Hashem comes to this library a few times a week, for want of something better to do. This afternoon he sits down and starts scrolling through Facebook. There are the familiar posts about what’s going on in Syria. And then there’s one that makes him want to cry. Sweden’s political parties, someone has written, have collectively agreed to stop giving permanent asylum to Syrians, with the exception of those who have come as a family. And for the men who haven’t, the post claims, there are to be restrictions on their right to family reunification.
His head starts to spin. If this is true, everything he’s prayed for over the past six months has come to nothing. He is safe. But his family, alone and afraid on the other side of the Mediterranean, are not. And now they never may be.
This was not the limbo that Hashem had in mind when he left Syria two-and-a-half years ago. The Syrian regime had tortured him inside their jails, destroyed his home, and forced him to move from town to town to escape their bombs. So in June 2013 he escaped to Egypt with his wife, Hayam, and their three young boys, Osama, Mohamed and Milad – all of them seeking some semblance of stability. But in post-revolutionary Egypt, stability was hard to find, so in April 2015 Hashem left in a smugglers’ boat for Italy. A fortnight later he reached Sweden, after an epic journey retold in the Guardian this June. He had hoped to win asylum and then apply for his family to join him. But today in the library all that seems impossible.
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