For Whom the Light Shines

Now, the mighty Mediterranean sea beckoned for the tired occupants of the small, overflowing boat. Sometimes it was blue and calm. Sometimes it was ruthless and firm. They tried to hold on to the boat with all their remaining strength but it threw them up into the air and they held their breath. The journey was endless. Time seemed to be sucked into its the sea’s suffocating omnipresence, like stardust into a black hole. The passengers looked at each other. They looked above at the skies. They waited for a sign, an answer, anything. They looked around—at other people, at the Homeric sea, the air, anything—knowing these were the last images they would ever see. Then, one after the other they jumped in.

Soon Guleed and the his mother and the Smuggler were the only ones aboard. The Smuggler waited. The woman looked at the arms of the tired men throwing up tiny splashes of water as they tried to fight gravity, fate and fatigue. She looked at the men and women whose bellies were now full of salt and whose lungs were now sputtering against cold water. She could feel the sharp saltiness of the water on her tongue and down her throat. She could feel the water on her skin. She shivered. Did the water have to be so cold?

She stood up and embraced the boy. He looked confused.

“I have failed you,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

“I have forgotten how land feels like.” he said. “How does land feel like?”

The woman looked towards the shore.

“Like home,” she whispered. Her memory of land felt like walking on a bed of nails. “You will see soon. I know you will make it.”

She let go of him. She kissed him on both cheeks and cupped his face in her hands. She smiled a weary smile, her eyes creasing in the corners. She turned around and faced the Smuggler. She pointed at the gun in his hand. She closed her eyes and she could still see the men back in the Sahara. She could feel their rough hands chafing her skin. She could picture the beads of sweat dripping from their faces and dripping on to her back. She could hear their grunts carrying through the wind. She could recall the musty smell of a rifle’s leather strap, half-buried in the sand. Now, she looked at the sea one last time. This had been her first trip to a sea in her entire life. The setting sun mottled everything with shades of red, like a Raphael painting. She looked at the muzzle of the gun. She stood still, her eyes seemingly steady, trying, unsuccessfully, like every mortal, to be truly brave in the face of death, petrified into calm submission by loneliness and terror.

*

When the journey began, the boy and his mother travelled in a fourteen-teen-seater Nissan Caravan, together with fifteen other people, mostly Somalis and Ethiopians. They travelled from Nairobi and incised the belly of the Great Rift Valley until they crossed into South Sudan. From Juba they boarded another van that drove them to Khartoum. Then they made their way up the Sahara aboard a speeding two-seater Nissan Navarra fastened with sticks for the men to hold on to so as not to fall off, the women hunched close together on the floor of the truck.

The Sahara was an endless piece of orange paper and the wind had made long lines and lonely hills out of the sand. The truck made its ways through the land and sand morphed into a map of borders. Guleed felt continuously thirsty and hungry. He felt tired. His whole body ached from the bumpy ride. But he knew he had to be strong for his mother. He would fight anything along the way to make sure she arrived safely at their destination. And when they arrived in Europe, he could finally be the professional footballer he always wanted to be. At home, he had won all the local tournaments and accolades, but his refugee status had denied him the opportunity to play at the national level. He thought, as his feet dangled from the side of the truck and he held on to the stick for dear life, as a dead corpse lay half-buried in the sand, that he would join a football academy and he would work hard and soon he would play in the top leagues in Europe. Perhaps one day he would play at Anfield for his team, Liverpool F.C. And when he was rich and famous, he would come back home and build academies for aspiring young footballers in the refugee camps.

After six days of flying on four wheels through the desert, they crossed into the south of Libya. In Al-Qatron, they waited for several nights in a desert village. Their food supplies had run out and they survived on water and plain bread. They couldn’t know if the men would show up or if they had duped and deserted them. They waited. Life is one long attempt at postponing death, it seemed to them—it was death served in tiny slices. The men showed up. They felt relieved. They were crammed into a large truck with small holes for ventilation. In the heat and darkness, they crossed through Sabha and drove north into Tripoli, their clothes soaked in sweat. Here, they waited in a nondescript compound with a whitewashed house. Their legs were wobbly. Their eyes began to retreat into their sockets.

When the next car came, the smugglers started reading names from a list. Guleed and his mother and two other women did not hear their names. They were told their agent had only paid the smugglers up to Tripoli. They would not proceed to the final leg of the journey across the sea. They had paid the Mukhallas for the entire journey, they protested. He had not, they were told. They were told to make phone calls to their families and arrange for a wire transfer or else they would be tortured.

When no money came through after three days, Guleed was taken to a remote corner of the compound where some men and boys were chained to iron posts. They were all stark-naked. Guleed was stripped naked and chained to a post. His skin sputtered against the hot metal. The thirst intensified. Sweat seeped into the sand. The air smelled of a mixture of urine and blood. Five burly men flogged them on their backs. They had them drink salty water. They smoked cigarettes and used the prisoner’s bodies to put the butts out, but the laughter of the men was louder than the prisoners’ cries. The men then took the three women inside the house. Guleed heard her wail—felt his mother’s wail—as she was raped. He felt it to the depth of his being, to somewhere he did not know existed within him. It was a hoarse cry, empty of will, like a drowning man’s cry in the remotest sea. Guleed wished it would stop. It went on. He could not cover his ears. He watched the winds flirt with the glistening sand, lifting the hem of the earth. It was a smooth, elegant movement, like a carefree couple swaying to a Beethoven piece on a breezy night. Nature’s dance to the tune of man’s tragedy. When she emerged, she was white with dust. Blood had burned into her skin. Hooyo was a ghost and her gaze sliced his gut.

“They are going to be sold to local madams to work in brothels,” the man next to him said. “Until they can make enough money to pay for the boat ride,” the man said.

Guleed’s eyes followed the women. He felt he had let his mother down. He had failed to protect her. He surged his body forward with all his will. The iron chains cut through his wrists. Guleed watched the women falter as they walked off, and when they came back two months later, skinny figurines drifting in the wind, he could not tell who his mother was or how long she was gone. He could not sit still from then on, rocking his body back and forth. “I have failed you hooyo,” he said over and over. All he could see now were bright orange lights and they danced and jumped around and dangled in front of his eyes.

*

Now it was Guleed’s turn to jump. He plopped in. His body was weak. But he swam, and the waves carried him on. He felt light. The journey had sucked everything out of him—his energy, his weight, his memories, his hopes. He did not look behind at the remaining drowning men. He looked towards the shore and saw a fishing boat coming but the obese men aboard it could not see him.

The sun was attentive—history was not. The bright orange lights dangled in front of his eyes again. The island of Lampedusa was white and its cliffs were brown and dull. In Guleed’s eyes, it was a large stone crocodile with a long tail lying on the water. People walked on the beach but all he could see was an army of spiders scurrying on the sand. Soon the sea spit him out onto the shore. He was lying under the belly of the stone crocodile.