Hisham Bustani
TRANS. BY Alice Guthrie
The Ship
For Faisal Darraj, sailing around this world, vomiting on it; and for Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, whose ship was the first, and nothing at all like this one.
When they told us we would set sail for Alexandria, I didn’t imagine it would be this bad, and nor did the hordes of men and women arriving elegantly turned out for the occasion in their formal suits and dresses.
As soon as I got there the first snag was starkly apparent, this vessel clearly having been designed for transporting livestock; but I was hardly in a position to protest, having bought myself a dirt-cheap ticket whilst fleeing a massacre. The year was 1976, the massacre was Tel Zaatar, and the port where our vessel was moored: Beirut.
What truly did amaze me was that all those Beirutis, trussed up like that in all their finery, even agreed to board in the first place. One after the other they trooped on up and thronged into what soon became a crammed pen of colourful humans, their nonstop chatter turning to shouts then screams with the shifting of the floating deck. Maybe they had thought there were rooms allocated to them, below deck? Maybe they had thought it would be a short journey, and imagined their mode of transport as a kind of floating balcony on which they could sunbathe and enjoy the views, take the sea air? I don’t know. But they boarded like a flock of sheep, and that was that.
The pressure was unbearable, the noise was unbearable, and what I had expected to be a room shared with four or five others turned out to be a patch of floorspace, scores of bodies all stuck to it, without room to even breathe. I don’t know what made me cast my eye up above us to find that – even up there! – a boy had swung himself unto an iron ledge under a light fitting, a perch just big enough for one sole butt (his, in this case). I gestured to him with my open hands, and he shook his head. I repeated the movement twice, and he shook his head again. Three times, four, no use. Only when I did the movement five times over, narrowing my eyes and glaring at him, did he dart down for me to hand over the fifty Lira agreed upon in our wordless transaction. Up I went. I didn’t come back down until we had been lost and drifting at sea for two whole days, after the skipper got drunk.
Your perspective on the world changes when you’re suspended over one specific little spot, an endless blue desert extending around you, a large number of humans crammed beneath your feet. When night falls over the scene all that’s left of my view is the page, I’m on in the novel I brought with me to read, illuminated by the lamp on the beam above me, and a parallel space mapped out by the muttering of the people beneath me – hardly visible to me now – shot through with the shrill smell of their vomit. The puking began with the first motions of the boat and continues still, even if now it’s a little less frequent.
That was to be my first time at sea. So, with the guarded caution of the first-timer, I had sought advice from those I reckoned would be well informed on how to keep the discomforts of seafaring – which I’d read so much about and seen so vividly portrayed in films – at bay. “Take hardly any stuff with you, just the essentials, and set out on an empty stomach,” they had told me. “Your food supplies should be meagre: ascetic. That way you’ll stay light and fast-moving, and you won’t be hit by the classic seasickness.”
So, I did as they said, and I was in luck, for no sooner was the ship out of the port and listing with the swell, and everyone below deck reeling and tottering along with it, than one of the women heaved – she was in fact extremely beautiful, and elegant – into the narrow space between her feet. And as you can well imagine, the space was so small that her vomit splattered all over her own feet as well as those of her neighbours. The same thing happened over and over down there in the area beneath me, as I could closely observe. Judging by the way some of the bodies in the distance were moving, their heads disappearing from view now and again, I guessed the same thing was also going in the furthest reaches of the hold.
A low point came when a venerable elder suddenly vomited onto another gent, a man no less revered than he, who was standing at his side. The latter raised his cloth handkerchief to wipe away as much as he could, an instant before emptying the contents of his own stomach out over the first man; a kind of account settling I sensed was calculated and deliberate.
And just like a wave of yawning ripples through a whole group of people, triggered by one single initial yawn, the retching outbreak spread through the throng down below: the sounds of guts rebelling followed by gasping, then by the sight of those gooey lumps sticking to the bodies and the floor. And then there was the smell.
When darkness fell the bodies lay down and slept, stuck together, afloat on two seas, the upper one denser and more viscous than the lower.
A scrap of bread, a little piece of cheese, and a slug of whiskey: that was my dinnertime banquet. Then I would put the remainder back in my single small bag, hooked onto a protruding bit of metal beside me. The bag also contained a novel, as we’ve already mentioned, all the money and official documents I had in the world, a spare shirt and trousers, and a packet of tissues.
After the crowd had quietened and I had been reading steadily for a good while, a sensation snuck up and crept over me, gradually intensifying: that vilely distinctive pressure, low down in the belly. At first, I tried to ignore it, distracting myself with an attempt at picking out the various individual bodies from the mass beneath my perch, focusing on the way they moved. But as time went on the feeling only grew more insistent, taking over my thoughts. Descend from my perch? Unthinkable. Who could guarantee I’d find it vacant upon my return?
The problem was that the more I turned the matter over and over in my mind, wrestled and struggled with it, the more urgent it became, until eventually I made up my mind. I raised myself up on the metal ledge, wrapped my spare trousers and shirt around the light so that it was almost completely shaded, and I could no longer make out anyone down below – thereby convincing myself that they in turn would be unable to see me – then I undid my flies, pulled down my underpants, pressed the peehole of my penis against the metal side of the pillar, released the pressure and relaxed.
I imagined the urine to have a murky orange tone. While it trickled down, gentle as a sparse mountain spring, I steeled myself to offer some justification or other, make some excuse; but no one down there raised their voice. Maybe my warm stream became part of someone’s dream.
When I was done, I took a deep breath, then wiped the sides of the pillar and the metal bench, and my shoes, with paper tissues. Once I’d chucked the tissues over the side, unwound the spare shirt and trousers from the light and returned them to my bag, I settled down to read once again and then I slept, sitting upright, undisturbed by anything at all until I was woken a little after dawn by the shouts of a man down below cursing my ancestors and I. It turned out my book had fallen on his head. While those around him were trying to calm him down he began to tear the pages out of the book. He threw some of them into the air and handed the others out to anyone who wanted to wipe their bottom after defecating off the side of the boat into the sea. So that was the end of my reading matter for the trip.
I’m thinking about all that now, forty years on, with us still lost in the same Mediterranean Sea, having set out this time from a remote spot to the west of Alexandria. The boat is similar to that one, with some key differences: among the tightly packed humans on board there is not a single chic outfit; there are quite a number of children; and the skipper (not remotely drunk) evaporated during the night. We found no trace of him in the morning, the engine wasn’t working anymore, and so the craft drifts now at random, its only navigation and momentum the current and the waves.
There wasn’t a light fixture to climb up this time, and even if there had been, I am no longer young enough to have got up there. In my bag (still following the same old advice) is a novel, some bread and cheese, a quarter of whiskey, all my documents and money, a spare shirt and trousers, and a packet of tissues. The personal effects of someone fleeing a massacre. It’s 2016, and the massacre is Aleppo.
In my hand is a fully charged satellite phone, and a number given to me by the now long-gone skipper, back when we were still on land. “This is the number of the Greek coastguard”, he told me. “Once they answer your call, you’re safe.”
They did answer, several hours ago. I spoke to them in good English, but no one has appeared yet on the horizon, or in the sky.
And the calm sea hasn’t kept one of the women from vomiting just here, in between my feet.
Hisham Bustani is an award-winning Jordanian author of five collections of short fiction and poetry. Much of his work revolves around the dystopian experience of postcolonial modernity in the Arab world. His work have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Georgia Review, the Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, and The Best Asian Short Stories. His latest book is The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (Mason Jar, 2022).
Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, researcher, and curator specializing in contemporary Arabic writing. Her translation of the complete short stories of the maverick Moroccan gender activist Malika Moustadraf was published by Feminist Press (US) and Saqi Press (UK) in February 2022. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate Arabic-English translation around and about, including at the University of Birmingham and the University of Exeter.