The Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins

Author:Matthieu Aikins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Camp

13

On every island, the people watch the sea. On Lesbos, spring brought the little boats. If you stood on the northern headlands, you could see them coming from the Turkish side of the channel, dots that grew larger until you could make out the bright life jackets and hear the whine of the engines, then the people’s cries as they came through the surf. They landed on the beach if they were lucky, on the rocks if not.

The boats arrived like messages from distant wars; some years brought more than others. In 2014, as Syria burned, some forty thousand people landed on the Greek islands, the most yet. Over the winter, when the sea turned stormy, only the most desperate made the crossing. But the following spring, of 2015, when the weather warmed again, it became clear that this would be a year unlike any other.

That March, almost eight thousand came ashore on the islands, an unusually high monthly number. The flow doubled in April, and kept increasing so that fifty-five thousand landed in July. By then, the world was waking to the crisis, and the media flocked to Lesbos, the photographers stalking beaches turned orange with discarded jackets. Their cameras watched as the boat people flung themselves to the sand and wept with joy, thanked God and took selfies, and then started walking. At the overwhelmed registrations center, the Greek authorities handed out pieces of paper ordering the migrants to self-deport, and then let them board the ferry to Athens, where they headed north through the Balkans, into Europe.

In August, a hundred thousand people landed in the Greek islands, most of them on Lesbos. A majority were Syrian, and there were unusual numbers of women and children among them, as it became apparent that you could travel safely once you reached solid ground. By December, a third of those coming ashore were underage. Not all made the crossing: of the 800 dead or missing at sea that year, 270 were children.

It was pandemonium on the beaches. Some days it seemed like the end of the world: And the sea gave up the dead which were in it. Corpses washed up without head or limbs; others were untouched, as if asleep. The fishers’ names for the shore changed, one resident would later write. A rock they’d called the Seal was now the Old Man. Some locals refused to catch fish, saying they were fed from the corpses of drowned immigrants.

On September 2, a family of four got into a boat in Turkey. They were Syrian Kurds from the city of Kobani, where, three months earlier, ISIS had massacred more than two hundred people. In the predawn darkness, the boat capsized in rough seas; the mother and her two boys drowned. At sunrise, the three-year-old—Alan Kurdi, or Aylan as he would be known to the world—was found on the beach. A Turkish photographer shot the scene: a child collapsed forward the way exhausted toddlers will, his red shirt hiked to show his white belly, a wave lapping his brow.

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