Prologue
Behram, Turkey, 2 September 2015
From the beach we could see the island of Lesbos – and Europe. The sea stretched either side as far as you could see and it was not rough, it was quiet, flecked only by the smallest of white caps that looked as if they were dancing on the waves. The island did not look too far off, rising from the sea like a rocky loaf. But the grey dinghies were small and low in the water, weighed down with as many lives as the smugglers could pack in.
It was the first time I had seen the sea. The first time for everything – travelling on a plane, in a train, leaving my parents, staying in a hotel and now going in a boat! Back in Aleppo I had barely ever left our fifth-floor apartment.
We had heard from those who had gone before that on a fine summer day like this with a working motor a dinghy takes just over an hour to cross the strait. It was one of the shortest routes from Turkey to Greece – just 8 miles. The problem was that the motors were often old and cheap and strained for power with loads of fifty or sixty people, so the trips took three or four hours. On a rainy night when waves reached as high as 10 feet and tossed the boats like toys, sometimes they never made it at all and journeys of hope ended in a watery grave.
The beach was not sandy as I had imagined it would be but pebbly – impossible for my wheelchair. We could see we were in the right place from a ripped cardboard box printed with the words ‘Inflatable Rubber Dinghy; Made in China (Max Capacity 15 Pax)’, as well as a trail of discarded belongings scattered along the shore like a kind of refugee flotsam and jetsam. There were toothbrushes, nappies and biscuit wrappers, abandoned backpacks and a slew of clothes and shoes. Jeans and T-shirts tossed out because there was no room in the boat and smugglers make you travel as light as possible. A pair of grey high-heeled mules with fluffy black pom-poms, which seemed a crazy thing to have brought on this journey. A child’s tiny pink sandal decorated with a plastic rose. A boy’s light-up trainers. And a large grey floppy bear with a missing eye that must have been hard for someone to leave behind. All the stuff had turned this beautiful place into a rubbish dump, which made me sad.
We had been in the olive groves all night after being dropped off on the cliff road by the smuggler’s mini-bus. From there we had to walk down the hill to the shore which was about a mile. That may not sound much but it feels a very long way in a wheelchair over a rough track with only your sister to push and a fierce Turkish sun beating down and driving sweat into your eyes. There was a road zigzagging down the hill which would have been much easier, but we couldn’t walk along that as we might be spotted and arrested by the Turkish gendarmerie who could put us in a detention centre or even send us back.
I was with two of my four elder sisters – Nahda, though she had her baby and three little girls to handle, and my closest sister Nasrine who always looks after me and is as beautiful as her name, which means a white rose that grows on the hills of Kurdistan. Also with us were some cousins whose parents – my aunt and uncle – had been shot dead by Daesh snipers in June when they went to a funeral in Kobane, a day I don’t want to think about.
The way was bumpy. Annoyingly, Nasrine pulled the wheelchair so I was facing backwards and only got occasional glimpses of the sea, but when I did it was sparkling blue. Blue is my favourite colour because it’s the colour of God’s planet. Everyone got very hot and bothered. The chair was too big for me and I gripped the sides so hard that my arms hurt and my bottom got bruised from all the bumping, but I didn’t say anything.
As with everywhere we had passed through I told my sisters some local information I had gathered before we left. I was excited that on top of the hill above us was the ancient town of Assos which had a ruined temple to the goddess Athena and, even better, was where Aristotle once lived. He’d started a school of philosophy overlooking the sea so he could watch the tides and challenge the theory of his former master Plato that tides were turbulence caused by rivers. Then the Persians attacked and made the philosophers flee and Aristotle ended up in Macedonia as tutor to a young Alexander the Great. St Paul the apostle also passed through on his own journey to Lesbos from Syria. As always my sisters didn’t seem very interested.
I gave up trying to inform them and watched the seagulls having fun gliding on thermals and making noisy loops high in the blue, blue sky, never once stalling. How I wished I could fly. Even astronauts don’t have that freedom.
Nasrine kept checking the Samsung smartphone our brother Mustafa had bought us for the journey to make sure we were following the Google map coordinates given to us by the smuggler. Yet, when we finally got to the shore, it turned out we were not in the right place. Every smuggler has their own ‘point’ – we had coloured strips of fabric tied round our wrists to identify us – and we were at the wrong one.
Where we needed to be wasn’t far along the beach but when we got to the end there was a sheer cliff blocking us off. The only way round was to swim, which we obviously couldn’t do. So we’d ended up having to walk up and down another rugged hill to reach the right point on the shore. Those slopes were like hell. If you slipped and fell into the sea you’d definitely be dead. It was so rocky that I couldn’t be pushed or pulled but had to be carried. My cousins teased me, ‘You are the Queen, Queen Nujeen!’
By the time we got to the right beach the sun was setting, an explosion of pink and purple as if one of my little nieces was squiggling coloured crayons across the sky. From the hills above I heard the gentle tinkle of goat-bells.
We spent the night in the olive grove. Once the sun had gone the temperature dropped suddenly and the ground was hard and rocky even though Nasrine spread all the clothes we had around me. But I was terribly exhausted, having never spent so much time outside in my life, and I slept most of the night. We couldn’t make a fire because it might attract police. Some people used the cardboard dinghy cartons to try and cover themselves. It felt like one of those movies where a group go camping and something terrible happens.
Breakfast was sugar cubes and Nutella which might sound exciting but kind of sucks when it’s all you have. The smugglers had promised we would leave early in the morning and by dawn we were all ready on the beach in our life jackets. Our phones were tied inside party balloons to protect them on the crossing, a trick we had been shown how to do in İzmir.
There were several other groups waiting. We had paid $1,500 each instead of the usual $1,000 to have a dinghy just for our family, but it seemed others would be in our boat. We would be thirty-eight in total – twenty-seven adults and eleven children. Now we were here there was nothing we could do – we couldn’t go back and people said the smugglers used knives and cattle prods on those who changed their minds.
The sky was cloudless, and close by I could see that the sea wasn’t just one colour, the uniform blue of pictures and my imaginings, but bright turquoise next to the shore then a deeper blue darkening to grey then indigo near the island. I knew the sea only from National Geographic documentaries and now it was as if I was part of one. I felt really wired and couldn’t understand why everyone was nervous. For me it was like the biggest adventure!
Other kids were running and collecting pebbles of different colours. A small Afghan boy gave me one the shape of a dove, flat and grey with a white marble vein running through it. It was cool to the touch and worn smooth by the sea. It’s not always easy for me to hold things in my awkward fingers but I wasn’t letting go of that.
There were people from