Near and Far

At dawn I see what looks like a large town ahead. The truck leaves the wide road and starts whining down narrower streets lined with square white buildings. There is a new smell in the air, a bit like when my mother cooks alicha. Birds circle and screech overhead.

“We’re near the sea,” says Almaz. “You can smell the seaweed. It smells a little bit like cabbage.”

“How do you know? Have you been to the ocean before?” I ask her.

“One of my father’s sisters lives near the coast. We went to visit her once when I was little. The water was warm and some people were swimming. I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember the smell.”

I can tell that she is thinking about her parents. I want to distract her somehow.

“England is an island, so we’ll never be far from the ocean there. Maybe we could go together,” I say.

The truck slows and pulls over at the side of a narrow road. One of the smugglers starts tapping people on the shoulder and gesturing that they should get out. He taps me and Almaz. Soon there are about fifteen of us standing on the sidewalk, wrapping our arms around ourselves against the cold morning breeze.

We follow the smuggler through the doors to one of the accommodation blocks and into a small room on the third floor.

“Here you will wait for the boat,” he says in English. “But first we’ll check your money.”

As we sit on the floor, silent tears roll down Almaz’s cheek. Her shoulders begin to shake and through a sob she says, “How will Mom and Dad find me in England?”

“You know the same phone numbers, so you’ll be looking for the same people. Your dad said you should get in touch with your aunty, and your parents will be in touch with her, too, so she can send them money. When they come, they will find you. Don’t worry. At least they aren’t too far behind you.” I realize that I sound confident, reassuring. Not like myself.

The smugglers didn’t wait for the slower walkers to reach the new truck. So I know they won’t send a truck for the injured passengers. There would be no extra money, and they would be responsible for a truckful of injured people. But I have learned that sometimes hope itself is as important as the thing you are actually hoping for.

The smuggler writes all our names down, which takes a long time as we speak several languages among us. He asks in English if we have paid or not.

“You must be quiet,” he says before he leaves. He taps his gun and points to the door. Men with guns will be waiting outside. I wonder how the money my uncle wired to the man in the white shirt could have made it up here.

An hour or so later the man returns. He walks over to a lady by the window, which has a sheet draped in front of it.

“You need to pay one thousand, six hundred dollars,” he says.

She looks up at him and shouts something back—not in English.

“Quiet,” he snaps, but she stands up and starts waving her arms, still shouting.

The man grabs her by the arm and drags her toward the door. I hear screaming and shouting in the corridor, and a loud cracking sound, then she is quiet.

Almaz grips my arm.

After a few minutes he returns. This time he goes over to one of the men in our group. “You also need to pay one thousand, six hundred dollars.”

The man replies in his own language, but quietly. Eventually he takes a phone offered by the man with the gun. He is calling a friend or a relative. Maybe they will have the money, but if not, the man will be staying here.

The smuggler turns and looks at me and Almaz but doesn’t come over.

For three days we wait in the room. I am used to small spaces now, but some of the others pace around and shout at the smugglers until they come into the room and threaten to take them away. But we are given hot food to eat and warm blankets to sleep on. There is even a toilet in the corridor outside.

We can hear the sea at night. It’s maybe a tenth of a mile from our room. I wish that Mom and Lemlem were waiting with me. Lemlem would sit on my lap and Mom would talk to me about what kind of work she might get, about whether we might live near the sea. She would wonder if the injera will be any good.

To pass the time, Almaz teaches me what she knows about dinosaurs. We invent a stupid game, where she tells me the name of a dinosaur and I have to guess what it looks like. I get T. rex right, but apart from that I have to accept it’s really not a strong subject for me. In return, I try to teach her how to play chess; how to set up the board, and what the different pieces are called. I realize it sounds like a ridiculous game unless you’ve actually seen a chessboard in action.

We are both exhausted from the desert journey, and the rest of the time we doze. Almaz rests her head on my lap rather than the hard floor, and I lean against the wall. A few months ago I could never have imagined a girl sleeping on my lap, but here it feels completely normal.

In the middle of the night, after the third day, there is a knock on the door. Three smugglers come in.

“Boat,” says one of them in English. “Put on all your clothes and come.”

Almaz and I are already wearing everything we own.

We walk sleepily down the stairs to a truck waiting outside. A cool wind is blowing in from the ocean and seeps through my thin layers of clothing in a few seconds.

We climb into the truck and the man gestures that we should move into the middle, as close together as possible. Once we are squashed into a tiny space, one of the armed men climbs in. The others begin passing him huge sacks, which he stacks around us. The sacks of rice are a decoy. In the middle of them sits the true cargo: people.

Soon we are completely hidden behind a wall of rice. The sacks push down on us, shunting us farther into the middle of the truck. At least they protect us from the freezing morning air, but I don’t know for how long we will be traveling like this.

The truck bumps slowly along the road, and after a few minutes we must join a highway of some kind. The truck chugs along at top speed. After a little while I drift off to sleep.

I wake maybe several hours later. We have stopped, and the smugglers are throwing bread rolls and bottles of water into the truck. Then we keep going. We must be traveling along the coastline. The wind is still strong, but doesn’t drive away the gathering clouds. I can hear seabirds screeching over the roar of the engine.

By late afternoon, the truck comes to a stop again. This time we climb out and gather next to a strip of sandy beach with a small concrete jetty jutting into the shallow sea. I have never seen the sea before. Almaz is staring out across the water. The horizon is gray, which makes the water seem dark blue, almost black.

Gathered around the jetty are men clutching bright-orange jackets. They walk toward us, waving the orange bundles at us and talking urgently.

“Who wants to buy a life jacket?” asks one of the smugglers.

Almaz and I have no money, but some people in our group are reaching into their pockets.

“Do you think we need one?” Almaz asks, looking concerned.

“No, we have a boat. We don’t need a life jacket, too.”

Almaz looks up at me and smiles her warm smile, which helps me to forget the biting wind for a moment.

The smuggler points to two small orange inflatable dinghies. I look at them in horror.

He sees my face and says, “No, no. Big boat.” He points out to sea.

We are to get in the little boats, which will take us to a bigger boat.

“Do you think there really is a bigger boat?” Almaz whispers.

“I guess if there were lots of little boats, then they would need to pay lots of people to sail them. It makes more sense for them to use one big boat,” I whisper back.

The smugglers point to me and the other men, and we start to drag one of the boats toward the edge of the water. We push it alongside the narrow jetty until it begins to bob up and down by itself. We push the second boat up behind it. The smugglers herd the others onto the jetty, but I can’t see Almaz. For a second I panic and then realize she is in the middle of the group of women. I push my way past the men, and even though one of the smugglers is shouting at me, I go and stand with Almaz.

People begin to step gingerly into the nearest boat. It wobbles and they sit down abruptly. When there are seven or eight people sitting down, the guard nods to Almaz, who steps into the middle of the second boat. I follow. The smuggler tips the engine propeller down into the water and tugs at the starter cord. A high-pitched roar breaks the silence and we steer slowly away from the jetty.

Almaz shivers in the breeze and spray flicks up onto our thin clothes, sucking away any warmth we have left. I put my arm around her shoulder, and it steadies us both as waves slam against the bottom of the boat. As we carve a path out to sea, I decide that I don’t like being surrounded by water. It seems alive; it seems angry.

After a few minutes the smuggler at the back of the boat shouts and points. In front I see a large blue fishing boat bobbing on the water. Almaz looks up at me, and I smile, full of relief that there is a big boat after all.

We must be the last people to join. As we steer closer, I can see hundreds of heads, moving up and down as the boat gently rocks with the waves.

We pull up to where a rope ladder hangs over the side of the larger boat. Our dinghy is moving to a different rhythm in the waves, and the boats bump against each other.

Men wait at the top, their arms outstretched. Almaz tries to grip the rope without falling between the two boats. She clings on, and looks up, reaching a hand to the next rung, where one of the men grabs her arm and begins to haul her toward the top. The other women go next; then it’s my turn.

As I jump into the hull of the bigger blue boat, I feel safer. Next to me is a mother with a small baby strapped to her chest in layers of bright cloth. The wooden sides and gentler motion are reassuring. Almaz pushes through the closely packed bodies to reach me. I think we are lucky to be near the edge. From the middle of the boat wafts a sour smell of vomit. Not everyone is okay with the rolling of the waves. Lots of people are wearing the bright life jackets they were selling by the jetty. They look warmer than everyone else. There is no roof or shelter from the wind, and although it’s not yet dusk, the clouds make it feel later.

There is a grating vibration through the floor of the boat as they haul in the anchor. I guess that’s what’s happening because right after that, the boat spins around, and we start bumping through the waves toward Europe.

Almaz and I have been thrown together once more with people we know nothing of. Only, this time there has been no time to talk, no chance to learn anything of the lives that brought the others to share this boat with us. Are they scared, too? There is no one to turn to for reassurance. Then, as I look up, I recognize the doctor, separated from us by two or three rows of people. He must have stayed in a different safe house.

“Hey, Doctor!” I shout. The words leave my mouth before I have a chance to stop them.

He turns around, as do many others to see who is making the noise. He nods at me and shouts hello.

It is a small thing, but I feel better. Safer. I feel Almaz slip her hand inside mine. I feel a flicker of warmth as I realize that she has no doubts about me; she trusts me to look after her.

We haven’t been sailing for very long when the wind becomes much stronger and the clouds lower. The engine of the boat splutters as we ride the waves, struggling under its heavy load. I can hear the men steering the boat shouting to one another. The first few drops of rain begin to fall, and I put my arm around Almaz’s shoulder again. We are both shivering, our faces shiny wet with spray and rainwater.

I don’t know if the sea is always this rough. I see my fear reflected in the faces surrounding us.