No one bothered to ask who it was Kamal had dialed. Some assumed it was a national coast guard, or perhaps whatever arm of the United Nations was supposed to deal with such things. Or maybe it was a private charity, something like Doctors Without Borders or the Christian groups that took on the names of saints and angels. Or maybe Kamal had simply called a random number. It didn’t much matter; the voice on the other end of the line, which to all but two of the passengers went unheard, was all of these things. It was the world.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Umm Ibrahim said. “This means we’re close, right? If we weren’t close to land, we wouldn’t have reached them in the first place.”
Some of the passengers stopped to consider this, but in the absence of any signs of life on the horizon, it was of little comfort.
Amir leaned his head against the boards. He listened to the shouting and pleading below. He thought of Quiet Uncle, blind among blind bodies, caught in this punishment of a journey—the sea endlessly receding below, the fruit of the upper deck endlessly out of reach.
He reached his fingers through the boards. The hand of his uncle met them.
“It’s going to be all right,” Quiet Uncle said.
“Stop saying that,” Amir replied. “I want to go home. I want to go home.”
Amir cried. There was nothing to it, a whimpering lost in the storm.
“Listen to me,” Quiet Uncle said. “Listen—I know the nickname you gave me. I know what you called me when I wasn’t around. And you’re right. I thought I could hide my way through life, I thought my brothers were selfish and stupid for speaking up. But the truth is we’re all selfish and stupid.”
A wave washed over the railing. The water fell through the cracks into the lower decks. Amir coughed the salt water out of his mouth.
“Pay attention—there isn’t time,” Quiet Uncle said. “Whatever happens, you have to promise me you’ll do whatever you have to do. Whatever kind of person you need to be—quiet, loud, violent, invisible—you be that person. Promise me.”
Another wave crashed. Amir tried to lift himself up but Quiet Uncle wouldn’t let go of his hand.
“Promise me,” he said.
“I promise,” Amir replied.
The grip on his hand released.
Chapter Twenty-three
After
The workers circle the rubber dinghy, stabbing it at regular intervals. The raft whistles and contracts. When it appears to have no more air left to exhale, the workers begin to roll it up so as to fit it on the waiting flatbed truck. But try as they might, they can’t get the craft to compress beyond a certain smallness. Even though they’ve pulled all the air from inside it, beneath the skin the craft has bones, and the bones won’t bend.
“This is it then, the panicking time,” one of the workers says to another. “One a month, maybe. One a week, maybe. But three in two days, no. Now they’ll start shutting things down, now they’ll bring in the real army.”
Colonel Kethros stands at the shore. The tide is rising and every other wave licks at the soles of his boots. Like many beaches on the northern end of the island, this one has an isolated, lunar quality about it, visible in the way the rocky, unvegetated hills pen the curving beach, the way not much can be seen from here but the sharply rising land. Considering this, it occurs to the colonel that the migrants who arrived the previous night and immediately set southward in the direction of the Hotel Xenios would not have been able to see the resort when they made landfall here. Instead, they would have likely noticed its lights when they were still farther out to sea, their raft still drifting. And once they made landfall, they would have simply walked toward where the lights should be, even though they could no longer see them. They would have navigated not by sight but by faith.
Elias and Alexander stand at the side of the road by the truck, doing nothing. Like Andreas, they have spent plenty of time on this part of the island but have so far proven useless, unable to provide the colonel with even the most basic information when he asked where in these parts children were likely to congregate. One of the twins suggested the edge of the eastern inlet, where tourists sometimes went so their kids could jump off the small protruding rocks into the turquoise water, but the colonel dismissed this—the inlet was too public, too close to the main road. No, the colonel said, where in this place are children likely to congregate in secret? But the twins simply looked at each other and shrugged.
Kethros turns his attention to Nicholas, who has decided to make himself useful by helping clear the residue of the migrant landing. Carefully he picks up and folds every piece of discarded, waterlogged clothing before handing it to the workers, who then simply chuck it in the nearest garbage bag. They seem to regard the young soldier as, at best, harmless, and for the most part they ignore him.
The colonel waves at Nicholas, who stops what he’s doing.
“Go back and stand with Elias and Alexander by the truck,” the colonel says. Nicholas complies.
The colonel’s phone rings. He ignores it. Since before sunrise it has been ringing—calls from the capital, from Lina Eliades and from various reporters. What these people expect from him—which of their own uncertainties and anxieties they think he might alleviate—he can’t begin to imagine.
The other military truck pulls up to the roadside. Andreas, who the colonel dispatched to fetch coffee, has returned. He parks the truck and walks down the beach to where Kethros stands.
“It’s a mess at the Xenios, Colonel,” Andreas says. “There’s nowhere to put them—even the facility at the old school is full. They’ve got them sleeping on the sand.”
Kethros doesn’t reply.
“The ministry called again,” Andreas continues. “They want us back at the staging area.”
The colonel walks past Andreas and yells at the workers to hurry up. They look feeble and foolish, wrestling with an empty rubber raft, trying to tame a slack, inanimate thing. Watching them engaged this way, the colonel feels the victim of an ongoing chronological prank, a punishment befitting the old myths. It’s not the first time he’s felt this way. For a week after the amputation of his leg, he suffered from endless hiccups. None of the doctors could explain why, but every few seconds that light seizing came, and by the second day the medical staff needed to sedate him just to keep him from tearing out his tubes and monitors. The surgeon said the body just does these things sometimes, responds this way to the loss of itself.
Now he feels something similar, another punishment without end, whereby he is destined to spend eternity a step behind the happening of things, unable to preempt or even witness any event of import, only bob about helplessly in its wake.
A black rectangle, half-buried in the sand, catches the colonel’s attention. He walks over and picks it up—a cell phone, the old kind, with fat physical buttons on its front, the kind most Westerners left behind a decade earlier. It’s clear the sand and salt water have rendered the thing unusable, the screen scratched away to nothing, most of the buttons missing.
He turns the phone over in his hand. Written on the back in permanent marker is a phone number he recognizes immediately. It’s the emergency desk at the coast guard office.
For most of the last year, this was how it has worked—once the migrants sensed they were nearing land, they would call this number, say they were in distress, and wait for the ships to come out and get them, the phone’s signal a kind of invisible flare. That the coast guard often couldn’t pinpoint the signal with any accuracy, that often the signal itself disappeared well before they could get to its location—none of this mattered much. At some point the strategy worked its way into the passage’s unwritten guidebook. Such knowledge seemed to spread through osmosis, a communal knowing. Only in recent months has the practice abated somewhat, in part because the number of vigilante boats prowling the coast has increased, and it is becoming more a
nd more difficult for the migrants awaiting rescue to tell good ships from bad.
The colonel tosses the phone into one of the garbage bags by the side of the truck.
“That’s good enough,” he says to the workers, who have managed to awkwardly bundle up half the raft with duct tape. “Get it on the truck and let’s go.”
The workers comply. Soon the truck is backing onto the road and heading south toward the main island. The colonel and his soldiers get in their vehicles and follow.
Riding in the front jeep with Andreas driving, the colonel observes the bare northeast corner of the island receding in the side mirror.
Recently he’s come down with phantom pains. At unpredictable intervals a dull sensation seems to crawl up from the empty space within his prosthesis. The last time he felt such a sensation was in the aftermath of the day he awoke in a field hospital corseted in white dressing and emptied of all recent memory. It lasted a long time, the years he spent in slow rehabilitation of both body and mind, relearning the mechanics of balance and unlearning the stubborn, seething rage he felt at both the people who’d sent him to the killing fields and the people he’d failed to defend. How he hated the people he’d failed to defend.
Now the phantom pains return and the colonel attributes their return not to any particular incident, but rather to the general indignities of middle age. On the other side of fifty, he experiences aging as a return, of sorts. With increasing regularity, the past pummels him—memories long dormant resurface for no particular reason and linger for days, and the dull throbbing in his knee he believes to be a physical manifestation of this same phenomenon. He’s read somewhere that the makeup of the human body is such that wounds never truly disappear, and that certain diseases of malnourishment, when extreme enough, will cause the skin to spit old scars back up to the surface, the body a secret archive of harm. He wonders now if aging isn’t itself a kind of gradual malnourishment, a closing in of things, the past forced violently back to the surface.
The plain weakness of it disgusts him—the way it makes him no better than any other small, ordinary man going through any other small, ordinary midlife crisis—but in truth he knows what he misses most is being young, the nothing days spent fishing in the south-shore lagoons, the nights spent drunk and happy by torch- or firelight in the small, hidden places where the youth of the island have always gone to be alone and alive—the inland ruins or the abandoned mountainside monastery or the lighthouse he sees now receding in the jeep’s rearview mirror.
“Stop the car,” the colonel says.
Andreas pulls over to the side of the road. The workers’ truck ahead of them continues onward but the soldiers in the jeep behind them stop.
“Turn around,” the colonel says. “Go, now. Quickly.”
Andreas turns and heads in the opposite direction. For a moment the vehicles pass each other, and the driver of one shrugs at the driver of the other. Soon both are speeding north.
The colonel points to the lighthouse. “There,” he says. “Move, move.”
Andreas floors the pedal, his uncertainty about the nature of their purpose giving way to a youthful excitement at the prospect of going fast. In a couple of minutes the trucks pull up to the foot of the stone lighthouse, dust clouds chasing behind them. Before the truck stops, the colonel is out and moving. In his half-pivoting gait he hurries not toward the lighthouse but to the edge of the nearby forest, where he sees the fleeting glimmer of two shades of gold—blond strands of hair and a shimmering necklace, the boy and girl, running away.
Chapter Twenty-four
Before
The lights appeared first as fog. Only after a while did the individual bulbs become distinguishable, and a small, twinkling line of blue and green and red and orange revealed themselves, suspended just above the waterline. Among those in Amir’s corner of the Calypso, Umm Ibrahim was the first to see it.
“Look, look,” she screamed.
Some of the passengers followed her pointing finger and saw the lights, which for the first time since the massive freight ship passed them the previous night gave a sense of perspective in the otherwise empty sea. The colored bulbs did not stand still; they moved atop the water, rising and falling with the movement of the sea.
“What is it?” said Kamal. He turned to Mohamed. “Are we here? Is this land?”
Mohamed didn’t answer. He squinted in the direction of the colored lights. Suddenly, he and a few around him became aware of something else coming from the same source. A repetitive melody, four beats on a tabla followed by the flirty chime of a flute.
“Listen, it’s our music,” Umm Ibrahim said. “It’s ‘Khosara, Khosara.’ I know it—it’s an Egyptian song. It’s our people.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Mohamed said. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“What’s there to know?” Walid replied. He pointed at Teddy, manning the wheel. “Go in their direction,” he demanded.
“I can’t go in any direction,” Teddy said. “The engine is dead.”
Walid sat stunned, the tips of the waves crashing over the railing and onto his already-soaked frame.
“Do you have flares?” he asked Mohamed. “A megaphone, some way to reach them?”
“We don’t know who they are, you idiot,” Mohamed replied. “Everyone knows the Westerners run trap boats. How do you know they’re not trying to lure you to them with lights and Arabic music and then sink us all?”
“We’re already sinking,” Walid yelled. “Look around you—this boat is coming apart. We’ll drown out here. Use your gun, fire a few shots in the air—maybe they’ll hear us.”
“Be quiet,” Mohamed replied. He observed the men and women around him, some of whom had started eyeing his weapon. He pressed himself back against the boards. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.
A huge wave crashed onto the deck. Water rushed down through the cracks.
Another set of lights began to materialize on the horizon. A strip of blue and white neon, perhaps a couple hundred feet behind the suspended colored bulbs and a little higher up, as though perched on a hill. Between them the two sources of illumination gave evidence of land that could not yet be seen. Whereas the colored bulbs bobbed and bounced, the blue and white neon remained in place. Soon some of the passengers began to understand what it was they were looking at—a boat, docked on the shore, and behind it a structure, the beginnings of land, only a mile or two away.
“Get back from the edge,” Mohamed screamed. “Get back from…” But there was no one listening to him now. Mesmerized by the distant lights, the passengers rushed portside. The boat leaned hard. From among the mass of bodies one man, a young Tunisian, stepped onto the railing and became the first to jump into the sea.
Chapter Twenty-five
After
Amir watches from the lighthouse. The beach, a mile to the south and well downland, looks this morning similar to the one he awoke on two days earlier—here too there are men in uniform standing by the roadside, a hastily constructed cordon to keep gawkers at bay. And even though the workers who scour the beach now are not dressed in the white astronaut suits he remembers seeing, their hands are gloved and their mouths and noses covered. But Amir sees no bodies, no field of human debris, only a few sandals, plastic bags, soiled clothing and a now-mutilated raft. Mechanically, efficiently, the workers collect these things, drop them in large blue garbage bags, and throw the bags onto the waiting truck.
Amir runs his finger along the bell-shaped locket around his neck. In the ceaseless urgency of his time on this island he has succeeded in avoiding the thought of his mother, of where she might be now, of what she must have thought on waking in that still-too-alien seaside city to find half her family gone. But in this moment there is no turning away, and finally facing the absence of his mother, Amir recalls every time he wished ill on her for hitching their f
uture to a man who was family yet not, for abandoning their home, for giving him a brother who was no brother at all. He recalls these times and in doing so feels certain that this is his fault, that he would never have ended up in this place if only he had been better. The island spread out before him, its eastern spine ragged and desolate and wind-lashed, appears now not as a place or even a dream but a punishment. Amir traces the locket around his neck and makes peace with the certainty that if he never leaves this place, never sees his mother again, it will have been his fault.
But the girl says he will leave this place. She says home, and he believes her.
He watches as the workers roll and fold the dinghy as much as they are able and then hold it in place with duct tape and lift it onto the truck. In a little while the beach is pristine again, but for a few smears and indentations in the sand—markers of the people who arrived here the night before, fading now in the rising tide.
The truck departs. As it backs onto the road, it emits a loud beeping noise and the noise startles Vänna awake. Slowly she shakes the sleep off. Unable to tell how late in the morning it is and worried they might miss the ferryman, she quickly gathers her things into the backpack. She steps out onto the walkway that circles the lantern room, where Amir is standing by the railing, watching a truck and a pair of military jeeps driving away.
And then, suddenly, the jeeps stop. They turn back and race in the direction of the lighthouse.
The children watch, but only for the instant it takes to realize that in this barren quadrant there is no other landmark; the vehicles are headed directly for them.
Vänna grabs Amir by the shoulder. As the two of them turn to run, the backpack slips off Vänna’s shoulder over the railing. Its contents spill as it falls, books and magazines spreading their pages winglike, floating down to the sand.
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