What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Vänna walks to the courtyard. Her father taps the seat next to his. He tries to put the cap back on a bottle of Harborshine but stumbles and drops it onto the stone tiles. He smiles and shrugs.

  “I brought some burgers from the Xenios,” Vänna says. She sets one of the takeout boxes on the table and then picks up the bottle cap and a red plastic cup and an overturned ashtray off the floor.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” her father says. “I’m not, though. Anyway, I wasn’t. If she tells you I was, she’s lying.”

  He is a small man, and in his smallness there is an ingrained element of youth that for years made him look a decade younger than he is. But now, in middle age, it has begun to bestow on him an air of ridiculousness, like the character in a movie Vänna once saw who aged four times faster than other children. His neatly parted hair is now slowly easing into a comb-over, but still looks strangely childlike.

  Vänna sets one of the takeout containers on the table in front of him. He smiles and rubs her arm in gratitude but does not touch the food.

  “I saw Colonel Kethros and some soldiers driving up the road when I was walking back,” Vänna says, trying to sound uninterested. “You didn’t see where they were coming from, did you?”

  But her father doesn’t seem to be listening at all. He stares out at the forest across the road.

  “She can’t tell cruel from strong,” he says. “Never could.”

  Vänna doesn’t reply. She’s heard all this before, and knows what’s coming next. She empties the ashtray in a nearby trash can and sets it back on the table. She waits.

  “I’m so glad it was you who lived,” her father says.

  He pauses for a response from her that never comes. It’s always the same story, the story he tells her because he can’t bring himself to simply ask her to side with him against her mother.

  “That’s right,” he continues. “There were two boys before you. They both died inside her.”

  She knows he won’t stop until she plays along. Still, she says nothing.

  “She only ever wanted boys,” her father says. “She was so disappointed that the one who lived was you.”

  He watches her, smug with drunkenness, expectant.

  “I’m not taking sides,” she says.

  “Who’s asking you to take sides?” he replies. “I’m just telling you the truth. The truth doesn’t take sides.”

  Vänna picks up the other takeout container. “I’m going to eat in the farmhouse,” she says.

  She crosses the courtyard. She sees mud prints in the grass, two-by-two in one direction, many in another, a tangled mess of strangers’ tracks. There’s a violence to it. She walks faster.

  On her way to where she’s left the boy in the outbuilding, she hears her parents’ bedroom window swing open. She turns.

  “Why were you gone so long?” her mother asks.

  “The road was closed,” Vänna replies. “There was a wreck on the beach and the soldiers blocked the path.”

  Her mother looks in the direction of the farmhouse. Vänna follows her eyes to find a half-open gym bag on the ground.

  “He forgot to take it,” Vänna’s mother says.

  “Who forgot?” Vänna asks.

  Her father laughs. “Our brave protector,” he says. “Who else?”

  Vänna’s mother ignores her husband. She stares at the bag a moment, thinking. Finally, she says, “Take it to Nimra, to that zoo she runs in the school gymnasium.”

  “What do I tell her?” Vänna asks.

  “Don’t tell her anything, just give it to her. Go, now.”

  Vänna walks to fetch the bag.

  “Wait,” her mother says. She disappears back into the bedroom and a moment later returns with a pair of yellow kitchen gloves. She throws them down to the yard, where they land at Vänna’s feet.

  * * *

  —

  In the farmhouse she finds the boy sitting up in the hayloft, a towel for a blanket, curled up, fetal. And seeing each other, both express a kind of relief that transcends the border of language between them, a lightening.

  “I’m sorry,” Vänna says, “They had soldiers everywhere….”

  She stops speaking. She walks to the open jug of maple syrup and closes the lid. She climbs the staircase and sits beside him. “Here,” she says, sliding the takeout container in front of him. “Eat some real food.”

  The boy devours the meal. The caution with which he treated her during their first meeting momentarily disappears.

  “Slow down—you’ll be sick,” she says. But he ignores her, and she is happy to watch him eat.

  When he is done, she reaches over and gently wipes a smear of ketchup from the corner of his mouth with the tail of the towel he sits on.

  “Good?” she asks, giving him a thumb’s-up. He responds in kind.

  She feels the afternoon sunlight against her back. She knows they have perhaps another two or three hours before dusk, and her thoughts turn to more pressing things. In the back of the farmhouse there lie in boarded stacks the makings of a twin bed. She considers rummaging around for her grandparents’ old toolbox and putting the bed together herself, but quickly she decides against it.

  “Come,” she says. “I’m going to take you to meet someone.”

  She stands and picks up the bag her mother told her to deliver, then motions for the boy to follow. She opens the front door and glances outside at the courtyard, where her father sits in his chair with his eyes closed. She turns to the boy and puts her finger against her lips in a motion requesting silence; he nods.

  Light as thieves, they move around the courtyard and to the back of the house. As they cross the backyard, Dadge the sheepdog lifts her head in faint recognition, but quickly loses interest. They climb over a dilapidated wooden fence and pass into the remains of the old harborberry grove, muddled now with weeds and otherwise barren. With Vänna leading, the two children walk in the direction of a long, tin-roofed building on the other side of the grove—once a high school gymnasium and now a temporary pen for those without country.

  Chapter Ten

  Before

  It was Teddy’s shift again. Amir watched him struggle in the wheelhouse. He was a short, skinny man, his slightness of frame exaggerated by the ship’s oversize wheel, which seemed to turn of its own volition exactly in the opposite direction of wherever Teddy wished to steer. The boat tilted and bobbed and every few times the starboard side dropped down from the apex of a wave, a spray of mist came through the broken window. Still, Teddy held fast, and in the darkness, without any point of reference on which to fix, it was just as likely as not the boat was going where he intended it to go.

  Maher looked up from his book. “You want some help?” he asked.

  Teddy shrugged. “There’s not much to help with.” He tapped the cloudy glass-bubbled compass attached to the helm’s dash, inside of which a needle sputtered wildly. “Just keep it on N, right?”

  “I guess so,” Maher said.

  It took only a few sentences for the passengers overhearing the conversation to become aware that of those near the stern of the boat, the Eritrean and the Palestinian were the most fluent speakers of English, and quietly many made note of this fact, in case it proved useful upon landfall.

  Teddy noticed Amir watching him. He smiled. “Maybe you can help,” he said, waving the boy over.

  Amir looked up at Umm Ibrahim, uncertain. “Go ahead, baby,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  He stood up and walked around the mass of bodies to the wheelhouse. It was only a half-covered thing, the roof planks gnawed and cracked, green with streaks of mildew. The compartment, no bigger than a broom closet, smelled of licorice and salt water. It was a too-tight space for even one person, but in this upturning of the world, it felt comforting to be so confined; it was the sight
of the endless open sea that brought on claustrophobia.

  “Hold tight,” Teddy said, wrapping Amir’s fingers around a handle. “Don’t let it move you; you’re the boss.”

  Instantly it moved him, the counterclockwise rotation so sudden he was nearly lifted off his feet trying to keep hold. Teddy laughed and righted course. “We’ll do it together,” he said.

  Walid, sitting nearby, rapped the side of the wheelhouse. “No play, no play,” he said in English. “Make serious.”

  Teddy chuckled. He pointed to the nighttime darkness that surrounded them. “Are you worried we’ll get lost?”

  Mohamed gestured at Walid to quiet down. “It’s fine,” he said. “Just mind your own business.”

  “This isn’t a time for joking around,” Walid protested. “We’re not out here to play.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mohamed said. “When you get to the other side, then you can pretend to be a walking funeral—that’s what they’ll be waiting for. But right now, it doesn’t matter if you play or dance or whatever.” He pointed to an old man sitting portside, quietly reciting fifteen attributes of God from the end of a Quranic chapter. “Just be like this guy. Just mind your own business.”

  “His steering is my business,” Walid said.

  Mohamed shook his head. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this.” He reached into his pocket and for an instant a look of complete terror crossed Walid’s face, until Mohamed pulled out a rusted skeleton key. He motioned to Teddy.

  “Hey, take this,” he said in English, tossing the key his way. “You make open small door inside. You give.”

  Teddy opened the small cupboard below the dash. Inside he found a small mug with a Nefertiti-bust handle and an unlabeled bottle three-quarters full of something white and cloudy. He passed these things down, and from passenger to passenger they found their way to Mohamed, who poured a mugful and gave it to Walid.

  “You people like arak, right?”

  “Can’t stand the stuff,” Walid said, declining. “It tastes like candy gone rotten.”

  “Who gives a shit what it tastes like?” Mohamed replied. “C’mon, I need there to be at least one more real man on this boat.”

  Walid took the cup. He sipped the liquor, he winced.

  “There you go,” said Mohamed, who’d learned over the years exactly how to ply a man such as Walid into compliance. He spoke to the others nearby, and made sure Walid heard it. “Now this is someone I can drink with, someone with a pair of balls.”

  Kamal leaned over. “I’ll take a sip,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Mohamed replied.

  * * *

  —

  The boat meandered through the empty sea. In time Amir grew tired and let go of the wheel. He sat on an upturned bucket by the foot of the wheelhouse and listened to Teddy and Maher speak in a language he couldn’t understand, as all the while Walid grew more and more tipsy, Mohamed occasionally refilling his cup.

  “How long ago did you leave Eritrea?” Maher asked.

  “Eight months,” Teddy replied.

  “And only now you’re getting on the boat?”

  “There was a lot before the boat. There was leaving the country, then finding someone who would take me, then crossing the desert, then getting into Egypt, then finding someone else who would take me, then this.”

  “So why did you leave?” Maher asked. “Military?”

  Teddy nodded. At the sound of the word military, Mohamed sat up.

  “He’s with the army?” he asked Maher.

  “They’ve got mandatory conscription,” Maher replied. “Everybody’s with the army.”

  “Not soldier,” Teddy said in broken Arabic. “Mathematician.”

  “You’re at war over there, in your country?” Mohamed asked.

  Teddy shrugged. “Depends what you mean by war.”

  Amir listened, and at the sound of the word was drawn into a memory of home.

  His father once said war was something that happened to people but also alongside them. From where he sat in the Utus’ living room back in Homs, reclined on a honey-colored Louis XV chair, that particular aesthetic of decor which to an older generation of Arabs symbolized not only an aspirational Westernness but also a time before the worst of things, Amir’s father pointed out the window to the shattered end of the street. The week prior, not long after military planes had littered propaganda from the sky, little square papers that fell to the ground like dying birds, the barrel bombs had torn open one of the buildings nearby.

  In the evening the shells explode and overnight it rains and in the morning the children swim in the craters, Amir’s father said. People live—what else is there to do?

  They were three brothers who, in Amir’s view of the world, together comprised the entirety of manhood. His whole life, he had associated Loud Uncle with brashness and Quiet Uncle with timidity but ever since he heard him say it, he associated his father with that statement—What else is there to do?

  He was forgettable in the way many good men were, not physically imposing but of dignified bearing, a posture he adjusted according to the import of his company. In the last years of his life, before he was taken, he wore a short, neatly trimmed beard, black but littered with minute red hairs his friends and neighbors complimented as being a trait of the Prophet, a beard that when he wore his skullcap to Friday prayers made him appear a pious man, and when he didn’t, made him appear cosmopolitan. He made do with an uncooperative left arm, a remnant of childhood calamity from a time before the drought, when the Utus still farmed a vast orange grove near the sea: while picking rocks, he’d stumbled and shattered his humerus on a half-buried shovel blade. He screamed, feverish, for days and his mother and siblings pleaded, but Amir’s grandfather refused to take him into town because the only doctor there was a Frenchman, and he’d rather his son die than be fixed by a Frenchman. And so he’d learned to live with it, as he’d learned to live with drought and displacement and now a war that raged alongside him. What else was there to do?

  Perhaps this is what made him stand out, the day after another half-dozen children were arrested for spray-painting slogans on the walls and swept into the underground prisons, and Loud Uncle convinced him to march with him in the protest, and when the screaming and shooting subsided they were never to be seen again. Perhaps it was not the presence of a revolutionary at a revolution that so enraged the secret police who took them, but the presence of an ordinary man.

  * * *

  —

  “What kind of mathematics did you study?” Maher asked.

  “Big numbers,” Teddy replied.

  “Big numbers?”

  “You ever hear of tree functions? Graham’s number?”

  Maher shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay—nobody has,” Teddy replied. “Let’s see. You know how to add, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  “And multiplication is just adding again and again, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And when you take something to the power of something, that’s just multiplying again and again, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s one way you can get to big numbers,” Teddy said. “Just keep going one more level up.”

  “A million billion,” Walid said, sleepy-eyed and smiling. “A billion million billion.” The two men ignored him.

  “So what do you do with these numbers?” Maher asked.

  “Sometimes you use them for proofs, or you try to find the next big number, like with primes, just to show you can. Sometimes you do nothing with them,” Teddy replied. “It’s about imagination. When you have a number that’s bigger than all the atoms in the universe put together, what does that mean? How do you think about something that’s too big to think about?”

  “A gabrilli
on,” Walid said to himself, giggling.

  Maher held his book up to Teddy, almost apologetically. “I never really understood numbers,” he said.

  “But words?”

  “Yes, words.”

  “And you prefer them to people?” Teddy asked.

  “Very much.”

  “Then you understand.”

  Walid stumbled up, making a motion with his hand in imitation of a jabbering mouth. “Blah blah blah,” he said. “Enough of this talking. We need music.

  “You,” he said, pointing at Kamal. “You young people have music on your phones, right?”

  “Sit down, man, you’re drunk,” Kamal replied.

  “You do, you all do, I know it.” Walid leaned in Kamal’s direction, holding a stranger’s shoulder for support. “Play something.”

  “I have one song on this phone,” Kamal said. “It’s by Amr Diab and I downloaded it for my uncle and it sucks.”

  “Amr Diab? I thought that guy was dead,” Mohamed said.

  “Amr Diab will never die,” Kamal said. “He goes to a clinic in Brazil every year where they change out all his organs.”

  “Play the goddamn song!” Walid yelled.

  “Fine, fine.” Kamal turned up the volume on his phone and set it down halfway between where he and Walid sat. Through mediocre speakers the sound of the classical guitars came out as static and the accordion as an old modem and hardly anyone could make out the voice behind it all, the whole while yodeling, Habibi, habibi.

  Walid clapped his hands in approval, and by the time the song ended he was belly-dancing in place, oblivious to the growing amusement of his neighbors, and by the time he had Kamal play it a fourth time in a row, even the people who had never heard it before and didn’t speak Arabic could sing the chorus, and Walid was up now and dancing with his tie like a bandanna around his head, and Mohamed smiled and shook his head and Amir, caught up in the silliness of it all, laughed and sang along.

  Chapter Eleven

  After