Also by Omar El Akkad
American War
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2021 by Half-Lung Club LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: El Akkad, Omar, [date] author.
Title: What strange paradise / Omar El Akkad.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021749 | ISBN 9780525657903 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657910 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524712075 (open market)
Classification: LCC PS3605.L12 W48 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021749
Ebook ISBN 9780525657910
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by Stavros Ntagiouklas / Millennium Images, U.K.
Cover design by Kelly Blair
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Contents
Cover
Also by Omar El Akkad
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One: After
Chapter Two: Before
Chapter Three: After
Chapter Four: Before
Chapter Five: After
Chapter Six: Before
Chapter Seven: After
Chapter Eight: Before
Chapter Nine: After
Chapter Ten: Before
Chapter Eleven: After
Chapter Twelve: Before
Chapter Thirteen: After
Chapter Fourteen: Before
Chapter Fifteen: After
Chapter Sixteen: Before
Chapter Seventeen: After
Chapter Eighteen: Before
Chapter Nineteen: After
Chapter Twenty: Before
Chapter Twenty-one: After
Chapter Twenty-two: Before
Chapter Twenty-three: After
Chapter Twenty-four: Before
Chapter Twenty-five: After
Chapter Twenty-six: Before
Chapter Twenty-seven: After
Chapter Twenty-eight: Before
Chapter Twenty-nine: After
Chapter Thirty: Now
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
To Sonny
It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
—Ambrose Bierce
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
I taught you to fight and to fly. What more could there be?
—J. M. Barrie
Peter Pan
Chapter One
After
The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers: shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of nightfall’s temporary burial, the dead ferment indecency. There’s too much of spring in the day, too much light.
Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight. And so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being.
The sea is tranquil now; the storm has passed. The island, despite the debris, is calm. A pair of plump orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock, take rest on the lamppost from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp, throat-scraping thing.
In time a crowd gathers near the site of the shipwreck, tourists and locals alike. People watch.
The eldest of them, an arthritic fisherman driven in recent years by plummeting cherubfish stocks to kitchen work at a nearby resort, says that it’s never been like this before on the island. Other locals nod, because even though the history of this place is that of violent endings, of galleys flipped over the axis of their oars and fishing skiffs tangled in their own netting and once, during the war, an empty Higgins lander sheared to ribbons by shrapnel, the old man is still, in his own way, right. These are foreign dead.
No one can remember exactly when they first started washing up along the eastern coast. But in the last year it has happened with such frequency that many of the nations on whose tourists the island’s economy depends have issued travel advisories. The hotels and resorts, in turn, have offered discounts. Between them, the coast guard and the morgue keep a partial count of the dead, and as of this morning it stands at 1,026 but this number is as much an abstraction as the dead themselves are to the people who live here, to whom all the shipwrecks of the previous year are a single shipwreck, all the bodies a single body.
Three officers from the municipal police force pull a long strip of caution tape along the breadth of the walkway that leads from the road to the beach. Another three wrestle with large sheets of blue boat-cover canvas, trying to build a curtain between the dead and their audience. In this way the destruction takes on an air of queer unreality, a stage play bled of movement, a fairy tale upturned.
The officers, all of them young and impatient, manage to tether the fabric to a couple of lampposts, from which the orange-necked birds whistle and flee. But even stretched to near-tearing, the canvas does little to hide the dead from view. Some of the onlookers shuffle awkwardly to the far end of the parking lot, where there’s still an acute line of sight between the draping and four television news trucks. Others climb on top of parked cars and sweep their cameras across the width of the beach, some with their backs to the carnage, their own faces occupying the center of the recording. The dead become the property of the living.
Oriented as they are, many of the shipwrecked bodies appear to have been spat up landward by the sea, or of their own volition to have walked out from its depths and then collapsed a few feet later. Except the child. Relative to the others he is inverted, his head closest to the lapping waves, his feet nestled into the warmer, lighter sand that remains dry even at highest tide. He is small but somewhere along the length of his body marks the sea’s farthest reach.
A wave brushes gently against the child’s hair. He opens his eyes.
At first he sees nothing, his sight hampered by the sting of salt and sand and strands of his own matted hair in his eyes. His surroundings appear to him as if behind frosted glass, or on the remembering end of a dream.
But other senses awake. He hears the sound of the sea, tame and metronomic. And beneath that, the hushed conversation of two men, inching closer to where he lies.
The child blinks the silt from his eyes; the world begins to take shape. To his left the beach curves in a long, smooth crescent until it disappears from view behind the rise of a rocky hill lined with thin, palm-like trees. It is a beautiful place, tropical and serene.
For a moment he doesn’t register the dead, only their belongings: ball caps and cell phones and sticks of lip balm and forged identification cards tucked into the cheapest kind of waterproof container, tied-up party balloons. Bright-orange life vests, bloated as blisters, some wrapped around their owners, others unclaimed. A phrase book. A pair of socks.
The boy’s neck is stiff and it hurts to move, but he turns slightly in the direction of the sea. In the shallows sits a rubber dinghy outfitted with police lights. Farther out, the water sheds its sandy complexion and turns a turquoise of such clarity that the tourists’ sailboats seem to float atop their own shadows.
Two men approach. Baggy white containment suits cover their bodies and white gloves their hands and white masks their faces, and vaguely they remind the boy of astronauts. They move slowly around and over the bodies, occasionally nudging at them with their feet and waiting for a response. Some of the corpses they inspect wear small glittering things around their fingers or necks. The boy watches, unmoving, as the masked workers bend down and carefully pocket anything that sparkles. They speak a language he doesn’t understand. They move toward him.
The boy doesn’t take his eyes off them. His clothes, soaked with salt water, hold fast to his frame; he flicks his toes in the tiny puddles collected in his shoes. His jaw aches. He lifts his head from the sand. He rises.
Seeing him, one of the two workers takes off his face mask and yells. The words mean nothing to the boy but by the gesticulations he gathers that he is being ordered not to move.
The man turns, first to his colleague and then, his voice even louder now, to the officers stationed at the edge of the beach. Once alerted, they begin to sprint in the boy’s direction.
The boy looks around him. To his left, past where the beach ends at a small gravel road packed with police cars and ambulances and trucks with large satellites affixed to their roofs, there stands a dense forest of the same palm-like trees that bookend the far hillside, their crowning leaflets like the skeletal remains of some many-limbed starfish, or a firework mid-burst. Everywhere else the sun shines brightly, but in the shade of the canopy there is a darkened thicket, perhaps a hiding place.
The men rush closer, yelling alien things. Pinned between the water and the land, the child turns toward the sheltering trees. He runs.
Chapter Two
Before
The highway from Homs to Damascus, spindly and unlit and lined with squat concrete barricades, was deserted but for the five buses speeding southward, past the purple-green olive groves and the terraced desert. Still, the passengers hunkered low in their seats. Some checked soccer scores on their phones and carried on quiet conversations with their seatmates, passing the time. Some rocked forward and back, trying to lull their infants to sleep, and some made the same motion though they had no children. Some slept and others fought sleep, fought what it might bring. Such were the myriad mechanics of initiation into the oldest tribe, the tribe of endless leaving.
Amir Utu sat near the back of the second bus next to his mother, Iman, his half brother, Harun, and his uncle and now stepfather, Younis. With his thumbnail he dug furiously at a wristband that misspelled his name Amin, and his age as six, not eight. Earlier, at the site of departure, the humanitarian workers said every evacuee would have to wear a wristband, but when it became clear there weren’t nearly enough, they placed them only on the wrists of children, and although none of the workers could say with much confidence what purpose such a thing would serve, it turned out by chance there were exactly as many wristbands as children on the convoy, and the workers took this to be an indicator that the correct decision had been made.
Silently, Younis rubbed the edge of a coin against the passport pages on which he’d earlier pasted passable facsimiles of Egyptian visas. In the way he moved the coin against the watermarked paper, lost entirely in the task at hand, there was an air of ritual. Amir observed without emotion the man he’d only ever called, behind his back, Quiet Uncle, the man who was now responsible for Amir and his mother and this new child to whom Amir felt no connection at all. How a man so meek, who shrank back into himself so readily he seemed to wear his own skin like a too-big suit, might ever take responsibility for anyone at all, Amir couldn’t imagine.
Baby Harun gummed a fold in his mother’s skirt. Iman held her infant with one hand and with the other checked Amir for signs of damage. She asked him questions: “What floor did we live on? What street? The broken clock tower in the roundabout, what time did it show?”
“Leave him alone, Iman,” Quiet Uncle said. “Don’t keep reminding him.”
But she continued. “Tell me the name of the girl you liked,” she pleaded, “the one from the pastry store, the one with the French accent—do you remember? Do you remember?”
Amir stared, unable to answer. Whenever she opened her mouth his mother made a sound no different from the sound made by everything around him since the first bombs fell, a fine metallic din.
He retreated from his surroundings into the pages of a comic book. For years it had been his favorite—the adventures of a boy named Zaytoon and a girl named Zaytoona in the alleyways and fields and citadels of a city that reminded him of his own. There was no quality to the art, the shading uneven, the linework like bad stitching, the colors too bright and bleeding. But the stories had a whimsy to them. The children were adventurers, and over the course of an issue they might devise from mechanic-shop scraps a dirigible, or turn a bellows and a garden hose into a means to walk the bottom of the sea.
Amir read, captivated—not by the plot or the impossible contraptions, but by the way Zaytoon and Zaytoona’s little town always seemed to reset at the beginning of every new story, as though none of the previous ones left a mark. He had never noticed this before but he noticed it now and, although he couldn’t articulate it, the thing that most amazed him was the sheer lightness of such a repairable world. To live so lightly was the real adventure, the biggest adventure.
The buses drove onward. In peacetime the journey to Damascus might have taken an hour and a half. This time it took twenty-six.
At one of the checkpoints the passengers were marched onto the side of the road and made to stand in line and a young soldier asked them who they believed in. He phrased it this way, simply and without preamble: “Who do you believe in?” It was the fourth checkpoint of the day and at each one the evacuees had been made to wait for hours and stand outside and give plainly rehearsed answers to the same questions about their allegiance to the state and the Leader. But none had rehearsed for this, and none knew what to say to the young soldier as he marched up and down the lineup of exiles at dawn, chewing on sunflower seeds and asking, “Who do you believe in?” Some stammered and said, The government. Others said, The Leader, God bless him and his brother, and God rest his father’s soul. And God bless his children, others added, our future leaders, but the soldier did not appear to approve of this answer and instantly those who’d given it wished they’d never mentioned future leaders, never mentioned a future at all. On this went, so empty the pantomime that even the young soldier himself did not seem to care when Quiet Uncle, early in line and unable to think on his feet, responded, “Whoever you want.”
Years earlier, before he was disappeared, Loud Uncle said only a coward survives the absurd.
* * *
—
On the first day of spring the convoy reached Damascus and for a while the Utus lived as guests of a relative in a villa in the eastern district. Their host was a woman named Mona, a distant cousin on Amir’s father’s side of the family. Through much pleading, Quiet Uncle had persuaded her to let them stay, though it was
clear that Mona intended theirs to be a short visit, a temporary respite on the way to wherever they were going.
It was a modern-looking home of white walls aligned at right angles, a curveless cube of a style Amir had seen only in foreign magazines. Often Mona held cocktail parties in the villa’s stone-tiled garden patio, beneath the scattered shade of the flowering jasmine trees, and on the mornings of these days, before any guests arrived, the Utus learned to expect a last-minute suggestion from Mona that they go visit a tourist attraction or undertake some other daylong excursion on the other side of town.
Sometimes Amir managed to avoid these trips, and if he remained out of sight and earshot for the entire evening, Mona did not seem to mind him staying home. From the confines of the servants’ quarters—a tiny secondary house in the back of the garden—he would watch and listen to the voices of the guests, voices that were like his, yet alien. Dressed in fine suits and gowns that glittered under the hanging lantern lights, the attendees spoke about the success of the recent literary festival or the unacceptable surge in the price of tickets to London and Paris or about the Qatari emir’s daughter buying up art at auction with her oil-field allowance and locking it away in a warehouse somewhere because of course these people have more money than taste and wasn’t it just barbaric. The scent of their perfumes mingled with the scent of sizzling lamb skewers on the grill and the scent of white jasmine.
It mesmerized Amir, the revelry of their parallel world. On the outskirts of this neighborhood he had seen the shattered windows, the craters in the roads, the buildings stripped of their outsides—and so he knew the monstrous thing that had taken his father and Loud Uncle and had driven his family from their home had also, in some way, visited this place. But the men and women at this party seemed not to know or care. Late at night when the rest of his family returned from their excursion, sneaking back into the house unseen through the servants’ entrance, Amir remained at his lookout watching. He stayed this way until the early hours of the morning, until the last of the guests stumbled drunk into their waiting sedans and the house grew quiet.
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