Saba isn’t saying anything.
Nor is Nadeche. She wishes she had something to do right now. The T.V. crew got out an hour ago. They’ve been broadcasting thirty-six hours on the trot and now they’re trying to edit a feature to send from the mobile unit to the broadcaster. Or they’ve fallen asleep. She’s sitting beside a woman who’s snoring like two men, and who has a small boy on her lap. Nadeche regrets offering her the seat. Two seats – what a luxury that would be now! They’d kept the double seat free for Malaika, but Nadeche refused special treatment, insisting that the woman take it. How else could she have reacted? It’s incredible how jam-packed the buses are. This has nothing to do with the Turks, but with the euphoria of the refugees when they caught sight of their transport.
“If we don’t have to walk, we don’t mind it being a bit more of a squeeze.”
An adult on every seat and a child on most adults. And the aisles full of people. The smell must be appalling. Nadeche doesn’t notice it anymore, but the way her skin feels, the way everything sticks to everything else in this bus – and everyone to everyone else – is revolting. Even Saba stinks a little, sitting there on her lap, and Saba usually doesn’t stink at all. But her smell is not half as bad as her silence.
Nadeche runs a sticky hand through Saba’s sticky hair. She doesn’t know what to do. If they were in her car she could drive for a bit, just to pass the time, but the car was given the elbow. By Lionel. And now that everyone’s on a bus, she can’t do much to help anymore. Distributing water, aspirins – all that’s done at the service stations by the army.
Nadeche takes a filthy scrap of material from her filthy trouser pocket. Carefully, because there’s not much water left in the bottle, she moistens it and wipes Saba’s brow. Then she makes her a hippie headband with the material. She can see why people used to think hippies looked like tramps, but it does keep the forehead cool.
Saba doesn’t react, she just lets all this happen. She stares out of the window. Then she says, “You didn’t know either, did you?”
“No,” Nadeche said.
Saba turns and looks at her. “What about him?”
“He didn’t either.”
“But he must have known! And you too!”
“He doesn’t tell me everything. I’m sure he knew more than I did, but he didn’t know that.”
Saba turns back to the window.
“He couldn’t have known, sweetheart! Nobody did. Not even the Turks. The plan was different.
The little hippie doesn’t react. It’s hard to tell whether Saba doesn’t believe her, or whether Nadeche just isn’t getting through to her. In desperation she gives Saba a squeeze.
“He told me himself. The plan was actually very different.”
The plan was that the column of refugees should board the buses in the same order in which they’d been walking. Every day one section of fifteen kilometres would board. And the buses would wait until a large convoy was ready. The Turks thwarted this plan. They made some calculations and showed Lionel how it would only lead to a huge traffic jam. When a convoy comes to a halt it takes an eternity for it to get moving again. Because the buses can’t all drive off at the same time like coaches on a train. The one at the front has to set off first, and only then can the second one go, then the third – this all adds up. With ten buses, if everything goes smoothly, it’ll take four minutes. With a hundred buses it’s forty minutes. And with a thousand it’s more than six hours. So for the entire process to be quick, each bus needs to leave immediately and then keep going, on and on and on. Two drivers per bus, fixed fuel stops, fixed toilet stops, fixed water stops and nothing in between. But even the Turks thought they would board the buses in phases. They thought they could use the intervening time to drive the next buses over to the car park.
But the refugees didn’t see it that way.
The little hippie lets out a sob. Nadeche can feel her shoulder becoming damp.
She can understand them. After a year and a half ’s trek, and seeing the people ahead of them board a bus, no-one’s going to lie down after kilometre number fifteen and wait till the next day. So what do they do? They walk one more kilometre, which means they’ve done sixteen that day – it’s not so much. And the ones behind realise they haven’t stopped as they usually would. So they walk on as well, because it’s only another two kilometres – it’s a piece of cake after the distance they’ve already covered. And it goes on like this because word gets around that there are buses waiting. Which everyone automatically translates as: if we lie down now and go to sleep, the buses might all be gone tomorrow. So they up their pace. Not only that, the further back you are, the more kilometres you have to add on to your normal daily march.
Nadeche saw the footage on her smartphone. Everyone saw the footage on their smartphones. The pictures weren’t from MyTV, but from n-tv and A.R.D.: people goose-stepping along the road. People overtaking others, which has never happened before on this trek. Causing those being overtaken to panic. Parents lifting up their children. Hurrying past the lorries, scooping up food and water so they can keep going, like marathon runners. Baleful figures who’ve been walking without a break for eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours, driven on by a fear that nobody had anticipated. Parents screaming at their exhausted children, beating them onwards. And the horror in their eyes the further back they are.
People suddenly running for their lives.
“If he’d known, he would have . . . he would have done everything differently,” Nadeche whispers to Saba, even though she doesn’t know whether this is true. Lionel told her that the Turks had called him. The telephone number that had vanished all of a sudden popped up again, and someone shouted into his ear, “Are your people ever going to stop, or what? We’re done for today!”
Lionel called his contacts and realised he was no longer in control of the situation. Even if they’d promised everyone there would be enough buses – that they could rest for at least two hours without worry – nobody would have believed them. Nobody believes reassuring news when thousands of those dreadful, sleepless, horrified spectres wander past and just want to keep going. The fear in their faces was visible, the fear that if they didn’t keep going now, everything would have been in vain.
The Turks were quick enough to realise that if they’d tried to stop people boarding at that point, it would have led to a disaster. They had their hands full trying to get enough buses onto the full roads. They must have created a new track especially. There is drone footage of the small car park. It looked like an enormous mincer in which people and buses were being combined. For when people begin to walk more quickly, they no longer arrive in a steady flow. But a catastrophe at the border was averted. In part because it had already happened, earlier on the road.
She remembers the footage of Pakka standing beside his medical supply vehicle, shattered, resigned, howling, somewhere by the side of the road. People are lying on the ground, all the way to the border crossing. The column left thousands behind. People who collapsed and could go no further. Some just have cramp, some are unconscious. Some are injured. Broken ankles from walking carelessly, the rush, and even from being kicked by other people.
Some are dead.
Saba’s mother sent a photo via her mobile.
She tried to leave Saba’s father behind in a dignified fashion. She couldn’t bury him, given the hurry – the fact is, she didn’t know that theoretically she would have had enough time. But then if she’d known that, he wouldn’t have rushed to his death in the first place. Dignity is relative, of course. In this case it meant dragging him out of the middle of the road. She sat him up against a bush. It did indeed look a touch more dignified, or at least a little less passive than if he were simply lying there. Did she turn him to face the wide expanses of Iraq, or the panicky sprint to the border – it’s not clear from the photograph. In his arms Saba’s mother put one toy from each of the three children.
Then she ran for the bus.
Nadeche can feel the dampness running into her bra. But the sobbing has stopped. From the corner of her eye she strains to look at the small, grubby head. Saba has fallen asleep.
That’s something, at least.