The Man Who Lives in an Airport

Read the text. The man who lives in an airport In the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a visitor to the United States from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakhozia. He can’t return home because of political problems, but he can’t enter America either. He is stuck in New York’s JFK airport.

In fact, the film was based on the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian man who has lived in Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris since 1988.

Nasseri was a refugee living in Belgium. In 1988, he tried to enter the UK via Paris, but he had no birth certificate or documentation; that’s why he can’t leave the airport now. He doesn’t know when or where he was born. ‘I think I’m about 48,’ he said.

The British immigration authorities sent him back to Paris. And since then he has never left the airport.

‘I live on the same bench opposite the airport video shop. I have my own sleeping bag and a kind of camp bed. I sleep right here on the floor under the bench.

Think English Pre-Intermediate • Unit 8 pp.70–71 © Oxford University Press PHOTOCOPIABLE ‘I usually get up around six, have a shower and brush my teeth, and get my breakfast in McDonald’s – bacon and eggs. I have to eat the food from here because I have no supermarket.

‘I read the papers every day, the International Herald Tribune and sometimes The Guardian, and I read my books and listen to the radio. I’m also doing an independent study of history, economics and business from textbooks that I order by post.

‘I wash my clothes in the bathroom, then I dry them at night on a luggage trolley.

‘Most of the time people leave me alone, but some stop to chat or buy me a sandwich. The airport officials are kind, but I don’t talk to them much. I have no friends and no girlfriend, but I’m not lonely.

‘Lots of people write to me and several hundred people have sent me letters and money.’

There are several people who live in the terminal – sleeping and eating there, and getting up at 5 a.m. to use the bathrooms before the passengers arrive.

Recently, Nasseri received permission to go back to Belgium, but he refused to sign the papers. Maybe he’s never going to leave the airport. After all, it’s home.