The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  I wanted to be brave. “Let me talk to him,” I said.

  “Habibi, please,” I begged him. “You need to listen to the nurses.”

  “So what? I don’t care,” he responded. “I’m not going to do the surgery anyway. I don’t want it.”

  “Do it for Rehanna and the boys,” I said. “So that you can make it to the anniversary.” The memorial, which was in Kurdistan, was less than a month away. It was the wrong thing to say. His heart monitor started to beat even faster. It filled me with guilt, a feeling that had become all too familiar since the tragedy.

  My sister took the phone back and told me that Abdullah needed to rest. She sounded exhausted from her vigil. Just before she hung up, I heard him in the background saying to her, “Sister, don’t leave me alone.”

  The next day, after more than two weeks in the hospital, Maha arrived to find Abdullah, as always, glued to his phone and crying. She was so worried that this habit was doing him more harm than good that she tried to take his phone away. When they got into a tug-of-war over it, the phone fell on the ground and broke.

  “My whole life is on that phone!” he cried. “Maha, go fix it.” So Maha, an exhausted, broke refugee, hit the unfamiliar streets of Istanbul and tried to find a place to repair the phone. She was weak from not eating and from many sleepless nights of vigil, and after finally finding a repair shop, as she was walking back to the hospital, she fainted. Luckily, she was close to the hospital. A nurse saw it happen and came rushing out. She took Maha to the hospital lab for blood tests. Maha was okay, just weak from stress and lack of food.

  “, Ya haram bihriq al-alb. It will make your heart burn,” Maha told me. “Even the nurses feel sorry for him. After all that he went through, they understand, and they try their best to help him.”

  I was so grateful that my sisters could be there with Abdullah. I wanted so badly to be with my family. But I had a salon to run, and I hoped to be in Erbil with Abdullah for the anniversary of the tragedy. I had to believe he would survive this illness and be back in Kurdistan before September 2.

  In early August 2016, with the anniversary of the tragedy just weeks away, the media started calling me again to do follow-up articles about Abdullah and my family. They asked the same question: one year after the tragedy, had the picture of the boy on the beach helped the world understand the refugee crisis? I didn’t want to tell the media about Abdullah’s health issues. And he was in no shape to do interviews. But with every passing day, it got more and more difficult to hold off the queries of so many reporters. Meanwhile, Abdullah was unlike himself, fluctuating from weak and vulnerable to hostile.

  “You’re not putting a camera and a big tube down my throat. I will choke and throw up. You need to understand that I don’t care if I’ll die,” he would bark at the nurses.

  “We have to do this procedure to prepare for your surgery,” the nurses would respond.

  “I’m not having surgery.”

  “It’s the only thing we can do to save your life.”

  “I don’t care about my life.”

  Maha and Shireen shy away from conflict, so it was my job to talk to Abdullah.

  “Baba is worried about you,” I told Abdullah on the phone. “He wants you to live and move on. We all do: we can’t take more pain. We need you to listen to the doctors and have the treatments that will help you get better, please.”

  Abdullah said something in reply, but I couldn’t understand it; he was still having difficulty speaking. Shireen took the phone back. “We can only pray to God for help,” she said.

  Finally, after many days of arguing and lashing out, Abdullah agreed to have the scope procedure. After that, he was scheduled for surgery to clear the fluids and toxins from his heart and chest.

  “I think the doctors are finally getting through to him,” Maha said. “But before the surgery Abdullah needs a blood transfusion. Luckily, some people from the KRG are here to help. They found a blood donor,” said Maha. “Today, he called me and Shireen to sit on his bed. Then he hugged us so hard, and whispered, ‘Forgive me for this. Thank you for helping me.’ ”

  Before Abdullah had the surgery, we all talked to him on the phone.

  “Please forgive me if I don’t make it,” he said to me. “If I don’t, I want you to continue to put your voice out there. Someone has to keep speaking for these innocent people.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Allah karim,” I said. “You’ll be the one who goes out there to help them. You’ll be fine.”

  Thankfully, he was. After ten more days of antibiotics and recovery, Abdullah was mostly recovered from the sepsis. And then, a month after he entered the hospital with this horrible life threat, Abdullah did something he hadn’t done since the tragedy: he sent us all a silly video. For the first time in almost a year, we allowed ourselves to say, “Abdullah is finally back.”

  But more challenges lay ahead. Abdullah would soon have to face the anniversary of the tragedy. He was released from the hospital in mid-August, and he returned to Kurdistan soon after. The KRG was planning a memorial service for Adbullah’s wife and children.

  “I don’t want to be alone for the anniversary. Can you come to Erbil?” he asked me.

  I told him I’d try my best. I was desperate to see him again, and so I put everything on hold to get to Kurdistan to be with him. It had been a year since I last saw Abdullah, and it was even more heartbreaking to see him this time. He was skinny and pale; his vocal cords had been injured during the operation, and he could barely walk or even talk. Thankfully, Abdullah now had a home to go to. The government generously provided him with a furnished townhouse, which was a great relief. Before my arrival, he had moved in many of his personal possessions, but he had not yet slept there. We stopped off at the hotel to gather the last of his things.

  At the townhouse, I put my luggage in the guest room and freshened up. Then I explored the house. I stopped cold in my tracks when I got to Abdullah’s bedroom. His bed was covered with his kids’ stuffed animals. And there were more of their toys in a cabinet. Abdullah came in, opened the closet, and pulled out the suitcase filled with the kids’ old baby clothes, the one I had brought to Sham in 2011. Abdullah opened a cabinet drawer and placed the baby clothes in it, one piece at a time.

  “Remember these?” he said, holding up a pair of baby shoes. “And this toy?” He picked up the Sesame Street doll I’d seen him holding on the news. He held the toy to his face, breathed deeply, and started to cry.

  “, Reehton rahit. Their smell is gone,” he sobbed. “The suitcase was full of dust, so I got the clothes washed at the hotel. Why did I do that?”

  “Please, Abdullah, stop it. Don’t torture yourself,” I said. Then I tried to comfort him, saying, “Maybe someday you will get married again and have more kids.” It was the wrong thing to say.

  “How am I going to find another woman like Rehanna?” he asked. “She was the perfect wife and a loving mother.”

  It hurt me to watch my brother suffering. Even in the safety of his new house, Abdullah was still in constant pain from the surgery and the tragedy. We were all alone, and I considered what a strange place we were in. I realized that there were no hospitals or medical clinics nearby to provide the follow-up medical care that he needed, and I wondered what my brother would do if something happened to him when he was alone. That night, in the guest bedroom, I stared at the crisp white ceiling for a long time, thinking about the past and wondering, What’s next? How can I help him?

  The world isn’t fair, I thought, as I cried myself to sleep.

  I don’t know how Abdullah managed to stay alive for a whole year all by himself. He was slowly healing, but he now had many scars on the outside, to match the ones inside, from his surgery. The incision stretched from his trachea to his belly button, and beneath that there were three smaller incisions where tubes had been inserted to reach his other vital organs. His dental work remained unfinished, so he still couldn’t chew food. On the morning of th
e memorial, we went shopping for yogurt and lots of fruit to make smoothies. When we got to the counter, Abdullah held up some Bubblicious gum.

  “Smell it,” he said. “It still smells just like it did when we were kids. It reminds me of all the holiday parties back in Sham. Remember Mama would be cooking all day, and she’d send us down to the store, and we’d buy this gum for one franc?”

  “And she’d say, ‘, Habibi, don’t stop and play with your friends. I need that parsley and eggplant.’ ”

  “Remember the mess after those parties? Everybody yelling, ‘You do the dishes. You wash the floor.’ We didn’t go to sleep until four a.m.”

  Now grief and worry and nightmares kept us up all night. Now we found ourselves rushing back to the townhouse to do media interviews. Abdullah wanted to repeat his message: stop the war, let the Syrian people go home, and in the meantime, help the refugees. There were many outlets clamouring for exclusive interviews, but Abdullah agreed to do only a few, with the German paper Bild, BBC TV, and some Arabic media. After seeing his condition, I knew that he had to save all his strength for the memorial service. The media would have to make do with talking to me. My email and cellphone didn’t stop pinging from the moment I arrived in Erbil. I did a number of Facetime interviews and a live interview with ITV on the morning of the anniversary for their UK breakfast TV show. I also did interviews with CNN, Sky Media, and many newspapers and radio stations from all over the world.

  That night, we went to the memorial. The Kurdish people put on a beautiful service at the refugee camp. The refugees had made a feature-length movie dramatizing the story of my brother’s family’s tragedy and that of the Kurdish people. The movie was beautiful but also so heartbreaking that Abdullah and I cried from start to finish. When we returned to the townhouse, Abdullah retreated to his bedroom. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of him yelling, “Alan! Ghalib! Rehanna!” I jumped out of my bed and rushed to his room. He was sitting upright in bed, but he appeared to be asleep.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, grasping Abdullah’s shoulder.

  “I have pains in my chest,” he said. Then, after a few moments, “I had a dream I was with my family.”

  I couldn’t go back to sleep. It was three a.m. I went downstairs and made some coffee. I opened the front door and sat for a few hours, smoking, drinking coffee, and thinking about my family until it felt as if my heart would burst. I looked up to the sky and started praying to God to heal Abdullah. I even asked Alan and Ghalib and Mama in heaven for help. My chest was burning and tears poured down my face. Then, as the sun began to rise, two birds appeared. They danced and chirped in the air above me. One was bigger than the other.

  “Ghalib? Alan?” I said out loud. Then, to myself, “You’re crazy, Tima.” But those birds continued to dance and sing until my tears stopped.

  A little while later, for the first time since my arrival, Abdullah came downstairs to have breakfast with me. It seemed like another good sign, and my heart was finally happy.

  Thank you, God, Mama, Ghalib, and Alan, I thought.

  There was still a long road ahead, though. Abdullah’s nightmares continued for the next few days. I did some research on local medical organizations that might be able to treat both Abdullah’s physical and psychological wounds. I found two clinics online that specialized in post–traumatic stress disorder for victims of war. But when I contacted the clinics, they said that they didn’t have the resources to deal with new patients. And even if they had, Abdullah still didn’t want to see a doctor, let alone get help for his ailing mind. All sorts of things in the waking world triggered Abdullah’s trauma and grief. One morning, while I was cleaning the counters, Abdullah came down for breakfast, breathed deeply, and said, “Ah, ya Allah, ekhti, that was Rehanna’s favourite cleaner.”

  I wanted so badly to take away his pain and turn his mind to something that would make him feel better. “Why don’t we go visit the kids at the refugee camp?” I suggested.

  Abdullah brightened at the idea. “We can’t go empty-handed. Let’s bring diapers for the babies.”

  “Okay. Is five hundred dollars’ worth of diapers enough?”

  “Anything is better than nothing.”

  Abdullah called a grocery store in Erbil, put in an order for five hundred dollars’ worth of diapers, and then called the camp supervisor to arrange our visit. We picked the diapers up the next day and drove straight to the camp. When we got there, word spread quickly, and within minutes, hundreds of refugees flocked to the camp entrance, so many people that we had to tell them to go back to their homes and that we’d come around to deliver the diapers to families that needed them. As we walked around looking for families with babies, many refugees invited us to share a meal with them. It was so typical of Syrian and Kurdish hospitality: even though they didn’t have enough food for themselves, they wanted to share their last piece of bread with us. It reminded me so much of home. We talked to many of them, and each one had his or her own painful story. I saw the suffering in their eyes, felt the pain in their hearts. Everyone was desperate to go back home to Syria. I kept looking at Abdullah as we shook our heads in sympathy, and after listening to their stories, we would say, “, La hawl w la qowwata illa billah. There is no strength without God.”

  Abdullah only lit up around kids. We didn’t have enough diapers for all those needy people, so we promised to return soon. After we left the camp, we drove to the top of a nearby hill that overlooked it and sat to catch our breath. I told myself that one day, he might be healthy enough to remarry and have more children. But Abdullah’s mind was elsewhere.

  “Look at all these families,” he said, staring down at the camp. “Then imagine all the millions of other families living in camps, getting so desperate that they risk that crossing. I don’t know if I can stand hearing more stories about people drowning in that sea. It’s not fair. All these charities spending billions of dollars in aid, and it’s still not enough. I want to do it myself. And deliver it myself, so I can ask, ‘What else do you need?’ ”

  “It will be impossible to help everyone.”

  “At least we can try. I thought that photo of Alan was the true wake-up call. A year later, did everybody forget? If this war doesn’t stop, there will be more starvation, more suffering. We need to end this war.”

  “Who are we? We can’t even help our families,” I said. “We are nobody.”

  When Rocco picked me up at the airport in Vancouver, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing out of my mouth was, “I didn’t want to leave. I don’t want to be here.” Rocco and Alan deserve sainthood for continuing to love and support me in so many ways. I returned to life at my salon, working Tuesdays through Saturdays. But the only thing that sparked my imagination was my recent conversations with Abdullah—about starting a charity, about keeping Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan’s voices alive. I started to think, “So what that we are nobodies? Even nobodies have a voice.”

  We could either wallow in shame and misery or continue to use our voices to stop the war and the refugee crisis. I decided to reach out to high schools and universities. I told them that I was available to talk, to share my family’s story in the hopes that it would motivate the students to help others in need. Many schools were happy to host me, and I met many beautiful young adults who wanted to help the refugees in some way or another.

  “You don’t need to do something big,” I would tell them. “Imagine yourself starting in your community, helping your needy neighbours. Even if you plant one seed, keep watering it and that seed will grow into something beautiful.”

  “Tima, you’ve given me hope,” a student told me after one of my talks. “I want to find a way to sponsor a refugee family and bring them to Canada.”

  Words like that were so beautiful to hear that they gave me the power to keep speaking. It was worth it. Like my baba always said, “Forget what hurts you. It won’t change anything. Be proud of yourself and remember that our story is one of many.
Inshallah, everyone will follow your courage.”

  I wanted to realize my brother’s dream of helping refugees everywhere. So I called Abdullah and said, “Let’s start a charity in our family’s name, dedicated to Ghalib and Alan and all the refugee kids.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I have no clue. I can register it here, and we can start by focusing on the kids near you in the Kurdistan-based camps. Then, when it’s safe, hopefully we can help the ones in Syria, and if we can make it grow, we can start helping other children and refugees around the world.”

  “Fatima, if I could deliver anything to those kids, my life would be worth living.”

  I called a local lawyer, who offered to help with the legal work for free. It would take six months or even longer for our charity to become registered. I created a basic website for anyone willing to provide support in the meantime. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Finally, we had a way forward.

  Chapter 15

  Al-shajarah marat la t’eish iza ghyirna makana

  Trees Often Transplanted Never Prosper

  I’m in Sham, at our family’s house, making snowballs with Abdullah and our friends on the rooftop. We are so happy it’s snowing. The snow rarely survives a full day. The sun will come out and it will melt, and the steep, cobbled streets will flood and glisten. We want to make the most of every second in the snow. Abdullah races down to the kitchen and returns with a bowl. He makes a snowball and rolls it in the bowl until it glitters.

  “I made something special for you,” he says. “Have a seat, and enjoy my hab al-’aziz.” He hands me a snowball coated in anise seed and sugar.

  “Mom!” someone calls out, startling me out of my daydream.

  I was not a child in Sham anymore. I was standing at my kitchen window, staring out at the falling snow. It was December 2016. My son, Alan, was standing behind me, saying, “I’m going to shovel the driveway so that you can get your car out later.”