A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea Read online

  Doaa wished that she could shut out the sound of the shifting sea. It was like the music in horror movies, making the scenes of death before her even more terrifying, as if the drowning of the people were set to the rhythm of the waves. Each time someone died, her heart broke. How many men had she seen take their life vests off when they decided to die? She’d lost count. I don’t blame them, she thought, even if her religion did look down on suicide. Their agony was too much for them to bear. And who am I to judge someone who takes his own life? I’m just a dot in this vast sea that will soon devour me, too. If not for the strength that the two little girls on her chest gave her, she would have slipped under the waves, as well.

  Doaa was exhausted but too afraid to sleep for fear that the babies might fall from her arms. She counted the corpses floating around her—seven. At least they were facedown so she didn’t have to see their faces. Their shirtless backs were bloated and blue-black, the color of whales. The stench was unbearable. Each time a wave pushed a corpse into her, she pushed it away with her feet or her hand. A man named Momen helped her move some of them away. He was one of the only remaining survivors and now stuck close to Doaa.

  Momen gave her strength with his words of encouragement. “You are selfless, Doaa. I’ve been watching how you are supporting the others. You’re so brave and strong. I want to keep you safe. If we survive, I’d like to marry you.”

  Somehow, here, Doaa didn’t find his words too forward or strange, just caring. It was his way of keeping going, something to perhaps look forward to if they ever made it out of the water alive. Doaa replied, “Hang in there and we will talk about it later when all this is behind us.”

  On the morning of the third day, as the sun rose, a man, a woman, and a small boy came into Doaa’s sight. The adults were holding on to an inflatable ring, just like Doaa’s, which was around the boy’s waist. But suddenly, the tube burst and the boy dropped into the water, his arms flailing. Doaa saw that the woman couldn’t swim well. As soon as she no longer had the ring to cling to, she, too, sank below the surface, then came up for a last desperate gasp of air before her head fell forward and she was still.

  The man was able to help the boy. He put the boy’s arms around his neck and swam toward Doaa. “Please hold him for a while,” he begged her when he reached Doaa. He was so exhausted his words were slurred. He said the boy was his nephew and that the woman who had just died was the child’s mother. Doaa hesitated: “There’s not enough room!” The boy was about three, bigger than the girls, and Masa and Malak would drown if the water ring sank. But the boy was looking at her in anguish and Doaa’s heart went out to him. “We’ll find a way,” she said as she reached for him and laid him on her outstretched legs. He was wiggling and raising his head, looking around him and pleading, “I want water. I want my uncle. I want my mommy,” over and over.

  Doaa didn’t know what to do to comfort the desperate boy and she was afraid his fussing would cause their ring to burst and they would all drown, too. Doaa wanted nothing more than to keep them all safe. The boy reminded her of Hamudi, and Doaa thought of how devastated she would be to see him drown. Again and again, the boy asked for his mother. “Your mother went to get you water and food,” Doaa told him, and for a few minutes that would quiet him, but then he would complain of thirst. To soothe him, Doaa finally scooped her hand in the sea and give him salt water to drink. Over the next two hours, his uncle would swim off a short distance to keep his body moving, then swim back to check on him. He had nothing to keep him afloat. The boy began to shake and his lips turned blue; his small chest heaved up and down. His uncle, holding on to Doaa’s inflatable ring, took the boy into his arms and began to cry. “Don’t leave us,” he begged.

  The boy said weakly, “Please, Uncle, you can’t die, too!” Then his body suddenly went limp over his uncle’s shoulder. The man hugged the boy to his chest, pushing away from Doaa’s float, and she watched as he and the little boy sank together before her eyes, while the body of the boy’s mother floated next to her.

  “Dear God,” she heard Momen say, “everyone is dying around us. I saw my son die, and my wife. Why is this happening to us? Why did they sink us? No one is coming to save us!”

  “They’ll come for us, inshallah, Momen,” Doaa told him softly. “Be strong, pray, so hope is still inside you.”

  But as she uttered these words, Doaa began to sob. She’d only held the little boy for a few hours, but she felt as if he’d become part of her. “They say the pain a mother feels when she loses her son is the worst in the world. I feel like that. I loved that little boy.” She had seen so much death, but this last one made her feel as if her heart would crack into pieces. “It’s my fault he died,” she cried to Momen. “I should have been able to save him.”

  “No, no!” Momen replied, “It was God’s will. You are good, you tried to save him.”

  But Doaa couldn’t help feeling that she had failed the little boy. With renewed determination, she thought about how she wouldn’t fail Malak and Masa. Now, nothing mattered more to her than keeping them alive.

  When the girls started to stir and become agitated, she would sing to them her favorite nursery rhyme: “Come on sleep, sleep, let’s sleep together, I will bring you the wings of a dove.” She also invented games with her fingers to distract them. She discovered that Malak was ticklish under her chin and would laugh when she played a game in which she would use her fingers to pretend a mouse was running up Malak’s chest and onto her neck. When the girls fell asleep, Doaa would rub their bodies to keep them warm, and when she thought that they might be losing consciousness, she would snap her fingers near their eyes and speak firmly, “Malak, Masa, wake up, sweethearts, wake up!”

  The only word Masa said back to her was “Mama.”

  Doaa felt such a deep connection to these children that she began to feel as if she were their mother now. Their survival meant more to her than her own life.

  In the moments when Doaa wasn’t comforting the girls, she would recite the Quran, and many of the remaining survivors would gather around her to listen and pray. Some of them also knew the words of the Ayat Al Kursi, a prayer she used to recite before bed and knew by heart.

  Their voices soothed the babies, and their words comforted Momen and the other survivors around her. Reciting the verses gave Doaa a sense of strength that she felt came directly from God. She clung to hope that someone would come to rescue them all soon.

  On Friday, their fourth morning in the ocean, Doaa noticed that Malak and Masa were sleeping almost all the time and were barely moving. She constantly checked their pulses to make sure they were alive.

  Momen became a kind of bodyguard for Doaa and the girls; protecting them gave him a sense of purpose. No other women were left among the living. The other men seeking comfort from Doaa formed a circle around them, some trying to lean on her ring for a rest. Momen would try to shoo them away, warning them, “She’s carrying these kids! She could lose her balance.” But Doaa would let them stay: “Lean gently, please, for the sake of the children.” Momen didn’t have a life jacket, but he was a good swimmer. Still, Doaa saw by late afternoon that he was beginning to lose strength.

  “Don’t you leave me, too!” Doaa cried, thinking he was the only adult she had left that she felt close to and trusted since Bassem had died. She didn’t know what she would do without his help and comfort. Momen was floating on his back with his eyes closed when suddenly his body went still, then flipped forward, his face submerging in the sea. Doaa now felt she was completely alone except for the two children whose lives depended on her.

  She was going in and out of consciousness as she lay in the ring with Malak and Masa resting on her chest. When she opened her eyes, everything looked blurry. She splashed her face with water to keep herself awake and checked to make sure that the girls were still breathing. She laid her head back again and looked up at the sky, seeing nothing but foggy shapes; then all of a sudden she thought she spotted a gleaming white
plane above her head. I must be hallucinating, she thought, dismissing the idea. Then she thought of Bassem’s words: “I pray that God would take my soul and put it in Doaa’s so that she will live.” She began searching the water for the spot where Bassem had died, but it all looked the same: just still water and floating corpses surrounded her. She tried to banish the thought of her beloved’s body sinking below the water and getting eaten by sharks with no proper burial.

  In anguish, she looked up at the sky again for any sign of a plane, but instead she only saw a small gray-and-black bird. It flew toward her and circled over her head, then glided away. The bird came back three times, and each time it seemed to look straight at her. Could this mean land is near? she wondered. She hadn’t seen a single bird in four days, not even a seagull. This bird must be a sign from God, she thought. Maybe someone will save us.

  Not long after the bird departed, she heard the sound of an engine and spotted the same white plane overhead. This time she knew she couldn’t be imagining it. “Dear God!” she shouted. “Did anyone see that?” The few remaining survivors had drifted away and she was floating alone with only Malak and Masa. Two men swam toward her—Mohammad, a Palestinian she recognized, and an African man she hadn’t seen before. Mohammad had a life jacket, and the African man was clutching a large plastic water canister. Doaa watched the sky and saw what looked like diamonds falling down like fireworks. Again the plane was circling above her.

  “There really is a plane!” Doaa exclaimed, hopeful. “Come closer, so they see us!” she told the men.

  “I don’t see anything,” Mohammad replied, squinting up at the sky.

  “Give me your plastic bottle,” Doaa commanded. When he handed it over, she held it up and angled it so that it reflected against the sun and the plane could see them. The plane started flying lower, and as it did, all three of them waved their arms, shouting, “Help! Save us!”

  But then the plane suddenly disappeared and the sun fell slowly into the horizon. Doaa prayed, Please, God, they must have seen us, panicked at the idea of spending another night in the pitch-black water.

  The sun was in her eyes now and its rays were blinding her vision, but she still kept scanning the horizon in hope. When she spotted a massive ship off in the distance, she pleaded to Mohammad, who was close by, “Stay with me, please, help me reach the ship.” Doaa knew that she couldn’t swim while holding the two babies.

  “I can’t tread water any longer,” Mohammad told her, “I’m too tired. I’ll swim to the ship and tell them to come here and get you.”

  The two men set off and Doaa watched them struggle to swim toward the boat until she could no longer see Mohammad. But the African man was still visible, and she wondered why he’d stopped all of a sudden when he was so close to being rescued, until she realized that he wasn’t moving at all. He’d died just when he was about to be saved.

  Night fell and Doaa could no longer see the ship or anything else in the darkness. The sea was choppy, and something crashed into the side of her ring. She turned and saw it was the corpse of the African man. His face was swollen and his eyes were open wide. Doaa screamed and pushed the body away, but the force of the current kept moving it back, smashing it into her again and again. She moved the babies to the center of her torso. Clutching them with one arm, she used all her remaining strength to paddle her free hand in the direction she last saw the boat.

  But she felt that she was getting nowhere. She turned around and looked behind her. Off in the distance, she saw the lights of another big ship. She scooped some water to splash over the babies’ faces to keep them awake.

  How will I reach that ship? she wondered. It is so far away. Dear God, I have the will to get there, but please give me the strength.

  She began paddling toward the boat with one hand, the other wrapped around the two little girls. She didn’t care what happened to her, but if Malak and Masa lived, she felt that her life would mean something. She would last long enough to know that she had saved the little girls, then she could finally stop struggling and be with Bassem again.

  TEN

  Rescue at the Dying Hour

  The chemical tanker CPO Japan was sailing across the Mediterranean toward Gibraltar when a distress call came in from the Maltese coast guard: a boat carrying refugees had sunk and all available ships were requested to provide assistance. International law requires that all ships must “render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost.” The captain of the Japan heard the call and changed course. He assigned extra lookouts to take up positions all around the cargo deck. Ship crews throughout the region regularly kept watch for refugees and migrants that had risked crossing the Mediterranean, knowing how often such attempts ended in death. The crew of the Japan would do whatever they could to save any survivors. But when they reached the coordinates given in the distress call, all they saw were scores of bloated corpses floating in the sea.

  The ship slowed to avoid hitting the bodies. They heard from a container ship that was already at the scene that their crew had saved five people but were about to end their rescue operation since it was getting dark. Trying to search for more bodies in the dark would be futile.

  Since the start of the European refugee crisis in 2014, merchant ships had been playing an indispensable role in saving lives as unprecedented numbers of refugees and migrants attempted the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. In the year of Doaa’s shipwreck, commercial vessels rescued an estimated forty thousand people. However, they are ill-equipped to operate as search-and-rescue ships, and every attempted rescue costs the shipping company time and resources.

  The captain of the CPO Japan thought that he had done his part. He had answered the distress call, and no one would blame him for turning his ship around and continuing on course. But as he looked at the dead bodies floating around him, he decided to order the crew to release their lifeboat into the sea. If the other boat found five people alive, perhaps there might be others, he thought. He couldn’t bear to give up when all he could see in the fading light was corpses.

  A silent, determined consensus prevailed among the crew as they set about launching their search. They were just merchant seamen, men from Eastern Europe and the Philippines who had come together to man the vessel. While they weren’t professional rescuers, they couldn’t abandon the scene without at least trying.

  The wind was picking up, the water was choppy, and visibility was poor. Three crew members boarded a closed lifeboat, and other crew cranked the pulleys to slowly release it down into the sea. This high-tech model was designed to move through rough weather on high seas and remain watertight. They passed dozens of bobbing corpses as they set off. “Don’t pick up the dead,” the captain told them over the radio, “just look for survivors.”

  The crewmen circled the area, but found only more corpses. It seemed that their search was in vain, but suddenly the captain’s voice crackled over the radio. Back on the ship, a watchman on the bow had heard what he thought was a woman’s voice calling for help. Somewhere out there, someone was still alive. The men in the lifeboat headed toward the bow, hoping to locate the source of the pleas for help.

  The wind grew stronger as they continued searching, making it difficult for them to pick up anything other than roaring noise. Periodically, they would stop the boat’s motor so they could hear better. Every now and again they could just make out the faint echoes of a woman’s voice, but it seemed to come from a different direction every time. “Keep yelling,” they shouted over and over, knowing that if she didn’t, they’d never be able to find her.

  After four days and nights in the water with nothing to eat or drink, Doaa’s strength was failing. Her arms ached and she was so dizzy that she was afraid she would pass out. She could no longer feel her lower legs, and her throat was raw from calling out over and over. She wanted to give up, but the weight of Masa and Malak resting on her chest filled her with the determination to live. She kept paddling to stay af
loat, and with each push of her hand through the water, she would call out, “Ya Rabb!”—oh, God! But her voice seemed to disappear into the wind.

  She had spotted the CPO Japan when it first approached, and it had seemed so close, but now she couldn’t see it at all. Where could it have gone? she wondered as doubt began to creep up on her and she became more and more certain that she and the girls would die before anyone found them.

  Then, as if Allah had at last answered her prayers, Doaa heard voices calling. She could just make out a few English words: “Where are you? Keep talking so we can follow your voice and find you!” Suddenly a wave rocked her, and the voices grew muffled, as if they were drifting farther away. Then they stopped altogether.

  Doaa frantically searched her mind trying to remember the English word for help. When it didn’t come to her, she instead used any words she knew and all her remaining strength to project them forth. Can’t they see me? she wondered as she bobbed in the water, worried that perhaps she wasn’t making any sound at all, or that she was hallucinating. But she could see that a searchlight was scanning back and forth over the waves, and each time she cried out, the light would sweep closer to her. She willed the bright beam to illuminate her float as she paddled frantically toward it. Her determination to save Malak and Masa gave her strength that she didn’t know she still had.

  The girls were barely moving now, beginning to lose consciousness. Doaa splashed water on their faces to keep them awake and, as quickly as she could, steered her way around the corpses and toward the sound of her only hope. She couldn’t let Masa and Malak die now that rescue was so close.

  Doaa’s mouth was so dry that the sound coming out seemed to make a crackling noise through her lips. She wasn’t sure how long she could continue shouting or keeping herself and the girls afloat. But her fear that if she stopped yelling the searchers would give up and the girls would die kept her going. Masa and Malak were both limp now, lying listless on her chest. Doaa felt as if their blood circulated through her own veins and that all their hearts were beating in unison. Their lives depended on her getting to that rescue boat. Once Masa and Malak are safe, she thought, I can go back to the spot where Bassem drowned and be with him again. The thought that she only had to last a little while longer and then she could rest and be with Bassem comforted her.