The good deed, p.4
The Good Deed, page 4
On the hot days, she would jump off the side of the boat, my fearless tadpole, her tender limbs disappearing beneath the surface while my heart leapt under my tongue and lay there, quivering. “Come back!” I would call. “Come back!”
The day Jaques stopped visiting, not long after Linnette turned six, she blamed me. “You should have been nicer to him, Granny.” She pursed her little mouth in condemnation.
“I was nice to him.”
“No, you weren’t. You always looked bored when he talked. That’s why he liked me better than you.”
He did, it was true. And yes, I was bored.
We got over it, Linnette and I, although it was harder for her. She moped. She snapped. She climbed the red ladder to her room and stayed there for hours, reading book after book in her precocious way, playing her electronic games, or scribbling misspelled, furious secrets in her little diary, which of course I snooped through while she was playing outside. “Granny made Jak go way. I luv Granny, but sumtimes she’s a grump. I luv Mommy and Daddy to. I mis them.”
Her nest of a room. The stuffed animals arranged according to color, a chronogram of black to yellow marching along the shelf. Her books of fairytales and intrepid adventuresses. Her jars of sea glass and shells. Her sleek little bathing suits, baskets of hair bands, resolute refusal to own a doll or wear a dress—she hated anything with a frill. Her fierce little diary.
I open my eyes, lost over where I am. Floating on my back in the sea, thinking the thoughts that are forbidden.
4
LEILA
Hellenic Boat Report
June 22, at 6:23 AM
Three boats arrived on Samos this morning, carrying 166 people: 18 women, 12 children, 136 men.
So far today, 8 boats have been stopped by the Turkish Coast Guard; 405 people have been arrested.
Dropping my cell phone into the worn pocket of my galabeya, I gaze down at my luckless sons standing beside me. What childhoods I might have given you, my loves, had you not come into the world when you did. Hazem, you could be playing your beloved football in parks and streets, rather than having to make do with kicking pebbles against a fence. Majid, born with the voice of a songbird, you could be taking singing lessons with your friends instead of rubbing your ears and straining to hear. You would both have a father and uncles instead of a family of widows. You would both be in school, learning history and mathematics, penmanship and geography—learning to think.
Such ordinary things for a mother to give her children. Such ordinary things now out of my reach.
Yalla, I say to them quietly, let’s go look for your sister and Dunia. And grasping their hands, small and fragile as sparrows, I pull them the few meters over to the cage by the camp police station to search for those eighteen women and twelve children who arrived today amongst the hundred and thirty-six men.
Many other camp dwellers are here to look for their lost ones, too, jostling one another as they push forward to the cage, each murmuring names, not daring to shout for fear of the police: “Maria, Ahmed, Miriam.” The names tangle like the words of dreamers. “Hakim, Rifan, Hossein, Liliane, Azita.”
Farah, Dunia, I chant with them, as if reciting a prayer. Farah, Dunia.
“Farah, Dunia,” my boys echo, their voices tiny.
But nobody amongst those eighteen rescued women is Farah. And not one of those twelve children is Dunia. There are only hundreds of frightened, bewildered strangers locked inside the cage and a group of angry police officers outside, shouting at us to go away.
The disappointment drops through me like a stone.
“Why aren’t they ever here, Mama?” Hazem asks, Majid watching us with a knot of incomprehension on his brow. “Aren’t they ever going to come?”
I crouch down and gather my boys close, these boys who have lost too much already.
Don’t worry, my loves, I tell them, your sister and Dunia will come, insh’Allah.
And only when I say this do I believe it to be true. They will come.
5
NAFISA
For thirteen months now I have lived in this coffin of a tent, squeezed between one shipping container and the next like a beetle between bricks. The keepers of this place put me here, I assume, because they see me as old and without power. But I am not old, only withered before my time. And I am not without power. I am hiding.
I am able to escape, though, at least when the moon is no more than a curl in the sky and I can wrap the dark about me like a cloak. Rising quietly so as not to disturb my neighbors, I weave up the hill, past the other tents and shipping containers, the towering lights that stare down at us like great angry eyes, and slip through a hole in the fence at the top. There, I climb high above the camp, far out of reach of the town and the keepers, and further than I ever go with Amina and Leila, until I find a quiet spot and a soft patch of pine needles and herbs on which to make my bed.
All night I lie swaddled in the perfumes of resin and sage, searching for you, Amal, in the sky. I trace the invisible lines from star to star until I find you etched throughout the heavens. And there, with you dancing above me, I am content.
You were never a child I was supposed to love as I do, little heart, and I knew what it was to love a child because I gave birth to four before you. Osman, the father you never had, welcomed each of your brothers and sisters into the world with song and celebration, as he would have welcomed you. Osman, a boy to my girl when we married, childhood heartsweets, whose faith in me was as steadfast as the earth beneath our feet. I search for him in the night sky, too, but can never find him.
When two people have loved each other ever since they were children, as he and I did, it is hard to point to the moment when we slipped from innocence to passion. I only know that I had always counted the minutes until I would catch sight of him walking by, or hear his voice calling me from outside, when my heart would pick up, jump and cartwheel until my cheeks burned and my chest cramped. What a smile he had, so kind it hugged the world. What eyes, shining with a pleasure that could warm a room. What arms, able to hold the whole of me, and I am not small. What a voice, deep and soft like the wind in the night. We could not keep from loving each other until our parents said, enough, marry and marry now. We were fifteen.
I tell you this under the stars, Amal, or I tell it to Amina and Leila under our olive tree. I do not always remember which.
We owned a little farm in the southeastern state of Blue Nile, Osman and I, bequeathed to us on our marriage by my grandfather, the village chief. There, we raised a small herd of cows for milk and breeding, and cultivated vegetables and groundnuts, sunflowers and sesame to sell in the market, our children helping us however they could. Faisal, your eldest brother and our firstborn, tended the vegetable garden. I can see his serious little body now, crouched intently over the small patch of okra we had taught him how to grow, his head bowed, his small hands busy at the weeds, the knobs of his knees scuffed but sturdy. Faisal was my helpmeet, my twenty-sixth rib, the little man-boy by my side.
Your sisters, Yusra and Aisha, had the job of guarding the cows, crying if we had to sell one, refusing to speak to us when one of them died. Yusra was a born commander, with a fierce motherly instinct and a tendency to order her siblings around, even her big brother. By the time she was six, I could already imagine her taking over the family, running the village, keeping everyone in line.
Aisha did everything Yusra did, a cuddly butterball of a child who cried and loved easily and deeply, and who, had God graced her with a long life, would have been adored by her family, her village and her own children, as she would have adored them.
And then the littlest one, Amir, who suckled eagerly at my breast from the instant of his birth, grew fat and round, and smiled earlier than any of his siblings.
And you, Amal, with your spark and determination, your loud laugh, athletic limbs, grace, and kindness. Had you been born among us, you, too, would have been loved by us all.
Osman and I spent our days on our little farm digging wells, mending walls, ploughing and planting. Irrigating when our river swelled, conserving when it shrank. Faisal went to the village school once he was old enough, while we put the younger ones in care of my mother until her death, and then in the care of Samiya, my dearest friend. In short, we lived as our neighbors lived, laughing, crying, working, quarreling, watching our children grow, and trying to pretend that we were not afraid.
Our fears were rooted in the hidden wealth of our nation, and this I want you to understand. For beneath the hardscrabble surface of Sudan, the earth is rich with gold, oil, chromium, and graphite, and so has been plagued by plunderers for decades, the forces of greed and imperialism rending brother from brother until he kills, son from mother until he rapes, while opportunists seize and cling to power as long as they can. It is not always a blessing to live atop riches.
And so it was that only eleven months after Amir was born, the second civil war of my lifetime erupted and our murderous dictator of a president, Omar al-Basheer, sent his forces to our village to slaughter anyone he saw as a threat.
The first set of soldiers stormed in without warning, eyes filmed over like those of the dead, bodies in ill-fitting camouflage, faces wrapped in khaki hoods, as if already shrouded for the grave. Samiya flew up the road to us screaming, “They’re killing all the boys! Run!”
Osman seized ten-year-old Faisal by the hand, plucked up little Amir, his stomach as round as a coconut, my milk still wet upon his lips, and run they did. “Umi!” I heard Faisal cry as they disappeared into our sunflower field. “Why?”
The second set of soldiers, five of them, same uniforms, same hoods, arrived at my house a few minutes later. Guns to my daughters’ heads, orders to me. “Strip or we shoot.”
They made your sisters watch. Four-year-old Aisha sucking her blanket, Yusra clutching her hand like the little mother she was. The soldiers held them by the ears and hit their heads with the butts of their rifles if they closed their eyes for even a second or voiced so much as a whimper. Those two warm little heads.
Then, through the terror and pain and stink, I heard it. Three bursts of gunfire from out in the fields.
One.
Two.
Three.
The soldiers laughed and bared their teeth. “That’s what you get for resisting us,” they jeered, yanking up their trousers as they left. Who had resisted and how, they never explained.
“They never do,” Amina mutters, or I think she does.
“They never have to,” Leila adds. “Oh, my dear sister.”
As soon as I could move, I struggled up, bloodied and filthy and dazed with shock, and pulled on my clothes. “Come,” I just managed to say to your sisters, the two of them standing as still as sticks, eyes pinned wide. “Let’s find your father and brothers.”
Find them we did, lying in our sunflower field; Osman had not managed to run far. He, Amir and Faisal heaped on top of one another like sacks of refuse, the wheeling shadows of vultures crisscrossing their bodies, flies drinking from their lips. Osman’s arms were flung out as though trying to snatch our children from death. Faisal’s mouth hung open, his last question forever unanswered.
Amir’s baby feet, so round and soft, lay still as they had never before, even in my womb.
“Umi, why doesn’t Baba talk?” Aisha whispered. Yusra hid her head in my skirt.
Six of my surviving neighbors helped me lift the heavy body of Osman and the too-light one of Faisal onto boards and carry them to the graveyard, while I stumbled after them with tiny Amir shrouded and stiffening in my arms. There, we joined the other new widows of the village burying their own husbands and sons, brothers and fathers, after which we held one another and screamed.
“Were no men or boys left at all, not even the newborns?” Amina asks. She squints at me against the sun and draws her legs to her chest; a little egg of a teenager with the face of a prisoner.
No. Not one.
A third group of soldiers came next, the murahaleen, another militia working for Basheer, only even more ruthless. Seven men this time, or rather boys, the eldest not even fully grown. The same eyes of death beneath their masks. Same brutal instructions to me. I fell unconscious.
When I awoke some time later, ripped open and ragged, the murahaleen were gone. But my daughters lay splayed beside me. Each shot through the temple.
I stared at their little bodies flung across the ground, their eyes open but blind, and could neither scream nor weep. My tears had dried to gravel, my voice to a stone, my prayers to dust. I could only gather my babies into my lap. Cradle Yusra’s torn, tender head. Count Aisha’s baby fingers. Brush the soil from their round, scuffed knees. And with my voiceless voice, I cursed every soldier on earth, every man who has hurt a woman or a child, every boy who has killed or raped, and swore to wreak my revenge.
“Revenge, like water washing out a wound,” Amina spits when I say this, her eyes burning. How her spirit reminds me of yours, Amal, so fierce and determined.
Leila shakes her head, adjusting her soft body on her log. “Vengeance only triggers more vengeance. When will it be enough?”
Vengeance or justice, I reply, what’s the difference?
A day later, or perhaps two, Samiya and four other women came to fetch me, each of whom had been treated as I was. They found me sitting on the floor of my house, my dead daughters still in my lap, my thighs still stained with gore, our bodies crawling with flies. The women gently pried Yusra and Aisha from me, lifted them into their arms and coaxed me upright, leading me again to the burial grounds, which had now grown larger than our village. There, we laid our murdered daughters beside their brothers and fathers, uncles and grandfathers; washed and stopped up our torn vaginas with rags; gathered what belongings we could balance on our heads in baskets and bundles; and joined the thousands of others fleeing Sudan for Ethiopia.
We walked all and every day on that journey, Amal, thirty, forty kilometers at a time. Blistered feet, swollen ankles, knees crying at every step, backs throbbing, necks aching. We washed in rivers and slept in the bush, rotated as lookouts for animals and men, and took what food we could find—sometimes as gifts from villagers, sometimes by scavenging from fields and trees. Samiya remained my companion throughout, a woman with the same strength that had graced little Yusra. And on the days I felt so crushed by grief that I wanted only to lie down and die, Samiya was always the one to stop me. “If you leave this earth, Nafisa,” she would say, “your memories will leave with you and Osman and your children will be wiped from the world forever.” So on I would stumble, trudging the dusty roads of history, as so many women have before me, faces drawn, feet cracked, bodies reduced to sinew and bone, eyes emptied of hope. Rivers of women running.
We ran for three weeks, my companions and I, many of us lost to murder, abductions or exhaustion on the way, until we finally reached the Ethiopian border. There, we threw ourselves on the mercy of the police, who packed us into huge, rattling buses and drove us south for hours, until we reached a place unlike any I had ever seen. It was called Fugnido and housed thirty thousand refugees, white tents and rickety shacks stretching over the barren land all the way to the horizon, the air dense with the same stench of sewage, loss, and sorrow that I and my sisters breathe here on Samos.
If only these memories would slip away from me as the sea below the camp here slips from the shore. If only it were so easy.
It was at Fugnido that I discovered I was carrying you. “Abort,” the other women hissed, “or smother it at birth.” And often they did just that with their own children of rape, creeping into the night with a bundle, returning with none. But I knew that you were not to blame, just as I knew that your face would never remind me of your father because I did not know which of my attackers your father was. I also knew that those very murderers who had tried to take everything from me had left me this greatest gift instead: you. And so when you were born, I named you Amal: one who gives hope.
After your birth, those same people in the camp who had advised me to abort ostracized us—me for keeping you and you for your anonymous fathers. But I was impervious because the spirits of my murdered children had already told me that they loved you, their littlest sister, and that I was to do you no harm. Osman, too, came to me in a dream and gave us his blessing. “I will look over her,” he promised. “I will love her as my own.”
This is how I know that you will always have an invisible chorus of the dead looking over you, Amal, gracing you with all the life of which they were robbed. Faisal gave you his loving heart, Yusra her protectiveness, Aisha her bubbling laugh, and little Amir his future.
Yet now, as I sit up here on the mountainside listening to Amina with her bitter history and longing for her mother; to Leila with her missing daughter and granddaughter and counts of the drowned, I wonder if I have burdened you with more than you can bear. The weight of war and death is heavy enough on our adult heads. Why, I ask myself now, did I ever expect one as little and fragile as you to carry for me all my memories, all my ghosts?
6
HILMA
The man who runs my favorite stationery store in Vathi is a chatty little fellow with a point of brown beard who reminds me of an elf. I drive there this morning in my rented Fiat, green as a pea and not much bigger, both to enjoy his company and to buy a hiking map and a second batch of ballpoint pens. Mine keep running out of ink, perhaps because of all the writing I’m doing here, this obsessive recording of my days, whether to offer a confession or a plea for forgiveness after all, I’m not sure.
