by Ele Fountain
There is a man who seems to be a doctor, walking amongst the people lying on the ground. He crouches down next to Shewit. He looks like he’s Mesfin’s age, but with many more wrinkles around his eyes.
“Does it hurt anywhere apart from your leg?” he asks.
“No, just my leg.”
He lifts the fabric towards Shewit’s knee and she cries out. “You’re lucky it’s not your femur, but you have a nasty fracture in your lower leg. I have to put a splint on it to hold the bone in place until you can get to hospital.”
Almaz looks up and catches my eye.
“Do you know how far we are from the border?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “We need something to use as a splint.”
I look around and see several bundles of firewood hanging from the back of the truck. I pull out one long piece and take it back to the doctor.
“That will work,” he says, snapping the stick in two. “Can I rip your dress?” He tears some fabric from the bottom of Shewit’s dress, then rips it into smaller pieces. One piece he gives to Shewit. “Put this between your teeth to bite down on. Hold your daughter’s hand. OK, are you ready?”
He gently places the sticks either side of the bent bone and begins to push it back into place. Shewit screams with pain, then her eyes close as she passes out.
“It is better that way,” the doctor says without looking up.
Tears run down Almaz’s face.
Mesfin says nothing. He strokes his wife’s forehead.
The doctor finishes securing the splint to Shewit’s leg. “This will allow her to travel without causing the fracture to worsen. She needs as much water as you can give her.”
He stands up and looks around. People are waving at him and shouting to get his attention.
One of the smugglers fires a shot in the air. There is silence, only the sound of one woman moaning in pain, as everyone who can turns to look at the man with the gun. He starts shouting, but I can only understand a few words of what he says.
Almaz is listening intently. As soon as he finishes talking, people start gathering the items scattered around the truck.
“He says that we’re close to the border, only fifteen kilometres away,” Almaz says. She wipes away two large tears which spill down her face. “He says we have to walk. We should reach the border by nightfall, when another truck will come to collect us. They’ll send a smaller truck into the desert tomorrow for the wounded and take them to be treated.”
I hear the man with the gun shouting again. I think he is trying to get people moving.
Mesfin speaks again. “Almaz, shikorina, your mother cannot walk. We have to rest here and leave tomorrow when the other truck comes. You must go ahead with Shif. You must not miss the boat.”
“No!” It is the first time I have ever heard Almaz raise her voice. “I’m staying here with you and Mum. You’ll need me to help you carry her and look after her.”
“I can look after your mother.”
“I won’t go without you.”
My last night at home comes rushing back to me. The feeling of emptiness when Mum told me that she and Lemlem wouldn’t be coming with me.
“You must go ahead. I have to wait for your mother’s leg to heal before they’ll let her travel on the boat. I’ve already paid for our crossing and I won’t get the money back. It will be your job to get in touch with Aunty in England so that when your mother and I reach the port, she can wire enough money for us to take the boat. If you don’t go now, we’ll all be stuck here. We have our mobile phone. When we get to somewhere where I can buy a SIM card, then I’ll call Aunty with our new number. You will know where we are.”
Almaz buries her face in her hands.
Mesfin looks at me. “Take care of my daughter. That is your job from this minute onwards. I know that I can trust you with her life—you’ve saved it once already.”
I nod, but I don’t know if he is right to trust me with anyone’s life.
Shewit begins to stir and moan. Mesfin lifts the lid with water to her lips. Behind us everyone who can still walk has gathered their few belongings together and is waiting next to the smugglers, trying to shelter in the shade of the truck. The smugglers pass water containers to the men. There are only a few containers left.
“Let’s move Mum to the shade,” says Almaz.
Mesfin lifts Shewit under the shoulder, and Almaz and I slide our arms under her thighs to support her.
She cries out in pain. “Please, please leave me here.”
We walk crab-wise as fast as we can to the shade by the truck. Shewit is moaning in agony when we lay her in the sand.
I spot our laundry bag marooned a few metres away on the ground. I drag it over to Shewit and Mesfin.
“You keep this,” I say. “You might need extra clothes to keep warm at night.”
The smuggler shouts something else I don’t understand, but he stands up, and the people scattered around him get slowly to their feet.
Almaz hugs her father, then bends down to kiss her mother on the cheek. Shewit is barely conscious.
“I will see you soon, Mum,” she whispers.
Then Almaz stands up and walks with me towards the man with the gun. Tears stream down her face. Mine too.
I say goodbye to Mesfin and Shewit, and we walk over to those who are able to continue on foot.
While other passengers sift through the precious objects in their bags to see if there is something they can leave behind, it seems Almaz and I are shedding people as we make our way north.
Although the midday sun is beating down, we begin to walk slowly through the stony sand, our feet slipping back with each step.
After two hours we stop for water. Each person is allowed one capful from the container. There is no more food. My feet are blistered from the sand and sweat rubbing inside my shoes. My hands sting. My head thumps to the rhythm of my heartbeat; my body is so hot that everything feels swollen.
Almaz struggles to keep up with the pace set by the smugglers. She isn’t alone. Several people begin to fall behind, including the family with the small boy. I hold out my hand to Almaz.
“It’s easier to walk when I have both hands free,” she says, without stopping.
The group which started out together from the damaged truck is strewn across the desert behind us, moving so slowly that it’s hard to tell the people from the rocks that are forever lodged within the shifting sands.
My thoughts are strangely calm. There is no spare energy to focus on anything but placing one foot in front of the other, then feeling it slide halfway back to where it started from. I hope that Almaz is feeling a similar, temporary peace.
As the sun begins to drift down towards the horizon, I see the outline of a truck several hundred metres ahead. One of the smugglers shouts something, and a man on the truck shouts back. He waves his gun in the air. We have to hurry up. There are five or six men with guns waiting for us.
Perhaps fifty people gather around the armed men. I cannot see the family with the young boy. They start to herd us up onto the back of the truck.
Almaz touches my arm. “Please come with me,” she says. “I don’t want to speak to them on my own.” She walks towards one of the armed men. “When will the truck come to pick up the people who are hurt?” she asks in English.
Without turning round, he grunts a single word at her.
She turns to me. “He says tomorrow.” Almaz seems reassured, but asks, “Do you think they have enough water to last them until tomorrow?”
“They left some containers with the injured people. Your mum and dad are sensible. They’ll stay in the shade, and they won’t be walking, which is what uses up water.”
We are the last to climb up, and sit right at the back. I wrap one arm underneath one of the water canisters and hold on to Almaz’s arm with the other. The engine sounds ridiculously loud as it revs in the darkness which is softly replacing the last of the orange glow ahead. We lurch slowly through the san
d, rocking a little from side to side as the wheels struggle to grip. This truck is smaller than the first one and even more cramped, though there are fewer of us.
Almaz dozes on my shoulder. My eyes ache with exhaustion. I promised to look after her and I know that if she slips off the back while she sleeps, they won’t stop the truck to go and look for her. Apart from my family, Almaz is the most precious thing I have. She has become part of my family. I will not let her go.
Near and Far
At dawn I see what looks like a large town ahead. The truck leaves the wide road and starts whining down narrower streets lined with square white buildings. There is a new smell in the air, a bit like when my mother cooks alicha. Birds circle and screech overhead.
“We’re near the sea,” says Almaz. “You can smell the seaweed. It smells a little bit like cabbage.”
“How do you know? Have you been to the sea before?” I ask her.
“One of my father’s sisters lives near the coast. We went to visit her once when I was little. The water was warm and some people were swimming. I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember the smell.” I can tell that she is thinking about her parents.
“England is an island, so we’ll never be far from the sea there. Maybe we could go together,” I say.
The truck slows and pulls over at the side of a narrow road. One of the smugglers starts tapping people on the shoulder and gesturing that they should get out. He taps me and Almaz. Soon there are about fifteen of us standing on the pavement, wrapping our arms around ourselves against the cold morning breeze.
We follow the smuggler through the doors to one of the accommodation blocks and into a small room on the third floor.
“Here you will wait for the boat,” he says in English. “But first we’ll check your money.”
As we sit on the floor, silent tears roll down Almaz’s cheek. Her shoulders begin to shake and through a sob she says, “How will Mum and Dad find me in England?”
“You know the same phone numbers, so you’ll be looking for the same people. Your dad said you should get in touch with your aunty, and your parents will be in touch with her too so that she can send them money. When they come, they will find you. Don’t worry. At least they aren’t too far behind you.” I realize that I sound confident, reassuring. Not like myself. I know they won’t send a truck for those we left behind. There would be no extra money, and they would be responsible for a truckful of injured people. But I have learnt that sometimes hope itself is as important as the thing you are actually hoping for.
The smuggler writes our names down, which takes a long time as we speak several languages between us. He asks in English if we have paid or not.
“You must be quiet,” he says, before he leaves. He taps his gun and points to the door. There will be men with guns waiting outside. I wonder how the money my uncle wired to the man in the white shirt could have made it up here.
An hour or so later the man returns. He walks over to a lady by the window, which has a sheet draped in front of it.
“You need to pay 1,600 dollars,” he says.
She looks up at him and shouts something back—not in English.
“Quiet,” he snaps, but she stands up and starts waving her arms, still shouting.
The man grabs her by the arm and drags her towards the door. I hear screaming and shouting in the corridor, and a loud cracking sound, then she is quiet.
Almaz grips my arm.
After a few minutes he returns. This time he goes over to one of the men in our group. “You also need to pay 1,600 dollars.”
The man replies in his own language, but quietly. Eventually he takes a phone offered by the man with the gun. He is calling a friend or a relative. Maybe they will have the money, but if not the man will be staying here.
The smuggler turns and looks at me and Almaz, but doesn’t come over.
For three days we wait in the room. I am used to small spaces now, but some of the others pace around and shout at the smugglers, until they come into the room and threaten to take them away. But we are given hot food to eat, and warm blankets to sleep on. There is even a toilet in the corridor outside.
We can hear the sea at night. It’s maybe two hundred metres from our room. I wish that Mum and Lemlem were waiting with me. Lemlem would sit on my lap and Mum would talk to me about what kind of work she might get, about whether we might live near the sea. She would wonder if the injera will be any good.
To pass the time, Almaz teaches me what she knows about dinosaurs. We invent a stupid game, where she tells me the name of a dinosaur and I have to guess what it looks like. I get T. rex right, but apart from that I have to accept it’s really not a strong subject for me. In return, I try to teach her how to play chess; how to set up the board, and what the different pieces are called. I realize it sounds like a ridiculous game unless you’ve actually seen a chessboard in action.
We are both exhausted from the desert journey, and the rest of the time we doze. Almaz rests her head on my lap rather than the hard floor, and I lean against the wall. A few months ago I could never have imagined a girl sleeping on my lap, but here it feels completely normal.
In the middle of the night, after the third day, there is a knock on the door. Three smugglers come in.
“Boat,” says one of them in English. “Put on all your clothes and come.”
Almaz and I are already wearing everything we own.
We walk sleepily down the stairs to a truck waiting outside. A cool wind is blowing in from the sea and seeps through my thin layers of clothing in a few seconds.
We climb into the truck and the man gestures that we should move into the middle, as close together as possible. Once we are squashed into a tiny space, one of the armed men climbs in. The others begin passing him huge sacks, which he stacks around us. They are sacks of rice, a decoy; in the middle of them sits the true cargo: people.
Soon we are completely hidden behind a wall of rice. The sacks push down on us, shunting us further into the middle of the truck. At least they protect us from the freezing morning air, but I don’t know how long we will be travelling like this for.
The truck bumps slowly along the road, and after a few minutes we must join a highway of some kind. The truck whines along at top speed. After a little while I drift off to sleep.
I wake several hours later. We have stopped, and the smugglers are throwing bread rolls and bottles of water into the truck. Then we keep going. We must be travelling along the coastline. The wind is still strong and I can hear seabirds screeching over the roar of the engine.
The cloud never clears, and by late afternoon the truck comes to a stop again.
*
This time we climb out and gather next to a strip of sandy beach with a small concrete jetty jutting into the shallow sea. I have never seen the sea before. Almaz is staring out across the water. The horizon is grey, which makes the water seem dark blue, almost black.
Gathered around the jetty are men clutching bright orange jackets. They walk towards us, waving them at us and talking urgently.
“Who wants to buy a life jacket?” asks one of the smugglers.
We have no money, but some people in our group are reaching in their pockets.
“Do you think we need one?” Almaz asks, looking concerned.
“No, we have a boat. We don’t need a life jacket too.”
Almaz looks up at me and smiles her warm smile, which helps me to forget the biting wind for a moment.
The smuggler points to two small orange inflatable dinghies. I look at them in horror.
He sees my face and says, “No, no. Big boat.” He points out to sea.
We are to get in the little boats, which will take us to a bigger boat.
“Do you think there really is a bigger boat?” whispers Almaz.
“I guess if there were lots of little boats, then they would need to pay lots of people to sail them. It makes more sense for them to use one big boat,” I whisper back.
The smugglers point to me and the other men, and we start to drag one of the boats towards the edge of the water. We push it alongside the narrow jetty until it begins to bob up and down by itself. We push the second boat up behind it. The smugglers herd the others onto the jetty, but I can’t see Almaz. For a second I panic, and then realize she is in the middle of the group of women. I push my way past the men, and even though one of the smugglers is shouting at me, I go and stand with Almaz.
People begin to step gingerly into the nearest boat. It wobbles and they sit down abruptly. When there are seven or eight people sitting down, the guard nods to Almaz, who steps into the middle of the second boat. I follow. The smuggler tips the engine propeller down into the water and tugs at the starter cord. A high-pitched roar breaks the silence and we steer slowly away from the jetty.
Almaz shivers in the breeze and spray flicks up onto our thin clothes, sucking away any warmth we have left. I put my arm around her shoulder, and it steadies us both as waves slam against the bottom of the boat. As we carve a path out to sea, I realize that I don’t like being surrounded by water. It seems alive; it seems angry.
After a few minutes the smuggler at the back of the boat shouts and points. In front I see a large blue fishing boat bobbing on the water. Almaz looks up at me, and I smile. I am so relieved that there is a big boat after all.
We must be the last people to join. As we steer closer, I can see hundreds of heads, moving up and down as the boat gently rocks with the waves.
We pull alongside it, to where a rope ladder hangs over the side of the larger boat. Our dinghy is moving to a different rhythm in the waves, and the boats bump against each other.
Men wait at the top, their arms outstretched, as Almaz tries to grip the rope without falling between the two boats. She clings on, and looks up, reaching a hand to the next rung, where one of the men grabs her arm and begins to haul her towards the top. The other women go next, then it’s my turn.