visa.’
Laughter spread through the bus.
‘It was your suggestion. You start,’ said the woman in red.
‘I knew this would come back to bite me.’
‘No escaping, Khalo. Begin,’ Lena said.
For a moment I said nothing. Memories can be strange. For years you think they are over. Then someone says, ‘Tell us,’ and suddenly there they are, sitting in the same place. They have not grown old or faded. They were merely quiet.
‘Very well. I’ll start in London, on the first of September 1993.’ I paused. ‘But the memory isn’t just about the day I arrived. It’s about what I saw afterwards, one thing at a time, and found hard to believe.’
‘Such as?’ asked the newcomer.
‘They told you that you could stay. Then they arranged somewhere for you to live. You even received financial support so that, at the very least, you could get by.’
The woman in red watched me.
‘Today, telling you this, I know it may sound ordinary. A system of social support, with its own rules. But it didn’t seem ordinary to someone arriving from another world. I had read about such things: social rights, the welfare state, refuge and support for people forced to leave their countries. Reading about something and finding it happening in your own life are different.’
I was used to seeing the state mainly in the face of an official. In interrogation. In prison. In questions and orders. Suddenly the thing I had always called ‘the state’ showed me another face and said: here is a place where you can stay. Until you can stand on your own feet, there is at least enough to live on.
‘I could hardly believe it.’
‘Because you hadn’t expected it?’ Lena asked.
‘Exactly. I’d mostly met the idea in books: society accepting some responsibility for someone in difficulty. But reading it is one thing; suddenly being the person receiving that support is another.’
I laughed. ‘It wasn’t as if someone waited at the airport with flowers and said, “Mr Kamali, welcome. Here’s your house and here’s your money!”’
Everyone laughed.
‘There was a process and paperwork, of course. What mattered to me was the experience itself: someone who had just arrived and had almost nothing was not abandoned altogether.’
‘How did it feel?’ asked the woman in red.
I thought. ‘Surprise. Relief. Perhaps a little disbelief too. When your relationship with power has been shaped by fear for years, it takes time to grasp that it can take another form.’
Lena opened her mouth. I raised a hand. ‘No! Analysis at the end. Memories first.’
She laughed. ‘Very well.’
The Police, Books, a Pub and a Stool in Hyde Park
A little farther on, two police officers stood by the street. My eyes went to them without my asking.
‘Take the police, for example,’ I said.
‘What about them?’ asked the newcomer.
‘One of the first things I noticed in London was that the officers I saw did not resemble the familiar image of armed police imprinted in my head.’
To someone who grew up here, perhaps that would mean little. An officer stands in the street; people walk past; the officer goes about the job. It was not that simple for me.
Each time I passed, my body reacted before my mind could say a word. A tremor in my stomach. A moment of caution. Did they look at me? Why? Will they ask something? Should I stop? Keep walking?
Several steps later reason would finally catch up: ‘Naser, this is London. Nobody is after you.’ But the anxiety had already done its work.
‘You knew you were safe, but your body didn’t believe it?’ said the woman in red.
‘Exactly. That feeling had not formed in a day, so it could not leave in a day. It had come for me under two different regimes. Uniforms changed. Names changed. Slogans changed. But in my mind and body, the approach of an agent of power had acquired a meaning that a border crossing could not erase.’
Here, people passed the police. Nobody suddenly changed direction, fell silent or panicked. At first, I sometimes did. You can leave your country, but you cannot check your body’s memory in as baggage at the airport.
I paused. ‘Something else struck me: books.’
‘Why books?’ asked the newcomer.
‘You sat on a bus and someone was reading. You took a train and several passengers had books. A novel, a newspaper, a thick volume whose subject I couldn’t guess. They opened them, read, turned the pages. At their stops they slipped in a bookmark, closed the book and got off. That was all. Nothing happened.’
That ‘nothing happened’ mattered to me. Nobody asked: What are you reading? Who wrote it? Why have you got it? Who gave it to you?
To someone who had paid a price for reading and owning books, for holding an opinion, who had known prison and torture, the ordinary scene was no longer ordinary. Sometimes I looked at the covers, not to discover what the passengers were reading, but to reassure myself that it was really possible to show the cover openly.
‘Sometimes you find freedom not in parliament but in a train passenger’s hands,’ I said.
Lena raised her head but did not interrupt.
‘A young person sits opposite you with a book. It might not even be political; that doesn’t matter. Reading is ordinary to them, not something for which they must first look over their shoulder. Perhaps one of the strangest forms of freedom is an event that no longer happens.’
‘I like that,’ said the woman in red softly.
‘Keep it. We may need it later.’
I smiled. ‘But London wasn’t all police and books. There were funny things too.’
‘Thank goodness!’ she said.
‘A friend and I once went into a pub.’
The donkey lifted his head.
‘You weren’t there. Don’t get excited.’
Everyone laughed.
It was the sort of pub whose regulars clearly came from a particular circle. Nobody needed to say so; you could tell from their clothes, manner, conversation and the feel of the place that we were probably not regulars. We could tell as much ourselves. We were uneasy at first. When you are new to a society, you do not yet know its unwritten rules. Where do you sit? How do you order? What is ordinary? What might give away how recently you arrived?
‘They probably knew the instant you walked in,’ said the woman in red.
‘Exactly. We fancied ourselves undercover agents, though they could probably spot newcomers a hundred yards away.’
We went to the bar. The barman glanced at us and, I think, understood quickly that we did not know the place. What stayed with me after all these years was not that he noticed. It was what he did with that knowledge.
He was friendly, completely natural. No condescending smile, impatience or signal that we did not belong. He served us, and when we did not know something, he helped without making us feel like strange creatures who had wandered into the pub.
It probably meant nothing to him: two customers had arrived and he did his job. To me it mattered. Newcomers inspect small gestures through a magnifying glass. A frown can seem enormous; so can a smile. That barman gave me no lecture on equality and did not say, ‘Welcome to British society.’ He simply treated me like a customer. That was all. Sometimes a society is built from such ‘that was all’ moments: a counter, a greeting, someone hearing your accent without pulling a face as though you had committed a crime against the language.
The newcomer laughed. ‘A crime against the language?’
‘I committed plenty in those years. Luckily no case has reached court yet.’
The donkey brayed.
‘Don’t laugh. Your English is still worse than mine.’
The bus laughed. Then I said, ‘But another London place was sweeter and stranger to me than all the rest.’
‘Where?’ asked Lena.
‘Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.’
The first time I went, I went mainly to watch. People had gathered round several speakers. One stood on a stool and talked. A little farther away someone was saying almost the opposite. One discussed religion, another politics. People asked questions, objected, laughed. Someone called out in the middle of a speech and the crowd laughed; another applauded; another walked on without caring.
But I watched more than the speakers. I kept scanning the surroundings.
‘What for?’ asked the woman in red.
‘The police.’
The bus went quiet.
‘When somebody stood among a crowd and spoke loudly about government, politics or religion, I was used to guessing the next part of the story. Sooner or later someone would arrive, tell them to stop, ask their name, pull them down. But nobody came. The speaker went on. Someone in the crowd objected; the speaker replied. Someone mocked him, somebody else cheered him, and the world did not end.’
At first I thought, ‘Aren’t these people afraid?’ Gradually another question took its place: ‘Why do I expect them to be afraid?’ Perhaps that question mattered more to me than the speech itself.
What looked to me like extraordinary courage was an ordinary Sunday to many of those present. I stood and listened for a while. One speaker was so certain that, given another five minutes, he seemed ready to solve all humanity’s problems.
‘Where we came from,’ I told my friend, ‘this man would be either a minister or a prisoner.’
My friend laughed. ‘For now he’s just talking.’
‘For free?’
‘For free.’
‘More dangerous still!’
We both laughed. After all these years I cannot remember what the man was talking about. Perhaps that is the interesting part. I forgot his words, but I remembered his right to say them.
That day I saw freedom of expression not in a legal clause but in a scene. One person spoke; another disagreed; neither disappeared. Afterwards they probably both put their coats on and got on with their lives.
‘Did you climb onto the stool yourself?’ asked the woman in red.
‘Madam, I was just learning English. After three minutes up there, people might have thought I was part of the park’s comedy programme.’
Everyone laughed.
‘Besides, I first had to learn that freedom of speech means you are allowed to speak, not obliged to pronounce on everything.’
‘We should keep that one too,’ Lena said.
‘You want to keep everything I say today!’
When the Mind Migrates Later Than the Body
A few minutes later I said, ‘Now, Ms Lena, you have permission to do your psychology.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Only if you don’t turn the rest of the journey into a seminar.’
She laughed. ‘I hear a common thread in all those memories.’
‘What is it?’
‘Expectation.’
I waited.
‘Passing the police, you expected danger. Seeing someone read openly, part of your mind still associated a book with trouble. Entering the pub, you did not know whether the new society would welcome or reject you. At Hyde Park, you expected authority to intervene. Even when you were offered a place to live and financial help, you were surprised, because your earlier experience of government and the individual had been so different.’
‘So there was something wrong with me?’
‘No. That isn’t a helpful way to describe it. Your mind was making predictions based on earlier experience.’
‘But its predictions weren’t always right in the new place,’ said the woman in red.
‘Exactly. That is where new experiences matter, not through a speech or in a day, but through repetition. Once you pass the police and nothing happens. Then again. And again. You see people read openly, hear political discussion and watch the speakers walk away without being taken from the street. Slowly your mind learns that the surroundings have changed.’
‘So my body arrived in Britain on the first of September 1993, but my mind came on a later flight?’
‘Delayed, by the sound of it,’ said the woman in red.
I laughed. ‘Some of its luggage still hasn’t arrived!’
Even Lena laughed. Then she said, ‘Social psychology has another part to this. You weren’t only learning that you were safe. You were finding your place in a new society. A refugee doesn’t live only with the question “Am I safe?” Others follow. Who am I here? How do others see me? As a refugee, an Iranian, a foreigner, a man with an accent? Will I be accepted? Must I leave something from my past behind in order to belong? Can I be part of this society and remain the person who carries another history?’
‘What’s the answer?’ asked the newcomer.
‘I don’t think there is one answer for everybody.’
‘At last Lena has admitted she doesn’t have a ready answer. Record this historic moment,’ I said.
The donkey brayed.
‘Recorded.’
Then I grew serious. ‘Perhaps that is part of seeking refuge. You don’t want to leave all your past at the border, but you cannot carry its full weight on your shoulders every day either.’
‘What do you do?’ asked the woman in red.
‘Perhaps, little by little, you learn what to put down and what to keep.’
I looked at the road. London was no longer the city of 1993 to me, and I was no longer that man of 1993. Yet sometimes all it took was a police officer, someone opening a book on a train, an old pub or the mention of Hyde Park, and for a few seconds the younger man appeared beside me again. Not because I was still him, but because he had become part of me.
‘If you could stand beside that newly arrived Naser in Hyde Park today, what would you tell him?’ asked the woman in red.
I thought. I could say, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But that would not be true. Fear was part of the journey. I could say, ‘Everything will be all right.’ That would not be true either. Life puts some things right and breaks others.
‘Perhaps I’d say nothing at first,’ I replied.
‘Why?’
‘I’d stand beside him. Tell him not to hurry. You don’t have to understand this country today. You don’t have to settle your past today. Just look. Look at the officer you pass without anything happening. At the passenger who doesn’t hide the book. At the barman who notices you’re new and guides you kindly rather than humiliating you. At a society that gives you somewhere to stay and a little support to live on while you find your feet — something you had mostly read about in books. And look at that man on his Hyde Park stool, speaking so passionately that he thinks he’ll save the world by sunset.’
Everyone laughed.
‘Look, Naser. For now, just look. You’ve arrived in a place where many ordinary things are extraordinary to you. One day perhaps the reverse will be true. These small freedoms may become so familiar that you stop noticing them. I hope you never entirely forget that once the sight of someone with a book on a train meant freedom to you.’
I stopped. Rain tapped against the glass. The wiper swept out and back.
‘Perhaps I’d say one last sentence to that Naser.’
‘Which?’ asked the woman in red.
‘You’ve arrived, but your journey isn’t over.’
Nobody spoke. It was not a heavy silence. It was the kind you did not want to spoil straight away. Even Lena kept quiet. Even the donkey.
Three seconds. Four. Five.
The donkey brayed.
I shook my head. ‘I knew it. This creature cannot abide a philosophical silence.’
The bus laughed.
I looked in the mirror. ‘Very well. That was my memory. Who’s next?’
Suddenly everyone found something to look at: a window, the ceiling, the bus floor — anywhere but my face.
‘What a crowd! You were all experts at analysing me. Now it’s your turn, nobody’s a refugee?’
The donkey brayed again.
I turned to him. ‘Not you. Your migration case is complicated enough to need four separate parts.’
Laughter filled the bus. And that was how the game of memories truly began.
To be continued.
Naser Kamali, in his modest, welcoming room.
Translator’s notes
- Speakers’ Corner: The long-established open-air speaking area in Hyde Park, London. The narrator describes his own first encounter with it in 1993.
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