No Safe Place

by Deborah Ellis

  “I can play. I will show you.” He got to his feet, lifted the trumpet and began.

  He played “Flight of the Bumblebees.” The notes came out strong and clear and filled with such joy that the flight of the bees became a dance, and the little room filled with the sound of a million happy bees buzzing around.

  Abdul had never heard anything like it. He couldn’t believe that someone so difficult as the Russian could create sounds so wondrous.

  After he was done, it took awhile for the echo to clear from the room and out of everyone’s head.

  “Extraordinary,” said Gemma’s mother. “Who taught you to play like that?”

  A look of pain came over Cheslav’s face.

  “I ran away from the Russian army,” he said. “That’s where I learned to play. But I will not go back! I will go to America, to New Orleans, where they have good jobs for trumpet players. If you try to send me back to the army I will throw myself off a cliff!”

  “Sit down, son,” said Beth. “Start at the beginning. You are what? Fifteen? How can you run away from the army at fifteen?”

  Cheslav told his story. He told it standing up, as if he was ready to bolt at the first sign of someone trying to send him back to the army.

  When he was finished he said, “Now I have a trumpet again. It is not as good as my trumpet from Russia, but it will do for now.”

  “It will do very well,” said Beth. “Who’s next? Rosalia? What country are you from?”

  “I don’t have a country,” Rosalia answered. She had taken out Gemma’s braids and was trying a new way to arrange the girl’s hair. “Some say we came first from India. Some say we came from the devil and should go back to him.”

  And then she told her story. No one remembered to drink their tea. No one even moved.

  She came to the end. Abdul couldn’t speak.

  “Why did you come to England?” Beth asked. “Why do you want to be here?”

  Rosalia shrugged. “It’s a place. It’s a place that’s not where I was. There, it was bad. Here — maybe better?”

  “And what do you want?”

  Rosalia looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, do you want to go to school? What do you want?”

  “What do I want?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “No one ever asked me that before.”

  “I need a stretch and a fresh cup of tea,” said Beth. “Gemma, let’s get a start on the dishes while the kettle heats up.” She picked up the now cold tea pots and headed for the kitchen, stopping briefly in front of Abdul. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, young man.”

  Cheslav and Rosalia looked lighter, like they’d each put down a heavy burden. Abdul crossed the room, drawn to the guitar. He touched the top. His finger stroked one of the tuning pegs.

  “Do you play?” Cheslav came up beside him.

  “No.”

  “I think you do.”

  “I don’t.” Abdul turned away from the guitar and went over to Jonah. “I’ll take the medallion back now.”

  “Can’t I keep it?”

  “No.” He wanted to hit the kid. “It’s mine.”

  “I’ll give it back. Before I go to bed.”

  “I want it now.”

  “I’m not hurting it.”

  “What’s wrong?” Rosalia said.

  “Nothing,” said Abdul.

  “It has writing on the back, but I can’t read it.” Jonah showed it to Cheslav and Rosalia.

  “It’s Arabic,” said Cheslav. “What does it say?”

  “It says mind your own business!” Abdul wanted to leave, shutting the door behind him, shutting away all these people who were trying to pry into his life where they didn’t belong. He wanted to walk away and never think about any of them again.

  But he couldn’t go without the medallion.

  When Gemma and her mother returned with fresh tea, everyone looked at Abdul.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “I am from Iraq. My father and brothers were killed by an American bomb. My mother was shot later by the religious militia. I came here.” He raised his cup with shaking hands and took a big swallow, even though the tea burned his mouth and throat.

  “And how old are you?” Beth asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Your father and brothers died in the initial bombing, in 2003?”

  “Soon after.”

  “And when did your mother die?”

  “Two years later. A bit more. She was driving a car and they shot her. I stayed with my uncle but it didn’t work out, so I left.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I stabbed a policeman in Calais, but it was an accident. There was a riot. Over food.”

  “And you don’t play guitar,” said Cheslav.

  “No.”

  It was Rosalia who took the thin chain and medallion from Jonah and held it out to Abdul. He clasped it but she would not let it go.

  “What does the writing say?” she asked.

  Abdul hung his head.

  “It’s a name,” he said quietly. “It’s Kalil.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The American helicopters were on another patrol the first day Abdul started in at the new school.

  It was two weeks after his mother’s death. His Uncle Faruk agreed to shell out for school fees so Abdul could enroll, even though it was the middle of term.

  Abdul was sitting in algebra class, trying to coax his brain into working the way it used to, when the thump-thump of the helicopter came closer and closer until it was right over the school.

  The Iraqis were used to it by now, but that didn’t mean they liked it. The young men in Abdul’s school jumped up out of their seats and ran outside, Abdul joining them. He certainly wasn’t going to be the only one sitting there, looking at the teacher.

  Outside in the school yard it was a rock fest — rocks and bricks and pieces of wood — anything the boys could find to throw, they threw. Some of the stones glanced off the chopper but none did any real damage.

  The soldiers in the helicopter yelled at the boys to stop, and their teachers tried to corral them back into school, but it wasn’t until the machine guns started going off that the students paid any attention. Those not close enough to jump back into the school took shelter wherever they could as the soldiers shot at empty places in the yard.

  Abdul jumped behind a slab of concrete left in the schoolyard by the earlier bombing of the neighborhood.

  “Not exactly ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’” said the boy crouching next to him.

  Abdul looked at him. “I know you.”

  “It was not a good day,” the boy said. “You had just lost your mother. I’m Kalil.”

  “They say it gets easier.”

  “They’re lying. It doesn’t.”

  Kalil, fourteen, was a year older than Abdul, but they were both in the same grade. So much of their schooling had been disrupted that very few of the students were in the class they would have been without the war. They discovered they lived just two streets away from each other. Then they discovered that they both wrote songs and played the guitar, and Abdul again had a reason to keep living.

  Abdul had taken more formal guitar lessons than Kalil, but Kalil had also studied piano, which made him better able to write down the music they wrote. They learned each other’s songs. Abdul’s were about the real things he saw around him, about the war and hardships. Kalil wrote about the world he wanted to live in instead of the world that was.

  “We should write something funny,” Kalil suggested, so they wrote “The Bomb That Lost Its Way,” a bouncy little tune about a cruise missile with no sense of direction that ended up taking a nice beach vacation on a deserted island.

  They wr
ote about the people in their neighborhood, like the art teacher who began making false passports when the art school was bombed, and families who tried to make the journey to safety along the dangerous roads out of Iraq. They tried to make things work out better in their songs than they did in real life.

  “I wrote this last night,” Abdul said before class one morning. They’d taken to bringing their guitars to school so they could play every chance they could get. “It’s called ‘The Car.’” It was about a magical car that only women could drive. It mowed down anyone who tried to stop them.

  “You could get into trouble singing songs like that,” said a boy from a more senior class who had joined the group listening to them.

  “Don’t you like his voice?” Kalil joked.

  “Women should not be driving.”

  “Women should not be doing many things, including marrying jerks like you, but I suppose one of them will be forced to.”

  The older boy took a step toward them, but Kalil was already on his feet. Abdul still looked like a boy, but Kalil was tall and wiry, already developing the shoulders of a man. Besides that, he was fearless and unpredictable.

  “You have been warned,” the older boy said as he backed away.

  Kalil just laughed and launched into a rousing tune called “Fifty Ways to Fix a Bully.”

  Sometimes Abdul would come up with a bit of a tune, then Kalil would finish it and they would both write the lyrics. Sometimes the lyrics would come first. Sometimes one of them would write the whole song, and when he played it, the other would say, “Why did you put the chorus there? Stick another verse in first.” They listened to lots of music when the electricity came on and scrounged for batteries during the long periods when there was no power.

  The closer Abdul got to Kalil, the tenser things got with Uncle Faruk.

  “You spend too much time with that boy,” Uncle Faruk started saying. “You are too much like your father, all the time with the music and the poetry. Quit dreaming and get to work.”

  His uncle owned several small shops that sold whatever goods he was able to import. Abdul worked hard for him, to keep the peace and pay for his keep, and it made him feel closer to his father that Uncle Faruk hadn’t liked him, either.

  Abdul spent as much time as possible at Kalil’s house. He and his family were Mandaean Sabian, not Muslim, which was another reason why Faruk didn’t like Kalil. His father was a goldsmith. Kalil had two sisters, both younger, and they would giggle and whisper whenever Abdul came over.

  “We’ll be like Lennon and McCartney,” Abdul said. Kalil was already growing his hair long, and Abdul was trying to do the same.

  “We’ll be even better,” said Kalil. “Our songs will be better because they are about real people and real stories.” He got very excited and started to bounce on his toes, which was what he did when an idea was too great to sit still with. “Here’s what we’ll do. We will first collect all the stories here in Iraq – all the stories! And we’ll turn them into songs. Then we’ll go to another country and do the same thing there. We will keep traveling and collecting stories and at the end of our very long lives we will have the whole world, in music!”

  “Is that possible?” Abdul asked. “Can we do such a thing? We would need money, passports, visas.”

  Kalil shrugged.

  “We will figure out how to do things when the time comes. Shall we do it? Are you with me?”

  “We’ll see everything!” Abdul said, bouncing now, too, because it was impossible not to. “We’ll see the rainforests of Brazil, the Sahara Desert, the top of Mount Fuji, the bottom of the sea!”

  “We will become the greatest songwriters to ever live!”

  Abdul stopped bouncing.

  “Lennon and McCartney broke up,” he said. “They stopped writing together.”

  “It was the money,” Kalil said. “There was too much of it. They got richer and richer and it rotted their brains. That won’t happen to us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because whenever we get more money than we need to get by, we’ll give it away. No accountants, no lawyers. Our brains will not rot. We’ll never forget that it’s the stories that matter, the stories and the music. Let’s seal the deal.”

  Abdul wore a ring that had belonged to his father, a simple silver band. He took it off and gave it to Kalil. Kalil reached up and slipped a thin gold chain from around his neck. From it dangled a small medallion.

  “My father made this for me when he realized how much I like the Beatles,” he said. On one side of the medallion was an etching of the Yellow Submarine. On the other side was Kalil’s name in classical Arabic calligraphy.

  Nothing else mattered after that, only the dream. For the dream, Abdul worked long hours in his uncle’s store, so long and so hard that his uncle even started to pay him a wage, which he squirreled away for the future. He borrowed books on music theory and studied them far into the night, hunching over a candle flame so he wouldn’t disturb the cousins he shared a room with. He and Kalil talked with everyone they met, looking for stories, writing and discarding bad songs, refining and improving the ones that had promise.

  Abdul didn’t care that Faruk was getting more and more grouchy, even getting his sons to hold Abdul down one night so he could forcibly cut his nephew’s hair.

  “You want to look like a girl?” Faruk shouted. “Are you my niece or my nephew?”

  Abdul just looked at his uncle and smiled, even while he was being slapped. He didn’t care. Hair would grow back. And he would soon be gone.

  When Abdul was with Kalil, he could forget about everything else — the car bombs, the army raids, the headless bodies that would turn up behind his uncle’s shop. The war had taken from him nearly everything that he loved, but the war couldn’t touch him when he was thinking about music.

  And then Kalil’s father was killed.

  Maybe it was a political assassination — many Mandaean Sabia were being targeted. Maybe it was a robbery committed by ordinary criminals. By that point in the war there was not much to distinguish the two, and there wasn’t much of an investigation. Kalil’s father became just one more dead Iraqi.

  “My aunt is taking my sisters to the south,” Kalil said after the funeral. “It’s too dangerous for them here, and there is family in the south — well, distant relatives.”

  “Are you going with them?” Abdul brushed some of the hair out of Kalil’s eyes so he could see his friend’s face.

  “I was thinking,” started Kalil. “Why don’t we just leave? I don’t want to stay in Iraq. Let’s just go. Begin our adventure now instead of waiting until we finish school and are old men of eighteen or twenty.”

  “Could we?”

  “I have some money saved, a little, and I can sell some things to get more money. All we need are our guitars and a satchel to keep our songs in. What do you say?”

  Abdul was ready. “Where will we go?”

  “We’re going to pick up where Lennon and McCartney left off, right? So let’s go to where they started. Let’s go to Liverpool. To Penny Lane. We’ll start our new lives there.”

  It was decided. They would leave in a few days. Kalil wanted to be sure his sisters got away safely, and they both needed to sell what they could. Abdul had some jewelry that had been his mother’s. He sold it for much less than it was worth, but it was money he needed. He added that to the money he’d earned at his uncle’s shop.

  On the day before they were to leave, they arranged to meet in the vacant lot between their two streets. It had held a house before the bombing, and it was a place where they often met to work on their music.

  Abdul got there first. His head was full of England. Soon they’d walk the same streets the Beatles had walked, breathe the same air they had breathed.

  He saw Kalil heading toward him, his long hair bouncing with every bounce of
Kalil’s body. His friend looked strong, excited and very happy. Kalil waved at him, a big smile on his face.

  Then came the shouting.

  “Fag! Homosexual! Disgrace!” Men with sticks came out of nowhere and swarmed over Kalil, swinging and kicking, hitting and cursing.

  Abdul couldn’t move. He saw his friend fall to the ground but he couldn’t seem to move to rescue him.

  Finally, he got his legs going.

  “Are you with him? Are you with this fag?” A man wielding a metal bar came at Abdul. Abdul shook his head and backed away.

  The men kept swinging — and laughing! — until there was nothing left to swing at. They tossed their weapons into the dirt and spat on Kalil’s body.

  “Death to homosexuals!” they yelled. “We’ll kill them all, and all who help them!” Then they walked away.

  A small crowd had gathered. Abdul ran forward. He cradled Kalil’s bloodied body in his arms, stroking his long, lovely hair that was now sticky with blood. He cried to Kalil to forgive him.

  After awhile, someone took Kalil away. Abdul stayed on the ground. When he finally raised his eyes, he saw Uncle Faruk looking down at him with hatred and disgust. And Abdul knew that, even if he wanted to remain, he no longer had a home in the nation of his birth.

  The next morning Abdul sold his guitar to a student at his school. He left Baghdad that same day. He knew he would never return.

  / / / / / / / /

  “I came to England to leave this little bit of Kalil in Penny Lane,” Abdul said.

  “And after that?”

  Abdul didn’t answer.

  “There’s a National Express coach station in the town just north of us,” Beth said. “You can get a bus there for Liverpool.” She looked around from face to face, then shook her head. “My daughter comes first. You all seem like good kids, but I could be breaking the law by helping you out. You stole a boat. You snuck into the country illegally. Jonah is different. He’s a British citizen, but I still have to report him to Children’s Services. I don’t know how much I can help the rest of you. I’m a single mother. I have to be careful.”