Another Kurd, Another Drowning

His name was Baris Yagzi, all of twenty-two, drowned on April 23, 2017, off the coast of Turkey, when the refugee boat he had boarded sank in the Aegean, killing at least sixteen people, including children, and leaving only two survivors—a pregnant woman from the Congo and another from Cameroon. The usual story, the boat would have been barely safe had it carried only one-fourth the number of passengers. He was one of hundreds of thousands of refugees who sailed across those seas, one of thousands who died doing so.

He had dreamed of going to Brussels to study music, but his visa application was rejected. He grew desperate. He paid smugglers thousands of dollars for a seat on one of those boats. He was Turkish, not Syrian. The picture in the paper showed a boy of uncommon pulchritude, a young Apollo and his instrument, his head supported by the violin’s chin rest, dark, brooding eyes looking at a point somewhere to the left of the camera, eyebrows of an ancient relief, a beauty mark on his left cheek, a perfect imperfection.

Baris washed up on the Turkish shore clutching his violin case, his fingers squeezing the life out of what gave him life. He would not let go even as he drowned. Within the case lay his instrument, that wooden vessel, and sheets of music of his own composition, now wet and unsalvageable.

You texted me a link to a newspaper article about Baris when it first appeared. You typed only one word: Arion.

In ancient time on our island, this Lesbos, Arion, he who would invent dithyramb and coin its name, came to be. The greatest musician of his time, the boy won a competition in Sicily. On his way back to Lesbos, carrying his lyre and prize money, the ship was waylaid by pirates who stripped him of his riches and offered him a choice in how he was to die: be stabbed and then buried properly once on land or be thrown into the sea and drown. What to choose, what to choose? Arion asked if he could sing a last song before dying, one that would help him decide. The boy raised his voice in praise of Apollo, the god of poetry and the greatest lyre player of all. The boy’s song was so pure that dolphins floated on the water’s surface to listen, and Apollo, he who had once skinned Marsyas alive, heard the boy.

When the pirates threw young Arion overboard, the dolphins carried him and his lyre to the safety of shore.

But not Baris.

Where have the dolphins gone?

Where the gods?