The Boy on the Beach

by Tima Kurdi

  The smuggler’s call came a little after midnight. Abdullah and Rehanna carried their sleeping boys to the rendezvous point nearby. Soon after, a car pulled up. Aside from the smuggler, there were two male refugees in the front seat, and a woman and young girl in the back. Abdullah and Rehanna got into the back with the boys in their laps.

  During the hour-long drive, Alan and Ghalib were fast asleep. The touristy areas were quieter, but the bars and streets around the marina were still quite busy. As they got out of the car and the smuggler guided the group toward the boat, another family appeared—a husband, wife, and three children. It now seemed that there were too many people for the boat. Abdullah and Rehanna didn’t know what to do. Financially, could they afford to hold out for another fiberglass boat or even another rubber dinghy, even for a few more days? Could they afford to give up on Europe and return to Istanbul? The kids were already so skinny and sickly: would they survive another winter? There was already a hint of autumn cool in that late summer wind. Abdullah couldn’t have known that the choice he was about to make would change his life and also change the world.

  Chapter 10

  Allah yerhamon

  God Rest Them in Peace

  From the time I received Abdullah’s first text from Izmir to the time I got his final text on the night of August 31, I called Baba every night.

  “, Rabbi yassir wa la tu’assir. Oh God, please ease their troubles,” he would say.

  I waited for Abdullah’s texts, or any news from my family, anything to indicate that they were still alive. In those many hours between texts and conversations, my mind raced back and forth, from the sunny spots to its darkest corners, thinking the worst, hoping for the best, searching for clues that I might have missed within our chain of text messages, monitoring any news I could find, watching the video Abdullah had sent of the waves. Our whole family was praying for them to cross safely.

  Since early August, I had been living in two worlds. In one world, I was a wife and mother and hairdresser living a lovely life in Vancouver, Canada. In the other world, I was helping my family, desperate Syrian refugees who had given up hope of a sustainable life in Istanbul and had turned their sights on Kos. These two worlds were separated by ten thousand kilometres and eight time zones. If you asked my husband and my son which of those worlds I spent the most time in, they would have said the latter.

  On August 28, I read the horrifying news that a refrigerator truck was found in Austria containing the bodies of seventy-one refugees, four of them children. In Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, the governments had chosen to deal with the surge of refugees by building higher fences to keep them out. But none of these stories seemed to grab the public’s attention. Perhaps the news was too terrible and depressing to imagine, so people who did hear about it simply blocked it out. I can’t blame them. I used to be like that once too.

  On September 1, I woke up long before the sun rose. I sent Abdullah many messages, nagging him to text me back. I was glued to my cellphone all day, checking it compulsively.

  I called Baba. “Did you hear anything from Abdullah?”

  “, La, Inshallah kheir. No, but God willing everything will be all right.”

  “He told me that the journey would only take thirty minutes!” I said.

  “Maybe he didn’t leave yet, or he ran out of minutes on his phone so he can’t call us,” Baba said, trying to calm me down. “You know how it’s been for them the last month.”

  I hoped Baba was right, but nothing could calm my fears. I called my sisters and we worried together. “. My heart is boiling,” we would say to each other.

  As night fell in Vancouver, I was stressed and tired. I put my phone on the kitchen table and went to bed early, as usual. Afterward, I was racked with guilt for the simple fact that I had gone to sleep. I woke up at about five a.m., my heart banging against my chest. In Turkey, it was already afternoon. I raced to the kitchen and found I’d received dozens of missed calls—from Shireen, Maha, Hivron, Ghouson, and my father.

  Why were they all calling me at the same time? I was shaking, and I could feel my pulse racing. I phoned Shireen in Damascus, and she answered right away, but the signal was bad.

  Shireen was crying and screaming. All I could hear was her repeating Abdullah’s name.

  “, Sho beeh, Abdullah? What’s wrong with Abdullah?” I yelled.

  I let out a loud scream and started to cry. “. Oh God, something’s wrong!” I yelled. It woke my husband and son, and they came rushing into the kitchen.

  “Something happened to Abdullah,” I said. I was crying so loud that they couldn’t understand what I was saying.

  “Find me Ghouson’s number,” I said to Rocco. My hands were shaking so badly, I couldn’t hold the phone. When I reached Ghouson, she sounded like she’d been crying.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked.

  “, Wlad Abdullah w Rehanna mato. Abdullah’s kids and Rehanna died,” she wailed.

  “Sho? Keef? Aimteh? What? How? When? Where’s Abdullah?”

  “He’s in the hospital. Standing in front of three dead bodies.”

  I dropped the phone and started to scream. I collapsed on the floor. I slapped my face and pulled at my hair. I wanted to hurt myself.

  “Ya Allah, laysh? Ya Allah, la la. Oh God, why? No, no! , Kolo minni. It’s all my fault!”

  If I hadn’t sent the money for the smugglers, Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan would still be alive. If I hadn’t become obsessed with Abdullah’s teeth and offered to pay for implants, he would never have asked me for such a large sum of money to take that crossing to Kos instead. If I had been more generous with money when they were living in Istanbul—for food, for rent, for milk, for Ghalib’s eczema medication—maybe they wouldn’t have had to resort to attempting that crossing. Too many what ifs, crashing into each other.

  Rocco picked me up and put his arms around me. But it made me feel like a cornered animal. I squirmed out of his grip and began to shriek “Why?” over and over again. Rocco and Alan sat me down on the living room couch. I wailed even louder. I wanted to scream so loud the world would hear me. When I closed my eyes, all I could see were those boys’ faces. All those calls, all those videos and photographs my brother had so proudly sent me of his boys. At that moment, their voices and their laughter rang in my ears. I could not believe that those voices had suddenly gone silent. I felt as if Abdullah was dead too. His family was his whole life. He had lost everything that mattered. Now, without them, how would he go on? And who would he become?

  I have to think hard to be able to recall what happened after that. It’s like trying to make sense of a nightmare. I collected many pieces of this story after the fact, because I was too consumed by grief to care about details in the moment. I talked at length to Abdullah and my family; I read and re-read news and social media reports; I reviewed my text messages and emails.

  In many ways, I was just like you, an outsider looking in, trying to understand the tragedy and the flood of information. I remember calling my sisters. Most of the time, we didn’t speak. We just cried together. When I called home to talk to Baba, Shireen answered his phone.

  “I’m worried about Baba’s heart,” she whispered. “He can’t even stand; his legs won’t hold him up. He’s been sitting on the floor for hours. Sometimes he’s weeping and sometimes he’s just completely silent. He wants to go to Kobani for the burial. But that’s crazy. We said, ‘Allah yerhamon. God rest them in peace. You can’t get there in time for the funeral. And it’s too dangerous anyway.’ ”

  Shireen handed the phone to Baba. We had no words except for “Allah yerhamon.”

  I was desperate to hear Abdullah’s voice. But we couldn’t call him; his cellphone was in the sea. I knew only that Abdullah arrived at the hospital in Bodrum early that morning and was confronted with the bodies of his wife and children. He knew he had to call his family and deliver the terrible news. He remembered that plastic-wrapped slip of paper containing our phone numbe
rs. When he reached into his pocket and found the Turkish coins that Ghalib had begged him to keep, he started to weep. A stranger saw Abdullah crying over those coins. He handed Abdullah his cellphone to call our relatives. That beautiful man said, “Take the phone. It’s yours to keep.”

  The first person Abdullah reached was Ghouson. He asked her to share the grim news with the rest of the family. By nine a.m., a few close friends had arrived at our home to be by my side. It was already seven p.m. in Turkey. I asked Rocco, “Please go on the Internet and see if anyone is talking about what happened to their boat.”

  When he came back with the iPad, he looked like he had seen a ghost.

  “My sister, Anna, just sent something to me. I don’t know if you should see this.”

  I grabbed the iPad from his hands. That’s when I saw the photograph of Alan for the first time. The shot of that little boy, Abdullah’s son, my nephew, face down on the beach in a red T-shirt and blue jean shorts—the clothes I had bought for him in 2014 during my visit to Istanbul, the clothes I had touched with my own hands.

  “This is Alan,” I cried.

  “Are you sure?” Rocco asked me.

  “I think so.”

  I texted the picture to Ghouson, but she didn’t reply. I phoned her and she was crying.

  “, Had Alan. It’s Alan,” she sobbed. “He was wearing those clothes when they left Istanbul.”

  To this day, it makes me sick to think about that photograph of Alan, even though I carry it with me everywhere I go. It is burned into my mind and tattooed onto my heart. It’s impossible to describe exactly how it struck me in that first moment. Maybe it’s not even necessary to do so. It probably struck you in a similar way. It conveys two things at once. On the one hand, it’s the familiar and tender pose of a toddler sleeping, his body awkwardly contorted, yet he’s sound asleep nonetheless, his fat little cheek pressed against the mattress. But it’s not a mattress. It’s wet, cold sand. And he’s not asleep. He is dead. Everything about the setting is so very wrong. He’s at the edge of the tide line. The water is lapping against his face. You are simultaneously overtaken by panic and urgency—a need to act quickly to remove him from harm’s way before it’s too late. Then you realize, it’s already too late. You cannot save him. I could not save him. All at once, that photograph conveys our greatest joys and our darkest fears. Whether you are a parent or an auntie like me, a teenager or an elder, you feel as though you have stumbled upon a terrible accident. This has happened to someone too young and vulnerable to properly care for himself. A boy who died under your watch.

  Of course, to us, the blood relatives of Alan, that photograph cut so much deeper. Because family is supposed to provide the first line of defense and protection. Family is supposed to keep their young safe. Even though we knew that Alan was dead, that photograph made it an unavoidable fact. We had not been there for him in the most desperate, and certainly the most terrifying, minutes of his life.

  I will never be able to understand what that tragedy did to my brother Abdullah. I will never be able to understand how much that photograph of Alan devastated an already traumatized father. For me, it was proof not just that all my attempts to help safeguard Rehanna, Ghalib, and Alan’s lives had been useless. It was proof that I had provided the wind that drove them into that sea.

  The photograph of Alan went viral on social media soon after the Turkish photographer posted it on Twitter. The news outlets picked up the image and ran with it. Before noon, Vancouver time, the British and European media had already published the image of “the boy on the beach.” The North American media followed suit. Many of them didn’t even know his name. All the media outlets eventually provided a name, but it was the wrong one: Aylan, based on a misspelling by the Turkish authorities. Ghalib’s name was also misspelled, as Galip.

  For my family, that initial media coverage made the wound even deeper. Isn’t it reckless to publish a picture of a dead child before knowing if the boy’s family members have been notified? My sister Shireen’s son Yasser had reached Kos just two days prior to the tragedy. We knew that he had made it out of Greece and was somewhere in Central Europe. But that terrible morning, Shireen didn’t know of his exact whereabouts. Imagine how she felt, waiting for word from her son and hoping that he didn’t see the photograph of his cousin or read any newspapers before she was able to break the news to him.

  “Breaking news” is an apt term for the way that photograph smashed my family into pieces. When I tried to read those initial media reports, anger pierced through my grief. I wanted to set the record straight and give back my nephews’ names and dignity. And I wanted the world to understand how and why they had drowned, washed up on a beach, a thousand kilometres from their homeland. But first, I needed to talk to Abdullah. Finally, at five p.m. my time, I got to speak to him. It was after midnight for him. He had been to the morgue and his mind was haunted by the sight of his wife and sons’ dead bodies, which he had seen at least twice, first to identify them, then later, after they had been autopsied.

  “Their chests are all stitched up. That would hurt so much,” he said, as if they had still been alive during the autopsies and could feel the pain of the scalpel.

  “Ghalib is covered with scratches and bruises.” Perhaps from hitting all those rocks along the shore, where his and Rehanna’s bodies were found.

  “You should see my Rehanna now,” he wailed. “She looks like a balloon. Her body is so bloated, like she drank the sea. Why?”

  “It’s all my fault,” I wailed.

  “No, Fatima, you are the best sister in the world. You always did your best for me, for our family. , Hada qadar min Allah. It’s the fate of God.” Even in his darkest hours, in the dark of night, my brother tried to comfort me.

  For a few minutes, we had no words and communicated with our sobs.

  “Habibi, sho saar? Sweetheart, tell me what happened on the boat.”

  “The waves were so high, the boat capsized. I did everything I could to save them, but I have only two hands. I was trying to hold Rehanna with one hand and the boys with another. Then Rehanna said, ‘Enkez alawlad. Save the kids.’ It’s the last thing she said to me. Allah yerhamha. God rest her in peace. I tried to save them, but the waves were crashing. One by one, they slipped from my hands.”

  We cried again. Then I told Abdullah about the photo of Alan, saying it was all over the news and social media.

  “I can’t look at it, I can’t,” he said, and lapsed back into tears. Eventually he said, “Inshallah, it will be the wake-up call to the world, so it will help others. People have been dying for far too long. People need to see the reality of all the suffering refugees. My boys had such a short life. Why did this happen to them?”

  I could think of no answer that would provide solace. He was still in shock from the trauma of that terrible night at sea and its aftermath.

  “I always came home from work with a banana for the boys,” he sobbed. “, Mozeh wahdeh, just one banana, that I would split in half. I didn’t have enough money to buy two. The boys loved bananas. I should have bought one for each of them. I will put a banana on each of their graves.”

  “, Wallah haram. This has to be a message from God,” he said. “That he wants us to love and have peace and be human beings. , Allah hatt alnoor ’ala Alan, God shone the light on Alan, , Minshan yissahi al-’alam. This picture is a wake-up call to the world. This war needs to stop. We need to stop people from drowning.”

  After another long silence, Abdullah talked some more. “After I left the morgue, I went back to the beach. There was a refugee family with small children, carrying life jackets. Sister, I begged them, ‘Please don’t go. You’re alive. Who cares if you’re hungry? You are alive.’ But they barely noticed me. As the mother passed by, I kept begging her to turn back. She looked at me and said, ‘We’re already dead.’ ”

  He told me that he had to get off the phone because the media wanted to talk to him. When the line went dead, I was once ag
ain struck by the feeling that he was dead too, that I would never see him again. His words rang in my head over and over again: “They had such a short life.” And, “This picture is a wake-up call to the world.”

  That’s when I got off the couch. I needed to add my voice to Alan’s. I needed to share their true names and their true stories with the world to keep their voices alive. I was just a hairdresser living on the opposite side of the world from Syria. I had no connections to powerful people. All my attempts to provide a safe haven for my family had failed. But I had a luxury that my family didn’t: I spoke English. Maybe I could become the translator for my family and for so many millions of suffering Syrians who had no voice. Maybe I could keep the spotlight shining and prevent all these people from falling back to sleep. But I was still in shock. I didn’t know how to make myself heard. I asked Rocco to email the CBC’s Go Public news program and forward the photo of Alan to them, and also to talk to our MP, Fin Donnelly. If I slept at all that first night, I did not know it. In the middle of the night, I put a post on Facebook with a photo of Alan and Ghalib laughing. I wanted the world to see them as living, breathing, laughing young boys.

  The next morning, a dozen reporters and camera operators appeared in my front yard. I must have brushed my hair and washed my face and changed my clothes, but I have no memory of doing such things. I went outside and sat in a chair that Rocco or Alan or one of my friends had placed there. Two framed photographs of Ghalib and Alan were placed beside me, and my family and friends stood behind me as I faced the cameras and microphones.

  I began to talk. I could not even attempt to hold back my tears. I just cried and talked, as if I were confessing my crimes to a jury of my peers. I repeated what Abdullah had told me about what happened at sea. I blamed myself for sending him the money for the smugglers. I said that I had applied for asylum in Canada for Mohammad’s family and that I had begun the process for Abdullah’s family too, but my application for Mohammad had been rejected.