What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  The woman replies with a single word Amir is unable to understand.

  The man tries to respond, but she cuts him off. She turns not just her head but, for an instant, her whole body, such that her weapon momentarily points at the man. She repeats the same word. The man nods and runs into the house. As though no conversation has taken place at all, the woman trains her gun back on the teenagers kneeling in the yard.

  One of the teenagers says something in broken English and reaches into his bag, but as soon as he does, the woman at the other end of the yard fires. She aims for the space above their kneeling bodies, and the two of them fall flat to the ground as though the bullets had gone through them. In the outbuilding, Amir too pushes himself down against the plywood, the terrible reverberation of gunfire running through him, dragging with it the memory of every past reverberation.

  They stay there, all of them, until, a few minutes later, a couple of trucks, painted the dark green of military camouflage, come racing up the road. The trucks pull into the driveway and four young-looking soldiers emerge, then a fifth man—older and more broadly built than the others, and by demeanor their superior. The man issues a command to the four, who reply immediately in unison and then make for the teenagers. Though there are twice as many of them, and all armed, the four soldiers approach with caution, spreading out and making parentheses of themselves around the couple, like trappers closing on a wounded predator.

  Calmly and without a hint of doubt, the commanding officer walks to the woman holding the rifle. He moves with an obvious limp, his left foot less like a foot than a crutch on which the rest of him pivots. He says something to the woman and then lowers her rifle until it faces the ground. He puts his hand on her shoulder and smiles and it is only then that the woman seems to reemerge from her trance. She stops looking at the young couple, who, moments later, are bound with zip ties and taken away by the soldiers. They board the trucks and leave the driveway. For a while after they leave the woman just stands there, rifle by her side, and Amir is unable to tell from the expression on her face whether she’s excited or frightened or feels nothing at all. Then she walks back into the house, and not long after, Amir hears the sound of fevered shouting coming from inside, but the whole affair ends as abruptly as it began.

  He lies for a long time afterward on the plywood by the half-open window. The edge of the hayloft is lined with old paint cans and brushes hardened to cracking. Whoever tried to paint the interior of the farmhouse completed only a small patch near the ceiling. Everywhere else, the wood and the stonework shine through.

  With utter confusion, he tries to make sense of the baffling play he’s just witnessed, performed with such intensity by a troupe whose actors were barricaded from one another by walls of language and place and purpose, two opposing scripts come alive on one shared stage, its director absent or impotent or wholly uncaring.

  Chapter Eight

  Before

  The Calypso shook and sputtered. A sound like asthmatic wheezing came from somewhere belowdecks, the scent of diesel fumes filling the air. The boat moved but in the darkness the geography of movement was indistinguishable from the geography of stillness.

  A storm came. Rain fell, vaporous as steam at first, then hard and piercing. The sea, for a moment, took flight, and though in the thrashing of the waves it felt like the vessel, rickety and worn, was on the verge of sinking, it remained afloat and moving, the Eritreans struggling mightily to keep the compass arrow fixed on N.

  Amir settled into his small cocoon of space on the topmost deck. He hugged his shins and made himself small between the feet of Umm Ibrahim, the pregnant woman next to whom he’d sat on the ferry ride to the Calypso. As soon as the boat collided with the seaborne storm, most of the passengers on the top deck began to panic. But Umm Ibrahim paid no attention to any of this. She simply lowered her head and, by the small light of her phone screen, commenced memorizing and reciting the words she intended to say on landfall.

  Hello. I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.

  With no one left to complain to, some of the passengers instead took their anger out on the two Eritreans who’d been drafted cocaptains. “You’re already lost,” one man screamed in English. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” To which Teddy, the Eritrean more fluent in English, could only raise his arms in resignation and say, “Do you?”

  Soon the storm worsened, the waves grew fiercer and the boat’s vicious rocking scared the passengers back to their seats. They held on to the side of the gunwale railing, and in the dark the boat filled with the sound of pleas and prayers. Amir sank into his oversize life vest. Each wave lifted the boat high and dropped it into the preemptive crevice of the next. Feeling a sensation of the ground giving way beneath him, Amir involuntarily held on to Umm Ibrahim’s swollen ankles to steady himself. He felt the woman’s hands on the shoulders of his life vest, struggling to steady herself as well.

  “Just sit down and don’t move,” said the thin man who earlier had asked one of the smugglers about Amir, an Egyptian who would only give his name as Mohamed. “The sea is like this—in a minute it’ll pass.”

  Nobody listened, but as quickly as it started, the storm began to recede. The water calmed and the waves evened out and the rain turned once more to steam. In the dark, Amir heard some of the passengers laugh uncontrollably, a reflexive response to survival. Others applauded, though Amir could not tell who they were cheering for, and suspected that they themselves did not know. Something communal, a relief-born friendliness, now took hold among the passengers. They began to talk to one another.

  A few feet across the deck from him, Amir heard a couple of men arguing. One of them stood, and a moment later Amir’s small corner of the boat lit up. When his eyes readjusted, he saw the middle-aged Syrian who’d argued with the smugglers on the ferry. He stood next to a glass lantern hanging off a wooden pole that might have once served as a tiller arm. He placed a flashlight inside the lantern, and the stern of the boat lit up with shards of broken light. It did little good, but at least now Amir could see faint outlines of his neighbors, shades and silhouettes where once there was only breathing dark.

  “There,” the Syrian said, addressing another man, from whom he’d apparently wrestled away the flashlight. “What kind of person tries to keep light for himself?”

  He returned to his seat across from Amir, a clearing in the shape of him that the others had immediately filled when he went to place the flashlight in the lantern, and which he had to elbow his way back into. He was a tired-looking man, dark circles under his eyes and a kind of shapelessness growing out from the sagging flesh of his jawline. Without knowing why, Amir immediately took him for a government bureaucrat, someone who signed papers that allowed other people to do things.

  Soon the passengers began to trust that the storm had truly passed. Some took advantage of the calm to sleep, nodding off where they sat. Others, including the Syrian, struck up a conversation, introducing themselves to the people around them.

  Amir did not pay attention to the conversation, until he noticed the Syrian, who introduced himself as Walid Bin Walid, talking about him.

  “Look at this,” Walid said, pointing at Amir. “He’s wearing a vest twice as big as he is. It makes no sense. It’s a vest for a man, not a boy.”

  “It’s not too big,” Amir yelled back. “You’re too big!”

  “Leave the boy alone,” replied another man, a slim, bald Egyptian who looked to be in his late twenties and who would, during the ensuing conversation, introduce himself to the neighboring passengers as Kamal Roushdy. “Who cares if it’s big for him? Maybe it’ll save his life if this piece of garbage springs a leak.”

  “It’s about more than that,” Walid replied. “These men took our money. They’re handing out life vests made for adults to little kids; God knows w
hat else they’re doing improperly.”

  At this, Mohamed started laughing.

  “You’re on a matchbook in the middle of the ocean and you’re talking about doing things properly,” he said. “Brother, you left properly behind on the dock.”

  Walid pointed at Mohamed but spoke to the people around him. “That’s their man, by the way,” he said. “I knew they wouldn’t send us out without a spy onboard.”

  Mohamed nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And you better believe they have people on the other side as well, people who can find you even if you make it all the way up to Sweden, America, the moon. Now keep your mouth shut so I don’t have to let them know you’re making trouble, and leave that boy alone.”

  Walid turned away. “It’s not right,” he said, talking to himself but staring at Amir.

  * * *

  —

  The boat sailed on. At times the clouds overhead uncoupled and a wash of moonlight gave the whole vessel shape. Hours passed. Amir waited for dawn, for light.

  He heard a commotion coming from mid-vessel. The Eritreans had decided to work in shifts. Teddy prepared to descend to a small crawl space at the bottom of the wheelhouse to sleep while his partner steered. But some of the passengers nearby were arguing that both should stay.

  “Why do you care?” Teddy said to the passengers. “I thought you said we don’t know what we’re doing. We’ll both collapse if we don’t take turns.”

  “They wouldn’t have told you both to do it if the work didn’t require two men,” one of the passengers protested.

  “This work doesn’t require two men,” Teddy replied. He waved at the throttle, the clouded compass and the splintered wheel. “I’m not sure it even requires one.”

  He disappeared into the crevice at the foot of the wheelhouse, curling up with his jacket for a blanket.

  Watching him, Amir thought the man was descending to the lower deck, the place where Quiet Uncle and most of the passengers were penned. He’d seen them earlier, marching downward, one of the smugglers shutting the door behind them with a padlock. Of all the chaos of the passing storm and the passengers’ screams and prayers, it was the sound of people beneath the boards that frightened him most. It made the boat living, made it organic and coldly voracious, a stomach in mid-digestion. Even now he could hear it beneath him, that half-alive sound. No one else around him seemed to notice; sitting behind him, Umm Ibrahim sipped on a small vial of lemon juice to keep her nausea at bay and continued quietly reciting her foreign mantra.

  Hello. I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.

  “Please. Please,” said a curly-haired Palestinian named Maher Ghandour, who, along with Walid Bin Walid, Kamal Roushdy and Mohamed, made up the nucleus of Amir’s small corner of the boat. Of these passengers, Maher was the one who had first caught Amir’s attention. He was thin and clean-shaven and dressed in a shirt that looked to be about a decade older than his twenty or so years. Bandages covered the tips of all his fingers.

  “What?” Umm Ibrahim replied.

  “Please, not Blease. P-uh, not b-uh.”

  “So you’re an English teacher, are you?”

  Maher raised his palm. “You’re right—I’m sorry.”

  “Leave me alone,” Umm Ibrahim said. “I have to learn it. They don’t treat you well unless you speak their language.”

  Mohamed, the smugglers’ apprentice, chuckled. “You want to speak their language? Take off that bedsheet you’re wearing and throw it in the ocean. Their language isn’t just about words.”

  “We’re not coming from outer space,” Umm Ibrahim said. “You’re telling me they’ve never seen a Muslim before?”

  “I’m telling you the exact opposite,” Mohamed replied.

  Amir could make no sense of the conversations taking place around him. Nor could he understand why so many people had lined up for this trip. Years earlier, Amir’s father and Loud Uncle had taken him out on a small dhow. They sailed in the shadow of the massive military vessels near Tartus, keeping close to the shore and out of sight. There were only the three of them in the boat, the sun shining and the water calm. Amir had caught a fish that day, though now when he thought about it, he couldn’t discount the possibility that, when his head was turned, Loud Uncle had hooked the little mackerel at the end of the line through sleight of hand. His father said he should get to know the sea because his people were of it, and although the drought had forced the Utus to abandon their orange groves and leave the coast for the cities inland, they’d always be seaside people.

  But other than that one boat trip, the ferry across Aqaba and now this strange voyage, Amir had never spent time on the water. What he did remember of those two previous trips was that they had been nothing like this. On this boat the passengers pressed against one another, curled up into themselves. They sat with their faces down, pale in the light of their cell phone screens. They appeared in transit from themselves, concussed by the collision of the coming and the going, weightless as a tossed projectile at the apex of its arc.

  Soon the rocking of the sea and the lateness of the hour swayed most of the passengers to sleep. Amir sat amid darkness pierced by flashlight and silence pierced by snoring. Just above him, he caught sight of a sagging white sail hanging from one of the thick braided ropes that met at the mast. It hung limply, unmoved by the wind, and seemed to have no purpose at all; whatever propelled this ship, Amir knew, was the thing gurgling and rasping in the lower deck, the thing exhaling fumes. He could see it, almost, through a small crack in the boards beneath him, under slivers of flashlight that illuminated a tight-packed human armada of limbs and eyes, a pair of which caught sight of him and at which he could only stare back briefly before a great sense of indecency took hold and he forced himself to look away.

  Chapter Nine

  After

  At the Hotel Xenios the poolside restaurant is crowded but free of its usual cacophony. The tourists sit under beach umbrellas, picking at their food and nursing elaborate tropical drinks. Vänna overhears little snippets of conversation about the wreck on the beach; the incident has ruined the tourists’ day, confining them to the grounds of their hotel. She hears a middle-aged couple argue about whether to demand a refund.

  After she pays for four cheeseburgers, she crosses the path back to the main road that leads to her home. At the intersection, she finds her sandals where she left them, the thin foam hot against her soles after an hour in the midday sun.

  Not far from where the dirt path ends, Vänna sees two military trucks come up the road from the direction of her home. She recognizes the vehicles as those used by the loose assortment of military, police and coast guard officers charged with chasing down those who wash up on the island’s shore alive. She stops and watches them pass.

  The lead truck slows as it nears her; the passenger-side window rolls down. She recognizes immediately the broad, handsome face of the man who’s been chosen to lead the island’s efforts at rounding up the illegals, her mother’s old friend Colonel Dimitri Kethros.

  “What have you got there?” he asks, smiling and pointing to the plastic bag in her hand.

  “Just lunch,” Vänna replies. “Bought it from Xenios for Mom and Dad.”

  “Smells good. I don’t suppose you bought any extra, by any chance?”

  “No,” Vänna says. “Just for the three of us.”

  Kethros eyes the bag in her hand and for a moment she thinks he can see into it somehow, that he can tell she’s lying and from this lie will deduce exactly what she’s up to. He has that look about him, of a man in possession of exactly as much information as he needs.

  He is one of the largest men on the island—not fat and only a little taller than most, but well built, solid in a way she associates with military men even though many of the soldiers dispa
tched to the island are scrawny and barely out of their teens. In the thick straightness of his jawline and the width of his shoulders, the inverted triangle of him, he seems to have been built to excel at work that demands uniform and insignia. But he also has a charming smile, and this, more than any other facet of what he projects to the world, is what Vänna distrusts the most.

  Kethros chuckles. “You can’t blame a man for trying,” he says. He pats the side of the passenger door and then waves her on. “Hurry up, before it gets cold.”

  She waits for the trucks to drive away. It is only then she notices that the second vehicle is not a jeep, but a kind of wagon, whose covered trunk looks like the sort of thing used to transport soldiers or prisoners. As soon as the vehicles are out of sight, Vänna sprints home.

  She arrives to find her father sitting on one of the wicker chairs in the courtyard, and before she can go to the farmhouse, he calls her over. She can tell he’s been drinking. He has no tolerance at all, and when drunk, assumes an outward posture entirely at odds with his inward disposition, or perhaps the two are inverted and he is finally, temporarily free to be what he really is. He leans back with his feet up on the table, a small, bitter grin on his face, and she knows at once her parents have been fighting again.

  From childhood she has sensed it but only in recent years has she become fully cognizant of it—this weaponized emptiness between them, a void where once there might have existed tenderness, affection, a shared stake in shared happiness. Sometimes when she observes them following one of their fights, Vänna rejects outright that her parents are or ever have been in any kind of love. She thinks of them instead now as voyeurs, indecently intimate strangers.