What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  The children run down the staircase and out the lighthouse door. Outside, violent against the cliffsides to the north, the waves crash. The clouds dim the daylight and the canopy of nearby Terrace trees fragment it. They grow nowhere else on the island, these upturned things, the spiked branches perfectly horizontal, longest near the bottom of the trunk, shortest at the top. Morning light, by the time it reaches the floor of the forest, resembles the golden fading that precedes the end of the day. Vänna and Amir sprint westward, toward the forest.

  Hand in hand they run blind, the sound of the soldiers closing in behind them. The men, by their movement, radiate something animalistic, a violence of breathing and footfalls. Vänna hears someone give an order to split up, and though the voice has lost all the cool detachment she’s come to associate with Colonel Dimitri Kethros, she knows it’s him.

  Her toe catches against a protruding rock. Pain shoots up her entire left side and she lets out a scream but neither she nor Amir pause. Even as her left sandal dislodges and she feels every inch of ground beneath her, every pebble and twig, she runs.

  Behind them the soldiers head along three different directions, and soon their sounds thin out, so much so that Vänna begins to hope they might have lost the scent. But one persistent echo of footfalls remains on their trail, a single body, he blind to them and they blind to him in the thick of these scaly, leaning trees, but close and closing.

  At the very western edge of the forest Vänna and Amir come upon a clutch of high brush. It marks a border of sorts—here the Terrace trees end and the land lowers into a narrow footpath along the northern coast. Vänna can see, just a mile or so along the path, a small boathouse and its weathered dock. Their destination.

  She takes Amir by the arm. They step into the brush, the sharp nettles picking and scraping against their skin. They both kneel down, sinking into the brown-green shrubs, becoming inanimate. Amir curls up with his hands around his knees, the way he spent most of his time on the boat journey. Vänna crouches beside him.

  They wait. The footfalls that they heard earlier sprinting now slow to a cautious, molasses pace. But the sound grows closer, the soldier inches closer.

  Not like this, Vänna thinks, not here. She considers making a break for it, sending Amir in the direction of the boathouse as she lunges at the soldier, tackling him. But there’s no use, no hope—she would not keep the soldiers from doing what they’ve come here to do. They would catch both her and the boy, and what stings more than this certainty or the opposing uncertainty of what they would end up doing to the boy is the simple fact that she has come this far, come this close, and failed.

  The footsteps grow closer, then stop. A pair of hands reach down and spread a gap in the brush. The children and the soldier stare at each other in silence.

  Vänna stands. She pulls Amir up. The two children are only a few inches away from the young soldier who’s caught them. Vänna recognizes him by his lanky frame—she saw him around the Hotel Xenios a few days earlier and then among the gaggle of Colonel Kethros’s subordinates who came to her home. She suspects he is at most five or six years older than she is. He looks a way she doesn’t associate with soldiers—not so much weak or fearful or winded from chasing the children through the forest. He looks in pain.

  Vänna shifts to her left, such that she stands directly between the soldier and Amir. From elsewhere in the forest come the disjointed voices of the other men yelling, trying to track one another down. Soon they will arrive here, and there is no getting around the fact that they will take the boy but at least she will make sure they can’t take him quietly. She’s going to make it ugly, she’s going to give them a fight.

  But the young soldier who stands in front of them makes no reply to the calls coming from the other side of the forest. He simply stares at Amir, then Vänna, then past both children to the little-used footpath that leads to the boathouse.

  “Go,” he whispers.

  Vänna doesn’t move. In a span that lasts no more than a second or two but feels eternally longer, she tries to determine whether this is some sort of trick. Or perhaps the soldier is only speaking to her, for whom punishment is temporary and optional, and not the boy, for whom it is neither.

  But he speaks again, his voice still a whisper but more urgent now.

  “Go.”

  Vänna grabs Amir. The children back away a few steps from the soldier and then turn and run down the sloping footpath. Nicholas watches them fade from view and fade from earshot, the sound of them swallowed by the sound of the waves. Then he turns around and joins the others.

  * * *

  —

  A dampness spreads out from the place where the flesh of Colonel Kethros’s leg meets his prosthesis, and with it a sharp pain. He waits in the disorienting middle of the forest. One by one, his four soldiers return to him, each empty-handed.

  A girl’s sandal is dislodged on a rock nearby. In this place, so far removed from the beaten path that even the most adventurous tourists have not had the chance to trash it, the sight of such a thing is peculiar, jarring. But in the past year the colonel has seen many similar sights—discarded jackets, shoes worn straight through, underwear soiled from endless days at sea. At almost every migrant ship landing, this phenomenon, this shedding, has become commonplace.

  But this is different. This is no foreigner, no illegal. This is the discarded belonging of a local girl, and the colonel feels upon seeing it that the girl has been in some way defiled, that decency itself has been defiled, and that he has let it happen.

  Kethros inspects his soldiers, all still struggling to catch their breath even though they’ve been running only a short while.

  “Where did they go?” he asks.

  “We didn’t see anything,” Elias says. His brother nods.

  “Nothing,” Andreas says.

  “Nothing,” Nicholas says.

  The colonel observes Nicholas, and is again fascinated by the boy. From the moment he arrived in Kethros’s unit, the colonel knew Nicholas was not fit to be a soldier. You can see it in his eyes, the way they dart around like the eyes of a stalked deer. It has become frowned upon to call such a thing weakness, but anyway weakness is not the right word for what the colonel now sees clearly in the marrow of his young subordinate. It’s something else, an absence of something vital.

  His father once told him that every man is nothing more or less than the demands he makes of the world, and that the more a man demands of the world, the bigger the magnitude of his success or failure in life. This, his father said, is what matters—the size of the asking. And this is what the colonel thinks of as he studies Nicholas’s darting eyes, studies the weight of the lie on him; this is what the word weakness can never properly describe—the absolute poverty of the boy’s asking, the willingness with which he seems ready to shuffle meekly through the world, making not a single demand. Weakness Kethros can tolerate—this other thing, he can’t.

  “Where did they go, Nicholas?” he asks.

  Nicholas pauses a moment, but there’s no fight in him. In shame he points to the western edge of the forest. The colonel sidesteps him and walks through the thicket, until he sees the footpath that leads down to the boathouse.

  “Elias, is there a proper road farther inland, one that leads down there?” he asks.

  Elias nods.

  “Good. You and Alexander come with me. Andreas, take Nicholas back to the staging area. Watch him until I get back.”

  Andreas approaches Nicholas awkwardly, certain of what the colonel means but uncertain as to how he should behave toward a soldier who until moments ago was one of his own. But before Andreas can say or do anything, the colonel grabs Nicholas, his hand cupping the boy’s jaw with such violence, his teeth pressed inward, his lips compressed, and it appears for a moment to the other three soldiers that their commander is trying to crush the lower part o
f Nicholas’s face, to rip it clean from the rest.

  But as quickly as it comes, it passes—Kethros releases his grip. He pats Nicholas on the cheek. He smiles, and in a single, purposeful movement he reaches out and rips the patch stitched into the chest of his uniform.

  “It’s all right, son, it’s all right,” the colonel says. “Just imagine how little would get done if all men had spines.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Before

  Amir held on to a rusted cleat on the deck, struggling to keep from sliding portside as wave after wave smashed into the hull behind him. Dexterous claws leapt upward, over the gunwale and down onto the deck, the water digging into the rot-green flesh of the Calypso. With every wave the boat tipped farther onto its side, the passengers skittering sideways, the critical angle closing in, after which the vessel would continue its rotation, capsizing.

  A deep cracking sound emerged from somewhere below, the hull giving way. As the Calypso tilted, the flashlight came loose from its hook and was washed overboard. Only the faint backlit clouds and the distant colored lights of shore provided illumination. The passengers screamed and shouted for help, their voices no sooner escaping the boat than they were swallowed by the storm. To anyone standing at the shore the Calypso would have been just another parcel of nighttime, unheard and unseen.

  Another man pushed his way through the crowd and onto the portside railing. He zipped up his orange life vest as high as it would go and then, stumbling as though punch-drunk, he tried to step onto the railing, preparing to dive in pursuit of the Tunisian who moments earlier had made a break for the shore. He managed one foot up before the boat shuddered violently and tilted, throwing him overboard. He tumbled, colliding neck-first with the water, and whether it was the sea or the night that took him, in an instant he vanished from view.

  “Stay on the boat, damn you, stay on the boat,” Mohamed shouted. “Whoever jumps dies.” But as the waves increased in ferocity, washing the deck entirely and shattering the remaining wheelhouse windows, more and more passengers leapt overboard. The ones who’d bought life vests from the smugglers went first, struggling for traction on the sea-slick deck, orienting themselves in the direction of the music and the colored lights. Each after the other in rag-doll posture, they took flight, each after the other they disappeared, the floating world rising up to meet them.

  Among those readying to jump, Amir saw Umm Ibrahim. In the bedlam she’d moved portside, the keeling side that dipped with every wave until it neared touching the water. Amir watched her as she steadied herself against a fellow passenger, and then in one motion reached down and pulled her niqab completely off.

  Underneath she wore a bright, sleeveless summer dress, decorated with watercolor lilacs. An orange life jacket rested too high on her frame, pushed upward by the rise of her belly. As she stood at the edge, she turned and scanned the deck. The boat righted itself with a falling thud between waves, and the water drained away. There came over the Calypso a kind of diastolic silence, a temporary pause. And in this pause Amir and Umm Ibrahim caught eyes.

  “Come back,” Amir yelled. “Don’t go, don’t go.”

  Umm Ibrahim looked at the boy as though she’d never seen him before. She turned and, the boat rising and tilting in her direction, jumped.

  As the Calypso smashed back onto its hull, a square piece of the deck by the wheelhouse exploded upward. The combination lock that had kept it in place broke open, and suddenly a monster of grasping limbs burst out from the belly of the boat. The passengers confined to the lower decks struggled to escape.

  The last screw holding the cleat to which Amir clung came loose. Before he could latch on to any other part of the railing, he was sliding toward portside, toward the water. Screaming, he grabbed at whatever bodies he could, but each shook him off.

  Then a pair of arms were around him, arresting his motion. With the weight of both the stranger’s body and the righting boat, Amir was slammed down onto the deck, the wind knocked out of him, the boards cracking beneath.

  Amir wiped the salt water from his eyes. He saw, looming over him, Walid.

  “Give it to me,” Walid said.

  “What?” Amir replied.

  “Give it to me,” Walid repeated. “It’s useless on you.”

  With one hand Walid pinned Amir by the throat, with the other he struggled to loosen the zipper of the boy’s life jacket.

  “No,” Amir screamed. He turned his head and bit down as hard as he could on Walid’s finger. He tasted blood.

  Walid let out a cry and slapped Amir across the face. He grabbed each side of the boy’s life jacket, and with a sharp burst of force, pulled the jacket open. The cheap plastic zipper exploded like confetti; the jacket came undone.

  Walid shoved Amir to the side, half turning the boy to slip the jacket from around his arms. In possession of what he was after, he stumbled upward. He put the life jacket on and backed away toward portside, searching out the distant shore, the lights and the music.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  After

  The footpath, almost never used, is overrun in places with weeds, and sometimes it disappears into a labyrinth of jagged rocks and in one place is made a long, shallow puddle by the encroaching tide. Vänna can feel a cut along the bottom of her exposed sole, stinging. But it doesn’t matter. They are close now, and only one thing matters.

  The boathouse is larger than she imagined, a square-shaped stone dwelling with a thatched roof, parts of which have been torn off entirely. Two shuttered windows are carved into the front side of the house on either side of a small wooden door. An old rusted spade leans against the side of the house, a small water pump in the otherwise barren front yard. The place looks abandoned.

  Vänna leads Amir across the yard and into the boathouse. The door is unlocked and gives with a small, bitter squeak. Inside there’s no light but that coming in through the gaps in the rooftop, and it takes a few seconds after they enter for the children’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. They see the mostly empty interior—only a half-dozen flat tables of pale plywood, a sink and counter fit for gutting fish.

  Vänna looks out the north-facing window. A wooden staircase outside switchbacks down the cliff to a small, narrow dock. This is the place. In a couple of hours, maybe sooner, the ferryman will come.

  “Let’s go wait down there,” Vänna says. “We’ll stay by the cliffside.”

  She takes Amir’s hand and leads him back out the door, but before they reach it, Colonel Kethros and his soldiers walk in.

  They turn and run to the window, but the soldiers reach them and pull them back inside.

  Vänna pushes them away. She takes Amir close to her, crosses her arms around his chest. She stares at the colonel.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asks. “What difference does it make to you?”

  The colonel sighs. He pulls a wooden chair from below the counter and carries it over to where the children stand. He sets it down a couple of feet from them and he sits. He wipes the sweat from his brow and then slowly, meticulously, unlaces his left boot and rolls up his pant leg over his caramel-colored prosthesis. He undoes the straps that hold the limb to his knee. As the false leg comes loose, a ring of red gashed flesh is visible on the underside of the colonel’s skin. It leaks blood, fresh and mingling with the ridges of his amputation scar. The colonel sits back, airing his wound.

  “What difference does it make to you?” he asks.

  The colonel waves over Elias and Alexander. He points at Vänna.

  “Take her, and then come back for us,” he says, then turns to Amir. “I’d like some time alone with this one.”

  “Take her to the staging area?” Alexander asks.

  The colonel shakes his head. “No, no, take her home,” he says. “Let her mother deal with her.”

  The soldiers move in and take Vän
na by the arm, and it is only then that the small boy whom they’ve exerted so much effort chasing at their superior’s behest, the boy who until now appeared so small and terrified in the way he stared at the colonel that they’d almost forgotten about him completely, comes alive in rage. As soon as they take Vänna by the arm, he lets out a scream and begins clawing and kicking at them with such violence, they are momentarily forced backward. One of the brothers takes Vänna in a bear hug and the other does the same with Amir, and in this way they are able to keep them apart, but neither will let up until Kethros reattaches his prosthesis and stands and grabs the little boy and tosses him clean off his feet and onto the ground.

  “Enough,” the colonel says, and the room grows quiet.

  He moves in Vänna’s direction. She does not recoil, instead leaning forward to meet him, teeth bared. He removes her dislodged slipper from his pocket, kneels down, and slides it gently back on her foot. Then he rises.

  “Go on,” he says to his soldiers. “Take her home, then come back.”

  “You’re a coward,” Vänna says as the soldiers drag her away.

  “We’re all cowards,” the colonel replies. “The world is a coward.”

  * * *

  —

  The soldiers pull Vänna out of the boathouse and around back to where their truck is waiting. At first she kicks at them, and even though they are twice her size and both they and she know it is a useless thing, the kicking reminds the soldiers of previous times they’ve been attacked this way. In the past it was the migrants—angry, disoriented, foreigners who tried to fight them off outside the gates of the detention center. Foreigners who screamed for the spouses and children from whom they’d been separated, and in the primal rage of their screaming could be dismissed as barbaric, undeserving of civility. In those previous instances the brothers responded with violence, hurt these aliens instinctually, the way one swats at a burrowing mosquito and, if he hits his own limb in the process, so be it.