From a Low and Quiet Sea Read online

  Farouk, his wife said now. And then nothing. This was a thing she often did, as though to reinforce her own sense of his presence, of his realness to her. Always he used to say, Yes? Or, What is it? But he had learned with the years to stay silent when he sensed a certain mood of hers, a certain type of heavy quietness. Worry was passed now, discarded like a garment worn too long: they knew the ins and outs of the plan, of each stage of the journey, the rendezvous and routes and the vehicles that would be used. There was only a kind of cold tension left, a brittleness, as they each intently regarded the other, trying to hear the things unspoken. He’d left instructions in a letter for his closest friend, a doctor with no wife, whom he’d known since childhood, who’d shared a room with him at the university, who’d toasted him at his wedding, who’d smiled at his new-born daughter, his eyes filled with tears. His house could be used by the hospital, and anything in it, and his car, and he was sorry it had come to this. He’d measured the weights of his conflicting duties carefully, he told his friend in the letter, and he’d measured and measured again, and he’d mourned the time when such duties weren’t in conflict one against the other but were all part of a good life and all given to the same end, but this now was how the world was, and he was left with no choice but to get his daughter and his wife to safety.

  His wife’s family had crowded into their house the previous evening, and her sisters, one a year older and one a year younger, had covered Martha’s face with kisses as they clung to her, and they’d cried so loudly that he’d feared a passer-by would hear and think it suspicious that such sounds were coming from a house where no one had been lost, and deduce that they were leaving. Amira asked why her aunts were crying, and her grandmother said they were crying for joy, because they were so happy that their sister and their niece were going to have such an adventure. And she took Amira on her knee and said, When I see you again, my love, you might be a scientist, like your mother, or a doctor, like your father, or a baker, like your grandfather and me. Be happy, whatever you are, and remember how precious you are, and how much I love you. And Amira had smiled at her grandmother’s words, and had lain in her lap awhile like a baby, and Martha’s father had stood close beside Farouk, and they had watched the women’s leave-taking in silence, until the old man whispered, Go with God, my son, and live long, and he had taken Farouk’s hand in his, and the old man’s hand was shaking hard.

  Farouk, his wife said again, and he felt a sudden impulse rise within him to strike her hard across the face, and scream at her that this was all her doing, that he was sorry he’d ever told her about the trafficker and his invitations. He imagined himself standing over her, asking what the fuck she’d said to the man the evening she’d insisted on speaking to him alone, what promises she’d made him, what caused her to think it was all right to smile at him that way, to flirt with him, to giggle with her mouth covered like a coquettish adolescent, while he had sat outside looking in like a boy, like a penitent, on a stool in the garden, guarded by an acned fool. But it was quelled again as quickly, and he wondered at himself, at the things within him never felt till now. Perhaps, he thought, this is the way it is for everybody, at times of terrible pressure: maybe every possible version of a person can be glimpsed at once, maybe every man’s true self is like a particle unobserved, assuming all possible shapes in any given moment, only fastening into one when it’s called upon to be, to do. And he put his hand on her cheek, and was relieved when she took it in hers, and kissed it, and held it against her lips awhile, and told him over and over that she loved him, that she’d only ever loved him, of all the men who lived he was the only one who could ever make her happy. And he pitied every man who wasn’t him.

  He remembered London’s low skies and humming streets, how the rain smelt in the mornings, sweetly earthy in the green areas and sharper, more metallic on the concrete and tarmac. He loved the sudden fogs, the way they’d roll in from the river and hang between the buildings, blunting the scape of the city, softening it, rendering it ghostly. He’d walk the mile or so from his digs to the university hospital and he’d smile at people he met on the path, and sometimes they’d smile back and bid him good morning. He walked with an umbrella because it seemed the thing to do, though he rarely opened it, and he went to pubs sometimes and watched series of small comedies played out between men and women who didn’t know each other, and some of his fellow student doctors spent every spare moment in these mad pursuits, and he joined them sometimes but he never tried too hard. He wondered now how he’d feel when men like that were peacocking about his daughter, telling her tall tales, coaxing her, trying to impress her, to make her laugh, to wear her down so she’d agree to sleep with them. He was a man of the world, a progressive, almost a liberal. But still he heard a whisper inside himself, a soft voice, reasonable and measured, saying, Don’t you envy those militants in a way? The ease they’ve granted themselves with their certitudes, their pristine rubrics, their perfect clarity? And he wondered would it be so bad, to stay, to grow his beard a certain way, to pray, to keep his daughter locked away from the world until her time came to be a wife and mother, to be the only man to lay eyes on the flesh of his wife?

  The moon and the acacia tree and the jeep were aligned in the yard of his house, and there was a low vibration from the east and a sound of scuttling creatures from the scrub, and the man was standing at the driver’s door and he was smiling, saying, I decided to drive you myself, brother. I feel a different kind of worry for you. I feel you have important things to do. Now, do you have the bribe money? Yes. Give it to me. There will be at least two patrols between here and the boat, and the moon is not our friend tonight: she’s shining like a searchlight. You have been called to the home of your parents in the north because your father is dying. I am your cousin. Okay? Be sure your wife and your daughter are properly covered and that they have toileted, and tell them to be still if we are stopped, not to speak, to each other or to anybody else, unless they’re spoken to first. Understand? And he said he understood, and his wife and daughter floated in their alien garb across the yard to the jeep, and the man hoisted their suitcases, and his daughter asked again where they were going, why she had to wear this, and his wife said, Hush, my love, lie across my lap and go to sleep, it’s still the dead of night.

  He’d imagined that the journey would be quiet and tense, and that the night would be cloistering, oppressive, around them, but the earth was silver-lit and luminous, and the dust of the road was held down by the dew, and he’d forgotten how beautiful the land could be, when it swept and rolled and suddenly changed its texture and its shape, and he felt a longing for his childhood and his parents and the time when all his decisions were easy, or were made for him. The man drove mostly in silence but he spoke now and then in sudden bursts that startled Farouk as they began. He praised Farouk for his sense and said he hoped his colleagues and his neighbours would follow suit and leave. He half turned in his seat and smiled back and praised Martha for having a profession, a biologist, he said, slowing his voice to emphasize the word. The study of life. That is what I would have been myself, he said, had I had the brain! I only have wit enough for this, for driving cars and paying bribes and chartering sound vessels for the sea.

  And one hour in, a truck appeared, stopped side-on in the horizon, and as they neared they saw that it was an armoured vehicle, marked with the crest of some foreign regime, and there were three soldiers strung across the tarmac of the road, two at either side crouched with their guns at their shoulders, aiming squarely at the windscreen of the jeep, and one in the middle, forward from them, his hand raised to halt them. Their driver rolled the jeep slowly to the checkpoint, lowering his window, smiling, and was told there was a toll now on this road, by order of the provisional government, and that the toll was calculated based on the number of passengers and the distance to their destination and the nature of their business, and the driver spoke in a low voice for a minute or so and he passed a sheaf of notes to the soldier,
who nodded at Farouk and craned his neck to see the back seat and Farouk risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that his wife was still, her eyes were downcast, and his daughter was lying with her head on his wife’s lap, and his wife had one gloved hand on her daughter’s cheek and the other tucked demurely out of sight.

  And at a wave from the leader of the soldiers the lorry was moved on a little so they could drive on with the white sun rising at their right, and at last they saw the glinting sea, and they stopped at a tiny slipway by a stunted quay and a gull bent itself to the breeze and screamed as Farouk and his wife and his daughter looked across a desert of water to the curve of the rim of the world. We wait, the driver said, and Farouk started to say something, then realized there was nothing to say, nothing to do but wait, and he was silent. A beach jagged away from the quay’s left side towards a headland, and all along the beach were tiny knots of people, standing looking at the water and the path along it laid by the rising sun. Most of the groups were ringed by luggage, as though they’d arranged their possessions around them as protection, circles of totems strung along the sand containing souls, and all the things the souls could not leave behind in their old worlds. Some of them have been here days, the driver said, as though they were nothing to do with him, were the clients of less meticulous planners, less scrupulous fellows. He clicked his tongue and shook his head and checked his watch, and the solitary gull resumed its screaming as a tiny launch rounded the headland and its pilot wrestled it to its mooring at the quay and the knots of people loosened on the beach and hefted their luggage and made for it.

  The boat was anchored out at sea, almost past the reach of a naked eye, and the launch was low in the water, but it was smooth and it didn’t list or pitch, but rolled with the gentle swell, and his daughter’s hand was resting on his arm, not squeezing it as it would if she were frightened. His wife gradually relaxed her grip on his forearm, and she turned her veiled face to the sun, and she hummed as they cut through the water and the sound of her matched the launch’s diesel throb, and mitigated its ugliness, and he saw that their course dissected the sun’s long reflection, and there was a sweetness that vied with the salt in the air, and the other people on board were silent but they seemed content, and men rested their feet on leather cases, and women smiled shyly at one another, and he felt a calmness he hadn’t felt in weeks, or months, ever since the first days of the planning of their exodus. The pilot of the launch looked young, but he occupied his perch at the prow with authority; there was a practised assurance to his movements, a nonchalance to the way he scanned the horizon and adjusted his wheel to the roll of the swell so that they stayed as flat as they could, and it occurred to Farouk that all of the other passengers were well dressed enough and seemed respectable, and he decided that the trafficker hadn’t lied outright when he said that this passage would be pleasant, that the ship they would sail on would be top-notch, that the crew would be experienced and professional, that his fellow passengers would be men like him, professional men, with good wives and well-behaved children, and there would be no riff-raff, and he felt a surge of pride that he was the kind of man who could arrange his family’s escape, who had the wherewithal to get them to the West, and make for them there a life, new and better and absent of fear. He looked at the line of the profile of his wife’s face, and he stirred a little so she’d look at him, and when she did he knew that he’d been right, that she saw him as a capable man, a strong husband and father, a saviour, and that she knew he’d allowed her to question the trafficker in the kitchen only to calm her own nervousness, that he’d humoured her. He breathed the crisp air deeply and he smiled.

  This cannot be the vessel, he heard someone say, and there was movement from near the prow, and Farouk stood to look. The pilot was leaning down from his little bridge and he was answering the speaker in a fast voice, and the sun was flashing off the glass of his shades so Farouk could not make out his countenance, or tell if he was angry, but the man who had spoken was standing, and he was stabbing a finger towards the pilot’s chest, and Farouk saw that he was holding in his right hand a small pair of field glasses through which he must have seen the anchored boat, and Farouk squinted against the sun and formed his hands into a shade on his brow and saw that the boat seemed small in the water, and single-masted, and to be made of wood, and was not at all as the man in charge had described, and he knew then why they had been taken from the shore on this launch: the traffickers could not allow the vessel to be inspected from dry land, when people still had the option of turning back, and setting out again along the road towards their homes. Farouk looked down at Martha and saw that she had removed her veil, and that she was smiling at him, and his daughter asked if they were nearly there, and said she felt sick in her belly, and asked if the big boat would be as bumpy as this one, and if she could talk to the girl over there, sitting with her mummy and her daddy and her brothers, and Farouk saw that the pilot now had a gun in his hand, a small rifle, and the strap of it was slung around his neck and the barrel of it was pointed down, and maybe it had been there all along but, for some reason, he hadn’t noticed, and the complaining man was quiet now, and was taking his seat slowly, his eyes all the while on the gun’s glinting barrel, and Farouk saw a jet-black seabird whirl and flap against the sun, and dive towards the water, and enter the waves with its wings sleeked back along its body, and he felt breathless suddenly, as though he’d just been running, and he sat and said, Of course, my little love, of course you may.

  There was nothing then that could be done. He thought of all the things the man in charge had said, and all the questions he’d been a little too quick to answer, and the black cloth bag with drawstrings that he’d put the counted money in, and the tightness of his drawing of those strings, and the relief Farouk had felt when the bargain had been made, and the strange excitement that had fizzed inside him at the prospect of their adventure, and he felt a flushing burn inside his stomach at the memory of the vision he’d had of standing at the prow of a gleaming yacht, watching it plough the water cleanly, marvelling at its smoothness, at its litheness, with Martha standing beside him saying, Oh, how beautiful this is, how beautiful. And now they were here on this undulating sea, docking with a wooden tub, and the pilot of the launch was telling them to remove their life-jackets, they belonged to the launch, the ship’s crew would give them more when they boarded, and he was holding the launch fast to the starboard side of the wooden boat by grasping a handle on its side, and he had lashed the launch loosely with an ancient-looking rope, and he was grasping a woman’s arm as she stepped from the edge of the launch onto the bottom of a ladder that seemed to be fastened tight to the edge of the wooden boat’s deck, and she was screaming to her husband that she was frightened, that it was too bumpy, that she wanted to go home, that this was no good, and her husband shoved her roughly from behind, and Farouk saw his field glasses, swinging from a strap around his neck.

  He helped his wife and daughter up the ladder and onto the deck, and Martha stood with her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and the girl stared in wonder at the mast that rose from the centre of the deck and the naked boom that jutted from it and she smiled at the little girl she had seen on the launch, who was half hidden now in her own mother’s skirts, and she held her doll out from her so the little girl could see, and Farouk realized she wasn’t afraid, that it would not occur to a child so loved and so protected to feel she was in danger, with her father and her mother so close by, that her trust in them was implicit and complete, that her love for them was perfect. He was grateful for his wife’s strength, for her subversion of her terror: she mortally feared the sea and had read of people fleeing in the past who had paid vast sums and been forced into dinghies, like sardines in a tin, and the dinghies had deflated and sunk with all souls, and she had accepted his decision that the people they were dealing with could be trusted to get them to safety, that they wouldn’t dare lead people like them into danger, that this would be something more like
a pleasure cruise, that the documentation they had been provided with, along with their own credentials, would mean a short stay on some small island before a transfer to mainland Europe, to some country that was short of doctors, and wasn’t that every country in this day and age?

  When at last the launch had been emptied of people and the small uncertain band of them stood on the wooden deck, the complaining man began an inspection of the craft. He walked aft and shook the rail and leaned over it so that Farouk thought he might fall in. His arse was large and so was his stomach and the rail was under pressure until he eased his weight back on his feet, and he removed his field glasses from around his neck and he replaced them, and he scanned the horizon with them, though for what purpose Farouk could not imagine, and then the man lowered himself to his knees as though in prayer but he put his ear to the boards of the deck, then rapped with his knuckles on the wood, and listened, as though for some reply, for some tone or timbre in the echo of his rapping that would reveal to him the seaworthiness or otherwise of the craft. Then he raised himself slowly and walked through his fellow passengers, who parted silently for him, and he made for the steps to the bridge, though they were cordoned with a chain, and as he raised a fat leg to breach the cordon the launch pilot shouted from his prow, Do not disturb the captain and the crew. They are sleeping. And he began to throw the luggage that was stacked at the centre of his small craft onto the deck of the wooden boat, and the complaining man leaned over the starboard side to remonstrate, but the pilot didn’t answer him, or break from the rhythm he had established for leaning down and gripping a case or a bag and flinging it towards the passengers, and one bounced back from the top bar of the rail and splashed into the sea and sank quickly, and someone keened like a small child, and Farouk saw that it was a child, the girl his daughter had been smiling at, and her mother was weeping silently as she pulled her backwards from the rail saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, my darling, everything that’s lost will be replaced.