No Safe Place (4 page)

One hand released, and the boat began to right itself.

Rosalia picked up the other oar, and she and Cheslav whacked at the other hand until it was smashed and bloody. Abdul, his hands clutching Rosalia and Cheslav so he wouldn't fall over, kicked at the smuggler's head, smashing his nose, and pushed him away from the side of the boat. The oars pushed him farther away, and the waves did the rest.

It was barely a minute before the sea sucked away his screams and curses.

The migrants sat back down on the benches. No one spoke. The boy passed in and out of consciousness, and the Uzbek who had saved him shivered and shook in his wet clothes.

The rain came down and the waves carried the boat this way and that. Abdul could not get the motor re-started. The others tried, but they also had no luck. Without the motor, the rudder was useless.

The migrants huddled together so they could share what little warmth they had. They bailed out the boat with their cupped hands and scanned the sky for any signs of daylight.

Abdul was sure that every slap of a wave against the hull was the slap of the smuggler, caught up with them and ready for vengeance in the cold, dark night.

Abdul was tired of huddling in the house.

Bit by bit, he headed toward the door, trying to be invisible. It wasn't easy. Not only did he have the handle of his guitar case tight in his hand, but there were wall-to-wall relatives packed into his parents' small house.

He'd been cooped up with them for more than two weeks while the earth shook and the sirens shrieked and Baghdad went up in flames. He'd tried his best to do the extra work his mother asked of him — the extra work brought on by all the people seeking refuge in their house because they thought it was in a safe neighborhood. He hadn't even complained — well, not too much — when his older cousins and brothers had gone out with the men to find supplies and he was kept at home by his mother, even though he was eleven and hardly a child.

But today was Wednesday. He'd already missed two Wednesdays with his guitar teacher, and he was not going to miss a third. All he needed to do was make it through the door.

It helped that the glass in the windows had been shattered by the explosions. The family had covered the windowpanes with flattened cardboard boxes and sheets of newspaper. It made the house darker than it would normally be. And since most of the bombs fell at night, people slept during the day. Abdul could see several sleeping relatives in each room he passed. He also had to be careful of his mother's paintings, taken down and stacked against the walls so they wouldn't be damaged when the house shook.

Holding his guitar carefully so it wouldn't knock into something and make noise, Abdul went step by step toward the door. He even held his breath.

From the back kitchen came the voices of his mother and her two sisters having a discussion about how many meals they could get out of the remaining flour and oil. With every second Abdul expected to be called on to fetch something or clean something.

But he made it to the door, then through it. He even managed to close the door behind him.

The small concrete yard was empty in the heat of the day, so Abdul had no problem crossing it and letting himself out through the high metal fence that separated their house from the street.

He stepped out into a city he didn't recognize.

It was as though God had picked up the world, shaken it madly, then let it fall through His fingers and scatter on the ground.

The men in his family should have prepared him. He should have been allowed to stay in the room when his brothers and older cousins came back with supplies and talked about the world outside. He should not have been sent out with the younger children.

The houses immediately around Abdul's house all had pieces missing. One had a huge hole in the roof. Another had a hole in the wall. Another had collapsed altogether. There were big chunks of cement and glass everywhere.

Abdul headed off in the direction of his teacher's street. He passed a home that had the whole front wall blasted away. Abdul could look into the open rooms. He saw an old man and woman sitting in the remains of their kitchen, looking at their hands.

He kept walking, the guitar bumping gently against his legs. The more he walked, the more rubble there was. He saw buildings that were still smoking and cars that were smashed and broken. He almost stepped on the body of a man that was badly burned, the mouth still open in its final scream.

Some neighborhoods were crowded with people scrambling through the wreckage, calling out to each other when they found food or a body. Others were trying to make crude repairs, shoring up their broken houses to get ready for the bombs to fall again.

When he got to his teacher's house, all that was left were hunks of concrete with steel rods sticking out of them like bones out of the remains of a fish. None of it was recognizable as walls or a roof.

Abdul could see the blue of the curtains — just a scrap — peeking out beneath the remains of a cookstove.

He called out his teacher's name.

“Bashar!”

There was no answer.

He called out the names of his teacher's family members – his wife, Maryam, his sons, Mohammed and Samir, and his little daughter, Fatima.

“Here I am,” said a tiny voice. Abdul ran toward the sound.

“Fatima, is that you? Where are you?”

“I'm here,” she said again. The sound came from above and to the back. He ran that way.

She was sitting on top of the rubble, clutching an orange and green pillow.

“It's your lesson day,” she said when she saw it was Abdul. “Papa's not here.”

“Where is he?”

She shrugged, then pointed down.

“Inside,” she said. “I think they're inside. I didn't like the way the house shook. I brought my pillow to sleep outside. Mama told me no, but I can do that sometimes.” She tried to lift the slab of concrete that jutted into the one she was sitting on.

“It won't move,” she said.

Abdul climbed up onto the rubble — difficult to do with one hand full of guitar. He sat down beside her.

“Has anyone come to help you?”

She just looked at him, her eyes big and round.

He tried to remember being five years old, but that was six whole years ago. A lifetime.

“Are you hungry?” he asked her. That was a safe question. Even five-year-olds knew if they were hungry or not.

She nodded.

“Come to my house. My mother will feed you.”

“Will my mama and papa be there?”

He helped her climb down the rubble.

“It's my lesson day,” he said. “If I don't show up, your father will know where to look for me.”

He held her hand as they walked, and he wasn't at all embarrassed to be seen holding the hand of a little girl.

He had to walk her back through the rubble and destruction. To keep her busy and not scared, he taught her a song.

“This is by the Beatles,” he said. “It's called ‘Yellow Submarine.'”

Little Fatima did not know English, so he taught it to her in Arabic. The song still worked, and they sang it together all the way back to his house. Whenever he spotted a dead body, he made her sing especially loud so she wouldn't be afraid.

That night, Fatima sat in his mother's lap surrounded by all the relatives that Abdul now felt lucky to have around him — even his Uncle Faruk, who had majored in business and who his father said was allergic to joy. Fatima leaned back against his mother and laughed with the other little kids at the puppet show he and his father and cousins put together of Alice in Wonderland, with puppets made out of socks and cooking utensils. Abdul was playing the Queen of Hearts.

As he waited to make his entrance, he wrote his first song. It was about Fatima. He called it “The Girl on the Rubble,” but in the song, the girl was not pointing down at the ruins. She was trying to touch the stars.

It was a night without sleep. The rain fell without mercy, and the waves tossed the boat around like a plaything.

There were no lights to row toward and there was no rescue coming. No one on earth knew where they were, and no one had even noticed that they were missing.

The migrants clung to the boat, riding out the rise and fall of the waves.

Abdul tried to hold the rudder steady, but he didn't know why he bothered. He didn't think it was helping or hurting. The sea kept swirling.

“Bail out!” someone would yell, and everyone would bend and scoop, the waves easily replacing what they labored so hard to get rid of.

Dawn came slowly, hidden behind the thick clouds. By the time Abdul realized he could see, the rain had downshifted from a deluge to a drizzle. The air was still cold and the wind still blew, but the waves rolled instead of rocked. The migrants rolled with the waves and, exhausted from fear and shivering, they slept.

/ / / / / / / /

“We killed the boy's uncle.”

Cheslav's voice startled Abdul out of his slumber. It seemed to be around mid-morning. The rain was more mist than drops.

“It was self-defense,” Rosalia said. “He would have tipped us over, climbing into the boat with his giant body.”

“Who will care?” asked Cheslav. “We did it. The man was a pig, but he was all we had to guide us to England. Now we are stuck on the open sea in a piece of crap boat with a little boy who will turn us in as murderers. Boy, what kind of a boy are you?”

Abdul's arm was around the nephew's shoulder, trying to keep him warm. He could feel the heat from the boy's fever through his wet clothes.

“He's sick. Leave him alone.”

“Soon. But we need to know. Is he the sort of boy who will cry to the authorities? Will he go, ‘Boo-hoo, my uncle is dead and these are the people who killed him'? Or will he say it was an accident?”

“It was an accident,” said Rosalia. “It was. Until we smashed his fingers.”

“And those smashed fingers will still be attached to his body when it washes up somewhere. There will be questions. What will the answers be?”

“Can't this wait?” Abdul asked.

“For what? We could be picked up at any time. His body could be fished out of the water at any time. Maybe there is something in his pockets to tie him to us. He has our money. Maybe he has something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know! A list with our names on it? I did not come all this way to end up in a British jail. I can see that the boy is sick. It will not make him sicker to answer a question.”

“We will all say he fell off the boat,” Rosalia said. “We will keep our mouths shut about the broken fingers and the kicks to his head.”

“It's the boy they will listen to. He's one of them.” The Russian crouched down in front of the boy. “You are young, but you are old enough to look us in the eye and say what is in your mind. Do you want to put us in jail for killing your uncle?”

The nephew raised his head. His eyes met Cheslav's.

“I'm all alone.”

“So are we. What's your answer?”

“You all saved my life,” the boy said. “Especially him.” He nodded at the Uzbek, who hadn't moved or spoken during the whole discussion. “I won't send you to jail.”

Cheslav straightened up. “You hear that? That's a good, strong answer. If we are caught and questioned, we will all say his uncle fell off the boat, and we know nothing about how he got injured. Are we all agreed?”

Abdul and Rosalia agreed.

“What about you, Uzbek?” Cheslav put a hand on his shoulder. “You're the big hero. What do you have to say?”

The Uzbek slumped under the pressure of Cheslav's hand. Abdul knelt beside him and looked in his face.

“I think he's dead.”

“He's not dead! He can't be.”

“I know what dead looks like. Come and see.”

Cheslav and Rosalia looked. The tall young man had died.

“It was the cold,” Abdul said, “and the wet. And maybe the fear.”

“What should we do?” Rosalia asked.

“We throw him into the sea,” said Cheslav. “We can't sail into England with a dead body in the boat.”

“We didn't even know his name,” said Abdul. “What are you doing?”

Cheslav was taking the jacket off the dead boy. “This is a warm jacket, warmer than mine. He doesn't need it anymore.”

“That doesn't make it right.”

“Look around you. None of this is right.”

Cheslav maneuvered the Uzbek's arms out of the sleeves and spread the jacket out to dry.

Abdul sighed heavily. He bent down and undid the boots the dead boy was wearing. They were in much better shape than his own shoes.

“What's in the wallet?” Rosalia asked Cheslav, who was taking a small black wallet out of the inside pocket of the Uzbek's jacket.

“Don't worry. I'll share it with you.”

“I mean, is there a name?”

Cheslav opened the wallet. In the place where the money would have been there was a photo of a man, a woman and three children, all dressed up and stiffly posed on a sofa. There was also a folded piece of paper.

“No money.” He carefully unfolded the wet paper. “It's a letter.”

“You can read Uzbek?” Abdul asked.

“Uzbekistan used to be part of the Soviet Union. They still speak Russian there.” Cheslav read the note to himself.

“What does it say?” Rosalia asked.

“It's from his mother,” Cheslav said. “What do you think it says?” He tossed it into the sea.

“Was there a name on it?”

“No.”

“So we can't write to her,” Abdul said. “She'll never know what happened to her son.”

“If she wanted to know, she would have kept him with her,” said Cheslav.

“We should have a service,” Rosalia said. “We should say some prayers. We should say goodbye with respect.”

“From Uzbekistan, he was probably a Muslim,” said Abdul. “I am also Muslim. We should lay him out and pray before we send him on his way.”

Rosalia used the Uzbek's neckerchief to cover his face. Abdul said a Muslim prayer. Rosalia said the Our Father in Polish and Cheslav prayed in Russian.

“Do you know any prayers?” Rosalia asked the boy.

“I'm sorry,” he whimpered.

“Why are you sorry?” Abdul asked. “This is not your fault.”

“I've been bad luck since I was born. My uncle was right. I'm a curse.”

“Your uncle was a bad man,” said Rosalia. “No one cares what he said.”

“I'm bad luck.”

Cheslav threw up his arms. “Little boy, we are all alone on the ocean with no working motor, no map, no food, no water, no papers, no dry clothes, and no home. Why do you think an unimportant child like you could make our lives any worse?”

“It's my name. My name is Jonah.”

Everyone stared at him, and for awhile, no one spoke.

It was the Russian who started laughing.

The others watched him, stunned, and then, one by one, they joined in.

“What's so funny?” demanded the boy. “Don't laugh at me!”

“We're all going to die out here,” said Cheslav. “After all we have been through, you really think your name is what gives us our bad luck?”

Jonah wiped his eyes and stopped crying. He almost smiled.

“Let's finish this,” Abdul said. “Let's say goodbye to this Uzbek with no name. I think I would have liked him.”

“I don't know any prayers,” Jonah said. “But I know a Christmas carol.”

He sang “Silent Night” while they lifted the Uzbek up and out of the boat. They placed him in the water as gently as they could. For a little while his body floated next to the boat, until the waves took it in one direction and the little boat went in another.

“Sleep in heavenly peace.

Sleep in heavenly peace.”