On the Road to Skala Sikamineas

The drive back in the dark to Skala Sikamineas seemed endless, a long first day on Lesbos. I did not have to share my fears with Emma because she had already deduced our patient’s condition. She was a good diagnostician. Sumaiya was going to die, and soon. A couple of days, a week or two or six, we couldn’t be precise without full imaging and blood panels. Her cancer was likely advanced, there for over a year, and unresectable. Any treatment, if she qualified, would barely extend her time by a month. We should convince her to get hospital tests tomorrow, I said.

Sumaiya and her husband had tried to keep the news from their girls, but Asma had guessed that her mother was not going to last long. We wondered how much pain Sumaiya had endured to get to Europe. I told Emma that I had a bottle of oxycodone and if we needed more, I could get Francine to next-day some. Emma assured me that she had access to pain medication, from pills to fentanyl patches.

We had been driving in silence for a while when I received a video call from Mazen, who had landed in Athens. First thing he said was that I was too dark and he could only see me as an undulating shadow. What had the Greeks done to me, what? I missed him awfully. He was going to spend the night in a hotel near the airport and take the first morning flight to Mytilene. I had better pick him up, he said, because he had no idea where we were staying.

I did not wish to spend time in the café-cum-pickup bar with Emma and her Rodrigo. I wanted to be alone, so I took a sandwich back to my room. In the dark corridor on a cheap aluminum chair, the cleaning woman sat, eyes closed, her scarfed head leaning on the wall right below a wooden crucifix that had misplaced its Christ. She stood up as soon as she heard me coming toward her. In Arabic, I told her she needn’t get up on my account; she should rest if she needed to. She sat back down, said she needed to catch her breath before she walked up the hill to her apartment. We exchanged pleasantries, and then she asked how long I was staying at the hotel. I realized I had no answer. I hadn’t made up my mind, I told her. I was thinking of going to a hotel nearer the camp. She suggested I leave the town. Going up and down that hill could cause me all kinds of anguish, and if I could avoid that, I should.

She explained that she’d arrived on the island six months earlier from a small village near the Iraqi border. She’d traveled by herself; her husband had died in a government jail. Everyone who was on the boat with her had moved on: to Athens, to Cologne, to Malmö. She’d thought about it but decided she was too old, too set in her ways to keep changing. She was staying here. She had a good enough job, never slept hungry. She didn’t think she would get a better job in Germany, and she didn’t believe what some Syrians were saying, that you would be given a giant color television as soon as you crossed the border. She bade me goodnight; she needed to get home.

I entered my room. Everything was quiet and ever so spare.