What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  But they respond with no such violence this time, not only because of the age and gender of their captive, but because, like all soldiers, they maintain a subconscious ledger of who they are free to hurt and who they are obliged to protect, and if they are not to protect a girl such as this one—a girl born into this place and this language and this skin—they protect no one at all. The soldiers drag Vänna to the waiting truck and force her into the back and the whole time neither of them will look her in the eye.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Before

  In the last moments some held on dearly, leaving splinters of nail and streaks of blood between the boards. And although earlier the boat was filled with screaming, of these remaining few none made a sound. Others, knowing now what was about to happen, what was inevitable, gave in, and without resistance were swept off the deck and into the water. And they, too, made no sound.

  In the distance the island, the colored lights, the music.

  One final time the waves lifted the Calypso high. Under the force of a tumbling body, the mast snapped at its base. The sea overwhelmed, drowning the bloom of limbs that struggled to escape the lower quarters. Turning past the point of rebound, the old fishing boat flung its last few occupants still hanging on to the far starboard side into the air. For an instant the deck became perpendicular to the surface of the water and then, like a closing eyelid, met it.

  Amir took flight. Headlong into the seaborne sky, the roof of the great inverted world. In meeting him the water was not cold or concussive but warm and tranquil, its temperature the temperature of a body, the temperature of blood. With ease and without pain, he flew past the surface, past the depths, past the places where light and life surrendered and the domain of stillness began. And then lower, farther, past the crust of a million interlocking bodies who’d braved this passage before him and come to rest at the bottom, sick with the secrets of their own unallowed mourning. Past the smallest flour-white bones, past the world at the feet of the world. To the lowest deep, then a lower deep still. Until finally to a dry womb of a place in which were kept safe and unchanging everyone he had ever known, and everyone each of those had ever known, outward forever to encompass the whole of the living and the lived. And each of these the boy met, in their old lives and their new lives waiting, and from each drew confession and each he felt into as though there were no barrier between them, no silo of self to keep a soul waiting. What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all.

  * * *

  —

  And then he surfaced.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  After

  Not long after it leaves the boathouse, the military truck comes to a stop. Vänna sits in the windowless back, unsure of why they aren’t moving, only certain that they haven’t been driving long enough to reach their destination. On the wooden bench across from her, in this vehicle that has only ever been used to transport soldiers and prisoners, Elias sits with his head down, his gaze focused intently on Vänna’s feet.

  The truck idles for a while, then the engine goes dead. Elias taps on the small sliding plate in the steel divider that separates the cab from the back. His brother slides the plate open.

  “What’s the problem?” Elias asks.

  “Goats,” Alexander replies.

  “What?”

  “Goats, goats. What do you want me to do?”

  The brothers give each a pair of accusative shrugs, the universal means by which two men simultaneously abdicate responsibility for something over which they have had no control in the first place.

  “Stay here,” Elias says to Vänna. He gets up and unlocks the back doors. In the moment between when they swing open and when the soldier hops out and locks them shut again, Vänna catches a glimpse of where they’ve stopped. It’s the narrowest stretch of land on this corner of the island, a place where the road slims down to a single lane in each direction over a land bridge about fifty feet above the sea. Were it not for this sliver, the two parcels of land that make up the northeast end of the island would be islands themselves.

  As soon as the doors close, Vänna stands up and peers through the still-open metal grate. Out the front window she sees the brothers arguing with an old shepherd. Behind them, a small herd of snowshoe goats meanders in no particular direction, singing. It’s a breed native to the central mountains, its name derived from the animals’ flat, wide hooves. Vänna watches the shepherd and the brothers as they each point to the goats with great intensity, as though someone involved in the conversation had not yet become aware of the animals’ existence. The three men yell. The goats sing.

  In a way she enjoys the absurdity of it, the way the absurdity grates on the nerves of these two young men who have been told their entire adult lives with great, solemn seriousness that theirs is the most consequential profession, the one so central to the keeping of evil from good that it requires its own parallel morality. To see men like that, their rifles slung limply over their shoulders, trying in vain to shoo away a herd of serene, singing goats, offers a small vent for her hatred. She wishes nothing else on these two soldiers but to spend the rest of their military lives doing exactly this.

  For ten minutes the soldiers and the shepherd wrangle the animals, until finally all are off the road and ambling uphill, away from the end of the bridge and the shoreline. Sweating and aggravated, Elias and Alexander walk back to the waiting truck.

  Vänna retreats from her lookout by the small metal window. She sits down on the floor, close to the rear doors. She kicks off her sandals and presses her knees close to her chest. She waits.

  Elias walks around the back of the truck and swings the doors open. A pair of feet meet him, the force knocking him to the ground. Before he realizes what’s happening, Vänna is out and running.

  Elias yells at her to stop and then yells at his brother for help, and quickly both Elias and Alexander are chasing Vänna. They close the gap and almost catch up with her when she jumps onto the stone barrier at the edge of the bridge. She stands there facing the soldiers, who stop dead in their tracks and raise their hands at her, pleading.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Elias says. “It’s fine—you can go home on your own if you like, just come down from there.”

  Behind and below her Vänna hears the sound of the waves. She imagines waves sound the same everywhere, this hush-swoop-hush, this tumbling respiration. The soldiers approach, inching forward, their arms outstretched toward her.

  “Don’t,” says Alexander. “Everything’s going to be all right, just don’t.”

  Vänna raises herself onto the balls of her feet. She lifts her arms up and outward and feels the breeze between her fingers. She leans back. The bridge turns to sky, the ground to air.

  How beautiful in their simplicity are the constituent parts of flight. This magic of endless falling that wraps itself around her, this way the body becomes a lightness and the lightness a world. It requires no trajectory, no destination, only a parcel of air and the willingness to never land.

  * * *

  —

  In the boathouse at the end of the island Amir and the colonel are alone. The boy, shuffling back in self-defense, stares wild-eyed at the officer.

  He looks the part, this brick of a man who is his hunter. In the old country all the soldiers Amir ever saw were either scrawny juveniles or plump and middle-aged. But this man—trim, broad, possessed of a physical dignity—looks the way soldiers look in the movies. Were this another life Amir might have observed the colonel not with abject fear but with awe, with admiration.

  Kethros paces the room, unhurried, unconcerned, as though the boy weren’t there at all. He runs his finger along one of the empty plywood tables, clearing a thin trail in the years-long accumulation of dust, his finger and the table making a whispering sound. He pulls on one of the meat hooks drilled into a nearby ceiling beam, th
e wood squealing under the weight. He breathes in the stale mothball air.

  And then he speaks, and when he does, the foreign language Amir expects to come from his lips is instead a perfect, flawless Arabic—not the stilted phonetics of foreigners who’ve learned from textbooks, not even the distant dialect of a different Arab country, but the exact accent of Amir’s country, his city, his people.

  “I know this place,” the colonel says.

  He sits down on a wooden chair, its reed-thatched back fraying. He takes off his military beret and tosses it on a nearby counter and not once does he acknowledge Amir, who huddles in the far corner of the room, not once does he look in the boy’s direction. Instead he studies the empty plywood tables.

  “We had a shipwreck here, when I was very young,” he says. “It was a fishing boat, it got caught out in a bad storm. It was a charity run—that means they were out catching fish for the monks up in the monasteries. Back then you were expected to do that at least once a month, alms of a sort. That’s why up to the mountain they’ve chiseled each of the fishermen’s names onto the side of a huge cloudstone plaque. No one reads them, but they’re there.

  “I remember the bodies started washing up on the shore and the municipality brought them here first. They were laid out side by side, maybe on these same tables. It was an ugly thing to see, all of them together like that. The dead deserve their space. But they had to put them somewhere until they could put them in the ground. I know you people bury your dead quickly. Maybe you’re afraid of them, or maybe they’re afraid of you. Here we take a little more time, a little more care.

  “We had an old man running the coroner’s office on the island back then, this British doctor who got his start sawing off limbs in the First World War and was pretty well deaf and blind by the time he got here. They brought him out to this boathouse, this makeshift morgue they’d set up, to play supervisor. We’ve always been good at that, deferring to these foreigners from the mainland.

  “This old man arrives, and what’s the first thing he does? He says he needs a dozen rolls of twine and twenty little bells, one for each of the dead. Everyone thinks that he’s gone crazy, but he’s supposed to know, so they do what he says. And when they bring him these things, he takes the twine and wraps one end around the big toe of the first corpse, then runs it to the next, and the next and the next, hanging a little bell on each line. Until he’s built this jangling spiderweb that connects all the corpses. Finally one of the medics works up the nerve to ask him why he’s done this, and the old man says it’s in case any of the sailors aren’t really dead. If one of them should move, he says, the bells will ring, and we’ll know right away.

  “I remember when my father told me that story, it made me so angry. Here’s this man who’s supposed to be a doctor, a learned man, whatever that means, and he’s worried about make-believe, he’s worried about ghosts.”

  Kethros stands up. He leans against the plywood table. He flicks a sliver of sawdust; it hangs for a moment in the air.

  “But that’s what I do now,” the colonel says. “That’s what I’ve been reduced to, chasing ghosts.”

  He approaches Amir, who backs away until he’s up against the room’s far wall. The colonel kneels down and brushes a black curl away from Amir’s eye. He opens the small bell-shaped locket around the boy’s neck, and looks from the faces within to the boy’s own face.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Amir.”

  “Amir, Amir,” the colonel repeats. “Amir of the believers, Amir of the apostles. Tell me, was that girl kind to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course she was,” the colonel says. “They all are. And what do you think the prerequisite for kindness is? Have you ever tried to be kind to someone better off than you?”

  Amir says nothing. In this closeness he can see the sweat beading on the colonel’s forehead, the tiny pouches of fat beneath his eyes, the silvering hairs along his temples, and each tiny detail, in its evidence of mortality, of hurrying age, scrapes away at the veneer of soldiering physique he observed from a distance.

  “Don’t worry,” the colonel says, patting the boy on the cheek. “I’m not your accuser. I don’t care what you are.”

  Kethros lifts himself back up, wincing as his knee unbends. At a nearby sink he washes the dust off his hands. A distant rumbling sound comes in through the open windows, mingling with the sound of the sea.

  “But you should know what you are,” he says. “You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief. They will march the streets on your behalf, they will write to politicians on your behalf, they will cry on your behalf, but you are to them in the end nothing but a hook on which to hang the best possible image of themselves. Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.”

  Amir eyes the cabin’s front door, wide open, the cliffside and the forest visible just a few hundred feet away.

  “Hate me all you want, but at least to me you exist,” the colonel says. “To me you’ve never stopped existing.”

  Amir springs up. He runs for the door. He makes it halfway across the room before he feels the neck of his shirt pulled back to choke him, the stopping force so great he is for a second lifted clean off his feet.

  “No,” the colonel says. He drags Amir backward, grips him by the neck, pushes him against the back wall. “No more.”

  Amir screams. He kicks at the colonel, he thrashes and claws, but is easily subdued.

  “I’m going to take you back to the camp, where you’ll be fingerprinted and entered into the system,” the colonel says, unaware of the shadow building in the doorway behind him. “We will do this properly, like civilized people. We will have good form.”

  The colonel feels a small displacement of air, a gray sliver moving in the farthest periphery of his vision, and upon turning is too late to defend himself against the spade that collides with the side of his head.

  Colonel Kethros falls, his grip on Amir coming loose. On the ground, unmoving, he reveals to the boy the sight of Vänna Hermes, soaked and bloodied, a gash open across her left cheek. She tosses the spade on the ground.

  “Yallah, Zaytoon,” she says.

  They race hand in hand down the cliffside staircase that leads from the boathouse to the dock. There’s no time; one way or another, the soldiers will come for them again. The island is too small—there’s no life to be had here. They don’t stop running until they reach the final piling where an unmarked powerboat is anchored. An old man climbs down from the bridge. He inspects them both, frowning.

  “Where will you take him?” Vänna says, and upon hearing her flawless command of the language, the ferryman remembers what Madame El Ward told him—he is to take only one migrant; the girl is not a foreigner.

  “There’s a community near the port,” he says. “His people, they take care of their own. Do you know his sect, his ancestry, his hometown?”

  “No,” Vänna replies.

  “They’ll help him anyway; they’re not going to turn their backs on a little boy all alone. But it’s better if…you know.”

  “He’s not alone,” Vänna says, and before the old man can protest she is pulling on the anchoring rope, the boat sliding closer. Gently she guides Amir onto the deck, and then she follows.

  “I don’t do locals,” the ferryman says. “I don’t want trouble—we have to keep this quiet.”

  “I’m not local,” the girl replies. “I’m not anything. Let’s go—there’s Ministry people who know we’re here and if they catch you, I think you know how this will end.”

  The ferryman looks up at the cliffside. “Please,” he says feebly. “He’s not your problem.”

  “That’s right,” Vänna replies.

  * * *

  —

  They set s
ail. In time the sea unparts and the mainland appears on the horizon, the roar and rumble of the ports, a floating jam of cruise ships and tankers, the city so dense its low white buildings seem to shove one another into the sea. Amir stands on the deck, the wind crisp against his skin. He stares out at the dawning metropolis, its awful bigness.

  He holds his friend’s hand. He waits on home.

  Chapter Thirty

  Now

  The sunheads whistle. A northward breeze sets the sleep-gum leaves to dancing. From upland the cliffside restaurant fills the air with the smell of charred lamb and rosemary. The hotel house band plays on the patio, songs the middle-aged tourists remember from their youth. A shipping magnate, drunk on the day of his sixtieth, tosses a Champagne flute off the edge of the cliff and buys everyone a round.

  They come here for what is tranquil, what is undisturbed. They come to visit the mountainside monasteries and the ancient ruins, to hunt for a nest of copper arrowheads or a poem chiseled into stone or perhaps even the remains of the island’s ancient dead themselves. They come to see time autopsied, to marvel from the safety of the present at the endlessly dying past.

  But more than anything, they come for the sea. They come to bathe in the glass-clear tide and run squealing from the harmless surf and watch at sunset as the water takes on a low fire. In a way the sea makes them children again, returns them to a time when the world was an unbounded thing, made only to be immersed in, made only for joy.

  A newlywed couple slip off their shoes and start a stumbling conga line; an old woman at the bar claps along. A moment later the hotel’s duty manager takes the microphone from the house-band singer and informs the tourists that in another hour the beach will reopen. A cheer rises from the crowd; the day isn’t lost.