The port itself was busier than I thought it would be, and darker. There were no streetlamps or much lighting of any kind, leaving the air in blacks and blues scumbled over purples. A cold wind scalloped the water around the only docked ship, the giant ferry going to Athens. It could carry hundreds of people, but it looked like there were no passengers on board. Rasheed explained that the ticket to Athens cost eighty euros per person and that many refugees would have given their last penny to the Turkish mafia in control of the crossing between Izmir and Lesbos, thinking that they’d have finally arrived once they landed in what they thought was Europe. Most of the people waiting at the port did not have enough to cover a ferry ticket.
We walked through a sea of teenage boys that parted gently to let us through and coalesced again as we passed. I remembered that you were nervous around crowds, but you looked more astonished than frightened. Most of the boys were speaking Farsi. I assumed they were Iranian at first, but then I noted the epicanthal fold of their eyelids and realized they were Afghan, probably Hazara. We came upon a group of kids speaking Arabic, three girls and a boy, huddled close on a bench. They didn’t seem concerned at all, chatting about nothing in particular. The eldest girl, perhaps no more than twelve, chestnut hair bursting from under a woolen cap, warily watched our approach. I said hello, introduced myself, asked where their parents were. The eldest said they were taking a walk and would be returning soon. I wondered what emergency would force the parents to leave their children in a strange place surrounded by a hundred teenage boys or, worse, whether these kids had been abandoned. But Mazen took over again. He talked to them, found out which Syrian village they were from, after which he joined them in chatting about nothing at all. I asked him in English, hoping the kids would not understand, whether we should be worried that their parents were not there. Once again that evening he regarded me as if I were speaking some language that no human had spoken before.
“This is my younger sister,” he told the children. “I’m older by one year but wiser by more, many more. She moved to America a long time ago but forgot to take her brain with her. I kept it in a fine jar, which looked rare but was made in China. Every time we get together, I give her back her brain, but it takes a little while for her to adjust to it. Just as she gets back to normal, she returns to America and forgets her brain again.”
The children snickered. One of the girls told Mazen that he was a big liar, like her dad. She accused him of adding salt and pepper to every word that left his mouth. Mazen denied the accusation with no little ardor, insisting that he was most honorable. Why, he had never lied in his life ever, not once. Everywhere he went he was called Mazen the Truthful. The girl, the cutest among them, asked me if I forgot my brain, to which I shook my head no.
“Of course she’d say that,” Mazen said. “She forgets. Here, let me show you the jar I keep her brain in.”
He patted his jacket, pretending to search for my lost brain. Where oh where had he put it? The girl stood up, laughing and pointing at him. “You can’t find it because there is no brain!”
The parents finally appeared. As their daughter said, they had simply gone for a Proustian stroll before boarding the big boat. Mazen talked to them briefly before they were on their way to the ferry with their children, their belongings, and their tickets in hand.
“You’ve been away for too long,” he told me.
“I was surprised that they would leave their children alone,” I said. “After all they’d been through.”
“Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?”
“I’m an American.”
You stood with Rasheed quite a ways from us, surrounded by about twenty boys who looked like they were all talking to you at once. I wondered if you felt you were being crowded by the boys, but it didn’t seem so. You didn’t move away from them no matter how close they got. One boy kept pointing to your phone, but you didn’t seem to understand what he was saying. By the time Mazen and I neared, Rasheed was asking the boy to slow down, for he was speaking much too fast. He didn’t understand Farsi that well, Rasheed said. The boy grinned.
“He wants you to look at his music video on YouTube,” Rasheed said. “He’s a musician. No, he’s a singer-songwriter, he says.”
“On phone,” the boy said in English. “On phone.”
You had trouble tapping in the right web address, your fingers too old to be phone nimble. You gave the boy your phone. He held it in his small hands as if it were the queen’s crown jewels. “Ooh,” he said. “So nice phone.” He proceeded to tap the screen maniacally, his thumbs a veritable blur, and voilà, a video began playing. The four of us were the guests of honor with front-row seating for the tiny screen, and the rest of the boys rough-and-tumbled their way to some angle of viewing behind us. Onscreen, the boy sang only slightly off-key, danced to a disco beat in front of a large mirror, delightfully cute in a coiffed do and besequined all over. The tune sounded hummable, but I couldn’t understand a word, wasn’t even sure what language the song was in, though the boys behind me were in awe. Chatter, chatter, a hand with pointing forefinger would appear over my shoulder, and another boy would begin to clap to the beat of the song.
“That’s wonderful,” you said, and the boy beamed in gratitude. Why was it that those boys thought you were someone of importance or someone who cared about who they were? Had Rasheed told them you were a writer? Because after the video ended, one at a time, they told Rasheed what they did or what they wanted to do, so that he would translate for you. This one was a carpenter, a mason, a cook, a shepherd who was willing to be retrained, sporting a worn jacket lined with lamb’s wool, a couple of sizes too large. You took it all in, nodding your head, hearing them—you, the witness. This one was the youngest of twelve, all of his family still in Afghanistan; that one had a brother in Brussels, a cousin in Brazil, an uncle in Denmark. Your head bobbed up and down, your gaze focused on each speaking boy, your concentration that of a believer listening to his gods. This one’s name was Najib, that one Mumtaz, and of course no less than five Mohammads. The teenagers were dynamic, so alive, as noisy as starlings chattering as they settled at sundown. Every single one of them told you he was eighteen. You kept asking, and they would say eighteen. Rasheed repeated the word so often that the boys no longer needed him to translate their age. I’m eighteen, I’m eighteen, they chirped. Not one of them looked older than fifteen, sixteen at most, with faces rarely, if ever, touched by razors.
“They don’t have any money to buy a ferry ticket to Athens,” Rasheed said. “They’re completely out.”
“But Athens isn’t even their final destination,” I said.
“They’re stuck,” he said. “There is a Swedish NGO run by an Iranian immigrant that comes here some nights with extra ferry tickets, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be around tonight.”
I noticed you getting antsy again. You glanced left, then right, took in all the boys. You moved closer to Rasheed, whispered something in his ear. Rasheed smiled, repeating the word “certainly” a couple of times in Arabic. You two began to walk away. The boys didn’t seem to mind, remaining in their own group, talking, arguing, gesturing wildly as if in a scene from an Italian movie, swimming in hormones, having what appeared to be a good time. I ran after you. Mazen ran after me.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To buy ferry tickets,” you said.
“There are about a hundred boys out there,” I said, trying to catch up. I, the voice of reason.
You stopped, your gaze not leaving your shoes. Rasheed threw a smile toward you, a life jacket, but you didn’t notice. He lifted his arm to console you but didn’t follow through with the motion, returning it to his side.
“I can’t afford eight thousand euros,” you said, paused for another moment, then started marching again into the dark night. “But I have a credit card.”
&nb
sp; I thought at first that you were going to buy one hundred tickets. You had me worried. You seemed determined. We followed in step, exited the port’s gate, and crossed the street. The ticket office was around the corner, which I felt was a good thing: the boys who might be watching us wouldn’t see where we were going.
The office, an old-fashioned travel agency, was overbright and plastered with tacky tourist posters on all of its walls. Would a resident of a Greek island dream of a beach vacation somewhere else? You walked in first, held the door open for us, waited for Rasheed to lead the gaggle of us to the sole agent at a wide, bedraggled desk.
Rasheed, in English, said, “We’d like to buy ferry tickets to Athens.”
The agent, a young man in his thirties, handsome and peppy, tuned himself to high sparkle. If he were in a United States high school, he would have been a cheerleader. “Would that be four?”
“No,” you said, handing him your American credit card. “I want ten tickets.”
The young man didn’t blink. He produced a supply of tickets and counted out ten.
“What happens to them in Athens?” you asked Rasheed.
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “They’ll have to be processed again before moving on, if they’re able to do so. This is one leg of a long journey.”
“A drop in the bucket, I know,” you said. “But I can help ten boys on this part of their passage.”
Rasheed decided he could afford two more tickets. Mazen looked at me. Without speaking and letting either you or Rasheed know, he was asking if it was okay by me for him to contribute. He said he could afford two tickets as well.
“I’ll buy ten as well,” I said. “That’ll make it an even two dozen.”
The march back was less military, more hesitant. How would we distribute the tickets? We decided we’d let Rasheed, the most experienced, deal with it. The starlings we’d left behind were still grouped together, the numbers remained at around twenty-five or a little more. Rasheed entered the circle, spoke his slow Farsi. The boys grew quiet but more excited, like stalking predators waiting to spring. Rasheed would hand out a ticket, and the boy who took it would leave the group, pick up his belongings, and rush toward the giant ferry, disappearing into the dark. One, two, until all twenty-four tickets were gone and only two boys remained standing before Rasheed, visibly the youngest by quite a bit. They hadn’t been able to push through to the front. They looked about to break out in tears.
Rasheed held his hands out to show he had no tickets left. The words for “sorry” are similar in Arabic and Farsi, so we all understood him.
“No,” I found myself saying, but apparently not as loudly as you did.
“Come with me,” you told the boys in English, and they understood you. One picked up his tattered backpack, spoke rapidly to the other. His voice hadn’t broken yet. They were thirteen at most. They stood before you, clutching their bags, smiling and waiting. And back to the ticket office we marched. I told you I could pay for one of the tickets, but you assured me you wanted to do it, as if it were some form of penance.
When you handed the boys their tickets outside the travel agency office, they hugged you, both at the same time. You looked perplexed, unsure how to hug them back. Then they turned to my brother and hugged him so fiercely he began to weep. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him cry. When it was my turn, they hesitated. Should they or shouldn’t they? They looked ecstatic. I moved toward them with my arms out.
We watched them run across the street, heading back into the port. Beyond the gate stood at least a dozen boys looking at us, and behind them more and more boys, and more, ad infinitum.
Learn a Language, Bed a Spy
Did you ever ask Rasheed how he came to speak Farsi? I knew he spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and English fluently. Of all the other languages he could have chosen to learn, why would he pick Farsi? That was a story in itself.
When he was much younger, he began an affair with an older married Jewish man. Even though they had to keep their relationship secret—they couldn’t even be seen together—they lasted for more than five years, meeting in a friend’s office three or four times a week. They kept telling themselves that it was just sex, and in a strange way it was. Rasheed told me that his lover had this fantasy of being ravished and sexually used by a dominant Arab, and Rasheed obliged. Rasheed had to curse and belittle his lover in Arabic while he was inside him, had to smack him figuratively and spank him literally. It was the best sex either one of them had had up to that point in their lives. They were able to sustain the erotic charge for about a year and a half, and just as the novelty of being sexually humiliated by an Arab began to lose its luster, the Israeli whimpered in Farsi during one of their sessions, a slipup, only one sentence. When they were done, Rasheed’s lover would not elaborate other than saying that he was learning Farsi. He wouldn’t say why. He didn’t have to since this was a couple of years after the Iranian Revolution. To spice up their now-flagging sex life, Rasheed began to learn Farsi as well. Soon he was able to belittle his lover in broken Farsi; he moved from calling him sharmouta to calling him jendeh, much to his lover’s delight.
For me, the best part of this story is trying to picture Rasheed as the butch one in any relationship.
I don’t know if you heard this either, but Rasheed sent me an email recently telling me that there are many young Afghan boys in Athens working as prostitutes. Sex work is the only thing these boys can do to survive. For five euros, a European gets to fuck a young boy. Only five euros. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but I do hope that the boys we sent forth to Athens are long gone by now.
A Toddler by Any Other Name Is Still a Toddler
Do you remember the photograph of the dead boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, the one that went viral and prompted international response, all the breast-beating and hair pulling around the world? Aylan Kurdi, remember? There were demonstrations in Germany, in Canada, in Cairo. People held signs mourning the losses of Aylan and humanity.
Rasheed saw the photo in the paper while having his morning coffee in Jerusalem, and by afternoon he had booked his first flight to Lesbos with three other nurses. He wasn’t sure what moved him to take such a quick and decisive action. He thought it had to do with the fact that he had seen numerous photos of dead Palestinian children in Gaza or the West Bank but wasn’t able to do much about those kids, never able to help.
In Gaza itself, an artist created a gigantic sand sculpture of the toddler on the beach. The sculptor left the natural color of sand for the three-year-old’s skin tones, but used red sand for his T-shirt, blue for his shorts, orange for the soles of his shoes, and so on. Gazan children played all around it. There were reenactments of the death on shores in Rabat, Morocco, and the South of France, where dozens of people wearing the same color clothes as Aylan laid their bodies on the sand.
Emma, too, saw the picture that same morning as Rasheed. With tons of makeup and fitted sweaters, she boarded her first flight to Athens less than three weeks later.
A month ago, you told me that you tried to research the events of New Year’s Eve 2016 in Cologne, the night that was used as an excuse to shut the doors to refugees worldwide. You sent out feelers through friends at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. And yet you couldn’t figure out what exactly happened that night. Everyone had a different story; little was actually documented. You thought that was strange.
Well, here’s something just as weird.
The boy’s first name was not Aylan but rather Alan. It must have been misspelled early on, and no one corrected it until it was too late. His family name was Shenu, but once the family arrived in Turkey from Syria, they were called Kurdi because of their ethnic background.
Years later, it is the rare person who knows this.
Years later, there are still contradictory stories about what happened on that boat on the morning of Se
ptember 2, 2015, before it flipped and the young Alan gained a y as his cuddly corpse floated to shore.
Do you know of the Turkish poet Cemal Süreya? The name Süreyya is spelled with a double y, but he lost one of them in a bet with another poet, or so the story goes and is still going. Cemal died sometime in the early nineties. Maybe his y remained behind for a while, waiting patiently for the right opportunity to come along, and suddenly, years later, a toddler’s body appears on the Turkish shore, calling for it:
Here I am.
Another Kurd, Another Drowning
His name was Baris Yagzi, all of twenty-two, drowned on April 23, 2017, off the coast of Turkey, when the refugee boat he had boarded sank in the Aegean, killing at least sixteen people, including children, and leaving only two survivors—a pregnant woman from the Congo and another from Cameroon. The usual story, the boat would have been barely safe had it carried only one-fourth the number of passengers. He was one of hundreds of thousands of refugees who sailed across those seas, one of thousands who died doing so.
He had dreamed of going to Brussels to study music, but his visa application was rejected. He grew desperate. He paid smugglers thousands of dollars for a seat on one of those boats. He was Turkish, not Syrian. The picture in the paper showed a boy of uncommon pulchritude, a young Apollo and his instrument, his head supported by the violin’s chin rest, dark, brooding eyes looking at a point somewhere to the left of the camera, eyebrows of an ancient relief, a beauty mark on his left cheek, a perfect imperfection.
Baris washed up on the Turkish shore clutching his violin case, his fingers squeezing the life out of what gave him life. He would not let go even as he drowned. Within the case lay his instrument, that wooden vessel, and sheets of music of his own composition, now wet and unsalvageable.
The Wrong End of the Telescope Page 22