The Girl from Aleppo

  Everyone in the café was trying to arrange passage to Greece. Some like us had come by road and plane, others by road the whole way. Many said they had sold all they had to come here, including heirlooms and family homes, or had borrowed money. One man said he had even met someone who had sold his kidney to fund the trip.

  Some had already tried the crossing. We met one family who had failed because their dinghy was too overloaded and quickly sank. But they were trying again. ‘Either you die from shelling in Syria or you die at sea,’ shrugged the father. Though the Aegean crossing was much shorter and nowhere near as dangerous as the open sea between Libya and Lampedusa, at least fifty people had drowned making the crossing so far that year. ‘There’s no life left in Syria,’ agreed someone else. ‘It’s like being in a burning house – it’s risky to jump out of the window, but what’s the alternative?’

  The price was usually about $1,000 a person, but some people said it was better to get a wooden boat which was more expensive. We were trying to get some kind of motorised yacht because of my wheelchair, which everyone thought would be too heavy for a dinghy, so I’m always the obstacle. Mustafa’s cousin Mahmud even said I shouldn’t bring it.

  While Uncle Ahmed was getting recommendations for smugglers, the rest of us went to buy life jackets. A good one cost 50 euros. People in the café had warned us not to buy the cheaper locally made ones which cost only 15 euros but were stuffed with foam or packaging which absorbs water and wouldn’t float. Nahda’s children were excited trying them on, except for one who cried. On the advice of the people in the café we also bought a pack of party balloons. They’d told us that the best way to protect the all-precious phone on the boat crossing was putting it inside a balloon.

  As we went back to the hotel we crossed the square where people were speaking urgently on phones. ‘You’ve got to decide now, spaces are running out!’ we heard one man say. ‘I’ve never lost a passenger,’ insisted another.

  Every evening around dusk, lines would gather on the square as tour buses arrived to collect those off to make the crossing as if they were going on holiday.

  As if it wasn’t bad enough that we needed a special boat because my wheelchair would weigh down the dinghy, Nasrine and I were delaying everyone because Shiar was supposed to be transferring the money for our passage and it didn’t come. I knew that Mahmud and some of the others were saying they should go on without us. Eventually the money came through, and Uncle Ahmed called to say he had found a suitable boat and we would go the next night. I couldn’t believe we were finally going. We didn’t have much to get ready, but Nasrine rearranged our backpack to have something to do and charged the phone.

  The next day the phone didn’t ring. We kept checking it was on even though we knew it was. Then my uncle called. He told Nasrine that the smuggler had stopped answering his phone. We stayed up late, thinking at any moment the call would come, but nothing. When even at 2 a.m. he didn’t answer, we knew this was a bad sign.

  After two days we realized the man had disappeared and like a lot of people we had been cheated. Uncle Ahmed had paid a deposit, fortunately not too much.

  Then the same thing happened again. We waited and waited because those proper boats were hard to find. As August came to an end we began to get worried. We heard that the sea was going mad, the waves getting higher and the water cold, and we were in a panic. The longer we waited the more dangerous it would be. We knew the others felt we were delaying them. In the end Uncle Ahmed said we would have to go in a dinghy but we would pay more to try to get one just for our family. It was decided that if the wheelchair became a problem in the boat we would get rid of it. No one said what would happen to me.

  This time my uncle did it differently. To try and get round the cheating, a system had developed where you pay the money to a third party, then the money is only released to the smuggler once you are safely across. The way it works is you pay the money to an ‘insurance office’ and they give you a numeric code. Then once you reach Greece you call and give the code to the agent so he can collect the money. If a passenger doesn’t call after three days, the smuggler can also get the money, so they get paid even if the person drowns.

  Compared to some people’s experiences, we were lucky. We met a family with a toddler and a ten-day-old baby girl sleeping outside on the front terrace of the mosque because they had lost everything. They told us they were from Deraa where the revolution had started and they had fled after their house was destroyed in a bombing raid. They had left so hurriedly that the woman Rasha gave birth along the way. It had taken them twenty days to get to İzmir, then they had paid a smuggler $2,700 for the crossing and he had disappeared.

  Like I told you when I talked about the Nujeen principles, I don’t like to believe that people are evil by nature, but when I met people like the people smugglers I wasn’t sure I was right. They were taking the money of people who had already lost almost everything and were leaving them begging. Then there were ones who sent people, even children, to sea in substandard boats. I don’t like to judge someone, but what kind of man sends someone to die and makes money from it?

  It made me remember the discussion Nasrine and I had had back in Aleppo in 2006, when Saddam Hussein was executed. I was confused because I felt sorry. I mean, we all know what Saddam did to the Kurds – this was personal for us. But Nasrine told me there’s no shame in feeling sorry, what we wanted was justice not revenge, and anyway he shouldn’t have been executed on the Eid holiday.

  The Ramadan before we left Turkey, there was a TV programme about verses of the Koran and how they came to the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). One of them was the story of the Ethiopian man who murdered the Prophet’s uncle Hamza the Brave with a spear. The Prophet forgave him, and the man became a Muslim and later used the same spear to slay a false Prophet. I was so happy that the Koran supported my view of the ultimate good nature of people.

  But the people smugglers really tested that. And they were making so much money. I calculated that if on average people were paying $1,000 each and the smuggler squashed in as many as sixty then that’s $60,000 each crossing. Even after you take away the cost of the boat and commissions to agents and the bus to the beach, they must make at least $30,000 per crossing. So far that year 300,000 people had crossed that way – that’s millions of dollars!

  In Café Sinbad, we watched the news on CNN and Al Arabiya. Most reports seemed to be about the ‘Refugee Crisis’, showing crowds of people arriving on the Greek islands and in Macedonia, Hungary and Austria, exactly where we were going.

  On 31 August we saw Mrs Merkel again giving a press conference, calling on the EU to do better. ‘If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for,’ she said. ‘We live in orderly, very orderly circumstances,’ she added. ‘Most of us do not know the feeling of complete exhaustion combined with fear.’ She ended by saying, ‘Wir schaffen das’ – ‘We can do this.’ I like that woman. Maybe she will be our Queen Zenobia.

  Finally, the day after that, on our tenth day in İzmir, the call came. Uncle Ahmed had found a boat to take us to Lesbos. It was our turn to go.

  11

  The Route of Death

  Behram to Lesbos, Wednesday 2 September 2015

  It was after midnight when the bus finally picked us up from Basmane Square where we had all been waiting for hours with our life jackets and few belongings. Other waiting groups had gone and each time we were left behind. Finally, ours came. My cousin Mohammed carried me on and I told Nasrine to make sure the wheelchair didn’t get left behind by those who were against our bringing it. Then we drove through the night, most of us dropping off to sleep.

  Suddenly the bus screeched to a stop. The doors opened and Turkish gendarmerie got in, flashing their torches like one of those old war movies of Nazis searching for Jews. What could we say? We told them the truth, that we were Syrians fleeing war. They told us we must go back to where we came from. The bus turned round and st
arted heading towards İzmir. I couldn’t believe we were going to return after all that. But the driver was a nice man. After a couple of miles he pulled over and told us to get out and wait for a bit and someone else would come and get us. It was about 5 a.m. The place where he had dropped us was an abandoned olive-oil factory. We huddled by the walls, shivering in the pre-dawn darkness, away from the pools of light thrown by the streetlamps, worried about being spotted again by the gendarmerie. I saw that Nahda was weeping. One of her little girls had got left behind on the bus. Luckily the driver noticed and brought her back within a few minutes.

  As soon as the sun rose my uncle kept calling the smuggler, but he was not answering. ‘Not again!’ I said. The glare of the sun was becoming unbearable, and I feared we were in an endless vicious circle of being conned.

  Finally the smuggler answered, and after nine hours, at around 2 p.m., five taxis came to pick us all up. They drove us along the main road overlooking the sea, past the turn-off to Assos, and pulled into the side of the road by an olive grove.

  ‘Wow,’ I exclaimed as I was lifted out into my chair. Inside the taxi we had been too crowded to really see out, but now we could see green fields dotted with grey rocks and gnarled olive trees leading down to a sparkling blue sea. I gazed about in wonder. Just west of us on a cliff were what must have been the ancient columns of Assos and the ruins of Aristotle’s school of philosophers. Across the water was a dark rocky island. ‘That’s it, Greece,’ said Uncle Ahmed.

  Nasrine punched into her phone the Google coordinates we had been given for our departure point and we began the walk down to the shore. Google said 1.1 miles, which wasn’t far, but we couldn’t use the road that wound down in case we were spotted and instead had to walk through the olive groves. The way down was hard and rocky and Nasrine and one of my cousins had to carry me in my chair much of the way as it was impossible for the wheels. Soon my back was hurting badly as we were bumping around and I was jolting so much, but everyone kept saying, ‘You are the Queen, Queen Nujeen in your chair.’ I felt like one of those ancient monarchs being carried in a litter like I’d seen King Herod in a biopic of Joseph, who we call Yusuf.

  When we got to the shore, it wasn’t sandy as I had imagined it would be, so my chair still couldn’t move. We thought we were in the right place as there were discarded nappies, clothes and medicines all over the beach and old life jackets, evidence everywhere of refugees.

  But it turned out that somehow we were at the point used by another smuggler. The right place was half a mile further along the shore, but there was a cliff in the way and no way round. The only way there was to climb the hill and then go down. It was hard enough getting up but coming back down with my wheelchair was almost impossible as it was slippery and rocks kept being dislodged. Everyone was getting very hot and bothered. There was a group of people down below already waiting who could see we were struggling, so six Moroccan guys came up to help. Somehow they had rope with them which they used to tie the wheelchair and make a kind of pulley system.

  Finally, we made it. By then it was five in the afternoon and the sea was sparkling in the lowering sun. This beach was also littered with refugee debris, but we didn’t care. We were tired and happy to be there. Some boats were going out, but they told us ours would not go till the morning and we would have to sleep in the olive grove. So it was another cold night outside. I’d never heard waves lapping on a shore before, and I listened to them and the breeze in the trees until they lulled me to sleep.

  The smuggler, who was Turkish but a Kurd so we’d trusted him, arrived next morning with the boats in ‘Made in China’ boxes for us and the other groups waiting. When our dinghy was inflated Uncle Ahmed became very angry. We had paid extra to have a new dinghy, but it was clear this was an old one and there was a big repair patch on the bottom. Also the outboard motor was only 20 horsepower instead of the usual 30. The smuggler just shrugged. What could we do? We couldn’t go back to İzmir and start the whole process again.

  By 11a.m. all four boats were prepared and we were all ready in our life jackets, but the smuggler said he was waiting for the Turkish coastguards out at sea to move away.

  Then it was all day waiting with nothing to drink, no food but sugar cubes and Nutella, and nothing to do but stare at the water we had to cross. We got tired and took the life jackets off. In the afternoon the wind began getting up and the waves got higher. I started to think we were going to die on the beach. Around 4.30 p.m. the smuggler told us to put our life jackets back on and each group to have their driver ready. In our case this was Uncle Ahmed, but the other groups didn’t seem to have realized they would have no pilot and hadn’t chosen. Then at 5 p.m. the coastguard shift changed and it was time to go. Nadha and her husband Mustafa bid each other goodbye as he was staying behind to look after his parents.

  The motors were attached and the dinghies pushed into the water, then everyone waded through the shallows to clamber in, some of them carrying small children in their arms. Suddenly I realized I was the only one left on the shore. In her anxiety to go even Nasrine had climbed on board. ‘What about me?’ I yelled.

  Our Moroccan friends were still waiting for their boat, so they carried me out to the dinghy in the chair and lifted me in.

  ‘Goodbye, Turkey,’ I said as Uncle Ahmed started the engine.

  From the sea the island looked much further away. Our dark grey dinghy was very small. Even though we had paid extra just to be the thirty-eight of us, which was much better than the fifty or so we had seen crammed into earlier boats, it was still more than double the ‘15 Max’ it said on the box, particularly with my wheelchair, and it felt very squashed.

  Like everything I was doing, it was my first time on a boat. I felt like a six-year-old girl not a sixteen-year-old. ‘Why are you nervous?’ asked Nasrine. ‘I am not nervous, I’m excited doing everything for the first time,’ I replied. ‘It’s not excitement, it’s fear,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ She never showed her own fear because she knew everything she did would affect me. She was the one who knew the outside world and I took all my cues on how to react from her.

  I did my deep breathing from Brain Games and looked around the boat at everyone. We were all spaced out from two days with little sleep, then being in the hot sun with nothing to drink. My three cousins whose mother and father had been shot were sad and quiet. Many people had closed their eyes and were praying. Nasrine was crouching on the floor trying to hold my chair still.

  Our elder sister Nahda didn’t look at the sea. Her baby and the three little girls were all crying and she was focused on calming them. She was stressed because she’d decided to take her children out of the poisoned environment of war to somewhere they could get on with life, go to school, but now it seemed like a big responsibility for a thirty-three-year-old alone and she wondered what she had done.

  Uncle Ahmed was all furrow-browed trying to drive the boat. He’d spent the last two days in the hotel in İzmir studying YouTube videos on how to do it. At the start he gunned the engine too much and we shot forward then zigzagged a bit as he tried to correct the course. ‘Look out!’ shouted Aunt Shereen as we bumped right into a wave and water came over the sides. The sea was much less calm than it had looked earlier in the day. To start with it was nice to feel the spray after being in the hot sun all day. Finally, my ‘Young Forever Love’ T-shirt I had worn for days was getting a wash. But as waves pitched us up and down, some of my cousins started retching. Others were crying and screaming ‘Oh God!’

  At one point a wave tossed us right to one side and my aunt lost her bag with all her valuables. We seemed very low in the water. My cousins used their shoes to scoop water out of the dinghy. Sometimes people throw things off but we didn’t have much. ‘We should never have brought the wheelchair,’ said Mahmud.

  I felt I should be worried – I knew this water might be our grave. And of course I can’t swim. I’d never been in water. None of us could swim. Yet sitting in my wheelch
air, higher than everyone else, I thought of myself like Poseidon, God of the Sea, in his chariot. I tried to imagine the hippocampus, the half-horse half-fish that towed it along, and fancied that through the spray of mist I could see the Nereides, the daughters of Poseidon, riding the horse fish, tossing their long hair and laughing in the wind.

  I smiled at the thought. ‘Look, Nahda, how beautiful it is!’ I cried as we were tossed up and down. I laughed every time we were hit by another wave even though we were drenched through. ‘You need a psychiatrist, laughing here,’ said someone. Actually I was praying too, but quietly.

  We were so intent on our own boat that we didn’t see what happened to the other three leaving with us. But Mustafa, scrambling up the cliff to follow our journey with binoculars and report back to our parents, was horrified. As he watched, the first boat left with the waves and was quickly overturned. We were the second boat to go. The third got much of the way and overturned close to the island, leaving the people to swim. The fourth was picked up by the Turkish coastguard. Mustafa was in tears on the phone to my father because he didn’t know if it was us. In fact we were better off as there were fewer of us compared with the other boats and Uncle Ahmed’s YouTube lessons had proved useful. He went against the waves instead of with them and got us to sit more on the side where the waves were hitting the boat to keep it down.

  After a while a mist came down and we could no longer see Lesbos ahead. I hoped we were going the right way. Mahmud kept looking at my wheelchair. I knew we had agreed that if it became a danger we would throw it into the sea, but surely he wouldn’t really do that.

  I kept an eye out for pirates and Turkish coastguards, but the only people at sea seemed to be refugees. Hundreds of people were making the crossing every day and two other dinghies were not far behind us. I didn’t realize how close death was. Just a small tear in the fabric from my wheelchair catching and we could have capsized or a large wave could have turned the boat over at any moment.