Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  “Maybe you could help,” Papi told him.

  “I’m recovering!” Señor Castillo argued. “I can barely move in this heat! Besides, I don’t see you bailing.”

  “I’m tending to my wife,” Papi said. “Who’s really sick.”

  Ever since the Bahamas, something had come over Isabel’s father. He’d been more attentive to Mami. More focused on her than anything else. Nobody else noticed, but Isabel did. She’d seen him hold her hand, watched him gently move her hair out of her face, heard him whispering that he loved her, that he needed her.

  Things she had never seen or heard him do before.

  “Are you saying my father is faking it?” Luis challenged.

  “I’m just saying it’s very nice for him that everybody else is keeping this metal coffin afloat while he sits back and relaxes,” Papi said.

  “You wouldn’t even have this ‘metal coffin’ if I hadn’t built it!”

  “I’m not sure if built is the right word,” Señora Castillo said, trying to pull two of the side pieces back together. “Cobbled is more like it.”

  Iván and Señor Castillo erupted at the same time.

  “We did the best we could!” Iván yelled.

  “Oh, now you’re telling us how to build things?” Señor Castillo said. “Where were you and Luis when we were up all night putting this thing together, eh? You were at your law office, doing God knows what.”

  Isabel shrank in her seat and put her hands over her ears. She hated when her parents argued like this, and now everyone on the boat was mad at each other.

  “I was helping people,” Señora Castillo told her husband. “You’ve never appreciated what I do—”

  “And what was I supposed to do,” Luis threw in, “tell my police commander I had to stay home and build a boat so I could escape?”

  “All of you, stop it,” Amara yelled from the back of the boat. “Right now. You’re acting like children.”

  Everyone fell quiet and looked appropriately chastised.

  “I think it’s time for a water break,” Amara told them. “Isabel? Will you hand out the bottles?”

  It was a little earlier than their rationed water break, but none of them complained. The clear, delicious water was the best thing Isabel had ever tasted, and it settled them all down like mother’s milk for a baby.

  “We’re all hot, and we’re all tired, and yes, we’re sinking,” Amara said. “But if we lose our heads, we’re only going to die faster. We can resolve this.”

  “She’s right,” Isabel’s father said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Señor Castillo said. “I should be helping.”

  “Only if you’re up to it,” Papi said, and he sounded like he meant it.

  “The boat is falling apart, though,” Iván said. “We’re taking on too much water.”

  “We have too much weight,” Señora Castillo said.

  She was right, but what could they lose? There was just the engine, the fuel, the food and water, and the nine of them.

  “What if one or two of us slipped out into the water at a time,” Papi suggested. “They could hang on to the boat. Floating in the water alongside would help take some of the weight away.”

  “But it would drag on the boat. Slow us down,” Luis said.

  “But it might keep the boat afloat longer,” Señor Castillo said.

  “I think we should try it,” Amara said. “We’ll take turns in the water. It’ll keep us cooler too.”

  And right now, Isabel thought, cooler heads just might be the most important thing of all.

  Mahmoud was in and out of sleep, waking every few seconds when the waves washed over him. Minutes—hours?—passed, and Mahmoud dreamed that a boat was coming for them. He could hear its motor over the lapping of the waves.

  Mahmoud jerked awake. He ran a wet, cold hand down his face, trying to focus, and he heard it again—the sound of a motor. He wasn’t dreaming! But where was it? The rain had stopped, but it was still dark. He couldn’t see the boat, but he could hear it.

  “Here!” he cried. “Here!”

  But the sound of the motor still stayed frustratingly, agonizingly, far away. If only whoever was on the boat could see him, Mahmoud thought. All his life he’d practiced being hidden. Unnoticed. Now, at last, when he most needed to be seen, he was truly invisible.

  Mahmoud cried in exhaustion and misery. He wanted to do it all over again. He wanted to go back and stand up for the boy in the alley in Aleppo who was getting beaten up for his bread. To scream and yell and wake the sleeping citizens of Izmir so they would see him and all the other people sleeping in doorways and parks. To tell Bashir al-Assad and his army to go to hell. He wanted to stop being invisible and stand up and fight. But now he would never get a chance to do any of that. It was too late. There was no time.

  Time. The phone! Mahmoud still had the phone in his pocket! He pulled it out and pushed the button on it through the plastic bag, and the screen with the clock on it lit up like a beacon in the night. Mahmoud held it over his head and waved it in the dark, screaming and yelling for help.

  The motor got louder.

  Mahmoud wept for joy as a boat emerged from the darkness—a real boat this time, not a dinghy. A speedboat with lights and antennas and blue and white stripes on the side—the colors of the Greek flag.

  A Greek Coast Guard ship, come to save them.

  And on the front of the ship, down on his knees with hands clasped in thanks, was Mahmoud’s father.

  Waleed was there too, in the back under a foil thermal blanket, and soon Mahmoud and his mother were out of the water and wrapped in the foil blankets too, what little body heat they still had left reflected back at them. Mahmoud’s mother was too insensible to speak, so Mahmoud told his father how they had given Hana away rather than see her drown with them. Mahmoud’s father wept, but pulled Mahmoud to him and hugged him.

  “Hana’s not with us, but she’s alive. I know it,” his father told him. “Because of you, my son.”

  The Greek Coast Guard boat swept through the choppy Mediterranean the rest of the night, pulling more people out of the water. The Coast Guard finally set Mahmoud and his family and all the other refugees down on the island of Lesbos. It was almost six o’clock in the morning, and the sky was beginning to lighten with the dawn. Mahmoud wasn’t sure, but he thought he and his mother had spent more than two hours in the water.

  When they stepped off the boat, Mahmoud’s father got down on his hands and knees and kissed the ground and gave thanks to Allah. It was time for morning prayers anyway, and Mahmoud joined him. When they were finished, Mahmoud staggered up the rocky gray shore, squinting at the hills that rose just beyond the beach. Then he realized: They weren’t real hills.

  They were piles and piles of life jackets.

  There were mountains of them, stretching up and down the coast as far as Mahmoud could see. The way Aleppo had its piles of rubble, Lesbos had its piles of life jackets, abandoned by the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had come before them, shedding the vests they no longer needed and moving along on the road to somewhere else.

  There were bodies on the beach too. People who hadn’t survived the sea in the night, who hadn’t been found by the Coast Guard in time. Men, mostly, but a few women too. And a child.

  Mahmoud’s mother rushed to the infant, howling Hana’s name. Mahmoud hurried after her, horrified, but the child wasn’t Hana. It was someone else’s baby daughter, her lungs filled with seawater. Mahmoud’s mother cried into his shoulder until a Greek man in a uniform moved them both away from the body and recorded the infant in a little notebook. Tallying the daily dead. Mahmoud staggered away, feeling as numb as if he were in the freezing water again.

  Mahmoud’s mother went to all the other refugees who had landed in the night and were still there, asking each of them if they had seen her little Hana. But none of them had. The boat with Mahmoud’s little sister on it was gone—it had either reached the island a
nd its passengers had already moved on, or it too had wrecked on the rocks.

  Mahmoud’s mother fell to her knees on the rocky ground and wept, and Mahmoud’s father held her close and let her cry.

  Mahmoud felt gutted. It was all his fault. Hana might still be with them if he hadn’t gotten someone on that boat to take her. Or she might have died during their two hours in the water.

  Either way, they had lost her.

  “Mahmoud,” his father said quietly over his sobbing mother, “check the other bodies and see if they have any shoes that will fit us.”

  Josef wished he was invisible.

  Once the rest of the passengers discovered who had jumped overboard yesterday, everyone stopped to tell him how sorry they were. How everything would be all right.

  But how could it be all right? How could it ever be all right?

  Josef stood at the rail on A-deck where his father had jumped. Down below, the sea was no longer empty. It was dotted with little motorboats and rowboats. Some carried reporters shouting up questions and trying to get pictures of the ship. Other boats offered up bunches of fresh bananas and bags of coconuts and oranges. Passengers on C-deck tossed money down, and the fruit was passed up the ladder by the Cuban policemen guarding the top and the bottom. Lately, though, the boats were full of relatives of people on board. Mostly men, they had come ahead to Cuba to get jobs and find places for their families to live.

  One man brought the same little white dog every day and held it up for his wife to wave to.

  The boats with relatives came close enough for their families to yell back and forth a little, but they couldn’t get any closer. Thanks to Josef’s father, a handful of Cuban police boats now surrounded the St. Louis. They kept the rescue ships at a distance and watched for anyone else who tried to jump to freedom.

  Or death.

  At night, the Cuban police boats swept the hull with searchlights, and the St. Louis’s crew members, on the captain’s orders, patrolled the decks on suicide watch.

  “Evelyne, there he is! There’s Papa!” Renata cried. She stood a few paces away from Josef down the rail, trying to point out one of the little rowboats to her sister.

  “Where? I don’t see him!” Evelyne whined.

  Josef was more interested in the small police boat that had navigated its way through the flotilla and was pulling up to the St. Louis. Any time they had a visitor now it was cause for conversation, and soon word spread throughout the ship that the boat had brought the Cuban policeman who had saved Josef’s father.

  Josef ran down to fetch his mother and sister, and together they hurried to the social hall, where a group of passengers and crew gathered to give the Cuban policeman a hero’s welcome. They parted for the policeman, cheering and slapping him on the back and shaking hands with him as he went. It was the first time he had been back to the ship since jumping overboard to save Josef’s father, and Josef and his family strained to get a good look at him over the heads of the other passengers. Josef’s mother cried and put a hand to her mouth, and Josef felt a surge of affection for the policeman. This was the man who had saved his father’s life.

  The policeman seemed genuinely flattered and surprised by all the attention. He was a short, stocky man with olive skin, a wide face, and a thick mustache. He wore blue pants, a gray shirt with epaulets on the shoulders, and a matching gray beret. Around his waist was a leather belt with a nightstick and holster hanging from it.

  His name, they were told, was Mariano Padron.

  Captain Schroeder arrived to thank Officer Padron on behalf of the passengers and crew. Josef felt a ripple of tension spread throughout the room. Josef had seen the captain less and less as the hot days of waiting at anchor dragged on, and he wasn’t the only passenger who had noticed. But they were there to celebrate Officer Padron, not badger the captain about why they were still on the ship. The mood became happy again when the policeman was presented with a gift of 150 reichsmarks that had been collected from grateful passengers. Officer Padron was stunned, and so was Josef—150 reichsmarks was a lot of money, especially for people who might need that money later to pay for visas and entrance fees. Officer Padron tried to refuse the money, but the passengers wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I was just doing my job,” Officer Padron told the audience through a translator. “But I will never forget this. I will never forget any of you. Thank you.”

  The passengers applauded again, and while many of them turned their attention to the captain to ask him for a status report, Josef and his mother and sister pushed forward to talk to the policeman.

  Officer Padron’s eyes lit up at the sight of Josef’s mother. He said something in Spanish, and the passenger who had spoken for him in front of the crowd smiled and translated his words.

  “Señora! Your father was a thief?”

  Josef’s mother frowned. “A thief? My father? No—I don’t understand.”

  “Your father, he must be a thief,” Officer Padron said through the translator. “Because he stole the stars from the sky and put them in the señora’s eyes.”

  Josef finally understood—it was some kind of compliment about how pretty she was. His mother smiled politely but impatiently. “Officer Padron, what about my husband?” she asked. “Is he all right? They won’t let me go ashore and see him.”

  The policeman took off his hat. “I am so sorry. So very sorry. Señora Landau, yes? Your husband is alive,” he said through the interpreter. “He is in the hospital. He has been … ” Officer Padron said something more, but the translator frowned. It was beyond his limited Spanish. Officer Padron could see his confusion, and he pantomimed what he meant by turning his wrists upside down, closing his eyes, and lolling his head back like he was asleep.

  “Sedated,” Mama said. There was pain in her voice. Josef knew she blamed herself. The whole reason her husband was gone was because she had been sedated and unable to stop him.

  Officer Padron nodded. “It’s not good,” he said through the interpreter. “But he will live.”

  Josef’s mother took both of the policeman’s hands in her own and kissed them. “Thank you, Officer Padron.” She spoke in German, but the policeman seemed to understand. He blushed and nodded. Then he spied Ruthie half hidden behind her mother’s skirt and knelt down to her. He put his policeman’s beret on her head and said something in Spanish, and she smiled.

  “He says you’re the policewoman now,” the translator said. “He will be the criminal. You must catch him!”

  Officer Padron led Ruthie on a merry chase around the room, Ruthie squealing. Josef’s mother laughed through a sob. It was the first time Josef had heard her laugh or seen her smile in months.

  Officer Padron let Ruthie catch him, and he plucked the hat off Ruthie’s head and put it on Josef’s head, speaking in Spanish again.

  “He says it’s your turn,” the translator said.

  “Oh, no,” Josef said. He waved a hand to make sure the policeman understood. He wasn’t in the mood for fun and games, and besides, he was too old for that kind of thing.

  Officer Padron tapped Josef’s chest with the back of his hand, urging him to play.

  “He says he is the passenger,” the translator said. Officer Padron raised himself up in mock anger and spoke in Spanish. “You! Señor Policeman!” the translator said. “When will we leave the ship?”

  The happy mood suddenly disappeared. Josef and his family and the translator all looked at each other awkwardly. Officer Padron had only meant to mimic what everyone asked him all the time, but the question made Josef sag. It felt like they were never getting off this ship. Officer Padron realized his mistake immediately and looked anguished at having brought it up. He nodded in sympathy. Then, in unison, he and Josef spoke the answer all the Cuban guards always gave:

  “Mañana.”

  Isabel slipped over the side of the boat into the sea and sighed. The water was warm, but it felt much cooler than being in the boat. The sun was just setting on the wester
n horizon, turning the world into a sepia-toned photograph, but it still had to be close to a hundred degrees outside. If it wouldn’t have swamped their boat and drowned them all for good, Isabel would have prayed for rain to break the muggy heat.

  Isabel’s father had rigged up a makeshift sunshade out of his shirt for her mother, and she seemed better now. The aspirin had kept Mami’s fever down, and though she was still exhausted and near to bursting with Isabel’s baby brother, she seemed at peace somehow. Hot, but at peace.

  If the rest of them wanted relief, they had to wait for their turn in the water.

  Again, Isabel thought about their journey as a song. If the riots and trading for the gasoline were the first verse, and the tanker and the storm the second verse, this part of their trip—the long, hot, stagnant day and a half they had been traveling from the Bahamas to Florida—this was the bridge. A third verse that was different from the others. This verse was death by slow measures. This was the down-tempo lull before the coming excitement of the climactic last verse and coda.

  This was limbo. They could do nothing but wait.

  The last sliver of sun finally disappeared below the waves, and Luis cut the engine. The world went silent but for the soft lapping of water against the hull and the creak of their disintegrating boat.

  “That’s it,” Luis said. “With the sun down, we won’t be able to navigate as well.”

  “Can’t we use the stars?” Isabel asked. She remembered reading that sailors had used the stars to navigate for centuries.

  “Which one?” Luis asked. None of them knew.

  Amara lifted one of the gasoline jugs and swished around what little there was left in it. “Saves us gas, anyway,” she said. “The thing’s been eating it up. We’ll be lucky to have enough to get to shore when we see land.”

  “When will we get there?” Iván asked. He was bobbing in the water just ahead of Isabel, hanging on to the hull like she was.

  “Tomorrow, hopefully,” Señor Castillo said from inside the boat. It was the same thing he’d said yesterday, and the day before that.