What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Soon they come upon a small cave, set far enough back from the water that Vänna assumes no change in tide will flood it. She leads Amir beneath the overhanging rocks and sets down her pillowcase and the plate of hotel food and the child’s backpack Madame El Ward gave her.

  “Here is good enough,” she says.

  They sit awhile in the shallow belly of the cave. They observe each other. In time the immediacy of adventure leaves them and in a way they become the strangers they never had a chance to be, discovering each other anew.

  She notices for the first time that his hair is naturally curly, and, washed now of the residual grime of the sea, he looks younger, more luminous. His skin is darker than hers; it matches the shade she subconsciously associates not with a country or an ethnicity but with the entire middle belt of the Earth. He looks like an islander.

  She smiles at him. He smiles back.

  Suddenly Vänna remembers the books Madame El Ward gave her. She opens the small backpack and retrieves them. She starts with one of the translation books. It was published a year earlier by one of the volunteer-run resettlement groups and is intended for children. She flips through the pages casually, past cartoon animals whose speech bubbles bear greetings and simple declarations in a dozen different languages—some she speaks, some she can guess at, some she can’t begin to decipher.

  On a page she finds a map of the sea that surrounds them. She points to her island and looks at the boy.

  “This is us,” she says, pointing at the both of them.

  Amir observes the map. He points to a place on the other side of the sea.

  Vänna nods. Looking up at him, she notices for the first time around the boy’s neck a gold bell-shaped necklace. In the action of the day its shell-clasp has come loose and it hangs open now, baring its insides. She looks at the two photos within, one she assumes is of the boy’s mother and the other of him as a baby.

  “Did you come here alone?” she asks, but the boy doesn’t understand.

  Vänna thinks a moment, then points to the necklace. To her surprise, the boy takes it off from around his neck and hands it to her.

  Delicately Vänna sets the open locket onto the page, such that the picture of the woman sits atop the land on one side of the sea. Then she slowly moves the locket across the blue on the page, until in an inch or two the woman’s photo arrives on the island.

  She watches the boy follow the journey in miniature. He looks up at her. He shakes his head. He begins to cry softly.

  “I’m so sorry,” Vänna says. She pulls him close. She tries to think of some way to cross the gap of language and reach him, to offer some comfort.

  “Look, look,” she says. With her arm still around him she leans the two of them forward such that they can see out the mouth of the cave. She points northward, to the end of the island.

  “When we get there, there’s a man who’ll…” She stops. She picks up the phrase book and the necklace and moves the pictures back in the other direction. The boy smiles.

  “It’ll be okay, David,” she says.

  For a second Amir, who has forgotten the fake name he’d given her earlier in the day, stares in confusion. Then he remembers.

  “No David, no David,” he says. “Amir.”

  Vänna nods. She reaches out and shakes the boy’s hand.

  “Hello, Amir,” she says. “I’m still Vänna.”

  She hands the necklace back, then takes the plate the hotel housekeeper gave her and sets it between them, using the open translation book as a place mat. They sit in silence eating the guests’ leftovers, Amir inhaling a mostly uneaten, overcooked roast, Vänna picking at the garnish, a few small stalks of watercress.

  A few minutes later, she stands up. She motions for Amir to keep eating, then walks out of the cave and back down the shoreline toward All Saints’ Beach. She returns carrying a pair of the hotel’s beach-chair cushions. She sets them down side by side in the cave, then she lies down and kicks the sandals off her feet and wipes the sand from her skirt. She looks at Amir and pats the other empty cushion.

  They lie down beside each other. The cushions are narrow; they are forced close together, and in that closeness she can feel the rise and fall of his breathing. Night falls, silence settles alongside it, and the children sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before

  “And what’s so bad about America?” Kamal asked.

  “You poor, deluded man,” said Mohamed. “Where to begin, where to begin?”

  For hours the migrants in Amir’s corner of the boat had passed the time this way, talking about their destinations, the places where they hoped to settle one day. Like the boat in which they traveled, the conversation seemed to take no direction at all, in this moment a heated debate about the inhumanity of the Dublin agreement, in the next an exchange of advice on how to best avoid the suspicion of the police officers who patrolled the train from Copenhagen to Malmö, how to best imitate a Westerner. And preoccupied with conversation, the men and women were able to keep from thinking about the journey, about their depleting supply of food and water and the smell of unwashed skin, which had now overpowered that of the diesel fumes. So they talked, and their talk filled the emptiness that surrounded them.

  “How do you even plan to get to America?” Mohamed said.

  “I’ll figure it out,” Kamal said. “I have a cousin there.”

  Mohamed finished a small plastic bottle of water and tossed it overboard. “There are three things you need to know about America,” he said. “First, everyone there is racist, especially the ones who tell you they’re not. Second, they’re terrified of sex. And third, no matter the crime, they’ll always find themselves innocent.”

  Kamal stared at Mohamed, incredulous. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said. “You come from our part of the world and you want to tell me Americans are terrified of sex? Americans are more comfortable with sex than anyone.”

  “No,” Mohamed replied. “They’re comfortable with violence, not sex. Sometimes they just get the two confused.”

  Mohamed turned to Maher. “Hey, English professor, tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Which America?” Maher replied. “There’s lots of countries inside that country.”

  “The America that gets to decide what to do with people like us.”

  “No,” Maher said. “You’re not wrong.”

  Kamal waved Mohamed off. “What do I care what they’re terrified of, anyway? And you want to throw stones, look at this boat.”

  Kamal pointed to the floor, below which the lower galleys hummed. “Look at the skin color of the people up here and look at the skin color of the people down there and tell me we’re any better.”

  Mohamed shook his head. “That has nothing to do with the color of anyone’s skin. There’s a price to sit up here and there’s a price to sit down there. If any of those Africans had enough money to be sitting in the top deck, that’s where they’d be. This is about business, not race.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Kamal replied.

  * * *

  —

  Amir leaned against Umm Ibrahim’s knee, cramped and in pain. Earlier, the sea had kicked up and sent the boat rocking. Umm Ibrahim, her little vial of lemon juice long empty and with nothing else to keep the nausea at bay, had succumbed to seasickness. Barely able to lift her niqab’s face covering in time, she threw up a thin stream of fluid off the side of the boat. The passengers against whom she’d been pressed tried to move out of her way, and all succeeded but for Amir. Before he knew what had happened, the back of his shirt and life jacket were soggy with vomit.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” Umm Ibrahim said between gulping breaths, trying to regain her equilibrium.

  Amir recoiled. He unzipped his life jacket and took off his shirt and under the gaze of all around him he st
ared at the thin yellow liquid that stained both.

  Umm Ibrahim pointed to the men who sat near her. “Someone give him a shirt to wear,” she said.

  None of the men responded. In their silent reticence was evident the reality that somewhere along the journey they’d passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival. Passengers who a day earlier had shared with Amir a sip of canned orange juice or a bag of sunflower seeds or a bite of stone-hard baklava, or had simply smiled in his direction, now looked straight through him.

  “What pathetic men you are,” Umm Ibrahim said.

  “Lady, calm down,” said Walid. “It’s hot out. Let him sit without a shirt—it won’t kill him.”

  “Shut up,” Umm Ibrahim said. She snapped her fingers in the direction of Maher, who sat in silence reading his book. “You,” she said. “Hand me that rope.”

  Maher snapped out of his hypnosis and looked around him. On the deck near where he sat was a line of coiled rope, fraying but thick.

  “This?” Maher asked.

  “Yes, this,” Umm Ibrahim replied. “Don’t stare at me like that. Let’s go, let’s go.”

  “Would you just sit back in your place and calm down?” Walid said. “Enough with this…”

  “Tell me to calm down again,” Umm Ibrahim said. “Tell me to calm down again, see what happens.”

  Maher struggled to lift the rope, which required the assistance of three other passengers, who sat on parts of it. Finally, he managed to pass one end to Umm Ibrahim, who laced it through the arms of Amir’s jacket and shirt, then tied it in a double-overhand. She leaned over the railing and dipped the makeshift clothesline into the water.

  Amir stood and watched, as did a few of his seatmates, none of whom, caught up in the strangeness of Umm Ibrahim’s ad hoc washing, noticed that the life jacket remained afloat only for an instant before sinking below the surface.

  A moment later Umm Ibrahim pulled the line. She set the jacket and the shirt on the edge of the railing behind her and looped the rope through a hook to pin the clothing in place.

  “It’ll be dry soon,” she told Amir. “Good as new.”

  Amir sat back down on the deck between Umm Ibrahim’s feet. Soon the passengers ignored him again, and he felt less self-conscious of his skin.

  He remembered watching his mother throw up, in the months before his half brother was born—the violence of it, the way the muscles inside her seemed to seize, a strange electricity working its way through her as she leaned against the bowl. Whenever he saw her this way she was always careful afterward to tell him that it was natural, but it never looked natural. Or if it was natural, it was the workings of a nature bereft of mercy, bereft of grace.

  Once he’d heard his mother talking with the other immigrant women who lived in the neighborhood. The conversation turned to childbirth, one of the women due in a few weeks and deeply anxious about how the local doctors would treat her and her newborn.

  Babies are resilient, Amir’s mother said—it’s a medical fact that babies are born knowing the basics of survival; should a woman give birth alone in the forest and pass out during, the child would come out knowing how to crawl, how to reach its mother’s breast, how to hold on.

  Amir thought back to this conversation now, and, feeling the curve of Umm Ibrahim’s belly against the back of his head, wondered if there was any truth to what his mother had said. Would a child born in the forest really come out knowing how to crawl? It seemed entirely impossible, as much the stuff of fantasy as Umm Ibrahim giving birth out here and the child born knowing how to swim.

  In time the swaying boat lulled him into a nap. When he woke, the sun had set but not before leaving its mark on him. His back burned. He reached over and asked Umm Ibrahim to give him his clothes. He put them on—his shirt had dried but the life jacket was still soaked. In the cooling night he leaned against Umm Ibrahim’s knee and leached warmth.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After

  “Do you even recognize your country anymore? Be honest—do you?”

  The interviewer, eager to move on, taps her pen and begins to ask the next question.

  “No, wait,” the man says. “Tell me this, tell me this: Why do they all have phones? If they’re all so poor, why do they have phones?”

  “I don’t know why they have phones,” the interviewer replies.

  “And another thing—why do these women keep asking for birth control pills? Half of them claim their husbands were killed by the secret police or whatever—after all, that’s what brought them here, isn’t it?—but the people who run the immigration facilities tell me they keep asking for birth control pills. Why, why?”

  “I don’t know why they keep asking for birth control pills,” the interviewer replies.

  Colonel Kethros watches. He recognizes the man being interviewed on TV as a representative of one of the nationalist parties, which have been making serious inroads over the past two years, capitalizing on the migrant crisis and the humiliating economic malaise.

  “Do we have to listen to this nonsense?” says the colonel’s companion, Lina Eliades, an administrator with the Ministry of Migration Policy, whose job over the last year has entailed chasing the geographic whims of the migrant passage. She spends most of her time traveling from the site of one boat landing to the other—liaising with local officials, standardizing the myriad forms used by different municipalities to count the living, taking guesses at the number of dead. She has known Colonel Kethros since grade school; they make time to meet whenever work brings Lina back to the island.

  “He’s putting on a performance,” Kethros says, pointing the remote at the television.

  “Of course he’s putting on a performance,” Lina replies. “That’s the whole point.”

  The colonel shakes his head. “But it doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

  Low clouds mute the morning sun. Across the street from where Lina and the colonel sit at a small roadside coffee shop, the grounds of the Hotel Xenios appear a ghost town compared to the previous day. The journalists are all gone; news arrives that another boat has washed up on one of the nearby islands where a popular movie festival is under way, and the visuals of such a landing—the chance to catch movie stars and migrants in a single shot—are too good to pass up. The soldiers and emergency workers and representatives from the coroner’s office have finished clearing away the bodies; likely they are sitting now in cold storage in the city morgue, subject to a set of death rites that, even now, after so many similar deaths, are still ad hoc and carried out by the state with endless reluctance.

  The colonel turns to his friend. “Tell me what you know about the next one,” he says.

  “What next one?” Lina replies.

  “Don’t play games, Lina. We all hear the same radio chatter.”

  Lina sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “A party boat reported it, said it looked like a large life raft.”

  “Different from the one that just washed up next door?”

  “Probably. We have reports of three different ones, or maybe the same.”

  “Headed this way?”

  “Who can say? They don’t steer those things—they just float.”

  The colonel finishes his coffee and lights a cigarette. “Nothing for months, and now two in two days.”

  “Relax,” Lina says. “You’re starting to sound like my bosses.”

  The colonel points south, beyond the hotel grounds to the sea and what lies on the other side of the sea. “Your bosses are letting them colonize us,” he says.

  “You’re getting melodramatic in your old age,” Lina replies. “It’s not a colonization, it’s just a bunch of people on boats.”

  “Every colonization is just a bunch of people on boats,” the colonel says.

  He looks across the street, where his s
oldiers loiter around their trucks, waiting on him. They are new recruits and much too young, the colonel believes, to be assigned any real responsibility. Elias and Alexander, the twins, work well together, and Andreas, who was born on the eastern side of the island, is at least good for local knowledge. But the fourth of the bunch, Nicholas, is much too soft, too bookish, clearly unsuited for military life.

  In a way they all are. At times they carry out his orders silently and robotically. Other times, when he is in a good mood and behaves in a friendlier manner with them, they become too familiar, and soon start to bombard him with questions about his previous military experiences: what it was like to see the peace collapse, to work a slaughter field; whether he felt his lower leg come detached from his body in the moment the mine exploded; whether he ever killed. In times like these the colonel feels a great and sullen rage overtake him—not at the boys themselves, who behave the same way he did at their age, but at the fact that the end of his military career should have come to this: babysitting four little boys, running around from migrant ship to migrant ship, swatting at flies.

  A couple of tourists walk barefoot across the street from the hotel grounds to the coffee shop. As they approach, Lina smiles and says, “Good morning.” The tourists smile back politely and exchange greetings but quickly pay for their drinks and walk away, looking warily at the military pickup truck parked across the street and the four soldiers gathered around it.

  “You’re scaring the foreigners,” Lina says.

  The colonel chuckles. “The foreigners are scaring themselves.”

  Lina opens her briefcase and pulls out a plain paper folder. “So, do you have numbers for me?” she asks.

  “One hundred and twenty, give or take,” the colonel replies.

  “Give or take…”

  The colonel sighs. “What do you want from me, Lina?”

  “Accurate numbers, Dimitri. Has anyone told you how to do your job out here? No, we leave you alone, we let you do whatever you think is best. The only thing we ask for is accurate numbers.”