What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

The children cram their books and their pillowcase of remaining food into their backpack and leave everything else behind. They head north, keeping to the coastline, away from the single road that meanders toward the northeast edge of the island. It is slow going, the rocks pushing outward into the sea in such a way as to force the children to hike up their clothes and step through and over the small tidepools and underwater embankments. But everywhere the sea is clear and they are able to see where their feet make landing.

  After a half hour Vänna looks back and, seeing the twisting shoreline behind her, begins to relax. It seems unlikely the colonel and his soldiers saw them.

  Soon the rocky outcroppings recede and the children find themselves at another sandy beach, this one open to the public and busy with locals and tourists in the midday heat. Other children, both Amir’s age and Vänna’s, scurry around, building sandcastles and playing tag. They observe Vänna and Amir with the cautious curiosity that in childhood precedes the making of friendships.

  A couple sitting on beach towels nearby smile as Vänna and Amir pass. One of them, a man wearing garish tropical shorts and a T-shirt bearing the name of some other place he once went on vacation, points to Amir’s jersey and gives a thumbs-up.

  “A Cleveland boy!” he says. “Think they’ll win Central next year?”

  Amir looks at the man with total confusion. The children keep walking.

  A mile or so north of the beach the hillsides become lower and the road traversing them swings close to the shoreline. From here anyone driving can spot the children. Seeing this, Vänna takes Amir’s hand. She quickens her pace.

  In a clearing they see a deserted cabin set amid a bloom of yellow saltflowers. Vänna leads them to it. Up close it appears to be a fisherman’s shack, made of stone and wood and a weathered tin awning. They settle inside and rest their feet, take shelter from the blistering sun.

  Vänna retrieves the pillowcase from the backpack and empties it on the floor. For lunch they eat a packet of almonds and another of bitter-chocolate truffles that Vänna strongly suspects are alcoholic. But the boy, who wolfs them down, doesn’t seem to mind, and so neither does she.

  Through the shack’s north-facing window the tip of the island is now clear to see. In a mile or so the land narrows until it is barely wider than the road itself, and this narrowing creates two mushrooms of land, each a near-island in and of itself. At the northeast corner of the second island the ancient lighthouse marks the coast. Tomorrow, at a dock very close to this place, the ferryman will come. All that stands between them and the lighthouse now is a few hours’ walking, over the hills and through the ruins.

  She watches Amir wandering around the shoreline, picking the saltflowers. They are a species native to the island; in the summer their flame-shaped petals harden and fall, and it is a favorite pastime of the local children to run through the fields trampling them, the sound of it like firecrackers going off.

  She walks outside to join him. He hands her a small bouquet.

  Vänna smiles. “Thank you,” she says.

  They hear a rustling in the brush behind the fisherman’s shack. They move to get out of sight, but the only shelter is the shack and to go to it is to go closer to the source of the sound. So they stay in place, watching the leaves rattle and part. They prepare to run.

  At first they don’t see the thing emerging; it’s too slow, too low to the ground, too much the color of the brush. And when finally they do, it’s not the eyes or the teeth or the claws they see first, but the scales. A line of bruise-green plates rise from the animal’s back. It looks prehistoric, its claws and tail tracing ruts through the sand as it shuffles out into the clearing. Vänna has never seen it before, but it looks as she imagined it would, the bird-eating thing.

  It notices them, but it doesn’t charge, doesn’t gnash its teeth or make any kind of sound. It simply observes them for a moment and then, unhurried, turns and crawls upland. The children watch it as it climbs and disappears behind a well of rocks and into a tidepool, and then over the other end and into a half-submerged cave.

  And then they are alone again, hidden from the road by the old fishing shack and the brush. The only sound is of the waves coming and going. They kick off their shoes and sit awhile, enjoying the warmth, skimming stones. And then they set off, northward.

  * * *

  —

  It takes another three hours of hiking until, exhausted, their feet blistered and the daylight all but gone, Vänna and Amir reach the lighthouse. It stands on a high, pedestal-shaped mound that extends past the mainland, and appears to the children as they come up the final rise as a hovering thing.

  Vänna motions to the stone structure and Amir, who has for the past hour walked glumly with his head down, brightens a little at the sight of their destination. The children walk to the entrance. Here, at the end of the island, where the hotel and time-share developers have yet to break ground, there are no other people to be seen—not locals, not tourists, nobody—and so complete is this emptiness that it’s possible for Vänna to momentarily believe the entire island is theirs alone.

  They climb a jagged, crumbling stone staircase that winds around and up the lighthouse, terminating in a vacant lantern room about thirty feet up. By the time they climb inside, the sun has set.

  A thick spiked vine grows out of a crack in the stone floor; otherwise the lantern room is empty. Vänna reaches down and grabs the weed between the spikes and pulls it out. She places the backpack down on the ground for Amir to use as a pillow. The boy, drained from the day’s walk, lies down and makes no complaint about the unforgiving stone floor. She lies down next to him; she fishes the translation book from their backpack and they try for a while to find a place where their languages meet. She pieces together from various pages the boy’s words for home and tomorrow, and he understands because he finds and mouths her word for thank you, and she can sense in him the gratitude, of which she has never been the recipient before and it feels good, feels cleansing. In truth she has no idea where the ferryman will take him, whether he will ever see his family or his home again, but she doesn’t for even a minute consider telling this truth because the truth is bereft of kindness while the lie is nothing but.

  They tire of words; they turn to pictures. Lazily they flip through the adventures of Zaytoon and Zaytoona, their impossible inventions and miraculous escapes, until Amir can no longer keep his eyes open.

  Vänna sits up and looks out at the land to the west. Beyond a small stretch of terrace trees is the place Madame El Ward told her to go. In the morning they will meet the ferryman, and he will know where to take the boy. And only after she’s made sure of this will Vänna return to her own home and face the consequences of what she’s done. She doesn’t much care what those consequences will be, and she enjoys the sensation of not caring, the lightness and sharpness of it.

  * * *

  —

  In the middle of the night she wakes and sees them, the luminous things. Delirious with sleep, she hears a commotion on the beach to the south. She looks out the lantern room’s window, where below floats an electric cloud of bright-blue fireflies. They move in erratic flight paths, this way and that, low over the sand and the surf—a dreamlike hovering marked with the sound of hushed conversation. In a moment her eyes adjust, and Vänna sees the fireflies have grown arms beneath them, and those arms have grown bodies.

  Slowly the migrants appear out of the night, standing by their beaten rubber dinghy on the otherwise deserted beach. Hands held high, they struggle to find a signal, a means of calling their families back home, confirming they’ve survived the passage, confirming they’ve lived.

  In time the light of the fireflies begins to disperse. The migrants start walking, headed in the direction of the Hotel Xenios to the south. Vänna watches this movement until it is over and the darkness once more total, then she lies back down and falls a
sleep. And when the morning comes the afterimage of what she’s seen strikes her as so incongruent, so much the fabric of a dream, she quickly comes to believe she never saw it at all.

  Chapter Twenty

  Before

  The human topology of the upper deck shifted as Mohamed enlisted a few men to shuffle over to the port side. He motioned to Walid and Maher.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Make yourselves useful.”

  “What are we going to do?” Maher asked.

  “You know exactly what we’re going to do.”

  The two men joined a couple others and Mohamed by the old man’s side. This time, none of the passengers complained when they stepped around them or pushed against them. They were obliging; they shifted to let the men pass, to let them do this work.

  Mohamed nudged the old man with his foot, eliciting no response. He knelt down and slapped the old man a couple of times. He waited a moment, then he stood back up.

  “All right,” he said, pointing at Maher and Walid first, then the two other men he’d drafted. “You two take the legs, you two take the arms. Kamal and I will hold up the middle.”

  Umm Ibrahim stood up. “You can’t,” she said.

  “Don’t start,” Mohamed replied. “Please don’t start.”

  “What are you? Do you not have a God?” Umm Ibrahim shoved her neighboring passenger aside and moved such that she was now as close to the old man as the others who were readying to lift him. She put her hand on his shoulder as though claiming an empty seat. “Just let him sit here until we land. He deserves a proper burial.”

  “He won’t get a proper burial where we’re going,” Mohamed said. “He’ll get a fridge.”

  Mohamed addressed the men standing around him. “Are you Muslims?” he asked.

  Kamal, Walid and a couple of the other men nodded. Maher shrugged.

  “Good enough,” Mohamed said. He turned back to Umm Ibrahim. “You want him laid to rest by people of his religion or a bunch of Christian strangers?”

  Umm Ibrahim said nothing. Mohamed knelt down. With efficient movements he eased the old man’s body such that he lay flat on the deck. As the dead body uncurled, the living bodies around it moved away, as though the old man had died of some contagion, some invisible leech still hungry.

  “On three, lift,” Mohamed ordered. The other men positioned themselves around the corpse, ready to comply.

  “Hold on a minute,” Walid said.

  “What is it?” Mohamed replied.

  “Maybe…” Walid stammered. “Maybe he has something. We should check.”

  Mohamed stood up. “Are you serious?”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Walid said. “Everyone here is thinking it. What, better the fish should keep it?”

  Mohamed stepped close to Walid, who stumbled back a few steps. But just as fast Mohamed turned and knelt down by the old man. He checked the solitary pocket on the man’s galabeya. Its only contents were an empty box of Tic Tacs and a folded piece of paper. On the paper was written a phone number with a German country code and the name Basboosa written atop it.

  Mohamed waved these things at Walid. “You want this?” he asked. Walid looked away.

  Mohamed threw the empty box of Tic Tacs off the side of the boat and folded the paper again and came to place it back in the old man’s pocket, then stopped. He handed it instead to Umm Ibrahim.

  “You want to do something for him?” he said. “Here. When you land, make the call. Let them know.”

  Umm Ibrahim took the paper. Just as Mohamed began readying to lift the old man once more, he heard Walid inhale breath.

  “I swear to God…” he yelled. “What is it now?”

  “The socks,” Walid said.

  Mohamed stared at Walid. “You tiny, tiny man,” he said.

  Mohamed knelt down and took the socks the man had been using as gloves. He crumpled them together and threw them at Walid. “Take them and go back to your corner. You say another word for the rest of the trip and I’ll throw you overboard myself.”

  Walid picked up the socks and shuffled back to the place where he’d been sitting. He looked at no one and no one looked at him.

  They lifted the old man, struggling against the weight his slight frame seemed to have taken on since death. They held him as still as they could, balanced lengthwise along the splintered railing, half of him flying.

  “Someone say a prayer,” Mohamed shouted.

  “Which prayer?” Maher replied.

  “Any goddamned prayer.”

  Awkwardly, as he supported one of the old man’s legs, Maher recited the opening chapter of the Quran. He had long ago abandoned all but literary interest in his faith, and what he recited now he knew only because it had been drilled into him as a child, and although his memory failed him and he recited the final verses wrong, beseeching the Lord to offer the straight path to both those He blessed and those who angered Him, and although many of the passengers on the boat knew that he had spoken the prayer incorrectly, none said a word except in unison when he was finished. A loud and single-voiced Ameen accompanied the old man off the boat and into the water.

  Some of the passengers watched, others looked away, pretending nothing had happened at all. A few of them leaned over the edge, and the boat leaned with them. Amir struggled to get between the bodies and press himself against the railing for a look, but Umm Ibrahim held him back. Shielded this way by the lip of the woman’s garment, Amir only heard the sound of the body departing. A bloated lash, an interloping wave.

  The old man faded into ripples. In the final moments before the glow of the boat’s lantern left him, he seemed to detach from himself, to become two distinct absences: one a trick of memory and light along the surface, the other a vessel of flesh sinking to the floor.

  * * *

  —

  The boat sailed on. The men who’d done the burial returned to their places. For a while it was quiet, until Umm Ibrahim, who had never taken her eyes off Mohamed, spoke.

  “I’m glad you’ll die along with the rest of us,” she said.

  Mohamed sat with his eyes closed, his head back against the railing. He did not reply.

  “I should have walked to the West,” Umm Ibrahim said. “Better to have died on land than out here with the likes of you. I should have walked to the West and when I got there I should have thrown myself at their mercy.”

  Mohamed laughed. “What mercy, lady? I promise you, they don’t give a shit about you or that kid you’re carrying inside you.”

  Amir felt a sharp shove. Before he had lifted himself up he saw Umm Ibrahim moving quickly in Mohamed’s direction. Some of the passengers tried to hold her back but could not do so before she reached the smugglers’ apprentice and spat in his face.

  Mohamed jumped up and grabbed Umm Ibrahim by the throat. He held her like that until the panicked passengers around them pulled him away. Mohamed and two of the men holding him fell back against the pole on which the lantern hung. The lantern fell to the ground and smashed open. Pieces of broken glass littered the rear end of the deck. The passengers leapt back, and the boat shook.

  Mohamed shoved the men aside. A trickle of blood ran down his forearm from where the lantern glass had cut him. He stood, teeth bared, one hand on the pistol at his side, the other pointing at Umm Ibrahim, pointing at everyone.

  “You sad, stupid people,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to yourselves. The West you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you’re the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad—they’re engines and f
uel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.”

  Mohamed stopped. He looked around him, saw the way in which all those who had earlier tried to hold him back had now backed away from him. Watching them, he felt some disgust at himself for having lost his composure, for having laid hands on a woman and having yelled this way at the passengers, who were, at the end of the day, customers, people no different than those he would rely on to make a living should he survive this apprenticeship and save enough money to run his own migrant fleet one day. But the men and women who shrank from him now, as though from a rabid, frothing animal, had barely heard a single thing he’d said. They stared only at his hand on the holster, at the gun by his side.

  “Anyway, there’s nothing to be done,” Mohamed said quietly as he slumped back in his place at the stern. “People live, people die. Believe in whatever you want, but for now sit down. The boat is old and won’t take much more.”

  The passengers quieted, the boat sailed, its diesel engine sputtering. Walid picked the flashlight off the floor and hung it up again. With the lantern shattered, its light was now a solitary beam. Only a while later did Maher, looking up from his book of apocryphal scripture, break the silence.

  “One should try to believe in things,” he said, “even if they let you down afterward.”

  “What?” Mohamed replied.

  “It’s something my favorite author once said.”

  Mohamed closed his eyes. “Your favorite author is wrong,” he said.

  Under light snow the migrants journeyed. Some leaned against each other and slept, some fixed an endless stare at the horizon, searching for land. But despite the exhaustion and the hunger and the deep and deepening fear, in the smallest way they were a little less cramped. In the smallest way they each now had a little more room.