the man who lost his past- paul berczeller

The man who lost his past

By Paul Berczeller

Merhan Karimi Nasseri has spent 16 years living in Charles de Gaulle airport. Now Steven Spielberg's Terminal has catapulted him to international stardom – but casts little light on who he really is, choosing to Hollywoodise his predicament instead



I first saw him, many years ago now, staring out with an uncanny gaze of blank intensity from the pages of a newspaper. Seated alone on a bench, immune to the endless motion of the airport around him, there was a curious inscrutability to his slight, balding yet dignified countenance. He looked like some unlikely cross between a Zen master and Chaplin's Tramp. He had these amazing long brows, as dark as his hooded eyes, and a small, perfectly groomed moustache perched on top of his upper lip. It was like a caricature of a face, five charcoal marks on a canvas. But strangely noble, too.

His name was Merhan Karimi Nasseri though he called himself "Sir Alfred". He lived in a lost dimension of absurd bureaucratic entanglement. That is to say, on a bench in Terminal One of the Charles de Gaulle International Airport, and he had lived there since 1988. For a series of insanely complicated reasons, the Iranian-born refugee was now a man without a country - or any other documented, internationally accepted identity status. Alfred couldn't leave France because he did not have papers; he couldn't enter France because he did not have papers. The authorities told him to wait in the airport lounge while they sorted the paradox out. That he did – for years and years.

Then one day, I heard that Alfred had finally been given his papers. He was free to go anywhere in the world he wished. Except now it seemed he didn't want to leave the airport after all. It was the only home - the only past - he had left.

I woke up that night burning with an idea for a movie about Alfred - co-starring Alfred himself. I counted the hours before I could hit my desk and get started on the script. To me, his unlikely nightmare was nothing less than one of the quintessential tales of our lonely, displaced, increasingly unreal age.

Perhaps I was a little overexcited, but I soon found that I was not the only one inspired by Alfred's true story. Every screenwriter in London seemed to have a version of his life in the drawer somewhere. And every single one (except mine) was a romantic comedy with a happy ending. None of the others had been made, nor would they ever be. Because word was out that over at DreamWorks, Steven - the Steven - was interested in the story. In sunny faraway LA, the big boys were preparing to immortalise Sir Alfred.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the world cinematic digestive system, my friend Glen Luchford and I grabbed a DV camera and a few changes of clothes and drove overnight to meet Alfred in the airport. Fittingly, days turned into months and we ended up spending close to a year with him shooting our low budget, arthouse feature, Here to Where (2001). If you've seen it, I probably know you.

Recently, Alfred has been back in the news again. Spielberg's latest, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones, is playing on thousands of screens around the world. Media everywhere is asking the same old question. Who is Alfred? No one has a clue. Alfred least of all, it seems. That is exactly how he wants it - I have spent enough time with him to know that. He has been in the airport for 16 years now. I suppose my fantasy upon first meeting Alfred back in the summer of 2000 was that I would be the one to save him. Where friendly lawyers, concerned doctors, crusading refugee groups and assorted praying Christians had failed, I would succeed. I would be the one to convince him to finally leave the airport.

He lived in the basement shopping mall of Terminal One. The circular main building was a triumph of avant-garde airport design when it opened in 1974, but its swank jet-age days were long gone. Alfred's red bench was the only anchor in his life. It was his bed, living room and corporate headquarters. It was actually two benches pushed together, about eight feet long in total and gently curved, just about wide enough to sleep on if he kept his hands tucked under the pillow. (Alfred did have a pillow – and sheets – that he carefully laid down when he turned in for the night.) But he never slept during the day, though his eyes would often droop out of boredom; you could always find Alfred sitting in the middle of his bench, in front of a rickety, white Formica table, which he employed as a desk.

From this perch, Alfred would survey his world. The display windows of an electronics store were across a corridor to his left; he could see the back of a newsagent's to the right. If he moved to one side of his bench, he could gaze across to a MacDonald's on the outer ring of the level. If he moved to the other, there were the shuttered doors of the misleadingly named Hotel Cocoon.

Stacked around the back of the bench were boxes, suitcases and plastic bags containing everything Alfred owned in the world. This included: an extensive archive of newspaper, magazine and TV reports about himself; a rather large library donated by friendly passengers with lousy taste; giant files of postcards and letters from well-wishers around the world; his dry cleaning; a vast collection of McDonald's straws and - most tantalisingly - a diary which recorded in apparently exacting detail every day of his bizarre existence since he first appeared at Terminal One.

Sitting next to Alfred I tried to get into the rhythm of his airport life. It was punctuated every other minute by three chimes heralding the flight announcements, that exotic mantra of foreign destinations that practically drove me mad by the end of my first day there. But Alfred had evolved in his strange habitat; he was able to tune them out. Life in the airport followed a masterplan, designed and controlled by some far off power. Waves of passengers came and went, the same patterns of humanity every hour, every day - the tide would bring in the Japanese in the early morning, the Africans would wash past the bench late at night.

Many passers-by recognised Alfred; some had even made a special pilgrimage to meet him, first or last stop on their Paris tour. Even those who had never heard of him seemed to sense that this was no ordinary passenger. He provoked pity in all of them but Alfred certainly didn't see it that way. He had an extremely high opinion of himself. And besides, as he would quickly remind you, his situation was only "temporary".

During Alfred's first years in the airport, his basic needs were supplied by sympathetic passers-by and airport workers who knew of his Kafkaesque situation. People bought him food, gave him money and listened with sympathy to his tale. But by the time I met him, Alfred had developed a more retail approach to survival. Now he preferred to engage with the professionals of the media, people like me. In return for a few exclusive hours of his stream of consciousness tale, Alfred would graciously accept a small gratuity. The constant stream of journalists and film-makers passing through provided more than enough to keep him going.

And yet from the moment I sat down next to him I felt the force of his – there is no better word – dignity. Alfred seemed totally content within himself. He did not aim to please or play on your sympathy. He was not the homeless guy on the tube singing for a drink. Everything in Alfred's life was conducted on his own terms. In some sense he was a freer man than most.

Despite outward appearances, Alfred lived a life of total self-sufficiency and order. He kept himself meticulously clean and groomed, using a nearby airport bathroom. He hung his freshly dry-cleaned clothes from the handle of a suitcase next to his bench. He always ate a MacDonald's egg and bacon croissant for breakfast and a McDonald's fish sandwich for dinner. (Perhaps one day McDonald's will have the wit to sign Alfred up for a celebrity endorsement.) He always left a tip. Alfred was not, to put it bluntly, a bum.

Still, I felt sorry for him - how could I not? Because one thing was never made quite clear in all the reports about Alfred: just how far gone he was. When he got talking about politics or the economy you could sense the remnants of a fine mind. But when he turned to his past you were dragged into the labyrinth of Alfred's fragile mental state. All the stories he had ever told over the years, all the articles ever written about him, were jumbled together in his head to produce a narrative that changed from day to day. The more you pressed him, the more absurd his supposed memories would become until he would suddenly stop short and fall silent. There seemed to be something in his past that he needed to forget.

It was very frustrating. He once spent a week insisting to me that he was really Swedish. But his most consistent story, as far as I could piece it together, went like this:

After his physician father's death in 1972, his family summoned him with the news that he was illegitimate. His real mother was, in fact, Scottish. (Looking at him, this seemed unlikely.) His family rejected him and Alfred left home to study Yugoslav economics in northern England. (This, amazingly, turned out to be true.) He returned to Iran in 1974 and got caught up in anti-Shah demonstrations. Arrested and tortured by Savak, the Iranian ministry of security, Alfred was stripped of his Iranian nationality and expelled. He spent the next years roaming through Europe in a search for asylum. Finally, in 1981, Belgium granted him refugee status and identity documents. That should have been a happy ending, of sorts.

Instead, soon afterwards Alfred was robbed of his documents or – according to another version – sent them back to the authorities in what he called "a moment of folly". He left Belgium for France where he spent the next years in and out of jail on illegal immigration charges. Apparently, he tried to return to England but was turned back at Heathrow. It was at this point, in 1988, that he first settled into his limbo waiting for papers in Terminal One. A prominent lawyer took on Alfred's case and fought a 10-year legal battle to win him identity documents and the right to travel. But then Alfred refused to leave the airport.

If nothing changed, he would die on his red bench.

It seems very naive to me now, but I hoped that the making of Here to Where would somehow provide the catalyst for Alfred to reclaim a "normal" existence. It was the story of Paul Hugo, a selfish and incompetent American director (played by me, naturally) who goes to Paris to make a fiction film about Alfred's life. Along the way, Hugo's own life falls apart; his producer and crew turn on him, his main actor quits, his girlfriend leaves him and shooting grinds to a halt. The arrogant young man changes from using Alfred to identifying with him. Hugo redirects all his frantic energies to saving him - or what he thinks will save him. My plan was that the last scene would see Alfred and I leave the airport together both on film and in real life.

It didn't exactly work out like that. For one thing, Alfred wasn't going anywhere, despite all my best efforts. Otherwise, our script took over reality or perhaps it was vice versa - I wasn't sure after a while. My friend Glen and I were at each other's throats, the crew was in revolt, my girlfriend left me, the money ran out. Only Alfred kept his cool, looking on with his usual Zen-like detachment.

The last day of filming was an emotional one for me. My character Paul Hugo had spent the night in the airport sleeping on the floor next to Alfred. Early the next morning they were in the airport bathroom, looking into the mirror at themselves, shaving. Nothing had worked out as I hoped. I felt we had failed Alfred in every way.

"I'm worried about what's going to happen to you," my character said. He was still trying to get Alfred to leave the airport, though I had long given up.

"I followed my identification," Alfred replied. "But you've been doing that a long time, right?" "Yes, it takes longer," he said. "I know, but nothing has changed." "Many things have changed." "But you're still here, Alfred, right? You're still at the airport." "Yes," he replied, carefully grooming his moustache. "One of the airport's passengers. I'm always a passenger. If I go, I come back again. I'm not wandering. I don't wander."

Suddenly, Alfred turned his back on me and walked out of the bathroom. I broke down in tears - me, not Paul Hugo. Like everyone else, we had used him and were about to walk away. What did he truly understand about our intentions - about the cynical real world beyond his bench?

Alfred walked up to Glen in the corridor outside the bathroom.

"How did I do?" he asked.

Last week I flew to meet Alfred, three years since I last saw him. His noble Persian face lit up when he recognised me, but then it always does when he first sees a reporter. We shook hands. He seemed quite content.

"I am famous now," was the first thing he said to me.

That was the only thing that mattered to him any more. Not his family or friends, not his past or future - only the archive of articles about a wasted life and a poster advertising Spielberg's film which he proudly hung from a suitcase next to his bench. "Life is waiting," went the Hollywood ad slogan.

Alfred was thrilled about The Terminal, though he would never get a chance to see it. He was looking forward to the Oscars. I didn't want to shatter his daydreams by telling him what a load of puerile crap Spielberg's movie was. I doubt he would have believed me anyway. "Yes, my interest in America has gone up because of movie," Alfred said. "That is very good."

Apparently Alfred had received a cheque of several hundred thousand dollars for his life story. It had been deposited in the airport's Post Office bank. But Alfred had never cared much about money. He was now under the impression that DreamWorks was going to get him a passport and take him to California. Spielberg was going to come to his rescue; Tom Hanks was going to visit him at his bench. In fact, publicity material for the film didn't mention Alfred at all; they were distancing themselves from his depressing story. It wasn't exactly a happy Hollywood ending.

I asked him if he had heard from any friends or family since I last saw him. He grabbed an old Toronto Globe and Mail article from one of his suitcases. "It says that my relation has elapsed. Cut off. In this phase, I am without parents." I looked at the article. "He has taken to saying he has no parents at all," it said.

Alfred looked away from me for a moment. "He denied me. Not his son." He turned back to watch me write notes. He seemed pleased. "In 1968 they denied me, said I was not their son, so I left country. My parents, I suppose, are Americans. If Clark Gable says he's my father – I don't accept unless he has documents to prove."

One of the strangest things about Alfred's situation is that no one from his past has ever come forward. It is as if he had never existed before the day he was first spotted in the airport. Perhaps all of us intrigued by Alfred's story preferred it that way.

But once I decided to solve the mystery of who he really was, his acquaintances and family were surprisingly easy to find.

Alfred had four brothers and two sisters, all of them middle-class people who lived in Tehran, except for one sister who was a dentist in Luxembourg. One worked in a bank, another was a chemist, another worked for state television and radio. Their father, Abdelkarim, was a physician who worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Masjed Suleiman, the birthplace of the Iranian oil industry - just like Alfred had always said. After he retired from the oil company, Abdelkarim moved the family to Tehran. He died in 1967 of cancer when Alfred was 22.

It seems the family had known for a long time about Alfred's plight. They were a very well educated family, knew the west well, and read newspapers from abroad. But they apparently always believed that Alfred was living the life he wanted, that he had some kind of master plan.

Alfred's closest relative was his brother, Cyrus, who was two years older than him. In their youth, the two boys seemed to have an idyllic childhood in Masjed Suleiman. "He was close to me and we usually had the same friends," he said. "We were mostly together. We had a good life. I liked swimming and Merhan used to play table tennis. He was very good at it."

Cyrus was a businessman who imported surgical supplies into Iran. He knew England well. He and his wife, Mina, had lived and worked there for many years. Their son still did. Cyrus was, in fact, responsible for Alfred attending university in Bradford. He was very reluctant to talk, at first. The family thought that Alfred's problem was still only one of papers - and they worried that speaking to me might cause their lost brother problems with the authorities. It seems that the family had no idea of Alfred's fragile mental state.

Alfred had lived with Cyrus and Mina for a time in London before moving into a flat of his own. They also lived upstairs from him in Tehran after they got married. At the time he was living with his mother. So Mina knew Alfred - or Merhan, as she scolded me when I used his new name - well. And the portrait both she and her husband painted of him couldn't be more different from the man now sitting on his bench in Terminal One. "What can I say, he was very normal in every way," she said. In every way? She laughed charmingly. "He was a good-looking man. Some of my friends wanted to be his wife or girlfriend. He had very normal relations with girls. But Merhan chose his own life and I guess it was not a family one."

We agreed that Merhan was a very intelligent man. "He was an intellectual. He spent all his time studying and reading books and listening to the radio," Mina said. "He talked all the time about politics. He read books on politics all day and night. It was very important to him. And then he started to do what he believed in."

One of the key parts of Alfred's story was always his arrest and torture by Savak because of his opposition to the Shah, followed by his deportation to Europe. Cyrus was reluctant to talk about this aspect of Alfred's life. But doing a bit more digging through sources in Iran, I was able to find out what really happened.

Apparently, Alfred participated in a student strike at Tehran University in 1970 to object to a new university regulation. Things started to get out of hand and Savak got involved. They questioned all the students and gathered up the ringleaders, about 20, including Alfred. After a few hours of questioning in a university classroom, the matter was apparently dropped. This was evidently Alfred's only serious problem with the security services.

There was no arrest, no torture, no confiscation of his passport and no deportation. It was not nearly as dramatic a story as Alfred now remembered. But he must have been scared. He certainly never forgot the incident.

The last time Cyrus and Mina saw Alfred was in 1976 when their son was born in England. Alfred had abandoned his studies in Bradford, apparently because his money had run out, according to Mina. (Actually, according to fellow students and teachers I spoke to, Alfred failed his course. They had all wondered what a young Iranian was doing in England studying Serbo Croatian.)

He left England to travel through Europe. For a while, he kept in touch, but then his letters stopped coming. With the revolution and then the war with Iraq, his family back home had their own problems to deal with. After four years without any contact, they went to the Foreign Ministry to ask for help trying to find him. "But we could not find any sign of him," said Cyrus.

Then in 1991, a family friend came upon Alfred at his bench in the airport. Amazed to find him after all that time, the friend went up to greet him. But Alfred wouldn't acknowledge that he knew him. The same thing happened on other occasions to other family and friends who tried to make contact with him. Finally they stopped trying. Was he ashamed of what he had become? Did the studious boy who loved politics consider himself a failure? Is that why he distanced himself from friends and family?

"Why did he say in the newspaper that his family rejected him?" asked Mina. "We do not understand that. That was not true. We thought this was the way he wanted to live. Everyone has his own life and he was going on in his own way. That's what we thought."

But I was curious - there were still things I wanted to know. The Alfred I knew was mentally ill. Had there ever been signs of it when he was younger? "No, no, not at all!" said Mina. "If there is something wrong with him now, it's not from the past. It must have happened to him there." This supported what Alfred's lawyer had said to me. He had arrived sane at the airport. At some point along the way - no one knew quite when - Alfred tipped over into madness. His life was indeed ruined by the absurdities of bureaucracy.

And what of Alfred's mother? It turns out that she died only four years ago - at the very time I was filming Here to Where. She knew all about what had happened to her son. And according to Cyrus and Mina, she couldn't understand why he insisted on saying that she was not his mother. It was the great sadness of her life. "He came from me," she told her other children. "Why does he say that?" Alfred doesn't know that she is dead. Cyrus is planning to fly to Paris next month to see his long lost brother. Perhaps Alfred's long journey still has another unlikely twist.