Here Comes the Boat

Grayness, soft as amnesia, blanketed the sea. A grayer Turkey interrupted the line where sea met sky. I shivered in spite of multiple layers, including fleece and a rain jacket. I felt the cold of the new year. My teeth clattered sporadically. The morning had matured into a reasonable hour, but it hadn’t warmed up. I wasn’t just cold. I was uneasy, as if I were back in school waiting for the teacher to hand out an exam.

Emma and Rodrigo had met people they knew on the beach, and they introduced me, but I stood to the side as they talked. Emma furrowed her brow as she looked my way. She smiled when I realized that I was frowning. I tended to squint when I was thinking. My mother used to hate that when I was a child. She once placed clear tape on my forehead so I’d notice when I frowned. Why was I remembering my mother while waiting for a boat on such a cold morning? Maybe it was because this beach was as physically close as I had been to her in decades.

Rodrigo spoke into a Motorola two-way radio, a palm-size black and chartreuse that he had cradled like a newborn for the entire hour drive from Skala Sikamineas. The air crackled, as did the device. A voice spoke. Rodrigo informed Emma that a boat was coming. She flashed me a smirk that said something in between “See all I do for you” and “Isn’t Rodrigo hot?” Half an hour out at most, we should be able to delineate the boat on the horizon soon, thirty-two people on a dinghy that wasn’t supposed to carry more than a dozen.

“Royalty maybe,” said Emma, because many boats of the same size had arrived with fifty refugees or more.

“The runners might be having cash flow problems because of the rains,” Rodrigo said.

I felt the first drop of rain on my hair and pulled my hoodie up. I hoped this wasn’t a prelude to a bigger storm, that Zeus wasn’t patiently waiting to hurl a few of his thunderbolts. Half of the two dozen people on the beach opened umbrellas. Emma decided her multipocketed parka was good enough for the time being. She was dressed down today: jeans, muddy hiking shoes. The head-scarfed South Asian and Chinese women who had been on my plane ran toward a van in the parking lot to wait out the storm.

When the darker speck of gray appeared on the water, everything seemed to change. I shifted my weight from heels to metatarsals. I felt as if we all began coiling our springs. For a moment, I relished the feel of wind on my face. The air turned blue and razor sharp. Two men ran toward a gray truck as old as Sappho, returning with duffel bags—space blankets, Emma called them. So many volunteers, she said, for just one boat. Only two months earlier fifty-seven boats landed in one day and there were only eight volunteers to deal with the arrivals. Unfettered pandemonium it was, she said. More than a hundred infants arrived that day, all of them wailing because of the wet cold.

I had to adjust my hoodie, pull it forward, because rain had direct access to my eyes. Another van arrived in the parking lot, from which nine college-age kids jumped out, five boys, unshaven and in dude drab, each carrying a clear plastic storage box filled with sandwiches, and four girls, two of whom wore long dresses and head coverings, probably Mennonite or Amish, definitely American. One of the boys rushed past me, his tennis shoes flicking sand all about. He had such a deep tan he looked like he’d jumped out of a rotisserie. Emma and Rodrigo did not turn to look at the newcomers, but they sensed their presence, as if the youngsters were unwelcome animals, interlopers in pride territory. Emma bristled, took a long breath, held it for a time.

I was soaking wet before the rain let up. Even those under cover looked shriveled, except for Emma, who seemed unmoved by the weather as she kept staring at the boat. Give her a sword, I thought, and she would look like a painting of Joan of Arc.

Like an epiphany, the embryonic stain on the water transitioned into an actual boat. I could see the orange of the refugees’ life vests, the gray green of the dinghy, the black of the wetsuits worn by the three people on Jet Skis—Spanish lifeguards I presumed—herding the boat to shore.

The sun, tired of being ignored, broke through. The sea now looked recognizable, the same translucent blue I used to step into as a child. Rodrigo unfurled his Oakley sunglasses, Emma her Prada. She pointed to two Italian physicians in the group. They’d been on the island for two weeks, she said. One of them was Giacometti-thin even with his sweaters and peacoat. He wore spectacles as thick as a glass paperweight. Looking at Emma’s pointing finger, I noticed that her nails were short and uncolored. The fabulous red press-ons of the evening before were gone.

Before she arrived, Emma said, smugglers bought dozens of old wooden boats from Turkish fishermen, then offered them to desperate refugees at exorbitant prices. The beach at Skala Sikamineas once had over fifty boats piled on top of each other. Many boats were landing each day and at night too. One could clean the beaches, pick up all the refugee detritus—there was a whole network of Greek salvage guys who would take apart the motors and refurbish them—but what did one do with the boats? Finally, some Norwegian divers arrived and began to dismantle them plank by plank until the area was clear. Rubber dinghies were more common than wooden boats, which was worse because they were easier targets for the commandos, dreadful men in black uniforms and masks who attacked the refugees in the waters. The commandos drove their boats toward the refugees, used long knives attached to poles to rip open the dinghies, and roared away. Sometimes they shot at the refugees. Greeks believed they were from the Turkish government, Turks thought they were Germans, but Emma said they were rogues among the Hellenic Coast Guard, members of Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi party.

The cacophony arrived on shore before the boat: the motors, the lifeguards on Jet Skis shouting in broken English, the refugees replying louder in Arabenglish, which brought a smile to my lips as soon as I heard it. Like a giant single-cell organism, the crowd began to inch closer to the shore. I found myself being swept along, still remaining on the periphery. The noise on our side of the divide grew louder as well.

“If a single one of these youngsters takes a selfie with the boat,” Emma said, “I’m going to gouge their eyes out.”

“What?” I said. “You’re not serious?”

“I most certainly am,” she said. “I promise I’ll do it. I’ve been saying it for a while now, and this time I will.”

“No, I meant you’re not serious that anyone takes selfies.”

“Oh, darling,” she said. “You’re so wonderfully naïve. A little girl in the forest is what you are.” She pulled me close, hip to hip. “That’s really all they want. The perfect photo for Facebook or Instagram or whatever’s the latest stupid thing. Look at me, I’m not useless. I’m a humanitarian. Aren’t I wonderful?”

For a few seconds, we all stood motionless, anticipating. The peeking sun lent us shadows. The first to land was one of the Jet Skis. The other two hovered for a few moments until the boat beached. My first thought before the rush was that no one should get in a boat like this, ever, let alone get in with thirty people sitting on top of each other. My second thought wouldn’t materialize because bedlam erupted.

Women and children were not first. Two young men jumped off at first stop, their shoes landing in beach foam. The shivering children, nine including two crying babies, were handed quickly to volunteers. Emma and I helped an old woman with pink watery eyes disembark, if you could call it that from such a slippery boat. We had to carry her; we gave her a throne by connecting our arms. She was a little wet and by no means a burden, so small and light as to be almost weightless, the bones in her face showing through pellucid skin almost blue from cold. She kept reaching back for her belongings, a tired plastic trash bag the size of a wheelbarrow. She relaxed when she saw Rodrigo carrying it. As soon as we placed her on a blanket, she began trying to unhook the life vest, the only nonblack thing she was wearing, but her fingers were stiff and cold, and she couldn’t figure out the latch. Emma knelt in front of her, unclasped the life vest. A man gave her a shiny silver square. He was going from one refugee to another handing out blankets, and she gave his retreating back a look that said nothing if not “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“It’s to keep you warm,” Emma said, rubbing her own arms to make herself understood. She retrieved the space blanket and unfolded it, gold lamé on one side and silver on the other. She tried to explain by gestures that the woman should change out of her wet clothes, crossing her arms at the waist and lifting them high, but the old woman paid her no mind. She wrapped herself in the blanket, covering everything including her head. She looked like sheet-shrouded cutting-edge furniture. I wanted to speak to her but wasn’t sure what to say. I felt nervous, out of my depth. Emma said someone had bags of clothes, but I couldn’t remember what part of the beach that was.

The old woman must have not sealed her plastic bag like the other refugees because some white cloth peeked out of it; upon closer inspection it turned out to be old wedding lace. That was possibly her own dress from long ago. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing that sort of divine work in this day and age.

A space-caped man in his forties, light greenish in hue, stumbled over, puzzled by the silver mound. He, too, was still in his wet clothes. “Are you all right, mother?”

I shuddered in surprise, a frisson of excitement? Of fear? Of nerves? His simple question rustled the leaves of my memory. I’d recognized the accent, Syrian, from around Deir ez-Zor, the same area my mother was from, although she’d gotten rid of hers long before I was born. But that was not what looped me. It was the way the son called her mother, the Arab way, our way: O my mother. Those words rattled my spine.

The old woman pulled the silver blanket off her head, and her black head scarf slipped down to her shoulders, but she didn’t seem to care. Sparse, messy, wet hair was all we saw for an instant before she raised her head and said, “Now you ask me? I died on that boat. The sea swallowed me. I screamed. ‘Help me, my son,’ I yelled and yelled, but you didn’t come over. And when it rained, you stayed with your wife, not with your mother. I lost ten years with every scream, but you didn’t care. When the man threatened to throw me overboard, you didn’t stop him. But now you ask if I’m okay. I want to die right here, right here in front of all these ugly people and everyone will know that I have an uncaring son. May the earth open up and swallow me right here so I can die this minute.”

I wondered if we were related, because that was my mother speaking.

Emma nudged me. “She was terrified on the boat,” I told her softly, “and is taking it out on her son.”

He had his head down, whether in shame, contrition, or frustration, I could not tell. “I couldn’t move,” he said. “No one was supposed to. For the balance of the boat. We were as uncomfortable as you were.”

A boy of about ten with wide-open eyes approached the old woman. He held out his left wrist, and in his right hand he held an empty plastic bag. “Look, Grandmother,” he said. “Uncle’s watch is still working. Look, the hand of seconds still turns.”

I don’t think I had seen a watch that old-fashioned in over fifty years.

The old woman’s face broke into what resembled a smile. Visible knots of dilated blood vessels appeared on her cheeks like warrior markings. She sat her grandson on her lap. “I told you it would work,” she said. “Your mother knows nothing. You didn’t have to take it off. I told you, cover it with plastic. You could cross an ocean and not a drop of water would touch it if you’re careful. You’re a good boy, not like your father who doesn’t care about his mother.”

The little boy beamed. His father seemed to be working on his breathing, inhaling and exhaling in a measured way.

The space blankets bent light in the uncanniest way. The silver and gold shimmered, and the volunteers looked as if they were hunting for treasure. One of the Mennonite girls was handing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil, more silver. I noticed a kneeling volunteer and thought he looked familiar. When he lit two cigarettes at the same time and handed one to an older Syrian man who had jute hair and looked traumatized, I recognized the Hertz clerk from the airport. Both men took a long drag of their cigarettes and began coughing at the same time. The refugee laughed.

Emma and I turned our heads toward a moan emanating from a woman on our left. She was being cared for by Dr. Giacometti. Her husband and three daughters hovered about. Emma grabbed my hand and walked me over to them.

The beach was a scene from a disaster movie, post­event, when the survivors get together and try to make sense of what happened: was that Godzilla or Mothra that laid waste to our city?

“It seems like there are as many volunteers as refugees,” I said to Emma. “Maybe more.”

“I told you, only for a few more days,” she said. “And then most of the volunteers return home, their holiday over, and everyone forgets that we’re here.”

Dr. Giacometti was asking for the translator, but she was busy with someone else. The Syrian woman seemed uncomfortable. He kept trying to touch her and she’d flinch. I approached, but Emma was quicker. She suggested to Dr. Giacometti that the woman might let her examine her. They must have worked together before, because Dr. Giacometti hardly blinked. He began standing as soon as Emma began kneeling, mouthing what seemed like “thank you.”

“I’m a nurse,” she said. “Tell her, please.”

Before I could say anything, the woman turned toward her husband. “Don’t you say anything,” she said in Arabic. “Not one word.”

Her husband opened his mouth as if to speak but decided against it. He pursed his thin lips. Warm eyes refused to see anything but his wife. His birdlike face was etched with concern.

“Not one word about what?” I said in her language and watched the woman hesitate. Her husband gasped audibly. The three girls seemed confused. I’m told my bedside manner might be acceptable, if barely, but it seemed my beachside manner needed work. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” the woman said, but there was. Her eyes were bloodshot with a yellowish tint. She looked much too thin, as well as pale and exhausted, which could have been the result of a boat ride during a storm, of sleepless nights while traveling, of diesel fumes, of many possibilities, but I wouldn’t be able to tell without examining her.

“She’s a doctor,” Emma said in English, whether to the woman or the husband I wasn’t sure, but it was the eldest daughter who jabbed Emma with her finger a few times. “She, doctor?”

She couldn’t have been more than ten, and she already had a head scarf, which I found strange. During my teenage years, when my father used to take us on trips to Deir ez-Zor, there were few women covered, let alone girls. Emma playfully jabbed the girl back, then jabbed me: “She, doctor.” Then she pointed to herself: “Me, nurse.” And then to the girl: “You, Tarzan?”

“No,” the girl said, in an ardent tone. “Me, doctor.” She paused, then extended her hand toward Emma. “Me, Asma,” she said. “Me, doctor.”

Emma didn’t hesitate. Instead of accepting the proffered handshake, she pulled the girl into an intimate hug, wet mingling with wet. “Asma, my Asma,” she said. “Best doctor in the world.” She stood up, took the girl’s hand. “Let’s get you all into dry clothes so you don’t come down with some nasty cold. Come on, all of you. Let’s go change and find something nice for your mother to wear while she stays here and talks to this good doctor.”

I had no idea whether the husband and three girls understood a word she said, but they followed her toward a van. As I watched them walk away, the three young girls holding hands, Emma turned around, gave me a smug look. “If you need me, wave your arms in the air like you usually do. I’m watching.”

Four refugees stood a few feet away, all young men. One with high-rise hair, his coat soiled with every imaginable sort of stain, genuflected as if praying but made a joke of kissing the beach. When he rose, his face was decorated with patterns of sand, which all four found excruciatingly amusing.

Alone with me on the crowded beach, the woman clutched her swollen 1940s handbag with a terrified and resolute suspicion. I berated myself for my lack of manners.

“My name is Mina Simpson,” I said. “Forgive my impertinence. This is my first time here. I was nervous and didn’t think of introducing myself properly with all that’s going on.”

She forced a smile. I did not need a diagnosis to see that she was feeling pain. She consoled me by explaining that social niceties were the first things to disappear in a crisis, although they shouldn’t, and she was happy that we were able to correct this minor misstep. Her name was Sumaiya, from a village outside of Hussainiyah, north of Deir ez-Zor. Her husband’s name was Sammy. Easy to remember, Sammy and Sumaiya. They were meant to be together, she said. Her family escaped from Daesh rule and regime bombing, mangy dogs all of them, she was never going back, and still, as much as she regretted it, she was not going to allow me to examine her. Her right hand lay on the upper right quadrant of her abdomen.

“I won’t tell anyone without your permission,” I said. “This is between the two of us. I’d rather examine you here with just us, instead of waiting until you get to camp, because I don’t know what it will be like there. Will you let me?”

“No,” she said. “Not here and not in camp. Maybe when we get to the end of the line, where we’re supposed to live, maybe then.”

And Pallas Athena’s wise owl flapped her wings in my brain. I finally understood, stupid me. She was gaunt. Icteric sclerae, abdominal pain, right upper quadrant where she held her imitation crocodile-skin handbag, for crying out loud, Mina. Even her skin looked jaundiced now. Had her loose clothing been wetter, clung more to her form, I would have noticed the distended belly.

“How long have you known?” I asked.

I watched her face register shock once more, except this time she recoiled. Her eyes turned beady with anxiety. I should backtrack. I didn’t want her to be frightened. I paused, then held her left hand. She would not look at me.

“I won’t say anything without your permission,” I said softly. “I promise you.” And then, to make it more official: “I swear on my mother and father.”

“What do you know?” she asked me, still facing ahead, toward the sea, toward where her past, her home, once was.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m only trying to figure things out. I’m guessing you don’t need me to examine you. You know what’s wrong, and whatever it is, it’s serious, serious enough that no other ailment caused by travel or sea voyage is going to make much of a difference. You’re afraid that if we find out, you will be sent back. Am I wrong so far?”

I could no longer read the expression on her face. Was she still afraid? Relieved? Curious? She remained silent, her eyes fixed east. I was right for the most part. I knew that. I might not be an oncologist, but I was not blind. I didn’t want to force things. Francine jokingly calls me her bull dyke for many reasons. Don’t leave me alone in a china shop. Sumaiya knew it was fatal, not just serious. How to be delicate?

“You’re not afraid of being sent back, are you?” I asked. “No, you’re not. You don’t want your family to be.”

She offered a weak smile.

“What kind of cancer?”

“You’re doing a good job,” she said. “Why don’t you guess?”

“I can’t,” I said. “Not without examining you, but if I’m forced, I’d say liver, or that seems to be what’s most apparent.”

“See,” she said. “You don’t need to examine me.”

I didn’t need to ask if she was on any treatment. Figuring out her medical history would have been next to impossible. I knew that every hospital in her area had been blown to smithereens by the Syrians, by Daesh, by Russia, by the United States. Everybody had had a go at doctors and their hospitals. I wondered who had diagnosed her and how long ago.

“Do you know if the disease started in your liver or elsewhere?” I asked.

“Liver,” she said softly, wistfully, without looking at me.

I squeezed her hand, told her that I would do everything I knew how to make sure she wasn’t returned, which was highly unlikely in any case. I had only arrived the day before, I said, and knew little about what could be done on the island and who could help, and then I pointed toward Emma in the parking lot surrounded by Sumaiya’s family and staring at me from way over yonder. She could help, I told Sumaiya. She worked for a Swedish NGO that had all kinds of doctors, and she would know how to make sure that they were not returned. Not only that, but she was trustworthy. If we told her not to tell anyone, she wouldn’t. I extolled Emma’s competence and discretion until Sumaiya relented.

I waved my arms in the air.