No Safe Place (6 page)

Abdul walked the deck.

The sun was up, and the water was calm. He recognized and appreciated the sweetness of the moment. He'd been here before — this brief juncture when immediate danger had passed, pressing needs were met, and the work of the next step had not yet begun. It was time to breathe, to feel the sun, to tend to wounds and not think too deeply.

Soon after their getaway, Jonah had collapsed. He'd just slipped to the floor as though his legs had turned to jelly. He was down below now, piled in bed with blankets. The yacht was well stocked with everything, including medicines. Abdul found some pills he recognized as being for fever. He crushed two of them, mixed them into a spoonful of strawberry jam from the kitchen and gave it to Jonah in small amounts. He made hot tea and held the boy's head while he drank it.

The men had also left lots of clothes. They were big men, and the clothes were big, but they were warm and dry and clean. The pockets of the trousers Abdul was wearing were deep. He'd transferred his money, pinned the pocket closed, and found a belt to hold them up. He had on a clean shirt, too, and a sweater that buttoned down the front and had a crest on the pocket.

The cabin cruiser had a small bathroom with a little shower in it. Rosalia had already used it, washing her long hair and emerging smelling of soap and shampoo. Abdul was waiting for more water to heat up before he took his shower. He'd had enough of cold water for awhile.

Cheslav was up at the wheel, wearing a sort of captain's hat he'd found in the cabin. He waved Abdul over.

“How is the boy?” he asked.

“He's sleeping. His fever is down, I think.”

“He is still a problem.”

“No more than the rest of us. Less, because he is British. When we land in England someone will take him in.”

“Someone who will ask questions. ‘Where is your uncle? Why are you alone? Who did you come here with?'”

“Jonah said he doesn't want us to go to jail. He's old enough to know how to keep his word.”

“Nobody keeps their word.”

“Well, then, maybe we'll get a reward,” Abdul suggested, although he didn't really think they would.

“If they catch us, they will charge us with murder,” Cheslav said. “They won't listen to us. Maybe they won't even listen to the boy. And now we have those Americans to worry about. We stole their boat.”

“We'll just have to get to England and disappear before they are picked up,” said Abdul.

“There's always one more thing to worry about.”

Abdul knew what he meant. There always seemed to be one more thing. Solve one problem, and another one cropped up. Find transportation, then run out of food. Find food, then get stuck behind a border. Find a forger to get a passport made, then lose a friend in a train accident. One problem was fixed and a new one was created. Always one more thing.

Abdul left the Russian alone.

Rosalia was in the bow, spreading out wet clothes to dry in the sun.

“You did some laundry?” Abdul asked. Rosalia ignored him. “What about my clothes?” He'd dumped his dirty clothes on top of the pile that Cheslav had started on the floor of the small bathroom.

Rosalia looked up at him, glared, then went back to spreading out her own freshly washed clothes over the chairs. They would dry quickly in the sun and the breeze.

Abdul left her alone, too, and went below. Maybe there was enough hot water now for a shower. If not, he'd shower anyway. And wash his clothes.

Cheslav was the loudest, but it looked like Rosalia might be the fiercest. He wasn't going to ask her again to do his laundry.

The water was a little warm. Abdul used lots of soap, then got back into his new clean clothes. His dirty clothes, the ones he'd traveled in from Iraq, were still on the floor. He scooped them up, then scooped up Cheslav's, too. If they were all going to survive, they would have to do things for each other.

Rosalia was in the little kitchen beside the bathroom.

“Use seawater for the washing. Just rinse them in fresh water,” she ordered, and tilted her head toward the cupboard with the bucket and laundry soap. “I don't know how much fresh water we have.”

“Thanks,” said Abdul.

“The little boy's clothes are in the bedroom.”

Abdul's arms couldn't hold anything more, so he dumped his and Cheslav's laundry up on deck and made a second trip. There was a rope attached to the handle of the bucket. He lowered it into the sea.

He washed his own clothes first. They hadn't been washed in such a long time, it took several buckets of water and lots of rubbing before they seemed clean.

He was used to looking after himself on the road, but it had been a long time since he'd looked after other people. Not since Iraq.

He'd missed it. It felt normal. This is what people did when they weren't on the run.

Clean clothes are so important, he thought, remembering how badly he'd smelled when he'd walked through the library. When we wear clean clothes, we feel like we belong. We feel like we have a right to —

“How much soap are you using?”

“What?”

Rosalia was standing over him, peering into the box of detergent.

“You use too much.”

“I know how to wash clothes.”

“I'm making a list,” she said, “of everything we have. Finish here. We'll have tea and talk. Do Kurds drink tea?” She left without waiting for an answer.

“We drink more tea than Gypsies,” Abdul muttered, then changed it to Roma even though no one could hear him. He knew from his time with migrants that many considered the word Gypsy to be insulting. He fiercely wrung out Jonah's shirt and shook it out before spreading it on deck.

Orders from Cheslav, orders from this girl — was this how it was going to be?

He was just finishing up when Rosalia came up on deck with a tray of tea and food.

“Get Cheslav,” she said. “I suppose he has an opinion, too.”

Cheslav was still at the wheel. The motor was off, but he sat at the controls. He was fiddling with the radio dials, trying to get a clear signal.

“Rosalia wants to talk,” Abdul said. “We have things to decide.”

“I make my decisions alone.”

“Stay here, then. We'll make the decisions without you. She made sandwiches and we can certainly eat those without you, too.”

Abdul walked away. In a moment, he could hear Cheslav following him.

They met on the bigger of the two decks. Cheslav looked at his freshly washed clothes.

“Who touched my things?”

“I washed them when I washed mine.”

“I know how to wash clothes. Leave my things alone.”

Cheslav took each piece of his wet laundry and straightened it out, smoothing out the wrinkles and folding creases into the trousers. Then he picked up a sandwich and started eating.

Abdul poured out the tea and thanked Rosalia for making it. She seemed surprised.

They'd all been eating steadily since coming on board the yacht, so they were no longer so ravenous that they jumped on the food, but there was always room for another meal. They'd all known too much hunger to pass up a sandwich.

“We have food for a week,” Rosalia said, “if we do not stuff ourselves. And there are two fresh water tanks. One is full, one half full. We will use them only for drinking and cooking, and they will last.”

“The fuel tank is at three quarters,” Cheslav said. But no one knew how big the tank was or how much fuel it would take to get them to England.

“Where are we?” Abdul asked him. “You've been behind the wheel. You must know where we are.”

“Why don't I use the radio and ask someone? I could call out in my Russian accent and ask for directions to Buckingham Palace.”

“Can't you be pleasant?” Rosalia asked. “Why do you argue about everything?”

Cheslav made kissing noises at her.

In the next instant, Cheslav was flat on his back and Rosalia's foot was on his throat.

“I am tired of pig men,” she said. She leaned her weight into his windpipe. Cheslav choked and gasped for breath and tried to push Rosalia off, but she held steady.

“Let him up,” Abdul said, going to her side. “That's enough. He will leave you alone.”

Still, Rosalia kept standing on the Russian's throat. Abdul saw something in her eyes. An anger — no, a rage — a rage so deep it had turned from fire to ice.

“There's been enough death,” Abdul said to her. “We all need each other, for now.”

Abdul watched Rosalia thinking. Then she moved her foot.

“For now,” she said, and backed away.

Clutching his throat, Cheslav shrugged off Abdul's attempts to help him to his feet. He stomped to the other end of the yacht.

“We need to find out where we are,” Abdul said. “We need to know that we're headed in the right direction.”

“So do it, then,” was all Rosalia said, before she, too, stomped away.

Abdul went below to check on Jonah, the one person on the yacht who might be in a good mood. The boy was awake and out of bed, wandering around the little kitchen. The men's clothes, large on everyone, were comical on him, flapping around his arms and ankles.

“What are you doing up?”

“I had to use the toilet. All that tea.”

“Back under the covers.” Abdul helped him wrap up. “How is your throat?”

“Sore.”

Abdul felt the skin on the boy's forehead. “Your fever is down.”

“I'm sorry to be sick.”

“Being sick is nothing to apologize for.”

Abdul went into the kitchen. The refrigerator had a tiny freezer. There were ice cubes. He got some out, put them between the folds of a towel and smashed them against the counter. He put the ice chips in a bowl.

“Try these,” he said, offering them to Jonah.

Jonah took a mouthful of the ice.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” Abdul asked.

“Being nice to me.”

“It's what people do.”

The little cabin bedroom was a mess from everyone going through it to find things they needed. Abdul started to tidy it up.

The yacht was their home now. If he ever had another home, he would want to keep it tidy. He folded sweaters and socks away into drawers, and hung shirts on hangers in the little closet.

“I heard shouting,” Jonah said.

“There was an argument.”

“I don't like shouting.”

There was a small wicker chair beside the bed. Abdul sat down.

“I don't know what to say about your uncle.”

“I didn't like him.”

“He was your family.”

“I didn't like him.”

Abdul nodded and absentmindedly smoothed out one of Jonah's blankets. “Do you have any other family?”

“My mother is dead. I never knew my father. My uncle said my mother was a whore.”

“Your uncle was a liar.”

“How do you know?”

“I met him. You must not think bad things about your mother. Is there anyone else? Any grandparents or uncles?”

“No. There was just us.”

Abdul nodded, and they sat in silence for awhile.

“I'm hungry,” said Jonah.

Rosalia had left a sandwich for Jonah in the kitchen. Abdul watched the boy grimace as the bites of sandwich went down his sore throat. Then Jonah went back to sleep.

It was that sort of day. There was work to be done and decisions to be made, but it seemed all that would have to wait. It was a day for eating and sleeping and not thinking too much.

Abdul went up on deck. He sat in the sun among the drying laundry and picked up a magazine. There was a man on the cover holding a large fish and looking very pleased with himself. Abdul practiced his English reading skills for awhile, then got up to wander the boat.

Everyone, it seemed, was sleeping — Jonah down below, Cheslav in the seat by the captain's wheel, his cap pulled down over his eyes, and Rosalia in one of the chairs by her laundry.

Someone should stand watch, Abdul decided, in case the coastguard or someone else was looking for them. But the chair across from Rosalia looked too inviting. He sat down on it.

A small plastic bag with tiny, shiny black stones was on the table beside her.

Abdul picked it up. He looked at Rosalia.

All the tension and rage were gone from her face. In her sleep, it looked like all was well.

“This is a smart girl.”

Mr. Kruger made no sign that he had heard Uncle Nikolas's words. He kept tapping his feet and looking bored.

“This is a very smart girl,” Uncle Nikolas repeated, “and I say that not because she is my niece, but because it is true. Only six years of schooling, but she has picked up many things on her own. Mathematics, she can do in her head. At just fourteen! Languages. Polish, English, Czech, and since we got your kind invitation, even a little German! You treat her right, she can earn good money for you.” He put his arm around Rosalia's slim shoulders.

Mr. Kruger gave a jerk of his head toward the waiting car.

“It's a long drive,” he said. “Let's go.”

“Now, we have an agreement,” Uncle Nikolas reminded him. “You will take my niece into Germany where she will work in your factory. You will find her a safe place to live and to go to school in the evenings, and for this service she will pay you a portion of her earnings. We have an agreement.”

“Say your goodbyes,” Mr. Kruger said. He picked up the small taped-up suitcase that held Rosalia's few things, headed over to the car and put it in the trunk.

Uncle Nikolas slowly steered Rosalia over to the car.

“Our family lived in Germany for hundreds of years before the war,” he said to her. “You have never been there, but, in a way, you are going home.”

“We carry our home in our hearts,” Rosalia said, determined not to cry. “My mother taught me that.” Before she died. Before Rosalia's father died and her older brothers scattered to the four winds in search of work.

Mr. Kruger honked the car horn. They were out of time.

Uncle Nikolas kissed Rosalia on the forehead and whispered an old Roma prayer in her ear. “Remember what you came from, and remember what you are worth,” he said and pushed her away. She turned, but not before she saw his tears.

They did not waste time saying they would keep in touch.

“In the back,” Mr. Kruger said, “and don't chatter.”

Rosalia already had a pretty good idea what kind of man Mr. Kruger was. She'd seen where his eyes had gone when he looked at her. She was glad not to have to sit beside him, and she certainly didn't want to waste any of her precious thoughts or words on him.

She was not sad to be leaving the cluster of hovels on the edge of the Czech village. It was close to the great city of Prague, but it may as well have been on the far side of the moon. No running water, no heat, no real toilets. It was worse, even, than the place where she'd grown up, in Nowa Huta, the huge industrial suburb just outside Krakow, across the border in Poland. At least in Poland she had gone to a regular school, though not all Polish Roma did. Her Czech cousins had been sent to special schools — Roma children were considered defective and inferior. Her uncle's children could barely read, and not because they were not smart.

No, she was not sad to leave this ugly scrap of wasteland, with its black, foul mud and the Nazi messages spraypainted everywhere by the skinheads who wrecked their homes and beat the Roma with baseball bats. She was not sad to leave this place that was heavy with the memories of the pig men with swastika tattoos who carried her off and hurt her in terrible, private ways among the garbage of a roadside dumping station. Her uncle and his family were sad to see her leave, but there was no choice. The thugs would come back, and they probably had friends.

Rosalia and the man driving went on in silence for a few hours, heading southwest instead of north.

“We're taking the long way to Berlin,” she said, just so he would know that she knew.

“You think I'd make this long trip just for you?”

They stopped for the first of the other two girls just west of Plzen. She was waiting in a cheap café. No one was waiting with her, and she cried as she got into the back seat. Rosalia kept her eyes firmly focused out the window and kept her hands deep in her jacket pockets. She did not reach out to comfort the new girl.

She should be strong enough to comfort herself, Rosalia thought, wishing the girl would stop crying.

They picked up a third girl and another man an hour later. The girl got into the back seat. Rosalia refused to move away from the window, so the weeper got the uncomfortable spot in the middle. The man, clearly a friend of the driver, got into the front.

The little car was now full, and they headed for the German border.

The passport check was cursory.

“Welcome to the new open Europe,” the driver chuckled, tucking the girls' passports into his pocket after they were waved through by the border guards. The other girls objected but Rosalia didn't care. Her passport was fake, and not even a good fake. She didn't have any real papers.

The car stopped in a small town and the three girls were allowed to stretch their legs and go to the latrine. The men bought them sandwiches and coffee, and they all sat together at an outdoor table, as though they were tourists on a holiday. The weeper — a Czech, who had finally stopped weeping — and the third girl, a Romanian, tried to engage the men in small talk: “Do you go to Germany often?” and “I can't wait to see Berlin on my days off.”

Rosalia kept her mouth shut. She listened, and she watched.

She watched the expression on the men's faces as the girls talked, and saw how they wore the sort of face people put on when they're forced to listen to people they don't consider equals. She'd seen that same expression on too many Czech and Polish faces when the Roma tried to talk to them.

She saw the way the men's eyes constantly scanned their surroundings, and recognized in that the eyes of her own people, who could not rest from watching for the police.

And she noticed how little time it took for them to jump up from their seats and come after her when she wandered away for a little walk.

She took all this in, and thought about it as they continued their journey.

They stopped for the night at an ugly cinder-block motel. Everyone went into one room.

“Sleep,” the men said, pointing at one of the double beds for the three girls to share. Rosalia kept her day clothes on, even her shoes, and took a space at the bed's edge, refusing to move even when one of the girls asked her to.

One of the men stretched out on the other double bed and was soon snoring, and the other sat up awake in a chair.

Rosalia dozed with one eye open and heard the men change places halfway through the night. She waited until the snoring started up again, and then slowly, quietly slipped out of the covers.

The man in the chair had his eyes closed. He appeared to be sleeping.

Interested only in testing, not in escaping — after all, where would she go? — Rosalia reached for the motel room door. She turned the bolt on the lock and opened the door onto the deep German night.

Slam! The man on watch was out of his chair and smacking the door shut. “Where are you going?”

“For a walk.”

“No walk!”

“What's going on?” And then both men were up, standing over her, yelling at her in Romanian and German. “You want to get in trouble — out in Germany without papers? You want to get us in trouble? Damn Gypsies!”

One man raised his arm to strike her.

“Not on the face!” his companion shouted.

And in that instant, Rosalia knew, and she could tell that the men knew that she knew.

The arm returned to the man's side, then came back out in a rush and hit into Rosalia's stomach with such ferocity that she buckled and fell to her knees. He pushed her into the dirty carpet with his foot.

The other two girls were whimpering, arms wrapped around each other, trying to look small on the bed. Rosalia did not cry. She got to her feet and got back in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.

She closed her eyes, but she could feel the men glaring at her. She heard the bolt lock again, and she heard the chair being pulled into a position right against the door.

“You two — if she gets away, you will both pay,” one man said to the girls. “Now, go back to sleep!”

“Take her shoes,” the other man said.

She didn't move a muscle as the covers were pulled from under the mattress and her sneakers were untied and yanked off.

“Now try to get away.”

Rosalia kept her face still, but inside, she was smiling.

As if a lack of shoes could keep her from running.

/ / / / / / / /

They were up and in the car again before the sun came up. No one was sleeping anyway, so the men decided they might as well be burning up miles. They sent all three girls into the bathroom together to get ready.

“I'm watching you,” the Czech girl cautioned Rosalia. “I'm going to Berlin. I'm not blowing this chance and I'm not going to let you ruin my life.”

“Your life is already ruined,” Rosalia was tempted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. If the girls couldn't see the signs for themselves, they wouldn't be convinced by anything she had to say.

They made brief stops, no more picnic lunches. A few toilet breaks, sandwiches eaten in the car, the men trading off between driving and sleeping. It was raining. They hadn't returned Rosalia's shoes, and the socks on her feet were wet and cold.

Rosalia read the highway signs and saw they were heading to the northern part of Berlin. The car finally turned into a housing complex beside a big shopping mall. It stopped in the parking lot of a row of short apartment houses.

The men got out quickly and one took a firm hold of Rosalia's arm. She was allowed to carry her own suitcase. The other man kept up cheery patter about how the girls would enjoy shopping at the mall on their days off.

Rosalia kept her eyes open. She saw the name of the street — Zühlsdorfer — and took note of the giant number one painted on the front door.

On the third floor, they stood before apartment 3A. One of the men knocked, and the door was opened.

More men were inside. Rosalia counted four of them.

Six men in total, and three girls.

In spite of herself, she started to tremble.

“This is what you've brought us?” one of them asked. “You travel all that way, and come back with this?”

“Clean them up, they'll be good enough,” one of the drivers said. “Keep the lights low.”

They saw she had no shoes. “Problems?”

“Too much spirit. We calmed her down.”

“We'll see.”

Rosalia was taken away into a small room with a narrow bed and a little bureau with four slender drawers. Three of the men entered the room with her and shut the door behind them.

She tried hard to control her shaking, but it had taken over her whole body. She put her suitcase on the floor by the bureau, then stood upright with her shoulders back and her head high.

I am brave, she told herself.

“You're shaking,” one of the men said.

“My feet are cold,” she replied, in careful but correct German. She was far from fluent, but could manage simple sentences.

She immediately realized she'd made a mistake. It would have been better not to let the men know she could understand them.

“We'd better get you out of those wet socks then,” a man said. He bent down to take them off.

“I will do it,” she said. She stripped her feet bare of the filthy, wet socks.

Then she coughed a deep chest cough. It was a cough that sounded like a cross between whooping cough and bronchitis, wet and contagious.

The three men backed away.

“You have your own toilet,” one said, “through there.” And they left her alone.

In case they were watching her through the keyhole, Rosalia kept her face passive as she went into the little room that had just a toilet and a sink. There was a rack with a towel on it. The towel was threadbare, but it was clean, like the rest of her space.

Rosalia washed her socks in the sink, rubbing most of the dirt out with the bar of hand soap, and hung them to dry beside the towel.

She washed herself in the sink and put on track pants for sleeping. Before turning out the light and crawling into bed, she moved the little bureau across the door. The horrible-sounding cough covered up the noise of moving furniture.

She got into bed, for the moment feeling fine.

The cough was fake. Her brothers had taught her. They'd used it to get their mother to bring them hot tea in bed on cold mornings.

Back when their mother was alive. Back when they had beds.

They'd taught her a lot of things. She was a good student.

/ / / / / / / /

Early the next morning, Rosalia took a closer look at her surroundings. The window in the small room would not open and was mostly painted over, except for a foot or so at the top that let in a bit of light. By standing on her bed, she could see outside.

The apartment building looked over a large park, still green in the fall, with trees that were starting to change color. Train tracks ran along one side of it, and apartment blocks rose up all around it.

She coughed again while she moved the bureau and got washed and dressed quickly. The apartment was quiet, but she was hungry. Maybe she could get some food and get back into her room before anyone else woke up.

She tried the door but it wouldn't open. She was locked in her room.

She was about to examine the window again — maybe there was a way to unlock it, a way to shimmy down a drainpipe three stories to freedom below — but she heard movement in the outer apartment.

Someone had opened the apartment door. Rosalia heard the jangle of keys, then heard water running, cupboard doors opening and closing, and soon smelled coffee brewing.

Her bedroom door was suddenly unlocked.

“Oh. You girls have arrived, have you? I suppose I'll have to open another jar of jam. How many are you?”

The woman at the door was short, perhaps in her mid-sixties, and she peered at Rosalia with an air of accusation.