No Safe Place

by Deborah Ellis

  The migrants started to jump forward, but held themselves back.

  “See how I treat my own flesh and blood? Imagine how I will treat you out there on the open Channel, you who are not my family.”

  The boy got up from the dirt and hurried back to the wharf.

  “Now, give me your money.”

  Abdul watched as the remaining migrants dug deep into pockets to bring out rolls of money — money that had made long journeys hidden in dark places, or had been earned with deeds too hideous to speak of. They had all come to the end of the land without arriving at a safe place. England was their last hope, but they could go no farther on their own.

  The smuggler took the money from the Uzbek first. The boy looked about seventeen, and his shoulders drooped as if from exhaustion. Abdul saw him head down the steps to the boat, speak to the nephew and shake his hand.

  Next was the white-skinned boy.

  “You’re fifteen?” the smuggler asked. “You look twelve. As long as you can work.” The boy handed over his money. “No Communist tricks. Behave yourself, Boris.”

  “I am Russian, not Communist, and my name is Cheslav, not Boris.”

  “Who cares, Boris? Get in the boat.”

  Last to board was the girl. The smuggler stared at her with a hard and hungry look.

  “The little Gypsy child,” he said. “Welcome aboard, sweetheart. If the journey gets dull, you can liven it up.”

  “I am fourteen, not a child. And my name is Rosalia, not sweetheart.”

  “Your voice I don’t need. Keep it quiet and get in the boat.”

  Abdul watched the little boat fill up. He moved around the edges, from dark place to dark place, until he could see that the smuggler’s attention was focused elsewhere. Then he stepped down into the boat and quickly scrunched himself onto a space beside Rosalia. The other migrants made room, and no one spoke.

  The little boat was half a mile from shore, the thick fog already making the coast of France a thing of the past, when the smuggler realized there was one person extra.

  “Who’s that? Who are you?”

  “I’m Abdul. You told me I could come.”

  “You’re that dirty Arab, that Kurd. I told you that you could not come!”

  “Well, here I am.”

  The smuggler started to stand, but that made the little boat rock even more in the choppy water. He could not keep his balance and sat back down again.

  “Then we’ll turn back. Boy! Turn us toward shore!”

  The boy was back by the motor, his hand on the rudder. He looked around. “Which way is the shore?”

  The fog was thick. The lights of France had vanished, and the lights of England were nowhere to be seen. The migrants clung to the benches they sat on, and waves tossed their little vessel.

  “You are a fool, just like your mother was,” the smuggler yelled at the little boy. “Just turn the boat around. Do I have to come back there?”

  Instinctively, the migrants squished together to form a barrier in case he should try to pass through. One step and he could topple them all into the cold October water.

  The boy at the back moved the rudder and the boat started to circle. The sea was against it. Waves smacked their faces and sent water flowing onto their clothes. The wind would not let them turn.

  His uncle kept yelling, and the boy kept trying to make the turn.

  “You will get us all killed,” Cheslav yelled. “Try to get the rest of your money then, when you’re at the bottom of the ocean!”

  Water sloshed against their ankles, filling their shoes. The migrants tried to bail out by cupping sea water with their hands.

  “Straighten that rudder,” the smuggler ordered. “And pass up your money, Kurd, or jump off my boat.”

  “I’ll pay you when we get to England,” Abdul said. “If we get there.”

  The smuggler cursed and ranted, but the growing storm gave him little choice.

  “I’ll get your money,” he said. “I’ll get your money and a whole lot else. You’ll regret this. You can’t cross me! I am a powerful man.”

  “You’re a loud man, anyway,” Abdul heard Rosalia mutter.

  For awhile they seemed to be making progress, although it was dark and foggy and windy, and they could well have been going nowhere at all. The waves got bigger, sending the boat climbing to steep heights, then dropping it into deep troughs. The Uzbek was sick over the side.

  The smuggler took a flask out of his jacket and poured its contents down his throat.

  “You all think paradise awaits you in England,” he said. “Think again. The British don’t want you. The British don’t want me and I was born there.”

  The more he drank, the more he switched his languages between English and French. He shouted sometimes and mumbled at others, so the migrants could not follow what he was saying. They could guess, though. They’d heard it all before.

  “Sure, I bring you over the Channel for money,” he said. “A man’s got a right to earn a living. But I also do it for revenge. Each of you mongrels who lands on the Queen’s soil is like a poke in the eye to Her Majesty.” Then he sang some lines of “God Save the Queen,” substituting “save” and “live” with words that were rude and vulgar.

  On and on he went, ranting and drinking. He didn’t even seem to notice when it started to rain.

  Abdul pulled up the collar of his jacket, but the gesture meant nothing. He was already wet.

  “And then on top of it, I get saddled with a kid. A useless insect of a kid. Afraid of his own shadow. Boy! Get up here!”

  The boy didn’t move. “I…the rudder…”

  “Kurd-turd — you take the rudder. Send the brat up here.”

  “He can hear you from his seat,” Abdul said. “We all can.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want you all to hear. Maybe I want a private moment between uncle and nephew.”

  “Then it would be better to do that on the shore,” said Cheslav.

  The smuggler reached out and slugged the Russian. His seatmate, the Uzbek, grabbed hold so he wouldn’t go over the side.

  “Hold it like this,” the boy said to Abdul, handing him the rudder. “It’s not hard.”

  “You don’t have to go up there,” Abdul said.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Balancing with his hands on the shoulders of the migrants, the boy walked the length of the little boat. The others kept him from falling as the boat rocked violently back and forth.

  “Here he is,” the smuggler said, grabbing the boy’s arm. “The cause of all my sorrow. My Jonah, my millstone. I had a good life until you came along. I had a woman — you don’t think I could get a woman, do you, mongrels? But the kid came along, and she left. ‘You’re work enough,’ she said to me. ‘I’m not looking after someone else’s kid.’”

  The smuggler’s big hand went down on top of the boy’s head. He tangled his fat fingers in the boy’s long, fine hair. Even in the dark and the rain, Abdul could see the boy wince. But he did not make a sound.

  “You’re bad luck. You’re an unwanted puppy, aren’t you?” the smuggler said, bringing his face low and breathing his foulness right into the boy’s nostrils. “You know what we do to unwanted puppies? We do to them what the sailors in the Bible did to their Jonah. We throw them overboard.”

  The next movements were swift and sudden and seemed to come from all over the boat.

  The smuggler picked up the boy by his hair and moved to toss him out of the boat. At almost the same instant, the Uzbek jumped from his seat and flung himself at the smuggler.

  The boat rocked viciously, the Channel water spilling in as each side dipped low.

  “Bail!” yelled Abdul, but the others were already doing that, even while they screamed in fear.

  The smuggler, clumsy and drunk, tried to shuc
k off his attacker.

  A wave decided it. Over the bow went the three of them, the smuggler still clutching the boy. The big man fought the water, trying to keep himself afloat. He was forced to release his fingers from his nephew’s hair. Every time he yelled and cursed, the sea flowed into his open mouth.

  The boy was now loose, carried away by the sea. The Uzbek pushed off the smuggler, who had managed to grab hold, and went out after the boy, his long arms slamming through the waves.

  Several times he just about grabbed the child, only to have the waves carry him away again. Finally, he took hold of the boy’s jacket and held tight. They began the hard swim back to the boat, the Uzbek holding the boy’s face out of the water.

  There were oars in the boat. Cheslav and Rosalia held them out for the Uzbek to grab on to. Abdul steered the boat close to them, then cut the motor to hold it steady as the Uzbek pushed the boy out of the water for the others to haul back onto the boat. Then it was the Uzbek’s turn, and the boat dipped perilously close to going right over as he reached up and climbed on board.

  For a long moment, they could all do nothing more than breathe. Abdul took off his own jacket and put it around the boy, but everyone’s clothes were more or less soaked, and the boat held no blankets.

  Abdul had almost forgotten about the smuggler until he heard a voice roar up from the sea and felt a slap so hard on the side of the boat that the shudder ran up and down its spine. A fat hand appeared out of the depths and gripped the edge of the boat.

  A second hand followed, and then it was as if Neptune himself was trying to climb into the boat. It tipped over almost ninety degrees and was edging to a complete flip when Cheslav took up an oar and smashed it down on the smuggler’s hands. Abdul thought he could hear the bones break.

  One hand released, and the boat began to right itself.

  Rosalia picked up the other oar, and she and Cheslav whacked at the other hand until it was smashed and bloody. Abdul, his hands clutching Rosalia and Cheslav so he wouldn’t fall over, kicked at the smuggler’s head, smashing his nose, and pushed him away from the side of the boat. The oars pushed him farther away, and the waves did the rest.

  It was barely a minute before the sea sucked away his screams and curses.

  The migrants sat back down on the benches. No one spoke. The boy passed in and out of consciousness, and the Uzbek who had saved him shivered and shook in his wet clothes.

  The rain came down and the waves carried the boat this way and that. Abdul could not get the motor re-started. The others tried, but they also had no luck. Without the motor, the rudder was useless.

  The migrants huddled together so they could share what little warmth they had. They bailed out the boat with their cupped hands and scanned the sky for any signs of daylight.

  Abdul was sure that every slap of a wave against the hull was the slap of the smuggler, caught up with them and ready for vengeance in the cold, dark night.

  FOUR

  Abdul was tired of huddling in the house.

  Bit by bit, he headed toward the door, trying to be invisible. It wasn’t easy. Not only did he have the handle of his guitar case tight in his hand, but there were wall-to-wall relatives packed into his parents’ small house.

  He’d been cooped up with them for more than two weeks while the earth shook and the sirens shrieked and Baghdad went up in flames. He’d tried his best to do the extra work his mother asked of him — the extra work brought on by all the people seeking refuge in their house because they thought it was in a safe neighborhood. He hadn’t even complained — well, not too much — when his older cousins and brothers had gone out with the men to find supplies and he was kept at home by his mother, even though he was eleven and hardly a child.

  But today was Wednesday. He’d already missed two Wednesdays with his guitar teacher, and he was not going to miss a third. All he needed to do was make it through the door.

  It helped that the glass in the windows had been shattered by the explosions. The family had covered the windowpanes with flattened cardboard boxes and sheets of newspaper. It made the house darker than it would normally be. And since most of the bombs fell at night, people slept during the day. Abdul could see several sleeping relatives in each room he passed. He also had to be careful of his mother’s paintings, taken down and stacked against the walls so they wouldn’t be damaged when the house shook.

  Holding his guitar carefully so it wouldn’t knock into something and make noise, Abdul went step by step toward the door. He even held his breath.

  From the back kitchen came the voices of his mother and her two sisters having a discussion about how many meals they could get out of the remaining flour and oil. With every second Abdul expected to be called on to fetch something or clean something.

  But he made it to the door, then through it. He even managed to close the door behind him.

  The small concrete yard was empty in the heat of the day, so Abdul had no problem crossing it and letting himself out through the high metal fence that separated their house from the street.

  He stepped out into a city he didn’t recognize.

  It was as though God had picked up the world, shaken it madly, then let it fall through His fingers and scatter on the ground.

  The men in his family should have prepared him. He should have been allowed to stay in the room when his brothers and older cousins came back with supplies and talked about the world outside. He should not have been sent out with the younger children.

  The houses immediately around Abdul’s house all had pieces missing. One had a huge hole in the roof. Another had a hole in the wall. Another had collapsed altogether. There were big chunks of cement and glass everywhere.

  Abdul headed off in the direction of his teacher’s street. He passed a home that had the whole front wall blasted away. Abdul could look into the open rooms. He saw an old man and woman sitting in the remains of their kitchen, looking at their hands.

  He kept walking, the guitar bumping gently against his legs. The more he walked, the more rubble there was. He saw buildings that were still smoking and cars that were smashed and broken. He almost stepped on the body of a man that was badly burned, the mouth still open in its final scream.

  Some neighborhoods were crowded with people scrambling through the wreckage, calling out to each other when they found food or a body. Others were trying to make crude repairs, shoring up their broken houses to get ready for the bombs to fall again.

  When he got to his teacher’s house, all that was left were hunks of concrete with steel rods sticking out of them like bones out of the remains of a fish. None of it was recognizable as walls or a roof.

  Abdul could see the blue of the curtains — just a scrap — peeking out beneath the remains of a cookstove.

  He called out his teacher’s name.

  “Bashar!”

  There was no answer.

  He called out the names of his teacher’s family members – his wife, Maryam, his sons, Mohammed and Samir, and his little daughter, Fatima.

  “Here I am,” said a tiny voice. Abdul ran toward the sound.

  “Fatima, is that you? Where are you?”

  “I’m here,” she said again. The sound came from above and to the back. He ran that way.

  She was sitting on top of the rubble, clutching an orange and green pillow.

  “It’s your lesson day,” she said when she saw it was Abdul. “Papa’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  She shrugged, then pointed down.

  “Inside,” she said. “I think they’re inside. I didn’t like the way the house shook. I brought my pillow to sleep outside. Mama told me no, but I can do that sometimes.” She tried to lift the slab of concrete that jutted into the one she was sitting on.

  “It won’t move,” she said.

  Abdul climbed up onto the rubble �
� difficult to do with one hand full of guitar. He sat down beside her.

  “Has anyone come to help you?”

  She just looked at him, her eyes big and round.

  He tried to remember being five years old, but that was six whole years ago. A lifetime.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked her. That was a safe question. Even five-year-olds knew if they were hungry or not.

  She nodded.

  “Come to my house. My mother will feed you.”

  “Will my mama and papa be there?”

  He helped her climb down the rubble.

  “It’s my lesson day,” he said. “If I don’t show up, your father will know where to look for me.”

  He held her hand as they walked, and he wasn’t at all embarrassed to be seen holding the hand of a little girl.

  He had to walk her back through the rubble and destruction. To keep her busy and not scared, he taught her a song.

  “This is by the Beatles,” he said. “It’s called ‘Yellow Submarine.’”

  Little Fatima did not know English, so he taught it to her in Arabic. The song still worked, and they sang it together all the way back to his house. Whenever he spotted a dead body, he made her sing especially loud so she wouldn’t be afraid.

  That night, Fatima sat in his mother’s lap surrounded by all the relatives that Abdul now felt lucky to have around him — even his Uncle Faruk, who had majored in business and who his father said was allergic to joy. Fatima leaned back against his mother and laughed with the other little kids at the puppet show he and his father and cousins put together of Alice in Wonderland, with puppets made out of socks and cooking utensils. Abdul was playing the Queen of Hearts.

  As he waited to make his entrance, he wrote his first song. It was about Fatima. He called it “The Girl on the Rubble,” but in the song, the girl was not pointing down at the ruins. She was trying to touch the stars.