When, in his dizziness and delirium, he started his fall, he was almost already asleep. Almost. His head was horizontal to the ground, cheek but inches from the thatch of grass about to cushion his landing. His eyes were open just enough to make out Ahmet on the beach, shoeless and shirtless, boyishly kicking up sheets of water. The last few frames before things went black: Ahmet facing in his direction, jumping up and down; arms straight up; acting—as always, posing for the camera. He knew Ahmet was hoping he was filming and, going under, he was thinking, Don’t worry, Ahmet, I am . . .
* * *
BOOM!
Ramadan woke to the sound of gunfire—or so it seemed, as one thunderous strike broke through his slumber. He cried out in a throaty whimper and clasped his right hand over his shoulder. The double-barrel combination of the boom and his exclamation roused Ahmet, who, lying beside Ramadan, propped himself up and in the universal inflection of What happened? mumbled, “Ne oldu?”
Ramadan cleared his eyes. The sun was setting on the Mediterranean, and the serenity of the waning light stood in contrast to his waking panic.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It sounded like a gun, a big gun. A cannon.”
Ahmet sat up, stretched, and yawned. “It was a cannon. Ramadan cannon.”
“My cannon?” Ramadan thought he was still dreaming, having a conversation that made no sense in the waking world. “I don’t have a cannon.”
Ahmet laughed. “No, boy. It is the big gun, to tell us the sun is going down. You forget—it is Ramadan, Ramadan.”
He had, indeed, forgotten—and yet again, he had fasted the whole day. Sleeping through the last few hours had made the sacrifice endurable. Ahmet rummaged through his backpack. When he faced Ramadan, he was holding up a plastic bag of goodies, and they lounged together in the twilight of Iskenderun, preparing to break their fast.
“Iftar,” Ramadan said.
Ahmet smiled at him and tugged his ear. “Allahu Akbar.”
Ramadan was fixated on the sunset, as a plump date slid into view. The dark, dimpled oval fruit turned garnet with flecks of topaz and rose, bejeweled by the last of the evening light. Where Ahmet had placed it, brilliant as it was, it could have been the sun resurrected. Jittery with hunger, Ramadan was nearly cross-eyed as he pinched the date, inches from his face, and put it into his mouth.
Chewing and smacking, he said, “Amen!”
Ahmet placed the bag on the ground between them and motioned for Ramadan to take more, which he gladly did. The sweetness of the dried fruit, a pitted variety, was the only flavor that registered. Years from now, if you asked him what a date, eaten at dusk in Iskenderun for iftar, tasted like, he would say, “Cotton candy.”
Ahmet pulled out a couple of bottles of water and two convenience-store sandwiches—pide bread filled with beef, cheese, diced green peppers, slivers of red onions, and parsley leaves—and he handed one of each to Ramadan. The horizon was flaming out, and they looked at the benevolent conflagration: oranges and reds blurring into golds and purples—and the Mediterranean bluing into black. Darkness engulfed them as they completed their meal.
“I am glad we will arrive at night,” Ahmet said. “Halep is very beautiful at night. Will be good in the camera. The lights. The buildings. The trees. I shoot that myself.”
“And the Citadel?”
“Yes. The Citadel will also look beautiful in my film. We will go there. Sami, he tell me that very soon it will be a real fortress of war again.”
“Hmm,” Ramadan said, trying to shrug off his sadness.
Ahmet looked at him and said, “I know. Is why we must hurry.”
They gathered their waste, and Ramadan dropped it in a garbage can nearby. When he returned, Ahmet had put his shirt back on, along with a brighter disposition.
“But soon—happiness! Forget about the war right now, Ramadan. We find Zahirah and Adad. Then we find your father!”
They walked over to the motorcycle and strapped on their backpacks and helmets. “But how can you be so sure about everything?” Ramadan asked.
“What? You don’t believe?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You don’t know. Okay. When everything happen like I say, you will think, ‘Oh, man, Ahmet told me this would happen.’ And it will be like I tell your whole story. Ramadan Ramsey by Ahmet Adem. Is nice—I like how this sound. You will see. But first thing—get on the motorcycle.”
Ramadan got on, wondering who he was in Ahmet’s storytelling mind. Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper? And once they got where they were going, was something going to happen with a gun? Then Ahmet started the engine. “Now say, ‘Forget about the war!’”
“Forget about the war!” Ramadan yelled.
Ahmet revved the bike, and sped off. “To Halep!”
“To Aleppo!”
16
The Poet of Refugee Road
But of course, wars, if nothing else, are unforgettable. That might be their only redemption. Ahmet couldn’t even forget Buster Keaton’s cinematic war—and that was only historical fiction. Were it not for his obsession, he and Ramadan wouldn’t have been zipping along the southeastern edge of Turkey, searching for an obscure entry into Syria. And if forgetting an invented war was impossible, the idea of forgetting a real, present-day one would soon prove a delusion.
Not long after leaving Iskenderun, they were cruising past a sprawling industrial complex, an oil refinery or a chemical factory, when Ahmet shouted, “This is it!”
At the first opportunity, he steered the bike off the main highway onto a dirt trail, pausing there. “Sami tell me we must go this way.”
“Why?”
“No checkpoint.”
“You sure?” Ramadan asked warily.
Ahmet reset himself on the seat and guided them toward the unassuming road. “Is ea-sy!”
But it soon became apparent that this “ea-sy” way—at least this stretch of it—was also dark and bumpy. Only about twenty feet wide, the road was lined with overgrown trees, whose branches occasionally encroached into their pathway. With the motorcycle headlight brightening only ten feet or so in front of them, they sometimes had to duck at the last minute when limbs reached out with a predatory aggression. They made the best of things at first and were making good time, until a particularly animalistic branch swiped Ramadan’s right shoulder, throwing the bike off balance.
“Whoa!” he shouted, tightening his grip on Ahmet.
After that, Ahmet slowed down—which was fortunate, because only a few minutes later a parade of shadowy figures darted out just a few feet in front of them. To steer clear of this jaunty line of scrambling silhouettes, eight or nine in total, he had to bring the motorcycle to a skidding, sideways stop, spraying a fountain of dirt from the rear wheel. Ramadan heard several high-pitched cries being swallowed by the bike’s idling gurgles. Children. The headlight was pointing into the wooded area lining the road, but it also spilled onto the path, allowing him to see the last scampering movements of a hunched-over man and, tagging along behind him, holding his hand, a young girl. When she glanced back, the headlight illuminated her face. She was eleven or twelve years old, roughly Ramadan’s age. Her eyes, locked in their own high-beam alert, must have been twice their normal size. Was she peering straight at him? She was searching, he thought, for the dangers that lurk in the dark—and yet her anxiety had more resignation than fear, which he understood: when forced to run, you can’t imagine that where you’re heading is worse than what you’ve left behind. You don’t mind, especially once you’re safely across the road—or an ocean, for the matter—the uncertainties of the journey, the occasional scares, the things that jump out at you when you least expect them. A Harley. A big man from Tampa named Ray. And the worst of it was the best of it—not knowing what would happen next. Then he saw the girl, exultant at this latest moment of survival, move into the cover of the foliage, which started closing behind her like the entrance to a secret passage. Through the dusty mist lingering in the ai
r, he saw, disappearing into the brush, her back leg and her shoe—a tattered, once-white sneaker bronzed with grime.
Above the hum of the motorcycle, Ahmet, technically shouting, but somehow achieving the intimacy of a whisper, said, “Refugees.”
Yes. Refugees. The word itself sneaked through Ramadan, seeking some place of comfort in his memories, safe harbor in his heart. “I ain’t no gotdam refugee!” he had once heard Mama Joon, sitting in the motel room in Houston after the storm, yell into her phone. “That’s for foreigners!” Evacuee, he had deduced, had a respectability, an Americanness, even, that “refugee” did not. An “evacuee” had escaped the uncontrollable forces of nature—a Gulf Coast hurricane, a California wildfire; “refugee” connoted shame. But Ramadan felt a kinship to the people crossing the road. Theirs was a migration inspired by the same impulse that had brought him here to witness their escape. That he was running to where they were running from made him feel even closer to them. New Orleans had been ravaged by the storm, but it had been revived; Syria could come back. He hoped so, for their sakes. Because soon enough—he knew this from the time he and Mama Joon had spent away—the place the Syrians had left would start to feel like the only true sanctuary in the world. Maybe if their nightmare could be his refuge right now, then one day it could be theirs again, too.
“Okay,” Ahmet said, steering the bike back into the forward position. The amber-lit passage ahead was still grainy with dust particles, making for a moody visual effect. “Is nice. I can use. Now is when we need GoPro! Get the camera—film over my shoulder.”
Ramadan reached into Ahmet’s backpack, which throughout their journey had served alternately as a makeshift pillow and an unacknowledged buffer of decency.
“Ready?” Ahmet asked.
“Almost.” Ramadan lifted the camera and craned his neck up so that he could rest his chin on Ahmet’s shoulder. “Go slow. Let me focus.”
He pressed record and watched evocative images—movement, night, mysteriousness—pass into the lens.
“Is okay?” Ahmet asked.
“Yes.”
“Is beautiful?”
Smiling behind the camera, Ramadan said, “I think so . . .”
“Good. See how the road turns here?” Ahmet guided the motorcycle through a couple of tight S curves.
“Yes.”
“I want this scene because I am not sure where one country end and the other country begin.”
“You mean you don’t know when we will cross into Syria?”
“I know we are close. Very, very close. But no—I no know. Could be here . . . could be here . . . could be right here!”
As Ahmet crept the motorcycle along and teased with his noncommittal narration of their arrival into Syria, Ramadan kept filming. Coming at him this way, through the lens, this fluid, nameless, grayish brown strip of land—the end of Turkey, the beginning of Syria—felt as if it was not just being recorded by the camera, but by him; dissolving into him, and he into it.
A few kilometers later, after they had picked up speed, the motorcycle hit another bump and skidded a little, and Ahmet slowed down again, almost to a halt. He hunched his right shoulder, Ramadan’s tripod, and said, “Okay, that is enough film.”
“Let me finish this last shot.”
He leaned back as far as he could, making sure Ahmet’s head was in the frame. Moonlight, gliding along the fiberglass surface of his helmet, added a lustrous stroke, and Ramadan thought Ahmet would be pleased with this image of himself haloing into the night. He was about to put the camera away when the right edge of the frame went dark and atmospheric. For an instant, he believed it was a serendipitous intrusion, more leafy branches extending into the trail—a physical nuisance, but a visual enhancement. But then the curving road began to straighten, and the black patch in the camera gained definition into two shapes, two vertical forms—two men—standing in the middle of the road. Unlike the other refugees, who at the sight of the motorcycle had rushed fearfully out of the way, these men had stopped and turned to face the light, to face them. And it became clearer with every slow revolution of the wheels, drawing them nearer, the men were proposing a confrontation. Indeed, crouching and stiffening their bodies, they looked like goalies or, worse, linebackers, staunch defenders, stalkers determined to make a tackle—or create a turnover.
Ramadan wanted to lower the camera and stop recording, but the tension had turned his arm rigid. And his own paralysis augmented his terror, as the menacing figures he had isolated in the frame were coming closer, growing larger.
“Ohhh . . .” Ahmet brought the bike to a complete stop, and Ramadan relaxed his arm and rested the camera on top of the backpack. The men appeared to accept this pause as an overture of engagement, for they took one step forward, rose up on the balls of their feet, and began to rock from side to side.
Ahmet whispered, “Hold on, Ramadan,” and he pressed the gearshift with his left heel. Ramadan let the camera drop into the backpack and locked his arms around Ahmet’s waist tighter than he had during the entire trip.
“They want the bike,” he mouthed so softly that it may not have qualified as an utterance. At any rate, it was as superfluous as yelling “it’s raining” in a downpour—and surely inaudible to Ahmet, who couldn’t have heard anything Ramadan said, not above the motorcycle’s screeching, not above the primal scream he had let fly: “Ahckkkkkkk!”
He leaned forward, tensed his arms, and rose from the seat. Ramadan, holding on as instructed, was jerked forward, sliding into the spot where Ahmet had sat all the way from Istanbul. The Harley revved loudly, resisting the sudden demand for its maximum r.p.m., and the rear wheel spun violently and ineffectually for a few seconds. When the bike finally lurched forward, Ramadan’s face smashed into Ahmet’s backpack. He heard the commotion of gravel and dust spewing behind them and, more frighteningly, shrieks of attack from the men. The grunts and growls quickly eclipsed all the other sounds, and Ramadan opened his eyes to the stark vision of one of the marauders, whose snarling face was but inches from his. In an instant, Ramadan’s expression of stoic dismay transformed into a warrior’s mask, mirroring the monstrous face in front of him: his eyebrows arched; his mouth drew back, exposing his teeth; his nostrils flared and pulsed; and he heard himself screaming. The man flinched, frightened or repulsed by what was essentially his own reflection, but he recovered his criminal will just as the bike had moved past him, and he reached out and latched on to Ramadan’s arm, peeling it from around Ahmet’s waist. Still holding Ahmet with his left arm, Ramadan struggled to win his release, but the man’s grip, though hot and human, had the strength of a metallic vice. He turned and shouted, “Ahmet!” but he saw out of the corner of his eye that his friend was locked in a battle of his own. The other robber had grabbed the left side of the handlebars, and the counterweight of his attempt to wrestle command of the bike from Ahmet was the only thing preventing the motorcycle from spinning out of control.
This four-headed moto-man of a contraption sputtered along the dirt road in the Turko-Syrian night for only a few seconds more, a beast at war with itself—a life-form mercifully too horrid to be sustained. In simultaneous instances of inspired distress, Ahmet lifted his left leg and applied a thumping kick to the chest of his rival, who went flying forward, which suddenly seemed backward as the bike regained some of its intended speed; meanwhile, Ramadan reached into Ahmet’s backpack with his free hand, removed the camera, and repurposed it into a weapon, slamming its steely back plate against the boniest part of his assailant’s wrist, and the man’s fist released Ramadan’s arm like a handcuff submitting to a key.
Ahmet looked back over his left shoulder, and Ramadan over his right. Perhaps an owl witnessed the completion of their escape, but the human eye saw only night. Their forceful exhalations—the huffing residue of the skirmish—mingled with blasts of Harley exhaust, boosting their getaway with a lung-powered thrust. The motorcycle regained its form and, with the grace of a steed, spirited them safely on t
heir way.
Ramadan examined the camera for damage and found it intact. He sighed, relieved that his survival hadn’t required destroying the instrument of Ahmet’s art. As he put the camera inside the backpack, Ahmet asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yes. But I wish Sami had told me we would be riding on Refugee Road!”
For a while after that, they moved along a smooth, straight stretch, and in the calm Ramadan, despite recent trials—or maybe because of them—again appreciated the advantages of motorcycle transport. The immediacy of it. The tactile thrill. The sensuality of distance being conquered by time. Entering Syria through this backwoods artery, a path so secluded and underground that refugees were using it, had heightened his awareness of the secretive nature of their journey. Ahmet hadn’t mentioned they would be taking such a route—sneaking in, essentially—until they’d left Iskenderun. Not that it would have mattered. But at least he could have prepared himself, in his way, for what might lie ahead. He would have consulted his talismans. Tapped his iPhone and checked in with Mama Joon. Rubbed the Magician for a little luck. Kissed his mother’s crucifix. And since they hadn’t yet made it safely off this road, all the way to Aleppo, he figured it wasn’t too late to say a quick prayer just in case. In the name of the Father . . . the Son . . . and the Holy—
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