Talking around
“You know, they’ve all these categories for refugees? Political refugess, refugees for economic reasons, …”
“Yes. So?”
“They’ve forgotten family refugees: people who leave a country because they can’t stand their family.”
“Like you?”
“Yes. Like me”.
(M.K., 65, left Budapest in 1956).
“… and then I went South, from Gilgit, but not towards Islamabad. I went into a different valley, crossing passes and such.”
“How did you get around?”
“On a jeep. I’d never seen a jeep taking on 20 people before.”
“How were the people?”
“Nice, really nice. There was this one guy with a gun. I asked him, ‘why do you have a gun?’. He said, ‘because the world is a dangerous place’. I said, ‘the world is a dangerous place because there are people like you running around with guns’. We both laughed. So, yes, nice.”
“And the landscape?”
“You know, when we arrived at the pass, I couldn’t believe my eyes – I’d never seen so much edelweiss before in my life. Edelweiss in Pakistan. Unbelievable.”
“You must have found that secret hole in space which connects Pakistan to Austria.”
“Guess so.”
(C.P. ,36, traveled to Pakistan from China in 1988. He comes from the countryside in Salzburg, a region hardly deprived of edelweiss.)