Across the Aegean
The year is 1923, and the night in question is of no importance to most of the world but to the hundred-odd Christian Turks on the deck of the Guldjemal. For now most are asleep - waiting under the afternoon sun has exhausted young and old alike.
Maria believes herself the only one awake. She has watched the horizon since sunset, the point where the midnight indigo of the sky and the shimmering black of the sea merge. For as long as she has known, she has loved the sea. The Aegean is merciless, a known truth -- it takes your heart and refuses to give it back, burying it under the storming waves, where the seabed lays silent. That silence was always the lure, mind quiet and only her heart thundering in her ears. Yet now, now it feels wrong. Wrong in the way the birds fall silent moments before thunder clouds roll in.
Leaden fear settles deep within her bones. Why does the sea that once embraced her do nothing as she is torn from her home?
***
The four days on the Guldjemal’s deck makes Maria’s first steps on Greek soil decidedly unsteady.
“Like a newborn foal,” her father, Dimitrios, laughs, but his smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Instead they are nervous, searching with equal parts suspicion and apprehension the port, sizing up the fishermen gutting barrels of fish, the very official men in their very official uniforms accompanied by soldiers advancing towards the Guldjemal.
One of them, a balding man whose tie seems to be choking him, smiles at them, says something Maria cannot understand. A mutter echoes from the front of the crowd, an attempted translation here, a guess there, but all almost the same: he said welcome home.
His words haunt her in the cart ride out of Thessaloniki. Is it home? Her mother mutters that the olive trees line the fields just like back in Aydin, and Maria wishes she could believe that is enough.
“They know baklava too,” says her mother, “that’s a start.”
The cart leaves them outside of a farmhouse where a family stand by open doors, all smiling bar the daughter, whose gaze trails on the cart with barely contained fury long after it becomes a mere speck on the dirt road. Maria would later find out her name, Meryem, but for now all she can think is that this girl would set something alight if she glares any harder.
Be kind, whispers Dimitrios as Meryem’s father beckons them inside, we are settling into the home they will have to abandon soon.
***
Meryem’s throat has been burning for weeks.
First the men in the tavernas, huddled around the only radio in the village, began to speak of an exchange -- Christians to Greece, Muslims to Turkey -- and then suddenly it was real, strangers settling into the lives they would abandon. She knows if she utters a word her heart will tighten, her throat will clench shut, and she’ll cry herself sick.
“I’ll teach them to work the field,” said her father one night, what feels like an eternity ago, perhaps no more than a week, “you’ll show them the town, make them feel welcome.”
“They’re taking our home--”
“No,” her father snapped. “They are no more taking anything of ours than we are of theirs. Soon we will make the same journey. Would you rather not be welcomed when we settle in the land they left?”
Meryem stays silent now as she did then. Her mother and father cut watermelon slices (karpuzi, her mother points, karpuz! Exclaims the other woman, thrilled to find one of the many common words) and the other family offer dried figs out of the few belongings with them in return.
Meryem’s throat burns in the weeks following. Tendrils curl around her heart as she teaches Maria Greek, piercing her chest with every step closer to leaving.
***
The Guldjemal is late.
It should have come in at midday, but it’s three hours past sunset. The pebbled beach is packed full of people waiting, dreading the streamline silhouette on the horizon. Most simply do not watch for it. Meryem and her father do.
“Are you scared?” Asks her father, pushing at his prayer beads absently.
“No,” Meryem lies.
“I am. Terrified, actually.”
She has never seen him like this, her father was brave, her father didn’t know fear, surely. “What will we do?”
“Survive.” He shrugs. “Settle. We know it’s not impossible.”
“What if we can’t…”
He looks upwards, above the horizon, to the cream streak of the milky way barely visible tonight, and it sounds more like a reassurance to himself when he says, “We wouldn’t be given hardship He knows we can’t overcome.”
***
The year is 1923 and the night in question is of no importance to most of the world but to an old steamer boat named the Guldjemal, packed to the brim of an indefinite number of Greek Muslims. For now only Meryem is awake, among a sea of sleeping bodies on the deck, with only the stars above and the lapping waves as company. For as long as she has known she has feared the sea. The Aegean is merciless, it takes all you love and cares not for any mortal. her father’s words echo, and she cannot look away from the inky expanse around the Guldjemal.
Someone should keep watch, someone should make sure the sea doesn’t finish us off.
But there is something about the unnatural quiet, something pulling at Meryem. It tells her she won’t get this quiet again, the breath at the end of one life, of Thessaloniki now so far behind, before she settles into the next, one in an unfamiliar land of strangers.
Maria, the girl who shared so few words with her, will not leave her mind. She settled in a world so different from her own, Meryem thinks, and hope opens a sleepy eye within her, we can do the same - I can do the same.