by Alan Gratz
“No, we—”
“Isabel! The boat!” Papi called.
The others had already lifted the boat up out of the sand and were lurching toward the sound of the crashing waves. The bright lights of the camera swung away from Isabel and lit up what looked like a party on the beach. More than half their village was on the sand, clapping, waving, and cheering on the boats.
And there were so many boats. Isabel’s family had worked in secret all night with the Castillos, worried someone might hear them, but apparently, everybody else had been doing the same thing. There were inflatable rafts. Canoes with homemade outriggers. Rafts made of inner tubes tied together. Boats built out of Styrofoam and oil drums.
A rickety-looking raft made out of wooden shipping pallets and inner tubes raised a bedsheet sail, and as it caught the wind, the villagers on the beach cheered. When another raft made out of an old refrigerator sank, everyone laughed.
The camera lights swung around again, and that’s when Isabel saw the police.
There was a small group of them, up on the rocks overlooking the inlet. Not nearly as many as there had been in Havana, but enough. Enough to arrest her family for trying to leave Cuba. But these police weren’t doing anything. They were just standing and watching. Castro’s order to let people leave must have still been good!
“Chabela!” her mother called. “Chabela, come on!”
Mami was already in the boat, and Papi was helping Iván in. Señor Castillo was trying to get the motor started.
Isabel waded into the water, the waves lapping up to the bottom of her shorts. She was almost to Papi’s outstretched arms when she saw her father’s eyes go wide.
Isabel looked back over her shoulder. Two of the policemen had broken from the group and were running toward the water.
Toward them.
“No—no! They’re coming for me!” Papi cried. Isabel fell into the water and swam the rest of the way to the boat, but her father was already climbing over the side.
“Start the engine!” he cried.
“No, wait for me!” Isabel yelled, spitting seawater. She got a hand to the side of the boat and looked back. The two policemen had hit the surf and were running high-legged through the waves. Worse, the other policemen were running too—and they were all headed for the Castillos’s boat!
Hands grabbed Isabel and helped her climb the side of the boat—Iván! But when he got her aboard, Iván and his mother then reached their hands out for the two policemen who were chasing them. What were they doing?
“No!” Papi cried, scrambling as far away from them as he could. Iván and Señora Castillo grabbed the arms of the two policemen and pulled them on board, and they all collapsed into the bottom of the boat. The policemen pulled off their berets, and Isabel recognized one of them instantly—one was Luis, the Castillos’s elder son! The other policeman shook out his long black hair, and Isabel was startled to realize it wasn’t a policeman at all. It was a policewoman. When she took Luis’s hand, Isabel guessed she was his girlfriend.
This must have been the Castillos’s plan all along—for Luis and his girlfriend to run away with them! But they had never told Isabel and her family.
Pak! A pistol rang out again over the waves, and the crowd on the beach cried out in panic. The pistol fired again—pak!—and—ping!—the hull of the Castillos’s boat rang as the bullet hit it.
The police were shooting at them! But why? Didn’t Castro say it was all right to leave?
Isabel’s eyes fell on Luis and his girlfriend, and she understood. They had been drafted into the police, and they weren’t allowed to leave. They were deserters, and deserters were shot.
The motor coughed to life, and the boat lurched into a wave, spraying Isabel with seawater. The villagers on the beach cheered for them, and Señor Castillo revved the engine, leaving the charging policemen in their wake.
Isabel braced herself between two of the benches, trying to catch her breath. It took her a moment to process it, but this was really happening. They were leaving Cuba, her village, her home—everything she’d ever known—behind.
Isabel’s father pitched across the roiling boat and grabbed Señor Castillo by the shirt. “What are you playing at, letting them on board?” he demanded. “What if they follow us? What if they send a navy boat after us? You’ve put us all in danger!”
Señor Castillo batted Geraldo Fernandez’s arms away. “We didn’t ask you to come along!”
“It’s our gasoline!” Isabel’s father yelled.
They kept arguing, but the engine and the slap of the boat against the waves drowned their words out for Isabel. She wasn’t paying any attention anyway. All she could think about was the ninety miles they still had to go, and the water pouring in from the gunshot hole in the side of the boat.
Mahmoud’s father stopped their Mercedes station wagon for gasoline at a little roadside station north of Aleppo. Waleed and Mahmoud sat in the car with their mother while she nursed Hana under a blanket. Fatima had put on a black long-sleeved dress and a pink flowery hijab that covered her head and shoulders. She and Youssef had agreed she should cover up more than she usually did in Aleppo, in case they ran into stricter Muslims outside the city. In some places, women were being stoned and killed for not covering up their entire bodies, especially in areas controlled by Daesh—what the rest of the world called ISIS. Daesh thought they were fighting the final war of the apocalypse, and anyone who didn’t agree with their twisted perversion of Islam were infidels who should have their heads cut off. Mahmoud and his family planned to stay as far away from Daesh as possible, but the radical fighters were coming farther and farther into Syria every day.
Mahmoud looked out the dusty car window as a jet fighter streaked by high above them, headed for Aleppo. A mural painted on the side of the gas station showed President Assad, his dark hair cut short and a thin mustache underneath his pointy nose. He wore a suit and tie in front of a Syrian flag, doves of peace and yellow shining light surrounding him.
A jagged line of real bullet holes bisected Assad’s face.
Mahmoud’s father got back in the car.
“I’ve got a route for us,” Mom said. She finally had a signal, and got Google Maps to open on her iPhone. Mahmoud leaned over to see. This route crosses a country border, Google Maps told them, marking the alert with a little yellow triangle. That’s what they wanted—to get out of Syria using the fastest path possible. Dad started the engine, put the car into gear, and they were off.
An hour later, they were met on the road by four soldiers waving for them to stop. Mahmoud froze. The soldiers might be with the Syrian army, or with the Syrian rebels. They could even be Daesh. It was hard to tell anymore. Some of these soldiers wore camouflage pants and shirts, but others wore Adidas jerseys and leather jackets and track pants. They all had short black beards like Mahmoud’s father, and wore head scarves of different colors and patterns.
But each of them had an automatic rifle, which was really all that mattered.
“Your hijab,” Dad said. “Quickly.”
Mahmoud’s mother pulled the end of the scarf up over her face so that only her eyes were showing.
Mahmoud sank to the floor of the old Mercedes station wagon and tried to disappear. In the seat beside him, Waleed sat up straight next to his open window, unmoving and unfazed.
“Everybody stay calm,” Dad said, slowing the car down, “and let me do all the talking.”
One of the soldiers stood in front of the car, his rifle aimed loosely at the windshield, while the others walked around the sides, peering in through the windows. The soldiers were silent, and Mahmoud closed his eyes tight, waiting for the shots to come. Sweat ran down his back.
“I’m just trying to get my family to safety,” Dad told the men.
One of the men stopped at the driver’s-side window and pointed his rifle at Mahmoud’s father. “Which side do you support?”
The question was as dangerous as his gun. The right answer an
d they lived; the wrong answer and they all died. But what was the right answer? Assad and the Syrian army? The rebels? Daesh? His dad hesitated, and Mahmoud held his breath.
One of the soldiers cocked his rifle. Chi-CHAK!
It was Waleed who spoke up. “We’re against whoever is dropping the bombs on us,” he said.
The soldier laughed, and the other soldiers laughed with him.
“We’re against whoever is dropping the bombs too,” the soldier at the window said. “Which is usually that dog Assad.”
Mahmoud breathed again with relief. Waleed didn’t know it, but he’d saved the day.
“Where are you going?” the soldier at the window asked.
“North,” Dad said. “Through Azaz.”
The soldier opened the back door of the car and slid inside, pushing Waleed into the back of the station wagon. “No, no, you can’t go through Azaz anymore,” the soldier said. “The Free Syria Army and al-Qaeda are fighting there now.”
The door next to Mahmoud opened, and one of the soldiers nudged him up from the floor and into the back with Waleed. Two more soldiers crammed themselves into the backseat, and the last one joined Mahmoud and Waleed in the back with their backpacks. He was dusty and smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in months, and the heat of the road radiated off him and his rifle like a stove.
Apparently, they were all coming along for the ride.
One of the soldiers in the backseat snatched up Mom’s iPhone and looked at the route.
“Use Apple Maps,” another soldier said.
“No, you idiot, Google Maps is better,” said his friend. “See here,” he told Mahmoud’s father, “you’ll have to go over to Qatmah, and then north through Qestel Cindo. The rebels and the army and Daesh are all fighting here,” he said, pointing to places on the map. “Many guns and artillery. And the Kurds hold all this territory here. Russian airstrikes have hit here and here in support of that Alawite pig Assad, and American drones are attacking Daesh here and here.”
Mahmoud’s eyes went wide. Everything the soldier was describing stood between them and Turkey.
“Go back south,” one of the soldiers told Mahmoud’s father. “You can let us off at highway 214.”
Dad turned the car around and drove.
The soldier with the iPhone scrolled up the map to see their destination. “You’re going to Turkey?”
“I—I went to engineering school there,” Mahmoud’s father said.
“You shouldn’t be leaving Syria,” said one of the soldiers. “You should stand up for your country! Fight the tyrant Assad!”
Between Assad and Daesh and Russia and America, Mahmoud thought, there wasn’t much of a Syria left to fight for.
“I just want to keep my family safe,” Dad said.
“My family was killed in an airstrike,” one of the soldiers said. “Maybe when yours is too, you’ll take up arms. But by then it will be too late.”
Mahmoud remembered the horror he’d felt when his apartment building collapsed and he’d thought his mom was still inside. The fear he’d felt when they couldn’t reach his father. If his parents had died in the airstrike, would he want revenge on their killers? Instead of running away, should Mahmoud and his father join the rebels and fight to win their country back?
Mahmoud’s dad kept driving. They were almost to the highway when gunfire erupted nearby—tat-tatatatat! tatatat!—and bullets pinged into the car. Mahmoud screamed and dropped to the floor as broken glass sprayed him. One of the back tires exploded, and the car swerved wildly and screeched as his dad fought to keep control of it. Mahmoud and Waleed went tumbling, and the soldier in the back rolled on top of them.
The soldier had a hole in his head.
Mahmoud screamed again and pushed the man away as the car skidded to a stop. Bullets whizzed by, then caught the car again—ping-ping-ping—and Mahmoud’s dad threw open the driver’s-side door and pulled Mom and Hana out with him. “Get out of the car!” he cried.
The soldiers in the backseat kicked open the door on the left side of the car and spilled outside. More bullets whizzed by overhead, and soon the rebel soldiers who’d been riding with them were returning fire, their automatic rifles booming in Mahmoud’s ears like he was in a barrel and they were beating on the outside of it with hammers.
All Mahmoud wanted to do was curl up into a ball and disappear. But he knew if he and Waleed stayed in the car, they would end up like the dead soldier beside them.
He had to get up. Get out. Move. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it would burst right out of his chest, but Mahmoud found the courage to grab Waleed by the arm, drag him over the seat, and dive headfirst out the door. They tumbled into the ditch beside his parents. Hana was wailing, but Mahmoud almost couldn’t hear her over the sound of the gunfire.
Mahmoud’s dad waited for a pause in the gunfire, then scrambled back up the ridge for the car.
“Youssef, no!” Mom cried. “What are you doing?”
Mahmoud’s father dove back into the front seat and yanked the iPhone and the charger cord from the Mercedes just as bullets ripped into the car again. He tumbled and slid back down into the ditch.
“Had to go back for the phone,” he told them. “How else am I going to play Angry Birds?”
He was joking again. Mahmoud knew they needed their phones to help them get to Turkey. Without the maps, they’d be lost.
Mahmoud’s father waited for another lull in the shooting, and then they all hurried away from the car, leaving everything else they owned behind.
Finally, Shabbos arrived. It was the day Josef would leave his childhood behind and become a man, and he could hardly contain his excitement. The ship’s bulletin board announced that the first-class social hall would be converted to a synagogue, a Jewish house of prayer, which meant Josef might have his bar mitzvah after all. He was careful not to show his eagerness in front of his father, however. What would once have been a happy occasion in the Landau home was now fraught with anxiety, thanks to his father’s paranoia.
“A synagogue, on board the ship?” Papa said. He shook his head as he paced their little room in his oversized nightclothes.
“The captain himself has arranged it,” Mama said.
“Ridiculous! Did no one else see the Nazi flag overhead as we came on board?”
“Will you not go to your own son’s bar mitzvah, then?” Josef’s mother and Ruthie were already dressed in their nice Shabbos dresses. Josef wore his best shirt and tie.
“Bar mitzvah? There won’t be enough men there to form a minyan!” Papa said. By tradition, ten or more Jewish men, a minyan, was needed for a public service. “No. No one who has lived in Germany for the past six years would be so foolish as to go to a Jewish service aboard a Nazi ship.” Papa ran a hand over his shaved head. “No. It’s a trap. Meant to lure us out. That’s when they’ll snatch us. A trap.”
Mama sighed. “All right, then. We’ll go without you.”
They left him pacing the room, muttering to himself. Josef felt like someone had yanked his heart from his chest. In all the times he’d dreamed of this day, his father had always been there to recite a blessing with him. But maybe this is what becoming a man is, Josef thought. Maybe becoming a man means not relying on your father anymore.
Josef, his mother, and Ruthie stopped short just inside the first-class social hall. There weren’t the required ten men for the service—there were a hundred men, probably more, all wearing yarmulkes on their heads and white-and-black tallisim—prayer shawls—around their shoulders. The card tables had been pushed to the sides of the room, and stewards were adding more chairs to accommodate the crowd. A table at the front held a Torah scroll.
Josef stood and stared. It felt like ages since he’d been inside a synagogue. It had been before Kristallnacht, before the Nuremberg Laws that made Jews second-class citizens, before the boycotts and book burnings. Before Jews were scared to gather together in public places. Josef’s parents had always taken him t
o synagogue with them on Shabbos, even when other parents left their children with their nannies. It all came flooding back to him now—swaying and humming along with the prayers, craning his neck to see the Torah when it was taken out of the ark and hoping to get a chance to touch it and then kiss his fingers as the scroll came around in a procession. Josef felt his skin tingle. The Nazis had taken all this from them, from him, and now he and the passengers on the ship were taking it back.
Gustav Schroeder, the ship’s diminutive captain, was there to greet them at the door. In the gallery above the room, a number of the off-duty crew had gathered to watch.
“Captain,” asked a rabbi, one of the men who was leading the service, “I wonder if we might take down the portrait of the Führer, given the circumstances. It seems … inappropriate for such a sacred moment to be celebrated in the presence of Hitler.”
Josef had seen paintings of the Nazi leader all over the ship, and the first-class social hall was no exception. A large portrait of Hitler hung in the middle of the room, watching over them all. Josef’s veins ran with ice. He hated that man. Hated him because of everything he’d done to the Jews, but mostly because of what Hitler had done to his father.
“Of course,” Captain Schroeder said. He quickly called over two of the stewards, and soon they had the portrait down and were taking it from the room.
In the gallery above, Josef saw one of the crew slam a fist down on the railing and storm off.
Josef’s mother gave him a kiss on the cheek, and she and Ruthie went to sit in the section reserved for the women. Josef took a seat in the section with the men. The rabbi stood in front of the crowd and read from Hosea. Then it was time for Josef to recite the blessing he’d been practicing for weeks. There were butterflies in his stomach as he got up in front of such a large audience, and his voice broke as he stumbled through the Hebrew words, but he did it. He found his mother in the crowd. Her eyes were wet with tears.
“Today,” Josef said, “I am a man.”