What Strange Paradise

Amir climbs to the top of the hayloft in the farmhouse and watches Vänna leave, wondering if she didn’t understand him when he mimed that he was hungry. She looks familiar to him, like the girl on the packages of powdered milk his mother buys for his baby brother. He has “quickly learned you [can] tell the quality of a product by how Western the people on the packaging [look]” (62). He wonders if Vänna will return.

After a while, he gives in to a stupor from hunger but comes to his senses when he hears his language being spoken in hushed tones outside. It is a travel-weary teenage couple. A moment later, they are confronted by Vänna’s mother, who holds them at gunpoint. The couple drops to the ground as Vänna’s father arrives. He appears to try to talk his wife down but fails, and the mother sends him into the house. When the young man on the ground says something in English and attempts to reach into his backpack, mother fires the gun above the couple’s heads. Amir flattens himself to the ground in the barn, “the terrible reverberation of gunfire running through him, dragging with it the memory of every past reverberation” (65).

Vänna’s mother holds the refugee couple at gunpoint until a military vehicle arrives. Four young soldiers, accompanied by their commanding officer, cautiously surround the couple. The officer gets Vänna’s mother to lower the gun as the soldiers zip-tie the migrant couple and haul them off. The affair is soon over, leaving Amir baffled and scared.

Amir makes himself small and hides beneath Umm Ibrahim, the pregnant woman, as the Eritreans fight for control of the Calypso in a growing storm. Most on the top deck begin to panic, but Umm Ibrahim continues to try to memorize her plea for help in English. The storm worsens but then abates, much to the relief of the migrants. The relief brings a new sense of camaraderie to those on the top deck, and many begin striking up conversations. The Syrian man, Walid bin Walid, takes objection to Amir’s oversized life vest, and an Egyptian man, Kamal Roushdy, defends Amir. The argument is stopped by Mohamed, an Egyptian man in league with the smugglers.

Teddy, one of the Eritreans, encounters some resistance from some of the passengers when he and his comrade decide to pilot the boat in shifts. A Palestinian man, Maher Ghandour, bickers with Umm Ibrahim when he corrects her English; he advises her to ditch her niqab if she wants to communicate properly with Westerners because “[t]heir language isn’t just about words” (73).

Amir thinks of Quiet Uncle and the African passengers crowded beneath the deck. He remains confused as to why so many people lined up for this “cruise.” He recalls fishing with Quiet Uncle, Loud Uncle, and his father. His father claimed that the Utus are connected to the ocean, though Amir has hardly been around it. He stares through a crack in the planks down at the “tight-packed human armada of limbs and eyes” before he has to look away due to “a great sense of indecency” (75).

Vänna picks up four cheeseburgers from the Hotel Xenios and heads home. On the way, she encounters two military trucks. They slow, and Vänna is greeted by Colonel Dimitri Kethros, her mother’s old friend, who has been put in charge of capturing undocumented migrants on the island. He jokingly asks if Vänna bought any extra food, and she imagines he can see through her and somehow knows about Amir. She watches the trucks drive away and notices that one looks as though it is used for transporting prisoners. She runs home.

Vänna’s father calls her over to the porch as she approaches the house. She can tell at once that he has been drinking and that he and her mother have been fighting. Vänna has noticed a distance between her parents, and she does not believe they have ever loved each other. She gives her father a burger, inquiring about Colonel Kethros. He ignores her, instead telling her a story she knows well. Her mother had two boys before Vänna, both of whom died in the womb. Her father claims that her mother wishes they had lived instead of Vänna; he, however, is glad she lived. Vänna refuses to take sides.

Vänna starts to head to the farmhouse but stops when she sees “mud prints in the grass, two-by-two in one direction, many in another, a tangled mess of strangers’ tracks” (80). She finds a half-open gym bag Colonel Kethros and his soldiers left behind. Her mother instructs her to “take it to Nimra, to that zoo she runs in the school gymnasium” (81).

Vänna takes a hamburger to Amir, who devours it gratefully. She considers trying to make a bed for Amir in the farmhouse but decides to take him to meet Nimra. They sneak away, heading for the former school gymnasium that now serves as “a temporary pen for those without a country” (82).

Amir accompanies Teddy when it is his shift to pilot the Calypso. Teddy and Maher are the most fluent in English of the small group closest to Amir. Teddy lets Amir steer the boat for a while despite Walid’s protests. Sick of Walid’s complaining, Mohamed produces a bottle of arak, an aniseed liquor, and convinces Walid to drink until he is drunk. Maher and Teddy discuss their reasons for leaving their countries. Teddy is a mathematician who fled Eritrea due to the country’s mandatory conscription policy. Amir thinks of his father, who was a more balanced man than Loud Uncle or Quiet Uncle but was “disappeared” during the Syrian Civil War just the same. Walid, quite intoxicated, demands Kamal play music on his phone. Kamal reluctantly complies. He only has one song, performed by the Arabic singer Amr Diab, but it delights Walid, who belly dances, much to the amusement of his neighbors. Many of the migrants on deck join in, singing along, though not all of them know Arabic.

Vänna and Amir approach the high-school gymnasium that has been repurposed for housing refugees and undocumented migrants. She asks the guard if they can see Madame Nimra El Ward, passing off Amir as her brother and saying that they have to deliver the gym bag on behalf of Colonel Kethros. The mention of the colonel causes the reluctant guard to let them through.

Madame El Ward was Vänna’s French teacher. After retiring, she fell into her current role as coordinator of the refugee site due to her skill with languages. They find her in her office in the gymnasium, arguing over the phone about a failed delivery of clean drinking water for the refugees. The office is full of papers and migrants’ personal effects. Amir observes the scene: hundreds of cots and refugees on the gym floor and a girl absentmindedly throwing a ball upward through a basketball hoop outside. He panics and tries to flee, but Madame El Ward calms him down in his own language. Amir tells her his name is David Utu.

Madame El Ward instructs Vänna to hide Amir until Sunday and then to take him to the very north of the island, where a local man runs an illegal boat to the Greek mainland. She believes that Amir will be safer with the Syrian refugee community on the mainland than he would be registering at the refugee camp or being sent back to Egypt. Even though there were no other confirmed survivors of the shipwreck, Madame El Ward tells Amir that she thinks his uncle will be heading to the ship north of the island. She gives Amir some comic books and other reading materials to keep him occupied. They spot some military vehicles entering the compound. Vänna and Amir leave just before Colonel Kethros enters the office.