Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  Isabel laughed. “Yes.”

  “Will they have political rallies every day at school in the US? Will we have to work in the fields all afternoon?” His eyes went wide. “Do you think we’ll have to carry guns to protect us from all the shootings?”

  “I don’t know,” Isabel told him. Their teachers told them all the time how homeless people starved in the streets of the US, and how people who couldn’t afford to pay for doctors got sick and died, and how thousands of people were killed by guns every year. As happy as she had been to go to el norte, Isabel suddenly worried that it wouldn’t be as magical a place as everyone in the boat believed.

  “No matter what, I’m glad you came with us,” Iván said. “Now we can live next door to each other forever.”

  Isabel blushed and looked at her feet. She liked that thought too.

  Castro’s face was even more submerged now, which meant they were taking on water. Between the tanker and the storm, the little boat had suffered a pounding—and it had never been very seaworthy to begin with. Señor Castillo had only expected the boat to be on the water for a day, two at the most. How much longer would it take them to get to Florida?

  And where exactly were they?

  “Hey, is that land?” Iván asked.

  He pointed over the side of the boat. Isabel and the others scrambled so quickly to see that the boat tipped dangerously in the water.

  Yes—yes! Isabel could see it. A long, thin, dark green line along the blue horizon. Land!

  “Is it Florida?” Iván asked.

  “It’s on the wrong side of the boat to be the US,” Luis said, looking back at the sun. “Unless we got blown into the Gulf of Mexico overnight.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m steering for it,” Amara told them.

  Everyone watched in silence as the green line turned into hills and trees, and the water got clearer and shallower. Isabel held her breath. She had never been so excited in her entire life. Was it really the United States? Had they made it? Amara brought them close to shore, then turned and ran south along it. Isabel searched the shore. There! She pointed to red and yellow beach umbrellas with chairs underneath them. And in the beach chairs were white people.

  A woman in a bikini lifted her black sunglasses and pointed at them, and the man with her sat up and stared. As the boat rounded the beach, Isabel saw more people, all staring and pointing and waving.

  “Yes! Yes! We made it! We made it!” Isabel said, shaking Iván’s arms.

  Iván hopped up and down so much the boat groaned. “Florida!” he cried.

  A black man in a white suit hurried down the beach toward them, waving his arms over his head to get their attention. He yelled something in English, and pointed for them to go farther south.

  Amara followed the shore around a bend, and the open ocean gave way to a quiet little bay with a long, wooden pier. The pier had a little café on it with tables and chairs. Fancy two-man sailboats were parked on the beach next to volleyball courts, and more umbrellas and chairs dotted the sand. Isabel’s heart leaped—the US was even more of a paradise than she ever imagined!

  Luis flipped a switch, and the putter of the engine died. The white people got up from their tables at the bar to help pull them to the dock, and Isabel and the others reached for their hands. Their fingertips were almost close enough to touch when black men in white short-sleeve uniforms pushed their way between the vacationers on the pier and the boat.

  One of them said something in a language Isabel didn’t understand.

  “I think he’s asking us if we’re from Haiti,” Lito said to the others in the boat. “We are from Cuba,” he said slowly in Spanish to the uniformed man.

  “You’re from Cuba?” the officer asked in Spanish.

  “Yes! Yes!” they cried.

  “Where are we?” Papi asked.

  “The Bahamas,” the man said.

  The Bahamas? Isabel’s mind went back to the map of the Caribbean on the wall of her schoolroom. The Bahamas were islands to the north and east of Havana, directly above the middle of Cuba. A long way east of Miami. Had the storm really taken them that far off course?

  “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “But you are not allowed to land. Bahamian law forbids the entrance of illegal aliens to the Bahamas. If you set foot on Bahamian soil, you will be taken into custody and returned to your country of origin.”

  Behind the officers, one of the tourists who knew Spanish was translating for the others. Some of them looked upset and started arguing with the authorities.

  “But we have a sick pregnant woman,” Lito said to the officer. He moved so the men on the dock could see Isabel’s mother, and the tourists behind the officers cried out in concern.

  The officers conferred, and Isabel held her breath.

  “The commandant says that for health reasons the pregnant woman may come ashore and receive medical attention,” the Spanish-speaking officer said. Isabel and Iván clutched at each other with hope. “But she cannot have her baby here,” the officer said. “As soon as she is well, she will be deported to Cuba.”

  Isabel and Iván sagged, and everyone else on the little boat was silent. Isabel felt sick. She wanted her mother to get better, but she didn’t want them to be sent back to Cuba. Couldn’t the Bahamas just let them stay? How was one more Cuban family going to hurt? She looked back at the pier and nice café. They had plenty of room!

  The situation was explained to the tourists on the pier, and they gasped and waited.

  “All right,” Lito said. “My daughter is sick. She needs medical attention.”

  “No!” Papi said. “You heard him! If we step off this boat, they’ll send us back to Cuba. I’m not going back.”

  “Then I will go with her,” Lito said. “I care for Teresa’s life more than I care for el norte.”

  Tears ran down Isabel’s cheeks. No. No! This wasn’t the way things were supposed to happen! Her family was supposed to be together. That’s why she’d insisted they all go on the boat. And if her mother went back to Cuba and her father went on to the United States, which one was she supposed to go with?

  Lito started to lift Isabel’s mother, but Mami pushed him away.

  “No!” Isabel’s mother said.

  “But, Teresa—” Lito said.

  “No! I don’t want my baby born in Cuba.”

  “But you’re ill! You can’t take another ocean voyage,” Lito argued.

  “I will not go back,” Mami said. She reached up and took her husband’s and her daughter’s hands. “I will stay with my family.”

  Relieved, Isabel threw herself into her mother’s arms. She was surprised when she felt her father kneel down in the boat and hug them both.

  “It sounds like we’re leaving, then,” Luis told everyone in the boat.

  Before they could get the engine restarted, one of the tourists tossed down a bottle of water to Señora Castillo. Soon the rest of the tourists were hurrying back and forth to the café, buying bottles of water and bags of chips and tossing them into everyone’s hands on the boat.

  “Aspirin? Does anyone have aspirin? For my mother?” Isabel begged.

  Up on the dock, an old white woman understood. She quickly dug around in her big purse and tossed a plastic bottle full of pills to Isabel.

  “Thank you! Thank you!” Isabel cried. Her heart ached with gratitude toward these people. Just a moment’s kindness from each of them might mean the difference between death and survival for her mother and everyone else on the little raft.

  By the time they finally restarted the engine and Amara swung them around to leave, they had more food and water than they had brought with them to begin with. But they were farther away from Florida and freedom than they had ever been before.

  “My baby,” Mahmoud’s mother wailed. “My Hana is gone.”

  The Mediterranean was still attacking them, wave after wave trying to drown them, and Mahmoud could tell that his mother didn’t want to fight anymore. It was all Mahmoud c
ould do to keep her head above the water.

  “I’m still here,” Mahmoud told her. “I need you.”

  “I gave my baby to a stranger,” Mahmoud’s mother howled. “I don’t even know who she was!”

  “She’s safe now,” Mahmoud told her. “Hana is out of the water. She’s going to live.”

  But Mahmoud’s mother would not be consoled. She lay back in the water, her face to the sky, and sobbed.

  The dinghy coming by had reenergized Mahmoud, but he could feel the buzz quickly draining away, replaced by a cold exhaustion that left his arms and legs numb. The sea rolled over him and he went under again, coming up spluttering. He could not keep himself and his mother afloat. Not for long.

  They were going to die here.

  But at least Hana was safe. Yes, he had been the one to convince a stranger to take his little sister away, and yes, his mother might never forgive herself for letting Hana go. But at least neither of them would have to live long with their regret.

  The rain began again, the awful, pelting, deadening rain, and it felt to Mahmoud like Allah was crying for them. With them.

  They were drowning in tears.

  Under the sweeping wash of rain, Mahmoud heard something like a drumbeat. Water on something that was not water. He searched the rising and falling waves until he saw it—the back side of a life jacket still strapped to a man. A man who floated facedown in the water.

  In his mind’s eye, Mahmoud immediately filled in the drowned man’s face with that of his father, and his heart thumped against his own useless life jacket. He flailed in the water, half swimming, half towing his mother toward the body.

  But no! The life vest was blue, and his father’s had been orange, like Mahmoud’s. And this one was a real, working life jacket. Mahmoud let his mother go for just a moment and wrestled the body over. It was the big man who had sat next to him on the dinghy. His eyes and mouth were open, but there was no life in either one. The man was dead.

  It wasn’t the first dead body Mahmoud had seen. Not after four years of civil war, with his hometown right in the center of the fighting. A man had been killed right next to him in his family’s car, he realized with a start. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? It seemed like a lifetime ago. But no matter how many times he saw death, it never stopped being horrifying. Mahmoud shuddered and recoiled.

  But if the man was dead, that meant he didn’t need his life jacket.

  Mahmoud fought down his fear and fumbled with the straps on the dead man’s life jacket. Mahmoud’s fingers moved, but he couldn’t feel them. His hands were like blocks of ice. He only knew he was touching the straps because he could see it happening. Finally, he got one strap unbuckled, and another, and as the body began to shift in the vest, Mahmoud realized he was condemning this man to the bottom of the sea. He would never be bathed and wrapped in a kafan, never be mourned by those who loved him, never have his friends and family say prayers over him, never be buried facing Mecca. Mahmoud was putting a man in his grave, and he had a duty to him.

  Mahmoud had heard funeral prayers too many times in his short life, most recently for his cousin Sayid, who had died when a barrel bomb exploded. Mahmoud quietly recited one now.

  “O God, forgive this man, and have mercy on him and give him strength and pardon him. Be generous to him and cause his entrance to be wide and wash him with water and snow and hail. Cleanse him of his transgressions as white cloth is cleansed of stains. Give him an abode better than his home, and a family better than his family, and a wife better than his wife. Take him into Paradise, and protect him from the punishment of the grave and from the punishment of hellfire.”

  When he was finished, Mahmoud clicked open the last of the straps and the man’s body rolled out of the vest and down into the murky depths of the Mediterranean Sea.

  “Here, Mom, put this on,” Mahmoud said. It took some time to get her into the life jacket, Mahmoud doing most of the work. But at last it was on her, and Mahmoud no longer had to fight to keep her afloat. She lay on her back, eyes closed, muttering about Hana, and Mahmoud clung to her life jacket. He still had to kick his legs to not pull them both under, but not nearly so much.

  He didn’t know where they would go or how they would get out of the water. Perhaps in the light of day they would see land, and be able to swim for it.

  In the meantime, they had to survive the night.

  “Help! My dad jumped overboard! Help!” Josef cried.

  Far below him, already a couple hundred yards away from the ship, Josef’s father thrashed crazily in the water. He screamed incoherently, but he wasn’t calling out for rescue.

  On the decks below, passengers ran to the rails and pointed. The ship’s siren continued to blow and sailors ran about, but nobody was doing anything. Josef spun around helplessly. What was he supposed to do? Jump in after his father? It was such a long way down, and he didn’t know how to swim—

  Down below on C-deck, one of the Cuban policemen tossed his cap and gun belt aside, kicked off his shoes, and jumped headlong into the green water. He hit the ocean with a slap and a splash, and for many seconds Josef held his breath as though he was the diver himself. Josef’s lungs were just about to burst when the man broke the surface a few yards away from where he’d hit, gasping for breath. The man flipped the wet hair out of his face, spun until he had his bearings, and set off swimming for Josef’s father.

  Josef’s heart raced as fast as his feet as he flew down the stairs. He pushed through the crowds and ran to the rail, but the policeman hadn’t yet reached his father. A woman screamed, and Josef followed the pointing fingers—two shark fins had appeared in the water.

  Josef froze in terror.

  There were more screams as his papa sank beneath the waves, and Josef had to cling to the rail not to collapse.

  One of the St. Louis’s lifeboats hit the water, and the ship’s siren had brought motor launches from the shore, but none of them were going to be in time. The only person close enough to save Josef’s father was the Cuban policeman. Even though the sharks still circled, the policeman took a deep breath and dived beneath the waves.

  Josef counted the long seconds before the man broke the surface again, this time with Papa in his arms.

  The passengers on the ship cheered. But Josef’s father didn’t want to be rescued. He struggled in the man’s arms, beating and flailing at him. “Murderers!” he cried. “They’ll never take me!”

  But Papa was weak and the policeman was strong. One of the motor launches from shore reached them first, and the policeman helped the other men lift Josef’s father into the boat.

  “Let me die! Let me die!” Josef’s father cried. The words struck Josef like slaps to the face, and tears sprang to his eyes.

  His father would rather die than be with his son. His daughter. His wife.

  The crack of a pistol shot made Josef jump. One of the men in the boat stood aiming a gun down into the water near the policeman. Pak! Pak! He shot twice more, and one of the shark fins turned away from the policeman to attack the shark the man had wounded with his pistol.

  The men laid Josef’s father in the bottom of the boat and helped the weary policeman aboard. There were sighs of relief and whispered prayers on the St. Louis. But Josef’s heart lurched when he saw his father kick away the man trying to help him. Papa lunged for the side of the small boat, trying to get back to the sea. “Let me die!” he cried out again.

  The policeman grabbed him and pulled him back in the boat. Two more of the men restrained him, and the boat quickly turned and sped toward the shore.

  The St. Louis’s siren stopped blasting, and suddenly it was over.

  All around Josef, passengers wept. But Josef now felt more stunned than sad. His father was gone. In many ways, his father had never really come back from the concentration camp. Not the father Josef knew and remembered. Not the father he loved. He had come back in body, but not in spirit.

  Josef’s father was gone. His mother was unc
onscious. His little sister was all by herself. And they would never let Josef’s family into Cuba now, not after his father had gone mad. Josef and his family would all be sent back to Germany. Back to the Nazis.

  Josef’s world was falling apart, and he didn’t see any way to put it back together again.

  The little boat was falling apart.

  The seams between the sides had cracks in them. The engine rattled in its mounting, constantly weakening the bolts that held it in place. Even the benches were coming loose. Only Castro hadn’t cracked. He stared up at Isabel, as stern and confident as ever, commanding her to FIGHT AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE AND WIN.

  But it was hard to fight against the inevitable. The water in the boat was almost to Isabel’s knees. She and the others worked sluggishly in the blazing-hot Caribbean sun to scoop, pitch, scoop, pitch, but water was seeping in as fast as they could bail it. The boat was sinking. Every empty water bottle and gasoline can had been tucked up under a bench to help keep them afloat, but if they didn’t reach Florida soon, they were all going to drown.

  Fight against the impossible and win, Isabel told herself.

  “When are we going to get there?” Iván whined.

  “Mañana,” Lito said wearily. “Mañana.”

  Suddenly, Isabel’s grandfather stopped bailing water. He sat up straighter, like he was looking at something in the distance. “Mañana,” he whispered.

  “Lito?” Isabel asked.

  Her grandfather blinked and his eyes found her again. Was he crying, or was it just sweat and seawater?

  “It’s nothing, Chabela. Just … a memory. Something I haven’t thought about in a long time.”

  Isabel’s grandfather gazed around the little boat, and his eyes suddenly looked sadder, Isabel thought. She would have crawled over and hugged him, but there was no room to do it without three people getting up and moving for her to get there.

  “Don’t stop bailing,” Señor Castillo told them from where he lay in the bottom of the boat.