What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Often, in these hours after the festivities ended, Amir’s mother ventured outside to sit in the garden and listen to the old Walkman she’d owned since childhood and had managed to save as they fled.

  Sometimes Mona came out to join her. For weeks, the two had treated each other with pleasant, mechanical formality, their conversations almost entirely composed of rapid-fire greetings and well-wishes, uttered in accordance with local custom and utterly insincere.

  One night, Amir peered out his bedroom window and heard Mona and his mother talking in the courtyard.

  “It’s a beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Mona said, taking a seat on the chair next to Iman, startling her. She picked a leaf from one of the jasmine flowers nearby. “It’s always beautiful this time of year. It’s a blessing, really, to have weather like this.”

  “Yes, of course,” Iman replied. “A blessing from God.”

  “Obviously, it’s not always this way,” Mona said. “Sometimes we get storms, or a cold night. But, you know, it passes.”

  Iman smiled and nodded. The two women sat in silence, watching the flickering lights of the old city center beyond the gates of the villa. In the garden the housemaid picked up the plates and glasses, remains of the party, and then set to wiping the soot and grease from the grill.

  “Why did you come here, Iman?” Mona asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Iman replied.

  “Why did you leave your home? Our President says people should never turn their back on their home, and he’s absolutely right. It’s a terrible thing, the worst kind of crime.”

  “My home doesn’t exist anymore, Mona,” Iman said. “Our President—” She paused. “It was bombed, it was destroyed. Our whole neighborhood was destroyed.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” Mona replied. “That’s what they want you to do, the terrorists, the foreigners.” She spread her arms wide. “They want you to say it’s this.” Then she closed her arms and held up her thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. “When you and I both know it’s really this.”

  Iman sat up in her chair. “But you must have seen it with your own eyes,” she said. “You must have seen it on television, just the other day—the rubble, the dead. You must have seen what they did to our city.”

  “The things they show on television?” Mona brushed her hand as though shooing away a fly. “They film those things on a soundstage abroad, they build fake sets and hire foreign actors. It’s all made up.”

  Mona patted her houseguest’s hand, a look of deep concern on her face.

  “You know,” she said, “you really can’t let yourself be so easily fooled.”

  * * *

  —

  The following week, at Quiet Uncle’s insistence, the Utus left Syria for good. What remained of their savings they spent buying their way aboard another brigade of buses down the length of Jordan, and then onto a huge white ferry that lumbered across the Gulf of Aqaba to Egypt. He had never spoken of the place before or shown any interest in or attachment to it, but in Egypt, Quiet Uncle said, there was at least the chance at life. He repeated this phrase, time and again: the chance at life.

  In the back cabin of the ferry, Amir’s mother rocked baby Harun through his crying fits while Quiet Uncle slept where he sat, the forged visa peeling off the page of his passport. Amir gazed out the window.

  Loud Uncle once said none of this was real, borders being a European disease. In the flint beyond the windows there were no markers of where one territory ended and the other began—only the sea which was the sky and the sky which was the land and the land which, whomever it belonged to, was not his.

  In the rear of the cabin a man sat cross-legged on the floor, reading the Quran out loud. For hours he did this, page after page, verse after verse, in a trembling, singsong cadence that rendered the whole recitation at once euphoric and funereal. And although almost all the passengers around him were visibly annoyed, none could work up the nerve to interrupt him. Amir, his head aching and the dull nothingness the bombs left in place of sounds receding, covered his ears with his hands. He could hear the world again but accented now with the faintest traces of ringing, the dying pleas of all the frequencies that from here on would be indistinguishable from silence.

  When they reached the shores of Taba, its colored resort lights dancing and the music of its nightclubs faint in the distance, they were ushered off the ferry and made to wait, to be inspected. Slowly, Amir and his family moved along the rickety dockside to the customs station, the remaining wheels on the family’s suitcases dragging against the floor, making a fine whistling sound as they neared the crossing. Amir watched as Quiet Uncle eyed the guards, fidgeting and fingering the page of his passport.

  A young, slim customs officer with a pencil mustache waved them forward, agitated. “Yallah, yallah, let’s go, already,” he said. “We’ll miss the noon prayer at this rate.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Quiet Uncle said.

  He handed four passports to the officer, who flipped to the picture pages and eyed each family member in turn.

  “What kind of a name is Utu?” he said.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Quiet Uncle replied. “I didn’t choose it.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “No, sir. Sorry.”

  “You’re from the war?” the guard asked.

  “We’re not from the…” Quiet Uncle started to reply, then stopped. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We have papers. Everything’s approved, the ministry…” He gestured vaguely behind him, toward the water.

  “You Muslim?” the guard asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But Shia.”

  Quiet Uncle shrugged and looked down.

  The guard flipped through the pages of each passport, unconcerned with the visas, looking for something else, something he didn’t find. He shook his head.

  “You’re lying,” he said. “You’re Jews.”

  Quiet Uncle looked around, hoping for some other senior officer to intervene. None did.

  “How can we be Jews?” Quiet Uncle asked. “Listen, listen—do we sound like Jews?”

  “You’re spies,” the guard said. “They train their spies to sound like your people.”

  “We’re not,” Quiet Uncle pleaded, exasperated. “I swear to God we’re not.”

  “Prove you aren’t,” the guard replied, smirking.

  Amir stepped forward from behind his mother, he pointed up at the guard. “Prove we are!” he shouted.

  Quickly, Quiet Uncle put his hand over Amir’s mouth and shoved him behind his mother. He turned back to the guard with his hands clasped together.

  “He’s just a little boy,” he said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Please, we’ve been traveling for—”

  The guard cut him off. “Shut up,” he said. “Act like a man.”

  As though nothing had happened, the guard stamped the passports and waved the family through.

  “Go, go, you son of a bitch,” he said, chuckling and patting Quiet Uncle on the back. “Hell, you probably are Jews.”

  The Utus hurried past the soldiers and through the checkpoint, under the eye of a massive billboard on which was painted a crude portrait of a different Leader and, below that, words of congratulations on his victory in the upcoming election.

  By the side of the highway they found a small phalanx of taxi and minibus drivers who made most of their money ferrying migrants from the port to the big cities. Soon they were cramped alongside a couple of other families and once again moving, the minibus rumbling down a thin dirt road past endless desert, and as the checkpoint retreated from view, Quiet Uncle ruffled Amir’s hair and handed him his phone to play games on, and for the first time since the bombs fell, Amir saw his mother smile.

  He believed then that it was over, that even if the place they’d crossed to
was entirely unknown to him or, worse yet, entirely familiar, at least they’d survived the crossing.

  Chapter Three

  After

  Vänna Hermes stands in the front yard of her home, raking frost and dreaming of half-eaten birds. Overnight, snow fell—only a light dusting, but still unusual for April. Sometimes the winter runs a month or two longer up in the inland mountains, the monasteries from a distance like little cotton bulbs. But it rarely snows at all anywhere else on the island.

  The sun has already completed her chore. Still, Vänna pushes the rake lazily this way and that. In the early-morning quiet, broken only by the occasional wail of a passing ambulance or police car headed in the direction of the nearby beach, the rhythmic scratch of metal on grass is a soothing sound.

  She sees no point in going back inside. She knows her mother will simply find some other chore to occupy what she calls cheaters’ days—those mornings when overnight storms or road-shuttering accidents or the memorial of the saints and prophets compel the schools to close. It seems to Vänna that, far from serving any practical purpose, or even as tools of punishment, the chores her mother tasks her with are instead designed simply to eat up time. She wonders what her mother secretly believes she will do if not chained to these menial labors, what kind of trouble she can possibly get into. In a way, it shames her to think she can’t dream up any misadventure terrible enough to contend with whatever it is that must swirl in her mother’s imagination. The island reeks of smallness on days like this.

  She is fifteen and fifteen feels empty, an absence of an age. Some part of her is becoming a stranger to the rest. The first time she sensed it was a year earlier, while wandering among the rocks by the sea at the foot of the sleep-gum forest—the first time she’d seen the severed wings. They sat there in the soil, the bones small and L-shaped at the site of the breaking, dollops of blood like rusted coins on the feathers. Seeing them this way, severed of body, she recoiled. But a small part of her responded with something like intrigue, a fascination with the kind of creature that eats the birds but leaves the wings behind.

  She envisions it as something reptilian, barbed with scales and green the color of harborberry groves, glacial until it comes time to pounce. Against the oceanside rocks its claws make a sound like a radio between stations. In the quietest hours it clambers shoreside and waits for the sunhead swifts to swoop down, a blanket of black wings descending. And at the bottomward apex, the lowest the birds will dip, it springs upward, ravenous. It leaves in the wake of its feeding the discarded appendages strewn along the forest floor. No other carrion, no sign of fight, only black-feathered wings.

  It is a nightmare thing but still, in her mind, preferable to any alternative—incurable disease, unbreathable air, a new ordering of the physical world under which the swifts can no longer survive. At least in this imagining, the birds die but some other animal feeds.

  Now it is spring again and near one of the hills that overlook the sea the sunhead swifts are starting to reappear. Up close their telltale feature is a small patch of orange along the neck, but at a distance they are simply a black and partway-shredded mass. In both northward and southward migration they move in waves, and for as long as Vänna can remember, the birds mark their arrival to the island with symmetrical breakings of pattern, making of themselves a shifting Rorschach test against the sky. In perfect time as they come up over the shoreline, half the flock will swing left and up, the other right and down, like a paper torn down the middle. They move this way and, as they do, they sound a cry like the high register of a harmonica, a piercing communal. For as long as Vänna can remember this is how the islanders have known to mark the changing of seasons, another winter ended.

  When she was younger she used to walk out to the beachside cliffs to watch them, to transcribe the secret script of their flight paths. She kept notebooks of these tracings, and made herself believe there was a language there, a meaning to the curls and curves the birds made in the sky. But even if there wasn’t, she enjoyed it, the simple act of watching the sunheads and letting the watching work its way through her hand and onto the page. There was a freedom in it, a temporary dispersal of the mundane.

  But as she watches them flying up over the eastern cliffs this morning, they break into strange new formations, asymmetrical and chaotic. All but a handful turn in one direction, a trickle dissents, and then a fault line runs jagged through the heart of the flock like a landmass coming undone. Something about the island is changing, she thinks, and the birds are first to feel it.

  * * *

  —

  She hears men yelling. The sound comes from across the road, somewhere within the forest of sleep-gum trees. Vänna turns away from the birds overhead; she watches the forest. Out from the mass of bronze-scaled trunks, haggard and panting, a small boy appears.

  He is dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts that might have once been green, but are now almost translucent, the way clothes deteriorate after many washings. He emerges from behind the trees, a thin gold chain hanging around his neck, a smear of sand on his face. Breathing hard, he stands at the edge of the road. The boy and the girl see each other, and for a moment neither one moves.

  The men’s voices grow louder, their source the same thicket from which the boy has just emerged. They are disjointed, irritable, one asking another, “Which way, which way?” Someone curses, and someone else says, “It’s not my problem, it’s your problem.”

  Vänna turns back to the boy, who remains in place, wide-eyed, helpless, and although she can make no sense of him, the way his face contorts in fear as the sound of yelling grows closer suddenly renders it grotesque to simply watch him, to watch whatever comes next, and do nothing.

  She calls for him to come over, but he either can’t understand or is unable to hear. Instead of raising her voice, she beckons him with her hand to approach. He pauses for a moment and then, jolted by the voices pursuing him, runs across the road.

  She meets the boy at the edge of the yard, where she helps him over the remains of a low stone fence that separates the Hermes property from the road. Up close she sees that he is perhaps eight or nine years old. His curly black hair is stiff with saltwater residue on the left side of his head but matted down on the right, half his face dirty with wet, clumped sand. Otherwise he looks like any other student at Vänna’s school.

  “What’s going on?” she asks, but the boy only stares at her, uncomprehending.

  She sees the sleep-gum leaves rustling up the road, the men exiting the forest a little farther north than the place from where the boy has come. She recognizes them instantly by their uniforms, and on the heels of this recognition comes another—the boy is not from the island, cannot be from the island.

  “Go, go inside,” she tells him, taking him by the arm and ushering him into an unused farmhouse that sits at the edge of the Hermes property. Quickly she guides him to the very back, beyond stacks of fertilizer and empty harvest crates and keepsakes from the farmhouse’s once-intended use as a storage shed for her grandparents’ failed bed-and-breakfast.

  “Wait here,” she says. The boy does not reply. Vänna moves both hands downward as though stuffing an invisible suitcase. “Sit, wait.”

  She leaves him there and walks outside. She stands by the old stone wall and watches as four men—two of them rookie coast guard recruits, recently graduated from Vänna’s high school—search the nearby field. They are frantic, still yelling at one another, assigning and deflecting blame.

  One of the men sees her. For a few seconds neither speaks, and then Vänna calmly points northward. The man nods. The search party turns away from the Hermes house and heads north.

  Chapter Four

  Before

  “No problem, no problem. Two for twenty franc. Okay, good price.”

  “Un, un. Seulement.”

  “Oui, oui, no problem. Deux for twenty fr
anc, best price.”

  At the foot of Pompey’s Pillar a boy about Amir’s age hawked T-shirts commemorating the revolution. He kept them piled on three chicken crates, next to garlands of jasmine and little packs of Kleenex and miniature Egyptian flags, a small and mobile storefront. Earlier in the day the police had chased the hawker from the boardwalk and then the road by the Hilton, and now he was here, hustling tourists.

  Amir sat on the concrete blocks that fenced the ruins, watching the boy work. He was a born salesman, charming and fluent in the salutations and small talk of at least a dozen languages. He held up two shirts, letting them unfold to show the English text—january 25—revolution—tahrir circling an Egyptian flag. He thrust one of the shirts at the chest of a large French tourist as though giving it away, goading him to take it. The tourist shoved it back.

  “Un, un,” he wheezed, holding up his index finger as his wife urged him to just take both shirts and be done with it. “One. You understand.”

  The boy adjusted his knock-off Atlanta baseball cap. “Oui, yes. One, two. Two for twenty franc. Best price.”

  “Not two!” the French tourist yelled, reddening. He yanked both shirts from the boy’s hands and threw one of them on the ground. “Only one! Imbécile!”

  The smile never left the boy’s face. “No problem,” he said. “One shirt for twenty franc. Best price.”