What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Vänna and Amir cross the harborberry grove. Most of the grove is barren but a few plants survive; here and there the pits of the fleshy green and black fruit litter the ground. It grows nowhere else but the island and during harvest season sets loose in the air a smell like the inside of a pickling jar.

  They walk in the direction of the repurposed gymnasium. The building, which once belonged to a nearby high school but has been cordoned off to form a temporary holding center, has about it an air of passive siege. Both the gymnasium and the soccer field adjacent to it are lined with a fence originally designed to hold insolent teenagers, and even though its height has been doubled since the facility’s repurposing, it still looks feeble. Police officers and coast guard troops patrol the perimeter, as alien to the people inside the facility as those people are to them.

  From where the grove ends at the bank of a small ditch, Vänna can see rows of small camping tents that cover the soccer field. Young men duck in and out of the tents, and a few sleep outside on the browning grass, taking in the sunlight after the previous night’s freeze.

  She sees a young soldier standing at the front gate. She can tell right away he’s a mainlander. It occurs to her then that she has no idea how many of the men who chased the boy to her house know what he looks like. She stops at the edge of the ditch and turns to the child. She points to the guard at the gate and then makes a motion of covering her mouth with her hand. The boy nods.

  They cross the ditch and walk up to the gate. The guard shakes from his stupor and observes them with a kind of disdainful curiosity.

  “You can’t come in here,” he says. “Go around the far road to get to the school.”

  “We’re not going to the school,” Vänna replies.

  It has been more than a year since these young uniformed men arrived on her side of the island. Like all soldiers, they were trained for warfare but, once dispatched here, what they found was not what most of them thought of as war. To become soldiers required they be rid of a certain kind of human reticence. The pulling of a trigger was in the end a rote, mechanical movement—anyone could be taught it. The difficult thing, the necessary thing, was to first kill off the instinct not to pull it. A person freed of this instinct requires the full theater of war, its protective mythology, without which this particular absence of restraint descends into sociopathy. But no such theater exists in these camps. For years these soldiers have been taught to wield hammers, only to come to the island and find not nails, but glass.

  “My brother and I live across the road,” Vänna says, pointing past the unused grove. “My mother is friends with Madame El Ward—she sent us to give her this bag.”

  She volunteers no further information. The guard looks from the ruined bag to the grove.

  “Leave it here,” he says.

  Vänna shakes her head. “This bag belonged to an illegal Colonel Kethros arrested near our house. He asked my mother to make sure it was delivered to this facility.”

  She waits to see whether the soldier buys it. But he doesn’t, she can already tell, and too quickly into the silence that follows, she blurts out, “You can call him if you want.”

  The soldier opens a small metal phone box bolted to the side of the guard kiosk. He punches a number.

  “Don’t move,” he says to Vänna as he waits for an answer.

  Vänna prepares to run. She eases slightly to be closer to the boy, who seems to have no idea what’s happening. She chooses a direction—south, toward the cloudstone caves, that vast underground network in which at least one tourist gets lost every week, down into the stalactite caverns slick with condensation, across the underground rivers, to places where they’ll never be found. It’s only a couple of miles away; they can make it.

  She knows it’s all nonsense. They won’t get twenty feet.

  “Hello? Alec? Where’s Kethros?” The soldier shouts into the receiver. His face twists into annoyed confusion as he tries to make out the answer across bad static.

  “It’s your job to know,” he says. “Listen, forward me to his deputy’s cell….It’s on the paper taped to the phone you’re holding….I don’t know if it’s pound or star, just pick one, for fuck’s sake.”

  Even the children can hear the sound of static disappearing as the line goes dead. The soldier slams the receiver back, picks it up and begins to dial again, then stops. He reaches into the kiosk and picks up two visitors’ lanyards. He hands them to Vänna.

  “Go inside the big building only, you understand? Don’t go out into the field, and don’t talk to any of them.”

  Vänna nods. She takes Amir by the hand; they pass through the gate.

  They cross a dirt yard, trampled by generations of children’s feet, and enter the gymnasium, whose exterior has been stripped of all signage related to the adjacent high school. Nothing indicates what the facility is now being used for, and so the wide, squat building stands absent public identity, a nowhere place.

  They walk inside. Vänna leads the way upstairs to Madame El Ward’s office. It’s a room of three walls, pressed against a narrow steel walkway, which overlooks the basketball and volleyball courts below. In place of a fourth wall, the room, which once served as a storage space for sports equipment, opens directly onto the walkway, offering a view of the whole gymnasium.

  They find Madame Nimra El Ward at her cluttered desk, arguing with someone on the phone. Vänna knocks on the side of the wall; Madame El Ward turns and, not seeing the boy accompanying Vänna, waves her in.

  The children enter and sit on an old couch on the other side of the room. Madame El Ward’s attention turns back to her phone conversation.

  “We’re going in circles,” she says. “I’m not saying you didn’t deliver it, I’m saying you may as well have not.”

  Vänna and Amir listen, though one doesn’t understand the language being spoken and the other doesn’t understand the context. They sit quietly, taking in the room. On the floor and the table there are boxes of identical files, some bulging with testimonials and photographs and notarized government documents, others completely empty. Each folder is labeled with a long identification number.

  “The issue is that it came in the same truck, Mr. Perdiou,” Madame El Ward says. “It came in the same truck that delivered the generator fuel yesterday, and which your employees didn’t bother cleaning between deliveries. You could see the light reflecting on the surface of the water when we poured it out.”

  Amir grows fidgety. He stands and walks over to the edge of the steel walkway. He looks out at the gymnasium below. The floor is marked with the straight and curving lines, the boundaries of myriad courts, but the nets and goals and almost all other sports equipment have been removed to make way for rows and rows of low steel cots. Only the basketball nets, which descend from the ceiling, remain.

  Amir watches a girl standing under one of the nets. She looks a little younger than Amir, or perhaps the same age but a little stunted. She stands directly under the net, a small red ball in her hands. There’s a paper bracelet wrapped around the girl’s right wrist. Amir watches as she silently tosses the ball upward through the bottom of the net, scoring in reverse. The ball floats upward in a perfectly vertical arc, as though on a string, and then falls back down through the net and into her hands. Over and over again. Each time, the ball doesn’t deviate an inch from its perfect arc, the net completely unmoved.

  “You understand perfectly what the problem is,” Madame El Ward yells into the receiver. “The question of why you need to pretend otherwise is one you should take up with your conscience, Mr. Perdiou. In the meantime, you owe me a day’s worth of uncontaminated drinking water. Good-bye.”

  Madame El Ward hangs up the phone. She puts her head down and exhales deeply, kneading her shoulders, trying to squeeze the knots out.

  “I’m sorry, Vänna,” she says, turning. “Some of these peopl
e, you have to hold their hand and show them how to be human.”

  She stops. For the first time, she looks at Amir.

  “The accident at Revel Beach this morning,” Vänna says. “I think he came on that boat.”

  Madame El Ward doesn’t reply. She has seen so many over the last year: alone, malnourished; orphaned by war or by sea; made into the undercurrents of themselves, broken in ways that rendered them unable to continue as children and yet a part of them left childlike forever. She has seen so many and every time the sight freezes her in terrible reverence.

  “They said no one survived.”

  She approaches the boy, kneels down, places her hand on the side of his face. He flinches.

  “Hello,” she says. “What’s your name?” Her ability to speak his language, and with something resembling his accent, takes Amir aback. But quickly he regains his composure.

  “David,” he says.

  “Are you sure that’s your name?” she asks. “You can tell me the truth. I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Amir replies. “You think I don’t know my own name?”

  Madame El Ward smiles. “Of course, of course,” she says. “I’m very sorry, David. My name is Nimra. Where are you from, David?”

  The boy says nothing.

  “Did you come here on a boat?”

  Amir hesitates. Madame El Ward runs her hand through his hair; she feels the salt.

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” she says. She leans in close to the boy, imparting a whispered secret. “We’re on an island, David. Everyone comes here on a boat.” She smiles.

  She goes over and opens one of her desk drawers. She retrieves a chocolate bar and hands it to him.

  “Tell me,” she says. “Did you come here alone?”

  Amir shakes his head. “I came with my uncle. I was on the top part of the boat and he was in the bottom part.”

  Madame El Ward stops smiling. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s…”

  Something about the way her expression changes, the way the cots line the floor downstairs, the way the girl tosses the ball over and over and over again—Amir turns and runs.

  Quickly Vänna grabs him and, a second later, Madame El Ward has her arms around him too.

  “I don’t like it here,” he screams. “Don’t make me stay here.”

  “It’s going to be all right,” Madame El Ward says. “I promise, you don’t have to stay here. Just take a deep breath. It’s okay to be scared. I know this is all new, but I’m here to help you.”

  She reaches behind her to the bottom of a nearby shelving unit, on which sit stacks of cardboard boxes. Unlike most of the room’s contents, these boxes are filled not with folders but with all manner of discarded relics from previous journeys—folded family photographs, half-used coloring books, sparkly pencil cases, hair bands. One box contains nothing but broken cell phones. She rummages through the boxes, searching.

  “How did you find him?” she asks Vänna.

  “He came running out of the forest this morning,” Vänna replies. “Up from the beach. There were men chasing him, coast guard officers and police.”

  “Just him?”

  “Yes.”

  Madame El Ward pauses. She looks out past where Amir stands, at the wide hollow of the gymnasium and at the cots that line the floor; the places where days have been etched in the walls with penknives and fingernails, the places where bedsheets were hung from the beams.

  She was Vänna’s French teacher once, before she took early retirement. They are neighbors too, in a relative sense, their houses both near the easternmost shore, about three miles apart. Like Vänna, she was born here, the only daughter of immigrants who made the same journey in a less hostile time. Vänna’s mother once said you could see it plainly on her face, the real origins of her, in her eyes and her hair, but also in the way she was, in the marrow of her. And hearing Madame El Ward described this way, Vänna could not help but think of ancestry as a kind of shackle one could never fully unclasp, an umbilical cord that, no matter how deeply cut, could never be severed.

  Early on, when the boats began to arrive more frequently, Madame El Ward set her retirement on hold in order to volunteer with aid and translation at the island’s hastily built migrant camp. And in time, as the government offloaded more and more responsibility to whichever aid group was willing to take it on, she came to oversee the whole facility, the place where those who survived the passage were taken to wait while, slowly and with well-honed inefficiency, the system considered their appeals for asylum.

  “Can you take him?” Vänna asks.

  “We can,” Madame El Ward replies. “By law he has to come here. The ministry would fire me if I…” She pauses. “Tell me, those men who chased him, did any of them see him with you? Do they know you took him here?”

  “No,” Vänna says. “I hid him in our farmhouse. I told the guard outside he was my brother.”

  “Your parents didn’t see him?”

  “No.”

  Madame El Ward stands. She walks to the window and looks outside. A soldier patrols the perimeter fence, a pair of headphones in his ears. She closes the blinds.

  “Vänna, do you know what happens to people here?” she asks. “I mean, do you know how this process works?”

  Vänna shrugs. “They come here, they apply for—I don’t know—passports? Then they get them and they go somewhere on the mainland.”

  Madame El Ward nods. “Something like that. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes they’re made to live in places like this gymnasium for a very long time, sometimes they’re sent to places…Listen, I want you to do something for me, Vänna. I want you take this boy somewhere.”

  Madame El Ward opens a desk drawer and pulls out a small paper map of the island. She shows it to Vänna.

  “Do you know the place at the very northeastern tip of the island?” she asks. “Have you ever gone there?”

  “Where the broken lighthouse is?” Vänna replies.

  “Yes, where the broken lighthouse is. I want you to go there. Right after the main road narrows for the second time, you’ll see a small path on the left side of the road. It leads through the terrace trees and down to an abandoned dock. I want you to take him there. Can you do that?”

  “What do we do when we get there?”

  “There’s a man I know who runs a boat to the mainland,” Madame El Ward says. “Once a week, Sunday at noon. It’s not something he’s allowed to do, and he’ll get in a lot of trouble if he’s found out, so you need to keep this just between you and me. But if you can get this boy there before the ferryman leaves on Sunday, he can take him where there’s a community of people from the same place he came from, a community of people who can help him. He stands a better chance that way, Vänna. Do you understand?”

  Vänna nods.

  Madame El Ward kneels back down to Amir. “Tell me,” she says, pointing at Vänna. “Has this one been treating you all right?”

  “Yes,” he says shyly.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now, if it’s okay with you, I want you two to go on a little trip together. I think you’ll have a lot of fun and I think afterward you’ll be able to get off this island. Would you like that?”

  “My uncle said we’d go back together after the boat trip,” Amir says.

  “I think he’s on his way there too. Soon we’ll see about getting you two reunited, but for now it’s important to get you away from those men who were chasing you this morning. And you don’t want to stay here, right?”

  Amir shakes his head.

  She picks a small child’s backpack from one of the boxes on the shelf and begins to fill it with books. Then she passes it to Vänna.

  “It’s the translation pic
ture book we give the children here,” she says. “And a couple of comic books, fairy tales, that sort of thing. It’ll keep him occupied.”

  Vänna takes the bag. “Sunday at noon,” she says.

  “That’s right,” Madame El Ward replies. “Just keep him safe and out of sight for two days. I don’t just mean out of the sight of the coast guard and the police, I mean everyone.”

  They hear a sound outside: trucks at the gate. Madame El Ward peeks out from behind the blinds. She sees two military vehicles at the driveway. The guard swings the gate open; they drive inside.

  “Go, quickly,” Madame El Ward says. “Look for Markos downstairs, and ask him to let you out through the back gate. Stay off the main roads, and stay safe.”

  “All right.”

  “Just two days, that’s all,” Madame El Ward says. “If you can keep him hidden for two days and get him on that ferry, if you can keep them from putting him in the system or sending him back, he’ll have a chance.”

  Madame El Ward waves good-bye. Amir waves back. The children leave just a few moments before Madame El Ward hears the front door open and the syncopated sound of boots climbing the steel staircase. A moment later, Colonel Kethros enters her office.

  Chapter Twelve

  Before

  A mist of salt water sprayed the stern; Amir’s legs itched. He pulled his shirt over his knees, stretching it until it resembled a nightgown. For hours after he returned to his place near Umm Ibrahim, he’d struggled to get comfortable. Each passing wave knocked his head back against the boards or to the sides, where it collided with Umm Ibrahim’s knees. It wasn’t long before the boat’s ceaseless movement acquainted all the passengers with their immediate neighbors, and erased some of the distinction between where one body ended and another began.

  So too had Amir become acclimated, unconsciously, to the smell of diesel fumes that now permeated the deck, and the growling of the engine deep in the gut of the old fishing boat. Subjected to these things for hours, the senses rendered them no more noticeable than the color of air.