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She was an innocent who seemed unaffected by her daddy’s bad character and substandard parental skills. But Abu Salma’s compulsive lying was even worse when he was half awake or half baked. Luckily, he was not the captain of the tiny boat, but the facilitator of the trip. A Moroccan migrant wanted to get to Greece too so he agreed to steer the boat in exchange for being the free-travelling ninth person. He was also a smoker and surreptitiously took puffs from the “great” hashish to calm his nerves. By comparison to the first trip, this one was practically hassle free, but as the Moroccan fired up the engine, he immediately steered the boat into a massive rock on the beach. Soaking wet and bewildered by the few-meter journey, they disembarked from the damaged boat and headed back to the beach.
One day later, Abu Salma facilitated another expedition with the Moroccan who was given a second chance. This time he drove the boat much further following his promise that he would ease up on cannabis and be fully mindful of any rock that could halt their progress. The engine did not 24
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abruptly stop, but nervously made ticking sounds before it quickly hemorrhaged a line of dark diesel fuel into the crisp blue Mediterranean Sea. Then the pathetic dinghy suddenly stopped, on reaching Greek waters. When the coast guard intercepted them, they threw out a rope from their large boat so that they could haul the unwelcomed passengers to safety.
The Moroccan began to yell relentlessly: “Don’t touch the rope, men. They will push us back to the start. We are only a few hundred meters away from the beach.”
Trusting his knowledge of how the smuggling business worked, the passengers paddled frantically with all their remaining energy to circumvent the Greek boat. It was as if it was the last remaining task in their epic struggle to feel human again. But the dinghy was stopped and the crushing emotions of defeat weighed heavy on their slouched bodies. Frustrated, a Greek coast guard officer hit the teary-eyed Moroccan on the head with the wooden paddle. His loud howl warned the passengers that the Greeks were not playing around.
“Baby, Baby,” screamed the Iraqi man in a desperate attempt to elicit sympathy. But there was no baby on board, and when one of the officers inquired: “Where is baby?” the Iraqi pointed to the round belly of the Somali woman. Unable to understand the broken-English dialogue, the Somali migrant was bewildered and frightened by the sudden interest in the belly fat she had always felt uncomfortable about. Folding her arms on her stomach in a tight squeeze, she ignored the ruckus. Having little interest in bringing the refugees to their side of the sea, the Greek coast guard paid no mind to the travelers’ distress and disgrace, and efficiently telephoned the Turkish gendarmes who hauled the dinghy away, holding its passengers prisoner for two more days. This time around, no one repeated the folly of declaring to be Palestinian. The Abu Shilla brothers were still in jail, still paying the price of their gullibility.
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Swearing in the name of his three-year-old daughter once more, Abu Salma insisted he was the best smuggler in the business, and if it were not for their damn luck, they would have already reached Greece and would have been dining like kings while the Greek gods watched from above. Promising the group a bigger and faster engine for their fourth try, Abu Salma once again led the passengers back to the familiar designated spot where the dinghy was supposedly tucked away; but the boat was nowhere to be found. It seemed like a sick joke he concocted under the influence of the smoke he could not live without. Pledging his word of honor yet again, he vowed the “technical error” would be sorted out by morning, and asked his passengers to find the patience to sleep at the beach overnight. To their continued heartache and in spite of his final performance, he was never seen again. Emotionally and physically drained, they walked back to the main road, only to find the gendarmes waiting for them. When they were eventually released, the Abu Shilla brothers had also been set free, Palestinian documents in hand. “This smuggler is solid,”
they insisted referring to someone they had met in jail. “He has a sturdy boat with a massive engine that can take us all the way to China,” one of the brothers animatedly declared.
On the fifth attempt, the group of nine had grown to twenty war refugees. To avoid suspicion, they split into two groups and walked to the beach via separate roads. No one spoke along the way, and no one dared ask questions. This boat was slightly larger than the last one and the engine was smaller than the first. The men yelled and roared in anger. The women cried out, some grabbing their hearts, some dropping to their knees. Maysam broke down and buried her wet face into the sand. “I cannot do this anymore. Death in Syria is better than this torture,” she wailed.
Most of the passengers just walked away and stood in the sand trying to form a new plan. The Palestinians, along with 26
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Marco and Maysam, stayed as their will was too strong to give up after all they had been through. Assuming the role of leader, Marco, hiding his insecurities, assured the group that they now were experts in sailing, and they could steer the boat to Greece. “Just go that way,” the smuggler pointed his stubby fingers in a vague direction in the darkness. And that is exactly what Marco did. He challenged the darkness in the final push towards freedom. For the entire journey, Maysam quietly sobbed and held onto his arm for dear life. With the moon as their only light, Isam Awad’s weaselly eyes fretfully surveyed the black skies and black water for gendarmes and the coast guard and other real or imagined dangers. At last, the much awaited lights of the Island of Mytilene glittered in the distance. “Ya Allah, Ya Allah, Ya Allah,” muttered Maysam, quickly reciting as many prayers as she could to help the dinghy reach the shores, bringing an end to the Syrian and Turkish nightmares, and freeing them from the abyss of the condemned.
A small jar of crunchy peanut butter was all that remained in Marco and Maysam’s small duffel bag when their feet touched the sand of Mytilene late at night. The exhilaration of their success exploded in cries and leaps for joy that were soon subdued by a haunting, unforeseen, and unexpected fear of the future. The water soaking through their trainers suddenly felt like a cold omen.
* * *
It was a two-hour walk along the main road until a police vehicle captured them. Excitedly relieved but exhausted, they had been waving down passing cars, this time seeking the police, not evading them. They had never been so happy to be taken in by armed men in uniforms, as this was a first step in obtaining the coveted pieces of paper confirming their 27
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presence on Greek soil. The official document would also indicate that they had only six months until they had to leave the country. Expectedly, they had to be kept in detention before being released to a refugee encampment, if they chose to do so a few days later. With bigger plans in mind, they wanted no part of the refugee camp. They knew Greece was a dead economy and real opportunities were rare. Wasting no time at all, they left their prison cells and headed directly to Athens in a large ferry, Hellenic Seaways, costing 50 euros each. Once there, Marco and Maysam stayed in the Hotel Sparta, a humble inn in the neighborhood of Omonia, at the cost of 7 euros a night. They were grateful to God, but with no money left for the next leg of the journey, they anxiously awaited more funds from Marco’s aunt, who in turn waited for her husband to get paid at the end of the month.
In those days, being smuggled out of Greece to the ostensibly hospitable Fortress Europe was not an easy feat compared to later years when the refugees were galvanized by their large numbers and the despairing philosophy that there was nothing to lose. The lengthy and costly process included ever-changing smuggling arrangements with dodgy characters, requiring fake identifications and, most importantly, sufficient funds.
Nameless faces dictated the rules and you had to abide by them.
Some of Marco’s friends from the dinghy departed a week after arriving in Athens. They paid no heed to warnings of the strenuous passage they would face if they opted to travel by foot. The enterprising few who opted to chart their path on land returned with nothing to report but utter failure and humiliation. The cost of the journey, shouldered mostly by Isam, was stolen by the creepy smuggler who disappeared with the backpacks that held every belonging still precious to them and their last reserves of vital money. Without even 28
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a dime for a taxi to take them back to their starting point in Athens, the powerless men were a pitiful sight.
Marco and Maysam could not tolerate the idea of travelling overland, and decided instead to fly to their destination using fake passports. As soon as his aunt’s cash arrived, Marco quickly sought and found a smuggler whose name was Jamal al-Sudani. Originally from Sudan, he claimed to have French residency and was always accompanied by a fashionably dressed girlfriend who spoke bits and pieces of several languages, including Arabic. To avoid his friends’ earlier mistake of handing over their money to the smugglers at the start of the journey, Marco sought another “insurance” office, where he deposited the smuggler’s fees on the condition that the funds would be released to the Sudanese man whenever he and Maysam arrived at their next destination. He underwrote all of their money, nearly 4,600 euros, which was guaranteed to pay for the couple’s trip and related costs.
The early preparations for the next phase of their journey meant that the Palestinian and Syrian couple had to take on another identity: Bulgarian. Lining up at the airport security check on their way to Rome, Maysam held a passport identi-fying her as Sofia, while Marco was John. They were told that the key to success was to avoid raising suspicion by behaving normally in this totally abnormal situation. Maysam, with fair skin, western-style clothes and captivating eyes, made it through the security check without a glitch. With her boarding pass in hand and her hear
t throbbing in her chest, she waited for Marco to join her.
But Marco did not look Bulgarian, nor did he know what behaving like a “normal” Bulgarian entailed, and his fake ID was spotted even before his passport was thoroughly examined. After he was held back by airport security, he was rigged up, futilely interrogated then tossed outside the airport despite his insistence that he was a fully fledged Bulgarian 29
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citizen. Whether the passport was forged or not did not matter, what mattered was that he had to play the part and believe that he was Bulgarian, at all costs. A few hours later Maysam called to inform him that she was in Rome and would have to proceed to another country without him. She took the next plane to Copenhagen, then to Oslo and finally to Stockholm where she stayed.
Marco remained hostage to the Sudanese smuggler’s trickery, changing the identity in the counterfeit passport to a man with a “less suspicious” shade of darker skin: Portuguese, to be exact, with the name of Eduardo. When this ID failed, he became the Spaniard Antonio, and then another European, and another, and so on. After all of these failed and embarrassing attempts, it became clear to Marco and his Sudanese smuggler that the airport route was no longer viable. Marco was just not a good con man. Every time Marco attempted to find his way through the security check at the airport in Athens, he was singled out and asked to join a line of other refugees who were also caught red-handed, fake passports and all.
Marco was now convinced that journeying on foot was his only option. After braving the sea in a rickety vessel, he felt certain he’d survive whatever hell awaited him. Others readily joined in. The new expedition included Isam, Zakariya, and Abu Alia from the sea voyage, and Omar, Thaer, and Hussein, all newcomers, all Palestinians. A Sudanese land smuggler instructed them to meet him up north in the city of Thessalon-iki, called Saloneek by Arab refugees due to the impossibility of pronouncing it in Arabic. The easy part of the trip included a night at the house of the smuggler with a “last supper,”
followed by a five-hour journey to Saloneek and a bus ride into the city. Marco took in the visual beauty and historical buildings, but even his Marco Polo spirit had dwindled to almost nothing. The real journey began at the railroad tracks with each of them carrying essentials like blankets, food, extra 30
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jackets, and plenty of water. Accompanying them were two old Somali women who sought the road to Macedonia as well. The man in charge was a Bangladeshi by the name of Mohamad Saed, who was soon nick-named Sméagol, after Tolkien’s corrupt fictional character.
Sméagol, a diminutive, bald man in his thirties, had discolored teeth, with a few missing and others separated by gaps visible from a distance. He was perfectly skinny, except for a round little pot-belly that made him look as if he had swallowed a small animal, yet to be digested. He looked and smelled filthy, his pants had no zipper, and his belt was replaced by a contraption made of plastic bags, rolled and tied together to form a rope that he needed to carefully disentangle every time he had to relieve himself. He led the gang of nine, including the two Somali women, as they walked along or beside the tracks so as not to lose their path.
On their first day of the journey, they walked for twenty long hours. On the second, they walked from eight in the morning until three the next morning. No matter how carefully they tried to ration their water supplies, they were running out quickly, and the food was completely gone. Fear of dehydration was at the back of everyone’s minds, coupled with constant hunger pangs as they walked along the tracks.
To Marco, hunger was nothing new and his expertise in suppressing mounting anxieties came in handy. Macedonia was finally getting closer and the numbness in their bleeding feet was proof that they were alive and had made it that far.
They listened carefully to Sméagol’s ominous final instructions: cross the street, jump the fence, climb the hill, walk for one hour and cross a river to their destination, a small village with giant windmills. What the treacherous Sméagol failed to inform them was that the river was not a natural body of flowing water but an open sewer, and to cross it, even on its most shallow parts, they would be covered by human feces up 31
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to their navels. Moreover, the distance between the shit river and the village was much further than Sméagol estimated, or perhaps the distance seemed further because they were weighed down by dried excrement hardening and cracking on their clothing, whose stench was unbearable as they climbed up hills and crossed valleys.
It was about midnight when the small village with the giant windmills finally appeared in the distance. The brief moment of ecstasy instantly vanished when two sets of blinding police lights flashed in the group’s faces, and another set illuminated their shadows behind them. After some days in Macedonian detention lacking basic human needs, they were sent back to Greece. Unfazed, they restarted their hellish journey again the following day walking for twenty hours, then twenty more, then crossed the street, jumped the fence, climbed the hill, walked a distance and once more crossed the vile shit river, only to be apprehended by the same police unit at the outskirts of the small village with the giant windmills.
It was for the best when Sméagol eventually abandoned the group, for they discovered that the journey did not really require so much walking, and that he had dishonestly mapped it out to minimize his costs and maximize his fees. Half-jokingly, Isam fantasized about ways to murder Sméagol, the man no one would miss. His replacement, a Bangladeshi called Nasser, had a more human dimension and was better dressed.
He managed to find an alternative route that was less tedious, although it still demanded the ritualistic baptism in the shit river. But instead of carrying on to the village to be greeted by beams of light, they would jump onto a moving cargo train that was known for slowing down in that specific area before gathering speed once more. Old metal screeching on metal, diesel fumes burning in the exhaust and a wide-open side door beckoned them to enter; they all managed to accomplish the feat that seemed to be out of a Hollywood western, except 32
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for the two poor Somali women whose heavy bodies fell on top of one another, with them shouting of hurt limbs and disappointment as they watched the train pass by.
The Palestinian refugees gathered in one corner of the wagon, while almost sixty other hapless men and women watched in silence as the new arrivals scrambled to make sense of an absurd situation. The others were black Africans, or brown Arabs and Asians. Some of the women wore traditional scarves over their hair, others did not, while some had pulled them off for fear of being noticed during their travel—but they all reeked of shit. When the train came to a complete halt, many hours later, nearly a dozen police officers stood outside poised in aggressive military positions, toting shields and commando gear, and accompanied by barking dogs on leashes, ready to stage a massive arrest of which compassion was no part.
It was not clear why some refugees managed to evade the police and escape successfully across the border. Perhaps they were vitalized or sickened by their collective smell and hopelessness, or encouraged by the police’s inability to contain such a large number of men and women fleeing with force and determination. Unlucky yet again, Marco was apprehended.
Handcuffed along with some others, they were taken to Gazy Baba prison in the capital, Skopje. “You have to wash,” he was told by a Macedonian officer with a straw-colored moustache.
The officer, in his forties, was covering his mouth and nose as he pointed at Marco’s feces-defiled body. “But we are hungry,”
Marco pleaded to the guard, and was told with a snarky grin that it was Ramadan and he should be fasting anyway.
It had been four days of grueling travel wherein Marco had not eaten a single meal. After they were sent back to Greece, the gang ate whatever they could find at the smuggler’s house, mostly dried bread and stale cheese, then showered before embarking on yet another attempt, this time with a person by 33