by Merle Kröger
As a kid, Olek had played in the catacombs. They had fled, screaming, from the ghost who supposedly roams around down there. A woman, they say, who will show the way out to those who get lost, but they had not wanted to risk it.
He feels his way down the narrow gap between two containers. It’s still there. The first row of cargo won’t be unloaded until Castellón. The bottle is almost empty.
Takes a deep swig.
Holds the envelope up to the light. Official seal.
The mail rarely brings good news.
Another swig.
Olek stares at the container right in front of his nose. CMA CGM. Major global freight transportation company. Bigger and bigger ships, longer and longer, more and more containers. Explorer class, three identical ships with a holding capacity for sixteen thousand containers—the Alexander von Humboldt among them—photographed by Cosmochief during a storm on April 14, 2014, in Barcelona, five stars.
In comparison, the Siobhan is minuscule, steaming around and distributing what the large ones leave behind. The Mediterranean trade is dying. It is no secret that Collins is already accepting offers. Last week, he said that our good Siobhan is going to be sold to a Turkish shipowner and will soon be transporting steel from Ukraine to Istanbul, provided that Ukraine still has a harbor and Turkey is not overrun by one of those lunatics from Syria.
Shipping is a barometer for world politics. Even people like Olek, who are not the least bit interested in politics, hear about everything. Wars. Banking crises. Ebola. Fukushima. There’s always a ship they know wherever anything is happening in the world.
Another swig.
Do it, don’t be a coward. He studies the letter one more time from both sides. Neutral white envelope. A registered letter that Dmitri had to sign for with the harbormaster.
She wants a divorce.
Or his contract is not being extended.
But it doesn’t matter; he can find a new wife or a new ship. Engineers are always in demand.
He tears open the letter resolutely.
Reads.
Drinks.
Reads again.
Turns the letter over, as if to check that it’s real. It can’t be true.
Olek starts to laugh. He sets the vodka bottle down, swallows the wrong way, has to cough.
Damned shitheads, what are they thinking?
He stops laughing and folds the letter up, carefully tucking it back into the envelope.
Oleksij Lewtschenko is being called up as a reservist in the Ukrainian army, effective immediately.
RAFT (NO NAME)
Karim Yacine
In order to not think about Zohra, he has to keep his thoughts here, in this boat, with these men who are about to die of heatstroke. They ran out of water a good while ago. Abdelmjid has stopped waving and is leaning back apathetically against the bulging rubber. He dipped his red cloth in the sea and has spread it over his face. Karim can’t see his eyes.
Not good.
The five from the village have moved up to the front of the boat. The forced solidarity functions for a crossing, but not anymore. Nobody is looking over at the ship. Their gazes are turned toward the open water. One of them is mumbling something. Perhaps a prayer.
The teacher from Algiers has given the remaining cousin a pill. He is asleep now, his head on the older man’s shoulder. The two boys from Karim’s neighborhood are sitting in the middle, bent over the younger one’s phone. The other one’s battery is already shot.
The teacher is reading a book. A real book! As if he were sitting in a street café and not in a raft with no gas. Time and again, he readjusts his glasses, which keep slipping down because he is sweating so much. Karim tries to decipher the title. Memoires d’Algérie. The teacher glances up and hands him the book.
Karim studies it, turns it over. He has never really been a book person. College, his parents’ dream for their children, shriveled up during the Black Decade. He searches for the name of the author. “A Jew wrote this book?” His voice sounds as mistrustful as he meant it to sound. Karim hands the book back.
The teacher removes his glasses and rubs them with the hem of his shirt. He speaks in a quiet voice. “A Jew who was born in Algeria and now teaches Algerian history in France. He collects letters and documents from the time of the war for independence and publishes them. Uncomfortable documents.” He opens the book and extends it back toward Karim, who waves it away, pointing at the sun in the sky. Too hot. In reality, his French is no good. It is an uncomfortable reality for him. He should have learned more.
All these years in a holding pattern. The Black Decade. Darkness. Night. The Algerians have spread a blanket over this decade and all the subsequent ones. Spring does not come to Algeria. Not the Arab Spring or otherwise. Even when the government builds houses and awards microcredit. In Algeria, the generals reign supreme. The president is a sick, old man. Hardly anyone knows who is standing behind him: Is it the same men who prevented the Islamic Salvation Front from winning the elections in 1992? Their sons? Their grandsons? Do they now suddenly want to give up some of the wealth they extorted from the Algerian people? Nobody believes that.
In any case, Karim never received any credit, although he served his country.
He was fourteen years old in 1992, and early on, he sympathized with the Islamists. Why not?
Then his favorite singer was murdered on the street in broad daylight.
Then he was called up, at the age of nineteen.
“Better go.” His parents were afraid for him, had been ever since one of his cousins disappeared into the torture prisons of the military police. Then a neighbor, a few weeks later, followed by the son of one of his father’s customers. His parents shipped him off to the military because they were afraid for him.
Once there, he was told: “The Islamists will kill your families when they learn you’re in the military.” He was trapped.
He wore the black face mask of the Algerian Ninjas, so that nobody could recognize him.
He stayed, even after his military service ended.
It was 1997, and he didn’t dare return home.
No one wanted the killing to stop. In the barracks, Karim lost the last of his illusions. Sometimes even they had no clue who committed the massacre last weekend. Fifty, ninety, two hundred dead. Clean up. Clear away. Cover.
Karim shot at least two men, perhaps more. He doesn’t know.
Others, he has handed over. Were they all Islamicists? He doesn’t know.
He no longer knows anything, not even if he had merely imagined hearing the voice of his school friend in the military prison, the one who had been a photographer.
No. Is a photographer, who lives in France. That is how Karim has pictured it. He has a wife and three children, and on the weekends, they go to the coast. He is doing well, his old friend.
He came down with shingles shortly after that, his entire torso full of it. The pain was unbearable, and they sent him back home. No sniper was waiting for him. Either they were all dead, or they had other things to do. Even today, he carries around a fear of that shot, just like the itch below his left shoulder.
The years following the war were restless ones. Karim hung around his neighborhood, always on the lookout for a good business proposition. He tried his hand as a taxi driver, then a mountain guide, but very few tourists came to Algeria. After 9/11, even that had dried up.
The time of the Harraga began a little after that. The Algerian teenagers take off in rafts, and Karim was one of them. It was like an addiction. He tried it again. And again. Getting better and better, wanting to outsmart the Spanish coast guard at all costs. And made it through.
He made it for six months last time. Then they caught him on the TGV, on his way from Paris to Zohra in Marseille.
Zohra.
Merde.
After his deportation, he had applied for the microcredit to start a small transport company that would run from Oran through the Sahara. If he wants Zohra to retur
n, he has to offer her something. She needs good doctors, a car. Karim’s brother was approved for the credit, but his application was rejected. He made a down payment on a property up in the mountains, with a view across the plateau to the sea. He drove up there every day, afraid that the owner would find another buyer who could shell out the whole sum. In his imagination, he built a house in which he would live with Zohra. At some point, it was finished, and he could describe it in great detail, as if it really existed. Come in, may I introduce you to my wife? Here is the living room. And over there, the kitchen. A conservatory here, because sometimes it gets really cold up here and Zohra can’t stand the cold.
Zohra.
Stop it, Karim.
He would like to ask the teacher what he is searching for in Europe, if he has a family. It would force him to stop thinking about Zohra, but before he gets around to that, the teacher suddenly jumps up and points over at the ship. The rubber raft lurches, and Karim throws himself against the edge, equalizing the boat at the last minute with his weight. Abdelmjid grabs the handkerchief from his face.
“Man, they’re lowering a boat down!”
“Finally!”
“I told you they would!”
All of a sudden, all of them are wide-awake.
Karim doesn’t say a word.
He watches the boat slowly glide down the side of the ship. There are people in it, though he cannot tell how many. But he sees how the tourists are all bunching back together again. He notices the flash of their camera lenses in the sun. As the rescue craft touches the surface of the water, he hears a noise. It sounds like the flapping of a sail. He squints to see better, and then he realizes what they are doing.
The people are clapping.
They are huddled together up there on the decks, clapping.
As if this here were Alhan Wa Chabab, Algeria’s American Idol.
CARTAGENA | SPAIN
Zohra Hamadi
These figures on the wall make her dizzy. Slapped on with simple black strokes, the mute silhouettes stare out to sea, just like she is. And yet they each seem to be moving, rising up like a vortex from the shadow of the harbor jetty, at the end of which a red lighthouse rises.
Zohra looks away, at the water, then back again, at the graffiti. There is something comforting about the vortex people. She cannot explain it, but they are also waiting, and she feels less alone. She leans against the warm wall and closes her eyes for a moment, becoming one of them.
The call was short, much too short for his words.
“We are stuck here without fuel, somewhere off of Cartagena. I set you free.”
I set you free, as if one could simply return a heart that was given as a gift. Karim will go to prison, possibly for many years, but damn him, he should have asked her at least. He should have asked her and looked into her eyes while doing so. Anger rises from her stomach and claws up her spine. The pain follows like an echo shortly afterward, filling her entire body.
Breathe, Zohra.
She breathes.
In the first moment, down there on the beach, she thought it would kill her. The anger, the pain, the loneliness. Her expression must have frightened the blond child, since it ran back to its parents. Zohra could feel their gaze from under the parasol.
A woman, alone.
A woman with a headscarf, alone.
A woman with a headscarf, alone, and a child who runs away.
The collective shock pierced her like a sound wave. She turned and began the long walk back to the car. She drove on, as if in trance, until the tears and back pain made her stop. She had reached a town.
Cartagena. So close to Karim, and yet beyond reach. She walked as close as she could toward the sea and ended up here, at the wall, with the mute shadows. The waiting ones.
At home, in Marseille, Zohra rarely wears the hijab, only when she feels insecure, exposed to strangers’ glances, like now. It is a deeply rooted tradition, inherited from her maman and she from hers. Nobody forced her. Zohra’s father is the director of an elementary school near Sidi Bel Abbés. He cannot stand the bearded ones. “They destroyed the Algeria your grandfathers fought for,” he always says. An independent, secular Algeria.
Zohra’s mother urges him to speak more quietly. “It is dangerous, Djamel, what if someone hears you? You know.” She bites her lip. Father breaks off. Everyone is quiet; the only sound is the scraping of their knives and forks on the plates. Everyone knows. Everyone knows what can happen if someone hears or sees.
On a Saturday in September 1997, Zohra was fourteen; the sky darkened shortly after three. Rain in September was almost unheard of, and yet it was raining when the minibus, with eleven of her father’s colleagues in it, encountered a roadblock. Eleven female teachers, who had been warned anonymously that:
Western education is haram.
Women who work are haram.
Students who do not wear the veil are haram.
They had refused to stay at home, and Zohra’s father had supported them in this. He thought it was right for them to resist intimidation. The Islamists pulled the eleven teachers out of the bus and slit their throats, one after the other.
“Even the sky cried,” the people say.
Year after year, along with the teachers’ relatives, Zohra’s family attends the memorial service held on the twenty-seventh of September. Year after year, her father’s hair grows whiter, his gait more stooped. It never leaves him, the monstrosity of these murders, which lost significance in the midst of the horror that never seems to end in these days. Not a day goes by when there is no murder, when one does not hear of someone going missing, being tortured or kidnapped.
Years later, the man who gave the order for the teachers to be murdered was arrested. He came from the same village in which the school is located. He is the father of three daughters. He is a shepherd.
Years later, her father still writes a memorial obituary for the local paper every autumn.
Years later, Maman whispers: “Go to France, my butterfly, go to your brother.”
Before it starts again. No one says it, but many think it as they watch the evening news. The Islamists have a strong following, in Iraq, in Syria. And behind closed doors, some do not think it is such a bad thing. We should not put up with all this.
Zohra opens her eyes and is back at the harbor wall, the lighthouse in front of her. At the pier across from the entrance lie two large gray warships. Even in the sunshine they look threatening. She shivers and shifts her gaze farther to the right.
Come.
Here.
Karim.
No sense waiting. No sense driving on. He didn’t even give her enough time to tell him where she is.
Zohra is angry. Her back aches, and her future is crumbling. The sea and the sky meet in a sharp line of blue. There is a fortress on the other side of the bay, built into the mountain. An old fortress, and above it, radio masts and satellite dishes stretch upward. The whole city is like this, an old city, Cartagena. She recalls that her parents most likely had been here once, maybe even right here: a pleasant thought that comforts her.
Before Zohra was born, Algerians were permitted to vacation in Europe, just like everyone else. After their wedding, her parents got on an airplane and flew half an hour from Oran to Alicante, just like that. They lay on the beach in Benidorm for a week, at her mother’s request. And then a week-long tour, to please the husband, who cannot get enough of all things old. The slides are brought out time and again, whenever someone in the family has a birthday or when the fast is broken.
A radiantly orange ship approaches the harbor exit. Zohra has déjà vu. I have seen it all before, this ship, this orange, this blue sea. In a moment, it will be parallel to her, just one of the many silhouettes against the harbor wall. It has to pass quite closely. Zohra watches a plump figure on the prow of the ship in orange-colored overalls, head under a white helmet, like an astronaut in a film.
Film.
Video.
&nbs
p; Karim’s video. The Harraga on the lifeboat, laughing, high-fiving. Rescued. The boat, the bright color.
Focus, Zohra, what did Karim say on the phone? Their fuel had run out. They were waiting for the Spaniards to come and save them.
The Spaniards. He explained it all to you, back then, when he proudly showed you the video. The blue circle with the yellow anchor is the symbol of the sea rescue service. It is always better when they come and not the Guardia Civil, although it doesn’t make a big difference. You are treated better, but you still end up in the deportation prison.
Before she can second-guess herself, she has raised her arms and waves. “Stop!” She plunges forward, out from the shadow of the wall. A strong gust of wind hits her back and pushes her over the sloping edge toward the water, as the pain returns. She flails helplessly with her arms in the air. The man with the helmet looks over to her at the exact moment she loses her balance.
Fate.
Ten minutes later, she is sitting in the back of the boat with a blanket around her shoulders. He crouches before her, tidily winding up the cord of the life belt. He has taken off his helmet.
They are speaking English, although neither of them really can. He always looks over that way, he says, because his grandfather was thrown into the sea there.
He fell into the sea?
“No,” he says, “my grandfather’s ashes.”
Zohra sees the pain in his eyes and nods. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “My abuelo was very old.”
Abuelo?
Another man in uniform joins them. Zohra pulls the blanket around her body more tightly, wishing she could hide in it. They speak Spanish, quickly and harshly. The boat moves away from the harbor jetty.
“I’m sorry,” says the one who saved her. “We can’t bring you ashore now. We have to head out. Emergency.” He points out. “Patera!”
Zohra does not immediately understand. “Zodiac?”
“Yes, yes!” He nods. “Zodiac.”
She smiles. “All right. No problem.”