Later the setting sun flicked red fire across the wave tops and darkness shrouded them again. Above Charity, points of light glowed like the lights of a city. She clawed herself awake and to her feet, towards salvation and voices half heard, then realised that the lights were mobile screens, held up against the starless sky. Someone near to her had managed to catch a signal.
‘I beg you sir, please rescue us,’ pleaded a man, rancid with sweat. Others joined in, calling and crying into his phone in English. ‘There are children.’
Charity heard the response, crackling from another world. ‘What is your position?’
‘In the Mediterranean Sea,’ the man answered. ‘Hello? Hello?’
When the signal was lost a wail rose out of their throats as if to swallow the world.
Another day and Charity stirred into its heat. Again there was no wind, no fuel, and now no water. She slipped in and out of consciousness as another soul – a pregnant Moroccan – slid from life. Charity managed to crawl out of the suffocating clutch of women. She elbowed herself through the crush of crumpled Nigerians and gaunt Ghanaians. She collapsed on the gunwales and tried to reach the water, to cup it in her palm, to drink. But she didn’t have the strength. Her hand trailed in the water, and she saw the ghosts. They glided towards her by the dozen, the white hem of their skirts licking the waves. She tried to hold out her hand to them. She wanted them to take her in their arms. She lifted herself, and rolled into the searing silver sea.
On that same day, 800 miles away across the Mediterranean, another young woman went into the water. Behind her was the Turkish coast. Ahead the rocky grey hills of Lesbos were silhouetted against the setting sun. Yusra was seventeen, two years older than Charity, and also trying for Europe. Her sister Sara was already in the sea, clutching a rope, trying to steady the small dark-grey dinghy. Each wave spun the bow around ninety degrees. Every swell jerked the girls’ heads against its rubber tube. Saltwater stung their eyes, filled their mouths, dragged and sucked at their clothes. On board eighteen fellow refugees prayed aloud.
Together the sisters kicked and steered the boat into the waves, pointing it at the island, keeping it from being swamped. Two of the men took turns in the sea while at the stern the Afghan pulled the starting cord again and again. Another boat passed them, its motor running, its passengers pointing at the stranded dinghy, but it did not stop. It ploughed on through the waves.
After three and a half hours in the sea, Yusra shuddered with cold, her limbs ached, her muscles seized. If I drown now, it will all have been for nothing, she thought, fighting down the rising panic. No time to live, no time to win.
Yusra could swim before she could walk. As a baby her father, a swimming coach, had lowered her into the shallow water at the pool’s edge and taught her to kick her legs. At the age of four he’d enrolled her in swimming classes. Whenever she lost courage he threw her into the pool, pushing her to train with her older sister’s group. By the time she started primary school she was practising two hours a day. Her father wanted Yusra and Sara to be the best, and his ambition fired their own. Yusra made the Damascus youth team and started to train with the Syrian national team, winning medals at home and abroad.
‘If your dream isn’t the Olympics, you aren’t a true athlete,’ her father told her.
But then a peaceful uprising erupted into civil war and tore apart the country. Russia entered the conflict to ‘stabilise’ the government with both regular and contract soldiers, the latter alleged to have been supplied by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the oligarch behind the St Petersburg troll factory.[19] The Kremlin wanted both to exercise its military muscle and to intensify the flood of refugees heading to Europe. Five million people – the majority of them women and children – fled their homes in the largest exodus in recent history.
Throughout it all Yusra lived for swimming. Swimming was the best distraction as friends and teammates left the city, as fire fights cracked along its streets. Her father was mistaken for the enemy, hung up by the feet and beaten. Government tanks destroyed the family home. A mortar shell hit the athletes’ hotel, killing a fellow sportsman. On the nightly news a banner scrolled across the screen totting up that day’s dead: 120 on Monday, 367 on Tuesday, 1,026 lost over a single weekend. One evening, as she swam lengths, a rocket-propelled grenade crashed through the roof of the Tishreen pool, sank to the bottom… and did not explode.
Yusra’s mother begged her to give up her training, to stay indoors in the belief that it would be safer. But the truth was not so simple. The choice was to stay home and die, or risk death to live abroad.
‘Swimming is my life,’ insisted Yusra, her ambition undiminished. ‘I’ll have to go to Europe.’
The sisters’ father funded them to fly to Beirut and Istanbul. As the aircraft circled the city the stewardess warned passengers not to steal the lifejackets. Turkish smugglers agreed to put the girls on a boat to Greece, at a cost of $15,000 each. On an August night a curtained minibus slipped them beyond Ayvalık to a pine-clad slope overlooking the Aegean. For two days they waited for a calm sea. Their first attempt had to be abandoned due to a coastguard patrol. Then their boat was slashed by competitors. On the third try the sisters waded through the green shallows and lifted themselves into the overloaded inflatable. The vessel was absurdly small, no more than twelve feet in length, and designed for four people. Water brimmed over its edge.
The six-mile ride across the Mytilini Strait to Lesbos was to take no more than one hour but after fifteen minutes the outboard motor spluttered and died. The inflatable wallowed in the swells. Waves crested over it and water pooled on its floor. To lighten the load, bags and shoes were dropped overboard, followed by one of the men and Sara. Yusra slipped in after them, swinging her legs over the side and sliding down into the water.
No swimmer would have had the strength to tow the boat in such choppy seas, but the sisters could steady it and keep it from taking on more water. The Afghan continued to pull the starter cord in desperation. The passengers prayed for help and forgiveness. Hours passed and the swells rose as the sun set and Yusra’s limbs went rigid.
Then the engine coughed miraculously to life and the sinking boat wrenched itself forward towards Greece. All shook with cold and fear. All were deathly pale. Thirty minutes later it hit the dark, stony shore. The men attacked the inflatable with their knives, shredding it in their fury. Yusra, her bare feet cut and bleeding, wept for ‘the soul was still in my body’.
That night they slept in a small country church. In the morning the sisters boarded a local bus to Mytilene, the island’s capital, where like the 80,000 others who’d landed on Lesbos that month they queued for temporary residence permits and then ferry tickets. In Piraeus, Athens’s large industrial port, touts sold them seats to the Macedonian border. Both there and in Serbia, government coaches ran the refugees further north, to the next border.
Hungary in contrast worked to frustrate their progress; erecting barbed-wire fences, closing the frontier and arresting migrants and their helpers. As in Russia, the Church played its part – Cardinal Péter Erdő, the country’s highest-ranking Catholic official, declaring that to provide shelter for refugees constituted human trafficking. In the following months Bulgaria, Slovenia and Macedonia also sealed their southern borders with razor wire. But Yusra and Sara were ahead of the clampdown, hiding overnight in a cornfield, paying another small fortune to be driven to Budapest. At Keleti station, where I once had arrived and would arrive again, they bought tickets to Vienna. Within sight of the Austrian frontier, Hungarian border officials then arrested them and held them in a stable.
19
In 2018 the US special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Prigozhin for his role at the Internet Research Agency. Other sources including the