Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  “Mañana,” Isabel’s grandfather whispered. He was treading water on the other side of the boat with Señora Castillo, his head just visible over the side. He’d been whispering that word off and on since yesterday, and still seemed shaken up somehow. Isabel didn’t know why.

  “We’ll see the lights of Miami sometime tomorrow, and we’ll head straight for it,” Mami said. She shifted and winced uncomfortably.

  “What is it? Are you all right?” Papi asked.

  Isabel’s mother put a hand on her belly. “I think it’s begun.”

  “What’s begun?” Papi asked. Then his eyes went wide. “You mean—you mean the baby’s coming? Here? Now?”

  Everyone in the boat perked up, and Isabel and Iván pulled themselves up on the side of the boat to see. Isabel was a jumble of emotions. She was excited to see her brother born after waiting so long, but suddenly she was also afraid. Afraid for her mother to have the baby here, on this fragile raft in the middle of the ocean. And worried too, for the first time, about how her baby brother would change her fragile family.

  “Yes, I think I’ve gone into labor,” Isabel’s mother said calmly. “But no, I am not having the baby here and now. The contractions are just starting. It took Isabel another ten hours to come after my contractions began, remember?”

  Isabel had never heard her mother talk about her birth before, and she was both curious and a little weirded out at the same time.

  “What are you going to name him?” Iván asked.

  Mami and Papi looked at each other. “We haven’t decided yet,” she said.

  “Well, I have some good ideas, if you want some,” Iván said.

  “We’re not naming him after Industriales players,” Isabel told him, and Iván stuck his tongue out at her.

  They were all quiet for a time, and Isabel watched as the golden horizon shifted from orange to purple to deep blue. Would her baby brother be born at sea, or in the United States? Would the end of their song really be a new life in Miami? Or would it end in tragedy for all of them, adrift, out of gas, and dying of thirst in the great saltwater desert of the Atlantic?

  “Hey, we never named our boat,” Iván said.

  Everyone moaned and laughed.

  “What?” Iván said, smiling. “Every good boat needs a name.”

  “I think we all agree this isn’t a good boat,” Señor Castillo said.

  “But it’s the boat that’s taking us to the States! To freedom!” Iván said. “It deserves a name.”

  “How about Fidel?” Luis joked, kicking up a splash on Castro’s face at the bottom of the boat.

  “No, no, no,” Papi said. “¡El Ataúd Flotante!” The Floating Coffin. Isabel winced at the name. It wasn’t funny. Not with her mother about to have a baby on the boat.

  “Too close, too close,” Señor Castillo agreed. “How about Me Piro,” he suggested. It was slang for “I’m out of here” in Cuba.

  “¡Chao, Pescao!” Mami said, and everyone laughed. It literally meant “Good-bye, Fish!” but everyone in Cuba said it to each other to say good-bye.

  “The St. Louis,” Isabel’s grandfather said softly. Everyone was quiet for a moment, trying to figure out the joke, but no one understood.

  “How about El Camello?” Luis said. “The Camel” was what they called the ugly humpbacked buses pulled around by tractors in Havana.

  “No, no—I’ve got it!” Amara cried. “¡El Botero!” It was perfect, because it was the slang word for the taxis in Havana, but it actually meant “the Boatman.” All the adults laughed and clapped.

  “No, no,” Iván said, frustrated. “It needs a cool-sounding name, like The—”

  Iván jumped a little in the water, and his eyes went wide.

  “The what?” Isabel asked. Then she jumped too as something hard and leathery bumped into her leg.

  “Shark!” screamed Isabel’s grandfather from the other side of the boat. “Shark!”

  The water around Iván became a dark red cloud, and Isabel screamed. Something bumped into her again, and Isabel scrambled to climb into the boat, arms and legs shaking, panic thundering in her chest. Her father grabbed her around her middle and they fell back in a tumble inside the boat. Beside them, Amara and Mami helped pull Señora Castillo into the boat as Lito pushed her up out of the water from behind. Isabel and her father scrabbled to their knees and pulled her grandfather in behind her.

  On the other side of the boat, Luis and Señor Castillo cried out Iván’s name as they hauled his limp body over the side.

  Iván’s right leg was a bloody mess. There were small bites all over it, as though a gang of sharks had attacked all at once. Raw, red, gaping wounds exposed the muscle underneath his skin.

  Isabel fell back against the side of the boat in horror. She’d never seen anything so awful. She felt like she was going to throw up.

  Señora Castillo wailed. Iván was so shocked he didn’t even cry out, didn’t speak. His eyes had a glazed look to them, and his mouth hung open. One of the gashes up near his thigh was pumping blood out like a garden hose, and Isabel watched as Iván’s face grew pale. She couldn’t speak.

  “A tourniquet!” Lito cried. “We have to get something around his leg to stop the bleeding!”

  Isabel’s father yanked off his belt and Lito tied it as high around Iván’s leg as he could, but the blood still flowed, coloring the water all around them in the boat a dark, sickening red.

  “No—NO!” Señor Castillo cried as the life went out of Iván’s eyes. Isabel wanted to scream too, but she was frozen. There was nothing she could do. There was nothing any of them could do.

  Iván was dead.

  Luis yelled in rage and pulled his police pistol from its holster. BANG! BANG-BANG! He fired once, twice, three times at the fin that circled the boat.

  “No!” Lito said, grabbing Luis’s hand before he could shoot again. “You’ll just bring more sharks with the blood in the water!”

  Too late. Another fin appeared, and another, and soon the nameless little boat was surrounded.

  They were trapped in their own sinking prison.

  Mahmoud was in another tent city. The paved parking lot at the pier in Lesbos was full of the kinds of camping tents sold in sporting goods stores—round-topped single-family tents of blue and green and white and yellow and red, all provided by Greek relief workers who knew the refugees had nowhere to stay while they waited for the ferry to Athens to come. Wet clothes were hung out to dry on bicycle racks and traffic signs, and refugees gathered around camp stoves and hot plates.

  It should have been a lively place, full of songs and laughter like the Kilis refugee camp, but instead a soft, mournful murmur of conversation hung over the tent city like a fog. Mahmoud wasn’t surprised; his family felt exactly the same way. They all should have been excited to finally be in Greece, to be allowed to buy real tickets to travel on an actual ferry to mainland Europe. But too many of them had lost someone in the sea crossing to be happy.

  Mahmoud’s mother had gone from tent to tent asking after Hana. Mahmoud had helped. It was his fault she was gone, after all. But no one at the dock had her, and no one had been on the dinghy that had taken her.

  Refugees came and went but the tents remained, and Mahmoud’s mother insisted they miss the next ferry to Athens so she could ask each new round of refugees for word of her daughter. But no one knew anything about her.

  Mahmoud felt as sick as he had on the dinghy. He couldn’t look at his mother. She had to blame him for losing Hana. He certainly blamed himself. He couldn’t sleep at night. He kept picturing his sister’s dinghy bursting on the rocks. Hana falling into the water. None of them there to help her.

  Mahmoud’s mother wanted to stay at the dock longer, didn’t want to leave without knowing what happened to Hana, but Dad told her they had to move on. There was no telling when the ferry line might suddenly decide to stop selling tickets to refugees, or when Greece might decide to send them all home. They had to keep moving or
they would die. Hana had to have gone ahead of them on the morning ferry they’d missed that first day. Or else …

  No one wanted to think about the “or else.”

  The huge Athens ferry arrived again that morning. It was the length of a soccer field, and at least five stories tall. The bottom half of it was painted blue, and BLUE STAR FERRIES was written in big words on the side. A radar bar spun near the bridge, and antennas and satellite dishes sprouted from the roof. It looked like the pictures Mahmoud had seen of cruise ships. Its lifeboats alone were bigger than the dinghy they had left Turkey in. Mahmoud tried to get Waleed interested in the big ship, to get him excited about their first trip on a boat that big, but his little brother didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care about anything.

  A big ramp on the back lowered, and refugees streamed on board the ferry. Mahmoud’s mother wept as they climbed a ramp with the other passengers. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the tent city, hoping, Mahmoud was sure, to catch a glimpse of someone carrying a baby who might be Hana. But she never did.

  The inside of the ferry was like the lobby of a fancy hotel. Every floor had little clusters of glass tables and white upholstered chairs. Snack bars sold chips and sweets and sodas, and televisions played a Greek soccer game. Refugees who still had belongings stuffed their backpacks and trash bags under tables and into the overhead compartments. Mahmoud and his family settled into one of the booths, and his father searched for a plug to charge his phone.

  “Mahmoud, why don’t you take your brother and explore the ship,” Dad told him.

  Mahmoud was only too glad to get away from the sight of his mother’s broken face, and he took Waleed by the hand and pulled him out onto the promenade that ran around the outside of the ship.

  Mahmoud and Waleed watched silently as the ferry pulled away from the dock, the ship’s huge engines thrumming deep below them. The awful sea that had tried to swallow them was calm and sapphire blue now. The Greek island of Lesbos was actually beautiful when you saw it from the sea. Little white buildings with terra-cotta roofs rose up tree-covered hills, and on top of one of the hills was an ancient gray castle. Mahmoud could see why people visited there on vacation.

  Besides the refugees, there were a number of tourists on board. Mahmoud could tell they weren’t refugees because they wore clean clothes and used their phones for taking pictures instead of looking up overland routes from Athens to Macedonia.

  Another refugee had laid out a mat on the deck, and he was praying. In all the bustle of waiting in line and getting on board, Mahmoud had lost track of what time it was, and he pulled his brother down with him to pray alongside the man. As he kneeled and stood, kneeled and stood, Mahmoud was supposed to be focused only on his prayers. But he couldn’t help notice the uneasy looks the tourists were giving them. The frowns of displeasure. Like Mahmoud and his brother and this man were doing something wrong.

  The vacationers dropped their voices, and even though Mahmoud couldn’t understand what they were saying, he could hear the disgust in their words. This wasn’t what the tourists had paid for. They were supposed to be on holiday, seeing ancient ruins and beautiful Greek beaches, not stepping over filthy, praying refugees.

  They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be—in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp—people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn’t want them to do—when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries—that’s when people couldn’t ignore them any longer.

  Mahmoud’s first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

  It was hard not to see the refugees in Athens when Mahmoud got there. Syrians were everywhere in the streets and hotels and markets, most of them, like Mahmoud’s family, planning to move on as soon as they could. Mahmoud’s father thought he had the right documents to travel freely in Greece, but a woman at an immigration office told him he would need to go to a local police station first to get an official document, and the police told him he would have to wait up to a week.

  “We can’t wait a week,” Mahmoud’s father told his family. They had found a hotel for ten euros a night, per person, and the people of Athens were very friendly and helpful. But Mahmoud knew his parents only had so much money, and they still had four more countries to cross before they reached Germany. Mahmoud’s mother would have stayed a week, or even longer, to keep asking everyone she met if they had seen a baby named Hana. But it was decided: They would take a train to the border of Macedonia and try to sneak across during the night.

  Josef watched from the deck as another little boat snuck through the flotilla of reporters and fruit sellers and Cuban policemen surrounding the MS St. Louis. This boat held a familiar-looking passenger, and Josef realized with a start that it was Dr. Aber, Renata and Evelyne’s father, who already lived in Cuba. Josef ran through the ship until he found the sisters in the movie theater, watching serials.

  “Your dad’s coming to the ship!” Josef told them.

  Renata and Evelyne hurried after him. When they got back to the ladder at C-deck, they got an even bigger surprise—Dr. Aber had gotten on board the St. Louis! Officer Padron was looking over some papers Dr. Aber had brought with him, and a small crowd had gathered to see what was happening.

  Renata and Evelyne ran to their father, and he swept them up in his arms. “My beautiful daughters!” he said, kissing them both. “I thought I’d never see you again!”

  Officer Padron nodded and said something in Spanish to Dr. Aber, and Dr. Aber smiled at his daughters. “Come! It’s time for you to join me in Cuba.”

  “But what about our things? Our clothes?” Renata asked.

  “Forget about them. We’ll buy you new clothes in Cuba,” Dr. Aber said. His eyes darted to the policemen, and Josef understood. Somehow Dr. Aber had gotten someone official to let him come get his daughters off the ship, but he didn’t want to wait around any longer in case the policemen changed their minds. He carried Renata and Evelyne to the ladder, and Renata barely had time to yell “Good-bye!” to Josef and wave before they were gone over the side.

  Josef was speechless, but the rest of the crowd wasn’t. Angry passengers surrounded Officer Padron and the other policemen, demanding answers.

  “How come they got off the ship and not us?”

  “Can you help us?”

  “How did they do it?”

  “Let us off the ship!”

  “My husband is in Cuba!”

  “They have papers! Right papers!” Officer Padron tried to explain in broken German, but that only made the crowd madder.

  “We have papers! Visas! We paid for them!”

  Josef was scared for Officer Padron, but he shared the passengers’ frustration. Why had Dr. Aber been able to take Renata and Evelyne off and none of the rest of them could go? It wasn’t fair! Josef clenched his fists and began to shake. Then he realized it wasn’t him that was doing the shaking. It was the metal deck of the ship.

  The ship’s engines were rumbling to life for the first time since they had dropped anchor. Which could mean only one thing: The St. Louis was going home to Germany, and they were all going with it.

  Without a word from anyone, the passengers rushed the top of the ladder as one.

  Officer Padron drew his pistol, and Josef gasped.

  “Paren!” the policeman cried. “Halt!” He swept the gun back and forth, and the other policemen drew their pistols and did the same. The angry passengers pulled back but didn’t run away. Josef’s heart was in his throat. Any se
cond now the mob was going to attack the policemen, Josef knew it. They would rather die than be sent back to Germany. Back to Hitler.

  The ship’s first officer and the purser arrived and threw themselves in between the guards and the angry crowd. They begged for everyone to remain calm, but no one listened. As the vibrations of the ship’s engines below grew louder and more insistent, more people rushed to the ladder to demand to be let off the ship. Josef was caught in the middle now. If the mob pushed forward into the guns of the policemen, Josef would have no choice but to push with them.

  It was hot—well over a hundred degrees on deck already—and the temperature of the crowd was rising. Josef was a ball of sweat, and the close-packed mob only made things worse. The situation was just about to boil over when a small white man in a gray suit climbed up the ladder behind the policemen. It was Captain Schroeder! But Josef wondered why was he out of uniform. And why had he been off the ship?

  For a moment the mob was so surprised it stopped surging forward. Captain Schroeder was surprised too. As soon as he saw the angry crowd and the guns drawn, he lost his temper. He yelled at the policemen to lower their weapons or he would order them off the ship, and at last they obeyed.

  “Why have the engines started?” one of the passengers yelled.

  “Tell us what’s happening!”

  Captain Schroeder put his hands in the air and called for calm so that he could explain. He took off his hat and mopped his brow with his handkerchief. “I have just been to see President Brú, to appeal to him personally for you to be allowed to disembark,” the captain said. “But he would not see me.”

  There were dark mutterings among the passengers, and Josef felt himself getting angrier. What was going on? Why had the Cubans promised the passengers they would let them in, only to turn them away now?

  “Worse,” Captain Schroeder said, “the Cuban government has ordered us to leave the harbor by tomorrow morning.”

  Leave by tomorrow? Josef thought. And go where? And what about his father? Would he be leaving with them?