No Safe Place

by Deborah Ellis

  Abdul got away from the main crowd and started to eat, still standing, using his fingers to get the food to his mouth. He ate quickly. Having food stolen was not uncommon. He used the rice to encircle morsels of stew and didn’t take his eyes off his plate until his tongue had lapped up everything.

  This would be his last meal until tomorrow.

  He looked up then at the crowd. It didn’t seem to have gotten any smaller, even though he could tell from how deeply the ladles were going into the pots that the charity would soon run out of food. He began to look for an exit, but the only way off the quay was through the crowd.

  He’d just reached the bin to toss away his plate when a roar rose up from the crowd. Abdul checked the tables. Food was still being served, but something was going on.

  He scooted behind the servers and jumped up on the loading dock. From there he could look out over the crowd.

  Something was happening in the middle of the lake of people. Bodies were bumping up against each other, the movements becoming harsher and rougher. In minutes the shouts turned to screams, and the edges of the crowd became wider as people in the middle tried to get away from the growing brawl.

  “Who is it this time?” one of the charity workers asked Abdul as he jumped down to help her load the empty pots into the back of the van.

  “I can’t tell. Looks like everybody.”

  There were too many people in too small a space. The crowd by the tables was pushed from behind, shoving one of the charity workers right into the wall.

  “That’s it, clear away!” the woman in charge yelled. She had a voice like a megaphone.

  It caused more panic. The people near the tables who had not yet been fed were desperate for food, and they saw their chance to eat being taken from them. One man took a pot that still had some rice in it out of the charity worker’s hands. He tried to tell her that he would distribute it, that she should get into the van and be safe, but he didn’t speak her language, and he had to yell to make himself heard through the crowd. All she heard was a man yelling at her and trying to take something out of her hands. She didn’t understand. She screamed.

  Abdul watched the tables collapse, the legs snap and the pots fall to the ground, spilling the food that was left. Hungry men, women and children tried to scoop up the food with their hands, swallowing stew with pebbles and dirt. Several people were stepped on. Their cries were lost under the trample.

  Abdul stayed on the truck helping to load pots, giving a hand up to the distraught workers.

  “It’s the Afghans and Eritreans,” one said. “An argument. Someone’s been stabbed.”

  “We have to get in there,” another worker said, digging out the first-aid kit.

  “You can’t. You can’t get through.”

  “I’ll help,” Abdul said without thinking. If anything, he was smaller than the woman with the medical bag. “Stay behind me.”

  The woman grabbed firmly onto his jacket and they jumped down off the truck into the crowd.

  Abdul plunged blindly, going against the wave of people, feeling backed up by the woman clutching his clothes.

  “Medic!” he shouted in Arabic, in French and in Kurdish. “Clear the way — medic!”

  Through the noise of the crowd came the noise of police sirens, the special sirens of the CRS, the security police. The sound that put terror into any migrant.

  Abdul knew that whoever was wounded would be arrested before they were treated, and likely deported after that. He wanted to help get them out of there, so that when the CRS got to the middle of the crowd there would be no one they could take away. The police would beat at the crowd with batons, but migrants were tough. Many had been beaten before, often by people more brutal than the French.

  By a miracle, the crowd parted enough to let Abdul and the woman through. The man on the ground was Eritrean. Blood came from a wound in his chest, and he was struggling to breathe.

  The charity worker opened the first-aid kid and ripped open packets of gauze with her teeth.

  “Hold this!” She pulled in volunteers to put pressure on the wound and carry the man to the truck.

  Abdul could tell from the cries and the noise of pounding boots that the CRS was almost at them. He got ready to run.

  Then he spied the knife — a serrated fish-gutter’s knife — scuffling around under people’s feet.

  A knife like that would give him protection. He wouldn’t even have to use it. He could just show it to people and they’d back away.

  Scrambling on his hands and knees, he went after the knife. Several times he almost had it, then it would be kicked from his reach by the crowd on the move.

  Finally his hand went firmly around the knife handle. Already he felt stronger. He held it tightly and got to his feet.

  He brought the knife up just as a CRS officer moved in close to him. The knife stabbed into the officer’s arm.

  In that moment, Abdul saw the officer look at his face and memorize it through the protective plexiglass of his faceshield.

  In the instant it took for the officer to raise his good arm, the one with the baton in it, Abdul ducked and plunged through the crowd.

  He could hear the officers coming after him, could hear the cries of the migrants who closed ranks and were beaten for not getting out of the way. He heard, and he kept moving.

  At the yacht basin, he jumped the low fence and stumbled his way down the stone steps, slimy from the seaweed left by the low tide. He tried to blend in with the wall as he made his way around the narrow ledge toward the steps in the opposite corner. The ledge was slippery, too, caked with seaweed and trash. But at least he couldn’t be seen from above. And the few boats in the basin were abandoned by their owners this late in the season.

  It was then that he noticed he was still clutching the knife. And it was covered with blood.

  Abdul grabbed at an iron ring attached to the stone wall and leaned down, dipping the knife into the cold sea water. He wiped the blade and handle dry on his trousers and righted himself on the ledge.

  The knife was too long to fit into his pocket and it was unsheathed, so it was dangerous to carry close to his body, and he certainly couldn’t carry it out in the open.

  For now he cupped the bottom of the handle in the palm of his hand and stuck the rest of it up his sleeve. He made his way over to the steps and headed up them.

  He emerged from the basin by the old Fort Risban and kept walking toward the beach. Across from the boardwalk, an inflatable slide in the shape of the sinking ship Titanic looked depressed and out of air. The children who might have played on it were lined up at the ice cream trucks, whining in the chill breeze while their parents argued. The beach looked like a holiday, with beach huts and white sand, but Abdul knew how much dog dirt there was underneath that sand.

  Away from the beach, in the high dune grass, Abdul found a child’s T-shirt, discarded and dirty. He shook it free of dried seaweed and gravel.

  “Mickey Mouse Christmas,” he read, and he smiled at the cartoon with the big ears and the red hat. He took the knife, wrapped it in the T-shirt, then undid his shirt and stuck the bundle next to his skin. He would not be able to get at it quickly, but he felt better knowing he had it.

  By the time the knife was hidden away and the last button on his shirt was refastened, Abdul knew one thing. He had stayed in Calais too long. He’d try to enter the Channel tunnel again that very night. And this time, he’d make it.

  He needed a place to hide until it got dark. The officer he’d stabbed might be able to identify him. There was a chance he’d be recognized.

  Lacking any better ideas, he headed toward the Jungle, doing his best to walk calmly, not to draw attention. He’d hide among the other migrants in the shantytown they’d erected in the forest out of packing crates and tarps. Even the police were afraid to go there.

  A
bdul could tell something was wrong when he was still half a mile away. Migrants were running and yelling, and he could smell smoke.

  He started to run closer when he saw the riot police leading a convoy of bulldozers into the Jungle.

  “They’re flattening everything,” a man called to him in Kurdish. “Don’t go down there. You’ll get your head broken.”

  Abdul joined his fellow Kurd, and they climbed a ladder attached to a warehouse wall. They went to the edge of the flat roof and sat, Abdul adjusting the knife next to his belly so he wouldn’t stab himself.

  “Mosul,” the man said.

  “Kirkut,” Abdul told him, naming the place of his father’s birth. It was easier that they were both Iraqi Kurds. They at least had a starting place to trust each other.

  They said no more for a long while and just watched the destruction taking place below them.

  Not that there was much to destroy. The shanties were constructed out of garbage, boards and plastic scrounged from the refuse tips or stolen from warehouse yards. Bits of plastic and cardboard were almost adequate in the summer, but it was now the middle of October. Surviving in them through the winter would be a gamble at best.

  “At least it was somewhere,” the Mosul man said, as if he was reading Abdul’s thoughts. “It was a place where a man could say, ‘I’m going home.’”

  “Somewhere to go,” Abdul agreed. He’d never had his own shack in the Jungle, but he’d made friends who let him sleep in theirs now and then. The shacks were scarcely more comfortable than sleeping on the street, and certainly no warmer. “Why now?”

  “I heard that a woman was raped.”

  That didn’t make sense. Women were raped all the time in the Jungle. The police didn’t care.

  “An English woman. Young. A journalism student,” the man said. “Now they decide the Jungle is unsafe. Now they decide the Jungle is unhealthy. My little daughter died of pneumonia in our shack, but it wasn’t unhealthy then.”

  “You have children?” Abdul asked, not even able to imagine what it would be like to live in the Jungle with children. He had only himself to take care of, and that was hard, every day.

  “I had three. Now I have one. One of my sons was born with health problems, and he died. One of Saddam’s bombs or one of Bush’s bombs, who knows? Another bomb took my wife.”

  A gust of wind blew tear gas in their direction, searing Abdul’s throat and making his eyes fill with water. He covered his face, closed his eyes, tried not to breathe and waited for the wind to change.

  “What will you do?” he asked when the breeze shifted.

  “There’s talk of a hunger strike. Not just among the Kurds — among the Afghans, too, and the Iranians, and the Eritreans. A hunger strike in the middle of Calais, in Place d’Armes.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Some think it will shame the French and the rest of Europe into helping us.”

  “Europe would be happy if we all starved to death. Our dead bodies would be easy for them to deal with.”

  “I think shaming them is good. But a hunger strike wouldn’t work. We don’t have the solidarity. We’re attacking each other instead of coming together.”

  As if to underline the point, the sound of an argument reached their ears from below. Two different groups, in two different languages, were fighting over some discarded cardboard they both needed to rebuild their shanties.

  “What does the world expect of us?” the man asked. “When we are treated like animals, we become animals.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  “My son and I are going to make our way to Paris, on foot if we have to — what’s another long walk? We are going to the Eiffel Tower, or to that fancy garden with the flowers, or to the place where the president lives. I will get some gasoline, and I will pour it over my son and myself. Then I will tell him how much I love him. I will hold him close to me, and I will light a match.”

  Abdul wasn’t shocked. But the man was making one big mistake.

  “Spare your son,” he said.

  “For what? For this?” The man gestured at the chaos and misery below them.

  “Take him to a mosque,” Abdul said. “Or a synagogue or a church. Leave him there with a letter from you that he can read when he gets lonely. Leave him with anything you still have that will remind him of you and where he came from. But leave him there, if you are determined to do this thing. The religious people will care for him. They’ll find him a home.”

  “You think it’s better he be cared for by strangers?”

  “No, it’s better he be cared for by you. Cared for, not set on fire.”

  “Go away. You are too young to know anything.”

  Abdul got to his feet. “Give your son a chance. If you don’t like it here, go somewhere else.”

  “Good advice. Go follow it yourself. How long have you been here?”

  Abdul stomped away. He was thinking hard.

  After every raid or riot, there was a huge crush of people at the Chunnel entrance. The security police would be there in force tonight, too, and they’d be angry because one of their own had been stabbed. His chances of getting through were very small.

  But he still had a way out.

  The smuggler was leaving at two in the morning. Abdul knew the place the boat was leaving from.

  All he needed to do was to keep hidden until then.

  THREE

  “If you give me a hard time, I will dump you in the Channel.”

  Abdul stood in the shadow between the canal wall and the light tower. Below him, almost close enough to touch, a small group of migrants were getting ready to make the final stage of their journey.

  The smuggler repeated his warning in French, just to be sure he was understood.

  “Now, give me your money.”

  Abdul counted heads. There was a family of five. They looked to be from Eritrea or Somalia. One of the children was a baby and would sit in its mother’s lap. So the five of them would take up four spaces.

  There was a teenaged girl, downplaying that she was a girl by tucking her long braid inside the back of her jacket. She wore a big hat pulled down around her face, and men’s clothes that were loose and big around her. Clearly, though, she was a girl.

  Five spaces.

  There was a white boy, medium height, young looking but trying to look older by frowning. White men were unusual in the Calais migrant world, but not unheard of. There was a war in Georgia. There were wars in lots of places.

  Six spaces.

  A tall teenager, male, with Central Asian features, stood next to the white boy. Was he Tajik? Mongolian? Abdul couldn’t tell. Maybe Afghan. He was hunched over and also frowning.

  Seven spaces.

  “Piglet! Get over here and help!”

  A small boy, ten or eleven years old, came running up to the smuggler. His hair was long and unkempt.

  The smuggler yelled at him in English.

  “You’re supposed to be working, not playing around. Is everything ready?”

  “I…I think so.” The boy spoke with a British accent.

  “You think so. Useless brat. Get all this crap on the boat.”

  The boy struggled with the two bags the Eritrean family had with them.

  The boy would take up a space. That made eight spaces. And the smuggler would take up a space. Nine spaces.

  Abdul was going on that boat. He crept behind the dumpsters and looked down into the water.

  The boat tied there was barely a bucket. It bobbed like a cork in the harsh waves smashing the old sea wall. Abdul counted out seating spaces for maybe six, if they all squished together. Even then, the boat would ride heavy.

  Evidently, the Eritreans thought so, too. The husband and wife discussed it furiously, the money in the husband’s hands, not yet reli
nquished to the smuggler. The smuggler got impatient and snatched the bills away.

  “The boat is too small,” the husband said. “The sea is too rough. My children…”

  “You can always make more,” the smuggler said. “You people breed like rats.”

  “We don’t go,” the husband said, his arm around his child. “We stay, find another boat. Return our money.”

  “Return your money? What do you think this is?”

  “Our money,” said the husband.

  “What money? Did you give me money? Better call the police.”

  The tall young man with the Asian features stepped forward and took the smuggler by the arm.

  The smuggler snorted and puffed.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The young man didn’t answer, just took the money out of the smuggler’s hand and gave it back to the Eritrean family. The smuggler glared hard at the young man, then signaled to the boy to get the family’s bags off the boat.

  “Enjoy the Calais winter, sleeping rough,” he said to the family. “You’ll wish you all died at sea.”

  To the tall young man he said, “You think you’re going to paradise in England? You’re going to hell — and I’ll make sure it’s a special one for you, you lousy Chinaman or whatever you are.”

  “Uzbek,” said the young man, and he stepped back into the group.

  “Uzbek,” the smuggler spat. “That goes for all of you. None of you have enough money for the voyage. Jobs have been arranged for you in England and you belong to me until your debt is paid. If you give me a hard time, now or later, I will make you disappear, and don’t think I can’t do it. I’m not forcing you to come. Remember that. I didn’t force you to do anything. You chose to be here, and you chose to agree to my terms.”

  Some choice, thought Abdul.

  The smuggler raised his voice. “Hey, Piglet. Get over here!” The boy came running again. “This is my nephew. My lousy sister died and saddled me with him. He has a name, but it doesn’t matter. To me he is a little pig eating my money.” He bent down and made pig-snort noises in the boy’s face. Then he knocked the boy to the ground with a wave of his big arm.