The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  “Can you believe this?” whispered Abdullah, his eyes huge.

  I can’t imagine what was going through his mind. After the village tour, the mayor took us to his house, where the women had been preparing a banquet. I insisted on helping with the cooking and went into the kitchen to find four women preparing a huge Kurdish meal, all harvested from their own gardens and chicken coops and herds of sheep—just like in Kobani. The smells in that kitchen—oh my God. A stew was bubbling in the biggest pot I have ever seen. It was amazing, like a trip back in time.

  When the moment came to serve the meal, I insisted on eating like all the locals, the same way my father liked to eat: cross-legged on the floor. Everyone offered their deepest sympathies to Abdullah, and our talk turned to the many hardships that the villagers’ families had experienced during the Iraq war, during Saddam Hussein’s reign of brutal ethnic cleansing, and under the rule of hostile or indifferent governments going back through many centuries. These villagers still carried the traditions and ideologies of their Kurdish ancestors: they were a multicultural, multi-religious group of people living together in harmony, working the land as peaceful farmers and herders.

  The day flew by. With our driver under instructions to return us to Erbil by nightfall, we had to tear ourselves from those good people long before we were ready to do so.

  “I could live my whole life in that village,” said Abdullah as the car pulled away. “Sister, we could live like we used to when we were kids.”

  I could hardly blame Abdullah for wanting to go back to the past. We both would have done anything to turn back the hands of time. Instead, we sat in the car and marveled at the living painting of the Alana Valley as we sped to Erbil.

  Abdullah asked whether I’d brought Alan and Ghalib’s toys back to him. “I need those toys from Istanbul,” he said. “I want to touch the things that have Ghalib and Alan’s fingerprints on them.”

  “Brother, I mailed them to Vancouver,” I lied.

  “Do you think I’m stupid? You mailed them from Turkey?”

  He knew the toys were still in my suitcase. But that image of Abdullah in Kobani, looking at his kids’ toys, was ingrained in my mind, and I couldn’t bring myself to reveal the toys to him. I didn’t think he could withstand the memories they would bring back, so I left them in my suitcase.

  The next morning, I texted Abdullah and told him to meet me downstairs for coffee. We made our way to the hotel’s restaurant, with its big-screen TVs broadcasting the latest horrifying news from Syria. The majority of the hotel guests registered little more than a passing interest in the unfolding events on the news. They seemed entirely removed from all forms of suffering and pain. Even though we were in the Middle East—under those impossibly blue skies, the weather so hot—it felt like a foreign world, a world entirely removed from the humble one we had grown up in, and even more so from the brutal reality of war and poverty. We sat in silence again, overhearing the fashionable tourists and business people ordering their expensive breakfasts, breakfasts that cost more than a refugee makes for an entire week of back-breaking labour.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked Abdullah.

  “Sister, don’t you think I ask myself that question every minute? We could write a book.”

  “You’re right. We should. For Rehanna and the boys. For all the innocent people victimized by war.”

  His face turned ashen and his eyes filled with tears. I followed his gaze to the TV screen: that photograph of Alan again.

  “, Ibni. My son. , Allah yerhamak ya rohi. Rest in peace, my beloved,” Abdullah said. Then he turned to me. “I need to get out of here.”

  The midday heat was like a brick wall, but the streets were quiet. We didn’t speak, we just let our tears run. After a while, we sat down on a bench in a square with a splashing fountain. As the sun shone down on us, I tried to help Abdullah open up.

  “Abdullah, what exactly happened that night? You need to talk about it.”

  Abdullah was silent for a while. Then he spoke. “The waves were too strong. I did everything I could to save them. But it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t save them, Fatima.” Abdullah put his head in his hands and started to sob. “, Mitl raffit al’ain. It happened in the blink of an eye. They were gone.”

  I knelt down on the ground in front of him and hugged his shins to my chest, his bony knees pressing into my collarbone.

  “I can’t breathe,” he said. “No one can understand our pain unless they walk in our shoes.”

  I let go and stood up. I took his hand and pulled him up from that bench. We walked back to the hotel and Abdullah went to his room. I wondered if I had gone too far, asked too much. But slowly, over the following days, he shared more details with me, and eventually I was able to see just how traumatic that night had been.

  “The boat was too small for all of us,” Abdullah said. “The bow was pointed, so there wasn’t much space on the floor of the boat. Everyone was quiet as we boarded. Alan was still fast asleep, and Ghalib was half asleep.” The Turkish man whom Abdullah had met earlier was at the helm, speaking in gestures as the refugees boarded.

  “Rehanna and I sat down at the bow. Ghalib was in my lap, and Alan was in Rehanna’s. Right away, the waves were slamming against the boat. It woke up Ghalib and Alan. The sensation of the spray of water on his face made Alan laugh. It made Ghalib cry.”

  “I held Ghalib to my heart, saying, ‘, la tkhaf baba habibi. Don’t be scared, sweetheart.’ The waves were so strong and powerful, and the boat was so overloaded that it started to take on water. People started screaming. We were like rag dolls against the thudding waves. In panic, the driver dived off the boat. I was sitting close to the front, but I could reach out with one hand and hold on to the steering wheel. The boat was drifting in the open sea, and I tried to steer it, but I was still holding Ghalib, and Rehanna was holding on to me too.”

  Abdullah told me the waves overwhelmed the overloaded boat. It capsized, throwing everyone into the sea.

  “It was pandemonium in the water. I held Ghalib and Alan and tried to corral them with one arm, and Rehanna was still holding my arm; we had our arms hooked at the elbow. I was using my legs too, trying to hold up the boys with one knee and Rehanna with the other. I kept screaming, ‘Breathe!’ But the waves kept pummelling us underwater. Rehanna was the first one gone. She kept yelling, ‘Save the kids!’ Then I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. She was gone, just like that,” Abdullah said, snapping his fingers. “I could only pray that her life jacket would save her. Each time a wave knocked us underwater, I tried to get under the boys and push them up to the surface, , minshan yitnafsoo, so they could breathe. But as soon I got them back to the surface, a new wave knocked them back under.

  “I don’t know how long it went on like that. There was a lot of yelling and screaming, but I didn’t hear the boys make any sounds. I was yelling to myself, ‘Don’t die. Please don’t die. , Ya Allah sa’idon. Oh God, help them.’ ”

  Abdullah thought about trying to swim to the shore, but the current was strong and the waves were knocking him sideways; the twinkling lights of the Turkish coastline seemed too far away. He could only hope that bystanders would hear the passengers’ desperate cries and send a rescue boat.

  During one momentary break in the waves, he got a look at Ghalib’s face.

  “Ghalib’s mouth was hanging open, and white froth was coming out. He wasn’t breathing. His eyes were open, but they were like glass. I was frantic, trying to see Alan’s face too.”

  Each time Abdullah was able to get Alan’s head above the water, the boy made no sound. His body was limp, his head lolling to the side. And his eyes were blank, staring. Abdullah thought that if he had a chance to do CPR, he might be able to bring Alan back from the dead. But it was impossible to do anything in that water.

  “I held on to the boys for as long as I could, trying to keep their heads above the water. I could not bear to let them go. But I was no match for those waves. One aft
er the other, Ghalib and Alan slipped from my grasp. It was like the sea opened its mouth and swallowed them. , Rah kilshi. Everything was gone. I went crazy, thinking, ‘I just want to die so that we can be together again.’ ”

  Abdullah gave up the fight and let himself sink under the water. He didn’t move his arms or legs. He just wanted to sink to the bottom of the sea and drown. But he kept bobbing back up to the surface.

  “I thought, ‘They’re so light. If I float, maybe they’ll float too.’ I swam around in circles, frantically calling their names. But no one came to the surface. I was all alone.” It was still dark, even with the moonlight. At some point, a searchlight found him in the ink-black sea. It was the coast guard. A helicopter also appeared. As it cast its spotlight on Abdullah, he looked around hopefully for his family—for anyone. When the coast guard ship got to Abdullah, the Iraqi man who had been on his boat reached into the water and pulled him out of that sea.

  “Marti, awladi. My wife, my kids!” Abdullah yelled. He noticed a man holding a searchlight, and so he grabbed it and went to the edge of the boat, hunching down and casting light across the black water. He couldn’t find them, but he couldn’t stop calling out to them. The boat and the helicopter searched the waters until daylight. But then the boat began to turn back to the shore.

  “Keep circling!” yelled Abdullah. But the coast guard told him they needed to get back to the shore.

  “I said to myself, ‘Inshallah, they’re going to be waiting at the dock.’ ” The shock and trauma had split his mind in two, and when he saw the ambulances lined up along the street, his hope turned to dread.

  “As soon as my feet hit that dock, I lost it. I became hysterical, hitting myself. I tore at my chest and my T-shirt ripped apart. I started running down the dock, crying their names. I got near one of the ambulances and saw an Iraqi couple from the boat. ‘Did you find your family?’ ‘No.’ They said, ‘Come to the hospital.’ But I couldn’t leave the shore. I wanted to look for my family. I went into the coast guard station, but the police said, ‘You need treatment. We’ll take you to the hospital.’ ‘I’m not leaving without my family,’ I told them. I was crazy, sobbing. After maybe an hour, I convinced myself that they were alive at the hospital and that I had to get there.”

  A police officer drove Abdullah. En route, the officer stopped to pick someone up. “I think he was a mullah or a sharia lawyer,” Abdullah said, “but he was speaking Turkish to the policeman. I thought I heard him say, ‘Rest in peace.’ I lost all hope. But then I said, ‘No, no, no. They’re still alive.’ ”

  When they got to the hospital, Abdullah didn’t want to go inside. He sat outside on a bench for a while, crying and pulling at his hair. Someone from the hospital eventually came out and took him in. A police officer asked him some questions about the names of the smugglers.

  “Where did you leave from?” he asked Abdullah.

  “When I told them where we’d left from, he said, ‘That’s right across the street from the police station. Nobody goes from there.’ ”

  Abdullah was asked to identify the bodies, and then later, he was given one more chance to see them after the autopsy.

  “That last look at them will scar my heart forever and ever,” Abdullah said.

  They lay in front of him, too white and covered in bruises and scratches. They had stitches from being autopsied. By then it was the middle of the night. Afterward, Abdullah was given the bag of his family’s clothes and told to go get some sleep, as if he could ever do such a thing.

  “I was walking down the same streets we had walked down together, but now I was alone. I called out, ‘Where are you, Rehanna? Ghalib? Alan?’ I asked God, ‘Is it just a bad dream? Please let me wake up from this nightmare.’ ”

  I left Abdullah on October 9, 2015. At the airport, for the thousandth time, I said, “I’m so sorry. How can I leave you like this?”

  “You have your family, Fatima. That’s all that matters in this life,” he responded.

  Soon after I left Erbil, Abdullah returned to Kobani for the traditional memorial, forty days after the funeral. Then he decided to go back to Kurdistan to try to continue helping the refugee children in the camps. Before leaving Kobani, though, he packed some of the boys’ clothes and favourite toys, as well as a few of Rehanna’s possessions—her favourite scarf and dress—and something else that I had no clue he still owned: from the closet of that war-torn bedroom, he removed a dusty suitcase. It was the suitcase filled with baby clothes for Ghalib, which I had brought to Damascus in 2011. When Ghalib no longer needed those baby clothes, Rehanna and Abdullah had lovingly packed them into a suitcase that they’d placed at the back of the closet with the hope of more babies in the future, ideally when the war was over. There’s nothing exceptional about saving a baby’s possessions for a potential future sibling or for their sentimental value. I still have some of my son’s baby clothes that I kept with the hope that I would get to have another child someday. And when I couldn’t, I kept them as mementos, for myself, and perhaps for my son and his future children.

  Of what use was that suitcase of baby clothes to Abdullah, a man who’d become a solitary ghost haunting a hotel in Erbil? The same use as a few toys and stuffed animals and a woman’s scarf and dress; they were the only things that still smelled like his family.

  Chapter 13

  Saaroo toyoor

  They Are like Birds Now

  On October 13, just a few days after I arrived home from Erbil, I received a phone call from a woman at the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

  “We want you to resubmit your application. We’re going to reconsider your private sponsorship for your brother Mohammad and his family,” she said.

  I couldn’t believe it. I cried, out of relief for Mohammad but also out of grief. Why couldn’t Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan be here too?

  “Mohammad has another child now,” I told her. The woman didn’t seem concerned, except she said that the sponsorship of seven people would now cost $35,000. She also needed a photograph of baby Sherwan. It didn’t need to be a special passport-style photo, the way it had when I was first applying for asylum for my family. Any photo of the baby would do.

  I went to the study to get the application package for Mohammad’s family that had been returned to us only four months before, though it seemed as though years had passed. As I looked through the stack of paperwork, I found the unsent papers for Abdullah’s family: three copies with three matching sets of photographs of Alan, Ghalib, Rehanna, and Abdullah; and the last page of the application, signed by Abdullah’s hand, dated April 14, 2015.

  I was crushed. Then I became bitter. I felt once again that we were pawns in a political game. Canadians were gearing up for the federal election, preparing to cast their votes for the country’s prime minister. The sudden move to approve my family’s application seemed too coincidental. The news that my brother and his family were going to come to Canada made headlines. Before I even knew that the family’s resettlement was official, media once again descended on my house for my comments.

  “It’s too late for Abdullah’s family,” I told the media, “but hopefully not for many other refugees.”

  The naysayers were quick to react, saying that it was unfair that Mohammad’s family got special treatment, even though Rocco and I were paying for the sponsorship. Some people also thought that since the tragedy, my entire family had been granted special privileges. The truth was that we were just like millions of other desperate refugee families, waiting and hoping for an end to the war that had torn us apart. My own family members were seeds in the wind, scattered across the map. Abdullah was in Kurdistan. In Sham, Baba, Shireen, and two of her kids were about to face their fifth war-ravaged winter. Shireen’s son Yasser was still alone in a shelter for children in southern Germany. Mohammad was in another shelter in the distant southern region of Germany, counting the days until his reunion with his family.

  Back in Turkey, my sister M
aha was still in Izmit, two hours from Istanbul; her son Adnan was the only one working, his pay going to the family’s rent and living expenses, while I continued to send her money. Hivron was still in Istanbul, but she was barely able to stay afloat. She had been separated from her eldest daughter for more than two years. She and her four youngest kids hadn’t seen her husband, Ahmad, since he’d made the crossing and reached Germany two months earlier. Hivron knew it would still be many more months before the German government granted asylum to her and the kids. With Ghouson and her kids preparing for their legal crossing to Canada, Hivron would soon be all alone in Istanbul. She had spent an entire lifetime as the baby sister, always racing to catch up with the rest of us. This situation was no different. She needed to get her family out of Istanbul.

  The weather had started to cool. Autumn had arrived and winter was on its heels: the world continued to spin around and around. For refugees, the tick-tock of passing time is magnified. Though Hivron had recently sworn to me that she would never attempt the Mediterranean crossing again, her mind changed a little more with each passing day. “Another hour is upon you,” she thought, “and you’re still here. Your situation just keeps getting more desperate.”

  Hivron decided to make her move. She packed whatever she could fit in a knapsack and left Istanbul with her four children. They travelled hundreds of kilometres to Izmir, then undertook a near-disastrous journey by boat across the Mediterranean. Their journey through Europe was fraught with more challenges and danger: at one point, they had to travel on the back of a garbage truck for hours. They reunited with Ahmad in Germany, but Hivron had lost all their IDs, so she could not immediately prove that Ahmad was her husband and the children’s father. It would take many weeks of jumping through bureaucratic hoops before they were even allowed to live in the same camp.