A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(48)
Sometimes the other women sitting close by would join Doaa when she took the Quran out; they would recite prayers alongside her and ask God to guide the ship safely to Italy. The woman sitting directly to her left struck up a conversation, telling Doaa about her difficult life in one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. She asked Doaa what drove her from Syria and where she was going. When she learned about Doaa and Bassem’s engagement in Egypt and their plans to seal their marriage in Europe, the young woman, who called herself Um Khalil, “mother of Khalil,” her two-year-old teething son, was delighted. “You’re a bride!” she exclaimed. “We will make you a lovely wedding when we get to Europe! We will sing and dance all night!” Doaa was touched. The other woman seated beside her, a middle-aged Syrian Palestinian, chimed in, “When we arrive in Italy, we will buy you the nicest dress and have two big parties—one for your wedding and one to celebrate that we have arrived!”
“You are so lucky with Bassem,” Um Khalil told Doaa, catching Bassem’s eye and smiling at him. At this, Doaa felt suddenly possessive and turned toward Bassem, and away from Um Khalil.
Bassem immediately recognized the insecure expression of jealousy on Doaa’s face. “You should keep chatting with her, she’s nice!” he whispered in Doaa’s ear.
“What do you mean by that?” Doaa asked, taken aback. Was he using her to get close to the other woman? she wondered.
Bassem grinned at her. “Are you jealous?” he teased. Then, seeing that she was truly distressed, he reassured her, “I only have eyes for you, my love.” Hearing this, Doaa curled up against him and took his hand in hers. “In just two days, we will be in Italian waters,” he predicted. “Then we’ll make our way to Sweden and be married and have our family.” He’d heard from friends who had made it to Europe that once they got to Italy, the smugglers would send out a distress signal, alerting the coast guard to their location using GPS. Sometimes, the smugglers would get picked up by collaborators before the rescue ship arrived, leaving the refugees without a captain or crew, Bassem explained. If not, they pretended to be refugees themselves to avoid being arrested, getting the passengers to vow to not disclose their identities, then the first chance they got, they would abscond from the group.
None of the passengers on board had any idea where they were. There were no landmarks, just a vast body of water surrounding them. Every now and then, people would test their mobile phones for a signal, but there was none.
That night, the passengers shivered in the cold, their thin layers of clothes soaked from waves that had splashed over the deck. Doaa stirred as she felt Um Khalil’s baby boy’s small fingers touching her face and pulling on her necklace. Instead of being annoyed that her sleep was disrupted, she found that his touch calmed her.
When the sun rose on their third day, their things slowly dried off, but it became swelteringly hot. Doaa’s clothes stuck to her, and the plastic-wrapped documents and phone underneath them felt as if they were melting into her skin. Late that afternoon another boat approached. “Move,” the smugglers said, ordering them to switch boats yet again. The passengers complained but did as they were told. They had to switch boats if they wanted to move on to the next leg of the journey. To Doaa’s surprise only about 150 passengers disembarked along with Bassem and her, while the other passengers remained on the last boat. One of the smugglers explained that the waves were too high for so many people so they had to split up, and Doaa and Bassem felt resigned to follow the directions of the smugglers. Bassem reasoned optimistically that they might reach Italy faster with a smaller number of passengers on board. Doaa looked around her, confused yet hopeful, and noticed that the two little girls Masa and Sandra, along with their parents, had boarded this boat as well. This was the fourth boat they had been on since they had started their journey and she hoped it would be the last.
On Tuesday morning, September 9, four days into their journey, Doaa and Bassem spotted another fishing boat in the distance, and as they moved closer, they realized that it was the same one they had been on the previous day. Again, without any explanation, the boats came together, and the smugglers ordered the refugees to switch boats yet again. On this windy day, the water was choppy. The smugglers tossed ropes to their collaborators on the bigger vessel. The boats crashed together, and Doaa was reminded of the crack of an explosion back in Daraa and the terror she had felt when she heard the sound.
A line of people formed to move back to the original boat. Children were crying as they were tossed like bags of potatoes into the arms of the burly men on the next boat. When it was Doaa’s turn, she slipped after they dropped her on the deck of the new boat, falling and sliding to the other side, bruising her elbows. Bassem helped her up. Then they watched in horror as Walid got his hand stuck between the two boats as he was leaping between them. The waves slammed the sides of the boats together and Walid screamed. When he finally pulled himself onto the deck, his fingers were severed from his hand and blood was gushing in all directions. Passengers rushed to wrap his hand in gauze to stop the bleeding, but his fingers were gone. He sat on the deck, sobbing in pain. Doaa stared in distress, too shocked to move.
The smugglers remained unfazed and continued to bark orders and push the remaining passengers on board. One man tripped and fell face forward into an iron pole, splitting his head open. Doaa’s stomach turned as she watched a woman who knew him calmly pull out a needle and thread from her bag and sew the gash shut.