A Girl in Every Port, but All the Boys in One

A couple of shifty seagulls eyed us as we left the restaurant. Rasheed suggested a postprandial walk to the Mytilene Port, something he did as often as he could trying to help the refugees who were waiting to board the last ferry to Athens, their next stop. You tried to get out of accompanying us, some excuse about bedtime and reading time, but I wouldn’t let you, and this time Mazen and Rasheed joined in. My brother told you we weren’t done with your company yet. You took another tack. You said you should return to your lonely hotel because there was a group of four Greek aunties who were playing cards in the restaurant, which also functioned as the lobby. They had arrived at around three in the afternoon and were still going strong by the time you left for the restaurant. You needed to go back to see if they were still there. It was an emergency, you joked.

When I was growing up in Beirut, my father’s two younger sisters used to play cards with three friends four afternoons a week, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. They would begin exactly at four in my aunt’s apartment one floor above ours, and the last hand was dealt at precisely eight in the evening. I mentioned that to you, and you said your father had a similar schedule, that he played with the same group of friends every weekday afternoon for over thirty-five years, and they stopped only when your father passed away.

“They could still be playing for all I know,” you said. “They may have found a substitute for my father and kept going, you know, like replacing a battery.”

“I miss that,” I said, though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I missed, what it was that I’d lost. “Are our aunts still playing?” I asked Mazen.

“Of course not,” he said. “Auntie Ilham died eight years ago, and Auntie Laila moved in with her second son even though she no longer recognizes him.”

The city of Mytilene was built some three thousand years ago, but the town center and marina had adjusted to serve the needs of the twenty-first-century tourist. As we walked from the marina to the port, there was a bigger variety of stores—more banks, grocery stores, well-lit cafés filled with evening locals, sprinkled with refugees. The two didn’t look that different, but the state of their comfort and that of their clothing were clear indicators of who was who.

The port itself was busier than I thought it would be, and darker. There were no streetlamps or much lighting of any kind, leaving the air in blacks and blues scumbled over purples. A cold wind scalloped the water around the only docked ship, the giant ferry going to Athens. It could carry hundreds of people, but it looked like there were no passengers on board. Rasheed explained that the ticket to Athens cost eighty euros per person and that many refugees would have given their last penny to the Turkish mafia in control of the crossing between Izmir and Lesbos, thinking that they’d have finally arrived once they landed in what they thought was Europe. Most of the people waiting at the port did not have enough to cover a ferry ticket.

We walked through a sea of teenage boys that parted gently to let us through and coalesced again as we passed. I remembered that you were nervous around crowds, but you looked more astonished than frightened. Most of the boys were speaking Farsi. I assumed they were Iranian at first, but then I noted the epicanthal fold of their eyelids and realized they were Afghan, probably Hazara. We came upon a group of kids speaking Arabic, three girls and a boy, huddled close on a bench. They didn’t seem concerned at all, chatting about nothing in particular. The eldest girl, perhaps no more than twelve, chestnut hair bursting from under a woolen cap, warily watched our approach. I said hello, introduced myself, asked where their parents were. The eldest said they were taking a walk and would be returning soon. I wondered what emergency would force the parents to leave their children in a strange place surrounded by a hundred teenage boys or, worse, whether these kids had been abandoned. But Mazen took over again. He talked to them, found out which Syrian village they were from, after which he joined them in chatting about nothing at all. I asked him in English, hoping the kids would not understand, whether we should be worried that their parents were not there. Once again that evening he regarded me as if I were speaking some language that no human had spoken before.

“This is my younger sister,” he told the children. “I’m older by one year but wiser by more, many more. She moved to America a long time ago but forgot to take her brain with her. I kept it in a fine jar, which looked rare but was made in China. Every time we get together, I give her back her brain, but it takes a little while for her to adjust to it. Just as she gets back to normal, she returns to America and forgets her brain again.”

The children snickered. One of the girls told Mazen that he was a big liar, like her dad. She accused him of adding salt and pepper to every word that left his mouth. Mazen denied the accusation with no little ardor, insisting that he was most honorable. Why, he had never lied in his life ever, not once. Everywhere he went he was called Mazen the Truthful. The girl, the cutest among them, asked me if I forgot my brain, to which I shook my head no.

“Of course she’d say that,” Mazen said. “She forgets. Here, let me show you the jar I keep her brain in.”

He patted his jacket, pretending to search for my lost brain. Where oh where had he put it? The girl stood up, laughing and pointing at him. “You can’t find it because there is no brain!”

The parents finally appeared. As their daughter said, they had simply gone for a Proustian stroll before boarding the big boat. Mazen talked to them briefly before they were on their way to the ferry with their children, their belongings, and their tickets in hand.

“You’ve been away for too long,” he told me.

“I was surprised that they would leave their children alone,” I said. “After all they’d been through.”

“Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?”

“I’m an American.”

You stood with Rasheed quite a ways from us, surrounded by about twenty boys who looked like they were all talking to you at once. I wondered if you felt you were being crowded by the boys, but it didn’t seem so. You didn’t move away from them no matter how close they got. One boy kept pointing to your phone, but you didn’t seem to understand what he was saying. By the time Mazen and I neared, Rasheed was asking the boy to slow down, for he was speaking much too fast. He didn’t understand Farsi that well, Rasheed said. The boy grinned.

“He wants you to look at his music video on YouTube,” Rasheed said. “He’s a musician. No, he’s a singer-songwriter, he says.”

“On phone,” the boy said in English. “On phone.”

You had trouble tapping in the right web address, your fingers too old to be phone nimble. You gave the boy your phone. He held it in his small hands as if it were the queen’s crown jewels. “Ooh,” he said. “So nice phone.” He proceeded to tap the screen maniacally, his thumbs a veritable blur, and voilà, a video began playing. The four of us were the guests of honor with front-row seating for the tiny screen, and the rest of the boys rough-and-tumbled their way to some angle of viewing behind us. Onscreen, the boy sang only slightly off-key, danced to a disco beat in front of a large mirror, delightfully cute in a coiffed do and besequined all over. The tune sounded hummable, but I couldn’t understand a word, wasn’t even sure what language the song was in, though the boys behind me were in awe. Chatter, chatter, a hand with pointing forefinger would appear over my shoulder, and another boy would begin to clap to the beat of the song.

“That’s wonderful,” you said, and the boy beamed in gratitude. Why was it that those boys thought you were someone of importance or someone who cared about who they were? Had Rasheed told them you were a writer? Because after the video ended, one at a time, they told Rasheed what they did or what they wanted to do, so that he would translate for you. This one was a carpenter, a mason, a cook, a shepherd who was willing to be retrained, sporting a worn jacket lined with lamb’s wool, a couple of sizes too large. You took it all in, nodding your head, hearing them—you, the witness. This one was the youngest of twelve, all of his family still in Afghanistan; that one had a brother in Brussels, a cousin in Brazil, an uncle in Denmark. Your head bobbed up and down, your gaze focused on each speaking boy, your concentration that of a believer listening to his gods. This one’s name was Najib, that one Mumtaz, and of course no less than five Mohammads. The teenagers were dynamic, so alive, as noisy as starlings chattering as they settled at sundown. Every single one of them told you he was eighteen. You kept asking, and they would say eighteen. Rasheed repeated the word so often that the boys no longer needed him to translate their age. I’m eighteen, I’m eighteen, they chirped. Not one of them looked older than fifteen, sixteen at most, with faces rarely, if ever, touched by razors.

“They don’t have any money to buy a ferry ticket to Athens,” Rasheed said. “They’re completely out.”

“But Athens isn’t even their final destination,” I said.

“They’re stuck,” he said. “There is a Swedish NGO run by an Iranian immigrant that comes here some nights with extra ferry tickets, but it doesn’t look like they’ll be around tonight.”

I noticed you getting antsy again. You glanced left, then right, took in all the boys. You moved closer to Rasheed, whispered something in his ear. Rasheed smiled, repeating the word “certainly” a couple of times in Arabic. You two began to walk away. The boys didn’t seem to mind, remaining in their own group, talking, arguing, gesturing wildly as if in a scene from an Italian movie, swimming in hormones, having what appeared to be a good time. I ran after you. Mazen ran after me.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To buy ferry tickets,” you said.

“There are about a hundred boys out there,” I said, trying to catch up. I, the voice of reason.

You stopped, your gaze not leaving your shoes. Rasheed threw a smile toward you, a life jacket, but you didn’t notice. He lifted his arm to console you but didn’t follow through with the motion, returning it to his side.

“I can’t afford eight thousand euros,” you said, paused for another moment, then started marching again into the dark night. “But I have a credit card.”

I thought at first that you were going to buy one hundred tickets. You had me worried. You seemed determined. We followed in step, exited the port’s gate, and crossed the street. The ticket office was around the corner, which I felt was a good thing: the boys who might be watching us wouldn’t see where we were going.

The office, an old-fashioned travel agency, was overbright and plastered with tacky tourist posters on all of its walls. Would a resident of a Greek island dream of a beach vacation somewhere else? You walked in first, held the door open for us, waited for Rasheed to lead the gaggle of us to the sole agent at a wide, bedraggled desk.

Rasheed, in English, said, “We’d like to buy ferry tickets to Athens.”

The agent, a young man in his thirties, handsome and peppy, tuned himself to high sparkle. If he were in a United States high school, he would have been a cheerleader. “Would that be four?”

“No,” you said, handing him your American credit card. “I want ten tickets.”

The young man didn’t blink. He produced a supply of tickets and counted out ten.

“What happens to them in Athens?” you asked Rasheed.

“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “They’ll have to be processed again before moving on, if they’re able to do so. This is one leg of a long journey.”

“A drop in the bucket, I know,” you said. “But I can help ten boys on this part of their passage.”

Rasheed decided he could afford two more tickets. Mazen looked at me. Without speaking and letting either you or Rasheed know, he was asking if it was okay by me for him to contribute. He said he could afford two tickets as well.

“I’ll buy ten as well,” I said. “That’ll make it an even two dozen.”

The march back was less military, more hesitant. How would we distribute the tickets? We decided we’d let Rasheed, the most experienced, deal with it. The starlings we’d left behind were still grouped together, the numbers remained at around twenty-five or a little more. Rasheed entered the circle, spoke his slow Farsi. The boys grew quiet but more excited, like stalking predators waiting to spring. Rasheed would hand out a ticket, and the boy who took it would leave the group, pick up his belongings, and rush toward the giant ferry, disappearing into the dark. One, two, until all twenty-four tickets were gone and only two boys remained standing before Rasheed, visibly the youngest by quite a bit. They hadn’t been able to push through to the front. They looked about to break out in tears.

Rasheed held his hands out to show he had no tickets left. The words for “sorry” are similar in Arabic and Farsi, so we all understood him.

“No,” I found myself saying, but apparently not as loudly as you did.

“Come with me,” you told the boys in English, and they understood you. One picked up his tattered backpack, spoke rapidly to the other. His voice hadn’t broken yet. They were thirteen at most. They stood before you, clutching their bags, smiling and waiting. And back to the ticket office we marched. I told you I could pay for one of the tickets, but you assured me you wanted to do it, as if it were some form of penance.

When you handed the boys their tickets outside the travel agency office, they hugged you, both at the same time. You looked perplexed, unsure how to hug them back. Then they turned to my brother and hugged him so fiercely he began to weep. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him cry. When it was my turn, they hesitated. Should they or shouldn’t they? They looked ecstatic. I moved toward them with my arms out.

We watched them run across the street, heading back into the port. Beyond the gate stood at least a dozen boys looking at us, and behind them more and more boys, and more, ad infinitum.