No Safe Place (2 page)

It was impossible to forget about the ferries. The hum of the motors and the foghorns announced their comings and goings. The terminal was a short walk from downtown, and with most of Calais slapped up against the Channel, the ferries were always visible.

Abdul felt like they were laughing at him.

He approached the grounds of the old warehouse where the meal would be served. Migrants were already gathering. A white man and woman passed him on the sidewalk, knocking his shoulder with their giant backpacks, dangling water bottles and paper sacks full of sandwiches from the boulangerie, laughing and looking at their street map. In a few hours they'd be in England, as easy as going for a walk — a walk to the ticket office, a walk onto the ferry, a walk into Dover.

Abdul couldn't even imagine what it would be like to be them.

The world is divided, he thought. Some people can get on the ferry. And some people can't.

The warehouse sat by the end of the train tracks, where Rue Margollé met the Boulevard des Alliés. A hundred or so migrants had set up camp there, hanging their washing and rained-on blankets over the barbs of the barrier fence to dry. They could almost spit on the ferries as they moved through the canal.

The parking lot by the loading dock was already filling up with migrants, even though it was early. This was when being small could be an advantage.

The food was always brought to the same location, to long folding tables set up in front of the loading dock of the warehouse. Abdul, checking the safety pins on his trouser pocket yet again to be sure they were still secure, started working his way in that direction.

The crowd was still in a gathering mood, and people let him move. Maybe today the charity would let him help serve. He'd been allowed to do it twice before. Even though it meant delaying his own meal — the scent of the hot rice and stew driving him crazy as he added a scoop of each to the thrust-forward plates — he would get an especially large portion at the end, and usually something extra. One time he'd been given a hygiene kit with a toothbrush and toothpaste and a little bar of fancy soap with the name of a hotel on it. Another time he'd been given a bar of chocolate, which he'd traded for bread.

The food was never late. Abdul appreciated that. Everything else in his life was uncertain. Maybe that was why the charity worked so hard to be dependable.

The charity van arrived. Abdul couldn't see behind him, but he could feel that the crowd had grown. It pushed forward as the big pots were lifted out of the back of the van. Always, there was the fear that there wouldn't be enough.

There were two big pots for each table. Abdul knew that one pot contained rice, and one pot contained stew. It was the same meal every day. Sometimes there was meat or chicken in the stew. Usually it was all vegetables.

He tried to squeeze his way to the front to ask for a serving job, but now the crowd was solid. They would not let him pass.

The lids came off the pots and the smell of the food was a signal for the crowd to push forward even more.

The charity people wore orange vests and tried to keep order.

“Take your plate, go out to your left,” they said, trying to keep the human traffic flowing. But there were too many people. They were too hungry.

Abdul got his plate of food. He tried to reach for a plastic fork, but was shoved out of the way. Circling his plate with his arms, he moved to the left, trying to follow the rules. He saw a woman trying to shepherd her children at the next table. One child was shoved and his rice and stew spilled all over his clothes. The noise from the crowd was so loud that Abdul couldn't even hear the child's cries.

Abdul got away from the main crowd and started to eat, still standing, using his fingers to get the food to his mouth. He ate quickly. Having food stolen was not uncommon. He used the rice to encircle morsels of stew and didn't take his eyes off his plate until his tongue had lapped up everything.

This would be his last meal until tomorrow.

He looked up then at the crowd. It didn't seem to have gotten any smaller, even though he could tell from how deeply the ladles were going into the pots that the charity would soon run out of food. He began to look for an exit, but the only way off the quay was through the crowd.

He'd just reached the bin to toss away his plate when a roar rose up from the crowd. Abdul checked the tables. Food was still being served, but something was going on.

He scooted behind the servers and jumped up on the loading dock. From there he could look out over the crowd.

Something was happening in the middle of the lake of people. Bodies were bumping up against each other, the movements becoming harsher and rougher. In minutes the shouts turned to screams, and the edges of the crowd became wider as people in the middle tried to get away from the growing brawl.

“Who is it this time?” one of the charity workers asked Abdul as he jumped down to help her load the empty pots into the back of the van.

“I can't tell. Looks like everybody.”

There were too many people in too small a space. The crowd by the tables was pushed from behind, shoving one of the charity workers right into the wall.

“That's it, clear away!” the woman in charge yelled. She had a voice like a megaphone.

It caused more panic. The people near the tables who had not yet been fed were desperate for food, and they saw their chance to eat being taken from them. One man took a pot that still had some rice in it out of the charity worker's hands. He tried to tell her that he would distribute it, that she should get into the van and be safe, but he didn't speak her language, and he had to yell to make himself heard through the crowd. All she heard was a man yelling at her and trying to take something out of her hands. She didn't understand. She screamed.

Abdul watched the tables collapse, the legs snap and the pots fall to the ground, spilling the food that was left. Hungry men, women and children tried to scoop up the food with their hands, swallowing stew with pebbles and dirt. Several people were stepped on. Their cries were lost under the trample.

Abdul stayed on the truck helping to load pots, giving a hand up to the distraught workers.

“It's the Afghans and Eritreans,” one said. “An argument. Someone's been stabbed.”

“We have to get in there,” another worker said, digging out the first-aid kit.

“You can't. You can't get through.”

“I'll help,” Abdul said without thinking. If anything, he was smaller than the woman with the medical bag. “Stay behind me.”

The woman grabbed firmly onto his jacket and they jumped down off the truck into the crowd.

Abdul plunged blindly, going against the wave of people, feeling backed up by the woman clutching his clothes.

“Medic!” he shouted in Arabic, in French and in Kurdish. “Clear the way — medic!”

Through the noise of the crowd came the noise of police sirens, the special sirens of the CRS, the security police. The sound that put terror into any migrant.

Abdul knew that whoever was wounded would be arrested before they were treated, and likely deported after that. He wanted to help get them out of there, so that when the CRS got to the middle of the crowd there would be no one they could take away. The police would beat at the crowd with batons, but migrants were tough. Many had been beaten before, often by people more brutal than the French.

By a miracle, the crowd parted enough to let Abdul and the woman through. The man on the ground was Eritrean. Blood came from a wound in his chest, and he was struggling to breathe.

The charity worker opened the first-aid kid and ripped open packets of gauze with her teeth.

“Hold this!” She pulled in volunteers to put pressure on the wound and carry the man to the truck.

Abdul could tell from the cries and the noise of pounding boots that the CRS was almost at them. He got ready to run.

Then he spied the knife — a serrated fish-gutter's knife — scuffling around under people's feet.

A knife like that would give him protection. He wouldn't even have to use it. He could just show it to people and they'd back away.

Scrambling on his hands and knees, he went after the knife. Several times he almost had it, then it would be kicked from his reach by the crowd on the move.

Finally his hand went firmly around the knife handle. Already he felt stronger. He held it tightly and got to his feet.

He brought the knife up just as a CRS officer moved in close to him. The knife stabbed into the officer's arm.

In that moment, Abdul saw the officer look at his face and memorize it through the protective plexiglass of his faceshield.

In the instant it took for the officer to raise his good arm, the one with the baton in it, Abdul ducked and plunged through the crowd.

He could hear the officers coming after him, could hear the cries of the migrants who closed ranks and were beaten for not getting out of the way. He heard, and he kept moving.

At the yacht basin, he jumped the low fence and stumbled his way down the stone steps, slimy from the seaweed left by the low tide. He tried to blend in with the wall as he made his way around the narrow ledge toward the steps in the opposite corner. The ledge was slippery, too, caked with seaweed and trash. But at least he couldn't be seen from above. And the few boats in the basin were abandoned by their owners this late in the season.

It was then that he noticed he was still clutching the knife. And it was covered with blood.

Abdul grabbed at an iron ring attached to the stone wall and leaned down, dipping the knife into the cold sea water. He wiped the blade and handle dry on his trousers and righted himself on the ledge.

The knife was too long to fit into his pocket and it was unsheathed, so it was dangerous to carry close to his body, and he certainly couldn't carry it out in the open.

For now he cupped the bottom of the handle in the palm of his hand and stuck the rest of it up his sleeve. He made his way over to the steps and headed up them.

He emerged from the basin by the old Fort Risban and kept walking toward the beach. Across from the boardwalk, an inflatable slide in the shape of the sinking ship
Titanic
looked depressed and out of air. The children who might have played on it were lined up at the ice cream trucks, whining in the chill breeze while their parents argued. The beach looked like a holiday, with beach huts and white sand, but Abdul knew how much dog dirt there was underneath that sand.

Away from the beach, in the high dune grass, Abdul found a child's T-shirt, discarded and dirty. He shook it free of dried seaweed and gravel.

“Mickey Mouse Christmas,” he read, and he smiled at the cartoon with the big ears and the red hat. He took the knife, wrapped it in the T-shirt, then undid his shirt and stuck the bundle next to his skin. He would not be able to get at it quickly, but he felt better knowing he had it.

By the time the knife was hidden away and the last button on his shirt was refastened, Abdul knew one thing. He had stayed in Calais too long. He'd try to enter the Channel tunnel again that very night. And this time, he'd make it.

He needed a place to hide until it got dark. The officer he'd stabbed might be able to identify him. There was a chance he'd be recognized.

Lacking any better ideas, he headed toward the Jungle, doing his best to walk calmly, not to draw attention. He'd hide among the other migrants in the shantytown they'd erected in the forest out of packing crates and tarps. Even the police were afraid to go there.

Abdul could tell something was wrong when he was still half a mile away. Migrants were running and yelling, and he could smell smoke.

He started to run closer when he saw the riot police leading a convoy of bulldozers into the Jungle.

“They're flattening everything,” a man called to him in Kurdish. “Don't go down there. You'll get your head broken.”

Abdul joined his fellow Kurd, and they climbed a ladder attached to a warehouse wall. They went to the edge of the flat roof and sat, Abdul adjusting the knife next to his belly so he wouldn't stab himself.

“Mosul,” the man said.

“Kirkut,” Abdul told him, naming the place of his father's birth. It was easier that they were both Iraqi Kurds. They at least had a starting place to trust each other.

They said no more for a long while and just watched the destruction taking place below them.

Not that there was much to destroy. The shanties were constructed out of garbage, boards and plastic scrounged from the refuse tips or stolen from warehouse yards. Bits of plastic and cardboard were almost adequate in the summer, but it was now the middle of October. Surviving in them through the winter would be a gamble at best.

“At least it was somewhere,” the Mosul man said, as if he was reading Abdul's thoughts. “It was a place where a man could say, ‘I'm going home.'”

“Somewhere to go,” Abdul agreed. He'd never had his own shack in the Jungle, but he'd made friends who let him sleep in theirs now and then. The shacks were scarcely more comfortable than sleeping on the street, and certainly no warmer. “Why now?”

“I heard that a woman was raped.”

That didn't make sense. Women were raped all the time in the Jungle. The police didn't care.

“An English woman. Young. A journalism student,” the man said. “Now they decide the Jungle is unsafe. Now they decide the Jungle is unhealthy. My little daughter died of pneumonia in our shack, but it wasn't unhealthy then.”

“You have children?” Abdul asked, not even able to imagine what it would be like to live in the Jungle with children. He had only himself to take care of, and that was hard, every day.

“I had three. Now I have one. One of my sons was born with health problems, and he died. One of Saddam's bombs or one of Bush's bombs, who knows? Another bomb took my wife.”