From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  When most of the luggage had been emptied onto the deck of the wooden boat, the pilot pointed to a hatch in the centre of the deck and commanded that they go below, and take a seat, and wait. And he raised his gun a little as he spoke, and his finger tapped the trigger guard in time with his words, as he said, Everyone go below, the crew will bring you water. It’s dangerous to be seen on deck. And the belly of the boat was dark as pitch, and smelt of diesel and fish, and there were no seats, so the passengers lit the space with their iPhones and saw that there were people already there, sitting in silence, huddled, some with sleeping infants in their arms, some with young children who clung to their mothers, and Farouk could not discern their numbers, and the hatch closed above them, and there were voices, or a voice at least, raised, and a door opened and closed and opened again, and slammed hard shut, and there was shuffling and the motor of the launch revved high and throbbed away, and a long minute later the engine of their own vessel cranked, and he guessed the next series of mechanical expectorations to be the bilge pumps activating, and there was a door at the reach of his arm and he lit it with his iPhone’s torch and he tried the wheeled handle of it but it was locked, or stuck tight, and he knew that it was the door to the engine room, and he breathed in and out slowly, and he searched for Martha’s hand, and when at last he found it she said, softly, so that their daughter wouldn’t hear, Farouk, my love, this is better than sitting and waiting for death.

  The boat pitched and rolled and someone groaned sickly but mostly the hold was silent. And hours passed like this and Farouk thought of a story he’d read about Copernicus, the great observer, who pointed out the impossibility of taking a measurement of motion from below the deck of a ship, and how this observation on the measurement of relative motion was the same one Einstein made centuries later to explain the very fabric of space and time, and he wondered what kind of man he was to be sitting on the floor in the hold of a ship, like a prisoner, like a captured slave, having thoughts like these, useless thoughts, about things he only half understood, when he should be up on deck, questioning the captain and the crew, finding out why there was such a deficit between the trafficker’s promises and the truth of this voyage, or at least securing fresh water for his daughter and his wife.

  The sobbing noise was in his ears a while before he realized it was coming from his daughter. His wife had been speaking to her in a low voice, a story about a girl who’d been taken prisoner by a king who wanted to marry her, but he was old and very ugly and she would never love him, so he kept her locked away in a room in a tower filled with pretty things, all sorts of jewellery and clothes and musical instruments, and performers and clowns and storytellers were sent every day to amuse her but she spent her days sitting by a window feeding a tiny bird that landed on the sill, and whispering to the bird, and the king would visit in the evening but the girl would never speak to him, and he asked his best archer to kill the bird one day, and he watched from afar through a looking glass as a slender arrow pierced the bird’s breast right there on the windowsill as the girl was whispering to it, and he watched as she sat there crying silently for hours, and her tears formed a pool around the bird’s little body, and eventually the king regretted what he had done, and he tried to command all the birds of the sky to visit the girl, and to sit on her sill while she whispered to them, but the birds wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t even stay still while he shouted at the sky and the trees, and the king’s rage flooded through him and drove him insane and he asked all of his archers to kill every bird in the kingdom, and they obeyed him, because they were afraid of him, and the killing of the birds took years and years, and cost the king all his gold, and all his castles, because he had to recruit archers from all over the world to kill the birds, but eventually the skies of the kingdom were empty and birdsong was never heard again, and the king was a feeble old man living in a tiny shack in a silent forest, and the girl had long since escaped the tower and returned to her home and her family, and the king had long forgotten why he hated birds so much, why he had killed them all, why he had lost his very kingdom in the cause of their annihilation.

  And Farouk wondered why Martha had chosen a story so sad, why she had made their daughter cry, and he realized that every other passenger had fallen silent and they were all looking now at his wife, and the only light there in the hold was from the slit along the jamb of the hatch above them and from the torches of phones, but he could see that some of the women and the girls had tears in their eyes, and some of the men had thoughtful expressions, and some looked angry, and the only sound was his daughter’s low sobs as she clung fast to her mother, and the sound of his wife saying, Hush, love, it’s not a true story, it’s a fable, and its moral is how useless it is to blame others for things not being as we’d like them to be. And the complaining man stood, and Farouk expected him to rebuke Martha for telling such a story, and he prepared himself to defend his wife, to cut the complaining man down to size, to tell him to be quiet and keep his whining to himself, that he should be ashamed of himself for taking so to heart a story told by a woman to her child, but the complaining man just said, The life-jackets. We gave them to that boy because he said they’d be replaced. Come on, my friends, we have to see the captain and the crew. We can’t just sit here in the dark like fools.

  And another voice behind him said, There are no life-jackets on this boat. There is no captain. There is no crew. There is nothing on this boat but us.

  Farouk enjoyed the telling of the story. Each time he told it something new occurred to him, some different meaning that could be ascribed to the girl and the tower and king and his war against the birds. Interviewers would invariably try to stop him at that part, tell him it wasn’t relevant, that he didn’t need to add this detail to his application, that there wasn’t space for it, and he would pause, and he would regard them solemnly, and he would wait until they began to shift uncomfortably in their seats, or to exhort him to continue, and he would say, This is the most important part of my story, this is my story, and he’d laugh then, or sometimes cry, or sometimes both, a little, at the same time. Laughing and crying seemed equally ridiculous, equally useless. They seemed to be the same thing, ebb and flood of the same water, creeping inversions of each other, night, day, night, day, night. Sometimes he imagined the interviewer to be God, and the purpose of the interview to be to secure his passage to Heaven, to ascertain his eligibility for a place in the afterlife, to decide the quality of his treatment there. Sometimes he imagined the interviewer to be a child, and so he told his story from its beginning in the simplest of terms, in short sentences enunciated slowly, and sometimes he skipped straight to the story of the king and the girl and the birds, and the interviewers would shake their heads, and tell him that the session was terminated, that he shouldn’t have made an application if he was unwilling to cooperate, to help himself, if he wasn’t prepared to give a full and frank account of the reasons he was claiming asylum in their land.

  He sometimes wondered if he lied. They supposed him to be lying, all of them. About being a doctor, about being smuggled in a fishing boat, about the reasons he had left his home, about his wife, about his daughter. Perhaps he had never had a daughter or a wife. They no longer seemed possible: the sea when he looked at it always seemed quiet; the storm that had thrown their boat from trough to crest to trough and splintered it to pieces didn’t seem like a thing that could really have happened. The complaining man at the door to the bridge, shouting, Open up, open up in there, imploring Farouk to help him at the handle of the door, to help him break it down. The screaming wind, the screaming. The door giving way. Their bodies falling over each other into the emptiness of the bridge, the silent, soulless place. The flashing, bleeping box set by the wheel, locked to it. The auto-pilot and the satnav and the disgusted sea, lashing all its rage against the prow, and then against the stern, and then against the port side, and then against the starboard side, and then against the mast and boom and deck and hold and all the s
ouls aboard the crewless craft, the small boat dumbly sailing to its doom.

  His mind began to clear after a time, a time immeasurable, it seemed. He couldn’t recall the date of their leaving, or the manner of it; he only knew, or judged from the softness of the air and the arc of the sun, that now it was early summer. There was short, prickly grass of a brownish green on the ground outside the tent. The beds in the tent were narrow and hard and arranged against its canvas sides in a rough square. Some of the other men lay on their backs and smoked all day, leaving only to queue for food and bottles of water in the morning and early afternoon and evening. For a week or so he was fully silent, watching from his bunk. Another man brought him food and water and addressed him as brother. There, brother, eat. There, brother, drink. And so he lay on his back on his narrow bunk in unfamiliar clothes: thick socks and heavy corduroy trousers and loose-fitting underwear and a white buttoned shirt over a white T-shirt and there was a neat pile of two sets of the exact same clothes beneath his bunk but there were no shoes. You have to keep an eye out when I am gone, brother, the man who brought him food and water told him. Your shoes have been stolen. Stay awake when I’m not here. These agencies are not well funded, and there are people here who should not be, and everything is pulled tight across a frame that grows each day, and everything is thinning and one day it will tear and disintegrate and we’ll be left here to fight it out among ourselves, or this whole place will be levelled and we’ll be bussed away to heaven knows where.

  And Farouk spoke then, and the words seemed to press sharply against the sides of his throat, and to die in the air as they entered it. The man leaned closer and Farouk caught an odour of staleness and cigarette smoke and saw a raised rash on the man’s neck extending down from his ear, and a white line of scar tissue cutting through his thin hair above the same ear, and the ear now was waiting for Farouk to attempt once again to speak, and the man’s eyes were closed in patient anticipation, and Farouk sensed that this man had been alone a long time, was used to it, had been blown here by some careless wind, was dried to cracking and ready to crumble to dust. And Farouk said into the man’s ear: I have to wait.

  Well, brother, you can’t stay here for ever. I am old, and I might die here. I don’t mind dying here. I only pray it will happen in my sleep. We glimpse the next world in our dreams anyway; it would be no more than that, a dream from which I’d never wake. I feel a skipping and a murmuring in my chest some nights, a pausing and racing and pausing, and I feel sure my heart is coming to its useful end. I wouldn’t have come here but I always dreaded being buried alive. It’s my greatest fear. That’s what drove me from my home. The thought of a great weight above me pressing down, of there being no room to move my arms or legs or to turn myself, of the total absence of light. My house was constructed from rammed earth and I stayed in it when everyone else was gone, my sons and their daughters to Europe and my wife to her grave, and every day the sound of the fighting came nearer and still I stayed until a line of Madayans passed my door on their way to the highway, some in cars and some on foot, drawing small wagons of children and belongings. Madaya has fallen, a man told me, and he described the bombardment, shells that fell and levelled whole streets, and people being buried in the ruins, people shouting from beneath the rubble. I set out walking then, and paid what I had to a man who gave me a seat on a dinghy, and the weather was clement and we washed up here.

  And Farouk took the man’s wrist in his hand and placed the ball of his thumb gently over the man’s pulse and after a minute he said, You have an ectopic heartbeat. An extra spark. A tiny electrical signal is generated by your body that sparks the electrical function of your heart. You happen to have two sparks, and the extra one is intermittent and irregular and it kicks your heart out of step. It becomes noticeable when you are sedentary for long periods, as when you’re lying down to sleep. It’s nothing that can kill you. Potassium will regulate it, so eat bananas. Or perhaps you could be prescribed beta-blockers, but they can be severe and stymie cortisone production. My best advice to you, in order to keep your heartbeat settled, is to raise your pulse for a sustained period each day, by jogging or walking energetically, or swimming perhaps.

  The old man laughed at this, a soft, almost noiseless laugh, a series of exhalations. Then he looked at Farouk, and his eyes were bright and there were wrinkles of mirth at the sides of them, and he said, You know, it’s a funny thing. I knew you were a doctor from the moment they brought you here. Something in the way you carried yourself, in the way you greeted us when you arrived, or didn’t greet us. Some feeling I had. I’m reading people’s faces and their bearing a long time, though. It’s never paid me yet, this skill I have. But so be it, some things just are. Why must you wait?

  I have to wait here for my daughter and my wife. They’re with the other women and the children in some other part of the camp. That’s how it’s arranged here, isn’t it? The children and women are separated from the men while suitable family accommodation is arranged, and then the processing of people’s papers starts. I don’t mind waiting here. I guess the other men are all here waiting too, while their wives and children set their places and prepare for the waiting-in. We have to be patient, all of us. There’s no point in striking out against the tide. Martha has our papers and Amira is a clever girl and between them they’ll arrange things and fetch me when it’s time. I’ve never felt so tired in all my life. The journey, I suppose. I always worked long hours but never had to journey far before. Even when I flew to London and back again I slept both times. I was afraid of flying so took a sleeping pill each time. My father drove me to Damascus and collected me again. How easy it was then, to move about the world.

  And he wondered why the old man stared at him with such a strange expression on his face. Why the old man’s hand was resting on his shoulder now, and was squeezing his shoulder softly in a kind of gentle rhythm, why the old man was shaking his head slowly from side to side and saying, Sleep now, my friend, lie down and sleep. I’ll stay here and watch over you and your spare clothes, and tomorrow I’ll see about finding you some shoes. You need to sleep, brother. Farouk lay back on his bunk and the old man unrolled a coarse blanket from his own bunk, which was set at a right angle from the foot of Farouk’s so that his pillow was almost at the edge of the doorway where the flap was bunched and secured with a short narrow chain and a hook, and Farouk thought how pleasant it would be later in the summer to leave the flaps tied back at night so the cool air would balm them and the soft sound of the sea would soothe them, and he hoped that he and Martha and Amira would have a tent together at the edge of the camp near the sea so that they would all three listen to the breaking waves and feel the gentle salty breeze in the evenings and watch the sun retreat below the line of the horizon and the galaxy begin to show itself, that splash of dirty milk across the sky.

  And he wondered again and again as the days went on about the old man. His story of living alone in a house of rammed earth in a village near Madaya sounded like a lie, but Farouk didn’t know why this should be so. It was a story like many others, but maybe that was why it had no ring of truth. What could the truth of him be? Farouk wondered why he was so interested in him. Why he toiled through the hours at a gathering of things: cushions and sheets and T-shirts and underwear. Why his accumulations waxed and waned – was he selling things? Was he a thief? The other men were not Arabs: they spoke a language he didn’t recognize and the old man didn’t speak to them at all, but still he moved easily around them and now and again presented them wordlessly with small gifts; without making eye contact he would hold up a garment or a blanket or a handful of cigarettes and one or other of the foreign men would accept the token with a nod or a trace of a smile. The old man seemed curiously politic, even in his silence, deferential to them almost, though without ever diminishing himself; in fact, he seemed straighter of back and to hold his chin higher when communicating in this curious way with the other men. There were five bunks in the tent. There were five
men in the tent. Farouk breathed in and breathed out and ate the food he was given and drank the water he was given, and he visited the latrine beside their tent twice or three times each day, and he came to know that their tent was one of a great line of tents that stretched as far as he could see, punctuated regularly by prefabricated latrines and shower stands, and across the tops of the lines of tents, if he strained his eyes against the brightness of the sun, he could see the tops of grassy dunes and he could hear the breaking rolling waves and he supposed that the women and children were sequestered there, in a more pleasant area, where the sea view was more easily accessible and the children could play on the beach and climb among the rocks, and he felt happy that Martha and Amira were having this time together, this period of gradual adjustment, before they would regroup and continue their journey.