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A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

Page 20

by Melissa Fleming


  Doaa knew she was in no condition to live alone in a foreign country, so she decided to take up the Egyptian family’s offer, and after two days at the elder-care home, she moved into their apartment in Chania. They had set up a bed for her in their girls’ room. The modest, cozy home, the familiar rituals, and Egyptian home cooking soon soothed Doaa.

  However, she knew that her parents must be worried sick. They hadn’t heard from her in more than a week, and Doaa had been too sick and disoriented when she was in the hospital to try to reach them. Every time she picked up the phone, she struggled to remember their phone numbers, and when she thought of what she would say, the idea of articulating what had happened to her and Bassem exhausted her and all she wanted to do was sleep. But she knew she had to call them eventually. Doaa racked her brain for their number or any of her sisters’ or friends’ numbers, but she couldn’t recall a single one. Then she had the idea to remove the SIM card from her dead phone and insert it in one that her hosts had given her. She remembered that when she had sent photos to friends via the messenger service WhatsApp, the phone number of the recipient would appear above the photos. On her new phone, she opened the messenger service and scrolled to the contacts list. The first number she saw of someone who could be helpful was of one of her friends in Egypt. She dialed the number, but it was the middle of the night and no one answered. Feeling slow and tired, Doaa continued scrolling through her phone. At last, she found a photo that her sister Ayat, who was now living in Lebanon, had sent to her. Above the photo was Ayat’s number, which Doaa immediately dialed.

  After several rings, she heard her sister’s sleepy “Hello?”

  “Ayat, this is Doaa!” It was still a strain to speak and Doaa’s voice sounded strange to her from all the screaming for help.

  “Doaa! Where have you been?” Ayat sounded relieved, and Doaa almost starting crying at the sound of her voice. She told Doaa their mother had phoned two days ago, desperate to know if she had heard anything from her sister. That was the first time Ayat had learned that Doaa and Bassem had been on a boat to Italy that should have arrived long ago. Ayat had been worrying ever since.

  “Where is Bassem?”

  “Bassem is sleeping at the mosque because we are all girls here and he can’t stay with us,” Doaa lied. She just couldn’t bring herself to tell her older sister that Bassem had died. Speaking the words would make it real. She abruptly told Ayat that she had to hang up as she was using a borrowed phone.

  “You need to call Mom and tell her you’re okay!”

  “I’ll call her, but I can’t remember her number. Please give it to me and I will,” Doaa promised before quickly getting off the phone.

  Doaa couldn’t think straight and didn’t sleep the rest of the night, worrying what she would tell her family about Bassem. She couldn’t even remember anymore what was real and what she had imagined. For days, all she had thought about was surviving and keeping the little girls alive. But now she didn’t know what she should do next. Masa and Malak had given her a sense of purpose; now she had none. Before, all of her plans had been about building a life with Bassem. Now she was alone. If she talked to her parents, she would have to admit he was gone, and that meant she would have to figure out how to live without him and also confront her feeling that she was responsible for his death. When Bassem had wanted to turn back during their bus ride to the boat, she had insisted that they forge ahead, despite her own premonitions.

  When she knew she couldn’t wait any longer, she picked up the phone to call her mother.

  * * *

  From the moment Hanaa and Shokri said good-bye to Doaa and Bassem, they were filled with worry. Hanaa had a foreboding that she would never see them again. After Doaa’s last call letting her parents know that she and Bassem were about to reach the beach from which the boat would leave, Hanaa and Shokri had stayed inside at home as much as they could, avoiding anyone who might ask whether they had any news. After five days passed with no word, Hanaa was beside herself with worry. The trip should have taken four days at most. She phoned Doaa’s friends and asked them to check “Fleeing from Death to Death,” a Facebook page that tracked refugee boat journeys to Europe and published announcements when a boat arrived safely. Many boats were listed on the page, but not the one that had left Gamasa on September 6.

  Hanna tried telling herself that they had made it and just hadn’t found a way to contact her yet. Or perhaps the boat had had engine trouble at sea and they were waiting for rescue. Shokri wondered aloud whether, as before, they hadn’t made it to the boat and were unable to call from prison. The one thing neither would say to the other was that Doaa and Bassem may have died at sea.

  Conflicting information began to come in through friends and family. On the way to the store, Nawara heard a rumor that the boat had sunk, but that Doaa and Bassem were among two hundred survivors. Another time, neighbors told Saja that Doaa and Bassem were dead. The sisters kept these rumors to themselves, for fear of panicking their parents.

  About six days after she’d last heard from Doaa, Hanaa also got wind of a rumor that the boat had sunk and there were no survivors. She began to fear the worst, but remained silent, not wanting to worry her family or admit to herself that Doaa could be dead. Then, on September 18, twelve days after Doaa and Bassem had left, a group of neighbors knocked on Hanaa and Shokri’s door, asking to come in, saying that they had some news. From the looks on their faces, Hanaa knew it was about Doaa and Bassem, but she was afraid to ask. The women moved out to the balcony and the men sat gloomily in the adjacent living room.

  Just as they were about to speak, Hanaa’s phone rang. She reached for it, relieved to break the tense silence and delay the news she sensed they were about to tell her. “Who’s calling and what do you want?” she said, uncharacteristically abrupt.

  “Mom, it is Ayat! Listen! Doaa is alive!” Ayat quickly told her mother about the 3:00 a.m. call that she had received and that Doaa was safe with a family in Greece.

  “Thank God!” Hanaa was weak with relief.

  Hanaa told Ayat that she had days ago heard that there had been a shipwreck but had kept the news to herself, not wanting others to worry. Then Hanaa asked about Bassem.

  “She told me he was sleeping in a mosque, but she sounded odd,” Ayat said. “I’m not sure. She was disoriented when we spoke, but something about what she said sounded wrong.” Ayat gave Hanaa Doaa’s number in Greece so she could speak to Doaa herself.

  Hanaa dialed the number as soon as she got off the phone with Ayat. A woman answered, speaking Arabic. Hanaa anxiously asked to speak to her daughter.

  After a few long seconds, Doaa picked up the phone. “Mom, I’m okay. I will call you when I am feeling better.” She sounded faint and distant.

  Hanaa was flooded with relief, but couldn’t believe that Doaa was going to hang up so quickly. “Where is Bassem?”

  “He’s at the supermarket,” Doaa said flatly.

  Hanaa could sense something was wrong in Doaa’s reply and hastiness to get off the phone. Hanaa asked to speak to Doaa’s hostess again. When the woman came back on the line, Hanaa pressed her for details. “She’s fine,” the host mother said, promising that the family would treat Doaa as their own daughter and protect her. When Hanaa asked about Bassem, the woman would only say that he was away, but gave no other details. Hanaa guessed from the woman’s strained tone that Doaa was nearby, so Hanaa asked if they could speak in private. A few moments passed, then the woman began to speak more frankly. She told Hanaa she suspected Bassem had drowned along with most of the other passengers and that Doaa was in denial. The woman said Doaa was a heroine who’d survived four days in the water and had saved a baby girl. “Doaa has a kind heart and she is safe with us. Be thankful to God she is alive.” Then the woman whispered to Hanaa, “May Bassem rest in peace,” and offered to put Doaa back on the phone.

  Doaa’s voice was so faint it was hard to recognize it was her.

  All Hanaa wanted to do wa
s cry, but she knew she needed to be strong for Doaa. “Say something, my daughter, so your father and our neighbors can hear it is you.” By this time, family and friends had congregated around Hanaa after hearing that Doaa was alive. Hanaa put the phone on speaker and told her, “Everyone is here, asking about you.”

  “I’m okay,” Doaa assured everyone huddled in the room, the most response she could manage.

  Everyone burst out crying at the sound of her voice.

  “Rest, Doaa,” Hanaa told her, promising to call again the next day.

  * * *

  Every night, nightmares rattled Doaa awake. She kept seeing Bassem slipping away from her into the sea. As these dreams came to her over and over, she wrestled with accepting them as fact. Slowly, the reality that Bassem was dead sank in, and during the day when Doaa was mainly left home alone, she was consumed by grief.

  Some days she would go out on the apartment’s balcony, look up at the sky, and imagine Bassem there. “If only you were here with me today!” she’d say with her face tilted toward the clouds, hoping in vain for a response. “My happiness is broken without you.” Other days, Doaa would pretend that Bassem was still alive. In one daydream, she would imagine meeting him walking down the main shopping street in Chania, where they would embrace and resume their love story where they had left off. She still couldn’t bring herself to admit his death to her family. During one of her phone calls with her parents, Shokri asked how she was coping with Bassem’s death, and Doaa replied without thinking, “He’s not dead, Papa, he’s alive.”

  Meanwhile, word was spreading through Arabic social media about the young woman who’d survived one of the worst refugee boat shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and saved a baby girl. Friends and family of missing passengers were anxiously looking for news of their loved ones, and Doaa’s story gave them hope. A friend of her host family’s published their phone number on a Facebook page for anyone looking for information about the wreck. Within minutes, hundreds of messages and calls started pouring in. “Do you know what happened to my daughter?” “Is my son alive?” “Did my mother survive?” “Here is a picture of my sister; did you see her?” “Did you see my father?” “Did you see my uncle?” “Did you see my friend?” The messages overwhelmed Doaa, but she did her best to reply to them, asking people to send photos so she could see if she recognized anyone. How could she tell them all there was no hope? That she knew of only six survivors, including herself, here in Greece, and five others who had been taken to Malta? But that was all. How could she tell them that she did recognize some people, but that it was from when she had watched them drown?

  Some of the messages were ugly: “How come you are one of the only ones who survived? You must have been helped by the smugglers.” Reading through the onslaught of messages exhausted Doaa, each one reminding her of the deaths she’d witnessed and reviving her sadness at losing Bassem and Malak. Then one text message, from a Mohammad Dasuqi, caught her eye: “Doaa, I think you saved my niece Masa.” A photo was attached of a baby girl in a blue dress with white pansies. Doaa looked closely at the picture. The toddler smiling at the camera was indeed the same Masa that Doaa had cradled in her arms for four days at sea.

  Doaa held out the phone to her host mother and exclaimed, “Masa has a family!” With a huge smile on her face, Doaa felt a surge of happiness for the first time since the shipwreck. She replied to the message immediately, relieved to finally be able to give someone some good news: “Yes, that is the same Masa who was rescued with me!”

  Doaa learned that Mohammad Dasuqi was the twenty-eight-year-old brother of Masa’s father, Imad, and was living as a refugee in Sweden with Masa’s oldest sister, Sidra, who was eight. He had only had enough money for the two of them to go to Europe and had applied to bring the rest of the family, including his own wife and infant daughter and Sidra’s parents and siblings, to Sweden through family-reunification procedures. But after a year had passed with no papers, Masa’s father had grown tired of waiting and decided to take matters into his own hands and book passage for his family. He believed that since Mohammad and Sidra had made it safely, the rest of the family was certain to reach Europe as well. Before boarding the boat, he had taken a picture of Sandra and Masa standing side by side, wearing bright orange life vests, Sandra’s arm slung confidently around Masa’s shoulders. He had sent the photo to his brother confident that they would soon be together again.

  When Mohammad heard of the shipwreck, and that almost everyone on board had died, his heart sank. He knew that his brother, his sister-in-law, and their little girls were on that boat and that they were most likely dead. Then he read about the nineteen-year-old Syrian woman who had survived and saved a two-year-old girl. He saw a picture of the rescued child and compared it to the photo he had. Masa was alive!

  The day after Doaa texted Mohammad confirming that Masa was safe, he flew to Crete, arriving at the hospital and demanding to see his niece. It would take almost a year for UNHCR and the Swedish embassy in Athens to confirm that Mohammad was related to Masa and to recognize him as her legal guardian so as to finalize reunification. During that time, Masa was cared for in an orphanage in Athens that specialized in treating traumatized children. She played with the other children and quickly learned to speak Greek. After DNA tests and court hearings, Masa was finally able to join her uncle, aunt, older sister, and a cousin, who had since joined him, to start a new life in Sweden.

  * * *

  Finding Masa’s family was a turning point for Doaa. The experience made her feel as if her heart might begin to heal. At fleeting moments she even believed she could be reunited with her own family and begin her life anew. But the news from home was grim. In the weeks after her rescue, media outlets from around the world had requested interviews with Doaa, questioning her about the circumstances of the shipwreck. A number of stories quoted her accusing the smugglers of ramming her boat, and of being responsible for the deaths of five hundred people. She didn’t understand the reach—or consequences—that these interviews would have until she received a distressed call from her mother.

  “Someone threatened me, Doaa!” Hanaa told her in the same frightened tone that Doaa had last heard from her mother when the Egyptian men had threatened to rape Doaa and her sisters. “He said, ‘Tell Doaa to shut her mouth and to stop naming names. We know where you live.’”

  It had been the first of many calls from unknown numbers, each one threatening to harm Doaa’s family.

  Hanaa told Doaa she’d reported the calls to the police and contacted UNHCR, which took the threats seriously. They sent someone to talk to the family and advised them to change apartments. “I don’t want to move again,” Hanaa admitted to Doaa. Doaa assured her mother she wouldn’t give any more interviews, and they hoped that the men would leave them alone.

  But a few days later, Doaa received another anguished call from her mother. She’d been home with the family when she’d heard a knock at the door. An elegantly dressed Egyptian man stood outside, politely asking for their passports, saying he was a police officer. Without thinking, Hanaa had retrieved the documents and handed them over. He flipped through them, reading the names aloud. “That’s when I became suspicious,” she told Doaa. Hanaa snatched the passports out of the man’s hands, asking him, “Why did you want our passports?”

  “I was just checking if there are any Syrians here,” he said, then left abruptly. After he departed, Hanaa went to the local police station asking whether they had sent an officer to her place to check IDs. When they told her they hadn’t, Hanaa was worried. What if she had put the family in harm’s way? she wondered. Then she received a text message full of obscenities that said, “I know the names of your daughters.”

  Not long after that, Saja and Nawara were walking home when they sensed that they were being followed. They turned to look behind them and spotted a tall, nicely dressed man with what looked like a knife in his right hand. They recognized him as the person who had come to their door as
king for their passports and posing as a policeman. Terrified, they quickly crossed the street and joined a neighbor they knew who was nearby. Later, when the girls told Hanaa and Shokri what had happened, the family realized they had no choice but to move. Hanaa called UNHCR again, and legal officers visited them to learn more. She told them the entire story of what had happened to Doaa and the threats, including the sexual harassment the girls were facing, which forced Hanaa and Shokri to pull them out of school. The UNHCR officer told the family that they were qualified for UNHCR’s resettlement program due to their precarious situation. Sweden was one of the countries accepting “vulnerable” Syrian refugees. “Sweden,” Hanaa said, “that’s where Doaa and Bassem wanted to go.”

  Doaa was determined to do everything she could to get her family out of Egypt. Her anger at the people who were threatening them temporarily shook her out of her grief and into action. She turned to UNHCR’s Erasmia Roumana, a caseworker Doaa had come to trust, for help. The process would be long and complex, Erasmia explained. While Doaa’s family would have a strong case, Greece had no established resettlement program with another EU country. Erasmia explained that Doaa had the option of applying for asylum in Greece. If she received it, she could settle there and have the right to travel and eventually apply for citizenship. But Doaa’s heart was set on Sweden; she and Bassem had planned to make a life together there. If she couldn’t get there with Bassem, she’d get her family there, and if she couldn’t get her family there, then she would have to go by herself. Once in Sweden, she would carry out her and Bassem’s original plan alone—to apply to the Swedish family-reunification program and bring her family to join her.

 

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