Life Events, file no. 1409211219671

Besançon?
That’s just how it turned out.
By chance.
Go to Europe, figure it out, my ex-partner told me.
The father of my children, I mean.
I thought I would see him again one day, but no.
He gave me some money and then he left.
I figured it out as best I could.
Besançon.
It’s a nice city.
I was lucky.
But the language is hard.
I didn’t speak a word of French, I only knew how to say bonjour and maison.
I arrived with my two children on December 11, 2001, they were five and seven.
The driver dropped us on the side of the road.
You’re in France, he told us, and then he left.
It was kind of him to take us that far.
If I’m not mistaken, now that I know the area, it was near Lyon.
We weren’t dressed for December, it was cold.
I tried waving down cars to find out where I was.
In France, yes, but where?
Where?
We waited a long time in the winter wind and then a woman stopped.
Don’t worry, she told me, we’re somewhere.
She understood English.
I’m taking you to Besançon, you’ll have to apply for asylum.
Driving over the bridge, I asked her the name of the river.
It’s the Doo, she told me, and she pointed to a sign that said: DOUBS.
Why all those letters? You say Doo but you write all that?
She dropped us at the Secours Catholique.
They gave us coats there and called the PADA.
The reception platform for asylum seekers.
Back then it was in a barracks.
Why are you here, where are you from?
We’re from Armenia.
How did you come?
Through Georgia. And then through Turkey.
How?
In a truck, hidden behind boxes. There were buckets in case the children had to do their business.
How many people were in the truck with you?
Just us.
Who was the driver?
I don’t know his name.
So before we left my daughter had broken her arm, well, her arm was broken due to our problems, anyway, she had a cast, and all of a sudden in Istanbul it started bothering her, it was itching and she was crying, it had to come off, so I went to the red market in the Armenian neighborhood to get help because I didn’t speak Turkish and I found an Armenian who told me: I will help you.
He’s the one who found the truck driver, the smugglers, he took care of everything. I was not in a mental state to do it, but I did have money.
How much did you pay for the trip?
It’s gone from my memory but I had enough.
What were your reasons for leaving?
We have to go all the way back to the beginning.
Otherwise it makes no sense.
So.
So.
Where to begin?
I was apparently born on March 8, 1975 in Masis, Armenia.
I say apparently because I have no birth certificate.
I have nothing.
Nothing at all.
Only my word.
All I know is we always celebrated my birthday on March 8.
I remember because it’s International Women’s Day.
And I also know my parents were born in Azerbaijan, they’re Azeri.
Back then,
I mean in the days of the USSR,
there was no conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
there were even intermarriages.
I think they came to Armenia to have me.
There was a good gynecologist there back then who treated my mother and it worked, I was born.
After that, they stayed there.
Everyone liked us in the village.
Until the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict, in 1988.
Then it became like a war.
And then there was the Sumgait pogrom.
And after that, in Armenia, Azeris became like traitors.
They were persecuted.
Beaten.
Killed.
They called us Turks, in reference to the Armenian genocide.
They still do today.
Filthy Turks! Filthy Turks!
My parents decided to go back to Azerbaijan.
It was becoming too dangerous.
Our bags were packed.
I went to school to say goodbye to my friends.
I was thirteen.
And on the way home,
on the way,
on the,
a neighbor grabbed me by the hand,
she lived three houses up from ours,
and she threw me in her cellar.
You have to stay here, she told me, that’s all she said.
I had no idea what was happening, I just sat there crying all alone in the dark.
Only when night fell did she come back down to see me and that was when she told me,
I don’t remember exactly how,
but she told me:
Some people burned your house down, you don’t have a house anymore and you don’t have parents anymore either, they killed your parents.
That’s all she told me.
I stayed hidden in the cellar for three days.
At night, she would bring food down to me, without making a sound, she was nice, she was just afraid of getting caught.
So it occurred to her to leave me with Rima.
Rima was a woman who lived in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
She had no children, she was a schoolteacher.
She agreed to adopt me,
“adopt” me,
because there were no papers, nothing.
No written trace.
Just her word.
But I had no choice.
There was emptiness all around me.
I just wanted to join my parents in death,
I did whatever I was told.
The OFPRA asked me why I didn’t go back to Azerbaijan.
It’s true.
It hadn’t even occurred to me.
I had family there.
My mother’s parents?
Or my father’s?
I don’t know.
I never met them.
They were strangers to me.
And I was scared.
And I didn’t speak their language very well. I went to an Armenian school.
So I ended up with Rima.
With Rima I was homeschooled, because I couldn’t go out, I had no papers, it was war every day and I had Azeri blood in my veins.
Forget all that, Rima told me.
Erase that word from your head.
Azeri.
It’s over.
We’ll say you’re Armenian, we’ll say your parents went to Russia to work, we’ll say I’m watching you, you’ll go out as little as possible.
There was a big library in her apartment.
I just read all day long.
Read and learned.
I had nothing else to do.
Except sometimes when we went to see her cousin, he was my age.
But that wasn’t very often.
It was the books that held me up.
It was the books that saved me.
Rima was single, she was happy to have me around, we got along well.
She didn’t replace the emptiness but we got along well.
She explained to me that not everyone in the country wanted to kill me.
Not all of them.
Because every night I thought:
Will it happen again?
Like in the village?
Like that day?
I went home, there was nothing left.
No house.
No one.
Nothing.
I have no photos.
I have nothing.
Nothing left of my parents.
Sometimes I try to dream to see if I remember their faces.
I don’t.
I see different faces every time.
I’m your mother, I’m your father, they say in my ear, but how do I know?
I’ve lost the key to knowing where I come from.
It burned with everything else.
But you have to keep going.
Where was I?
Rima.
She had a heart attack and she died all at once. I was eighteen.
I couldn’t stay at her place, it was a government apartment.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, all over again.
So I went to see her cousin.
Let’s live together, he told me, after all we love each other.
He was Armenian. I told him the truth.
We can’t get married, I have no papers, I have no parents in Russia, there’s no one to ask for my hand, no one, I told him.
I had to tell him.
Anyway, I had nothing to lose.
Nothing.
I had already lost everything.
At first he just stood there, stunned.
He couldn’t believe I was Azeri, I spoke better Armenian than he did, I’d studied the literature and everything.
And then there was the issue of his parents.
Because he was in love, yes, but then there was his parents. They were dentists.
They wanted absolutely no part in any of this, they were scared.
They bought us an apartment, they were very kind, but they didn’t want to see much of us.
I understand.
I was scared too.
I went out as little as possible.
I was always afraid that someone would recognize me.
Someone from my village.
Armenia isn’t very big.
I learned chemistry, for five years, between my four walls. They had a cousin who desperately wanted a degree in chemistry but she wasn’t a very good student, she was always partying. I learned chemistry for her. I took the exams for her.
And I passed.
I have a degree in chemistry but it’s not in my name.
It’s like my children. Their births were never registered.
Since I had no papers, I couldn’t go to the hospital.
I gave birth at home, in secret.
You can’t live your whole life in secret.
You can’t live your whole life saying your purse just got stolen.
We tried to buy papers.
Back then in Armenia you could.
My former in-laws spent a lot of money, but in the end nothing came of it.
The problem came with the national census.
All of a sudden we had to register.
And this time it was national, the purse story wouldn’t do. My ex gave his passport.
Your papers, ma’am?
Ma’am, your papers, please.
Your papers.
Do you understand?
Your papers.
She’s registered in Masis, my ex told them.
That’s the name of the village where I was apparently born.
I say apparently because there’s no trace of me there. Nowhere.
Last year I hired a lawyer to find a birth certificate in my name.
But there’s nothing in Masis in your name, she told me.
She searched all over Armenia,
she left no stone unturned,
there is no trace of you anywhere, she told me.
There is no trace of me anywhere.
And yet here I am, right?
And yet I exist physically.
Sometimes I wonder.
Sometimes I pinch myself to be sure I’m really here.
Ouch!
And so.
So, where was I?
She’s registered in Masis, my ex told the cops.
He didn’t mean to, it just came out, in the panic.
Very well, we’ll be back in two weeks.
They looked into it and discovered that in 1988 an Azeri family was killed in Masis but that the third person went missing and so that was me.
They came back just like they said and they started beating us.
Telling my ex he was a traitor.
Telling me:
Get lost, filthy Muslim, you don’t have the right to live here.
And then they came back again.
Once.
Twice.
They destroyed everything in my ex’s shop.
Mirrors in a thousand pieces.
They threw my daughter against the wall.
So. It wasn’t easy.
We had to leave.
We had to leave as fast as we could.
But the problem was, I couldn’t walk.
I was dizzy all the time.
Because they had hit me so much on the head.
My former in-laws found someone who would take me in, in a village far from the capital.
I was on a ton of medications.
By December I was doing a little better.
Now figure it out, my ex told me.
You’re a big girl. You have to get out of here.
I’ve had it. I’ve lost everything because of you, everything.
His cars, his shop, his apartment, everything.
He was an only child, spoiled by his parents, and now all of a sudden he had to go hide out in the country like a criminal.
He was mad, I understand that.
It doesn’t matter, it’s over.
After my parents, nothing matters.
He said goodbye to us at the border and I made it to Besançon.
I thought I would see him again one day, but no.
He turned his back.
I applied for asylum at the OFPRA.
I was rejected.
For lack of proof.
They wanted proof that I was actually Azeri and that the name I gave was my real name, but I had nothing.
No papers.
Only my word.
The day your parents died, why didn’t you go back for your ID?
But the house had burned down.
Why didn’t you go to the town hall?
At thirteen, it didn’t occur to me.
Today, if there was a problem, the first thing I’d take would be my papers. But at thirteen the only thing I wanted was to die.
How could I prove that I had been beaten nearly to death?
Pardon me, officer, could you please sign this statement for me?
I didn’t have a medical report either.
No doctor would have signed a report for an Azeri.
They treated me at night, in secret, in exchange for a lot of money.
I filed an appeal with the CNDA.
Well, the social workers did it for me.
I was in the hospital for depression, I’d stopped eating, I weighed eighty-four pounds.
But again.
We need proof.
We need proof.
The process took five years in all.
From my initial application for asylum to the appeal.
Five years of waiting.
For a yes or a no.
And at the end, we were rejected.
Since I was still in the hospital, the social workers petitioned the district to grant me a special residence permit for sick foreigners.
And in May 2005,
finally some good news:
I got my first residence permit, good for one year.
But I was still in the hospital.
Novillars Hospital.
My children were at a crisis shelter.
They can’t stay there forever, they’ll have to be placed with a foster family, the social worker told me, you’re not able to take care of them.
And that, that was what I needed to hear.
I decided to pull through.
For them.
I chose to get better.
I asked the doctor to let me have custody of them, every day,
every day,
every day.
And finally they gave me a trial period of one week, to see how it went.
It went well.
I was getting my strength back.
Little by little.
I started eating again.
Little by little.
And I managed to get out of the hospital.
I found an apartment downtown.
But I was scared of everything.
If someone raised their voice near me, I would burst into tears.
One morning I decided the only way to get better was by working.
Like when I lived with Rima.
Working, learning.
Books, books.
But I had no degree here. Not even a high school diploma.
There are jobs in home care, the job coach told me, or in retail.
I said, I don’t care, I just want to work.
The unemployment office offered me a position as a special needs assistant for handicapped children. For five years I worked in primary schools.
It got me back on my feet.
In 2011, I got a permanent position as an in-home caregiver.
I take care of an autistic child, he was too violent for the facilities.
I have scars all over, but I managed to form a bond with him.
I’ve taught him to read and count and write.
I work with autism specialists in Switzerland.
Soon I will take my exams.
If I pass all the modules, I’ll finally have a degree in my name.
Little by little, I’m coming back to life.
My children just got French citizenship.
And I have a ten-year residence permit.
I changed my status from sick foreigner to care worker.
It’s valid through 2020.
I have another three years ahead of me.
On the permit it says:
Country: unspecified.
Nationality: unspecified.
In stores I never pay by check, because you have to show an ID and when people see nationality unspecified, they look at me funny.
Unspecified, what’s that?
It’s me.
The lawyer can’t find me anywhere.
She searched all over Armenia, there’s no trace of me. Nowhere.
So was I really born there?
I wonder.
Were my parents my real parents?
I wonder.
They had trouble having a child.
Maybe they adopted me and never told me?
In Armenia, you wait until your child is grown to tell that kind of truth.
So maybe I am an Armenian after all?
But in that case, then who are my real parents?
There are always whys in my head.
Maybe I don’t exist.
I wonder.
There’s no proof of me.
Nowhere.

Excerpted from Papers by Violaine Schwartz, translated from the French by Christine Gutman.