Four Beaches
For six months, Hassan worked as a night porter at the Grand Palace Hotel in Tartus, signing in as the sun set and escaping to his room when it rose the following day. Even in this country, where you could rely upon nothing and nobody – betrayal and bombs, death and suffering aside – you could rely upon the sun to rise.
For six months, every morning Hassan changed out of his suit and headed to the water. A section of the beach had been partitioned for the foreign tourists – mostly government contractors and journalists – and visiting dignitaries from friendly countries. More often than not, this prime spot was empty. Armed guards from the Ministry of Tourism were always on hand, in shirt sleeves and sunglasses, whispering into walkie-talkies and polishing their automatic rifles. As he swam back and forth beyond the floating boundary, Hassan got to know each one of them by their facial tics and moustaches. Two of them, who might have been moonlighting, also worked in the hotel as close protection for some of the visiting Americans, but there was never any nod or word of recognition.
Swimming was a chore. It was boring after twenty minutes. After three hours it was agonising and after that it was dangerous. Cramp and fatigue were as much of a threat as the water. But as the proverb says, patience is the key to relief. And relief, when it was finally in sight, would be around six kilometres away. Hassan did not know anyone who had ever swum that far. Early one morning, before the guards arrived, he paced out his swim at around two hundred metres. Five lengths, which took him approximately thirty minutes, equalled one kilometre. Six kilometres equalled one hundred and eighty minutes: three hours. After six months he was able to manage four hours in the sea, alternating strokes, occasionally swimming on his back, and sometimes treading water. Four hours would be enough.
After another six months he arrived in Bodrum. He journeyed north, avoiding Aleppo, then onwards to the Oncupinar border crossing, where a returning refugee sold him – at great expense – his Turkish papers. With the help of other Syrians, in particular the brothers who took him in when he fell sick, he walked, hitched and stowed his way to the Turkish Aegean. He had lost too much weight and he had no money to pay for a boat. He borrowed a few coins to buy a notebook and some pencils, so that he could earn a little money selling sketches and portraits. He built sandcastles and sculptures and offered an upturned baseball cap to the English and German tourists who stopped to admire his work. But there was only ever enough to buy food. He would never find the money to pay the men who walked the beach every night, promising swift and safe passage across the water.
He left at dawn on his first attempt. He stowed his toiletries, shoes, clothes and notebooks in a plastic bag, wrapped in another plastic bag, inside his backpack. He pulled the pack over his shoulders, clipped the straps around his chest and stomach and walked into the sea. He heard laughter and shouting from the others who were camped along the beach. “Don’t be a fool,” someone said. “You’ll never make it. It can’t be done.” A child cried out “Look Mama, he’s wearing his underpants.” But he made good progress. He could see the tip of Kos when he looked up. If those grinning Italians – if they had spoken English he might have been able to explain – hadn’t dragged him out of the water and taken him back to the beach, he might have made it. The next time it was the Coast Guard or the Navy – some kind of uniform – and he would have been in trouble if he hadn’t run off when they landed at the harbour, sprinting like a fool along the jetty, a crazy man in pants waking the tourists from their slumber below decks. The third time, he was buzzed by jet skis. No. Daytime was no good.
It took another three weeks of sketches, portraits and sculptures before he could buy a head torch and compass. The shopkeeper assured him they were both waterproof. He did not ask if they could withstand the ocean. If and when the light went out, his strength would be the measure of his desire. As the day began to fade, he sat down on the beach to eat the few scraps of food he had left. He took off his clothes and packed his bag. Fixing the torch as tight as he could stand, he took a bearing with the compass and tied it around his neck. As he mumbled one final prayer, a voice behind him shouted “Hey, underpant man!” A woman with a toddler on her hip walked towards him. She was pulling a small inflatable dinghy behind her. “If you must try again, take this.” The dinghy landed at his feet. “Tie it to your pack. It will help you float.” How could he turn down her gift? So there he was, a skinny man breaststroking towards a bloody horizon as the sun set behind the mountains to one side. The inflatable followed, like a taunt that would not be shaken off.
*
The single bed was pushed against a wall so thin he knew how much his neighbour missed his mother. There was a small wooden table and foldaway chair under the window and a slim wardrobe in one corner behind the door, for which there was no key. Before he went to sleep he jammed a rubber wedge under the bottom and moved the table in front of it. His pencils went missing two days after he moved in, so he carried as much as he could in his backpack whenever he braved the streets. He ferried boxes and crates from stall to stall at a nearby market: fish, meat, vegetables and fruit. The stallholders palmed him coins or filled bags with the produce customers would not buy. He had learned very early on that thirty six pounds and ninety five pence was not enough to live on, but he was not allowed to work while awaiting the decision on his claim. When the middle men laughed at the amounts he tried to send home, he tightened his fists and held his tongue. But there was at least a familiar energy to the market. And the men behind the stalls shouted, laughed and sang all day, teasing old women and chatting up the young ones. What was Oi! Oi!? It certainly wasn’t covered in the classes at University.
He was planning what to cook with the aubergines and courgettes in his carrier bag when he was yanked between two stalls and shoved against a wall. A red haired man with yellow teeth pressed all his weight through his palm against Hassan’s chest. A young man with brownish fluff sprouting from his chin stood five paces back, looking at his shoes. This young man would be carrying the boxes from now on and yet again, Hassan was instructed to “Fuck off back to where you came from.” Instead, he took to walking by the river, where one day he leaned over the railings to admire a strip of sand at the edge of the muddy beach that had been unveiled by the ebbing tide.
In Poundland in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, he bought a child’s bucket and spade and some Union Jack bunting. He consulted the tide tables at the library and arrived at the river late morning. He tied the bucket to the railing and climbed down the ladder to the river beach, where he planted a length of driftwood like a flag on the moon. He fixed one end of the bunting to the railing, looped it around the driftwood and knotted the other end further along. Inside this triangle, he knelt and started to dig. He checked his watch and began to shape the first of two piles of sand. He heard coins dropping into the plastic bucket long before he had finished, three hours later. “Thank you! Thank you,” he shouted over his shoulder, smoothing the sand with a wet hand and allowing himself a smile. He found a stone heavy enough to place under the deflated dinghy so that it would not blow away. He walked backwards to the ladder, turned, and climbed up over the railings.
A group of Chinese tourists looked down, said nothing, and walked away. Four men, who might have been Russian, dripping with gold and confidence, shouted what might have been insults. The Spanish schoolchildren shook his hand and offered him sweets and cigarettes. As the crumbling parliament building and the city’s glass towers faded with the light, the young students urged him down to the beach to take his photograph alongside his sculptures of a man, naked except for his undershorts, clinging to an airless dinghy, and the body of a toddler, face down in the mud, oblivious to the encroaching tide.