Morning Sea Read Online Free Page B

sea.
    Jamila tells her son that he has to keep his eyes on a point on the horizon to keep from feeling seasick.
    Farid rummages in the bottom of the bit of sky where the sun melts the horizon.
    Black diesel smoke from the engine blows into his face. His mother holds him tight. He seeks that contact, her smell. But Jamila is permeated with diesel, the smell of this journey, the smell of their hope.
     
    Farid’s eyes hurt. His legs hurt. The sea is crosswise now, the boat leaning entirely to one side. They can’t move from the spaces they have been assigned, each in their own holes among the bodies. A little girl whimpers. Two men yell in a dialect Farid doesn’t know. The heat is suffocating. The sun burns sores on their lips. His mother rations the water. She gives him smaller and smaller sips, not even enough to clean his tongue. They do their business in a common bucket that gets emptied into the sea. Animals? It’s beyond that. Animals aren’t as afraid of death as they are. The sea is a world unto itself, a world within the world, with its own laws, its own strength. It expands. It rises. The boat is like the shell of a dead scarab beetle, the kind Farid used to find in the desert, killed by the ghibli. Farid feels the sun inside his head. It won’t go away, not even when he closes his eyes. He thinks of the wild caper leaves his mother would chew and put on his forehead when he was ill. He thinks of the man who sells prickly pears, his quick, magic gesture when he peeled them.
    Jamila crumbles a sesame stick into Farid’s mouth, but his throat is a wall of sand.
    The sea is a mountain that rises. Farid is scared of those watery dunes. The engine toils like a dying camel.
     
    At night, it’s cold. The temperature goes down with the water. The water becomes black paper. It lets off mist that lingers and makes them damp. Farid is ­shivering. He’s wrapped now in his mother’s veil, and he’s cold beneath the slippery, damp cloth. The hateful wind whips at him. Farid clings to his mother’s bones, trying to find the heat of her bosom. She is shivering, too, like a basket of nervous snakes. It’s been a long while since she let him near her breasts. You’re a big boy . Now she pushes him there, where some of the day’s warmth has remained, like on the rocks in the desert. In the end, it’s a blessing they have to huddle so close together, a blessing like the wind and sea. Farid sleeps. He thinks about the big palm leaves where he always took shelter when it started to rain. One day, Aghib, the old man who sits in the sun sewing Berber shoes for tourists, told him that everything that had happened in their country was the fault of oil, that if it weren’t for the black sea beneath the desert, no dictator would want to dictate laws and no foreigners would come to defend them with their cruise missiles. Old Aghib pointed at him, his calloused finger riddled with needle holes. Oil is the devil’s shit. Don’t trust things that seem like blessings. It’s worse than a monkey trap. Whenever something is a blessing for the rich, it’s bad luck for the poor.
    That didn’t stop Farid from trusting the gazelle that brought her muzzle all the way to his doorstep to eat from his hands.
     
    It’s dark, and the moon is gone. The man filling the engine with diesel uses his lighter to see. He staggers, then swears as the damp sea air douses the flame. Farid’s mother’s arms are not so strong now. They give way, like the boat, like wheels in the desert.
    Farid waits for sunrise. He waits for Italy, where women go around with their heads uncovered and there’s an infinity of channels on television. They will step off the boat into the lights. Someone will take pictures, give them toys, Coca-Cola, pizza.
     
    Rashid, Grandfather Mussa’s father, had already made this journey at the beginning of the last century, when the Italians burnt villages and chased the Bedouins from the oases and closed them in pens, packed