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“My baby,” Mahmoud’s mother wailed. “My Hana is gone.”
The Mediterranean was still attacking them, wave after wave trying to drown them, and Mahmoud could tell that his mother didn’t want to fight anymore. It was all Mahmoud could do to keep her head above the water.
“I’m still here,” Mahmoud told her. “I need you.”
“I gave my baby to a stranger,” Mahmoud’s mother howled. “I don’t even know who she was!”
“She’s safe now,” Mahmoud told her. “Hana is out of the water. She’s going to live.”
But Mahmoud’s mother would not be consoled. She lay back in the water, her face to the sky, and sobbed.
The dinghy coming by had reenergized Mahmoud, but he could feel the buzz quickly draining away, replaced by a cold exhaustion that left his arms and legs numb. The sea rolled over him and he went under again, coming up spluttering. He could not keep himself and his mother afloat. Not for long.
They were going to die here.
But at least Hana was safe. Yes, he had been the one to convince a stranger to take his little sister away, and yes, his mother might never forgive herself for letting Hana go. But at least neither of them would have to live long with their regret.
The rain began again, the awful, pelting, deadening rain, and it felt to Mahmoud like Allah was crying for them. With them.
They were drowning in tears.
Under the sweeping wash of rain, Mahmoud heard something like a drumbeat. Water on something that was not water. He searched the rising and falling waves until he saw it—the back side of a life jacket still strapped to a man. A man who floated facedown in the water.
In his mind’s eye, Mahmoud immediately filled in the drowned man’s face with that of his father, and his heart thumped against his own useless life jacket. He flailed in the water, half swimming, half towing his mother toward the body.
But no! The life vest was blue, and his father’s had been orange, like Mahmoud’s. And this one was a real, working life jacket. Mahmoud let his mother go for just a moment and wrestled the body over. It was the big man who had sat next to him on the dinghy. His eyes and mouth were open, but there was no life in either one. The man was dead.
It wasn’t the first dead body Mahmoud had seen. Not after four years of civil war, with his hometown right in the center of the fighting. A man had been killed right next to him in his family’s car, he realized with a start. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? It seemed like a lifetime ago. But no matter how many times he saw death, it never stopped being horrifying. Mahmoud shuddered and recoiled.
But if the man was dead, that meant he didn’t need his life jacket.
Mahmoud fought down his fear and fumbled with the straps on the dead man’s life jacket. Mahmoud’s fingers moved, but he couldn’t feel them. His hands were like blocks of ice. He only knew he was touching the straps because he could see it happening. Finally, he got one strap unbuckled, and another, and as the body began to shift in the vest, Mahmoud realized he was condemning this man to the bottom of the sea. He would never be bathed and wrapped in a kafan, never be mourned by those who loved him, never have his friends and family say prayers over him, never be buried facing Mecca. Mahmoud was putting a man in his grave, and he had a duty to him.
Mahmoud had heard funeral prayers too many times in his short life, most recently for his cousin Sayid, who had died when a barrel bomb exploded. Mahmoud quietly recited one now.
“O God, forgive this man, and have mercy on him and give him strength and pardon him. Be generous to him and cause his entrance to be wide and wash him with water and snow and hail. Cleanse him of his transgressions as white cloth is cleansed of stains. Give him an abode better than his home, and a family better than his family, and a wife better than his wife. Take him into Paradise, and protect him from the punishment of the grave and from the punishment of hellfire.”
When he was finished, Mahmoud clicked open the last of the straps and the man’s body rolled out of the vest and down into the murky depths of the Mediterranean Sea.
“Here, Mom, put this on,” Mahmoud said. It took some time to get her into the life jacket, Mahmoud doing most of the work. But at last it was on her, and Mahmoud no longer had to fight to keep her afloat. She lay on her back, eyes closed, muttering about Hana, and Mahmoud clung to her life
jacket. He still had to kick his legs to not pull them both under, but not nearly so much.
He didn’t know where they would go or how they would get out of the water. Perhaps in the light of day they would see land, and be able to swim for it.
In the meantime, they had to survive the night.
