Mahmoud was in another tent city. The paved parking lot at the pier in Lesbos was full of the kinds of camping tents sold in sporting goods stores —round-topped single-family tents of blue and green and white and yellow and red, all provided by Greek relief workers who knew the refugees had nowhere to stay while they waited for the ferry to Athens to come. Wet clothes were hung out to dry on bicycle racks and traffic signs, and refugees gathered around camp stoves and hot plates.
It should have been a lively place, full of songs and laughter like the Kilis refugee camp, but instead a soft, mournful murmur of conversation hung over the tent city like a fog. Mahmoud wasn’t surprised; his family felt exactly the same way. They all should have been excited to finally be in Greece, to be allowed to buy real tickets to travel on an actual ferry to mainland Europe. But too many of them had lost someone in the sea crossing to be happy.
Mahmoud’s mother had gone from tent to tent asking after Hana.
Mahmoud had helped. It was his fault she was gone, after all. But no one at the dock had her, and no one had been on the dinghy that had taken her.
Refugees came and went but the tents remained, and Mahmoud’s mother insisted they miss the next ferry to Athens so she could ask each new round of refugees for word of her daughter. But no one knew anything about her.
Mahmoud felt as sick as he had on the dinghy. He couldn’t look at his mother. She had to blame him for losing Hana. He certainly blamed himself. He couldn’t sleep at night. He kept picturing his sister’s dinghy bursting on the rocks. Hana falling into the water. None of them there to help her.
Mahmoud’s mother wanted to stay at the dock longer, didn’t want to leave without knowing what happened to Hana, but Dad told her they had to move on. There was no telling when the ferry line might suddenly decide to stop selling tickets to refugees, or when Greece might decide to send them all home. They had to keep moving or they would die. Hana had to have gone ahead of them on the morning ferry they’d missed that first day.
Or else …
No one wanted to think about the “or else.”
The huge Athens ferry arrived again that morning. It was the length of a soccer field, and at least five stories tall. The bottom half of it was painted blue, and BLUE STAR FERRIES was written in big words on the side. A radar bar spun near the bridge, and antennas and satellite dishes sprouted from the roof. It looked like the pictures Mahmoud had seen of cruise ships. Its lifeboats alone were bigger than the dinghy they had left Turkey in.
Mahmoud tried to get Waleed interested in the big ship, to get him excited about their first trip on a boat that big, but his little brother didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care about anything.
A big ramp on the back lowered, and refugees streamed on board the ferry. Mahmoud’s mother wept as they climbed a ramp with the other passengers. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the tent city, hoping,
Mahmoud was sure, to catch a glimpse of someone carrying a baby who might be Hana. But she never did.
The inside of the ferry was like the lobby of a fancy hotel. Every floor had little clusters of glass tables and white upholstered chairs. Snack bars sold chips and sweets and sodas, and televisions played a Greek soccer game. Refugees who still had belongings stuffed their backpacks and trash bags under tables and into the overhead compartments. Mahmoud and his family settled into one of the booths, and his father searched for a plug to charge his phone.
“Mahmoud, why don’t you take your brother and explore the ship,” Dad told him.
Mahmoud was only too glad to get away from the sight of his mother’s broken face, and he took Waleed by the hand and pulled him out onto the promenade that ran around the outside of the ship.
Mahmoud and Waleed watched silently as the ferry pulled away from the dock, the ship’s huge engines thrumming deep below them. The awful sea that had tried to swallow them was calm and sapphire blue now. The Greek island of Lesbos was actually beautiful when you saw it from the sea.
Little white buildings with terra-cotta roofs rose up tree-covered hills, and on top of one of the hills was an ancient gray castle. Mahmoud could see why people visited there on vacation.
Besides the refugees, there were a number of tourists on board.
Mahmoud could tell they weren’t refugees because they wore clean clothes and used their phones for taking pictures instead of looking up overland routes from Athens to Macedonia.
Another refugee had laid out a mat on the deck, and he was praying. In all the bustle of waiting in line and getting on board, Mahmoud had lost track of what time it was, and he pulled his brother down with him to pray
alongside the man. As he kneeled and stood, kneeled and stood, Mahmoud was supposed to be focused only on his prayers. But he couldn’t help notice the uneasy looks the tourists were giving them. The frowns of displeasure.
Like Mahmoud and his brother and this man were doing something wrong.
The vacationers dropped their voices, and even though Mahmoud couldn’t understand what they were saying, he could hear the disgust in their words. This wasn’t what the tourists had paid for. They were supposed to be on holiday, seeing ancient ruins and beautiful Greek beaches, not stepping over filthy, praying refugees.
They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be—in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp—people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn’t want them to do—when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries—that’s when people couldn’t ignore them any longer.
Mahmoud’s first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible.
Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.
It was hard not to see the refugees in Athens when Mahmoud got there.
Syrians were everywhere in the streets and hotels and markets, most of them, like Mahmoud’s family, planning to move on as soon as they could.
Mahmoud’s father thought he had the right documents to travel freely in Greece, but a woman at an immigration office told him he would need to go
to a local police station first to get an official document, and the police told him he would have to wait up to a week.
“We can’t wait a week,” Mahmoud’s father told his family. They had found a hotel for ten euros a night, per person, and the people of Athens were very friendly and helpful. But Mahmoud knew his parents only had so much money, and they still had four more countries to cross before they reached Germany. Mahmoud’s mother would have stayed a week, or even longer, to keep asking everyone she met if they had seen a baby named Hana. But it was decided: They would take a train to the border of Macedonia and try to sneak across during the night.