What Strange Paradise

Amir watches as the workers and soldiers clean up the scene around the refugee raft below the lighthouse. Though he has intentionally avoided it up until now, he cannot help imagining how his mother must feel with him and Quiet Uncle missing. He regrets the times when he resented her for marrying Quiet Uncle and having Harun.

Vänna wakes up as the last of the crew leaves. Seeing the soldiers’ jeeps below, she grabs Amir and they run down the stairs. Vänna drops her backpack, and its contents spill out. They see Kethros’s jeep turn around and make a run for it. Kethros and his soldiers—Nicholas, Alexander, and Andreas—follow in quick pursuit. Vänna and Amir take to the forest, and the soldiers split up to find them. Vänna hits her foot painfully and loses a sandal, but she keeps running. The children hear a soldier closing in, and they dive for cover into the undergrowth within view of the path that will take them to where the boat awaits.

Vänna is anguished at the thought of being caught when they are so close to Amir’s freedom. She is prepared to fight as the soldier directly in pursuit discovers their hiding place. She recognizes the soldier: It is Nicholas. He stares at them for a moment and then urges them to go. Vänna hesitates, but then they flee.

The soldiers regroup around Colonel Kethros. They all report that they found nothing. Kethros senses weakness in Nicholas. He pressures him, and Nicholas gives in. He points out the way Vänna and Amir fled. Kethros rips the patch off the chest of Nicholas’s uniform.

Amir struggles to hold on as the Calypso tips toward capsizing. Another man dives off the ship. Mohamed screams at the passengers that they will die if they jump. In the brief calm brought by the trough between two massive waves, Amir sees Umm Ibrahim preparing to jump, her life jacket forced too high up by her pregnant stomach. Amir cries out to her not to go, but she looks at him like he’s a stranger and jumps off.

The lock on the access to the lower deck breaks, and a mass of people surges out. In the chaos, Amir slides down the tilting deck toward the water. Walid catches him and attempts to rip off Amir’s life jacket. Amir bites his finger, but Walid smacks him and takes the jacket anyway. Walid puts the jacket on and seeks out the direction of the shore lights.

Vänna and Amir make it to the abandoned boathouse. The ferry will arrive in just a few short hours. They turn to go back outside just as Colonel Kethros and his soldiers enter. The soldiers prevent their escape. Vänna asks Kethros why he is doing this and why it matters to him. Kethros pulls up his pant leg and removes his prosthesis; his leg is bleeding at the old amputation site from the run. He turns Vänna’s question back on her.

Kethros tells the soldiers to take Vänna home and let her mother deal with her. He wants to be alone with Amir. Amir comes alive with rage when one of the soldiers grabs Vänna. The two children struggle until Kethros puts his prosthesis back on and slams Amir to the ground. He puts Vänna’s missing sandal back on her foot. Vänna calls him a coward, to which the colonel replies that everyone is a coward.

Vänna continues to struggle, kicking at the soldiers on the way to the jeep. They are used to this behavior with migrants and usually respond with violence; however, they leave Vänna alone. They are unable to look her in the eye.

The passengers left on the deck are silent as the ship begins to properly capsize. Amir is flung upward with the bow as the water floods in, drowning those remaining below deck. He is pulled beneath the waves into the surprisingly warm water. He sinks into the lowest depths of consciousness, seeming to become one with those who drowned before him, but then surfaces.

The soldier driving the jeep, Alexander, is forced to stop soon after they leave the boathouse due to goats blocking the way. The soldiers get out to argue with the shepherd, and Vänna feels some enjoyment as she watches their absurd predicament. She positions herself in a way that allows her to spring and kick Elias with enough force to knock him over when he opens the door. Vänna flees to the stone barrier on the side of the bridge facing the ocean. The soldiers try to coax her down, but she stretches out her arms and purposefully falls backward with the sensation of flying.

In the boathouse, Amir is alone with the colonel. Kethros appears unconcerned. When he speaks to Amir, it is in flawless Arabic, “not the stilted phonetics of foreigners who’ve learned from textbooks, not even the distant dialect of a different Arab country but the exact accent of Amir’s country, his city, his people” (228). Kethros tells Amir of a fatal shipwreck that took place nearby when he was very young. He recalls how the doctor presiding over the scene tied little bells to the big toes of all the corpses to alert him if any of them were still alive. The doctor’s fear of ghosts angered Kethros as a child, but now he realizes that chasing ghosts is his job.

Kethros corners Amir and asks his name. He asks if Vänna was kind to him. He tells Amir that the prerequisite to kindness is being better off than the recipient of one’s kindness. He tells Amir that he is “the object of [people’s] fraudulent outrage” and that “[t]oday [Amir is] the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though [he] never existed” (230-31). He tells Amir, “Hate me all you want, but at least to me you exist” (231).

Amir makes one last attempt to escape, but Kethros catches him. The colonel tells the boy he will take him back and have him fingerprinted and registered in the system. Just then, Vänna swings a spade down on Kethros’s head, knocking him unconscious. She is bloodied and soaked in ocean water. She tells Amir, “Yallah, Zaytoon.”

They race to the dock where an old man is waiting with a motorboat. Vänna asks where he will take Amir. He replies that there is a community of Amir’s people on the other side; they will take care of him. Vänna forces the ferryman to take her as well. Hand in hand, Amir and Vänna reach the blindingly white metropolis on the other shore.

Tourists visit the area for many reasons: archaeology, partying, weddings, and, especially, the sea. The hotel manager announces to the crowd at a wedding reception that the beach will reopen soon. The crowd cheers.

A child lies on the shore, dead. A masked and gloved man carefully inspects the child, noting the “bell-shaped locket he wears” (235). Behind them, a crowd of police, soldiers, reporters, and gawkers clamor, and “with great and delicate care, the masked man lifts the neckless from around the little boy’s neck” (235).