What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Amir watched the boy with admiration. He imagined him as a new friend; he imagined helping, in some way—carrying the chicken crates, counting the take at the end of the day. In this new country he felt a great distance from almost all the children he’d met, such that he could think of friendship only as a thing that depended on him being useful. But he couldn’t bring himself to approach the boy.

  At the other end of the street, not far from the gates to the ancient ruins, a couple of food trucks catered to a long lineup of tourists and locals. The tourists were mainly European, the locals upper-class, their Mercedes sedans parked haphazardly on the road and up on the sidewalks. Near one of the trucks a cook charred lamb over an open flame and in the other truck, with assembly-line efficiency, three men moved meat and cheese pies out of the oven and onto the rack, then off the rack and onto the plates. The smell of fresh-baked bread and grilled meat and za’atar rose, momentarily, over the smell of exhaust.

  Amir marveled at the movement of the cooks and the movement of their customers—the simultaneous ease and frenzy with which men and women shouted orders at the truck, the way the cooks silently absorbed these orders. It amazed him, how much chaos people can put up with, so long as what needs doing gets done.

  About thirty feet from the food truck, beneath the shadow of the concrete blocks, a fully veiled woman and her daughter sat on the ground, begging for change. Like the boy at the other end of the street, the woman spoke a smattering of many different languages. She gauged, quickly, the nationalities of the tourists as they walked past, and at each she hurled a plea for help. Taking their cue from the locals, the tourists ignored her.

  Amir turned to look at the woman and her daughter. The girl was about five or six, barefoot and dressed in pajamas. She sat cross-legged, counting her fingers, singing a song.

  Cautiously Amir hopped off the concrete barrier and walked toward the food truck. In the bustling crowd he became for a moment invisible, and none of the men inside the truck gave much notice to him as he walked around the back. Peering over the generator, he saw the counter on which the thin, freshly made pies lay, stacked in little towers. One man slid pies on, another took them off, each working in such serene, repetitive motion they became hypnotic.

  For a few seconds, both cooks turned away, and before they turned back, both Amir and a pie were gone, invisible once more in the crowd. High on adrenaline and the thrill of having gotten away with it, the prize warm in his hand, Amir ran to the place where the woman and her daughter sat.

  “Here,” he said, handing the pie to the woman. She refused to take it.

  “Did you pay for this?” she asked. Her daughter looked up, eyeing Amir.

  “Just take it,” Amir said, looking back over his shoulder at the truck. One of the men was re-counting a stack of pies.

  “Why would you do that?” the woman said. “Don’t you understand? You’ve given them an excuse.”

  One of the cooks had eyes on them now. He opened the truck door and stepped outside.

  Suddenly aware of what was about to happen, Amir flung the pie in the woman’s lap and clambered over the concrete partition. Without looking back, he ran for home.

  * * *

  —

  He returned to find Quiet Uncle back early from the public library, where he’d recently found work as a janitor. He sat by the window, watching the city and checking his phone every few minutes. Outside, Alexandria buzzed, preparing to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday. Inside, Fairuz’s voice flooded from the tape-deck speakers, which rendered the songs crackled and distorted, but still could not take away from the voice itself, its plain magic, its dueling lightness and weight. So often had Amir’s mother, father and uncles played the same tape that for the first few years after Amir became cognizant of music, he believed this woman to be the only person in the world capable of making such sound, and as a result was never nearly as astounded by the beauty of music as the fact that only one person possessed the singing.

  Someone in the apartment above them stomped against the thin floorboards. Quiet Uncle cursed and turned the cassette player down.

  “I swear to God, that dinosaur spends the whole day with her head against the floor,” he said.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” Iman replied. Amir smelled the char of old crumbs as the kitchen element heated; soon his mother came back from the kitchen with a small cup of coffee. She set it on the table by Quiet Uncle, the liquid in the cup barely moving, thick as tar, then she returned to the kitchen to make dinner.

  “They think there’s only so much living to go around,” Quiet Uncle said to no one, his eye on the city and through the city, through a tiny sliver of sight between the buildings, the sea.

  “Sorry, what was that?” Amir’s mother asked.

  “Nothing,” Quiet Uncle replied. “What did you buy?”

  “Just a few things,” Iman said. “Tomatoes, fava beans, bread. Come, sit on the couch, take your shoes off. I’ll make you something to eat.”

  Quiet Uncle waved her away. “I’m fine. Go feed Harun.”

  Amir turned on the television and sat on the couch in the living room. It was a small apartment furnished with ancient chairs and couches and beds that all bore the same gaudy, faux-gold overlay. A Turkish rug, its geometric patterns long ago faded into a uniform and clayish red, lined the entryway. A cheap thrift-store painting of a tropical beach hung on the wall.

  Reception depended on the clouds, and whatever the soot-lacquered pigeons on the rooftop were doing to the antennae. Sometimes a fuzzy BBC or CNN signal survived, but tonight the sole channel that came through on the sputtering cathode-ray television was local and government-run. It carried footage of a press conference.

  An old man in an ill-fitting military uniform stood at a podium, talking about a cure for all diseases. He praised the ingenuity of the Egyptian military for devising an end to illness, and added that although he could not yet show the new invention to the public, it would soon mark another glorious chapter in the country’s already glorious history. When he was done speaking, all the reporters in the room applauded and the man turned to the camera and saluted and the station cut to footage of the sun rising over the Nile, accompanied by a children’s chorus.

  “Turn off that nonsense,” said Quiet Uncle from his chair by the window.

  Amir’s mother returned to the living room and set a bowl of beans and three rounds of thick flatbread on the table. Quiet Uncle remained in his chair, checking his phone.

  “Is David still coming by tomorrow?” Iman asked.

  “Who knows with these people?” Quiet Uncle replied. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Iman replied. “It does matter. It will.”

  So often did his mother and Quiet Uncle mention the name of David that Amir had recently come to think of him as an apparition of sorts, not a representative of the United Nations’ refugee-resettlement arm but a figment of the family’s communal imagination. Amir had never seen David, only heard others in the neighborhood talk about him as one talks about the weather—predictively and with great uncertainty. David came and went and when he came, the refugees advised one another to dress appropriately.

  Quiet Uncle’s phone buzzed. He looked at it for a moment and then set it down carefully on the arm of his seat. He got up and kissed Amir’s mother on the forehead. He smiled.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. There’s no use being a fatalist. Let’s eat.”

  It had become a game of sorts, in Amir’s mind—to chart these little roller coasters of his uncle’s moods, the way he could hop in and out of his myriad small depressions, his waning and waxing expectations of the world.

  Once, not long after they’d first arrived in Alexandria, Amir heard an argument in the other room between his mother and Quiet Uncle.

  “I stepped in, d
idn’t I?” Quiet Uncle said. “I did the right thing, after he left.”

  “He didn’t leave,” Iman replied. “He was taken.”

  “And that’s my fault? I did something to make that happen?”

  “No, you did nothing.”

  That ended the argument, and brought about another two days of silence.

  But it wasn’t even during Quiet Uncle’s drawn-out sulking episodes that Amir disliked him most. It was afterward, when suddenly and with no explanation he cheered up, pretended nothing had happened; when he came back from work with a bouquet of flowers for Amir’s mother, or offered to take Amir to that part of the shoreline where the manicured, palm-lined hotel beach crossed over to the littered public one but the security guards never chased the locals away. It was when he showed how easily kindness could come to him, if he wanted it to.

  * * *

  —

  Evening set. Soon baby Harun was asleep in his crib and Quiet Uncle asleep in his chair, and Amir sat watching his mother watch soap operas.

  They bled one into the next, their plots trite and cautious and interchangeable. The brief, chaotic life of the revolution was over and with it the interlude during which it was acceptable to speak culture to power, to craft art out of dangerous things. Recycled again now were the same stories of doomed lovers and strained familial relations between wise elders and their headstrong, naïve children, all punctuated by long, patriotic soliloquies. In this way, though the accents were different and the geography different, this new place reminded Amir of home.

  He knew the reason his mother watched these shows had nothing to do with the storylines. Instead she focused on mouthing and reciting the actors’ words, bending and flattening the vowels just so. And he knew the accents of the actors sounded common and vulgar to her, but if she ever hoped to avoid the immigrants’ markup, every last trace of home in her voice had to be wiped clean. She needed to sound like the place in which she hoped to restart her life.

  Sometimes when Amir listened to his mother talk with the other women who lived nearby, women who had fled from the same place she had, he heard them say that what really mattered were other things: the color of one’s skin, the country of one’s birth, the size of one’s inheritance. But his mother always argued that what mattered most was to speak in a way that mimicked the majority tongue, to sound exactly like them. And even if those other things mattered more, this was all she could change.

  Amir sat silently, listening to his mother snap her tongue up toward the roof of her mouth, trying for a harder-sounding g, a deeper-sounding h. In moments such as these it was difficult to think of her as a single person, the same person he’d known all his life. When she was with her friends she was someone named Iman and when she haggled with the vendors at the market she was someone named Umm Amir and when she pleaded with the British man whose position seemed to entail passing judgment on whether she and her family were sufficiently destitute to be called refugees she was Mrs. Utu, and all of these people seemed to be entirely different and engaged in entirely different attempts at survival.

  The sound of a clanging bell came in through the broken window shutters. Quiet Uncle stirred in his sleep. Likely it was a trolley, or a vendor’s cart; in Alexandria all sounds, like the air, had a maritime quality—something tidal, an endless circling of arrival and departure and the brief, weightless intermission of life between them.

  It was Quiet Uncle who had wanted to settle here. At first Amir’s mother resisted; there was a smaller migrant community in Alexandria than in Cairo, fewer jobs to be had, less room to carve out a small parcel of anonymous existence. She had wanted to stay in the capital but after a few months there, Quiet Uncle had demanded that they move to the coast. He never explained why, always said something vague about room to breathe.

  A year had passed since they’d settled in Alexandria. It was a place sick with the ruins of colonial beauty. The new condominiums stood on the graves of the classic British and French and Italian villas, which stood on the graves of the Mamluk palaces, which stood on the graves of the Ottoman mosques, which stood on the graves of the Greek and Roman temples, which stood on the graves of myriad nameless and ancient villages long ago swallowed by the sea. Everywhere these identities warred and the warring produced no victorious identity, no identity at all, only the sense of manifold incompleteness, the universal aftertaste of conquest.

  Still, it had the water. It had that air scrubbed clean with salt, floating over the curve of the boulevards and hanging in the light of the teardrop lampposts. It was a comforting thing, to look out at the sea, to breathe its air.

  On television an old man told a young one that in the afterlife we will all meet the Prophet and to Him unburden every one of our sins and secrets. In time Amir tired of watching his mother mimic the accents of the soap-opera stars. He inched over to where Quiet Uncle sat asleep in his chair. He took his uncle’s phone off the handrest to play a game on it, and when he pushed the button and the screen lit up, he saw the last message his uncle had received. It was from an unknown number and contained a single word: tonight.

  Chapter Five

  After

  The soldiers run up the road. Vänna waits until the men disappear behind a curve and then waits awhile longer. When she is certain they’re gone, she returns to the farmhouse where she’d set the boy to hide.

  It is a sturdy, ugly thing, made of stone and concrete washed white like the other home on the property and roofed with terra-cotta tiles. Inside the gut of the farmhouse is a single open space, above it a half hayloft, reachable by a wooden staircase. It was made to house animals, Vänna guessed. But all anyone used it for now was storage.

  The plan, as Vänna understood it, was to start with a single room and build up from there. This is how her mother’s parents, Linnea and Levi Olsson, settled on this property when they moved to the island as new retirees a decade before Vänna was born. They plotted it down to the penny on a spreadsheet: For the first year they’d rent out the spare bedroom in the big house, only to friends from the mainland, or people those friends vouched for. Then, when they got the hang of it, when business picked up and word got around, they’d refurbish the farmhouse, turn it into a stand-alone vacation rental. And when things started rolling, they’d buy up the barren harborberry grove next door, clear out the gnarled roots and burrow holes, and really start building.

  To the best of Vänna’s knowledge, only six guests ever stayed at the Baldur Inn before the business went bust. Barely a month into the first high season, the mortgage crisis that hobbled the mainland found its way to the island; tourism dried up, the big hotel and time-share constructions along the eastern shore went into hiatus. On television there was talk of belts that needed tightening and entitlements that had become, quite simply, incompatible with a modern competitive economy. She remembers those years clearly, though it was almost half her life ago—the years when the whole world seemed to go broke all at once. She remembers the sight of men and women baking in summertime heat, waiting on the banks to open, waiting on day-labor work. Ever since then she has come to associate poverty with interminable waiting. These were the waiting years, and in time the family gave up on ever reviving the Baldur Inn.

  * * *

  —

  Vänna enters the farmhouse to find the boy at the far corner, peering into a brown, jug-like container. It’s a jar of maple syrup, a gift from a Canadian couple who stayed at the inn many years earlier. The boy has popped the lid and chipped away at the amber crystals lining the container’s neck. He eats the chippings, the hardened syrup crunching under his teeth, and as she approaches she can smell its burnt sweetness on him.

  He sees her. He pauses. He backs away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Vänna says, but she is sure now he doesn’t speak her language. He monitors her the way a small animal might monitor a rustling in the leaves.

 
So she too backs away. She walks to the other side of the room, where a large dismantled sign for the Baldur Inn sits alongside a few cardboard boxes full of bed linens and a cheap painting of an orange grove and the sea. She retrieves two bathroom mats from one of the boxes and places them on the ground, a couple feet apart, then sits cross-legged on one and motions for the boy to sit on the other. Never taking his eyes off her, he does.

  Vänna points at herself. She says her first name. Then she turns her finger and points at the boy. He pauses for a second, as though struggling to recall it, and then, suddenly, he blurts out, “David.”

  Vänna nods. She points at herself again. “Vänna Hermes,” she says, and points at the boy.

  He seems for a moment to panic. Finally, a kind of dejection comes over him and he replies, defeated, “David Utu.”

  She can tell from his accent he’s not of the island or even the mainland, and from his name she can divine no country of origin, nor can she figure out an easy way, using this makeshift language of pantomime, to ask him where he’s come from.

  So instead she points to herself again and this time holds up both hands with all ten fingers extended. Then she closes one hand into a fist and extends all five fingers on the other. Then she points at the boy.

  He holds up both hands, all five fingers extended on one, four on the other.

  Vänna smiles, proud of her resourcefulness, proud of prying these little doors between them open. She starts to think of something else to ask him, a way to get at the location of his family, his place of origin, how he’s arrived here. But he interrupts her, cupping his right hand such that all five fingers touch. He moves his hand toward his mouth, over and over, eating air.

  “Yes, of course, I’m sorry,” Vänna says. “Wait here.”

  She gets up and leaves the boy in the farmhouse. She runs back across the lawn and the stone-tiled courtyard into her house, entering through the kitchen door.