A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

by Melissa Fleming

  “But we have no future here,” Bassem insisted, dragging his toe over their names in the sand.

  “I could be attacked there and raped in front of you and you would be helpless and unable to defend me,” she shouted. “Besides,” she said, softening her voice, “there is no work for you in Syria.”

  Bassem stood in silence for a moment, thinking about what Doaa had said. Then he finally admitted, “You’re right.”

  Doaa took his hand. “Be patient, my love. If you keep looking, you’ll find better work in Egypt,” she said, trying to make her voice sound as if she believed it herself.

  However, the new climate in Egypt was not making things easier for them. One day, as Doaa and Bassem were out for a walk, they got briefly separated as they made their way down the street. A motorbike approached and slowed to a halt beside her. The driver, a nineteen-year-old boy whom she recognized from the neighborhood, suddenly grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. Doaa instinctively elbowed him, shaking her arm free, but when the boy grabbed at her again, she realized that he intended to force her onto the bike.

  Doaa got away from him and ran toward Bassem, yelling, “Bassem, quick! We have to go home now.”

  Somehow, Bassem had missed the entire episode, but sensing Doaa’s fear, he asked, “Did he do something to you?”

  Doaa, seeing Bassem’s face turn red with anger, decided that it would be best if they left before the situation escalated. “No,” she lied. “Nothing happened.”

  “That’s not true, he did something, didn’t he?”

  Before she could respond, Bassem strode up to the young Egyptian biker and punched him in the face. The bike fell to the ground and the man leaped at Bassem. The two men began to fight, throwing punches and trying to wrestle each other to the ground.

  “Bassem, stop, please, for God’s sake, stop,” Doaa yelled, worried that Bassem would get hurt and that the fight would only attract attention and get them into trouble.

  “Go home, Doaa, I’ll catch up with you,” he yelled as he turned toward her.

  The motorcyclist, seeing that Bassem was distracted, jumped back on his bike and sped away.

  Doaa and Bassem collected themselves and headed toward home, but on their way back they saw the bike returning. This time the biker had a friend with him on the back of the motorcycle, and two other men followed on a second motorbike. They were carrying wooden sticks and shaking them menacingly in the air. One man drew a knife from his pocket as they closed in on Bassem and Doaa. Bassem pushed Doaa behind him and shouted at them to leave her alone.

  “You came to ruin us! You are feeding off us,” the man with the knife shouted at them. Doaa yelled for help and began crying. She took out her phone to call her mother. The family had moved back into the hotel that had given them refuge when they first arrived in Egypt. They were again staying there rent-free since the temperature was dropping and vacationers were beginning to leave the area, and it was just a block from where Bassem and Doaa were now being surrounded as the men got off their motorbikes and closed in on them. Hanaa answered the phone and, as soon as she understood what was happening, alerted the hotel manager, Khalid, who had been so kind to the family. Khalid rushed outside and stood between Doaa and Bassem and the men, telling them to leave. Khalid was well respected in the community, and the men finally turned on their heels, mounted their motorcycles, and sped away.

  Khalid, Bassem, and Doaa returned to the hotel, and Khalid insisted that they go directly to the police station to report the incident. “If you don’t say anything, they could come back and do worse,” he warned. While Khalid tried to convince them to file a report, the young man who had grabbed Doaa and his father appeared in the hotel. The father was apologizing profusely. He acknowledged that his son was deeply troubled and told them, “If he ever does that again, you have every right to report him.” Then he turned angrily to his son and ordered, “Get down and kiss Doaa’s and Bassem’s feet.” But his son refused and started to cry. Doaa and Bassem felt pity for the crying troubled boy and decided not to report the incident. They just wanted to move on and stay under the radar of the authorities.

  As she lay awake that night, Doaa replayed the scene in her head and realized how close she had again come to being kidnapped. She was grateful to Bassem and Khalid for fending off the men, but she no longer felt safe in Egypt, even with Bassem at her side. The stress of the unpleasant encounter also strained her relationship with Bassem.

  One day, after a particularly bitter fight with him, Doaa announced that she wanted to break up, leaving him in shock. The next day Bassem showed up at the house looking ill. His tone serious, he told her, “Doaa, we need to talk. I have decided to go back to Syria. I stayed here for you, and I’ve accepted a lot of humiliation and hardship in Egypt because of you. And if you don’t want to be with me, then there’s no reason for me to stay here. I’ve decided that if you don’t want to come with me, then you are free. We can end our engagement.”

  Hearing this, Doaa cried out, “You can’t go! You’ll be killed!” But Bassem remained firm. Distraught, Doaa ran out of the apartment, realizing the mistake she had made in breaking up with him. She would be complicit in his death if he left and went back to Syria. Doaa knew that Bassem was struggling with the sadness of recently losing his brother, who had died fighting for the FSA, and that Bassem was plagued with guilt for not having been by his side. Doaa didn’t really want Bassem to leave her or to break off their engagement. She’d just been worn down by the stress and hardship of her life in Egypt and had snapped during their fight. Bassem followed her outside and found her sobbing. She begged him to change his mind. He studied her face and shook his head, taking out a tissue to gently wipe away her tears. “I didn’t mean it!” she sobbed. “I don’t want to break up.” Seeing Doaa’s distress and realizing that she meant what she said, Bassem took her in his arms and promised never to leave her. He vowed that they would only return to Syria together, when the war ended. From then on, Doaa prayed every night that they would always be together.

  That fall, Saja, Nawara, and Hamudi started attending school, while Doaa went back to work. Saja’s secondary school was in another part of town and she had to walk a good distance on her own to get there. Almost daily, young men would stand outside the school gates taunting her with insults as she entered.

  One day as Saja walked home from school, she noticed a tuk-tuk following her. Two rough-looking local men, with tattoos covering their arms, were inside. “Stop, Syrian girl!” they called out to her. “We like Syrian women and we want to see if you like us as well.” Saja kept her head down and continued walking to the primary-school gates where Nawara and Hamudi would be waiting. Upon arriving, she immediately took her siblings with her to the administration office to call her parents to pick them up. Hanaa was in tears when she arrived with two Syrian neighbors for protection. Later that day when Shokri heard about the encounter, he was frantic at the thought that his girls might now be in danger in Egypt.

  Hamudi was having a hard time as well. While he loved studying and was a good student, once the Morsi government was ousted and the atmosphere changed, the Egyptian kids who used to be Hamudi’s friends started to bully him.

  Then one day Hamudi’s school announced that they would no longer admit Syrian children. Their parents protested, reminding the school officials that the war in Syria had driven them here and that all they wanted was an education for their kids. They also argued that it went against state policy to deny refugee children an education, and that the teachers had no right to decide this policy. A compromise was reached and the school allowed Syrian students to continue to attend the school, but they were no longer allowed to sit at desks and had to sit on the floor.

  Around that time, a menacing-looking man on a moped pulled up in the square outside the hotel where Doaa’s family was staying and began shouting. Doaa and her family rushed to their balcony to see what he was yelling about. At the top of his lungs, he shouted, “If an
y of you parents send your children to our schools, they will be returned back to you cut into pieces.” He shouted this threat over and over for all to hear. The Syrian men of the neighborhood who witnessed the scene tried to chase him down, but he sped away before they could get his license plate number to report him. The feeling of fear that Doaa’s family thought they had left behind in Syria started to creep back in. Many of their neighbors decided to keep their kids at home from then on, and Shokri and Hanaa took their children out of school as well. Hamudi was devastated and spent his days sulking at home.

  Meanwhile, Shokri was struggling to make ends meet with only a few loyal customers, and Bassem could see how badly he was doing, so he offered to partner with him in his salon, and Shokri gratefully accepted. By then Bassem had quite a number of young patrons, and this helped to revive Shokri’s business. While the extra income helped the family out some, Bassem knew that he wanted more for himself and his future bride. Even with both of them working long hours, they had no hope of a life of anything other than grinding poverty. They couldn’t start a family under these conditions, and Bassem was losing more hope every day that they would ever return to Syria. It felt as if they were wasting their lives in Egypt among a population who didn’t seem to want them there. He couldn’t be with Doaa as much as he wanted since he worked so much, and he worried that one day he would not be there to protect her when she needed him. Bassem knew that something had to change.

  SEVEN

  Deal with the Devil

  On a balmy June afternoon in 2014, nine months after Doaa and Bassem’s engagement, the Al Zamel family was finishing up lunch. Doaa was still living at home with her family since she and Bassem could only move in together after they had a formal wedding.

  After helping to clear the plates, Bassem suggested that they all go for a walk before he and Shokri returned to work at the barbershop. The young couple walked ahead of the rest of the family, holding hands and chatting. When they reached the Corniche, Bassem turned to Doaa, his voice lower than usual. He spoke deliberately, as if he had rehearsed what he was going to say. “I have something important to discuss with you. I want us to go to Europe. We have no future here. We’re stuck, and we can’t go back to Syria.” He looked down into her astonished face and began speaking more quickly. “Everyone is going. A friend of mine went to Germany and has applied to bring his family there. It’s much better there, Doaa. You could go to school and I can open a barbershop. We can have a home together and start a family.” He watched her face hopefully, searching for some sign of agreement. “What do you think? We just need to get the money to go.”

  All Doaa could think of was the vast sea that stood between Egypt and Europe, and of water closing in over her head and filling her lungs. She still hadn’t learned to swim, and just the thought of crossing that expanse of water made her panic. She knew that refugees had no legal way to get to Europe. They wouldn’t be able to get the documents they needed to sail on another big ferry, like the one they had taken to Egypt. If they applied for a visa, it would be rejected, and to ask for asylum in Europe, you had to arrive there physically, and Doaa knew that the only way to get there was considered illegal by Egyptian authorities and unsafe by everyone. “Do you mean by a smuggler’s boat?” she asked. “Don’t even think about it. I won’t do it.” She knew those boats were small, decrepit, and overcrowded and had heard stories of boats sinking and refugees drowning. She couldn’t believe that Bassem would want to risk it. How could she cross the sea in one of those when she couldn’t even set foot in water?

  “But,” Bassem stammered, “you will only be in the water up to your knees, then you’ll be safe on the boat. We’ll be rescued once we get close to Italy, then we can make our way to Sweden!” Bassem explained how distress signals are sent out as soon as refugee boats reach Italian waters, and that the Italian coast guard sends ships out to bring everyone safely ashore.

  “Absolutely not.” Doaa shivered. “My answer is no, Bassem.”

  But he continued to bring up the subject every chance he got, trying to find a way to convince her. Doaa couldn’t understand why he kept insisting when he knew how scared she was of water. Every time they went to the beach together with her family, he saw her keep far from the shore, watching everyone else splash around in the waves. Bassem was a good swimmer, for a reason. He’d told Doaa that back in Daraa when he was about thirteen, he visited a lake with two of his friends. None of them knew how to swim, but they waded in anyway, playfully splashing one another. Then one of his friends moved into deeper water and began gasping for air and flailing his arms. Bassem and his other friend thought their friend was joking, but when they finally reached him, his face was submerged and his body was still. He had drowned. After that day, Bassem had vowed that he would teach himself to swim. “I promised myself that I would never stand by helplessly again while someone I care about drowns,” he had told Doaa.

  He also told her another story. A few years later he was at a lake with some friends sitting on the rocky shore. By that time, he was a confident swimmer. In the distance, he witnessed a rowboat capsize and a teenage girl fall into the water, obviously in distress. He ran toward the boat and jumped in the water. When he reached the girl, he wrapped her in his arms and pulled her to the shore, possibly saving her life.

  However, these stories didn’t reassure Doaa. Every time she imagined being submerged in water with no shore in sight, she thought she would be sick. “Bassem, I don’t want gold or expensive furniture and a life abroad in Europe,” she told him one night when he was trying, yet again, to convince her. They were alone on the balcony of Doaa’s apartment watching the sky darken while the rest of the family was inside listening to the radio. She couldn’t imagine a life without them nearby. “I want to stay close to our family. What if we went to Saudi Arabia instead? You used to work there.” In Saudi Arabia, they could have a new start and still be close enough to her family, and she wouldn’t have to get in a boat to get there.

  “You wouldn’t like it,” he countered. “It’s too conservative. You would have to wear a burka. You’d be covered in black from head to toe with only a mesh slit in the material to look through. You won’t even be able to go out unless you’re with me.” Exasperated, he said, “Half of my friends have gone to Europe! I get messages from them on Facebook from Sweden and Germany all the time. They have good jobs and they’re going to school. They say we’d be welcome there—not like here.” Bassem waited for Doaa to ponder this information, then added, “The other messages I get all the time are from friends back in Syria telling me who has died. Have you forgotten what it was like to see people die every day?”

  “Have you forgotten all the horror stories about those boats?” Doaa shot back. “And the stories about refugees like us drowning?” Angered, she stood up quickly and went inside to be with her family, leaving Bassem alone on the balcony. She turned her back on him so that he couldn’t see the tears of sadness and frustration spilling down her cheeks.

  This went on for two months. Bassem brought it up every chance he had, trying different ways to convince her. “Doaa, you look tired! You’re not thriving here! In Europe, your health would improve.” Doaa’s health was, indeed, worsening every week. Anytime Bassem saw her waver, he reminded her of Europe. “In Europe, you can study. We can open a salon together and you will earn money and finally be able to afford new clothes. You can even have a nice house there. We’ll be respected instead of despised and our kids can have a nice life.” He showed her pictures that he’d received of his friends smiling in front of historical monuments and blooming parks. One friend was pictured in Amsterdam, standing on a bridge over a canal with the pretty cityscape in the background. Seeing these photos, Doaa couldn’t help but listen and dream. Europe seemed like a place of order and hope, a fantasyland of possibility.

  The life the photos depicted was so different from the poverty, struggle, and danger she had come to accept as normal. Egypt had nothing for her and he
r family other than hostility and grueling work at low wages that could never quite provide what the family needed. They barely had enough for food and rent, and anytime they needed anything extra, such as medicine or a pair of shoes for Hamudi when he outgrew his, they had to borrow money that they couldn’t repay or sell one of their few remaining treasures. Doaa had no way to finish high school in Egypt, and she had all but given up on her dream of going to university. Like thousands of other Syrian refugees, she felt stuck in a life of limbo in a country where its own citizens were facing a sinking economy, high inflation, and rising food prices. In Egypt, Syrian refugees were tolerated, but with few possibilities to find real work and fully integrate into society.

  Doaa began to wonder what it might be like to walk out the door without the fear of being abducted, and for her siblings to go to school without the fear of being harassed, beaten up, or worse. She remembered what it was like when her mother wasn’t always sick and her father wasn’t always exhausted, and when Hamudi was a cheerful little boy with a chance at a normal childhood. None of that was possible now in Egypt.

  And in Syria, things were only getting worse. Hundreds of people died in a chemical weapons attack in Damascus that the Assad government was accused by the international community of carrying out. Extremist jihadists now came under the umbrella of rebel groups and they began fighting each other, weakening what moderate FSA opposition there was. In particular, a rising and violent organization called the Islamic State was gaining territory and imposing its fundamentalist doctrine and severe interpretation of sharia, Islamic law, on Syria. At least one-third of the population was now uprooted, with 3 million of them struggling as refugees in the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt.

  Doaa slowly began to consider the possibility of leaving. However, Bassem began wavering in his decision to move on. He loved Doaa too much to force her to do something that terrified her and began to have second thoughts. He decided that he should go to Europe on his own and then, once he was settled, send for Doaa and her family. He had heard of programs in Europe that reunited refugees with family members who had stayed behind. All you had to do, his friends had told him, was get there and ask for asylum, then apply to bring your family into the country as well. They would then be issued visas and plane tickets.