No Safe Place

by Deborah Ellis

  Just beyond the area of German headstones she came upon a sign. Sinti und Roma. An arrow pointed the way. She walked in that direction.

  Light filtered in from the pole lights above the train tracks. Rosalia stepped into a large square of grass full of low stone nameplates.

  She bent down to touch a stone and could just make out the name:

  Irina Sajetz, born 19-2-1920, died 31-12-1943

  She moved to another one.

  Hanna Srasko, born 10-5-1878, died 30-1-1944

  There were more, many more — the Roma and Sinti who had died in Marzahn concentration camp and the German citizens who had stood up to the Nazis, also sent here to eventually die.

  She sat among the markers. This may have been the very spot where her great-grandmother had beaten back the Nazi soldiers.

  Rosalia raked her fingers along the grass and thought about that fight.

  How scared her grandmother must have been! And how brave!

  A bit of sparkle caught her eye. Tiny black stones surrounded the base of a memorial statue. Rosalia picked up a handful of the shiny marble pieces and held them in her hand. She folded her fingers and held the jagged stones tightly, so that the edges pressed into her palm.

  All the people who had been brought to this camp had wanted to live. They wanted to laugh and love and be with their families. They didn’t want to be treated like garbage. They didn’t want to go up in smoke.

  And they didn’t want to give up.

  She wouldn’t give up, either.

  The man’s wallet in her pocket had money in it. She was healthy, brave and strong. She had a better chance than most, and she was not going to throw it away.

  Rosalia opened her hand, looked at the bits of marble, then looked back at the grave markers of her people. She put the marble pieces into her pocket. She’d keep them always, then pass them on to her own child, if she ever had one. It was almost like having a piece of land.

  She left the graveyard, climbing back over the fence, and found the entrance to the metro station. A couple of Euros fed into a machine got her a ticket. There was a map of Berlin nailed to a wall.

  She’d go to the station that was the farthest west.

  Germany was not a place for her to stay. France was next, then England. She’d find somewhere. The world was a big place. She’d find a home.

  The train came into the platform and she got on. The train car was heated and its floor was kind to her bare feet. She’d find shoes somewhere, but first she wanted to get away.

  She picked up a discarded newspaper, kept her head down and headed out on the next part of her journey.

  ELEVEN

  A cushion hit Abdul on the head, waking him up.

  He jumped to his feet and found himself standing toe to toe with a glaring Rosalia.

  “Keep away from me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t bothering you.”

  “You were watching me sleep. I will throw you off the boat.”

  Rosalia snatched up the little bag of black pebbles, stuffed it in her trouser pocket and stomped away.

  “I wasn’t bothering you!” he called after her. She cursed back at him in three languages from the other end of the boat.

  “She’s really angry.”

  Abdul heard Jonah’s voice.

  “I’m up here.”

  Jonah was sitting on the roof of the wheelhouse.

  “Be careful up there.” Abdul said, as he climbed up and sat beside him.

  “You sound like my mum. She was always saying things like that.”

  “That’s what mothers do. When did she die?”

  “I was eight. She died just before Christmas. Happy Christmas to me.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “She took a lot of drugs.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is your mum waiting for you in England?” Jonah asked.

  “No. She’s dead.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He’s dead, too.”

  “So you’re alone then?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Why are you going to England?” Jonah asked. “England’s nothing special, but people always want to go there.”

  “There’s something I have to do.”

  “Like a job?”

  “Isn’t that why most people go to England?”

  “Maybe you don’t need a job,” said Jonah. “Maybe you’re already rich. You never paid my uncle.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “So you owe him. But he’s dead. So now you owe me.”

  Abdul laughed.

  “You want me to pay you? That’s not going to happen.”

  “You owe me,” Jonah said. “If you don’t want to pay me money, you could just…take care of me.”

  “Take care of you?”

  “We’d take care of each other,” Jonah said quickly. “I’m a hard worker. I could make your tea and run to the take-away.”

  “Find someone else. I’m no good at taking care of people. Ask Rosalia. Ask Cheslav.”

  “Cheslav doesn’t like me,” said Jonah. “And I’m afraid of Rosalia. So that leaves you.”

  “No. It doesn’t. England is your country. People there will take care of you.”

  “Strangers.”

  “I’m a stranger, too,” said Abdul. “And I’m hungry. Do you want to help me make supper for everyone?”

  “No! I don’t want to help you. And I don’t want to live with you, either. I can take care of myself!”

  “Jonah…”

  “Go away. I don’t even want to sit with you.” Jonah turned his back to Abdul. “My uncle was right. You’re just a dirty Arab.”

  The words hit Abdul like a slap. He climbed down from the roof and left the boy alone.

  Rosalia was in the wheelhouse at the controls.

  “I’m taking us out of here,” she said, turning on the motor.

  “Jonah’s on the roof.”

  Rosalia yelled at Jonah to get down so he wouldn’t fall when the boat started to move. Jonah did as she said but went to the farthest place he could go on the deck and kept his back to them all.

  “Who started the boat?” Cheslav came into the wheelhouse.

  “I want to get to England,” Rosalia said. “England is north. I’m taking us north.”

  “We could pass England and go straight into the North Sea,” said Cheslav. “If we go straight west we will go out into the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Northwest, then,” said Abdul. “If we miss England, we’ll hit Ireland.”

  “Northwest,” Rosalia decided. “I will do this. You will back away and stop crowding me.”

  Cheslav took a step toward her, but Abdul took his arm and led him out of the wheelhouse. He’d had enough of people being angry for one day.

  / / / / / / / /

  Down in the boat’s tiny kitchen, Abdul opened cupboard doors and slammed them so hard they bounced open again.

  “I am so sick of these people!” He took down a bag of macaroni noodles and a can of tuna. “I’ll make a hot meal for myself. I don’t care if they starve.”

  He turned to fill a pot with water and saw Cheslav leaning in the doorway.

  Abdul felt foolish for talking out loud, even though he’d been speaking in Kurdish and doubted Cheslav could understand him.

  “Do you eat tuna in Russia?” he asked in English.

  “In Russia, we eat caviar.”

  Abdul laughed. He found the can opener. He could feel the Russian’s eyes on him. Cheslav was watching him the way his younger cousins watched him back in Iraq.

  “If you’re going to watch, you might as well work.” He handed over the opener and the tuna and turned his attention to the noodles. He emptied them into the boiling water and turned to see C
heslav holding the can opener, a look of confusion on his face.

  Abdul took it back, stuck it into the tuna can and gave the handle a couple of turns. Then he handed it all back to Cheslav. The utensil was awkward in the Russian’s hands but, after a couple of turns, the can was open.

  Abdul strained the tuna into the sink. After a while he fished a couple of noodles out of the pot, tried one to see if it was done and handed the other to Cheslav. Cheslav chewed carefully, then nodded. Abdul poured the noodles into a strainer, shook the water out of them and put them back in the pot on the stove with the heat off.

  “My father taught me to cook,” he said. “He liked to give my mother time to paint when she wasn’t at her job.”

  “Someone always cooked for me,” said Cheslav.

  “Your mother?”

  “No!”

  “Then who?”

  “They cooked. They didn’t talk.”

  Abdul let it go. He added the tuna and some butter to the noodles, then handed a wooden spoon to Cheslav.

  “Stir,” he said.

  Cheslav stirred.

  They divided the supper among four bowls and took them up on the deck. Jonah was still in a bad mood and refused to join them in the wheelhouse. Cheslav said he’d be happy to eat Jonah’s share, and Jonah came in and ate.

  After supper, Abdul took a turn at the wheel. Everyone stayed together in the wheelhouse. No one talked, but at least, Abdul thought, they weren’t fighting. He suspected that they, like him, were thinking ahead to the next stage of the journey. Once they landed in England, they would go their separate ways. He couldn’t say he was actually friends with Cheslav and Rosalia, but they weren’t enemies, either. He wasn’t really looking forward to being alone.

  Though it won’t be for long, he reminded himself. One last thing to do, then no more worries. No more loneliness.

  “I’ll clean up,” Jonah said. He gathered up all the empty bowls. “See? I can work hard.” He went below.

  “What did he mean?” Cheslav asked.

  “He wanted me to look after him in England,” Abdul said. “I told him no.”

  “He’s old enough to look after himself,” said Cheslav. He left the wheelhouse and went below.

  “The English will look after Jonah,” Rosalia said. “They would not let you be with him even if you wanted to.”

  “He says I owe him because I still have the money I didn’t give his uncle.”

  “That’s right,” said Rosalia. “You still have money.”

  “Do you have people in England? I mean…” He hadn’t meant to do this, but now he couldn’t see any way not to. “I mean, if you don’t have any money, I could let you have some of mine.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “For nothing. You could just have it. Because we are traveling together.”

  “We are not traveling together.” She got up and stood at the wheel to look into his face. “We are all alone on this boat. I am alone. The boy is alone. You are alone. The Russian is alone. You have some idea that we are friends, but we’re not.”

  “Fine.” Abdul stepped away from the wheel so Rosalia could take over. He headed out of the wheelhouse, then turned back. “I don’t know what happened to you, but you have no right to accuse me of wanting to hurt you. I don’t know you, but you don’t know me, either.”

  Abdul went to the back of the boat and watched the water churn up from the motor. He could not wait to get to England and get away from these people!

  He tried to calm himself. He curled his toes the way his father had taught him. As always, it helped.

  He put the others out of his mind and tried to picture England so he could be prepared. It was hard to make a plan without knowing what he was heading into.

  England would be orderly. That much he knew from the photos he had seen in books. The British liked stone walls, neat pathways and traffic laws. There would be hedges and street signs and little shops that never ran out of things.

  It would make the most sense to look for a dark place to land the boat, so that meant countryside or a small town. Abdul wished he knew how much he would stand out. He knew there were people who looked like him in England’s cities, but would he be too much of a stranger in the countryside? Would people see him and call the police?

  After he got rid of Jonah, he would be free. Maybe there was a train or a bus he could catch, but that idea made him feel cooped up and trapped. If someone tried to come after him on a train or a bus, he wouldn’t be able to get away.

  It would be better to walk. It would take him longer, but time didn’t mean much anymore. He’d walk at night, hide during the day and eventually, finally, he would get to his destination.

  His fingers went to the thin chain around his neck and he absentmindedly rubbed the medallion.

  He could spend his money in England. He could go into a store and buy food. He could even buy a way out of the rain — a cup of coffee in a restaurant, a ticket to a cinema. If he was careful, the money he had would be all he needed.

  Abdul heard a sound behind him. Cheslav pushed a blanket-wrapped bundle ahead of him out of the entrance to the stairs.

  “I cleaned out the cupboards,” he said. “I’m going to sell all this in England.” He took a screwdriver from the boat’s tool kit and began to remove a brass bell that was screwed to the boat.

  “How are you going to move around with all that?” Abdul asked. “Won’t it slow you down?”

  “I am not worried about that.” The bell clanged as he put it into the bundle, tied the ends of the blanket together and straightened up.

  The smile on his face changed to a look of alarm.

  “Lights!” he shouted. “Coming this way! We are being chased!”

  He ran to the wheelhouse and shoved Rosalia away from the wheel. Abdul fell to the deck as the boat jolted forward at full speed.

  “I’m not getting caught!” Cheslav yelled. He aimed the boat toward a bank of thick fog. “I’m not going back! I’m not going back!”

  TWELVE

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.”

  The housemother looked down at Cheslav, standing between two policemen.

  “It’s the third time he’s run away, and he’s only been with us for two years.”

  Cheslav stood on the front step of the Baby House, wet from the rain he’d been running in. He was too tired now to try to escape the grip of the officer’s hands on his arms.

  “He’s not too big to tie to the bed,” one of the officers said.

  “I don’t like to do that with the older ones,” the housemother said. “At least he’s nearly seven. Soon he’ll be someone else’s problem.”

  The police officers handed Cheslav over to the housemother and left. Cheslav was marched up the stairs and down the hallway to the room where the older boys slept.

  “No more outings for you,” the housemother said. “Get your pajamas on.”

  Cheslav’s fingers were numb with cold. He had trouble undoing the buttons. The housemother, impatient, yanked his shirt over his head.

  “You won’t find your mother by running around Cheremkhova. Now I have to wash these clothes. You are nothing but work.”

  She left the dormitory. Cheslav heard the click of the door locking behind her.

  He stood in the middle of the room and shivered. The dorm was cold and he was chilled from the rain. Whispers of children rose up around him.

  “Chicken got caught! Chicken got caught!”

  That’s what they called Cheslav. Chicken. Because he was scrawny and bony and spent playtime running along the Baby House fence looking for a way out, just like the chickens the housemother kept.

  “Chicken got caught!”

  Someone threw a pillow at him. He picked it up and went to his mat — one of twenty that took up most of
the floor space.

  There was no blanket on his mattress. Another child had taken it. Cheslav curled up around the pillow to try to get warm.

  “That’s mine,” said the boy who had thrown the pillow.

  Cheslav clutched the other boy’s pillow closer to his chest. He wrapped his arms around it and held tight.

  “Give it back.”

  The other child started to tug. Cheslav heard the sound of feet running across the floor as boys left their mats to crowd around and watch. Several joined in trying to get the pillow back.

  Cheslav was kicked and hit but he held fast to the pillow. His eyes were shut. He entwined his fingers together even as the boys tried to pry them apart. For long minutes, he took their abuse.

  Then, in a flash, he was on his feet and swinging. The other boy’s pillow flew out of his hands. But it was no longer about that. It was about hitting what he could hit. It was about getting relief from the rage that had built up inside him.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  The dormitory door flung open. A shaft of light flooded in from the hallway.

  “You again!”

  Cheslav was lifted out of the middle of the fray by the housemother’s strong arms. She carried him out of the dorm.

  “I’ve had enough.” She tossed him into the supply closet and locked him in the dark.

  Cheslav jumped and roared and clawed at his surroundings. Everything he could reach he yanked down from the shelves and threw against the walls. The blankets fell to the floor. The bars of soap and cleaning supplies ricocheted off the walls, often hitting him in the head but he didn’t stop.

  He threw himself over and over against the locked door.

  Finally, he fell to the floor in exhaustion. He made himself a nest in the blankets. And slept.

  / / / / / / / /

  “What about this one?”

  The housemother brought Cheslav forward. A tall man in a military uniform peered down at him.

  “He doesn’t look big enough,” the man said. “We don’t take boys before they’re seven.”

  “Cheslav just turned seven,” the housemother said. “He’s small but he’s strong. I think he’s just what you’re looking for.”