Displaced Cargo

“Get up. Get up. We have to go— Yasmin, now. Move! We have to go. Wake your brother.” 

Perhaps I am dreaming. I can still see the stars out the window as my eyes blink open and shut. There is no glass, so I can feel the warm summer air blow in as my mother continues whispering. 

“Yasmin, get up. Now.” I grumble and roll over, pulling the thin blanket over my head. Someone rips it away and slaps me in my face. I jolt awake, sitting up in shock. 

“I will not tell you again.” She hurries out of the room and into the kitchen; I can hear her shoving items off the counter into her bag. My little brother next to me is awake now too, and he looks at me with swollen, dreaming eyes. He does not know what is going on either. 

“Come on, Nasir. Let’s get dressed now.” I help him change out of his night clothes and into a t-shirt and loose pants. He is only two years old, but he wears the clothes of our other brother, Farid. He is not with us anymore. 

“Yasmin, the car is here. Get Nasir and come.” My mother’s hair is down and messy—she might not even realize. I hand her a scarf as I wrap my own around my head. She stares at it as though she forgot what it is for. 

A car honks twice outside, jolting her out of her trance. She scoops Nasir up into her arms, ignoring his whines and kicking. He is tired and confused. He wants to sleep. 

I slip on my sandals as fast as I can, and hurry out the back door. I see my Uncle Mahmud in a van, the engine running impatiently and the lights blinding me. It is never this bright so late in the night. It is unnatural, and it hurts my eyes. 

One of my older cousins jumps out of the passenger seat and pulls open the side door. He pushes me in roughly, then does the same to my mother. She is clinging tightly to Nasir and holding her hand on his face so he does not cry so loudly. My cousin slams the side door shut and jumps back in the front. Mahmud is pulling out of our yard before anyone has buckled their seatbelts. 

As my mother removes her hand from Nasir’s face to strap me in, he lets loose a feral scream. I know he will be the death of us all one way or another. Tears stream down his pudgy face, and he wails nonsense. He does not know very many words yet, but he certainly knows how to make noise. As we bump over the curb and peel out into the dusty road, we all hear quite clearly what he is screaming: 

“Taydi!”He hiccups through his tears and bangs his grimy hands on the window, looking back at our house as it grows smaller too fast. His teddy. We left it behind. 

The car ride is very long. I think it would not have felt so endless if I knew at the beginning how long it would be, but without a finish line in my head, the road just stretches on and on and on and on… 

I can tell by the sun that we have passed the time for both breakfast and lunch. I am able to suffer through my stomach’s grumblings, but Nasir hasn’t stopped crying to some degree since we left our house. When he got really sleepy, the cries were more of a tearful, delirious babbling, but now that he is in pain from his hunger, his wails pierce our eardrums. 

We have not spoken. My mother stares straight ahead, only moving to occasionally smack Nasir and snap at him to shut up. We have not stopped even for the bathroom, and although I am trying my best not to cause any additional trouble, the situation will soon be dire. 

Very quietly, I lean over to my mother and ask, 

“Please, Mama, can we pull over for just a minute? I am going to soil myself.” There is no telling whether or not she heard me. I squirm a bit in my seat and cross my legs to try and make it a little longer. My stomach cramps violently, and I feel a sharp pain shoot through my insides. 

“Mama, please.” My mother heard me this time, and she smacks my face like she did when she woke me up this morning. She hisses in reply, 

“I suppose you will have us all shot and dead so that you can piss in comfort? We are not stopping until we are over the border. Do not ask me stupid questions again.” This is the first I have heard of any destination. I had guessed, due to the barren landscape we seem to be driving in forever, but it still shocks my heart to hear it spoken. I know better than to ask her if she knows anything about where my father is. 

Time continues to crawl and the sun burns into me even through the van windows. I am sticky and hungry, lethargic and nauseated. At some point before evening falls, I urinate in my clothes and drift in and out of an unsettled sleep. Nasir finally runs out of cries and sleeps. We can all smell that he has done more than urinate in his pants, but no one speaks of it. My cousin and uncle up front have been peeing into empty Cola bottles and dumping them out the window, and the sights and smells make me fear I will vomit. 

I begin to wonder if I will die in this van when we finally pull into the lot of an abandoned petrol station. It reminds me of those American movies where two cowboys stand across from each other and fight for the one spot left in town. We shudder to a stop, and just as urgently as they shoved us into the van this morning, my uncle and cousin throw open the doors and shove us out. 

Mahmud pulls a folded envelope out of his shirt, damp and tearing from his sweat. He places it in my mother’s hands, then shoves it into her chest. He wants her to keep this safe. 

My cousin jogs to the back of the van and pulls out four folders. I can see our names on the front: Yasmin, Nasir,  Nadia, and Aziz. My cousin looks down for a moment, and he and my mother share a long look before he puts the folder labeled “Aziz” back in the van and closes the trunk.  He hands her the other three. 

“These are your life,” he says, 

“Lose them and you may as well leave the children outside to shrivel to death in the sun.” My head is spinning and I do not know what is going on. Why are they dumping us at this empty shack? 

Mahmud and my cousin get back in the van; they honk twice, pause, honk three times—and then they  peel away with the same urgency with which we left this morning. It briefly crosses my mind to wonder how they still have not run out of gas, but I am feeling too woozy to care much. 

I sit down in the dirt and put my face in my hands. I know my mother would only snap if I asked any questions, but I am so tired. I have almost slipped into unconsciousness once again when I hear two sets of footsteps approaching us from behind. This petrol station is not abandoned after all. 

Two men in dark clothes approach us. 

“Nadia?” one of them asks my mother. She nods, and the man looks around.

“Is there anyone else?” My mother looks at the ground and hoists Nasir higher on her waist. He is finally asleep. Normally her voice is so sharp and hard, but when she answers the man it is almost too soft to hear. 

“Just us.” 

He nods and gestures for us to go into the building. My mother starts walking immediately, but I feel frozen in place. When she realizes that I am not coming, my mother snaps her fingers twice and waves her hand at me in a gesture to hurry up. Still I cannot move. My voice sounds whiny and immature even to me, but I still say, 

“I don’t want to go in there, Mama. I don’t know these men and I don’t know what’s going on. Please, can you just tell me what’s going on?” As I finish my sentence, tears fill my eyes and my voice goes wobbly. My mother glances at the men, then walks right up to me. She pulls aside my scarf so she can hiss her words directly into my ear. 

“Last night after you were asleep, your father decided to attend a meeting in the city. It was a political meeting, and he never should have gone. He decided his ideas were more important than his family. They found out where the meeting was and They shot your father in the head. Then They burned the building down. Your uncle Mahmud was able to telephone me in time to warn me that They would be coming to the house next for you and Nasir and me. He arranged for us to leave before They arrived. He paid these men more money than you will ever see in your life to get us out of the country so that we will not be shot and killed and burned like your father. Does that make enough sense to you?” 

Her voice is heaving with emotion, and I can see tears angrily dropping out of her eyes. Her arms shake, but she just grips Nasir tighter to still them. My eyes sting and I feel sick. She grabs my face with one hand, and even though she is still crying, her voice is steady now. 

“If you would like to wake up tomorrow, you will do every single thing these men tell you. Now march.” She turns around and walks briskly towards the building. I shiver, and cannot banish the image of my father’s death out of my head. I know who “They” are, and I know what they have done to others in our city. I wish my father had just kept his ideas to himself. I wish my father was not dead. 

Realizing that I would also like to not be dead, I jog over to the building and step inside. It is dark, but a soft light comes from below: a cellar. I climb down the stairs and blink until my eyes adjust to the brightness. In this tiny basement there are nearly three dozen people: crouching, standing, laying down. Some are asleep, some look ready to run. There are babies and mothers, and only a few men. No one here is old. 

The tall man from outside follows me down the stairs and addresses the room. 

“Transport arrives in ten minutes. Have your papers and be ready to go. He will not wait for stragglers.” It feels for a moment that we in this room are simply things, cargo. Will I continue to be shoved into vans and transported to mysterious locations indefinitely?

Everyone begins shuffling around, standing up and trying to gather their children without waking them. A woman standing near me gives me a slight smile, but I cannot return it.

I hardly feel alive. I am wet with my own waste, and my stomach is growling so strongly that I can feel it moving. My father is dead and it seems that we are leaving home forever. I have no idea where we are going. I want to cry and scream and break something, but it takes all my energy just to stay standing. 

I want to go back to my house, to my room, to my bed. I want to hear the crickets at night and smell my mother’s cooking as I wake up. I want to take long walks through the dusty streets where I grew up and play silly games with my friends. I want to be annoyed by Nasir’s snoring at night and resent that we share a mat. I want to be bitten by the bugs that get into our house and scratch for days at the marks they leave. I want to lie outside with my cousins at night and look for shapes in the stars. 

I want to go home, but I am not sure it exists anymore.