What Strange Paradise Read online

  “One hundred and twenty-four.”

  “No unaccounted for?” Lina asks.

  “You want me to dredge the seafloor?” the colonel replies.

  “The government doesn’t care about the seafloor, the government cares about the land. No unaccounted for on the island?”

  The colonel says nothing. Lina repeats her question.

  “No,” Kethros replies. “No unaccounted for on the island.”

  “Thank you.” Lina scribbles a few lines on the back of her folder and puts it back in her briefcase. “When you can, have someone from your office put it down in writing and send it over.”

  Kethros watches the tourists hurrying back to the hotel grounds. “Our mistake was getting into the nice business,” he says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We thought tourism would be easy money—the sea is already here, the sand is already here, what’s left but to be nice? What’s easier than to be nice?”

  Lina points to the Xenios. “A few hundred fishermen on this island who have nothing left to fish can still put food on the table because of the nice business.”

  The colonel shakes his head. “For now, maybe. But you can’t bet your future on work that requires the coming together of people, not now, not with the world the way it is. The days of people coming together are ending; this is a time for coming apart.”

  Lina packs her papers. She says good-bye to the colonel and leaves in her small rented sedan to make her way back to the city, where she will spend the night waiting to hear where the latest migrant ghost ship has been sighted next, or if it’s ever sighted again.

  Alone in the roadside café, Kethros turns his attention back to the man on the television. The interview has become more heated, and now both journalist and politician are talking over each other. Then, almost in unison, both seem to become aware of this, of how it must look to their audience, and a tense calm returns to the proceedings.

  “I want to ask you about the government’s special provisions for underage asylum seekers,” the interviewer says. “You’ve been a frequent and vocal critic of this policy.”

  “I have,” the politician replies.

  “You said it conveys weakness.”

  “I have.”

  “But we’re talking about children,” the interviewer says. “Just recently we saw the now-infamous images of a child in one of the immigrant facilities—”

  “That was last year.”

  “That was last month. Do you honestly think the state has no special obligations to that child?”

  “It is not the responsibility of the state,” the politician replies. “It is the responsibility of its parents, who chose to bring it on this kind of journey.”

  Colonel Kethros changes the channel. A replay of a soccer match takes the place of the interview. The colonel leans back in his chair. He closes his eyes.

  Sometimes the small details of the nightmare change. Sometimes the mother and the father are different, but the child is always the same. Young, of indeterminate gender, and blond, which none of the other children in this place are. Sometimes the father slices a mango with a paring knife, the juice running down his forearms. Sometimes he hums an old folk song. Sometimes he is dead, his corpse propped up against a bale of straw, his wife slowly moving an emery board against his broken fingernails. But the boy is always the same—serene, his blank gray eyes fixed to a spot down the road.

  The soldiers are patrolling the country road, and to pass the time they dream up torture. It’s a game they play, a piece of communal black humor without physics or metaphysics. The point is to use no violence, but be as cruel as possible.

  Pareen, the youngest of the peacekeepers, suggests finding out what a prisoner’s mother used to cook him when he was a child, and then feeding him those meals every day in his cell, only with one key ingredient missing or altered each time. Kareem suggests a minor lobotomy, to remove all familiarity with sneezing, and then smearing pepper on the walls. Imagine, he says, how disoriented he’d be, how utterly terrified, every time.

  When his turn comes, Kethros suggests putting the captive back in uniform, handing him a weapon, throwing him into the middle of a genocide and ordering him to do nothing, to simply sit on the sidelines and watch, helpless. The men stop talking, the game loses its fun.

  One of the soldiers sees the child. Reflexively he removes some caramels from the pouch of his rucksack and throws them toward the side of the road. But the child does not move. He simply stares down the road, to the place where, moments later, the trap will spring.

  Sometimes the earth opens up slowly. Sometimes Kethros feels the air rush outward, feels his rib cage compress and his lungs crumple, the lifting, the emptying of space. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, sometimes the soldier ahead of him never reaches the place in the road to which the child’s gaze is tethered. Sometimes, as in a dream about falling, Kethros wakes an instant before impact, drenched in sweat and grasping at nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Kethros opens his eyes and jolts upright on his seat. He composes himself, sheds the aftertaste of the dream, just as Jonathan Hoff, who for the past year has served as the general manager of the Hotel Xenios, walks over from the hotel to see him.

  “I need to speak with you, Colonel,” Jonathan says. “Your soldiers won’t help me.”

  “It’s not my soldiers’ job to help you, Jonathan,” the colonel replies.

  “The people you’re supposed to be catching are causing our guests trouble.”

  “And which people are we supposed to be catching, exactly?”

  Jonathan points in the general direction of the sea. “Those people,” he says.

  The colonel sighs. “Go away, Jonathan.”

  The hotel manager continues to plead, but quickly resigns himself to the colonel’s indifference. He makes to leave. “What kind of person steals children’s clothes?” he says as he walks away.

  Colonel Kethros stands up.

  “What did you say?”

  Jonathan turns around. “The guests staying in our penthouse suite had their son’s favorite shirt stolen. Where they come from, everyone sues everyone; they’re threatening to take us to court.”

  “When did it happen?” the colonel asks.

  “Sometime yesterday,” Jonathan replies. “Last night, probably.”

  Colonel Kethros stands. He grabs Jonathan by the arm and walks him over to where the four soldiers stand by their truck.

  “Show us exactly where it happened,” the colonel says.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Before

  “What about you, Professor Maher?” Mohamed asked. “Where are you going?”

  Maher marked his place in his book with Kamal’s forged identification card. He looked up.

  “Wherever,” he replied.

  “That’s the spirit,” Mohamed said. He motioned to the rest of the men and women sitting nearby, speaking to no one in particular. “This is how you have to be if you want to survive over there,” he said. “Flexible.”

  “Hey, Hajj, you got any more gum?” Kamal asked, addressing someone sitting opposite him on the deck, indistinguishable among the mass of bodies cramped together. Nobody answered.

  “So what was it, then?” Mohamed said, returning to Maher. “The Israelis demolish your house, beat you at a checkpoint?”

  “I don’t care about the Israelis,” said Maher.

  “Yes you do,” Mohamed replied. “People don’t end up on boats like this unless their life depends on being somewhere or not being somewhere. If you really don’t care where you end up, then you sure as hell have a good reason for leaving.”

  “I didn’t,” Maher said. “I just left.”

  Mohamed chuckled. “Real easygoing, this one,” he said. “So you left for no reason, y
ou have no destination. What is it you want then, brother?”

  Maher shrugged. “I want to read books and be left alone,” he said.

  “Hey, Hajj, over here,” Kamal shouted again, waving his hand. No one responded.

  “This is why they don’t take us seriously,” Walid said, pointing his phone in Maher’s direction. “Read books? Brother, learn a trade, learn computers.”

  “Why?” Maher replied.

  “Because that’s how we take the future from them,” Walid said, animated now. “Look at Stockholm, look at Munich, look at New York—who’s picking up the garbage, cleaning the toilets? Who’s doing the work? Us. Who’s doing the living? Them. But in ten, twenty years, we’ll be the ones running the computers, the machines, the infrastructure, and they’ll have nothing left but poems and stories.”

  “So they’ll still do all the living,” Maher replied, “and we’ll still do all the work.”

  The men paused. Almost in unison, the ship’s passengers felt a change in the weather. Light, almost imperceptible at first, snow began to fall.

  “Great, just great,” said Walid. “This is all we need.”

  “Relax,” Mohamed replied. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  Maher wiped a couple of wet flakes from his book. He chuckled. “I don’t suppose you have blankets for sale?” he asked Mohamed.

  Mohamed smiled. “Friend, if the price is right, I’ll fish you a blanket from the bottom of the sea.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Kamal said.

  “No kidding,” Walid replied. “That’s the only thing that matters to these people.” He pointed at Mohamed. “Money, money, money.”

  Mohamed opened his palm to the sky. He watched the snowflakes disintegrate against the heat of his skin. “You keep mistaking this for a charity,” he said. He pointed to Kamal. “Ask your friend here, the economics dropout. We live under the invisible hand, not the invisible foot. This is a transaction, a business arrangement.”

  “Bullshit,” Walid replied. “You promised a cruise ship, you promised meals. Why is it so hard for you to admit it: you lied to us.”

  “You lied to yourself,” Mohamed said. “Did you really think there’d be a goddamn cruise ship waiting for you, because you saw it in the picture? Did you really think we’d feed you lobster for dinner every night? Brother, by the time we started lying to you, you’d already believed it.”

  “You’re a thief,” Walid said. “Dress it up however you want, but you’re just another black-market hustler.”

  “That’s exactly what I am,” Mohamed replied. “And when you finally get over there to the promised land, and you see how those dignified, civilized Westerners treat you—when you find out what they expect of you is to live your whole life like a dog under their dinner table—I’ll wait for you to come find me and apologize. You think the black market is bad? Brother, wait till you see the white market.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kamal said, this time loud enough that the conversation came to a halt. The passengers seated near the Egyptian turned to look in the direction where Kamal was squinting. It was the other side of the deck, port, where Amir and Umm Ibrahim were seated near a dozen others.

  Kamal stood up. He began traversing the deck, eliciting complaints from the people over and around whom he stepped.

  “Sit down,” Mohamed said, but Kamal ignored him. He walked to the edge of the deck and knelt down close to an old man propped against the railing.

  He was dressed in a thin white galabeya. He wore an embroidered, rounded skullcap on his head and it appeared at some point during the journey he had taken his socks off and used them instead as gloves. He sat motionless, his head lolling to one side

  Kamal tapped the old man on the shoulder. “Hajj, Hajj,” he said. The old man did not respond.

  A kind of knowing spread among the nearby passengers, and some of them inched away. Kamal held the old man by one arm. He looked over to Mohamed.

  “Goddamn it,” Mohamed said. “Goddamn it.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  After

  Vänna rubs her eyes. In the morning light, through the porthole of the cave’s mouth, the world seems inverted; she looks out at the sober-bright sea.

  To the north, the coast becomes snakelike, thinning and curling around itself such that the island’s northeast tip, the children’s destination, is mostly hidden from view. Although Vänna knows the area around this beach like the back of her hand, the land to the northeast is largely foreign to her. Looking at it now, its wide hills of brush and rock rising and falling, rising and falling, it appears a fictional place, a stage-play setting fit for the myths and wild, ancient stories that saddle this island’s history. And yet there’s an emptiness, something missing. In stories these places were lined with thick forests and streams, the ocean wild and roaring. Here the hills are mostly bare, their bareness made more evident by the smattering of sleep-gum trees and decrepit stone dwellings and the silence of the water.

  She twists slightly in place and hears her spine and neck bones crackle. She eases away from where Amir lies, careful not to disturb him. In the night she thought she heard him moaning softly in his sleep, and when she tried to wrap her arm around him to comfort him, he let out a scream and wrestled her away. But the whole time, he never opened his eyes, never left sleep.

  She stretches her legs to let the sunlight warm them, and watches as the indent of her body slowly disappears from the beach-chair cushion behind her. She watches the boy sleeping.

  In time he starts to stir, and when he wakes and sees Vänna at the edge of the cave, his face contorts into a look of such total terror that for a moment Vänna thinks the soldiers are standing outside the cave behind her. But then he seems to remember her. He smiles sheepishly and waves hello.

  Vänna waves back. She reaches into the pillowcase bag the housekeeper gave them the night before. Amir shuffles over and sits beside her. They spend a few silent minutes breakfasting on cookies and chocolate mints, the top halves of their bodies still hidden, their legs sticking out, warming.

  Vänna points Amir’s attention northward. Faint in the distance, atop a rocky outcropping that itself is invisible, stand the ruins of an ancient lighthouse. Only the very tip of the cupola and a leaning lightning rod can be seen from where the children sit.

  It is, like the ruins lining so much of the coastline, secret with age. Over the centuries it has been used, disused, retrofitted, neglected, transformed to historical and tourist curiosity and, finally, ignored. No one on the island can say when it last served any meaningful purpose at all, the lantern room nothing more than an empty circular space where drunk teenagers occasionally congregate. But, even decrepit, it has held on to its first and foremost use: to be seen.

  “That’s where we’re going,” Vänna says. But the boy doesn’t seem to notice the tip of the lighthouse and if he does, he doesn’t seem to understand.

  She sees him fidgeting, moving his shoulders such that his back rubs against his stolen jersey. She reaches over and pulls the back of the jersey’s neck, revealing a swath of dead brown skin, the remnants of a sunburn.

  She eases the shirt off his back. Flakes cover the entirety of the boy’s back and shoulders. Here and there little peels of it curl upward from the reddening skin beneath. Vänna pinches one of the curls. It feels of nothing.

  From across his middle back she peels away a patch the size of her palm, thin and fragile as a spiderweb. It comes off easily. She holds it up to the light, and in the light she sees that it is not brown at all, but a translucent thing. She reaches over the boy’s shoulder and hands him his skin. He gives her a look of mock disgust, but quickly he takes and inspects it—its microscopic rivulets, its infinite lightness. Then he crumples it up and tosses it on the ground.

  They sit awhile like this, Vänna softly pulling away at the skin a previous da
y’s sunlight has killed, relieving the boy’s discomfort. Amir sits quietly, skimming through the books Madame El Ward gave him. None hold his interest until he comes across a children’s comic book, at the sight of which he lets out a gleeful little cry.

  “Zaytoon wa Zaytoona,” he says, waving the book behind him. Vänna looks at the cover, a drawing of a little boy and girl, their surroundings a place Vänna can’t identify, but guesses to be the country of Amir’s birth.

  She smiles and nods, trying to match the boy’s excitement. He repeats the book’s title a couple more times, and when Vänna tries to do it, he laughs at her mispronunciation.

  Amir points at himself. “Zaytoon,” he says. Then he points at her. “Zaytoona.”

  “All right, Zaytoon, all right,” she says.

  Amir turns back around and skims the book. Vänna returns to peeling the dead skin from his back. Soon there are only patches of red across his shoulders and back where the heat still lingers. She helps him put the stolen jersey back on.

  Outside, to the south, they hear movement. Vänna expected it sooner—the sun is high and bright now, the tourists would be starting to fill the beach, and inevitably some of the more adventurous ones would wander outside the hotel’s manicured confines to go exploring.

  She leans out. At the edge of the beach she sees a few tourists, some splayed out on lounge chairs and beach towels, others wading into the water. Among them there are soldiers moving, inspecting the area, questioning the hotel’s guests and employees. She sees Colonel Kethros.

  Before Vänna can turn and grab Amir, the boy is tugging at her arm. He’s seen the soldiers too, recognized them by their uniforms as men no different from the ones who chased him through the forest a day earlier.

  He stares at Vänna, a terrible urgency about him, and then points northward, away from the uniformed men.

  “Yallah,” he says.