The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  For Rehanna and the boys, life in Kobani was much more difficult that winter. The war had cut off the supply of water and electricity to the city. It got worse in the summer of 2014: though the city wasn’t yet under direct attack from the terrorists, violence had reached the streets of Kobani. My dad’s cousin was shopping in the local souq when a suicide bomber exploded and he was killed. Going about the business of daily life became increasingly dangerous.

  Maha’s husband, Ghalib, had previously made a living working at my uncle’s car dealership in Aleppo, and in the summer months, he helped manage the grain and olive fields that his father had given him. But when Aleppo became too dangerous, their only source of income was a hardware store that Ghalib ran out of their house in Kobani. Their eldest son, Adnan, a plumber and electrician, had worked in Lebanon, but during a visit home he got stuck in Kobani; it became too dangerous to travel back to Lebanon. Now he and his dad spent their days in the shop, hoping for work to materialize.

  One day, the father and son were sitting in front of the shop door when Maha called out, “Supper’s ready!” so they came inside. Suddenly an explosion from a nearby suicide bomber cracked through the air, shattering all the windows of their house.

  “If they had still been sitting out front, they would have been killed,” said Maha. “, Allah satar, I called them just in time. God protected them.”

  Kobani was becoming dangerous for all young men, just as Sham had been at the start of the war. Now only fighters had currency. Girls faced even grimmer options—like rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage. Maha and Ghalib knew they had to get their family out of Kobani before it was too late. But to do so, they would have to split their family apart.

  They sent Adnan and his eighteen-year-old brother Mahmoud over land to Izmit, a port city in Turkey about a hundred kilometres east of Istanbul, where some of Maha’s friends had settled since escaping Syria. The rest of the family fled to Turkey soon after. As she abandoned her beautiful Kobani home, with the gardens she loved so dearly, Maha had no clue whether she’d see it ever again.

  “When I looked at Mama’s sewing machine, I broke down,” Maha admitted. “When Mama was sick, she said, ‘I want you to take it. But promise me you’ll take care of it and pass it to one of your girls.’ I felt like I was breaking my promise.”

  Maha worried they wouldn’t survive the border crossing, so she hired a smuggler to assist them. The terrorists had gotten into the sinister habit of kidnapping young girls, and Maha wasn’t taking any chances. She dressed her daughters in niqabs so their faces would be covered when crossing the ISIS-controlled checkpoint.

  “We can’t breathe,” her daughters said.

  “Be quiet. Keep your eyes down and your faces covered,” Maha instructed as the driver’s car inched closer to the guard’s booth.

  “Where are you going?” the border guard asked.

  “I’m taking this family to the Turkish border,” said the driver.

  Maha and her kids kept silent, avoiding eye contact as the guard gave them a long, hard look.

  Finally, he said, “Okay, go,” and waved them through.

  Maha and her daughters went to Izmit, where they reunited with her two sons. She lucked out on an apartment for three hundred lira per month. The kitchen and bathroom were shabby, but it had four bedrooms and was on the third floor, with a balcony that afforded them a view. They didn’t have any furniture but found abandoned items on the streets. Adnan had found work in the plumbing and electrical field, but her sons-in-law had to take back-breaking jobs in construction. They came home after dark every night, collapsing onto the floor as soon as they entered the apartment. Maha would call out, “You’re so dirty! Go straight to the shower.” But even showering was work; they had to first boil water on the stove. “We’re too tired,” was their answer, and within minutes they would be fast asleep.

  I continued to do what I could to help. I sent money to pay the rent for Maha, Mohammad, and Hivron, and sometimes I sent extra money for medicine or basic comforts, like electric hot water tanks so that they could take hot showers. But I couldn’t wire money directly to my brothers and sisters through any official channels like banks or Western Union because claiming that money required valid passports. I had to send it through their Turkish neighbours or through friends, which was limiting and frustrating. All I wanted was to help my family; why was it so difficult?

  As a refugee in Istanbul, my baby sister, Hivron, was eager to find work. She took her two youngest daughters for a walk in the neighbourhood and asked other Syrian refugees if they knew about employment opportunities. One family gave her the address of a potential employer, and she went straight to that location. A man was sitting on the stoop of a building.

  “Salam ya akhee,” Hivron said. “Do you have any jobs available?”

  “I do,” he said. The man paused and examined Hivron and her daughters. “Come back tomorrow, and bring your kids.”

  Hivron could not believe her luck: it seemed she’d found a job and daycare, all in one.

  “When I showed up at this place the next day, a minibus was pulling up, and a dozen little kids filed off,” said Hivron. “I thought, ‘Will I be working at a daycare?’ We followed the kids inside and down the stairs to a dark, cold basement. A few machines were cranking out socks. Nearby, forty children worked, some as young as three years old. They were sitting on the dank tile floor with scissors, trimming the threads on the socks.”

  The man she’d met the previous day arrived and said to them, “You can get to work now. The kids will show you how to trim the socks.”

  “I realized I was so stupid,” Hivron said. “That man expected my children to work. I was sick with rage, but I was too angry and shocked to say anything. I started working, and told my kids to do the same. As soon as that man went back upstairs, I talked to these tiny, dirty, starving sweatshop workers. Most were Syrian. One boy said, ‘I’m from Aleppo. I lost my daddy.’ Another one said, ‘My mama is sick at home and we need to pay the rent.’ But I said to myself, ‘Shut up and investigate.’ ”

  The man returned with their lunch—a pot of rice. “All those tiny kids rushed to that pot and started eating like starving puppies. When the man came back to collect the empty pot, the kids went like robots back to their work.”

  Hivron had seen enough.

  “What kind of man does this to children? This is haram,” she told the man. “You’re not a human being. I will report you to the police.” She took her kids home, and when Ahmad came home, she told him what had happened. Ahmad and Hivron decided they could not risk reporting the man to the authorities; it might mean they’d be deported. But that didn’t quell their outrage. Ahmad marched over to the sweatshop and gave the man a piece of his mind.

  Hivron got a job working in a fast-food restaurant that made barbecued chicken; her mouth watered and her stomach growled all day long. At closing time, all the leftover food was supposed to be discarded, but it was perfectly good, so Hivron often took it home for her family. One night, the manager caught her.

  “Those chickens will make you sick,” he said.

  “I’ll take the risk,” she responded.

  This new life was a shock to my family, just as it was to the many other Syrian refugees. When your life is turned upside down, when you have been forced to flee your home and leave everything behind, you do what you must to survive. In Syria, most of the women had never worked, but now, as refugees, they were forced to do so. Hivron didn’t want her older kids to work; she wanted them to go to school. But she had the same problem that Mohammad and so many other refugees experienced when she tried to enrol her kids in classes. Hivron went to all the nearby schools, but the staff would say, “Our classrooms are full. Try again next year.” Eventually, her son, Abdulrahman, got a job as a busboy at a restaurant, working nights, making twenty-five to forty Turkish lira per day—just fifteen Canadian dollars for up to twelve hours of work. Hivron was too worried for the safety of her t
eenaged daughter to let her work. She’d heard many horror stories about girls being sold or kidnapped to become wives or slaves, which was not unique to Turkey: it was happening everywhere, from Lebanon to Jordan to Syria.

  The younger kids in my family had nothing to do all day. They had few toys and fewer books to read, most of them written in Turkish. The older children had to babysit their younger siblings while their parents worked—until they too took on jobs. Mohammad’s two oldest kids, Heveen and Shergo, sometimes worked eighteen-hour shifts at a clothing factory, six days a week. Shergo’s job involved pressing clothing with an industrial ironing press, and his arms were routinely burned as a result. Heveen’s supervisor would threaten workers with a coat hanger. Heveen was so afraid of getting in trouble that if she had to go to the bathroom, she would hold it for hours so as not to risk abuse or, worse, be fired.

  My family had managed to escape immediate violence in Syria. But finding safety in Turkey had brought new challenges, and their journey was far from over.

  Chapter 7

  Hay alharb

  This Is What the War Has Done to Us

  Refugees in Turkey had to endure many hardships and found it impossible to sustain even the most basic survival. But the situation in Syria was much worse. Abdullah was desperate to bring Rehanna and the boys back to Turkey. But with ISIS’s chokehold on the region, her family had to plan their escape wisely and patiently. Abdullah was still working at the sweatshop, saving money so that he could rent someplace decent for his family when they arrived. He even asked his boss if he could sleep in the factory at night so that he wouldn’t have to pay for a room. The boss took pity on him and agreed. Abdullah had Saturdays free, and he spent those days looking for a new home so that his family could join him as soon as possible. But with so many more refugees flooding into Turkey, it had become even more challenging to find somewhere to live.

  I admit that I didn’t fully understand these hardships until I saw them with my own eyes. I hadn’t seen my family in more than three years, and I was desperate not just for a reunion but to meet my nephews Ghalib and Alan. I booked a trip to Turkey for five weeks starting in mid-August of 2014. I thought I might be able to fly my dad to Turkey, but my baba didn’t have a passport, so he decided to risk taking the bus and go by land.

  “That’s far too dangerous, Baba, with those checkpoints everywhere, all those rebels and terrorists,” I told him when I learned of his plan.

  “What would the rebels want with me, an old man?” he responded. He asked my siblings what they were craving most from home. They unanimously agreed: Syrian coffee and baklava. Baba didn’t have a lot of money to spare, but he brought just enough baklava so that everyone could have one piece. I called Baba the night before he left, and he shrugged off my concerns again, saying, “, Mafi hada bimout naqis omur. Allah has already written everyone’s time of death.”

  Baba took the route through the border town of Efreen, which lies east of Kobani, and was rumoured to offer the safest passage. It was a long week, waiting to hear from him. He had a cellphone, but there were often areas without a signal, places where none of us could reach him. Along the way, the bus stopped at many checkpoints, some under the command of rebels, some under government control, and still others guarded by the terrorists. Often, the terrorists would board the bus and interrogate the passengers, sometimes plucking men by the hair and dragging them off the vehicle. But as Baba predicted, they barely took notice of an old man. He made it safely to Turkey.

  A few days later, I arrived in Istanbul. My dad, Mohammad, and Abdullah met me at the airport. They all looked like old men. Even Abdullah’s smile seemed old. I would find out exactly why soon enough. We went to Mohammad’s house. It was after midnight, but Mohammad’s kids woke up to see me and we stayed up all night. Over the next few weeks, my baba and I travelled back and forth between my siblings’ houses, staying with each family for a few days at a time. It was a shock to see my baby sisters looking so old as well. Maha was forty-one and Hivron was only thirty-four, but the war had taken a toll. It had been more than three years since my last visit, and all my nieces and nephews had grown up so much—too much. Even the younger kids had a wise, wistful look in their eyes that no child should have. And they were so thin. Maha’s daughter Fatima was eight months pregnant, but her bump was alarmingly small.

  While I was there, I tried my best to help. But each time I looked at the faces of my family, I burned with shame for not sending them more money. I felt guilty when I hugged them and felt their sharp bones. I had always sent as much as I could afford, but my siblings were proud people and rarely asked for help—especially Abdullah.

  Still, some things hadn’t changed. The first time we sat down on the floor in Mohammad’s house to eat a typical light meal of labneh, olives, cucumber, and pita, it felt just like the old days. Abdullah had become his former self again, making funny faces and pretending—or so I thought—to be an old man with no teeth.

  “Baba, I want to eat cucumber. Can I borrow your dentures?” he mumbled, making us laugh until we cried. But after he’d finished playing the part, Abdullah wore a toothless grin.

  “What happened to your teeth?” I asked him. He shrugged off my question with more jokes. But when the young kids went to play outside, he finally told me about his grim encounter with the terrorists.

  That was just the first of many horror stories I heard in detail that night. We stayed up very late, my brothers and sisters-in-law and father filling my ears with hardships they and so many other refugees had endured. It was early morning when we finally went to bed. Mohammad had two bedrooms, but they only had one mattress. Abdullah, Baba, and I slept on rugs. I doubt I slept for more than a few hours that night, wondering, “How did this happen to my family? When will they be able to go home again?” In the late morning, my bones were aching. I’m sure Baba’s were too, but he didn’t complain. Neither did Abdullah. I took a quick shower—at least I thought it was quick. But when I came out of the bathroom, Mohammad was there, pointing at an invisible watch on his wrist.

  “The bill for that shower will be so big,” he said, and laughed.

  I had another eye-opener when Ghouson, Shergo, and I went to the market and I bought some food for the big afternoon meal. On the way back, Ghouson stopped in her tracks beside a Dumpster.

  “Look at that mattress. It’s a good, clean mattress,” she exclaimed.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked. Ghouson was a clean freak, just like Mohammad.

  “It’s a good mattress,” she repeated. “Shergo, let’s carry it home. It’s not even heavy.”

  When we got back, Ghouson and Heveen scrubbed and bleached the surface and then left it in the sun to dry. The kids were thrilled to have a mattress to share amongst themselves.

  Imagine how our father felt, seeing his family living in such desperate situations. And it got worse when we went to stay at Hivron’s apartment the following week. She was living on the third floor of a building that had been scorched by fire. The building should have been condemned, but why give it up when you are a slumlord who can take advantage of desperate refugees? When Baba and I walked up the flight of stairs to Hivron’s apartment, I thought the building would collapse. Everywhere I looked, the wood was burned black and rotting. It was the same inside her tiny one-bedroom apartment. The kids had to sleep on foam cushions in the living room.

  Hivron’s husband, Ahmad, insisted that I sleep with my sister on their one mattress, which took up the entire bedroom floor. They had access to a shared rooftop. It was so hot inside that Baba volunteered to sleep up there instead of in the apartment. “It’s just like in Sham,” he said, grabbing a foam cushion. Abdulrahman and Ahmad joined him. At night, it was very loud outside. I didn’t get much sleep, and in the morning, I said to Hivron, “Maybe I should take Baba back to Mohammad’s house.”

  Hivron’s face crumpled. “You’re ashamed of the way I live. You think I’m a dirty refugee.” She started to cry. “, Hay alhar
b. This is what the war has done to us.”

  “, Habibti. Sweetheart, I don’t think that. Don’t cry,” I said, hugging her to my chest. “I know you’re doing your best. I’m so proud of you. Of course we’ll stay. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “It’s not always so bad,” she said, wiping her tears. “Sometimes I get decent tips at the hotel. The Saudi tourists are the best tippers. Once, a woman left me a whole bag of her clothes. I’ll show you.” She went to her suitcase and pulled out a few pieces of designer clothing and threw them on the bed.

  “Remember how we used to get new clothes and shoes for Eid?” I said. “We used to put the shoes under our bed the night before and lay out our outfits.”

  “And we couldn’t sleep because we were so excited to put them on.”

  We both started to laugh and cry all at once.

  My dad was quiet during each visit to his children’s temporary homes. He must have swallowed so many tears, picturing their former lives in Damascus, the family home, and the strong foundation of love and support that he had worked so hard to build for them. Of course, the most important thing was that all his children and grandchildren were alive, and we were together for the first time in far too long. Most of us, at least. Shireen and her kids were still in Damascus, and Rehanna and the boys were still in Kobani. Abdullah was desperate to be reunited with his family, and Baba was yearning to meet his youngest grandson, Alan, for the first time.

  Cracks appeared on my father’s brave face when the two of us left Hivron’s early one morning to hunt for a decent cup of coffee. I convinced him that he could find such a thing at the nearby Starbucks. I ordered him an espresso.