Nujeen by Nujeen Mustafa

Author:Nujeen Mustafa [Mustafa, Nujeen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2016-08-22T22:00:00+00:00

From the sea the island looked much further away. Our dark grey dinghy was very small. Even though we had paid extra just to be the thirty-eight of us, which was much better than the fifty or so we had seen crammed into earlier boats, it was still more than double the ‘15 Max’ it said on the box, particularly with my wheelchair, and it felt very squashed.

Like everything I was doing, it was my first time on a boat. I felt like a six-year-old girl not a sixteen-year-old. ‘Why are you nervous?’ asked Nasrine. ‘I am not nervous, I’m excited doing everything for the first time,’ I replied. ‘It’s not excitement, it’s fear,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ She never showed her own fear because she knew everything she did would affect me. She was the one who knew the outside world and I took all my cues on how to react from her.

I did my deep breathing from Brain Games and looked around the boat at everyone. We were all spaced out from two days with little sleep, then being in the hot sun with nothing to drink. My three cousins whose mother and father had been shot were sad and quiet. Many people had closed their eyes and were praying. Nasrine was crouching on the floor trying to hold my chair still.

Our elder sister Nahda didn’t look at the sea. Her baby and the three little girls were all crying and she was focused on calming them. She was stressed because she’d decided to take her children out of the poisoned environment of war to somewhere they could get on with life, go to school, but now it seemed like a big responsibility for a thirty-three-year-old alone and she wondered what she had done.

Uncle Ahmed was all furrow-browed trying to drive the boat. He’d spent the last two days in the hotel in İzmir studying YouTube videos on how to do it. At the start he gunned the engine too much and we shot forward then zigzagged a bit as he tried to correct the course. ‘Look out!’ shouted Aunt Shereen as we bumped right into a wave and water came over the sides. The sea was much less calm than it had looked earlier in the day. To start with it was nice to feel the spray after being in the hot sun all day. Finally, my ‘Young Forever Love’ T-shirt I had worn for days was getting a wash. But as waves pitched us up and down, some of my cousins started retching. Others were crying and screaming ‘Oh God!’

At one point a wave tossed us right to one side and my aunt lost her bag with all her valuables. We seemed very low in the water. My cousins used their shoes to scoop water out of the dinghy. Sometimes people throw things off but we didn’t have much. ‘We should never have brought the wheelchair,’ said Mahmud.

I felt I should be worried – I knew this water might be our grave.

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