What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  The house is quiet. A pinewood-scented candle is doing nothing to mask the stale stink of cigarettes in the air. Vänna opens the kitchen window, then rummages through the fridge, looking for anything that might remain from a previous day’s trip to the grocery store, finding nothing but condiments and a bottle of club soda. In the cupboard there’s only baking powder and rat traps, a can of condensed milk and another of lemon curd, soft white fractals of mold growing inside. She begins to search the kitchen drawers, though she knows there’s nothing there, when suddenly she remembers a box of shortbread cookies she bought a week earlier at a charity bake sale at school.

  She turns to go to her room and finds her mother standing where the hallway meets the kitchen.

  “You finished the whole yard, I suppose,” she says.

  “The sun finished it,” Vänna replies. “It melted.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Sorry,” Vänna says. “Yes, I finished. I just came in to get a snack.”

  “You don’t need a snack,” her mother replies. She picks her purse off the kitchen counter and pulls out her wallet.

  “Your father will be home soon,” she says. “Go down to the Xenios and buy us lunch.”

  Vänna takes the money. Her mother lights a cigarette and turns on the tiny kitchen television.

  Everyone who’s ever met them has said the daughter is the spitting image of the mother. Both have the same cobalt eyes and smooth, knife-heel noses and wear their thin blond hair in a simple ponytail. Only the usual markers of age differentiate them—a few fine lines near the eyes, a little silver in the hair. Once, Vänna’s mother told her she looked beautiful in the way that all people, everywhere in the world, hoped to look beautiful. They were at the beach when she said it, Vänna having just come back from building a sand castle with a couple of tourists’ children, her arms and legs covered with wet sand. Her mother said it simply, without elaboration. And when she said it, she addressed Vänna but looked out at the tourists’ children playing in the waves.

  By turns she was a recluse, a self-imposed exile from her husband and her daughter, the only sign of her a thread of cigarette smoke blown out the bedroom window. By turns she was bitter, disappointed in something elusive, something missing from the bedrock of her life and for which Vänna couldn’t help but feel responsible. Sometimes the slightest thing enraged her—the mail left out, the sheepdog let in—and when enraged she simply detached from her surroundings, went out to the backyard to sit by the empty pool. She seemed so often a compendium of all her past selves, none of whom Vänna could ever interrogate, young women at various forks, turning this way or that. There were swarms of her, and Vänna did not know a single one.

  * * *

  —

  On a talk show two politicians argue. There’s something juvenile about the way they yell at each other, something giddy. Occasionally the station cuts from footage of the studio to show instead images of overcrowded migrant boats or men and women walking through the forest, hopping fences, dodging guards.

  Vänna’s mother watches, expressionless, and once more Vänna is struck by the great distance between her and this woman with whom she shares blood.

  “What are you waiting for?” her mother says without turning away from the television.

  “Nothing,” Vänna replies. She opens the kitchen door and leaves the house.

  Outside, another police car races down the road that separates the Hermes property from the sleep-gum forest and the sea. She watches it pass. On the morning news they’d said something about an accident on the beach and at first she thought it was probably some tourist. Once or twice a week, more during the high season, you could always count on some drunken foreigner falling from their cliffside balcony into the sea or getting their head slashed open in a barfight. Sometimes the tourists got so drunk they lost their way walking back from the beach to the Hotel Xenios—a ten-minute hike up the shoreline, if that—and they’d come wandering up the road like zombies, singing their drinking songs off-key.

  They might have been her problem if things had gone differently, if the Baldur Inn had survived the recession and the austerity that followed. And she reminds herself of this whenever her mother orders her to dust the farmhouse or uproot the weeds or tilt the satellite dish on the roof in the direction of some distant signal—at least she doesn’t have to wait on loud, drunken foreigners. At least the inn failed.

  Behind Vänna, in the side yard between the house and the remains of the long-unused harborberry grove, Dadge limps about, chasing twin ghosts—a couple of swirls of dead wildflower leaves whipped up by the wind. At fourteen, the animal is pushing antiquity, and if she was ever of any use as a sheepdog, she is useless now. Vänna watches the old dog amble, blind and deaf, sniffing at the two breeze-blown apparitions in the yard. She remembers the hours she’d spend as a young child chasing Dadge around the same yard, trying to pin a bonnet around her head.

  It is a small, modest home. All over the exterior of the white stucco walls are fine lines and cracks in the paint and in the concrete, and though she often sees her parents argue about the cost of repairing these blemishes, what is broken in the home never looks as ugly to Vänna as the air-conditioner vents sticking out the windows, or the cables running down from the antenna and satellite dish on the roof. She likes to think that the house grows prettier as it ages. Like almost every other structure ever built on the island, she imagines the house will look prettiest in ruins.

  Around the back of the home sits an unused swimming pool, empty and lined with a rough fiberglass skin. The previous owners once told Vänna’s grandparents that when the house was first built, as a secluded getaway for some distant descendants of colonial nobility, the pool was laid with a bed of crushed pink coral. If that had ever been true, it certainly wasn’t by the time the Olssons moved in. As the years passed and their daughter met and married Giorgos Hermes and began a new life in the old white home, and after years of putting it off, the old couple finally opened the inn only to give up on it six months later, whatever opulence lived in the house’s past was confined there. Still, even though a hundred years have passed since it was made of stone and framed in the green of harborberry groves and adorned with a pool of pink coral, somehow it holds on to the memory of these things, and in this way assumes a kind of inherited dignity unique to houses, even small ones, that begin life in the ownership of the rich. Whenever Vänna’s grandparents used to speak of the place, they inevitably slipped and began referring to all the grand things they were told it used to be.

  * * *

  —

  It’s warmer out; Vänna slips her sandals off at the start of the beach-bound road and walks barefoot down a sandy path she knows by heart. The air is sharp with salt and the wind makes of the sleep-gum leaves a murmuring crowd.

  It gets this way most years, right around the middle of April—quiet; the island, like much of the mainland, silent in preparation for the holy weekend, the tourists well dressed and on their best behavior, the big cities deserted and the small towns full. Hers has never been an observant family, but Vänna always enjoys the small awing pantomime through which her whole island passes in the days before the big Sunday ceremonies. The ceremonies themselves, with their ornate, arcane rituals and fleeting reverence, don’t interest her, only the calm that comes before.

  Between the beach and the Hotel Xenios rises a wide hill of dirt and brush. Where the hill drops and levels at the edge of the water, a wide footpath leads from the hotel grounds, and this is the fastest route from Vänna’s house. Most days, she likes to avoid the path and instead walk up the middle of the hill, following no discernible trail. At the peak of the hill, looking north, she’s able to see beyond the end of the island, beyond the fields and the ancient ruins, all the way to the lighthouse at the northeast tip, abandoned and long ago gone dark. But on this day, hurrying, she takes
the footpath at the base of the hill.

  She rarely spends much time by this part of the shoreline. Slowly the nearby resort has come to consume the place, as resorts and restaurants and gift shops have come to consume so much of the island’s outer rim in the years since the tourist money started coming back.

  The most obvious evidence of this transformation, or at least the one that annoys Vänna most, is a large party boat, decorated with strings of colored lights and permanently docked at the foot of the Hotel Xenios property. Most nights, it functions as a nightclub for the hotel residents, and from her bedroom Vänna can always hear the music. As of late, the DJ’s track of choice is a rap song whose backing music—a four-drumbeat pattern on a tabla followed by a high-pitched, Middle Eastern–sounding flute—Vänna despises. They play it every night, incessantly, like a beacon.

  Just before she reaches the beachfront, she sees a small cluster of folding desks and chairs, haphazardly arranged under a blue canvas tarp. A chaotic group of coast guard, police and army officers buzz about the makeshift command center. The sound of satellite phones, printers and fax machines carries over the sound of waves. On the other side of the road, a young police officer is caught up in a shouting match with two photographers trying to reach over and move a tarp that blocks the beach from view. The men wear big identification badges on lanyards around their necks and these they wave in the officer’s face, indignant.

  In the middle of the canvas-covered encampment, Vänna recognizes one of the coast guard officers, a boy named Ronis. He is the older brother of one of her classmates, pleasant enough if not particularly bright. She sees him sitting at one of the folding tables, a laptop and sheets of paper on the desk in front of him. Unnoticed, she traverses the gaggle of arguing, harried men and walks over to him.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  Ronis looks up from the sheets of paper that have until then consumed his attention. The sheets are divided with ruler and pencil into a grid of sorts. Some of the boxes contain names, others ages, others nationalities. Most contain nothing.

  “A mess,” Ronis says. He points toward the beach. “I swear, you’d think they’d never seen a shipwreck before, as though we don’t have one of these tissue-paper boats going under every single day.”

  Vänna looks out at the beach, blocked from view behind the raised tarp. She sees an ambulance slowly backing into the nearby parking lot, two police officers drawing the canvas back like theater curtains to let the vehicle through.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “A migrant boat sank just off the shore. Must’ve come apart in last night’s storm.”

  He shakes his head. “The bodies have been washing up on shore all day. A mess, just a mess.”

  Vänna pauses. She looks at the papers on the desk. “Are those their names?” she asks.

  “Just a few,” Ronis replies. “The ones who had identification cards, or they wrote their names on their skin and the sea didn’t wash it out.” He shrugs. “But even those, we don’t know if they’re lying. You never know with these people.”

  “Can you look up a name for me?” Vänna asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Utu. Is there anyone called Utu on the list?”

  Ronis looks at his notes and then the computer screen. “I don’t think so. I just got here, so I don’t know. Why?”

  “No reason,” Vänna says. “I just saw on the news this morning, they were talking about someone named Utu coming ashore, I think two or three days ago, but it was probably something different.”

  “It must have been,” Ronis replies. “This just happened this morning.”

  He leans back in his chair and pulls a plump orange life jacket from a pile behind him. “Look at this,” he says. “Look at what they were wearing. You know what’s inside these things? Foam. They suck up water like a sponge.”

  Ronis tosses the jacket back on the pile and shakes his head.

  “These people, they don’t think,” he says. “They don’t plan.”

  Chapter Six

  Before

  Amir lay awake in bed, listening. A little after midnight, he heard footsteps in the hall.

  He eased from his bed and crept to the door. He saw Quiet Uncle walking out of the bedroom down the hall, his steps light and careful, fluent in the places where the floorboards creaked. He wore plain gray pants and a simple work shirt, both recently ironed. Amir watched as his uncle typed something on his phone and then, softly easing the front door open, left the house.

  Once, years earlier, Amir’s father told him that none of this started with bombs or bullets or a few stupid kids spray-painting the slogans of revolution on the walls. It started with a drought. You come from farmers, he said, and five years before you were born the earth turned on us, the earth withheld. We are the products of that withholding. Every man you ever meet is nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.

  Don’t call this a conflict, Amir’s father said. There’s no such thing as conflict. There’s only scarcity, there’s only need.

  Amir looked down the hall to the other bedroom, where his mother and half brother lay sleeping. Then he followed Quiet Uncle out the front door.

  A year of experience had taught Amir that Egyptians did their living exclusively at night. He stayed well back of his uncle, unnoticed among the vendors of roasted peanuts and charred corn and all the people out walking along the corniche, entire families whose respite from the drudgery of the workday was to be outside, to simply exist. Everywhere around him music played and car horns blared and conversations collided, the city overfull with living.

  He followed for an hour, until Amir saw Quiet Uncle turn onto a pier at which only a single aging ferry was docked. Two old men sat at the entrance to the pier and before them a long line of people waited to board. The men appeared to be guards of a sort, talking to each person in line before letting them through or turning them away. Some of the people waved printed sheets of paper, while others showed things on their cell phone screens, and others simply offered cash. Slowly, the queue moved in the direction of the waiting vessel.

  Amir inched closer. He noticed another pair of guards at the far end of the dock, younger, standing at the ramp. They wore baseball caps that partially obscured their faces, and they appeared to be checking the people in line much more closely than the two old men at the entrance. Occasionally one of the young men looked farther down to the end of the line. For a second, Amir thought he had been spotted; quickly he hid behind a table at an adjacent street café.

  Four teenage boys walking down the corniche stopped in front of him to gawk at the lineup of men and women, who in appearance did not look Egyptian, but rather were a vast mixture of ethnicities and spoken languages and colors of skin. They varied just as widely by age too, from newborns to seniors, and though they all chatted as they waited to board, they spoke quietly and only to the people immediately beside them.

  Some of the men and women carried small backpacks, but most carried nothing. And those who did bring luggage seemed especially meek, holding the bags close to their chests. Amir watched as a police officer walked past the assemblage, nodding at the guards and continuing on his way, unconcerned.

  The four teenagers who’d stopped to see what was happening tried to start a conversation with some of the people waiting in line, but none would speak, so they turned instead to the two old men.

  “Hey, Hajj, where are they going this time?” one asked.

  “Mind your own business,” one of the old men replied.

  The teenager turned back to the people in line. “Let me guess, they told you you’re going to America, right? Freedom, McDonald’s, Tom Cruise, all that horseshit?”

  The passengers shuffled along.

  “They’re going north,” the old man said. “Happy now? They’re sailing to
Kos Town.”

  At the mention of the place, the four teenagers broke into hysterical laughter.

  “Kos Town!” one of the boys said, struggling for breath. “Why didn’t you say so? Make some room, then. I want to go to Kos Town.”

  “Me too,” said another. “Every night I’m out here trying to get to Kos Town.”

  The old man bent down and removed his sandal from his left foot. He held it up high, as though readying to throw it.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You hear me? Go!”

  The boys walked away, still laughing. The old man turned to the people in line.

  “Ignore them,” he said. “They weren’t raised properly.”

  Absorbed in this exchange, Amir did not notice that the other old man had spotted him hiding behind the tables. It wasn’t until he approached that Amir saw him. In his haste to flee, he nearly knocked a glass of cane juice off a nearby table.

  “Relax, relax,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing,” Amir replied.

  “Don’t be afraid—it’s all right. You were watching that boat, weren’t you?” The old man looked around. “Are your parents here?”

  Amir said nothing. The man turned to face the pier, where Amir saw that one of the guards near the ramp was staring directly at them. He gave an almost imperceptible nod to the old man, who nodded back.

  “How would you like to go for a trip?” he asked Amir.

  “What?” Amir replied.

  “But you have to keep it secret, just between you and me, all right?” The old man pointed at the assembled crowd. “All these people paid a lot of money to go on this trip. But you—I’ll let you go for free. How about that?”

  “Why?” Amir asked.

  The old man laughed. “Because I’m feeling generous,” he said. “But make up your mind quickly, before I choose someone else.”