What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Umm Ibrahim removed from her small purse a sandwich bag containing a few browning apple slices. She ate one and offered one to Amir. He shook his head.

  “You’ll get sick if you don’t eat,” Umm Ibrahim said. The heat had caused many others on the boat to take off some of their clothes, but she had not removed her niqab. Still, she had become familiar to Amir in other ways, by the color of her eyes and the sound of her voice and the bruising knock of her knee against his temple.

  “My mother says I shouldn’t eat fruit unless I wash it,” Amir replied. “Otherwise I’ll get germs.”

  Walid, trying to rub the hangover out of his temples, sighed. “Lady, what are you doing giving food away?” he said, pointing at Umm Ibrahim’s belly. “You already have a child to look after.”

  “What do you care what I do with my own food?” Umm Ibrahim replied. She retrieved a small bottle of water from her purse and handed it, along with an apple slice, to Amir. “Here,” she said. “Use a little of this to wash it off, then it won’t have any germs, right?”

  Amir took the bottle. He stood and leaned over the gunwale and rinsed the apple slice. With his back turned, he did not see the look of overwhelming rage that momentarily came over Walid’s face.

  “Remember this,” Walid said to Umm Ibrahim, “when you run out, when you’re stuck drinking the sea.”

  Umm Ibrahim came to respond but was interrupted by an electronic chime, repeating in rapid succession.

  Kamal reached into his pocket. “Sorry, sorry,” he said to his neighbors. He looked at the screen.

  “Looks like we have a signal,” he said.

  Suddenly the stern broke out in wild activity. The passengers quickly turned their phones on and tried to catch the electronic current in the air. For a brief moment, the sound of the wheezing engine was drowned out by an atonal orchestra of beeps and jingles. It moved up the boat like a wave, until even the passengers at the very edge of the bow had their phones out.

  “Be careful, be careful!” Mohamed yelled. “Stay in your places. There’s no signal out here, it’s just a mistake.”

  Quickly it became clear that whatever possessed Kamal’s phone was a fleeting thing, now gone. Slowly the passengers lowered their hands and turned off their phones and returned to their places, dejected.

  “You raised everyone’s hopes for nothing,” Walid said, leaning over Kamal’s shoulder to look at his phone screen. “What did you receive, then?”

  “It’s from the phone company,” Kamal said. “It says I’ve run out of credits.”

  Kamal turned the phone off. He sat back next to Maher, who’d never taken his eyes off his book. He watched him, watched the yellow-stained bandages that covered his fingers.

  “What did you use?” Kamal asked.

  “Acid,” Maher replied.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did they turn you away, the first time?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Kamal shrugged. “Just making conversation, brother.”

  Maher returned to his book. He set it low on his lap now, the spine braced against his crossed ankles, his bandaged fingers hidden behind the pages.

  “What did you do, back in Gaza?” Kamal asked.

  Maher closed his book. “I was a student. English literature,” he replied.

  “English literature?”

  “That’s right. What about you?”

  Kamal shrugged. “One year of an economics degree, then professional revolutionary, then guest of the government.”

  Mohamed put down his cell phone, on which he’d been playing a game of Snake. “Which prison?” he asked.

  “Scorpion,” Kamal replied. “Thirteen months.”

  “That’s a good one.” Mohamed pointed northward. “The Westerners have heard of that one. While you were in there, did they—you know—make less of a man out of you?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Kamal said.

  Mohamed shook his head. “Brother, I don’t give a shit, I’m just saying—when you get over there, tell them they did. Tell them they used the stick, the electrodes. Be graphic.”

  “Make them feel uncomfortable, that’s what you mean?”

  “No, none of that stuff makes them feel uncomfortable,” Mohamed said. “It makes them feel enlightened.”

  * * *

  —

  Dusk descended. Hoping to ease the kink in his neck, Amir stood and wedged himself between Umm Ibrahim and her neighbor, who both sat on the wooden benches just below the gunwale. Squeezed between them, he looked out at the white-green flesh of the sea. There was a scent to it, the salt that in the nostrils registered as a kind of burning. Gently the Calypso rose and fell with the sweep of the waves, each departing with a wet slap against the hull. Amir cast about the horizon, in search of land or life. He saw none.

  It entranced him, the echo-breathing emptiness of the sea. Here or there a gull cried out, and if he leaned upward and let his eyes go limp he was able to shape the contours of the clouds into all manner of strange creatures, but these were only fleeting breaks in the nothingness.

  He saw something moving, an off-black bruise on the water. It swam alongside the boat at perfectly symmetrical speed, never breaking the surface. For a second he thought it might be a shark. The previous evening, someone on his side of the boat had said this region was infested with them, and that they chased the boats because now that they’d gotten a taste, they’d turned insatiable.

  Then he realized it was just the muted shadow of the limp white sail hanging off the mast behind him.

  “Did you ever try the official way?” Kamal asked Maher. “I heard they have a special system for Palestinians.”

  Maher chuckled. “They sure do,” he said. “How about you?”

  Kamal took a small green card out of his wallet and handed it to Maher.

  Maher inspected the card, back and front, astounded. “They gave you one? And you decided to come on this boat?”

  “Of course they didn’t give me one,” Kamal replied. “It’s a forgery. There’s a guy in Sayyidah Zaynab who’ll make you one in fifteen minutes for a hundred pounds.”

  “Huh,” Maher said.

  “I waited on the real thing three years,” Kamal said. “I gave them all the papers they wanted, I told them the name of the officer who did it, I showed them the marks on my back, I went to see the man in that office—what do they call it, the boss of refugees?”

  “High commissioner…”

  “Every day. Every day. And then one day they said I’d left one of the fields empty on a form. I said, ‘What field?’ They said, ‘Apartment number.’ I said, ‘I live in a house.’ They said, ‘It doesn’t matter—the new policy is if there’s any blank field at all, it’s an automatic rejection.’ And that was that.”

  “How come they took your application in the first place?” Maher asked. “I thought you couldn’t apply in the country you’re from.”

  “My parents are Iraqi,” said Kamal.

  “You don’t sound Iraqi,” Maher replied.

  “Brother, I couldn’t point out Iraq on a map.”

  “Did you have a babysitter?” Maher asked.

  “A British guy,” Kamal replied. “A man named David.”

  “I had a David too,” Walid said. “British guy. He used to bring gifts every time he came to visit, those tote bags you see everywhere. Nice guy. Perfectly useless, but nice.”

  Maher pointed at Kamal’s forged identity card. “You should probably throw that out,” he said. “The worst thing you can do when we land is let them see your name on that thing.”

  “What difference does it make?” Kamal asked. “When we get there, it won’t matter if it’s real or fake.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Maher said. “I mean
because it has your name. You’ve got to give them a name that sounds like one of theirs. They hear ‘Mohamed,’ ‘Ahmed,’ anything like that, and it’s a different world altogether.”

  “He’s right,” Mohamed said. “Every time we do this, all you idiots bring blankets, medicine, cell phones. One man—a grown man—tried to bring his puppy. But nobody ever thinks to bring a big shiny cross. They see you coming off the boat with one of those things hanging around your neck, it’ll do you more good than all the ID cards in the world.”

  He pointed at the passengers huddled around him. “If you have any sense at all, you’ll never give the Westerners your real names. Pick something common—George, Jack, Peter, Michael, Nicholas. Pick a saint, any saint.”

  Umm Ibrahim nodded. “I chose Sylvia.”

  Mohamed chuckled. “Good luck with that,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The evening darkened, the boat drifted. Walid stood and lit the flashlight lantern. For a while the stern was quiet, until Amir spoke.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  The passengers around him looked at one another, but none offered an answer.

  “The old man said this was a short trip, and we’d be back soon,” Amir said. “But we’ve been out here forever. Where are we going?”

  Kamal turned to Mohamed. “What’s this boy doing on the boat?” he asked. “How did he get on here all alone?”

  “He’s not all alone,” Mohamed replied. “He’s got some uncle or something down below. He couldn’t afford to put himself and the kid up here, but that’s his problem.”

  Mohamed turned to Amir. “Listen, in a while we’ll be off this boat and then you and your uncle will find plenty of people to help you do whatever it is you want to do—stay, leave, open a nightclub, I don’t care. Until then, just keep quiet and don’t ask any more questions.”

  Kamal stood and began to approach the smugglers’ apprentice, before Maher restrained him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Kamal yelled. “This whole time he has family on the boat, and you won’t let them sit together? Why, because of a few dollars? Don’t you have a conscience?”

  Mohamed let out a high whistle. “A conscience, everybody!” he said, waving at the passengers surrounding him as though egging them on to join the conversation. “Our much-esteemed revolutionary wants to talk to us about a conscience.”

  Kamal shoved Maher’s hand aside. He took two steps before Mohamed eased his jacket open to reveal a small pistol holstered at his side. At the sight of the weapon, Kamal stopped; the other passengers quieted.

  “Conscience, brother, is the enemy of survival,” Mohamed said. “Sit down.”

  Neither Kamal nor any of the passengers near him responded, and for a few minutes there was only the wheezing of the engine and the wrinkled sigh of the wind through the sagging sail. Maher returned to his book, Walid and Kamal sat back down and stared out at the endless sea and Umm Ibrahim retrieved her folded paper and began once more to recite the English plea she struggled to memorize:

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

  Night fell.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After

  For a few seconds the colonel simply stands there, ignoring Madame El Ward entirely, observing the pictures decorating her office wall.

  They are unframed, creased with folding marks, and haphazardly attached to the wall with tape or pushpins. They are pictures of men and women and children posing by the landmarks of their adopted homes—here a young woman playing with perspective, holding up a tower; there a bundled-up child, making wings in a snowdrift. Pictures of the ones who made it.

  “Hello, Colonel,” Madame El Ward says. “Didn’t expect to see you today.”

  Kethros smiles. He sits on the couch. There’s an ease of place about him, a presumed sense of ownership over his surroundings.

  “You know, I never get any complaints from this place,” he says. “Everywhere else I station my men, they complain—the civilian administrators aren’t following the rules, the civilian administrators aren’t following the rules, like a broken record. But never here. You should be proud; the first thing to go in times like these is good form.”

  “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Madame El Ward asks.

  “Two things,” Kethros replies. “First, I was hoping you’d indulge me while I tell you the story of my day.”

  He leans back on the couch and puts his hands on the back of his head. “By now you’ve heard about the mess at Revel Beach.”

  “I have,” Madame El Ward replies. “One of your boys called me and said—what were his words again?—Don’t bother freeing up any beds.”

  “Which is tactless, I suppose, but true,” Kethros says. “Or so we thought this morning. Turns out we were wrong. A child survived. My soldiers gave chase but lost the scent somewhere around Marianne Hermes’s house.”

  The colonel sits up, motioning with his hands as though he were getting to the most important part of the story.

  “Later on, a couple showed up a few miles south along the coast in a flimsy little raft. When we caught them, they claimed they were from Syria, which is pretty well a made-up place now, so many of them lie about being from there. Anyway, they also passed through Marianne’s place. She called us to come get them.”

  “I don’t see what any of this has to do with me, Colonel,” Madame El Ward says.

  “Yes you do,” Kethros replies. “After we picked them up, we returned to the field office near the Hotel Xenios. And when we got there, one of my soldiers told me that Marianne’s daughter had come around earlier, asking if we found anybody in the wreckage of that fishing boat, anybody by the name Utu. Why would she do that?”

  “I’m not a mind reader, Colonel.”

  “Where did they go, Nimra?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Kethros exhales deeply. He stands and walks to the window, his false leg evident in the asymmetry of his gait. He opens the blinds.

  “Let’s not play this game,” he says. “Marianne told me the daughter was coming here, and that idiot I’ve got stationed outside just let a couple of kids through.”

  “I have more important things to do, Colonel, than help you with this hunch you seem to have,” Madame El Ward replies. “I’ve got six hundred people in a camp made for three hundred, and all of them are owed a day’s drinking water. Maybe you want to help with that instead?”

  “Did you fill out the requisition forms properly?”

  Madame El Ward grabs a sheet of paper off her desk and holds it up. “Of course I filled it out properly. Every day ‘properly’ changes, and every day I still fill it out properly. What possible good does it do to make them suffer like this? What purpose does it serve? Even ordinary criminals don’t get treated this way.”

  “Ordinary criminals commit ordinary crimes,” the colonel replies.

  Madame El Ward points to the gymnasium below. “We have children who can’t sleep through the night, we have people who don’t talk anymore, who try to slit their wrists with canned-food lids. This place is hell.”

  “Hell? Really?” Kethros walks to the edge of the railing and surveys the courts below.

  “You know, back when I was a peacekeeper, we had a problem,” he says. “If I’m being honest, it was our fault. You see, when they tell you to keep the peace in a killing field, what they really mean is, Do nothing. And when you have soldiers with nothing to do, they tend to develop bad habits. So we had this problem with bribes.

  “I tried to put a stop to it, but my superiors told me, You have to let that sort of thing go, because you have no choice; there’s nothing quite as useless as a perfectionist in wartime. I think they were wrong; I think wartime
is the only place for a perfectionist. But the problem is, at first people would pay a few dollars here and there just to get through a checkpoint with less hassle, and so it would get around that the going rate at that particular checkpoint was a few dollars. But then you have people who’ve got the means and who think if they just pay a little more than the going rate, they’ll definitely have no problems. When enough people do that, suddenly the higher amount becomes the new going rate. And so on and so on, until you have astronomical inflation. The soldiers begin to demand obscene amounts. It’s untenable.”

  The colonel returns to his seat on the couch. He waves at the boxes of folders littering the room.

  “That’s what you have here,” he says. “Inflation. Remember, a few years ago, when it was enough for them to say that the secret police had sent them a threatening letter or two, that a big man in dark glasses had looked at them funny when they were crossing the street? Now the going rate for suffering is higher. Now everyone has to claim they’ve been raped, tortured, their whole family wiped out, down to the pet dogs and the goldfish. Pretty soon they’ll come to you claiming they’re already dead. It’s untenable, Madame El Ward. It can’t go on like this.”

  “They don’t deserve to suffer whatever grudges you still hold,” Madame El Ward said. “This isn’t a war zone, Dimitri.”

  “And it isn’t hell either,” the colonel says. “But if you do believe in hell, Nimra, then you must also believe no one ends up there who doesn’t belong there.”

  The Colonel stands. He walks over to Madame El Ward. He places a hand on her shoulder. “Now,” he says, “tell me where they went. Don’t make me have you arrested for helping an unregistered illegal.”

  “The government changed that law,” Madame El Ward says, swatting the colonel’s hand away.

  “Are you sure? Are you sure they haven’t changed it back? Are you sure I couldn’t make a single call to the ministry and have you thrown out of this place and replaced with one of my soldiers? Go join the Jesuits if you’re looking for sainthood, but don’t you dare get in the way of my work. That we are in a position to be fled to and not fled from is because we have systems, rules, proper ways of doing things. You want to see what it’s like without systems? Hop on the next one of those boats that runs aground here and take it in the opposite direction.”