In my mind’s eye, I could see the coast guard as they cast their lines and nets into the sea, their hearts sinking. They pulled small bodies out of the water, bent and folded like soggy paper. The bodies they dragged onto the sand had been manhandled and torn by the waves. The coast guard could not understand why the sea was delivering such unnatural issue, born with hearts frozen by cold and fear. Why had these drowned souls found no one to make room for them, to permit them even the smallest portion of this thing called life? These drowned strangers, even if they died, had never actually counted among the ranks of the living. They had bodies that seemed alive, yet living souls never opened up and blossomed within them. No soul can enter that world of theirs; it is too miserable and black. Only the sea remains. It silently builds graveyards for the thousands who are not taken into account, and who take no account of themselves … Room to bury hundreds of thousands, and the space stretching broader and deeper as the leaky boats increase. Candidates elected for death, staring impassively at the destinies carved in marble before them. So they throw their bodies into the dark waters of tin and tar. They reach for the wave crests and embrace the danger as tightly as they would a life preserver.

“Take me!” shouted the exhausted man to the waves. He cared nothing for death and stood at the edge of the world, one step from the final abyss. “Suck me in, and do whatever you want. The land has spit me out, heaven refuses me, and I have nothing left but you, stretching out your arms for my miserable death! I was desperate, so I sold all I had and took a loan that brought a glimmer of hope. I rolled the dice of my life and of the lives of my wife and my two sons, and I did not look back. There was nothing left for me there, no trace of our lives, no field to plant. I gathered our papers into a bag, handed them over to that smiling man with the bronzed face. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he told me, ‘I’ll bring you all to dry land, and when you arrive, the clock of life will begin ticking again. Seconds, minutes, hours, and days in a long, vast, unending train. On the far shore, you’ll pile up real days, days of flesh and blood and bone, days of nourishment, sleep, warmth, and the feeling of security. Don’t be afraid! Give me everything you have, and put yourselves in the captain’s hands … ’ My wife tied my sons together tightly. ‘Either we all arrive together, or not at all,’ she said, her lips split by the salt and tears filling her vacant eyes. ‘No, untie them,’ I told her. ‘Perhaps one of the two will have different luck than we’ve seen. We’ve long been enemies with luck, and they’ll need some to survive, even if they are saved … ’ The cold wind burned us. The cold waters slapped against us. The boat was rocking us back and forth on the confused sea as the waves grew higher. Everyone was screaming, ‘Dear God, dear God!’ Within minutes the angry sky swooped down upon us. ‘Where are you fleeing to?’ it said. ‘Don’t you see? After all this affliction, do you not yet realize?’ The sky took my wife by the hand and pulled her up. She was cold and heavy, still tied to our two small children. So the sky took them all by brute force since she did not want to be separated from them.