A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(54)
It was now Thursday afternoon. I have been in this hell for two full days, Doaa thought. She noted that only about twenty-five now survived. Malak was sleeping most of the time, but whenever she woke, she would cry. Doaa knew that even though Malak couldn’t talk, she was desperate for water.
Among the other survivors was the family she had met on the boat with the two small girls, Sandra and Masa. They were all wearing life jackets, which were keeping them above water, but the older girl, Sandra, started having convulsions, her body shaking all over. Her father was holding her, speaking in a low voice through his sobs. Doaa thought she saw the girl’s soul leaving her small body as she went limp. Sandra’s mother, a determined look on her face, swam toward Doaa, holding the smaller girl, Masa, in both hands.
Sandra’s mother grabbed on to the side of Doaa’s float and looked directly into her eyes. “Please save our baby. I won’t survive.” Without hesitation, Doaa reached for Masa and placed her on her left side, just below Malak, who now had her head nestled under Doaa’s chin. She rested Masa’s head on her rib cage below her breast, and as she did so, the tiny body stretched out on her stomach. She’s not even two years old and has seen this hell, Doaa thought, stroking Masa’s hair and wondering if her small ring would keep all three of them afloat. Masa’s torso was submerged in the water and the waves pushed and splashed at them.
A loud wail pulled Doaa away from her thoughts. Sandra was dead and her parents were weeping beside her floating body. Doaa held her arm tightly around Masa and tried to comfort the grieving woman with some soothing words. But just minutes later, her husband’s body went slack as well. He had given up. His wife looked on in disbelief. “Imad!” she cried. Then, suddenly, she, too, went silent and passed away right before Doaa’s eyes.
As night fell, the sea turned black and shrouded with heavy fog. The girls began to shift restlessly and cry, and Doaa did her best to calm them. She was afraid to move her aching arms in case she lost her grip on them. Their weight on her chest almost stopped her breathing and suppressed her constant urge to cough. She longed for water. Earlier that morning, someone had given them a bit of rich tahini halva candy found floating in the water. “The babies should have it,” the stranger had said, handing it over. Doaa had broken off tiny chunks and pushed them into their open mouths. The sweet taste seemed to calm the girls. She’d saved a bit for herself, but it had only made her thirstier.
Water became an obsession for the survivors. Men urinated in empty plastic bottles and drank the liquid to stay alive. Doaa averted her eyes.
A few meters away, Shoukri Al-Assoulli was treading water near another group of survivors. Like Doaa, he had made it through the last two days, and like Doaa, he had lost everything. Now, he thought he might be losing his mind. The people around him were clearly hallucinating. One said, “Get into my car. Open the door and get into my car!” Another asked for a chair to sit down in. One man invited all the others to his house, which he said was close by.
A man named Foad Eldarma asked Shoukri to call his wife to come and pick him up. Then he asked him to take him home to her. Another man Shoukri recognized, who was also from Gaza, swam over to Shoukri, beckoning him to come with him because, he stated with conviction, he knew a place where they could get water. Shoukri followed him a short distance, kicking his legs, but nothing was there. Another man said that he knew of a café that had all the water they wanted to drink and that they could also smoke shisha pipes. He said he had $100 and would pay for them all and asked, “Do you want to go?”
“Yes,” Shoukri replied.
“But it will take us two hours to swim there!”
“No problem, let’s go!”
A few other men joined them as they moved through the water. “We must go straight, and then at some point we have to turn left,” the man instructed them. Shoukri’s head cleared for a moment and he realized the man was hallucinating and so was he. He swam back to the others to join the cluster of survivors not far from Doaa’s group. A cold fog wrapped around them, blinding them and making them shiver. A woman who’d lost her two daughters was sobbing. “I’m so cold. Please warm me.” Shoukri and his friend Mohammad formed a circle around her to give her protection.
That night, while Shoukri dreamed that he was home with his family, he let go of the bag of water bottles that was keeping him afloat. As soon as he started to sink, he regained consciousness and grabbed on to it again. Later, he pictured himself reaching land and throwing life rings to save people, then offering them water. As the hours passed, he slipped in and out of lucidity. He wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead.
Doaa wished that she could shut out the sound of the shifting sea. It was like the music in horror movies, making the scenes of death before her even more terrifying, as if the drowning of the people were set to the rhythm of the waves. Each time someone died, her heart broke. How many men had she seen take their life vests off when they decided to die? She’d lost count. I don’t blame them, she thought, even if her religion did look down on suicide. Their agony was too much for them to bear. And who am I to judge someone who takes his own life? I’m just a dot in this vast sea that will soon devour me, too. If not for the strength that the two little girls on her chest gave her, she would have slipped under the waves, as well.
Doaa was exhausted but too afraid to sleep for fear that the babies might fall from her arms. She counted the corpses floating around her—seven. At least they were facedown so she didn’t have to see their faces. Their shirtless backs were bloated and blue-black, the color of whales. The stench was unbearable. Each time a wave pushed a corpse into her, she pushed it away with her feet or her hand. A man named Momen helped her move some of them away. He was one of the only remaining survivors and now stuck close to Doaa.