The good deed, p.18
The Good Deed, page 18
I did everything I could to shield Dunia from what was happening around us: the women gagged, hooded, and dragged out in the black of night, the children terrified and kicking in the traffickers’ arms. I tucked her away in a far corner on a pile of straw and told her the fairy tales her father used to whisper to my belly when she was still inside my womb, sang her the songs Mother used to sing, taught her to write numbers and letters with her finger on my palm. Kareem helped me once he had recovered from his beating; a twenty-year-old with a moon face and round, shocked eyes, who had deserted Assad’s army so that he would no longer have to kill. He told her more of the riddles she loved, invented games that made her laugh. After all, he was barely out of childhood himself.
Kareem is in this camp now. But he has not come to find me.
“Mama, why are we here?” Dunia kept asking, huddling up against my side. “Why are we living in the dark like potatoes? And where are Teta and Majid and Hazem and the lady who likes riddles?”
Where indeed?
Every so often the traffickers would rouse us in the middle of the night, hurry us into a van or truck, and drive us to another basement, storeroom, or barn. But in the end, it was always the same. The dark and hunger. The fear and disappearing women. The stink and chains and locked door. And all the while, Haider screening me like a wall.
Perhaps I’m naïve, because it took me many days to recognize the brutality that lurked beneath his veneer of kindness. Rather, I felt sorry for him, thanks to the tales he told me of his past, the most pitiful of which was unrequited love.
“Her name was Yasmin,” he whispered one night in our basement cell, “a girl who lived two houses down from my family, with a laugh like the tinkling of bells. From the age of ten I yearned for her, built dreams of our marriage, our lovemaking, our future. For year after year, I pined.”
Even then I thought that Haider suffered from an excess of romanticism and self-pity, but I couldn’t help but feel for the boy he had been.
“I struggled long and hard to find the courage to confess my feelings for Yasmin to my father and persuade him to help me by asking for her hand,” Haider continued. “I was mortally afraid he would mock me or refuse me flat, for even by the age of twelve, I was already overlarge, with the muscles of a grown man, legs like stilts, and a face nobody liked to look at for long. But I was also the most intelligent boy in my school and had the personality of a leader. I believed that if only my precious love’s parents would allow me a moment alone with her, my wit, height, and precocious strength would win her for my bride. All I had to do was wait until I turned thirteen.
“The morning of that birthday, I chose my best shirt and freshest trousers, combed and oiled my hair, shaved—yes, even then I needed to shave—and practiced my confession in the mirror so I would sound neither like a pleading child nor a braggart. Trembling and sweating, I knocked on my father’s study door. He ran his eyes over me when I entered, leaning back from his desk. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said. ‘You look as if you’ve swallowed a cockroach.’
“‘Baba.’ I admit my voice squeaked. ‘Baba, I wish you to ask Yasmin’s father for her hand in marriage. I love her.’
“‘You’re ridiculous. Go away.’
“‘But Baba, Yasmin is virtuous, her parents are no less rich than we are, and her father’s a judge.’
“‘It is not her qualities I’m worried about.’
“Over the next two years, I begged with him again and again to ask for Yasmin’s hand, meanwhile finding any excuse I could to hover about her house, trying to catch her eye, certain that her inability to notice me was a manifestation of her purity. I left her presents, I left my father presents, I left her parents presents. I dreamt, I sighed, I groaned. No other girl was visible.
“Finally, when I was fifteen, my father relented, although his face was grim. ‘You should have set your sights lower.’ And with these ominous words he put on his visiting clothes and knocked on their door.
“He returned twenty minutes later, cheeks flaming, walked up to me and slapped my face.”
Yes, it took time for me to understand that this and all the other stories Haider told me were designed to seduce my sympathies and blind me to his malevolence, just as it took me time to recognize that he must have paid the traffickers to let him keep me for himself. Yet, even once I’d realized all this, I felt powerless to do anything about it. I wanted desperately to tell him to leave me alone, that I could look after myself, as I had ever since my husband Hassan had been killed. But I knew that, in reality, I could do no such thing. Not while we were under the traffickers’ control, not with Dunia to keep safe, and not while I felt that you, Allah, had deserted me. So I let Haider guard us, and when he began to speak as if he owned me, I hid my humiliation and smiled.
The others thought me his mistress. He told them as much—I heard him—and because he had the shoulders and hands of a giant, they found it safer to believe than challenge him. He told them worse things about me, too: that I’d persuaded him to protect me and Dunia at the sacrifice of the other women and children, attributing his own arguments to me, and that I’d offered my body as payment. With these lies, he ensured that if I ever reached out to our remaining companions to help me escape him, they would look at me and spit.
Kareem was the only one among them who knew the truth. He knew I despised Haider and would never make such a devil’s bargain. And he knew I was determined to be true to the memory of Hassan. The only reason Haider didn’t force himself on me was because Kareem was always watching. Even Haider couldn’t rape under Kareem’s haunted eyes.
The night of our release didn’t arrive until we had been living like vermin underground for five months, by which time only seven of our original number remained: the three men, Dunia and myself, and a pair of women too old to sell, Oum Aziz, a stringy widow of sixty, who, like me, had been separated from her family on the beach; and Oum Mahmud, an apple-faced grandmother of ten who refused to explain how she had ended up alone. But come our release did, the traffickers presumably eager to get rid of us now that they’d taken all they could. “Out!” they shouted, bursting into our basement without warning. “We’ve found you a boat! No talking!”
“They’re making us go out in this?” wailed Oum Aziz, for the wind was screaming through the trees and the clouds were so thick not a star could be seen—a night the traffickers had no doubt chosen because they knew the police and coast guard would stay safely ashore. “But they’re sending us to our doom!”
“Better that than one more hour in this living grave,” Kareem muttered. I was only grateful that the traffickers hadn’t chosen to murder us with guns rather than the sea.
They drove us to a beach in the dark, just as they had the night I lost Mother and my brothers, where they forced us with some eighty-three other people into a rubber dinghy meant for twenty. Dunia still had her pink backpack, the dresses my mother had made her wear, and the life jacket I’d bought for her before we were kidnapped on the beach. I had nothing.
Cries and shouts, bags lost in the dark, children shrieking, screams and rough commands. A lurch, a drenching wave, and out we were launched into the storm, our boat lying so low in the water that the sea’s surface glistened only a finger’s length from where we sat. The boat jumped and tumbled over the waves, thunder exploding in the distance, the wind knocking into us like a charging bull. We seized hold of one another and fell into a heap, desperately trying to keep from pitching overboard.
I looked around for the smuggler who was steering the outboard motor in the back, thinking to implore him to be more careful, but he’d vanished. Instead, one of the passengers had hold of it, looking as terrified as I felt myself.
With clouds covering the moon, we couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began, so had to rely on people who owned working phones to find which way to go. We dipped and rolled and bucked and dipped again, the waves stampeding around us, leaving us soaked and quaking. Up and down we went, the rubber twisting and flapping until, with a great crack, the flimsy plywood plank that made the floor splintered in two, causing the boat to fold in the middle and spring back up, spewing water bottles, telephones and luggage overboard, the passengers screaming. Holding Dunia tightly to my chest, I clung to a rope attached to the boat’s edge. Haider laid his enormous body over us, his weight saving and suffocating us at the same time.
On we heaved through the night, people vomiting and crying out your name, Allah, all of us in terror for our lives. Only after we had endured this for some three or four hours did the storm calm at long last and the wind die down, our nerves and stomachs settling with it. The clouds parted to allow a glimpse of stars. Kareem gave Dunia his remaining bread. I gave her my drinking water, my thirst so fierce I felt delirious, even as I was soaked and shivering, as if my head were in a desert and my body in snow.
Just as the quieter waters were beginning to soothe our spirits and raise our hopes of a safe landing, it happened. I don’t know why. Perhaps two waves converging on us from opposite directions. Perhaps a razor-finned fish. Perhaps merely our collective weight overwhelming the dinghy’s flimsiness. But with no warning at all, something made the boat snap in half like a cracker, deflate, and sink.
“Dunia!” I screamed, clutching her to me as we plunged into the black water. Realizing I was dragging her down with me as I sank, I let go and she bobbed up again, gagging and spluttering. Kareem reached for her too, managing to grasp a strap on her life jacket and thrust it at me.
“Mama! Mama!” Her voice as faint as a kitten’s mewl against the wind, her face already invisible in the dark.
I flailed and kicked to stay afloat, looking for something to hold onto—to hold her to—while others gasped and choked and floundered around me; none of us able to swim. I saw the life jacket of one young man fill with water and drag him under; a ring of death around his neck. I saw a woman reach for her little son and sink just as she touched him.
“Take this.” Haider thrust an oar in my direction. Gripping the strap of Dunia’s life jacket with one hand, I clung to the oar as best I could with the other. But just at that moment, a huge wave ripped Dunia out of my grasp and spun her away.
“Dunia!” I screamed. “Dunia!”
Kareem called her too, thrashing through the water to try to catch her. But we could no longer see or even hear her, not even the faintest cry. The sea had whirled her out of sight, its thunder deafening us, its salt blinding. All we could do was shout her name into the darkness, our voices as ineffectual as if we were whispering into the throat of a lion.
Now I move through this camp as if I’ve been struck blind, caught halfway between the living and the dead. And all the while Haider watches my every move, trails my every footstep, hissing at me as I pass. “You belong to me. You owe me your life. And if you refuse me, I’ll find a way to make you pay.”
I don’t belong to you or any man, I tell him. Leave me alone or I’ll report you to the police! I’m not afraid of you!
But, of course, Allah, I am.
25
NAFISA
How content I have grown up here on my mountain, the soil beneath me as soft as any feather bed, the grass a fragrant pillow. Why my sisters have not found me, I don’t know, but in truth, I no longer much care. I can look after myself. When I need nourishment, I make my way down to the town for supplies. When I need shelter from the wind and rain, I have my rock, my bush, and my umbrella. Otherwise, I am happy to spend my time watching the stars and waiting for the day when I can leave this place, Amal, and find you.
I’m getting to know the animals up here—they keep me entertained. The drab little nightingale who serenades me to sleep every night from a nearby pine, boasting of romantic conquests and territorial triumphs. The scorpions like tiny dragons, spearing their enemies with lethal accuracy. The Samos jays in their bold blues and reds, wagging their patchwork tails as they tell me of their quarrels. The blackbirds who study me sideways before bursting into their jubilant songs. The golden jackals with their sail-like ears and delicate fox faces, wailing together at dusk like heartbroken women.
Do you remember the rook you kept in Sofia, my love? The one who grew to know and guard you? Every day she would perch on the windowsill and wait for you to come home from school, when you would feed her the sesame seeds and pine nuts you had picked off the crusts of our bread while she eyed you with her head cocked, just as the blackbirds eye me here. She came when you were seven and stayed until the winter you turned eleven. You cried through the night when she disappeared.
I wonder how you are faring, my sweet. May the spirits of your brothers and sisters watch over you, and the spirit of Osman, too. I only hope that their strength is enough to help you withstand what I did to you.
When we find each other again, my daughter, I pray that you will have relinquished your anger at me as Amina is relinquishing hers at her mother. Love, after all, is stronger than anger. I pray, too, that your tears over my abandonment were not as anguished as mine were at leaving you. But if they were, my Amal, if I made you suffer as much as I fear, I swear that when we meet again, I shall beg your forgiveness, unravel all the hurt I have caused until you are soothed, and with the grace of Allah, stay and protect you for the rest of my life.
26
AMINA
Farah refuses to leave our metal box. I try to drag her out, tell her she needs fresh air and sunshine to keep up her health, but she only pushes me away without a word. I’ve given her my bed and now sleep above her, the boys squeezed into the narrow bunk over their mother, but she only lies all day with her face pressed into her pillow. Not even Leila can get her to move.
Leila is trying to be stalwart through all this, although I hear her praying when she thinks I can’t, and the prayer is always the same: “Merciful Allah, I am ever grateful for the return of my daughter. But why, after all we have suffered, did you have to take our Dunia away?”
Even the boys refuse to be distracted. “Where’s Dunia?” Majid keeps asking, his little point of a face crumpling with worry. “Isn’t she ever coming?” says Hazem, staring at Farah in fright. None of us has an answer.
One, two, three days pass like this, empty of news, each of us unwillingly but helplessly relinquishing our hopes for Dunia. And every one of these days, Sadek and I wait for hours at the Frontex, UNHCR, police, and information windows over and over to ask if she has been found, even though we never learn anything new. It has reached the point where as soon as the officials see us coming, they close their windows in our faces.
“Amina?” Leila whispers to me on the third morning, holding me back before I can join Sadek outside. “I need to ask you a question.”
I look at her.
Her cheeks flush inside her tight black hijab. “I don’t want you to think that Farah and I aren’t grateful for Sadek’s help. But be careful, little one. He seems a decent young man, but what do we really know of him?”
I know he grew up in Raqqa, Auntie, and that he was at Damascus University before the war interrupted. He’s a good person, I swear.
“But we don’t know anybody from Raqqa, Amina, so how can we tell if this is true? We don’t even know who his family is. Remember, it’s not only your reputation at stake here but ours, and people are already whispering.”
I trust him, Auntie, I reply, trying not to get angry, so you should too. And who cares what other people say?
But her gaze has already wandered back to Farah.
“Little hedgehog,” Sadek said to me only yesterday, resting his kind eyes on mine. “You are the light of my heart.”
And you, Sadek, I replied, looking back up at him, are the light of mine.
On the fourth day of this no-news, I’m startled out of an uneasy sleep at dawn by the sound of him calling from outside our metal box. “Amina! Farah! Quick, come!”
Jumping down from my bunk, I run to open the door a crack, while Farah and Leila cover themselves hastily and follow. Shush, Sadek, I whisper, you’ll wake everybody up. What is it?
“They’ve found a child!” He waves his long arms around, too excited to lower his voice at all. “A little girl saved from the sea! I overheard the camp manager talking about it. The girl was rescued the morning your boat capsized, Farah. She must be Dunia!”
At this, Farah lets out such a shriek that she rouses not only everyone near us, but all the rest of our neighbors, too. “Alhamdulillah!” Farah cries. “Where is she? Is she all right? Is she safe? Take me to her now!”
We dress quickly and rush with Sadek through the metal boxes and tents, litter and laundry, Farah striding in front of us, her head held high for the first time since she arrived.
When we reach the police office window, we are told, of course, to wait. So wait we do. For ten minutes, thirty, forty—for most of an hour we wait, while the policeman inside chats to someone behind him, browses through his cell phone, fiddles with papers, and sips his coffee. Farah tears at her fingernails with her teeth and walks in ever-tighter circles. Hazem sits on the ground and picks a scab on his knee. Majid pulls at his ears. Leila and I glare at the police officer, swatting away the flies feasting on our faces and necks. And Sadek tries and fails to get his attention.
At long last, the officer pushes away his cup and leans into the window. “What do you want?” he asks in English. It’s all I can do not to spit in his eyes.
