Anatoly Kucherena - Time of the Octopus

The Lawyer shook his head.

“No, to put it simply. Under Belgian law, the paperwork requires the presence of the person the passport is issued to, but then it is impossible to enter Belgium without documents.”

“Catch 22?”

“Exactly. Though after nine years of life at the airport, having already become not just a local celebrity, but a fixture of the transit area of Charles de Gaulle, Mekhran suddenly received from the Belgian Foreign Ministry an offer by which the country was ready to accept him without any documents. And you know, he…”

“Refused!” Kold smiled with his short, fleeting smile. “I studied psychology. It’s so simple: popularity and public attention are like a drug. Once tasted, ninety percent of people can’t refuse and try to recapture it again and again.”

“True, true,” the Lawyer nodded again. “So Mekhran left the transit area and went over to the airport hotel only after he fell seriously ill. The most ridiculous thing is that he moved neither to Belgium, nor Great Britain, but lives in Paris now and feels good.

“Emigrants are always like that: where it is good, there is home,” Kold murmured.

“By the way, Steven Spielberg did a quite famous movie based on Mekhran’s story “‘The Terminal’ starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Didn’t you see it?”

Kold tugged his shoulder, then nodded.

“Now I remember. Yes, I saw it.”

The Lawyer was irritated. He’d just spent several minutes telling this man something he already knew. But, maybe Kold is just too affected and couldn’t concentrate?

Mekhran Nasseri was neither the first, nor the only prisoner of transit areas in airports. In this same Sheremetyevo transit area, Zara Kamalfar also spent ten months – after fleeing Iran too, by strange coincidence,.

The husband of this unfortunate woman who belonged to a Muslim sect of dervishes was executed in 2006, and she fled with her two children through Moscow to Germany, hoping to receive shelter there and get political asylum in Canada.

The German officials, however, remained deaf to the tragedy of this family and sent Zara Kamalfar and her children back to Russia. After being forced to stay in the transit area, the refugees had almost no means of support. In a video appeal to the world, Zara said: “Life here is hard, very hard… We fill a bucket of water in the toilet in the middle of the night away from the eyes of the authority to take a bath. I have no place to wash my clothes, all doors are closed to us… A policewoman pushed me, I hit the wall and blood began to flow from my mouth. I don’t cry because I have to be strong. Children shouldn’t see my tears. I laugh to give them hope, so they can fight, so they withstand.”

After a while the children began fall ill from lack of sunlight, scant nutrition and a shortage of vitamins. The daughter developed a skin disease and the son had scurvy. All the same this story ended well since after ten months the Canadian authorities allowed the Kamalfar family to fly to Vancouver and gave Zara and her family residence permits.

But if Iranians were political refugees, then Englishman Gary Peter Austin simply missed his flight at a Philippines airport since his e-ticket had been inexplicably cancelled. The situation was complicated by the fact that he had run out of money and so was stuck ten thousand kilometers from Foggy Albion.

He spent New Year in the airport of Manila, and altogether spent twenty three days there, after turning into a local tourist attraction. In the end the unfortunate Austin’s ordeal ended when either a passenger flying to the Netherlands took pity on him and brought him a ticket – or he was helped by the British Embassy.

And the story of German Heinz Müller seems almost a good joke. Müller arrived in Rio de Janeiro to meet the woman of his dreams. They had become acquainted on the internet and agreed to meet, but to the great disappointment of this German Romeo, his Brazilian Juliet didn’t want him.

As a result, Heinz ended up in the middle of a foreign country without any money for his return ticket. He lived at Virakopus-Campinas airport near Sao Paulo for several days until he was taken to a local clinic for psychiatric assessment.

There are also some volunteers among the captives of transit areas. Japanese man Hiroshi Nohara stayed for 117 days at Mexico City airport without any apparent reason. His tickets and documents were in good order, and Japanese diplomats were constantly keeping an eye on him, ready to provide him with a new passport at once if necessary.

The story among journalists was that this little Japanese man was simply craving celebrity. And there was no doubt Nohara was happy to be interviewed, pose for tourists, crying out: ‘Terminal-2!’, with clear allusions to the Spielberg movie. And yet he always refused to explain what he was doing in the transit area.

The final twist in this stationary Odyssey was even more mysterious. One fine day in December 2008 a young Japanese woman called Oyuki literally took Nohara by the hand, forced him to buy a ticket and they departed together for Japan. And nobody heard any more about them.

And if for some transit areas were a shelter, then the famous Chinese dissident Fan Chzhen Hu used them for political struggle. For 92 days, Fan Chzhen Hu lived at Tokyo’s Narita airport in protest against the Chinese authorities’ refusal to let him come home after treatment in a Japanese clinic.

In the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and other countries with oppressive regimes, dispatching undesirable elements abroad and depriving them of their nationality was by no means rare, but only Fan Chzhen Hu ventured to fight for the right to return. Most surprisingly, he managed to draw international attention to the issue and China relented, their prodigal son back. The dissident was put under house arrest immediately in Shanghai, but this hardly frightened Fan Chzhen Hu who had already spent three years in Chinese prisons for illegal entrepreneurship.

All these various facts flashed through the Lawyer’s mind as he collected his thoughts. A tough conversation, with a lot of things depending on it, was ahead of him.

“Mr. Kold, this time I come to you without any gifts, but with news.” The Lawyer undid his brief case and took a transparent file out. “There is good news, and not so good news. Which should I begin with?”

Not a single muscle on Kold’s face moved. He simply nodded. For some reason, the Lawyer focused on his big ears. From the depths of his memory of a physiognomics course, he dragged up this theory: “Big ears are a sign of independent judgment and determination. They are also a sign of developed intelligence linked to extraordinary acts.”

“Let’s start with the good news,” Kold said at last.

“This is a letter from your mother,” the Lawyer said, taking an envelope from the brief case. “It was sent through authorized representatives. Here.”

Kold quickly skimmed the letter, then, apparently, started to read it from the beginning, much more attentively. At last, he put the letter aside.

“The Russian side,” Lawyer continued, “That is, the Minister of Justice of the Russian Federation received an official letter from the Attorney-General of the USA Mr. Eric Older. This document can be considered as the reaction of the American side to your petition for provisional asylum. Mister Older writes that,” the Lawyer glanced at the text of the letter, “You are accused of stealing state-owned property according to section 641 of Article 18 of the Code of the USA; the unauthorized information transfer of national defense interests according to section 793 sub-clause ‘d’ of the same article of the Code; and also of the voluntary search and transfer of classified information to a person who doesn’t have the corresponding permission, as in section 798, point ‘a’. Further, Mr. Attorney-General is convinced, by the way, that your lack of opportunity to leave Russia is reasonably proven by the fact that you, Mr. Kold, cannot leave the territory of Sheremetyevo airport. But at any time the American side is ready to issue to you with a passport with valid for a limited period on condition that you come back to the USA – by a direct non-transit route, it says in the letter.”