A Dangerous Crossing--A Novel

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  No functioning hospitals were left; even the underground clinic had been shredded. The most dangerous job in Aleppo was working as a doctor or nurse.

  The sky had fallen in Aleppo. No corner of the city was spared. There was nothing Sami hadn’t seen over the course of the war: barrel bombs, clusters, Scud missiles, mortar fire, snipers, chemical weapons. From one day to the next, a house on a well-known route would disappear. And now that their station house was gone, they’d have to begin again.

  They were committed to the people of Aleppo.

  Just as well that they were.

  Nobody else was coming.

  * * *

  It had taken Sami time to gain the strength to risk the journey to the border. Ali didn’t know the details of Sami’s experience—Sami refused to describe it, so Ali left it alone. He knew East Aleppo had been starved out by the siege. Sami had admitted as much. When Israa had cradled Sami’s head in her lap, he’d let slip, “I’ve been dreaming in fruit.” Another time, doubled over with stomach cramps, he’d said, “Hunger is the real assassin.”

  He hadn’t told them the worst until Ali had confided his horrors. When they took Sami to see the ruins of Israa’s house, Sami didn’t react.

  “It’s just like this in Aleppo. Every block, every house. There are no more roads left to walk on. When you come back from digging out the wounded, there’s no water to wash off the blood.”

  Ali didn’t ask who Sami had fought with or where his loyalties lay. Since he was a member of the Civil Defense, they couldn’t be with Assad. As for the rest, the rebels who held the east, the increasing fundamentalism that characterized the different groups who were the backbone of the rebellion, it had been enough for Sami to say, “Nothing’s worse than the black flag of ISIS. We saved Aleppo from that.”

  But what was left of Aleppo? When he posed the question to his friend, Sami’s response was hopeful, underscored by his courage.

  “As long as we resist, they can’t say they’ve beaten us down.” He smiled at Ali. “Even if Aleppo is gone, they can’t defeat Saladin.”

  But Saladin couldn’t save them now. His legacy was shrouded by phosphorus gas.

  Sami refused to concede. “It matters that you survived. You owe it to us to resist.”

  Ali shook his head. “I’m guilty of things that will send me to the fire.”

  “We’ve already been through the fire.”

  He wanted to be consoled. He wanted absolution from Sami, so he said, “There’s nothing worse than what I’ve done.”

  “You think so?” Sami lit a cigarette. He passed another to Ali. “You know my brother was with me in the Civil Defense?”

  Ali hadn’t wanted to ask about Shahoud. “Is he with the Mukhabarat?”

  Sami squeezed his eyes shut. “After we trained in Turkey, men signed up to volunteer—men like me, tailors, mechanics, schoolteachers like my brother. He had a fiancée on the regime side, did I tell you?”

  Sami hadn’t talked about his brother at all; it was one of those lines Ali knew better than to cross.

  “We divided the team into shifts. I was on the night shift.” Sami mimed putting on eyeglasses. “Shahoud had bad eyesight, he thought he’d see better in daylight. The next strike, they dropped two bombs. Shahoud went out after the first hit. The damage was so massive, they called for another team. When we got there, you should have seen it. The bomb had peeled the city block like an egg. You could see inside the shell, bodies everywhere, a mountain of rubble—we were searching through the thickest fog. So many people called for help, each member of our teams was active. Their faces were caked with dust, some of them were bleeding. They went to the site too soon, they were lucky they missed the second strike.”

  Ali shook his head. No one in Aleppo was lucky.

  Sami dug out a staircase. He found a girl whose throat was sliced by shrapnel; she was holding her sister’s hand. The rest of her sister’s body was scattered under the stairs. He used the flashlight on his helmet for visibility. The staircase was in danger of collapse; someone was calling from below. He attempted a vertical rescue. It was like an excavation, digging through blocks of concrete, trying to avoid the twisted steel.

  After the strikes’ pulverizing roar, quiet engulfed the street. It was a kind of death, this absence of the people of Aleppo. So eerily quiet, it reminded Sami of that Friday, the first time in thirteen hundred years that the call to prayer hadn’t sounded.

  The war had swallowed the Adhaan, divesting the city of its essence, the moment of Aleppo’s death. Unless that moment had come later, with the building’s final collapse.

  They’d worked with too much urgency and not enough skill. By the time they reached the bottom, no one was calling out. The dust was so thick, he felt like he was swallowing metal. He’d never forget the taste, razor-edged and cruel. They found the body at the bottom; its legs were severed by the blast. Sami checked to see if the boy was still alive … his blood was the one bit of color able to penetrate the dust.

  Ali didn’t want to hear the rest.

  Sami’s recital was remorseless.

  “I turned him and found his glasses. It was my brother, Shahoud.”

  Behind them, Israa was crying, deep, convulsive sobs, Aya cradled in her arms.

  Sami stubbed out his cigarette. “There are worse sins than the ones you’ve claimed for yourself.”

  Ali tried to embrace him. He knew Sami didn’t like to be touched, but in that moment, he’d forgotten. His body stiff, Sami moved away.

  “There’s nothing left of my life in Aleppo. There’s nothing left of Aleppo. Well…” A ghostly smile creased his mouth. “There was one thing I wanted to keep. Intelligence sent it to Damascus.”

  “What was it?” Ali couldn’t disguise the anguish in his voice.

  Sami flicked his cigarette away. “It was my brother’s white helmet.”

  30

  Calais, France

  The Calais Jungle was every bit as oppressive as Sehr had expected it to be. In some ways she was reminded of Moria. From the neat white containers at the heart of the concrete grid, a forest of tents spiraled out, and farther out from the center there were mounds of garbage and abandoned plastic sheeting. The makeup of the camp’s inhabitants was more diverse than on the islands, but here the hopelessness had set in more deeply. There was little sign that the camp’s inhabitants had anywhere to go beyond the northern perimeter. Purportedly, there were mosques and shops available to the camp’s residents, though not all those who ended up in Calais were Muslims. There were also distribution centers, but not nearly enough to meet the need.

  Every road at Calais was blocked—there was no work to be had and no hope of a permanent address. No chance of crossing the Channel, and nothing but risk involved in trying to stow away on the vehicles crossing into England.

  She’d scheduled a meeting with Matthieu Arnaud, the French government’s liaison with the camp. He treated her to a breakdown of numbers and ongoing problems. He did his best to be fair, passing no judgment on those who sought the camp’s protection, or on those who were clamoring for the Calais Jungle to be destroyed.

  He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and had a censorious cast to his face that wasn’t reflected in his straightforward speech.

  Sehr asked about Audrey’s visit to the camp earlier in the month, and the young man began to rummage through quantities of paper on his desk, searching for the agenda where he kept his appointments. When Sehr asked if his calendar was backed up on his phone, he gave a weary shrug. “My phone is stolen once a month like clockwork, so it’s best I rely on my notes.”

  His office had a view of the English Channel. He glanced out the window at the peaceful expanse of waves and the miles of untouched beachfront.

  “We built this camp for fifteen hundred people—it’s acquired a life of its own. We’ve had to work to contain the sprawl. We’ve had fires, we had to raze the southern part of the camp at the insistence of a certain segment of t
he population, and now there are tensions around the northern zone—what can I tell you, mademoiselle? We are heading to a point of conflict. These migrants cross agricultural lands, they fight with each other, there is a lot of violence spiraling out from the inside, and our trade unions and truck drivers have had enough. If migrants want to go to the UK, bien, the British government should build the camp on their side of the Channel, instead of telling us we aren’t doing enough. These are their words, not mine, but to be frank with you, the Calais Jungle is a nightmare.”

  Sehr’s family was from Afghanistan. Her parents had come to Canada as refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. In a soft voice, she said, “If only they could have stayed in their own lands.”

  There was no judgment behind the words. Arnaud flashed a sharp glance at her, his hands stilling in their work, but as he saw her expression, he took her words at face value.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “If only. There’s a balance to be struck, but it seems to me it’s struck on the backs of those who have very little say in what’s decided.” He paused for a moment in thought, then concluded with, “They are at the mercy of too many forces, with very few choices available. The making and unmaking of all of this—that is beyond my purview.”

  Yet he had a role to play, Sehr thought. A critical role, perhaps.

  His hands settled on his agenda. He snatched it up and paged to the week in question.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Sehr. “I should remember your friend, but the number of people who pass through this camp test my personal recall.”

  He read quickly for a moment, half-whispering to himself.

  Sehr waited, her hands clasped in her lap.

  “She made an appointment to speak with me about the Jungle, though she never called it by that name.” He gave Sehr a sudden smile. “I remember her now. She was very pretty, very charming, very much in command of her facts. She knew a lot about the camp before she arrived. And she came at a tumultuous time—two weeks after we closed the eviction zone. She was concerned that we had done that.”

  “Why? My understanding is that the French government bussed out the inhabitants of the eviction zone to other parts of France. The barrier to the highway, that’s relatively new, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “To prevent stowaways from creating problems for our drivers, we cut off their access to the road.” He sighed deeply. “Your friend wanted to look at our records. How many people in, how many people out at any given time.” He paused. “She was interested in children, but we don’t keep records like that. It’s impossible—a lot of people are dodging the authorities, they don’t want to be pinned to a place.”

  Sehr thought of things her parents had confided about their journey to Canada, their long delay in northwest Pakistan.

  “It’s more than that, wouldn’t you say? Many of them come from places where the authorities are corrupt or dangerous. They may not know whom to trust.”

  Arnaud agreed. “Yes, we can’t discount that. The point is I couldn’t give Mademoiselle Clare the figures she was looking for—our response in France has been reactive, improvisational. The main concern has been ‘How do we get these people out?’ A lot of the population has been transient, evading registration, so our estimates are just that.”

  Sehr wondered how Audrey had received this news. She thought she could guess what Audrey had been chasing. “Did she say why she was focused on children?”

  “There have been many unaccompanied children who’ve made the trek.”

  Sehr puzzled this through, staring out at the waters of the Channel. From here, the camp looked like a colorful assortment of blocks, flung carelessly over a patch of land. She could accept that unaccompanied children ended up in countries that neighbored Syria—Lebanon, Turkey, or Jordan. But it seemed unlikely that they made it as far as France. When she asked this question point-blank, Arnaud tugged at his tie.

  “We do the best we can. Our welcome center is overwhelmed.”

  “Was she looking for anyone in particular? A girl named Israa, by any chance?”

  His tone was one of genuine surprise. “She didn’t mention anyone by name. She wanted an overview of operations. She was trying to build a picture in her mind of what happens at each stop along the route.”

  But a picture of what, precisely? Sehr wished she had answers.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me, Monsieur Arnaud?”

  “There is one thing. When Mademoiselle Clare came, she seemed to know the roadblocks refugees encounter. She knew keeping the camp intact has been a major point of contention between France and our neighbor across the Channel. The pressure to close Calais comes from the English as much as it does from locals. When Mademoiselle Clare expressed interest in the children in the eviction zone, I told her the best thing she could do was take her concerns to the British.”

  Sehr frowned. She was getting close to it now—she could almost put her finger on it.

  “The British insisted we wait to close the zone until they relocated the children with their relatives in the UK.”

  “And did you?”

  Frustrated, Arnaud flipped his agenda shut. “We had no say over the eviction, it was in the hands of the police.”

  Sehr stood up and collected her briefcase. “So what happened to the children in question?”

  Arnaud passed over a business card to Sehr. It was the address of a mission in Brussels, but contact details were scant. Inwardly, she sighed. She needed to book a flight. As she made her calculations about her itinerary, she realized Arnaud had yet to answer.

  When she looked at him, she saw that he was sweating.

  “Monsieur Arnaud? What happened to these children you say were never counted?”

  His answer sent a frisson of fear down her spine.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know.”

  * * *

  In the taxi that took her to the ferry, Sehr tried Esa’s number again. He didn’t answer her call, she tried a third time. When it went to voicemail, she sat back in her seat to consider her options. Should she set up a meeting at the mission, or should she report back to Nate? If she did go on to Brussels, was there anything the others had discovered that would tell her what questions to ask?

  She decided to call Rachel. She tried not to think about that painful altercation in Athens. The things Esa had said … the harsh way he’d spoken to her … why would she put herself in a place where he could treat her like that again? Her heart beating faster, she realized she was angry. After all this time, she was angry: weary of being a supplicant, weary of having given herself where there was no appreciation of her gifts, of the risks she continued to take for a man who could shut her out of his life as easily as he shut off his phone.

  By the time Rachel picked up, Sehr’s tone was curt and to the point. She explained what she’d learned, advising Rachel she was en route to Brussels.

  Rachel didn’t say anything to this. What she did say in a kind and calming tone was, “Are you all right, Sehr? Did anything happen in France?”

  Sehr swallowed a fiery response. Esa’s indifference couldn’t be blamed on Rachel.

  Then it occurred to her she’d never asked him if there was someone else. He was so warm with Rachel, so close to her—why hadn’t she noticed this before? And why hadn’t he told her as much, if her suspicions were true? Maybe he thought nothing would stop what he’d once called her reckless pursuit. Or maybe he preferred to keep his secrets to himself.

  “Sehr?” Rachel prodded. “Are you there?”

  Miserable at her own thoughts, Sehr pulled herself together. “I’m here, Rachel, I’m sorry. Do you have any leads for me to follow up in Brussels?”

  Rachel summarized their findings in Izmir. She was in a car headed to the Syrian border. Just the thought of it made Sehr worry.

  “How close to the border, Rachel? What are you chasing that’s worth the risk?”

  She heard Rachel ask Ali a question along these lines.

  “Not t
hat close. We won’t get snatched across the border. But the boss wants me to ask if you found out anything about the storage receipt or about the name CIJA?”

  Sehr ascended into fury. “Tell him to ask me himself!”

  She hung up without another word.

  * * *

  Then she reconsidered. She knew what CIJA was—the name had come up during her research. She’d been distracted by Audrey’s trip to Brussels, but wasn’t the storage facility more significant? She considered Delft’s location, pulling up a map on her phone. She moved the map around until her suspicions were confirmed.

  She had a good idea what the storage facility contained.

  And she knew why Audrey had made the trip to Delft.

  31

  Camp Apaydin

  Hatay, Turkey

  The gated entrance to Camp Apaydin was guarded by a pair of Turkish soldiers in camouflage gear and matching caps. They were lounging under a makeshift shelter, but when the van pulled up to their gates, they jumped to their feet, demanding papers.

  Rachel looked out through the passenger window. They’d approached via a downslope that offered a broad view of the camp—rows of white tents neatly laid out, stamped with the logo of the Turkish Red Crescent. Rachel had done some reading: the camp housed four thousand residents. Nearly all were military officers who’d deserted the Syrian army; the rest were members of their families. Apaydin was under the jurisdiction of the prime minister’s Disasters and Emergencies Directorate, a division known as AFAD. Well-maintained and strictly patrolled, the camp was bordered with a perimeter of corrugated tin topped by rolls of barbed wire, while the camp itself was on the grid. Transmission towers were staged throughout the camp.