What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Vänna looks to the south; she sees her house about a mile away. The lights are on, both floors radiating a warm yellow, soft against the dusk. Many nights, while out bird-watching or walking along the hilly footpaths, she’s seen her home this way. It never ceases to amaze her how beautiful a place could look when seen from the right distance, in the right light.

  Now she sees the same jeeps from earlier in the day coming up the road. They turn onto her parents’ driveway and come to a stop. The soldiers disembark and, by the size of him, Vänna can tell Colonel Kethros is among them.

  His soldiers wait outside; he enters.

  They’ve been friends since college, he and her mother, and sometimes he drops by for a visit unannounced. She is someone else around him—not always happier, but more open to happiness, less indifferent. Vänna imagines this temporary variation of her is close to what she must have been like when she was younger. Sometimes when he visits, the two of them sit in the backyard by the empty pool and reminisce about college. Sometimes Vänna sits with Dadge, the sheepdog, in the pen by the side of the house and listens, and when she does, she hears Kethros talking to someone else entirely, a buoyant stranger with an easy, cackling laugh, and she hates herself for how much she wishes she had that stranger for a mother.

  But she knows in her gut this isn’t one of those visits. She can’t shake the certainty that the colonel has discovered what she’s done. It comes as no surprise to her. There’s no use trying to hide anything on an island so small, a place where the people all know one another and take comfort in the knowing. No sooner does a secret come to life here than it becomes a barterer’s currency. The colonel has discovered what she’s done and now he’s come to tell her parents.

  For a second Vänna entertains the thought that maybe her father has spent the whole afternoon at the bottom of the bottle, and worked his way to that aggressive, sloppy drunkenness she associates with the foreign tourists. She wonders what he’ll do, in that state, when Colonel Kethros walks into his home with news that his daughter has committed a crime, harbored and abetted an illegal, in violation not only of the law, but of something that predates and supersedes the law—something that lives in the history of her blood and the skin that encases her.

  She hopes, in this impossible imagining, that her father stands up for her. She hopes he gets angry, maybe even throws a punch or two, taps into that dark chemical in the brain that turns insecure, slighted men to wrecking balls.

  Of course there would never be any fighting, her father quickly pinned and pacified, punished for venturing to the visceral world where men like the colonel feel most comfortable. She can see it clearly, and can see just as clearly that if her father were ever so foolish as to try such a thing, it wouldn’t be in defense of his daughter, but in defense of himself—of that sliver of pride that told him the finely uniformed man who so often paid visits to his home was not a man but a grotesque mirror in which he saw, obscenely magnified, every aspect in which he knew himself to be deficient.

  It doesn’t last long. A few minutes after he walks inside, Kethros leaves the home and the jeeps drive away. But only one of them continues up the road. The other remains parked on the shoulder a few feet away from the Hermeses’ place, lights off.

  As the other truck passes the hillside on the road below, Vänna instinctively drops down to her hands and knees, even though there’s no chance anyone in the car can see the peak. She reaches back and brings Amir close to her, the two of them partially obscured among the brush. They remain this way until the jeep is gone.

  Eventually, she knows there will be no hiding. Eventually they’ll find her—either as she and the boy trek to the northeastern end of the island or afterward, on her way back home after delivering the boy to the ferryman, as Madame El Ward asked. This too she can see clearly: the way they’d drive her in silence back to her home, her mother waiting in the driveway, the look on her face not of disappointment, not even anger, but disgust.

  There’s no going home now, she thinks. Not until the child is delivered.

  Vänna turns away from her home. She finds the boy looking eastward at the lights of the seaside hotel.

  The Xenios, a sprawling modern cube of a building that hovers at the edge of the cliffside on the eastern shore, is alight with a neat trim of blue and white neon. Beyond the sleep-gum forest the children can see a series of interconnected swimming pools, shaped like elliptic doodles and joined by arching wooden footbridges. The underwater lights turn the pools a twinkling emerald. The day is ending and the tourists are leaving the beachfront; soon it will be quiet.

  She knows by heart the route to the hotel, a winding footpath from the peak of the hill down to the poolside gardens, and she knows there exists a second craggy route over the coastal rocks that leads northward from the hotel grounds to the lighthouse, the place where Madame El Ward said the ferryman would be. That path, which is not a path at all, but the kind of secret go-between that exists almost exclusively on the treasure maps of children’s minds, rarely sees any foot traffic. It veers well away from the main roads.

  Vänna holds out her hand; Amir takes it. She leads him cautiously between the ferns and bushes but Amir moves ahead and pulls at her hand to go faster. Before long, gravity takes them; the children race toward the hotel grounds, gaining speed.

  “Yallah, yallah!” Amir yells. The word is foreign to Vänna’s ears but its meaning clear—it speaks of restlessness, movement. That she understands what the boy means on some instinctual level doesn’t surprise Vänna, nor does the subconscious realization in that moment that it is natural for certain words to be subject to universal understanding—that, following its phrases for greeting and introduction, every culture’s first linguistic export should be the directive Let’s go.

  With Amir egging her on to run faster, Vänna gives up on following the thin dirt path. Soon the children are flying straight downhill, floating over the untouched ground between the switchbacks, laughing and dangerous with momentum.

  The hill ends abruptly, giving way to a small patch of manicured grass at the edge of the hotel grounds. When Amir hits the grass his foot catches in the soil and he trips and tumbles forward. He lets out a little yelp, but is back on his feet before Vänna can get to him.

  “No problem, no problem,” he says in broken English as she looks him over.

  Brushing the grass and soil from Amir’s limbs, Vänna notices a reddening rash on his inner thighs. She guesses it’s been caused by his clothes, made rough by the sea and needing to be washed, or better yet, discarded. Up close she can tell he has gone too long without bathing, though from her experience all boys to some extent smell unwashed.

  Beyond a small gate circling the hotel’s pool area, Vänna and Amir see a group of three kids at play. They’re a little taller and broader than Amir but, she guesses, probably a year or two younger, strangely domineering over the physical space they occupy.

  From a balustrade overlooking the pool area a woman dressed in a bright-red sarong calls for the three children to come upstairs. Begrudgingly, they pack their toys and water wings and towels. They climb the outdoor staircase that leads to a vast caramel-tiled patio—the cliffside balcony of the hotel’s penthouse suite.

  At the top of the stairs one of the children leaves his shirt hanging off the edge of the concrete railing.

  Vänna waits until the children are out of sight, then she follows, Amir close behind her.

  “Let’s get you some new clothes,” she says.

  Vänna and Amir climb the concrete stairs, soundlessly and with great caution. At the top they see a group of tourists sitting on folding chairs and hammocks at the far side of the patio. There’s perhaps a dozen in all, three adult couples, the rest children of all ages. They gather, popcorn in hand, in front of a large white projector screen, readying to watch a movie.

  Vänna and Amir duck behind th
e low concrete wall at the top of the stairs, spying. To their left, beyond the patio’s eastern railing, the land drops sharply along a sheer cliff to the beachside, offering an unobstructed view of the sea. To their right, two sets of floor-to-ceiling windows separate the interior of the penthouse suite from the veranda.

  Vänna reaches up and grabs the shirt left behind by one of the tourists’ children. Unfurling it, she sees it’s too large for Amir’s frame and, worse, soaked. She tosses it back over the railing.

  On the other side of the balcony, the projector begins to whirr. The opening titles of an old black-and-white movie Vänna doesn’t recognize appear on the white projector screen—a sweeping Orientalist orchestral, a neatly bordered map of Africa and Arabia. The tourists sit on their outdoor reclining chairs, watching, oblivious to the surrounding world.

  Vänna turns to Amir. In clumsy pantomime she tries to explain that she plans to sneak into the tourists’ suite, and that he should stay put and play the part of lookout, keeping an eye and alerting her by waving should one of the tourists decide to return to the hotel room. The boy stares at her, and it doesn’t appear he understands a single thing she’s trying to say.

  “Got it?” she asks, giving him a thumbs-up. He nods and responds in kind.

  Vänna sneaks around the edge of the railing and onto the balcony. She moves quickly, still in a half crouch, toward the sliding glass door that leads from the balcony to one of the bedrooms. She slides the door open and slips inside.

  It’s a vast room of inoffensive luxury. On a clean white double dresser stands a clean white lamp and under the lamp’s clean white glow it is difficult to tell where one accessory begins and the other ends.

  Vänna opens the dresser drawers. In the first she finds underwear and in the second Bermuda shorts and shirts. In the third she finds children’s clothes.

  She pulls out a pair of boys’ underwear and a pair of socks and the topmost shirt from a neatly folded pile. But before she can rummage for a pair of pants or shorts, she turns to check on Amir through the window and sees him standing by the edge of the balcony steps, his eyes wide with alarm. He waves at the far end of the balcony and then at her.

  Vänna drops to the ground. She crawls under the bed and lies perfectly still, watching the bottom edge of the sliding glass door, waiting. It seems in that moment incomprehensible to her that anyone within earshot would not immediately be alerted to her presence by the sound her heartbeat makes against the floor. She tries to hold her breath.

  A minute passes, then another. Finally Vänna begins to inch forward on her stomach, poking her head out from under the bed. She listens for the sound of footsteps from the other side of the room, in case someone has walked in from the suite’s living area. She hears nothing. Carefully she lifts herself up and out from under the bed. She looks at the balcony, entirely empty but for the family sitting at the far end, who appear not to have moved at all. She looks back at the edge of the staircase on the other side of the balcony. She sees Amir pointing at her and laughing.

  Vänna stands up and marches out of the hotel room, pushing the glass door open without care of being caught. She walks over to Amir and grabs him by the shoulder and pulls him around the edge of the railing and down the stairs.

  When they reach the bottom and are safely out of view, she shakes him by both shoulders.

  “Are you kidding?” she yells. “You want to get caught? Is that what you want?”

  But the boy can’t stop giggling and in his sheer joy at having tricked her there is something of a contagion.

  “It’s not funny,” Vänna says, smiling. “Let’s go, before someone calls the police.”

  She takes him by the hand. They walk down a deserted outdoor corridor, past the doors of the pool-facing hotel rooms along the ground floor.

  As they near the end of the corridor, their path is suddenly obstructed by a housekeeping cart turning the corner. They find themselves face-to-face with a member of the Hotel Xenios staff, a middle-aged woman dressed in the hotel’s blue and white housekeeping uniform. All three freeze.

  The housekeeper eyes both boy and girl, uncertain. In the way she looks at him, Amir senses that this woman is one of the people whose approval was of such importance to the men and women he traveled with on the Calypso. And on the tail of this thought comes another realization—that he is in possession of the pass phrase to be used in exactly such a situation. He takes a step toward the housekeeper and recites in broken English the words he’s memorized phonetically from days of repeated hearings.

  “Hello,” he says. “I am pregnant. I will have baby on April twenty-eight. I need hospital and doctor to have safe baby. Please help.”

  The woman looks at the boy. She says nothing.

  Amir, unsure whether he’s mispronounced something, begins once more to recite the sounds he memorized. This time, Vänna puts her hand against his chest. She turns to the housekeeper.

  “Please don’t tell,” she says.

  A wave of recognition washes over the housekeeper’s face.

  “From this morning?” she asks Vänna, but doesn’t wait for the girl to answer. Instead, she begins rummaging around her cart, then suddenly she stops.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she says.

  Before Vänna can reply, the housekeeper opens the door to one of the ground-floor rooms and disappears inside. She emerges with a handful of minibar provisions—cookies, chips, cashews, a bottle of water. She unfolds one of the pillowcases in her cart and begins stuffing it with these things and then others—small bottles of shampoo and conditioner, bars of soap, a towel, pillow mints.

  And then she stops again, as though arrested by some violent passing force. She steps around her cart and closes in on Amir, so suddenly and with such mysterious but obvious purpose that the boy instinctively takes a step backward. She kneels down and inspects him closely, her hand cupped under his chin.

  Without looking at her, the housekeeper speaks to Vänna. She points north, beyond the pool to the small hotel beachfront in the distance.

  “There’s an outdoor shower over there,” she says. “Do you have something else for him to wear?”

  “Yes,” Vänna says.

  “Then go. It’ll be empty now.”

  The housekeeper grabs the stuffed pillowcase and passes it to Vänna, all the while still staring at the boy. In this way she remains, seemingly on the verge of saying something but made entirely of silence.

  Vänna takes Amir’s hand and begins to lead him away. They take only a few steps before the housekeeper says, “Wait.”

  Vänna stops. The housekeeper kneels down beside the door of one of the hotel rooms and picks up a covered plate, the remnants of some guest’s room-service order. She hands it to Vänna, who lifts the metal cover to find a mostly uneaten lamb roast.

  “These people…” the housekeeper says, looking back at the row of hotel room doors. She trails off.

  “Thank you,” Vänna says.

  * * *

  —

  Soon they arrive at All Saints’ Beach, a small seafront that once was a public space but is now Xenios property, all the way up to the ancient ruins farther inland. In the fading dusklight the beach is empty, the only trace of tourists a few abandoned hotel towels and sunscreen bottles. The water glistens, still and clear as glass.

  Always, the tourists rave about the clarity of the water. Here on the island, where the economy runs on foreigners’ money, there exists an obsession with the transparency of it, the way one can stand on a nearby cliffside and, looking down, view plainly everything that lives beneath the surface. The tourists seem to prize this above all else; it doesn’t much matter what lines the seabed, so long as they can see it from a distance, decipher it with their eyes rather than the soles of their feet.

  Vänna leads Amir to the northern corner of the beach, where the ho
tel has installed a set of outdoor showers. She hangs the stolen clothes on the side of a small, weathered skiff that sits near the showers and may have once been used for fishing but is now purely decorative. She sets down a small bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap on the tiled shower stall floor.

  “Go on,” she says, pointing to Amir and then the shower, making a scrubbing motion with her hand.

  Amir shakes his head. He responds with a hand motion of his own, a pantomime that resembles a hand unscrewing a lightbulb.

  “What?” Vänna says.

  With more agitation Amir points at Vänna and makes the same motion again, until she finally understands. She turns around, her back to the shower.

  A few seconds later she hears the water run, a yelp as the coldness of it touches the boy’s skin. She stands facing the sea and waits.

  In a while the water stops running. She hears the sounds of him changing into his stolen clothes and then she feels a tap on her shoulder. The shirt she grabbed appears to be a sports jersey of sorts, white with an offensively cartoonish, red-faced caricature of a man on the chest, and though Vänna has no idea what team or sport this illustration represents, it is plain to see that the jersey is too large. Amir wears it like a full-length dress.

  “Looks good,” Vänna says, smiling.

  In her periphery, she catches the sweep of a distant flashlight. She turns to find a security guard from the Hotel Xenios patrolling the pool area adjacent to the other side of the beach. He moves slowly and without purpose, checking his phone as he walks.

  “Yallah, yallah,” says Amir, tugging on Vänna’s arm.

  “All right, yallah,” Vänna repeats. They hurry northward, past the end of the beach and along the uneven land where the rocks dive headlong into the sea, the outer rim of the island.