No Place of Refuge Read online

  ‘Let’s play a game,’ he said. She tried to pin down his age. He could be anywhere from sixteen to twenty, she thought. He was slim and wiry, with a clever, suspicious face. The little girl looked hungry. Rachel offered her an apple. She took it with a bright, beaming thanks.

  ‘What kind of game?’ she asked.

  ‘You tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine.’

  ‘Easy enough. I’m Sergeant Rachel Getty.’

  ‘Sergeant? You’re police?’

  ‘I am.’

  He looked at her plain blue windbreaker. ‘Not Greek,’ he said. ‘Not Interpol. American?’

  ‘No, I’m from Canada.’

  A light went on in his eyes. ‘Then you came because of Audrey.’ The little girl clutched his hand; he gave her a reassuring smile. He whispered to her in an undertone: something he’d said made the girl jump up and down.

  Rachel spoke to him sharply. ‘I’d like to know who you are.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ he said, still watching her. ‘My name is Ali Maydani.’

  They walked along the shoreline, the boy speaking to Rachel of his journey, the little girl playing a game of hop, skip, and catch up. Rachel noticed the way Ali kept his eye on the girl, even when his attention was focused on Rachel.

  ‘Is it slowing down?’ She meant the arrival of refugees on the island.

  He nodded. ‘You wouldn’t think it’s only four miles across to Lesvos’s northern shore. There’s a moment when you’re out on the raft on the open sea, and you feel like you’ve fallen off the edge of the world. You can’t turn back, and you don’t know what’s ahead.’

  Rachel knew he wasn’t talking about geography.

  ‘You risked it anyway. With your little sister in tow.’

  The boy spoke English well, the little girl not as well, though she seemed to understand their conversation. She was so endearingly good-natured that Rachel wanted to hug her. She wondered if these were late-developing maternal instincts, then asked herself how she could think that with all she’d been to Zachary. All she’d had to be.

  ‘Aya isn’t my sister,’ Ali said. ‘She’s my friend’s sister.’

  ‘And your parents?’ Rachel asked. ‘Her parents?’

  ‘Gone,’ he said, without elaboration. ‘They won’t be coming.’

  He asked her why she’d come to Lesvos, so Rachel told him the truth. Nothing she said seemed to surprise him. She had the feeling he’d known who she was, and that he’d expected her to come. When he told her he’d been on Lesvos since January, she guessed he’d found her for a reason.

  ‘You’ve been here a long time. Why haven’t you transited through?’ Ali planted his feet. He faced Rachel squarely, studying her open face – making calculations, she thought, as he pulled a photograph from his pocket.

  ‘I’m waiting for Israa,’ he said. ‘She’s Aya’s sister and my friend.’ Rachel looked down at the photograph. If Aya was pretty, the older sister could have given Helen of Troy a run for her money. The wide, clear eyes, the stunning symmetry of her bone structure, the rich, dark curls that framed her face. It was a face that was older than her years, the expression anxious, her hand raised as if to stop the photographer from capturing her image. She was a girl in motion, sixteen or seventeen years old.

  ‘Friend?’ she asked Ali, a humorous emphasis on the word.

  Ali flushed, his fingers curled around the edge of the photo.

  ‘I was going to marry her,’ he said with all the stout conviction of first love. He met her eyes with such grown-up clarity that Rachel adjusted her perceptions. ‘She’s missing. We fled Damascus together. When the smugglers took us to the boats, we were separated. I’ve been looking for her ever since.’

  He took a deep breath, his words forced into a sharp, hard point. ‘Audrey Clare said she would help me find her.’

  He turned the photograph over and pressed it into Rachel’s hand. It was covered in a jumble of figures that resolved themselves into names.

  Rachel looked up with a frown. ‘What is this?’ she asked the boy, alarmed by his sudden pallor.

  ‘This is everyone Audrey asked about Israa before she disappeared.’

  18

  Douma, Syria

  The sea was the enemy he’d thought about, the enemy he’d prepared himself to face, the enemy he’d convinced Israa was one they could overcome, fighting its remorselessness together. She hadn’t wanted to make the crossing; she’d said they should stay in Izmir, find work, find others who might bring word of her parents and brothers. Someone would know if they were trapped in Douma, or if they’d managed to escape.

  Israa returned home to search for her parents. While the jets had flown past, she’d rushed from street to street, calling out their names. She’d searched hospitals, clinics, bomb shelters. She’d chased after ambulances, crying for her little brothers.

  Sometimes the drivers answered her questions; other times, their sirens brought the echo of a storm in their wake – the double-tap carried out by helicopters and fighter jets: the first strike against the people, the second against the paramedics who raced to the people’s rescue.

  ‘Go back, go back,’ they shouted. Israa could only obey.

  She was his next-door neighbor. He’d been in love with her since they were children. They had played together without disrupting the strict conventions of their culture, their mothers keeping an eye on them, the children of the two families so closely intertwined that Ali and Israa’s love affair had passed beneath their mothers’ notice.

  Or so Ali had assumed. One morning he’d heard his mother decide his future across a cup of coffee. She promised there would be an engagement as soon as Ali enrolled in college. She told Israa’s mother not to worry, Ali was too deeply in love to look at another girl, even if he left for Damascus. If he tried, she’d straighten him out.

  So plans had been made, comfortably and without fuss, neither he nor Israa consulted. Later that night, he’d told Israa the news – the two of them had giggled at their mothers’ presumption. At the end of the conversation, they’d smiled into each other’s eyes, knowing they’d make the promise good.

  All this before the siege of Ghouta.

  Before Ali had gone to study in Damascus, his family falling afoul of the regime. His father dead of ‘respiratory failure,’ his oldest brothers conscripted into the army, the younger ones disappeared for joining in the protests. When they came for Ali, they forced him out of school, recruiting him to the kind of work he couldn’t wipe from his mind, in an effort to demonstrate his loyalty, and to keep them from Israa’s door.

  The destruction of Douma escalated. Finally, the morning came. Ali’s uncle decided he had to get them out. He paid for transport to the border: Ali and the others had been allowed to transit through, but his uncle was detained, accused of being a spy. Ali had friends on the other side to receive him, friends who knew the importance of getting him out. They paid bribes to the guards to look the other way, but something about his uncle had flagged the guards’ attention.

  Ali’s parting from his uncle was bitter, no words of consolation spoken, his tears a counterpoint to Israa’s despairing cries. He’d held her close and urged her to silence. She was wearing a niqab, her beautiful face hidden; he didn’t want to give the guards an excuse to demand a strip search. He’d seen perversity he couldn’t imagine on the long journey north. It had taught him to weigh the costs of each action he undertook.

  He yanked on Aya’s and Israa’s hands and left his uncle with the guards. In the camp on the other side, they found a moment of respite, pretending to be siblings. They’d made friends their own age, and heard all kinds of promises about a golden life in Europe: a life free of war, a life without Syria.

  The pain of it struck him in new and vulnerable places. He was leaving his history behind. The city of jasmine, the country that desolated childhoo
d. In Turkey, everything was different: a mixture of fear, loneliness, desperation, hunger, ridicule, and cruelty; exploitation leavened by occasional kindness.

  People were no longer seeing the boy Ali, in love with the girl, Israa. They saw a young man on the prowl, a predator who might strike, who needed to be contained. Kindness had become happenstance, too illusory to be prized. Except for the friends who had promised him safety. But they had promised it only to Ali, and not to the people he loved.

  He wouldn’t give his newfound friends what they’d come for unless they made arrangements for the others. While they took their time deciding, he was running out of options. To get the others registered, he’d have to risk the crossing. He’d pay the smugglers to take them to Mytilene, where they’d catch the ferry to Athens. Once he had papers for the others, the friends who’d met him at the border would return. They’d get him across to the continent, in exchange for what he’d promised them. Nothing could go wrong. He’d told himself this every step of the journey: nothing could go wrong.

  They’d been stopped at a dozen checkpoints between Douma and the border. His uncle paid the bribes, while the girls huddled together, muffled to the eyes. A few times the car had been searched. A few times, Ali had been abused. A few times, the money had been enough to wave them on.

  Then they were through and Ali’s uncle was on the other side of the barrier, in the hands of Assad’s men.

  He knew the fate that awaited his uncle; its imprint had scoured his mind.

  And implicated his body.

  19

  Mytilene, Lesvos

  Esa and Rachel found a table in the bar of the Sirena Hotel, where they’d asked Ali Maydani to join them. He’d left Aya in Shukri Danner’s care, promising to return within the hour. The hotel was really a guesthouse, and its bar was pleasant and homey, the tables a warm, polished wood. There was no overemphasis on the Greek identity, no plastic flags in shot glasses, no framed photographs of Mykonos or Santorini. The proprietor had an air of benevolent goodwill, dispensing drinks behind the bar, including a bitter beverage known as raki, while his wife bustled comfortably between the tables, her face and figure soft and round. The apron she wore around her waist was patterned with a floral border; Khattak guessed that the lovely, feminine touches in the bar were due to her artistic eye. Pots of violets adorned the wooden tables.

  They were using the hotel’s Wi-Fi to touch base with Sehr and Nate, both tasks Khattak had passed on to Rachel to give himself distance from the others. Rachel had introduced him to Ali; Khattak had felt an instant sense of connection to the boy. The depth of experience in the boy’s eyes, the sensitive cast to his mouth, made Khattak realize he was more fragile than the image he tried to project. He felt protective toward the boy, though he warned himself against it. He went through the list of names Ali had given them, making his own notes.

  The bar served plain, hearty food, the flavors wholesome and savory. He didn’t think Rachel had eaten so many olives in one sitting before; the bread and goat cheese that rounded off their appetizers were just as flavorful. There were small seeds in the bread that gave it an enticing, earthy scent.

  However hungry Rachel may have been, the boy was ten times hungrier. He was a charming, good-looking boy with a pleasant manner, but the waitress treated him with marked contempt, saving her smiles for Khattak, who was too preoccupied to notice. Disgruntled, she set down their main courses and flounced off.

  Minutes later a loud and hearty group of men tumbled into the bar, bringing with them an atmosphere of friendly chaos. They chaffed each other in different languages; Khattak’s ear picked out Greek, Italian, German, and bits and pieces of the lingua franca – English – through which they all communicated.

  Seeing Rachel at their table, the only guest in the bar who was a woman, the group of men stopped and took notice. A raffishly attractive man with speaking dark eyes doffed his hat and gave Rachel a smile of welcome. He and one of his friends wore navy jackets with the insignia Guardia Costiera on the breast. Members of the Italian Coast Guard. The older man’s jacket had a thick orange stripe on each shoulder, the same color as the jacket’s hood, and a single star on the inner lapel. A commander or captain, Esa surmised, watching Rachel offer a smile of her own.

  The men proceeded to a table close by, calling out greetings to the proprietor. Having struck out with Khattak, the waitress proceeded to try her sulky charm upon the men. In no time, she and a German medic named Hans had established a familiar rapport.

  The men at the table noticed Ali and waved. He waved back, his face a little anxious. He called out something in Italian but the man who was a member of the Coast Guard shook his head, his easy smile dimming into sadness.

  Ali pointed to a name on the list. Illario Benemerito.

  ‘That’s him. He’s a commander with the Italian Coast Guard.’

  Khattak nodded. ‘We’ll speak to him before he goes. Who else?’

  ‘Eleni Latsoudi will be here soon. She took me across to Turkey a couple of times before the HRT made her stop.’

  Rachel had used the intervening time to read up on her laptop. She leaned over her plate of eggplant moussaka to brief Khattak.

  ‘The Hellenic Rescue Team, sir. They’ve done phenomenal work during the crisis, stepping up when no one else would. I don’t mean the Coast Guard of the nations who are chiefly involved – Greece and Turkey. I mean the European continent. The places where walls went up.’

  ‘You call it a crisis?’ Ali turned his dark eyes on Rachel, his mild warmth erased.

  Khattak guessed where this was going. ‘Sergeant Getty doesn’t mean anything by it, Ali. Where we’re from, this is how the conflict has been framed: the civil war in Syria is responsible for the refugee crisis. It’s accurate as far as it goes, which is not far enough, I know.’

  The boy put his long head in his hands, his fingers buried in the curls. ‘I find it hard to think of myself as the victim of a crisis. I feel like a person – do you think the war erased that?’

  Khattak looked at the boy with great compassion. These were thoughts he hadn’t wanted to own to; this wasn’t the first time he’d had them. The question of ummah was always with him; it was a question of community, of rootedness in a common history, and the sharing of a present moment of crisis and decline. It was why he’d chosen to go to Iran, why he followed the news in the time he had free from his work. It was instinctive to him as a man of his faith to be deeply concerned about the ummah. He thought of the cruelty that characterized the abuse of dissidents in Iran. He knew the situation in Syria was worse on a scale that defied imagination – of a nature to wring tears from a statue of the Madonna.

  Assad was engaged in the wholesale slaughter of his people. Set aside for the moment the destruction of Syria’s cities: their colleges, hospitals, and schools, their mosques and ancient souks. Even if that wasn’t totted up in a column of unthinkable loss, there was the question of Syria’s people. Syria had been a nation of twenty-two million. Fully half that population was displaced: seven million internally, while five million had fled Assad’s incalculable violence. The abject misery of Syria’s prison system needed to be weighed on a separate scale of horrors.

  He’d known this, he’d followed the escalation of the war closely, he’d supported his mother’s efforts with the family she sponsored, but for all that, he’d kept the distance and silence of a member of Canadian law enforcement. He was beginning to feel the strain of this compartmentalization, of not acting where he felt action was called for as he’d done as a student, when he’d imagined a different future for himself.

  In the past, he’d shared his inner turmoil with Samina or his father. Often, he’d visited the mosque to find the devotional warmth of community, speaking to the imam when his heart was burdened most.

  Now the touchstones of his life were gone, he was working his way back to the friendship he’d shared with
Nate, and as much as he admired and respected Rachel, he didn’t believe she could understand. She couldn’t understand what it felt like to be in his skin, to be proud of who he was while despairing that perhaps there was no longer anything to be proud of – anything to claim except this sense of oppression.

  Looking at Ali’s young face and imagining the desperation of his journey, Khattak experienced a familiar weight of shame at daring to think these thoughts. Here was this boy who hadn’t begun to speak of his losses, and he could set that aside to think of a girl he loved, a girl he feared for with all his heart.

  Where was she? What had happened to the girl named Israa, the beautiful girl in the photograph?

  Police officers with their government’s backing were searching for Audrey Clare, dispatched by the fame and resources of her brother. Ali was searching for a girl among thousands of refugees, a girl without money or family, a girl whose dismal fate Esa envisioned as only a police officer could: she had drowned at sea, she had fallen into prostitution in Izmir, she’d been snatched back across the border, or she’d disappeared in the hands of smugglers.

  One life was sought with crushing urgency; the other had vanished unremarked.

  These were scales Esa had been weighing all his life, an actuary of the dead and disposable. The boy would trade his life for Israa’s. But Esa could search only for Audrey.

  Perhaps reading something in his face, Rachel palmed the list for herself. ‘The Hellenic Rescue Team took you on board? Why?’

  ‘To take me back to Turkey. I’ve done the crossing a dozen times searching for Israa. I only found the smugglers who brought me across once.’

  Rachel raised her eyebrows at Khattak, who caught her meaning. ‘Movement into Europe is strictly controlled. Why would anyone agree to take you across and bring you back? How could you circumvent the authorities on either side?’

  Ali made a familiar gesture with his hand, rubbing his thumb against his fingers.

  ‘Money?’ Khattak asked. ‘You bribed the volunteers?’