A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(45)
When she returned to the prison the next day, the guards were protective of her, knocking on the door to the women’s cell to check whether Doaa had taken her medication. Bassem visited, too, when they would let him, counting her pills and asking the other women to keep an eye on her. After ten days, they were released once more. “Don’t try escaping Egypt again,” the presiding officer told them, “and good luck.”
Doaa again decided that they should make another attempt to leave for Europe. Her experience in prison had been demeaning, but it had changed her perspective. The idea of resuming their life in Egypt seemed intolerable. Bassem was more reluctant to try again, but the smugglers still had their $2,500. So Bassem made the call and was given yet another address in Alexandria. It was the same scenario, but a different apartment. They were greeted by another Syrian family at the house—a husband, wife, and four children, refugees like themselves with the determination to risk their lives for the hope of a future better than the limbo they lived in now.
EIGHT
Ship of Horrors
At 11:00 a.m. on September 6, 2014, the call came. Doaa carefully packed a change of clothes for Bassem and herself, their toothbrushes, a sealed large plastic bag of dates, and a big bottle of water into the Mickey Mouse backpack she’d kept from her school days back in Syria. She carefully wrapped their passports and engagement contract in plastic wrap, then dropped them in a sandwich bag and folded over the end. Next, she wrapped her mobile phone and wallet with the five hundred euros and two hundred Egyptian pounds that they still had from their previous escape attempts in a separate plastic bag and secured each bundle underneath the straps of her red tank top, the first of four layers of clothes she had carefully selected for the journey. The plastic immediately made her skin sweat in the humid late-morning heat.
Five minibuses were waiting outside the apartment complex in Alexandria, already packed with fellow Syrian and Palestinian refugees, who looked up as the doors opened but said nothing. Doaa and Bassem climbed inside and found a single seat in the back for them to share, wedging their bag and their two life jackets between them and the window. People were packed in so tightly that Doaa could barely breathe, and a hushed tension filled the bus as it moved toward the highway as part of a convoy with the other buses. Doaa pulled her jacket up around her face, as if it could shield her from any security forces that might be watching. Just when she felt like she was about to faint from the stifling air inside the bus, they veered off into a truck stop and pulled up alongside a big run-down bus. They were ordered to get off and join other passengers in the bigger bus. People on this second bus were already sitting on each other’s laps or standing crammed together. “Get in, dogs!” they heard from inside the bus. “Men on one side, women on the other!” There were more women and children than men, so this rule quickly broke down. Another smuggler rasped, in an uglier tone, “If anyone opens his mouth, we’ll throw you out the window!” Of all the smugglers that Doaa and Bassem had dealt with in their previous attempts to leave, these were the roughest and most cruel.
Bassem usually assumed the role of reassuring Doaa, but was instead thinking about a way to get them off the bus. He didn’t trust the men in charge at all. He was unsettled by Doaa’s words as they sat down: “I feel like we are being taken to our deaths.” Just days before, she had also said to him as they were having coffee on the balcony that, as much as she tried, she couldn’t picture them in Italy or Sweden or anywhere in Europe. Everything after they boarded a boat was blank to her, as if the door to a house had opened and nothing was inside but emptiness. “The boat is going to sink,” she told Bassem flatly. Bassem had brushed off her remark, joking that her fear of the water was getting the best of her, but now he wondered.
As he was about to raise his doubts to Doaa, the bus turned into a rest stop. For a moment, as they left their seats and were allowed to enter the shop to buy refreshments and to use the toilet, they felt giddy, grateful for the brief respite, even if it was just to buy a snack. But when the signal came for them to board the bus again, with no information about where they were headed or how long it would take, and no trust in their guides, the gamble they were taking with their lives returned to sharp focus. Bassem wanted to stay at the rest stop, but Doaa was afraid that the smugglers, who were hitting and shoving people who were moving too slowly as they reboarded, would hurt them if they tried. So they returned to the bus, their destiny no longer in their own hands.
It was past 9:00 p.m. when the bus set off again. It took them through back roads past abandoned or half-constructed buildings. The smugglers walked the aisles carrying sticks and waving them menacingly, and occasionally smacking anyone whose children cried too loudly or who dared to ask where they were going. Doaa looked out the window and recognized a sign for Khamastashar Mayo—a section of Damietta’s beach. “We are close to home!” she said to Bassem. “We came to this beach with our family!” The smugglers had obviously chosen a different departure point from the one near Alexandria and had driven them down the coast toward Doaa’s place in Gamasa, which was now just a few kilometers away. Her phone’s battery was dead so she asked a man seated close to her if she could use his mobile to call her mother. “We are leaving now! Pray for us. We will call you when we arrive.”
“Look after yourself, hayati, be careful,” Hanaa replied. “May God protect you.”