Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  “What happens to the refugees when they arrive?”

  I knew Milly was being my therapist. At least a little. I squeezed her hand to thank her.

  “Well, that’s quite a controversy, as I understand it. I don’t know a lot about it, but I think the Italian government made it a policy to accept all immigrants who arrive here. But then, of course, how do they become part of the society … the social fabric? And some of them refuse to reveal their identities, because once they do, they will be required to show additional papers at the border. Many of them want to get to Germany. But I don’t know, Milly. I am just repeating things I’ve heard. Don’t take it from me. I feel more and more that I don’t know anything.”

  “Have you had any time to catch up a little with your classes?” she asked gently. She knew that I hadn’t. It was her way of nudging me to not abandon everything.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t bring myself to face that failing on top of everything else. I finished my coffee. I knew she was trying to talk me into a calm place, but I couldn’t concentrate.

  “I think I need to sleep for a while, Milly. Would that be okay?”

  “Of course, honey. Are you hungry? I could go down and get us something to eat. Or we could send for Antonio.”

  “I can’t stay awake. Go and explore, Milly. Take some time for yourself. When I wake up, we can make a few visits. Now that I’m here, the idea seems silly. The searching idea. I remember when I was little, someone stole my bike from the back porch. I was certain that I could figure out who it was and track them down. I’m afraid I’m that same naive little girl.”

  “Come on, let me tuck you in.”

  She led me back into the house, then across the central living space to a master bedroom. It was a quiet, peaceful room with a large canopy bed. She opened the window to let in air and then adjusted the curtains so that the sun would not strike me. I slipped out of my shoes and almost fell into bed.

  She came to sit beside me and took my hand.

  “I am so sorry about Ozzie. I know how deeply you loved … at least, I think I understand. And he surely loved you.”

  I sat up and hugged her. We stayed that way a long time.

  “Lord, we’re a pair,” she said finally and pushed up to stand beside the bed. She wiped her tears away with the heel of her hand. “Okay, I’ll be back in a while. You sleep. Rest, sweetie.”

  She tiptoed out of the room and closed the door after her. The noise of the fishing pier still reached me, but it sounded far away and of no concern whatsoever.

  * * *

  I dreamed of the Celtic Sea. I dreamed of being on the Ferriter with Ozzie. He shouted to me to look to starboard to see dolphins. And when I did I spotted Sylvie, Lawrence’s daughter, skating on the ocean. She held a hot chocolate in her hand and sipped from it. She stared at me balefully, and sipped in rhythm to the waves that undulated beneath us. Then I heard voices far away, and I knew I was waking, knew the world had begun to intrude on my sleep, but I wasn’t over my fatigue yet. I heard Mrs. Fox, the innkeeper in Dingle, tell me to make my breakfast, to find the rolls under the napkin, and then I was making love with Ozzie at Skellig Michael. We were married, he whispered. We are married, so I was a widow, I realized. I should never have questioned that. I saw, in my dreams, the shingle on the Great Blasket Island, heard the chickens clucking in the thatched roofs of the village cottages. Then Ozzie appeared again, this time riding a donkey, the donkey smiling at me with his long face and lips.

  Will you come tonight, or will you come tomorrow?

  “What time is it?” I asked, suddenly coming awake. I sat up and looked around. A breeze carried the ocean’s scent in on its back. In two clicks I remembered where I was. I pushed back into the pillows. I had pulled the bedspread over my legs as I slept and now I kicked it off. The dream clung to me. I was still in a half sleep when I heard someone knock softly on my door.

  “Kate, are you awake?” asked Milly, stepping inside the room.

  It was evening, I realized. The sunlight came at an angle and seemed tired of its work.

  “I’m awake.”

  She came in quietly and opened the window wider.

  “You slept straight through the day. I was worried you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight if I didn’t wake you.”

  “I’m glad you did. I was just coming awake anyway.”

  “You must be exhausted. Stress and emotions…”

  “I’m okay, Milly. Honestly.”

  She fluffed the bedspread down by my feet. Her bracelets jingled. Then she smiled at me.

  “You must be starving,” Milly said. “I found a trattoria close by. This place, this town … it’s beyond anything.”

  “Give me a minute. I’ll be right out.”

  Milly left and closed the door gently. I checked my phone. A thousand emails and messages from students. A note from the department chair at Dartmouth. I didn’t open the messages. I put the phone under the pillows and went into the bathroom to wash. For a long time, I stood looking in the mirror. I didn’t primp or do much of anything. I simply stared at myself.

  This is you, I thought, my eyes meeting my eyes.

  This is who you are. This is Kate Moreton, widow, heiress, cottage owner, cabin owner, failed professor, failed wife, daughter, friend to Milly, friend to Gottfried, fatherless, cruel, insensitive, redheaded. I didn’t much care for the eyes staring back at me. I bent my head to the sink and splashed water on my face. I kept splashing long after there was any need for it. Then I dried my hands and face.

  I took a deep breath, straightened my clothes, and stepped back out into the living room to join Milly.

  “There she is!” she said. “Oh, you look rested. I’m so glad you closed your eyes.”

  “I still feel sleepy as a possum.”

  “Are possums known for being sleepy?”

  She sat at a wicker table near the center of the apartment. She had closed the terrace door against the evening chill. She worked to open a bottle of wine. She had a bowl of calamari and a few bread twists in bowls ringed around her.

  A motor scooter revved outside the terrace and someone yelled a greeting in a happy tone. I smelled the gas of the scooter mixing with the fragrance of the sea. That, I realized, was the scent Ozzie had experienced in the instant of his death.

  36

  I knew nothing.

  Worse, I had the mistaken notion that I had known something about the human tragedy taking place on the Mediterranean. I was a professor; I was accustomed to researching. That was my stock in trade, my single gift. I had done what most of us would do: I had Googled a thousand sites, read articles in magazines, watched YouTube broadcasts of Italian Navy vessels pulling refugees from rusted fishing trawlers. Seeing it, I believed I knew something. I was wrong. Deadly wrong. It was far graver than I was prepared for.

  It took three days to confirm that I was in the wrong place. Or rather, that I needed to go to Pozzallo, Sicily, the place where the Italian Navy took refugees it saved from the sea. Our days on the mainland filled with increasing futility: each morning we went to a new office, a new official, and asked—in broken Italian, naturally—if the person could tell us anything about a ship going down. The Ferriter. Ozzie Ferriter. How painfully ignorant I was. Milly knew I was being ignorant, but she accompanied me anyway, nodded her encouragement, told me maybe the next place would provide some information. She knew better. A small seed in the center of my brain knew better, too, but I could not give it any water or light. To do so would be to make it grow and I could not permit that.

  Despite everything, we had good moments: a lunch on a sailboat converted to a tiny restaurant. Fresh squid and handmade pasta and with zucchini and basil, the light from the sea crackling, the waiter charming, the scent of food mixed with the sea smells making it sharply poignant. We acknowledged the absurd incongruity: we had come to find out about a man’s death in the face of vast human tragedy, and yet we sat and enjoyed a sumptuous meal, exquisitely prepared, in th
e luxury of a boat that never left the dockside.

  Then, almost in penance, we plunged again into the Italian bureaucracy, trying to get answers to questions we could scarcely form. Who were we, anyway? By what right did we approach these various functionaries and ask—demand, really—information that they could barely unwind from the spool of human suffering they confronted daily? It was hopeless. It was also ignorantly arrogant.

  “We should go home,” I said when we finished our rounds on the third day. Our search had been ineffective again that day. Pointless. Almost ridiculous. My stomach felt empty and sick. We sat near the pier outside of our apartment and watched the fishermen clean their boats for the next day. I wanted to be a fisherman. For the first time, I understood Ozzie’s desire to be on the sea. It was a simple life, a good life, a demanding one, but it was straightforward. I envied the fishermen, their good-humored shouts, their brightly painted boats. I could not look at them without remembering the Ferriter.

  “Kate, we need to go to Sicily. Everyone tells us that.”

  “It seems like chasing a firefly.”

  “That may be. But we have to turn over all the stones. We need to go.”

  “I’m fumbling around like an idiot.”

  “Not like an idiot. Like a woman who wants to know what happened to the man she loved.”

  “I don’t know why I’m putting us through this. Putting you through it. It’s selfish.”

  “Do you know what pot-invested means in poker?” she asked, squinting against the late sun. Then she smiled. “Of course you don’t. Why am I asking? You don’t know the first thing about poker.”

  “Do you?”

  “I used to play with my uncle Lenny during summers in Maine. He taught me with a penny jar. Pot-invested means you are playing a hand and you have to bet enough that to go forward is economically more prudent than to withdraw. You are pot-invested. You’ve put so much in, you might as well see the outcome.”

  “And I’m pot-invested about Ozzie down here?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “To leave now, well, it would be folding your cards. You might as well see this to the end. Then you’ll know what you know.”

  “Or don’t know.”

  “Or don’t know. Right. That’s possible, too. Likely, even. But you’ve got a lot of pennies in the pot. You might as well call the bettor. See his hand.”

  “Look at you with your poker metaphors.”

  She looked at me, then laughed. We were both tired. There comes a time on any trip that the idea of returning home becomes more inviting than to stay and go forward. Maybe we had both crossed that line. We didn’t talk much as we watched the sun go down. I reached over and held her hand at the end.

  We packed that night and caught an early boat to Sicily. There was nothing else we could do.

  By luck, we became friendly with a young Syrian man named Karam on the crossing to Sicily. He sat down beside us on the starboard side of the Cicogna, a trim vessel that cut through the waves rapidly and with a minimum of side-to-side motion. Karam worked as a translator for an Italian agency, a branch of Save the Children, that helped refugees in myriad ways. He was a young man, affable, with long hair held back in the front by a headband. He wore blousy trousers and dark brown sandals, and his phone never left his hand. His sideburns were thin, but he wore them long, like muttonchops, and they bled into a scraggly beard that covered his chin more than his cheeks. Two teeth had been knocked out or extracted on the right side of his face, and he frequently reached his hand up to cover that loss.

  “Big controversy,” he said in English, when he understood the purpose of our visit to Sicily. “Mare nostrum, right?”

  I knew the phrase. It meant Our Sea. It derived from ancient Rome, when the citizens spoke of their love and dependence on the sea. Now it held a different meaning. It was used in the press to speak about the Italian emphasis on welcoming refugees. The conservative elements in the Italian government pushed back against it.

  “I suppose it is,” I said. “I don’t know much about it.”

  “Oh, yes, big controversy. Arguing back and forth. Tick-tock. The conservatives, the right wing, you say? Yes, the right wing, they say if you let people in it encourages others to make the journey.”

  “And what do you say?” Milly asked.

  “I say humans don’t go on boats, creaky boats, unless they are desperate.”

  His English was excellent; he had been to school in England. He had been moving, he said, since he was eight years old, first with his father, then with a distant uncle. His father had died of pleurisy. His mother had been killed in a motorbike crash in Syria. He was rootless, he said, a citizen of the world, not of one country.

  We bought him coffee and an array of pastries. We asked him to tell us everything he could. And he did. He had a great deal to say. He talked about injustice, about the cruelty of the Syrian government to its own people, about the poverty in Eritrea and Mali, African nations that had become more religiously conservative in the past decade. He talked about the financial cost for each refugee, how many of them had paid a human transporter—he did not call them smugglers—roughly two thousand dollars for passage. He saw no solution nor any feasible end to the migration.

  “People are like plants,” he concluded, drinking his coffee, “they go toward light, not to darkness.”

  “Could you take us to a center?” I asked. “Would you do that for us?”

  He nodded. It was easy, he seemed to imply, but probably useless.

  “I’m sorry about your man, your husband,” he said. “There are some who help. Most, most people, they look away. They worry about their own share of sunlight. They don’t care if others wither as long as they prosper. Your man did not do that.”

  “No, I guess he didn’t.”

  “That means he had a good heart. If you find nothing else here about him, you at least found that.”

  Milly engaged him after that. They talked about art and about music and I felt myself drifting toward sleep. I put my head against the railing and closed my eyes. I concentrated on smelling the sea, hearing the gulls, letting them transport me back to the Ferriter, to the night when Ozzie told me to strip and let the dolphins see me. I thought about our bed, warm and safe on the dock, and the stars everywhere, small white lights, and the north-flowing current that had promised to keep us away from land forever.

  * * *

  CIE in Italian stands for centro di identificazione ed espulsione.

  CDA stands for center for first assistance.

  CARA stands for identification centers for immigrants without documents, asking for political refugee status.

  Like any institution, like an army, like a hospital, like a police force, the refugee crisis created its own vocabulary with a thousand acronyms. Several times as Karam spoke to us after we had landed, I glanced at Milly to see if she understood his explanation. It was clear from her expression that she was as confused as I was. We followed him, trying to piece things together. It felt like something that would take a long time to understand. Despair grew in me with every mile we crossed.

  We stopped at a grocery store and loaded our taxi with water bottles. As many as it could carry, Karam told us. We paid. Afterward, we went to the camp at Pian del Lago, Caltanissetta, a tent city that had been constructed under a motorway. It had been closed and reopened more times than Karam could count. It had no water. Refugees set up tents on wooden pallets, but there were no sanitation facilities and no sense of hope. The odor was horrible. The police, Karam said, chased people off, or offered to relocate them, but there was nowhere to put them. They stayed, sometimes for as long as a year, many of them drifting in and out as their circumstances changed. Many of them waited for papers so that they could continue to Naples or Palermo.

  “The water,” Karam said, climbing out of the taxi into the dense heat, “will help them to trust you.”

  What had we expected? How dar
e we dip our toe into such a pool of human suffering and not be prepared to help to our last breath? I felt pampered and spoiled, a wealthy American dabbling with good works. Ozzie had gotten it right: this was worth dying for.

  Children found us first. They came shyly, then with more confidence once they saw the water. Milly squatted and held out bottles to the smallest of the group. The children came forward, smiling, unsure, and I squatted beside her and did what I could. A few older men appeared behind the children and watched, both to protect and to ensure that children did not receive something that might be squandered in their inexperience. Karam had warned me that the refugees would be careful not to say too much if I asked them directly about Ozzie, or about anything, really. A misspoken word could have devastating effects on their chances of survival. They were cautious and wary, children and men alike, and when Karam called out in as many languages as he knew if anyone had heard or known of a boat called the Ferriter, the men pretended not to hear. They came forward for water instead.

  When we had handed out all the water, we followed Karam into the heart of the camp. The children followed us in a listless, bored way. They were accustomed to European visitors, people who arrived, took photos, made short television videos, then left. From their side of things, that’s all we were.

  Karam spent most of our visit on his phone, only narrating occasionally.

  “The population changes so quickly that it’s hard to keep track of anything,” he said, scarcely looking away from his phone screen. “New waves of people come almost every week. Some go away. Many die. Don’t hope. You should never hope here.”

  “Don’t say that,” Milly said, her eyes taking everything in. “Don’t say there’s no hope.”

  Karam shrugged. It was a worldly shrug, suggesting we would learn.