Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  There were many hands to shake and many congratulations after the ceremony, but it was all a blur to Josef. He felt like he was walking in a dream. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted this. To no longer be a child. To be an adult.

  Josef’s mother and sister left to go back to visit his father in their cabin. Josef walked the Promenade deck by himself, a new man.

  Renata and Evelyne jumped out from behind a lifeboat and grabbed Renata by the hand. Without their parents on the ship, they had skipped synagogue to play.

  “Josef! Come stand guard for us!” Renata cried.

  Before he could protest, the girls dragged him to a women’s restroom. He was afraid they were going to pull him inside, but instead they deposited him by the door.

  “Yell if you see someone coming,” Renata said breathlessly. “We’re going to latch all the stalls from the inside and crawl out under the doors so no one can use the toilets!”

  “No, don’t—” Josef tried to tell them, but they were already gone. He stood there awkwardly, not sure if he should stay or go. Soon the sisters ran back outside, hanging on to each other with laughter.

  A young woman staggered past them, clutching her stomach and looking green. Renata and Evelyne got quiet, and Josef could hear the woman desperately rattling the stall doors, looking for a toilet. The woman lurched out of the bathroom, looking even more green and desperate, and wobbled away.

  Renata and Evelyne burst into laughter.

  Josef raised himself up. “This isn’t funny. Go in there and unlock those doors this minute.”

  “Just because you had your bar mitzvah doesn’t make you an adult,” Renata told him, and Evelyne stuck her tongue out at him. “Come on, Evie—let’s do the bathrooms on A-deck!”

  The girls tore away, and Josef huffed. They were right. A bar mitzvah alone didn’t make him an adult. Being responsible did. He walked on along the promenade, looking for a steward he could tell about the bathroom stalls. He saw two stewards who had stopped to look over the side at the sea and came up behind them.

  “Must be doing sixteen knots, easy,” said one of the stewards. “Captain’s got the engines maxed out.”

  “Has to,” the other said. “Them other two ships is smaller and faster. They get to Cuba first and unload their passengers, and who knows? Cuba might decide she’s full-up with Jews when we get there and turn us away.”

  Josef looked out to sea. There wasn’t another ship on the horizon as far as he could see. What other ships were they talking about? More ships full of refugees? And why did it matter which one got there first? Hadn’t everyone on board already applied and paid for visas? Cuba couldn’t turn them away.

  Could they?

  One of the stewards shook his head. “There’s something they’re not telling us, the shipping company. Something they’re not telling Schroeder. The captain’s in a tight spot, he is. Wouldn’t want to be him for all the sugar in Cuba.”

  Josef backed away. He’d already forgotten about the stalls in the women’s bathroom.

  If he and his family didn’t make it to Cuba, if they weren’t allowed in, where would they go?

  Señor Castillo was in charge of the boat. No one had voted or named him captain, but he had built the boat, after all, and he was the one at the rudder, steering it, so that put him in charge. He didn’t look happy about it, though. He kept frowning at the motor and the rudder like there was something wrong, but besides a quick patch job of stuffing a sock into the bullet hole, everything was good. The lights of Havana had faded to a speck on the horizon behind them, and they had left all the other boats behind.

  Isabel clung to the wooden bench she sat on, squeezed in between Iván and her grandfather. Their boat was barely big enough for seven people, and with Luis and his girlfriend they were practically sitting on top of each other.

  “I think it’s time we met the other person on board with us,” Isabel’s grandfather said. Isabel thought he meant Luis’s girlfriend, but instead he pushed some of the sacks of food and jugs of water out of the way and pointed to the bottom of the boat.

  Staring back up at them was the huge face of Fidel Castro!

  Luis’s girlfriend gasped and then suddenly exploded with laughter. Soon all of them were laughing with her. Isabel laughed so hard her stomach hurt.

  Even grumpy Señor Castillo chuckled. “I needed something big and thick for the bottom of the boat,” he said. “And seeing as there were so many signs around with El Presidente’s head on them … ”

  It was true. Castro’s face was everywhere in Cuba—on billboards, on taxis, in picture frames on schoolroom walls, painted on the sides of buildings.

  Underneath this painting were the words, FIGHT AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE AND WIN.

  “Well, Fidel is thickheaded,” Luis said.

  Isabel put her hands to her mouth but couldn’t help laughing again with everyone else. You weren’t allowed to say things like that in Cuba. But they weren’t in Cuba anymore, were they?

  “Do you know what the greatest achievements of the Cuban Revolution are?” Isabel’s father asked.

  “Education, public health, and sports,” they all said together. It was a constant refrain in Castro’s lengthy speeches.

  “And do you know what the greatest failures are?” he asked.

  “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner!” the adults answered back, as though they’d heard that one many times before too. Isabel smiled.

  That prompted someone to break out food and drinks, even though it was late.

  Isabel sipped from a bottle of soda. “How long will it take to get to Florida?” she asked.

  Señor Castillo shrugged. “By tomorrow night, maybe. Tomorrow morning we’ll have the sun to guide us.”

  “All that matters now is we get as far away from Cuba as we can,” said Luis’s girlfriend.

  “And what is your name, pretty one?” Lito asked her.

  “Amara,” she said. She was very pretty, even in her blue police uniform. She had flawless olive skin, long black hair, and full red lips.

  “No, no, no,” Lito said. He fanned his face. “Your name must be Summer, because you’re making me sweat!”

  The girl smiled, but Isabel’s mother slapped Lito on the leg. “Papi, stop it. You’re old enough to be her grandfather.”

  Lito just took that as a challenge. He put his hands over his heart. “I wish I was your favorite song,” he told Amara, “so I could be on your lips forever. If your eyes were the sea, I would drown in them.”

  Lito was giving her piropos, the flirtatious compliments Cuban men said to women on the street. Not everyone did it anymore, but to Lito it was like an art form. Amara laughed and Luis smiled.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about drowning,” Papi said, clutching to the side of the boat as they chopped into a wave.

  “What do you think the States will be like?” Isabel’s mother asked everyone.

  Isabel had to stop and think about that. What would the United States be like? She hadn’t had much time to even imagine it.

  “Shelves full of food at the store,” Señora Castillo said.

  “Being able to travel anywhere we want, anytime we want!” said Amara.

  “I want to be able to choose who I vote for,” Luis said.

  “I want to play baseball for the New York Yankees!” Iván said.

  “I want you to go to college first,” his mother told him.

  “I want to watch American television,” Iván said. “The Simpsons!”

  “I’m going to open my own law office,” Señora Castillo said.

  Isabel listened as everyone listed more and more things they were looking forward to in the States. Clothes, food, sports, movies, travel, school, opportunity. It all sounded so wonderful, but when it came down to it, all Isabel really wanted was a place where she and her family could be together, and happy.

  “What do you think el norte will be like, Papi?” Isabel asked.

  Her father looked surprised at
the question.

  “No more ‘Ministry of Telling People What to Think or Else,’ ” he said. “No more getting thrown in jail for disagreeing with the government.”

  “But what do you want to do when you get there?” Señor Castillo asked.

  He hesitated while everyone stared at him, his eyes searching Castro’s face on the bottom of the boat as though there were answers hidden there.

  “Be free,” Papi said finally.

  “Let’s have a song,” Lito said. “Chabela, play us a song on your trumpet.”

  Isabel’s chest tightened. She’d told her parents what she’d done, but not Lito. She knew he would never have let her do it.

  “I traded my trumpet,” she confessed. “For the gasoline.”

  Her grandfather was shocked. “But that trumpet was everything to you!”

  No, not everything, Isabel thought. It wasn’t my mother and father, and you, Lito.

  “I’ll get another one in the States,” she said.

  Lito shook his head. “Here, let’s have a song anyway.” He began singing a salsa song and tapping out the rhythm on the side of the metal boat. Soon the whole boat was singing, and Lito stood and held out a hand to Amara, inviting her to dance.

  “Papi! Sit down! You’ll fall out of the boat!” Isabel’s mother told him.

  “I can’t fall out of the boat, because I have already fallen for this princess of the sea!” he said.

  Amara laughed and took his hand, and the two of them danced as best they could in the swaying boat. Mami started counting clave by clapping, and Isabel frowned, trying to follow the beat.

  “Still can’t hear it, Chabela?” Lito asked.

  Isabel closed her eyes and focused. She could almost hear it … almost …

  And then the motor spluttered and died, and the music stopped.

  Mahmoud could hear music beyond the fence.

  It was hard to see for all the people. He stood in a long line with his family, waiting at the border to gain admission into Turkey, near the city of Kilis. Around them were countless more Syrian families, all hoping to be let in. They carried everything they owned with them, sometimes in suitcases and duffel bags, but more often stuffed into pillowcases and trash bags. The men wore jeans and T-shirts and tracksuits; the women wore dresses and abayas and hijabs. Their children looked like miniature versions of them, and acted like miniature adults too—there was very little crying and whining, and none of the kids were playing.

  They had all walked too far and seen too much.

  After leaving the car behind, Mahmoud and his family had followed the map on their phone, skirting cities held by Daesh and the Syrian army and the rebels and the Kurds as best they could. Google Maps told them it would be an eight-hour walk, and they split the journey up by sleeping in a field. It was hot out by day but it got cold at night, and Mahmoud and his family had left all their extra clothes in the car in their haste to escape.

  The next morning they had seen the people.

  Dozens of them. Hundreds. Refugees, just like Mahmoud and his family, who had left their homes in Syria and were walking north to Turkey. To safety. Mahmoud and his family had fallen into step with them and disappeared among their ranks. Invisible, just as Mahmoud liked it. Together the shambling throng of refugees was ignored by the American drones and the rebel rocket launchers and the Syrian army tanks and the Russian jets. Mahmoud heard explosions and saw smoke clouds, but no one cared about a few hundred Syrian people leaving the battlefield.

  And now they were in line with him, all those hundreds of people and thousands more, and they weren’t invisible anymore. Turkish guards in light green camo gear with automatic weapons and white surgical masks over their faces walked up and down the line, staring at each of them in turn. Mahmoud felt like he was in trouble. He wanted to look away, but he was worried that might make the guards think he was hiding something. But if he looked right at them, they would notice him, maybe pull him and his family out of line.

  Mahmoud stared straight ahead at his father’s back instead. His father’s shirt was stained at the armpits, and with a quick sniff of his own shirt Mahmoud realized he stank too. They had walked for hours in the hot sun without a bath, without a change of clothes. They looked tired and poor and wretched. If he were a Turkish border guard, he wouldn’t have let in any of these dirty, squalid people, himself included.

  Mahmoud’s father kept their papers tucked into his pants under his shirt, along with all of their money—the only other things they owned now besides two phones and two chargers. When Mahmoud and his family finally got to the front of the line, late in the day, Mahmoud’s father presented their official documents to the border agent. After what seemed like an eternity of looking over their papers, the border guard finally stapled temporary visas onto their passports and let them through.

  They were in Turkey! Mahmoud couldn’t believe it. Step after step, kilometer after kilometer, he’d begun to think they would never, ever escape Syria. But as relieved as he was, he knew they still had so very far to go.

  Ahead of them stretched a small city of white canvas tents, their pointed tops staggered like whitecaps on a choppy sea. There were no trees, no shade, no parks or football fields or rivers. Just a sea of tents and a forest of electric poles and wires.

  “Hey, we’re in luck!” Mahmoud’s dad joked. “The circus is in town!”

  Mahmoud looked around. There was a main “street” in the camp, a wide lane where refugees had set up little shops, selling phone cards and camp stoves and clothes and things people had brought with them but no longer wanted or needed. It was like a giant rummage sale, and it seemed like everybody in the camp was there. The path was crammed full of Syrians, all strolling along like they had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

  “All right,” Mahmoud’s father was saying. “A man in the group we walked with gave me the name of a smuggler who can get us from Turkey to Greece.”

  “A smuggler?” Mom said. Mahmoud didn’t like the sound of that, either—to him, smuggler meant illegal, and illegal meant dangerous.

  Dad waved their fears away. “It’s fine. This is what they do. They get people into the EU.”

  The EU, Mahmoud knew, was the European Union. He also knew they were much more strict about letting people in than Turkey was. Once you were in one of the EU countries, though, like Greece or Hungary or Germany, you could apply for asylum and be granted official refugee status.

  It was getting there that was the hard part.

  “I’ve been talking to him on WhatsApp,” Dad continued, holding up his phone. “It will be expensive, but we can pay. And we’ll have to get to Izmir, on the Turkish coast. Assuming we stop to sleep every night, that’s a nineteen-day walk. Or it’s a twelve-hour car ride, non-stop. I’ll see if I can find us a bus.”

  Mahmoud and his mother and sister and brother walked the shopping street. People called out to one another in Arabic, and music from radios and TVs filled the air. Other children darted in and out among the adults, laughing and chasing each other into the alleys of tents off the main drag. Mahmoud caught himself smiling. After Aleppo—the near-constant gunfire and explosions, punctuated by the oppressive quiet of an entire city trying their hardest not to draw attention to themselves—this place felt alive, even if it was dusty and cramped.

  Mahmoud saw a cardboard box of used toys at one of the shops and knelt to dig in it while his mother and brother and sister walked on. He sifted through it, hoping—yes! A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle! It was the one with the red bandanna. The box didn’t have any other Ninja Turtles in it, but Waleed would be excited to get it. Mahmoud hoped so, at least. Waleed didn’t seem to get excited about much these days. Mahmoud paid ten Syrian pounds for it—about five cents in American money.

  A car honked behind Mahmoud, and he turned like everybody else. It was an old blue Opel taxi, traveling so slowly Mahmoud could walk faster. It was the only car Mahmoud had seen in the camp, and the crowd parted for it as
it drew closer. A Syrian pop song blared from the radio, and young men and women danced and laughed alongside the taxi. As it passed, Mahmoud saw a young couple sitting in the back. The woman was dressed in a white satin dress and veil.

  It was a marriage procession, Mahmoud realized. Back in Syria, it was a tradition to be escorted to your wedding by a parade of cars, to help carry you into your new life. Mahmoud remembered his uncle’s wedding, before the war. His uncle had worn a tuxedo and his bride had worn a dress of sparkling jewels and a tiara, and they had been escorted by a dozen cars to a party where Mahmoud had eaten a piece of the delicious seven-tiered cake and danced with his mother to a real band. Here, the couple’s only escort was a group of rowdy teenage boys running behind the taxi, and their destination was a dirty white tent with whatever food they’d been able to buy in the camp’s market. But everyone seemed to be having fun.

  The old taxi’s exhaust pipe made a sound like a gunshot—POK!—and everybody ducked instinctively. The spell of happiness and safety was momentarily broken by the unforgettable memories of the chaos they had just escaped.

  Mahmoud’s heart was still racing when someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he jumped.

  It was his dad.

  “Mahmoud, where’s your mother? Where are Waleed and Hana?” his father asked. “I found us a ride, but we have to leave now.”

  Josef followed the small group of kids through the raised doorway onto the bridge of the St. Louis. The bridge was a narrow, curving room that stretched from one side of the ship to the other. Bright sunlight streamed in through two dozen windows, offering a panoramic view of the vast blue-green Atlantic and wispy white clouds. Throughout the wood-decked room were metal benches with maps and rulers on them, and the walls were dotted with mysterious gauges and meters made of shining brass.

  There were a number of crewmen on the bridge, some of them wearing blue-and-white sailor uniforms like the stewards, and three more in brass-buttoned blue jackets with gold bands at the cuffs and blue officers’ caps with gold trim. One of the regular sailors stood at a spoked steering wheel the size of a truck tire with handles sticking out all around it. It looked like the steering wheels Josef had seen in paintings of pirate ships, but this one was metal and connected to a big rectangular pedestal.