Without Refuge
Page 14
Not now. Not yet. There is Alan. He lies on a
camp bed like mine. His eyes are closed, dark shad-
ows beneath them. He’s paler than I’ve ever seen
him. I take in the familiar bend of his gimpy leg, the
little curled left hand.
“Alan,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move. His eye-
lashes tremble like the wings of tiny insects. I kneel
beside him.
“Baba?” I say.
“He’ll be fine, Ghalib,” Baba says. He puts his
hand on my shoulder. “The doctor will make him
better. It’s dehydration. Exhaustion. Nothing more.”
Baba helps me to my feet and smiles. It’s a smile
of truth. A dam-burst of fireworks explodes in my
chest. It f loods me with something I can’t explain.
Like soap bubbles. Like blue sky. Like shooting
stars. It tastes of home and shining and fire all at
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once. I can’t speak. Baba leads me outside.
“Let the doctors care for him,” he says. “We’ll
visit later.” We’re surrounded by sunshine. Bright-
ness in the air and lightness in my heart. I breathe.
My heart slows. Baba hugs me close, whispers his
love in my ear. Dayah smiles. Bushra pinches me on
the arm. I hug her.
“You’re so brave,” she says. I pull back to look in
her eyes. I see only honesty there. I believe her.
A lot is happening. Much to take in. I look around.
Peer past Dayah and Baba. There’s one person miss-
ing. I search faces, eyes, expressions. I don’t see the
answer I’m looking for. Blackness rises through me
again, rinsing away the brightness in my blood.
“Dapir?”
“I tried to tell you,” Dayah says. Her whisper
burns with pain. “I didn’t want you to find out this
way, Ghalib.”
I shake my head as though I might shake the
truth away. The truth I already know. “No, Dayah.”
Tears spring to my eyes.
“She was old,” Baba says. “The journey was too
much for her. She got sick.”
“But your medicines.” My words break with my
heart. “You could fix her.”
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“I couldn’t fix her heartache,” Baba says.
“Was it me?” I whisper. I’m afraid of the answer.
Afraid to breathe. “Did I cause her heartache?”
“No, Ghalib.” Baba pulls me close. “War broke
Dapir’s heart. She couldn’t leave her homeland. It
was too much for her.”
“Where is she now?” I say.
“In Syrian soil,” Baba says. “Where she would
have wanted.”
“She never left Syria?”
“She never wanted to leave Syria.”
“She was peaceful when she died,” Dayah says.
Everything just given to me has been snatched
away again. The hardness of the camp, the cold-
ness of the dark night, the death of Dapir, all slam
through me like a barrel bomb, ripping my heart to
pieces. I sob. Baba holds me.
“This is all my fault.”
“None of it is your fault, Ghalib,” Baba says. “Not
Dapir’s death. Not Hamza’s injuries. Not crossing
the border, Ghalib. Always remember that.”
“I want go back in time to before the war,” I say.
“I want to go home.”
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Mohammad promises Alan a tracksuit if he eats his
food and builds his strength. “Same as Ghalib’s?”
Alan says.
“Very same,” Mohammad says.
“In the national strip?”
“Red with a white stripe,” Mohammad says.
I sit with Alan in the clinic most days after
school. He’s pale and thin, but with bright eyes and
a lively tongue that I never want to stop talking. He
leans his head against my shoulder to ask endless
questions.
Like “Why did you run away?”
And “Where did you find Safaa and Amin?”
And “Did you miss me?”
I answer as well as I can and promise to bring
Amin and Safaa to visit as soon as he’s well enough.
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When Dayah, Baba and Bushra are with us, we all talk endlessly about what happened after I crossed
over. We have so much to share.
“They closed the border completely, even to
trucks and buses,” Baba says. “People left. Walked
back into Syria.”
“But not us,” Alan says.
“We stayed, sleeping outside night after night,”
Bushra says. She’s lost weight. Dark circles under her
eyes, sharp lines etching her cheekbones. This has
been hard for her. For everyone.
“It was horrible,” she says. “We had only choco-
late and crackers from the sup-sup van. My back still
hurts from sleeping on the ground.”
“Baba found men to help us,” Alan says.
“People smugglers?” I say.
“You know about them?” says Baba.
“Some boys here crossed over with smugglers.
Got robbed by them too.”
Dayah fingers her neck. Several gold necklaces
are missing.
My breath catches. “Were you robbed?”
“Not robbed,” Dayah says. “But it was so
expensive.”
I feel so bad for my family.
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“Gold is nothing, Ghalib,” Dayah says. “I would have given my soul to find you.”
“They walked us for hours along the perim-
eter fence,” Baba says. “Mostly at night when it was
cooler and we wouldn’t be seen. Away from the bor-
der, into the hills.”
“With only hard biscuits and crackers to eat,”
Bushra says.
I remember my hunger, my endless thirst in the
Turkish hills. I look at Alan.
“We’re lucky you’re here, Alan,” I say to him. I
hug him tight.
“Alhamdulillah,” Dayah says.
“The smugglers carried water,” Baba says. “They
rationed it by day. Nothing at night.”
“How did Dapir manage the hills?” I think of
Dapir climbing, struggling, wheezing. Never com-
plaining. I’ll carry her loss in my heart forever.
“They were hard for her,” Dayah says. “She ran
out of energy, even when Baba carried her on his
back.”
“She went to sleep on our third night of walk-
ing,” Bushra says. “She was tired, but she wasn’t
hurting. She didn’t wake the next morning.”
There’s dark all through my blood.
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“If I hadn’t run to the border, Dapir might still be with us now,” I say.
Baba shakes his head. “Leaving Syria was too
much for her.”
I want the story to be happy again. I want to feel
bright through my blood again.
“Finally we arrived at a place where the perimeter
fence was cut through,” Baba says. “No searchlights
deep in the hills. No one to see us.”
“I was first to cross over,” Bushra says. I smile.
She smiles back.
“The smugglers left us then,” Baba says. “We
were on our own once we
were in Turkey.”
“How did you get here?”
“Bushra brought us,” Baba says.
“Bushra?”
“She was so strong, so brave,” Dayah says. “She
was determined to find you.”
A rush of surprise heats my face, and my heart
fills with happiness.
Bushra turns away when I look at her. “I heard
people talk of this camp,” Bushra says. “I hoped you
might have come here.”
“She made me walk when I wanted to rest,”
Alan says.
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“She kept our hopes of finding you alive,”
Baba says.
“Thank you, Bushra,” I say.
She looks at me. She hears how much I mean it.
“It was easier for me, Ghalib. I was with family. You
did it on your own. That’s real bravery.”
This is the second time she’s said this to me.
Some small part of me begins to think that perhaps
I’m not the coward I believe myself to be. Maybe I
am a little bit brave after all.
Fatima moves me from the children’s center into
one of the shared tents in the Kurdish section with
my family. I didn’t know there was a Kurdish sec-
tion. It’s in the oldest part of the camp, where Safaa
and I never walked, on the other side of Green River.
The paths are gravel and the toilets don’t overflow.
There are Kurdish weavings and patterned rugs,
and everyone speaks my language. The women in
their beaded scarves and brightly patterned skirts are
strong and equal to the men. Some people have even
planted green herbs and flowering bulbs around the
tents. It feels a little like home.
But the old tents aren’t so comfortable to live in.
Lots of people have to cram inside. We share with
three families: fifteen people in one tent. Sixteen
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when the doctors send Alan home. Empty potato sacks and orange onion bags cover the dirt floor.
We can never seem to get rid of the clouds of flies.
Dishes and cups, plastic basins and sacks of clothes,
packets of food, and water containers are stacked
everywhere, with our blankets and cushions and
rugs. Our tent smells of smoke and unwashed bodies
and greasy food.
“The smell’s coming from over there,” a woman
in our tent says. She nods toward the far end where a
family of five has taken over half the tent, and wrin-
kles up her face to show how bad the smells are.
“They’ve been here a long time,” she says. “Lon-
ger than anyone.”
She says it softly as though afraid of waking a
monster. We look at the woman. We say nothing. As
well as taking up half the tent, the long-time family
has extended outside their area with a makeshift
shelter of plastic sheeting and bamboo.
“Are they allowed to do that?” I say.
“It’s none of our business,” Dayah says. “So we
won’t be saying anything.”
“Just because they’ve been here forever, it doesn’t
give them the right to take over half the tent,”
Bushra says.
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“Don’t start, Bushra.” Dayah’s voice has that warning edge.
“They’re hogging all the space,” Bushra says.
“Everyone should share equally.”
“We’ve only just arrived,” says Dayah. “We don’t
know their circumstances.”
We hang blankets and woven rugs from the top
pole to divide the remaining space, so each family
has some privacy. Baba isn’t that concerned about
how the tent is split up. He’s more anxious about
not getting in touch with Uncle Yousef and the
mukhtar.
“It’s been longer than I said,” he says. “They’ll
think something is wrong.”
“A lot is wrong,” Bushra says. “Dapir is dead.
Alan is sick. Ghalib got lost.”
“Hush, Bushra,” Dayah says.
“I need to let them know we’ve made it to Tur-
key,” Baba says. “And find out about Hamza.”
“There’s a signal behind the clinic,” I say. “Peo-
ple can text and message there.”
“My battery’s dead.” Baba peers at his phone.
“And it’s not even set up to use in Turkey.”
“The phone man charges them with a car battery,”
I say. “He sets them up for Turkey and sells credit.”
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Baba and I join the line at the phone man’s tent.
He leans over the car battery on a fold-up table,
adjusting clamps and cables and connections to six
phones. Loud haggling and bargaining fill the air.
When it’s our turn, the phone man agrees to charge
and set up the phone in return for water-purifying
tablets from Baba’s pharmacy back home. He pries
the card from Baba’s phone.
“Keep this to try for a signal from Syria,” he says.
As soon as the phone is ready to use, Baba heads
off behind the clinic. It’s almost dark when he
returns. He looks happier.
“Hamza is doing well,” he says. “He’s breathing
on his own. They’re happy with his progress.”
It seems so long since Hamza and I ran down
Aleppo Way to find shoes. And only now is he
breathing on his own. It will be a long time before
he and his parents follow us. “There have been
more explosions, more airstrikes, but none near our
home,” Baba says.
“Did you tell them about Dapir?” says Bushra.
“They send their prayers and blessings for Dapir.
And for us all.”
Since I found my family, something has changed
between Bushra and me. Before, she was difficult to
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talk to, always snapping at me, but now she’s easier to be with. Instead of turning away from me, she smiles
and talks to me like I’m a real person. It feels different.
It feels nice. When Dayah sends us to collect water,
Bushra and I talk about home and the camp and
Dapir while we wait to fill our containers. Afterward
we join Dayah at the kitchen burners. It’s a long wait.
“They need twice as many burners,” Dayah says.
“It’ll be dark soon.”
Nobody wants to be left in the kitchen when
it gets dark. The camp isn’t a safe place after light
seeps from the sky. There’s no electricity to light
the tracks and toilet huts and kitchens. Everything
sinks into the night. It’s easy to trip and break an
ankle on uneven paths and broken stones. To get lost
among endless tents and makeshift shelters as you try
to find your way home. People even disappear. One
girl never returned to her family after she went to
the toilet. Her father heard her scream, but when he
searched for her, all he found was her shoe. And two
boys were kidnapped.
“Forced into ISIS,” Bushra says.
“We don’t know that,” Dayah says.
“Kidnapped girls are married off,” Bushra says.
“Or trafficked to other countries.”
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“How can you b
e so certain?” Dayah says.
“Bushra knows these things,” I say.
Bushra looks grim. “There are men who come
out at night like the rats that swim in Green River.”
Most people stay inside as the moon turns, only
reappearing to break their fast when the sun rises and
camp comes to life again. Dayah frets if we’re still
lined up waiting for the kitchen burners when the
sun drops behind the distant hills.
“We need to get back,” she says.
“Just another few minutes,” I says.
“We’re almost at the front of the line,” Bushra says.
So far, we’ve always gotten back to the tent
in time. Sometimes we hurry when twilight is
already thick and soupy. We rush along the dirt
tracks, hot food slopping, water sloshing. We close
the f laps of our tent, settle safely in for the evening to eat our meal.
Even though things are good with Bushra, Safaa
and I are awkward and uncomfortable somehow.
She doesn’t want to visit my family in the Kurdish
section.
“We’re not Kurdish,” Safaa says. “We’re Arme-
nian Syrian.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “You know my family.”
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“It would feel strange for me to be in the Kurdish section.”
“We don’t bite. And you’re only visiting, not
moving in.”
But she still won’t come. I see her every day at
school, but she doesn’t want to talk so much now
that Bushra is with me.
“Will we walk after school today?” I say.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Can I walk with you, Ghalib?” Amin says.
“When Safaa comes, then you can come too.”
Safaa takes his hand. “Ghalib needs to spend time
with his family.”
She turns away, leading him back to the chil-
dren’s center.
“After school tomorrow then?” I say.
But Safaa doesn’t reply. I feel sad for them,
especially Safaa. I think she’s a little lost now that my family has come. It must be strange and lonely for
her and Amin to be alone again, but it doesn’t have
to be like this.
The doctor finally discharges Alan after almost
a week. He’s a bit wobbly of foot, though no worse
than he is most mornings. His new white trainers
support his bad foot and help him walk straighter.
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All he needs is a little exercise to loosen up his stiff leg. As promised, Mohammad gives him a red tracksuit that will probably still fit him when he’s getting
married. Alan is so proud of it and wants to show it
off to everyone.