The Escape

In the darkness, the man to his left clutched Raza’s hand. ‘How much longer?’ the man said, and his voice revealed him to be a child.

Raza didn’t answer. He was afraid if he opened his mouth he would gag from the stench – of the oil-slicked harbour, of damp wood, of men for whom bathing was a luxury they had long ago left behind. The boards he was resting on were slick, and he didn’t want to know if anything other than sea water might have caused that.

When the boat set off, things got worse. The motion of the sea knocking beneath the men’s head was a minor irritant at first – but when they left the harbour and headed into the open sea, the waves bounced their heads so violently the men all sat up on their elbows. It wasn’t long before they started to suffer sea sickness. Soon the stench of vomit overpowered everything else. The Afghan boy next to Raza was suffering the most, weeping and crying for his mother.

Raza closed his eyes. In all the years he had sat around campfires with the TCN’s listening to their tales of escape from one place to another, in the holds of ships, beneath the floorboards of trucks, it had never occurred to him how much wretchedness they each had known. And Abdullah. Abdullah had made this voyage once, would make it again. Across the Atlantic like this – it wasn’t possible. No one could endure this. What kind of world made men have to endure this?

He placed his knapsack beneath his head and, lying down, lifted up the boy who was weeping and retching next to him and placed him on top of his own body, buffering the boy from the rocking of the waves.

The boy sighed and rested his head on Raza’s chest.

The hours inched past. No one spoke – conversation belonged to another world. By mid-afternoon, the hold felt like a furnace. Several of the men had fainted, including the boy who was now a dead weight on Raza’s chest. But Raza didn’t attempt to move him. He thought, Harry would have done for me without question what I’m doing for the boy. Then he thought, Harry would have kept me from a place like this.

At a certain point it started to seem inevitable they he would die in the hold. All he could think of was his mother. She’d never know he had died. No one would put a name to the dead piece of human cargo. So she’d keep waiting for news of him. For how long? How long before she understood that she’d lost one more person she loved? He whimpered softly, uncaring of what the other men might think of him.

When the boards lifted up and moonlight streamed in he didn’t understand what it meant until the captain’s head appeared.

‘Quiet!’ the captain warned in response to the ragged cheer that ran through the hold. ‘Raza Hazara, where are you? Come out. The rest of you stay here. We haven’t reached yet.’

Nothing in Raza’s life had felt as shameful, as much of a betrayal, as the moment when he identified himself as the man who was leaving. The boy on his chest, conscious again, clutched his shirt and said, ‘Take me with you’ and Raza could only whisper brokenly, ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached into his knapsack, lifted out wads of hundred dollar bills, and pressed them in the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t let anyone know you have this,’ he said, before crawling over the other men and holding out a hand for the captain to lift him out.  For a moment he considered dropping the knapsack in the hold, but he knew there was something else he needed the money for so he looked away from the men in the hold breathing in as much fresh air and moonlight as they could before the boards came down again.

A small rowing boat was alongside the ship, and a voice emerged from it saying, ‘Raza Hazara? Hurry. The plane’s been delayed already for you.’