The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (8 page)

Turning around, he realized that he was now alone and that his Sudanese friends had all rushed behind the wooden crates, as if they were
more sensitive to the light than him, vanishing totally and leaving him very conspicuous.

“Get out of the vehicle slowly!” shouted an authoritarian voice in much better English than his or the Africans’. “And put your hands on your head!”

The Indian, who had done nothing wrong, obeyed without a word and jumped out of the trailer. There, he found himself face-to-face with a man wearing a large white turban, just like his. For a moment, he thought they must have put a mirror in front of him, but he didn’t have to be a genius at Spot the Difference to see that it was nothing of the kind. The man was clean-shaven, in contrast to Ajatashatru, who had a large, stringy mustache and a three-day beard. He was also wearing a thick black bulletproof vest with UKBA written on it in big white letters. The fakir did not know what UKBA meant, but the pistol hanging from the man’s belt gave him a pretty good clue. So he decided this would be a good time to reel off the excuse he had prepared the night before. He delved into his pocket, took out the Ikea pencil and paper ruler to illustrate his words, and gave his excuse in Punjabi.

“I know, I know,” replied the policeman in the same language, clearly used to finding illegal
aliens in Ikea wardrobes holding paper rulers and pencils.

Then the policeman pushed him to the side, frisked him all over through his clothes, firmly and meticulously, and handcuffed him. At the same time, four of his uniformed colleagues appeared suddenly out of the darkness and clambered into the trailer, military-style.

They soon came out again, accompanied by the six Africans, whose hands were cuffed by those Serflex straps that gardeners use to attach trees to stakes so that they grow straight.

“What are you doing with Africans?” the stunned policeman asked in Punjabi.

The fakir did not know how to reply. With fear in his gut, he just watched as his companions got inside a van marked UKBA—United Kingdom Border Agency—before he himself was violently shoved inside. When the truck slowed down and then stopped, he got to experience what his friend called the syndrome of the pounding heart. The “good countries” had welcomed him in their own special way. Assefa was right: you never knew what kind of reception you were going to get. This time, however, it seemed as if the Red Cross would not be part of the equation.

In the overcrowded cell, Ajatashatru learned from an Albanian in a tracksuit and sandals that: 1) he was in Folkestone, England, a few minutes’ walk from the exit (or the entrance, depending on which way you’re going) of the Eurotunnel; 2) no, there was no Ikea near here; and 3) yes, he was up shit creek.

The Indian looked around him. They were all there, the men no one wanted. For Assefa and his friends, the journey had reached its end, but it was not the end they had hoped for. As he had promised himself, the fakir had been with them when they crossed the finish line. But this was not the happy ending he had imagined for them when locked up in his wardrobe, before his new friends had kindly freed him from his metal and bubble-wrap prison, then given him food and water. Someone must have mixed up Buddha’s files. This could not be the destiny of these brave men! Heaven must have made a mistake: it had sent them the wrong welcoming committee.

Ajatashatru’s eyes met Assefa’s, which were sad. Sitting on a concrete bench between two imposing North Africans, he appeared to have shrunk. His eyes seemed to say: “Don’t feel bad for us, Aja.”

While the fakir wove between the detainees—who made a charming mosaic of colors, accents and odors, all in tracksuits and sandals—heading toward his traveling companion so he could offer him words of comfort, the Indian policeman who had arrested him one hour earlier, whose name was Officer Simpson, opened the Plexiglas door behind which all the prisoners were held like fish in a waterless aquarium, and told Ajatashatru to accompany him to his office.

“Get ready for a rough fifteen minutes!” said the Albanian, for whom this was his tenth attempt to enter Great Britain.

But, confident that his good faith and the policeman’s understanding nature—he had the same blood as the fakir, after all—would clear up this terrible mix-up for good, Ajatashatru cheerfully followed in his compatriot’s footsteps.

“Let’s be clear about this: I am not your compatriot,” said Simpson, in English this time, as if he had read the fakir’s mind.

He told him to sit down.

“I am a British citizen and a government
employee. I am not your friend,” he added, just in case there was any further doubt. “And I am certainly not your brother or your cousin.”

He’s more royalist than the king, this one, thought Ajatashatru, coming to the realization that his good faith and the policeman’s understanding nature would certainly not be enough to clear up this terrible mix-up. You are only here today because your parents took a trip in the trailer of a truck one day, between crates of Spanish strawberries and Belgian cauliflowers, thought the Indian, deciding not to share these feelings with the man in question. Your parents undoubtedly experienced the fear that attacks the gut every time the truck slows down and stops.

Impervious to these thoughts, the policeman typed a few words on his keyboard, then raised his head.

“So we’re going to start again at the beginning, and you’re going to explain the whole thing to me.”

Officer Simpson asked for his name, his parents’ names, his place and date of birth, and his occupation. The response to the last question prompted open disbelief.

“Fakir? That still exists, does it?” he said, his face creased with skepticism and contempt.
Then he pointed to the sealed transparent packet that lay on the desk.

The Indian immediately recognized his personal effects.

“This is what we found on you. Take a good look and sign here.”

With these words, the policeman handed him a sheet of paper on which each object was listed:

“Why did you take my belt?” asked the Indian, intrigued.

“So you couldn’t hang yourself with it,” Officer Simpson replied curtly. “We also systematically remove shoelaces, but you didn’t have any. Could you tell me why you don’t have any shoes, by the way?”

The fakir looked at his feet. His sports socks were no longer very white.

“Because I left them in the Ikea store last night, when I had to hide in the wardrobe so that the employees wouldn’t see me …”

Having spent the last nine years uncovering illegal aliens in the most improbable hiding places and listening to their bullshit all day and all night, Officer Simpson did not believe a word of the story told by this Ajatashatru “Oh gosh” Rathod (though he doubted that was his real name), just as he had not believed a word spoken by the leader of the Sudanese illegals when he interviewed him earlier.

“All right, seeing as you’re not even trying, I’m going to cut this short. We searched your boyfriends, the Jackson Five, and guess what?”

Ajatashatru guessed that Officer Simpson had failed math, because there had in fact been six Sudanese men in the truck with him. But he thought it better not to say this.

“We found several pieces of evidence on them,” Officer Simpson continued, “that suggested you had all stayed in Barcelona. Given what the weather’s like down there, I have to wonder why you come and give us grief in England. You know it rains all the time here, don’t you? Monsoon season has nothing on this.”

“Listen, I know you are trying to discourage me, and I thank you for all this useful information you’ve given me about the weather in your delightful country. And one day, I would love to come back here, as a tourist, in less unfortunate circumstances. But I can assure you that I never intended to come to England and that I do not know those Sudanese fellows.”

“Sudanese? Ha, there you go!” exclaimed the policeman, proud of having caught the criminal red-handed in a lie. “So you know more than I do. Your boyfriends didn’t tell me anything. They even refused to divulge their nationality. Anyway, we’re used to it. Most illegal aliens destroy or hide their passports so we can’t identify their nationality and send them back where they came from.”

“But I told you where I come from. That proves I am not an illegal alien.”

“Your visa is valid only in the Schengen Area, and let me remind you that England is not, and never will be, in the Schengen Area. So, by definition, you are an illegal alien. Dress it up all you want.”

Annoyed by this, the Indian explained once again the reasons why he had come to France, and his idea (not quite so brilliant as it had first seemed, clearly) of sleeping in Ikea so that he could be there the next morning to buy his bed of nails: the Hertsyörbåk special fakir model made in real Swedish pine, puma red in color, with stainless-steel nails of adjustable length. He pointed out that he had put his order in yesterday, and that there was surely some record of that on the store’s computers, and that it would be a good idea to check with Ikea Paris.

As he said this, he pointed to the transparent packet on the desk, but realized as soon as he did so that the Ikea order form given to him by Elton John was actually in the pocket of his jacket, which had remained in the store.

Officer Simpson sighed. “All right, I’ve heard enough. I’m going to take you back to the cell, and the removal team will take you to the airport early tomorrow morning.”

“The airport? Where are you sending me?” Ajatashatru demanded, his eyes full of fear.

“We’re sending you back where you came from,” said the policeman, as though this were obvious. “You and your boyfriends are going back to Barcelona.”

In the pockets of the Sudanese men, the British authorities had found receipts from Corte Inglés, a large department store in Barcelona. The immigrants had bought six cans of beer there, plus a packet of peanuts and two boxes of chocolate-covered doughnuts. This was all the UKBA’s officers needed to repatriate the crooks, in accordance with international readmission agreements, to the illegal aliens’ last known country of stay—in this case, Spain.

In this way, some illegals are sent back to the country they have just traveled from, in application of the Chicago Convention, while others, more rarely, are sent back to their country of origin. Back to square one.

In this particular case, the police knew perfectly well that the truck they had stopped was coming from France, because they had caught it on its way out of the Eurotunnel. For that reason alone, they could have sent the immigrants to eat their peanuts and their chocolate-covered
doughnuts in the country of the frog-eaters, whose border was like a sieve. That would have taken an hour at most and would have cost nothing, or very little.

However, repatriating them to Spain, even if it was more expensive for the state, had considerable advantages for the British authorities, who had been trying for some time to send illegal aliens as far as possible from their borders. They knew perfectly well that such people would, as soon as they were free, make another attempt to enter the United Kingdom. If they could have built a giant catapult capable of propelling the immigrants thousands of miles away, they would have put them all in it without a moment’s hesitation.

“An airplane chartered by the aviation police is going to take you back to Barcelona,” the policeman informed him, and then terminated the interview.

So it was that, a few hours later, as the sun was looming on the horizon, the fakir found himself on the windy runway of a small airport in Shoreham-by-Sea, near Brighton, on the south coast of England.

If you squinted, it was possible to see, on the other side of the Channel, the bluish, evanescent outline of the land of the Gauls.

The bluish water.

The bluish sky.

The bluish seagulls.

The bluish faces of illegal aliens.

Or, at least, that was what Aja saw through the smoky, bluish lenses of his sunglasses, which he had pieced back together. They had been returned to him, along with the rest of his personal effects, firstly because he no longer represented a threat to himself or to others, and secondly because he would soon be free. They had even given him back his counterfeit €100 note, judging that it was so badly printed (and on only one side!) that nobody could possibly be fooled by it.

The fakir was sitting in an airplane, no longer handcuffed, between an asthmatic Moroccan and a flatulent Pakistani. Curious to know precisely what kind of fire he was likely to land in, having been thrown from the frying pan, and also to pass the time, the Indian asked his dear companions a long list of questions about Barcelona. What was there to see? What was there to do? Could you swim in the sea at this time of year? Was there a monsoon season? What was a doughnut? Oh, and did they have an Ikea?

But none of these questions was answered. Not because the two illegal aliens did not feel
like chatting—quite the contrary—but because neither of them had ever set foot, or even the tip of his little toe—in Barcelona, or even in Spain.

The Pakistani had arrived in Europe via Brussels Airport, carrying a fake Belgian passport, and reached England hidden in a truck, between two pallets of cabbages. But the British authorities had found a fan on his person (he could not stand the smell of cabbages) and that was all they needed to decide that he had come from Spain, because everyone knew that only the Spanish still used that old-fashioned, manual form of ventilation.