Sirens. Soldiers shouting through bullhorns. Screams. Explosions.
Mahmoud was barely aware of everything that was happening around him.
He lay on the ground, curled into a ball. Trying desperately to draw a breath that would not come. His eyes felt like bees had stung them, and his nose was a streaming cauldron of burning chemicals. He made a choking, gurgling sound that was somewhere between a shriek and a whimper.
After everything, he was going to die here, on the border between Serbia and Hungary.
Rough hands pulled Mahmoud from the ground and dragged him away, his sneakers twisting and scraping on the dirt road. He still couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t force his eyes to open, but he felt his chest beginning to work again, the barest tendrils of air reaching his lungs. He drank the air in greedily. Then he was thrown to the ground, and someone pulled his hands behind him and tied them together with a thin piece of plastic. It cinched painfully tight, and Mahmoud was lifted again and rolled onto the flat metal bed of a truck. He lay there, still gasping for breath, the plastic zip tie cutting angrily into his wrists as more people were tossed into the truck
beside him. Then Mahmoud heard the truck’s doors slam and the engine start, and they were moving.
Mahmoud’s breathing finally came back to something like normal, and he was able to sit up and open his bleary eyes. There were no windows in the van and it was dark, but Mahmoud was able to see the other nine men with him, all of them red-eyed and crying and coughing from the tear gas, and all of them handcuffed with zip ties. Including Mahmoud’s father.
“Dad!” Mahmoud cried. He worked his way across the floor of the bouncing van on his knees and fell into his father. They put their heads together.
“Where are Mom and Waleed?” Mahmoud asked.
“I don’t know. I lost them in the chaos,” Dad said. His eyes were red- ringed and his face was wet from tears and snot. He looked terrible, and Mahmoud realized he must look just as bad.
Mahmoud thought the van would stop soon, but it drove on and on.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Mahmoud asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t reach my phone,” Dad said. “But we’ve been in this van for a long time. Maybe they’re taking us to Austria!”
“No,” one of the other men said. “They’re taking us to prison.”
Prison? For what? Mahmoud wondered. We’re just refugees! We haven’t done anything wrong!
The van stopped, and Mahmoud and the other refugees were unloaded into a building one of the soldiers called an “immigration detention center.”
But Mahmoud could tell it was really a prison. It was a long, single-story building with a barbed-wire fence surrounding it, guarded by Hungarian soldiers with automatic rifles.
A soldier cut the zip tie off Mahmoud’s wrists. Mahmoud expected the relief to be instant, but instead his hands went from numb to on fire, like the
tingling needles he felt in his leg after it fell asleep, times a thousand. He cried out in pain, hands shaking, as he and his father were hurried into a cell with cinder-block walls on three sides and metal bars on the front. Eight other men were pushed inside with them, and up and down the hall more prison cells were filling with refugees.
A soldier slammed the barred door shut, and it locked with an electronic bolt.
“We’re not criminals!” one of the other men in the cell yelled at him.
“We didn’t ask for civil war! We didn’t want to leave our homes!” another man yelled.
“We’re refugees!” Mahmoud yelled, unable to stay silent any longer.
“We need help!”
The soldier ignored them and walked away. Mahmoud felt helpless all over again, and he kicked the bars in anger. There were similar cries of innocence and rage from the other cells, but soon they were overtaken by separated families trying to find each other without being able to see from cell to cell.
“Fatima? Waleed?” Mahmoud’s father called, and Mahmoud yelled their names with him. But if his mother and brother were here, they didn’t answer.
“We’ll find them,” Dad assured Mahmoud. But Mahmoud didn’t understand how his father could be so sure. They hadn’t found Hana, so what made him think they would find Mom and Waleed? What if they had lost them forever? Mahmoud was beside himself. This trip, this odyssey, was pulling his family apart, stripping them away like leaves from the trees in the fall. It was all he could do not to panic. His breath came quick and his heart hammered in his chest.
“I don’t believe it. They took us almost all the way to Austria,”
Mahmoud’s father said, checking his iPhone at last. “It’s just another hour by car. We’re outside a little town in the north of Hungary called Györ.”
Almost all the way to Austria, Mahmoud thought. But instead of helping them along, the Hungarians had thrown them in prison.
Hours passed, and Mahmoud went from panic to frustration to despair.
They sat in the cell without food or water, and only one metal toilet attached to the wall. All Mahmoud could think about was Mom and Waleed. Were they in some Hungarian prison somewhere too, or had they been pushed back across the border into Serbia? How would he and Dad ever find them again? He slumped against the wall.
“I have to say, this is the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in,” Dad said. He was trying to joke again. His father was always joking. But Mahmoud didn’t think that any of this was funny at all.
At last, soldiers with nightsticks came to their cell and told them in Arabic to line up to be processed.
“We don’t want to be processed,” Dad said. “We just want to get to Austria. Why not just take us all the way to the border? We never wanted to stay in Hungary anyway!”
A soldier whacked him in the back with his nightstick, and Mahmoud’s father collapsed to the ground. “We don’t want your filth here, either!” the guard yelled in Arabic. “You’re all parasites!” He kicked Mahmoud’s father in the back, and another soldier hit Mahmoud’s father again and again with his stick.
“No!” Mahmoud cried. “No! Don’t! Stop!” Mahmoud begged. He couldn’t bear to see his father beaten. But what could he do?
“We’ll do it! We’ll be processed!” Mahmoud told the guards. That was all it took—to surrender. The guards stopped beating his father and ordered
everyone to line up.
Mahmoud helped his father to his feet. Dad leaned heavily against him, needing his son for support. Together they shuffled in line along the far side of the hallway, away from the cells. Men and women and children watched them with hopeful eyes as they passed, looking for their husbands and brothers and sons.
And then Mahmoud saw them—his mother and Waleed. They were in a cell with other women and children!
“Youssef! Mahmoud!” Mahmoud’s mother cried.
“Fatima!” Mahmoud’s father cried with relief, and he stepped toward her.
Whack! A soldier clubbed Mahmoud’s father with his nightstick, and Dad went down again in a heap. Mahmoud and his mother cried out at the
same time.
“Stay in line!” the soldier yelled.
Mahmoud’s mother reached for them through the bars. “Youssef!” she cried.
“No, Mom—don’t!” Mahmoud cried. A soldier clanged his nightstick against the metal bars, and she retreated inside her cell.
Mahmoud got his father up again and helped him into what the soldiers called the “processing center.” There, clerks sat behind long tables, taking down information from the refugees. When Mahmoud and his father got to the front of their line, a man in a blue uniform asked them if they wanted to claim asylum in Hungary.
“Stay here? In Hungary? After you have beaten me? Locked my family up like common criminals?” Mahmoud’s father asked, fists clenched and shaking. Mahmoud still had to help him to stand. “Are you joking? Why
can’t you just let us go on to Austria? Why do we need to be ‘processed’?
We don’t want to stay here one second longer than we have to!”
The policeman shrugged. “I’m just doing my job,” he said.
Mahmoud’s father slammed his hand flat on the table, making Mahmoud jump. “I wouldn’t live in this awful country even if it was made of gold!”
The policeman filled in an answer on a form. “Then you will be sent back to Serbia,” he said without looking up at them. “And if you return to Hungary, you will be arrested.”
Mahmoud’s father didn’t speak again, not even to make a joke.
Mahmoud answered the rest of the clerk’s questions about their names and birthdates and places of birth, then helped his father back to their cell with the other inmates. Mahmoud’s mother cried out for them again as they passed, but Mahmoud’s father didn’t acknowledge her, and Mahmoud didn’t respond. He knew that would only bring down the wrath of the guards again.
Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. Be unimportant. Blend in.
Disappear.
That was how you avoided the bullies.