When You Don’t Know What to Say, Have a Cookie

We had to split up. Sumaiya was to ride in the ambulance to the Kara Tepe camp while Sammy went to Moria to pick up the kids and their belongings. I wanted to go with Sumaiya since no one else in the group spoke her language, but she maintained that Emma and I should help her husband and kids. She was only going to be moved to a new bed, as she put it. The Swedish doctors would take her. She did not need to understand anything they said. As soon as she arrived at the bed, she was going to sleep. In the wheelchair, she looked exhausted, barely able to speak. Her eyes insisted on drooping.

But then Mazen said he’d go in the ambulance. He could translate if need be. “I’ll make sure to be really sweet to you,” he said to Sumaiya, which delighted her.

In Moria, while Sammy went to collect his kids, Emma and I waited outside the barracks. Amid the lugubrious decay of the camp, she looked shiny and ultracompetent. With raking fingers, she pulled in strands of hair that had gone astray. She wanted to know if I had any ideas as to how to tell Sammy that he had to test his daughters. Sumaiya had tested positive for hepatitis B. We would leave it to him to explain to his daughters that their mother was not leaving the island. Emma’s organization could speed the Swedish registration process. They would have been able to move the family to Sweden within a day or two had Sumaiya not been sick.

“We are moving camps,” Asma said, coming out of the barracks, followed by the dank, stuffy air of the building, the smells of bodies and cold sweat. “We’re going to a better one.”

“Oh, yes you are,” Emma said after I translated. “It’s better for families, and we can take better care of your mother over there.”

Asma looked up at us. Her gloved fingers plucked at one of the extra-large buttons of her overcoat as if they were playing some ancient instrument whose music only she could hear. Her face, encapsulated by her head scarf, was gorgeous and questioning. She hesitated briefly before bluntly asking: “Is my mother going to die?”

Emma wanted to know what she’d said. I translated, and Emma gave me a look. “Tell her we don’t know when something like—”

“Yes, she is,” I said. I crouched down so Asma and I would be at eye level. I wasn’t that much taller. “Your mother is sick and declining. I don’t know how long she will continue to live, but she can’t stay much longer.”

Asma, aspiring doctor, seemed to shrink. Her lips quivered, her eyes welled, but she didn’t cry, not until Emma bent and hugged her fiercely. I watched them weep into each other’s shoulders. Asma was the one who pulled back first. Through tears she said she didn’t want her sisters to know, didn’t want them to see her in this state.

“Cookies,” I said.

Hand in hand, Asma and I walked the downward-sloping twenty steps or so to the tea and cookie dispensary. It was afternoon; there was a long line. We were heading toward the end when I noticed Rasheed and his Palestine Red Crescent Society vest at the front of the line, almost at the window. He grinned sheepishly, rubbed his stomach. “I need my afternoon tea and cookie,” he said, shouting so we could hear him across the distance. “I shouldn’t have sweets, but it’s not my fault. I blame British colonialism!”

I pointed to Asma and mouthed “cookie.” He nodded. We walked beyond the line a little, stood on a ridge of chilly dirt watching the refugee tents below us. The Greek riot police still loitered at the bottom of the hill. An American in his fifties, big man, rugby-build physique, talked to a group of refugees on the cement walkway quite a ways from Asma and me, but I could hear his slurry, adenoidal accent clearly. He was indicating where the refugees were to sleep that night. Another family waited to talk to him, a thin, lanky mother with worn men’s slippers on her bare feet, her four children wrapped around her like cotton candy on a stick.

Francine, Francine, help me talk to this young girl.

I pulled Asma close to me, my hand on her shoulder, and she gently squeezed it. At the end of the middle finger, her glove had a hole with a wreath of jagged stitches around it. The tip of her nail poked through the wreath. The cold afternoon light had a sheen, like air behind a windowpane. We observed the scene below us, the pup tents, the impromptu soccer game with no goals, the triple-strand concertina razor wire, the police vans, the far horizon where the sea and sky were joined by a thin blue thread that was never straight, as if sewn together by an incompetent seamstress. Quite a bit for the eye to fix on if it wished to avoid the discomfort of intimacy.

Below, to our left, was a static line, much longer than the tea and cookie one, where families, mostly women, waited for another gift box from an NGO. The women had a demeanor of calm anticipation peculiar to people accustomed to waiting. This package would be magically imbued with their dreams of respite, with their hopes of comfort, of a sudden change of fate. This was a box that would return everything to normal, a miracle of light and purity that would heal their family’s pain. Even though the package of the day before contained nothing but a box of cereal and a doll, today’s was sure to break the cycle. And the line began to inch forward little by little.

“I have dreamed of our house every night since we left,” Asma said. “It’s a small house with a small sitting room and two small bedrooms, but in my dreams it’s huge and warm and pretty and the courtyard is even bigger with a giant oak tree in the middle of it. I know we left our home, but my dreams don’t seem to know that.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m fine. She told me this was going to happen. She explained it to me. She said I have to be strong, and I am.”

“Yes, yes, you are.” I said. “Everyone can see that.”

Good, I thought to myself. That’s handled.

At one of the tents, next to a small campfire breathing a little smoke, two women sat one in front of the other on a small tarp as if in yoga positions. The younger of them, wearing a green head scarf, knelt with both feet under her behind as she combed the hair of the other, who seemed to be in a half-lotus position, an assiduous combing to rid the wet hair of even the tiniest tangle. On the other side of the women, looking utterly out of place, was a small pot of wilting geraniums wrapped in pink crepe. Francine had a black dress with a pattern of tulips the exact color of that pink.

No, I had not handled that.

“You are strong,” I told Asma, “but it’s difficult when we lose someone we love.” I made sure to look at her, to see her. “My father died a while ago. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but I loved him. I was sad for many months. A piece of my heart was taken away. I had to be strong because I had people who needed me. I had to go to work in the morning. I had to talk to all kinds of people. I would be strong and operate on a patient. But then I had to find time to cry by myself. I couldn’t help myself. I would cry and cry until I had to be strong again.”

“How long did you cry?”

“Oh, a long time,” I said. “Two months, maybe more.”

“And then what happened? Did you stop?”

“I don’t know what happened,” I said. “I think I started crying less and then a little less. I was still sad, but it didn’t hurt as much.” I crouched before her once again, face-to-face. “I’ll tell you a secret. You can’t tell anyone. As I’m talking about my father now, I want to cry. I’m still sad, but the sadness isn’t as strong anymore. I still think about him. Just today I was talking to my brother about him.”

Rasheed showed up with chocolate chip cookies for each of us, and Asma had hers in her mouth in an instant.