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“God help us—that is what we’re to ride in?” Mahmoud’s father said.
The boat wasn’t a boat. It was a raft. A black inflatable rubber dinghy with an outboard motor on the back. It looked like there was room for a dozen people in it.
Thirty refugees waited to get on board.
They all looked as tired as Mahmoud felt, and wore different-colored life jackets. They were mostly young men, but there were families too. Women with and without hijabs. Other children, some who looked to be about Mahmoud’s age. One boy in a Barcelona soccer jersey didn’t have a life jacket but clung instead to a blown-up rubber inner tube. A few of the other refugees had backpacks and plastic bags full of clothes, but most of them, like Mahmoud’s family, carried whatever they owned in their pockets.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” one of the smugglers said. “Two hundred and fifty thousand Syrian pounds or one thousand euros per person! Children pay full price, including babies,” he told Mahmoud’s father. There were two more Turks in tracksuits like the ones who had turned them away from the mall,
and they stood apart, staring at the refugees like they were something disgusting that had just washed up on the beach. Their scowls made Mahmoud want to disappear again.
Dad handed out their life jackets, and they put them on.
Mom stared out at the black dinghy bobbing in the gray-black Mediterranean seawater. She grabbed her husband’s arm. “What are we doing, Youssef? Is this the right decision?”
“We have to get to Europe,” he said. “What choice do we have? God will guide us.”
Mahmoud watched as his father pushed the cash they’d saved into the hands of one of the smugglers. Then Mahmoud and his family followed his dad to the dinghy, and they climbed on board. Waleed and his mother sat down in the bottom of the dinghy, his mother holding Hana tight in her arms. Mahmoud and his father sat on one of the inflated rubber edges, their backs to the sea. Mahmoud was already cold, and the wind off the waves made him shiver.
A big bearded man wearing a plaid shirt and a bulky blue life jacket sat down right next to Mahmoud, almost squeezing Mahmoud right off the edge. Mahmoud slid a little closer to his father, but the big man next to him just settled into the extra space.
“How long will we be on the boat?” Mahmoud asked his dad. “Just a few hours, I think. It was hard to tell on the phone.”
Mahmoud nodded. The phones and chargers were safely sealed away in plastic bags in his parents’ pockets, just in case they got wet. Mahmoud knew because he’d been the one who’d dug through the trash for the resealable zipper bags.
“We don’t have to get all the way to the Greek mainland,” Dad said. “Just the Greek island of Lesbos, about a hundred kilometers away. Then
we’re officially in Europe, and we can take a ferry from there to Athens.”
When the smugglers had packed the dinghy full of refugees, they pushed it out to sea. None of the smugglers came with them. If the refugees were going to get to Lesbos, they were going to have to do it themselves.
“Does anyone know if dinner is served on this cruise?” Mahmoud’s father asked, and there were a few nervous laughs.
The outboard motor roared to life, and the refugees cheered and cried. Dad hugged Mahmoud, then reached down to hug Mom, Waleed, and Hana. They were finally doing it. They were finally leaving Turkey for Europe! Mahmoud looked around in wonder. None of this seemed real. He had begun to feel like they were never going to leave.
Mahmoud had been so tired he could barely keep his eyes open before, but now the thrum of the motor and the chop of the boat as it hit wave after wave flooded him with adrenaline, and he couldn’t have slept if he’d wanted to.
The lights of Izmir dwindled to glittering dots behind them, and soon they were out in the dark, rough waters of the Mediterranean. Phone screens glowed in the darkness—passengers checking to see if they could tell where they were.
The roar of the engine and the whip-blinding sea spray made it impossible to have any kind of conversation, so Mahmoud looked around at the other passengers instead. Most of them kept their heads down and eyes closed, either muttering prayers or trying not to get sick, or both. The dinghy began to toss not just front to back but side to side, in a sort of rolling motion, and Mahmoud felt the bile rise in the back of his throat. On the other side of the dinghy, a man shifted quickly to vomit over the side.
“Watch out for the Coast Guard!” the big man next to Mahmoud shouted over the noise. “Turks will take us back to Turkey, but Greeks will take us
to Lesbos!”
Mahmoud didn’t know how anybody could see anything in the dark, cloud-covered night. But it helped his seasickness to look outside instead of inside the boat. It didn’t help his growing sense of panic, though. He couldn’t see land anymore, just stormy gray waves that were getting taller and narrower, like they were driving a boat through the spiky tent tops at the Kilis refugee camp. More people leaned over the side to throw up, and Mahmoud felt his stomach churn.
And then the rain began.
It was a hard, cold rain that plastered Mahmoud’s hair to his head and soaked him down to his socks. The rain began to collect in the bottom of the dinghy, and soon Mahmoud’s mother and the others were sitting in centimeters of shifting water. Mahmoud’s muscles began to ache from shivering and holding the same tight position for so long, and he wanted nothing more than to get off this boat.
“We should turn back!” someone yelled.
“No! We can’t go back! We can’t afford to try again!” Mahmoud’s father yelled, and a chorus of voices agreed with him.
They pushed on through driving rain and roiling seas for what felt like an eternity. It might have been ten hours or ten minutes, Mahmoud didn’t know. All he knew was that he wanted it to end, and end now. This was worse than Aleppo. Worse than bombs falling and soldiers shooting and drones buzzing overhead. In Aleppo, at least, he could run. Hide. Here he was at the mercy of nature, an invisible brown speck in an invisible black rubber dinghy in the middle of a great black sea. If it wanted to, the ocean could open its mouth and swallow him and no one in the whole wide world would ever know he was gone.
And then that’s exactly what it did.
“I see rocks!” someone at the front of the dinghy yelled, and there was a loud POOM! like a bomb exploding, and Mahmoud went tumbling into the sea.
