The Full Catastrophe (25 page)

The two men wanted to know what I thought. I told them I thought the migrants were coming because their homelands were poor or violent, that they didn’t necessarily want to stay in Greece. “It’s easy to come here,” said the man behind the desk. “The harder thing for you to do is to stay behind and fight to improve your own country.” I considered at that point whether I should ask him if his statement also applied to the Greeks—my parents among them—who had emigrated when the country was still poor—and the many Greeks who were again leaving at the time due to rising joblessness. I didn’t say anything, though. Before I left, I asked them their names, and they refused to give them to me. “You’re not going to write this,” the one with the
kombolói
said. “No, write it, write it,” said his superior behind the desk. “It’s the truth.”

The Evros River had become the preferred crossing point into the European Union because it was considered safer than the other common method—the perilous journey across the Mediterranean. Still, the Evros was deeper and its currents stronger than many aspirant border crossers assumed, and it became the final resting place for an untold number of people. During the time of my visit, bodies in varying states of decomposition were commonly found washed up on its thicketed banks. Many of the dead were taken to a burial site on the outskirts of Sidero, a tranquil village, home to a Muslim minority, in the mountains west of the river valley. Most Muslims were ejected from Greece in the population exchange with Turkey in the early 1920s, though those living in Thrace were exempted and remained. Greek authorities assumed most of the migrants who died in the Evros were Muslims,
and therefore arranged for the Muslim clerics in Sidero to perform the burials.

From Soufli, I traveled up to Sidero one afternoon in a taxi, which dropped me off next to a lime green mosque topped with a short, metallic minaret. Thrace is the only part of Greece where mosques can exist without the vehement protest of the broader population. Greeks justify this allowance with the common albeit questionable assertion that the area’s Muslims are descendants of the ancient Greek Thracians—the fairness of their hair and skin is sometimes pointed to as evidence—and therefore deserve the indulgence of being able to observe their religion. For their part, Muslims in Sidero and elsewhere in the region often self-identify as ethnically Turkish, a circumstance that tends to upset their fellow Greek countrymen.

The town was on a high plateau, and a roof of fast-moving cumulus clouds seemed almost within reach. I didn’t see any people at first. A few hens crossed the road. Gray winter forests and brush-covered fields dotted with grazing sheep surrounded the village, a cluster of single-story homes. There were no sounds but for the wind. Greece’s crises for a moment felt like distant abstractions. From the mosque emerged a man wearing a white skullcap with a golden wreath stitched to its crown. He had chestnut eyes and a gray beard trimmed to outline his jawbone. He spoke an accented Greek when introducing himself as Hasan Saramet, a village
hodja,
the Turkish honorific often used to describe an imam. Saramet’s mother tongue was Turkish. With him was a younger man with a slight mustache and a white skullcap who introduced himself as the prayer caller, Abdulrahim Kuru.

The men said they would take me to the cemetery where the migrants were buried. We hopped inside Kuru’s small car and drove a few minutes to the edge of town. On the way, Kuru told me stories about meeting border crossers while driving. Once, he was with his children when he found someone unconscious on the
side of the road. “I got out and pushed him a little,” Kuru said. “He opened his eyes. It was raining. I gave him a sandwich I had prepared for my kids. I didn’t know if it would do him harm, because he hadn’t eaten. I picked him up and asked him, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘From Pakistan,’ he said. ‘Where are we, Turkey or Greece?’ ” Giving away a sandwich or some clothes was often about as much help as they could provide, the men said. Offering a ride was far more risky. If the police pulled you over with an undocumented migrant, you could easily be accused of being a smuggler.

We pulled up to the burial site, a fenced-in hilltop of brown dirt imprinted with bulldozer tracks. The two men pushed back a heavy iron gate. Rows of dirt mounds marked the graves. The
hodja
estimated that four hundred people were buried there. Once, they buried twenty-five people at the same time. “They think they are going to find a good life,” he said. “But they die.”

“They should know what it’s like here so they don’t come,” Kuru added. “We see them as downtrodden people. They go to paradise.”

The
hodja
smiled—exposing a silver cap on a lower tooth. His expression looked somewhat bitter, as if perhaps he had some doubts about this. He then walked over to one of the fresher mounds of dirt. “Here, a sixteen-year-old girl from Afghanistan is buried,” he said. “Oh, how her parents cried.” Kuru told me the story. Her parents—a Christian mother and a Muslim father—had gone to Athens first, and then, once established, called for their two daughters, who were waiting in Iran, to follow. One of the girls was never found again. The other, the sixteen-year-old, was discovered drowned and decayed. The parents came to the border to attend her burial. “We told the mother not to look,” Kuru said.

On the way back into town, the men told me more stories of migrants they’d come across while driving through the hills. Kuru said that one time he saw three men walking in the mountains in
the middle of winter. Though he was afraid to give them a ride, he couldn’t refuse that time. “One of them was in very bad shape,” Kuru said, near death. “So I took the risk and drove them to the police station.”

The
hodja
added: “They wander up to the towns and ask, ‘Where’s Athens?’ ”

Nearly all the migrants I met planned to go to Athens. “Athens good?” one African man asked me through the fence of the border police station in Soufli. “Athens not so good,” I said. He looked at me like he refused to believe that. “Athens good,” he said. Compounding the misery of joblessness and penury that many encountered once arriving in Athens, the fascist Golden Dawn was, to use the words of one of its leaders, launching “a pogrom” against foreigners. Still, despite the extremely challenging conditions, for some, even a meager Athens subsistence was often preferable to circumstances back home. Bangladeshis, for instance, could often be seen pushing shopping carts filled with scrap metal. One Bangladeshi man I met, hauling a large water boiler in his shopping cart, told me he received seventeen cents per kilo for his cargo. This work still amounted to a much better daily wage than he could earn in Bangladesh. Others found better jobs unloading boxes of fruits and vegetables for farmers at outdoor markets, or doing yard work in the suburbs. Migrants rented cheap apartments in the overbuilt center of the city—in areas middle-class families had long ago abandoned for the fresher air of the suburbs—where a 300-euro rent split among several became a manageable sum.

One day in Athens during the summer of 2013, I came across some Bangladeshis who had pinpointed an excellent, albeit illegal, business model. I was walking through the neighborhood of Exarcheia, an unruly, graffiti-tagged area populated by young and
aging leftists, anarchists, junkies, and hipsters. Exarcheia is their bastion, and not just in a figurative sense. The neighborhood rests upon a long and at times steep incline leading to the green peak of Strefi Hill, one of Athens’s higher summits. Police are not fond of venturing into Exarcheia’s narrow streets, but rather tend to remain in the heavily guarded police station as if combatants occupying a hostile land. And it is. Police officers’ fascistic visage often inspires some of the Molotov cocktail–equipped youths of the area to launch incendiaries in their direction. On this day, I was walking by the neighborhood’s epicenter, Plateia Exarcheion, a small square inhabited by junkies and a semipermanent contingent of revolutionary street punks, enclosed by a ring of more-polished cafés where college students come to meet their friends. A group of Bangladeshi men sprinted past me with expressions reflecting a mixture of panic and amusement. Pursuing them was a far less agile cop wielding a baton and weighed down by body armor and a white helmet that seemed too big for his head. The Bangladeshis ran through the square before scattering into the neighborhood’s grid of alleys. Before the police officer reached the square, he stopped, turned around, and walked back the other way. He spotted a large shopping bag filled with cigarette cartons hidden between two parked cars. The officer grabbed it and jumped onto the back of a motorcycle being driven by a colleague, and the pair sped off. Within two minutes, the Bangladeshis reappeared on the same corner. This was where they conducted a brisk business selling black-market cigarettes. Such occasional police chases were a hazard of business to which they had become accustomed.

Mohammed, the twenty-seven-year-old ringleader of a cigarette-selling band of four or five Bangladeshis, immediately noticed the loss of the large shopping bag. “Why did they have to take it?” he said, smarting from the financial loss. The bag contained 280 packs of cigarettes, equaling a loss of about the same number of euros, he calculated. Mohammed was a lanky
man with eyes that darted back and forth under the bill of his Citroën automobile cap, a behavior that seemed an adaptation to his business, which required that he always be looking for customers and cops. He wore a shirt that said
JAPAN AUTO PARTS
and
TEAM YOSHIMORI
, and featured the red sun of the Japanese flag. He would have looked as if he were about to hop inside a race car had he not held a bag full of tobacco product in a pink shopping bag that said
ZIC ZAC
, the name of a women’s clothing brand. The youngest of the group, a twenty-year-old named Shaheen, who had on a pink-striped shirt and a small red backpack, and had a businesslike demeanor, went to check on the rest of the inventory, which was hidden across the street beneath a row of sewer grates. Shaheen looked both ways before bending down to remove a grate. He extracted a few cartons of their most popular seller, RGD, also known as “black,” manufactured in China, according to the packaging. A little lady with curly red hair then walked up to Shaheen and asked for two packages. He forked them over and she handed him a two-euro coin. “As-salaam alaikum!” announced another customer, a gray-haired man with the upper half of his shirt unbuttoned in the heat. He ordered a couple of cartons of faux Lucky Strikes and patted Mohammed on the back before walking off. “Greek people need very strong cigarettes,” Mohammed said. He himself did not smoke, and therefore all judgments about the quality of his product were based on imagination and customer feedback. “Customer tell me it’s not good cigarettes,” he told me. “But because of the Greek economic situation, they cannot buy from kiosk.”

Herein lay the business strategy. When it comes to smoking, Greeks compete with Bulgarians for the European Union leadership position; over 40 percent of Greeks smoke. With expendable income disappearing, newly hiked taxes on legal cigarettes, and addiction making for static demand, the Bangladeshis were running a brisk business selling what people needed for far cheaper.
Mohammed’s black-market cigarettes went for a euro a pack—about one-fifth the cost of a store-bought pack—though finer varieties went up to €1.30. Exarcheia also provided the Bangladeshis an excellent business environment. The abundance of anarchists, or “students,” as Mohammed referred to them, provided his team of salesmen with a degree of protection from the cops. “Students are very crazy,” Mohammed told me. “They make firebomb. Is very easy to make. Most of the students have them.” Still, the police came by often enough. That spring, Mohammed had been arrested for selling cigarettes and sentenced to ten months in jail or a 3,000-euro fine. “Greek police better than Bangladeshi police,” Mohammed said. “Greek police only hit you a little. Bangladeshi police hit you more.” Mohammed appealed the verdict and a judge let him go. “Give me one more chance and I never sell cigarettes,” he told the judge. Mohammed repeatedly justified his line of work to me, as if he felt guilty about it. It was not as immoral as selling drugs, he said. “Cigarette bad, but not too bad.” He would have preferred a normal job, he added, but those didn’t exist. “No choice,” he said.

Mohammed told me he quit school in Bangladesh in the eleventh grade and got a job at a cardboard box factory in order to help support his family. This was necessary because his father, a retired policeman, had lost the family’s money on a bad investment involving tons of potatoes. “That year, potato not selling,” Mohammed explained. The 6,500 or so Bangladeshi taka Mohammed earned in a month at the factory—worth about 60 euros, at the time I met him—helped support his three siblings. But still it wasn’t enough, so he took off for Europe. “I think then, oh, Greece is Europe,” he said while leaning on a parked Peugeot. The journey to Greece took him two and a half years, with stops along the way to work and raise money. In Iran, he worked in a Tehran bakery. In eastern Turkey, he worked in a restaurant, cleaning and cutting up chickens for the equivalent of a few euros a day. When
he had saved enough at each stop, he would pay a smuggler to take him on the next leg of the journey to Europe. “My target was always Greece,” he said. Mohammed crossed the border in the spring of 2010. He was surprised by what he found. In Bangladesh, he’d seen the Bollywood film
Chalte Chalte
, in which two lovers visit Greece. “Goodness, the signs you make,” the leading man sings to his lover in the film as the pair prance around on the whitewashed island of Mykonos, and in front of Athens’s finest tourist attractions. “What secrets are you exposing? What are you telling me with your eyes?” In the film, Greece looked clean and shiny, Mohammed told me. “I see the film, I think, Greece is very beautiful. When I come, I saw is very dirty.”

For people like Mohammed, Greece’s dysfunctional asylum system had advantages. It was very unlikely he’d ever qualify for asylum, but pending the final decision on a request for it, he could legally remain in the country. Since the asylum process was often mired in bureaucracy for years, an applicant ended up with a kind of de facto residency permit. After Mohammed arrived in Greece, he applied for asylum—claiming he faced persecution in Bangladesh for his political views—and landed a job in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Mohammed worked there four days a week for fourteen hours a day and earned 600 euros a month. In 2011, though, business fell sharply, and his boss, “a very big
malaka
,” according to Mohammed, said he would reduce his salary to 500 euros and increase his workweek to five days. Mohammed quit instead. This, he realized later, was probably a mistake. He looked around for something else, but couldn’t find anything. “Look all over Athens. Greek people all empty”—out of money, he meant. “We are foreigner. Illegal. How do we find job? That time, I go a little bit mad. Madness and crazy.” A friend, he said, told him he should look into the black-market cigarette business. “I think it is much better than looking for a job,” Mohammed said. He told me he’d been selling cigarettes for about half a year, though I
suspected, given his leadership role, that it had been longer. Each member of his crew earned about twenty euros a day, more on good days, he said. They worked seven days a week all day, though Mohammed took breaks on Friday afternoons to pray at a Bangladeshi mosque near Omonoia Square, a traffic hub in the city center surrounded by dilapidated, seedy streets. Mohammed said he’d been able to wire 1,500 euros to his family in Bangladesh, and had saved considerably more. “I think about future,” he said. “Greek people like to enjoy themselves. They don’t think about future. They spend money. Have good time.” Before I left, I told Mohammed that I didn’t know much about his homeland, only that it was very poor, that many garment workers had died in factory fires. The mention of his country’s garment industry, however, made Mohammed smile with pride. He had once gone to a big Greek store called H&M, he said. “Very great many Bangladeshi clothes. I buy one T-shirt. Expensive, but good quality.”