Mahmoud’s dad pulled out his iPhone and consulted the map. “This whole area is farmland,” his father said. “Flat land. Too easy to be caught.” He scrolled sideways on the map, and Mahmoud leaned in closer. “It looks like there’s a forest here, to the west,” Dad said. “They can’t have every meter of the border guarded. We’ll slip through at night. Once we’re in Macedonia, we’ll be all right. Where’s your mother?”
Mahmoud looked up. Mom was where she always was, working her way through the tents. Looking for Hana.
Hana wasn’t there, though, and she wasn’t at any of the other little clusters of refugee tents they passed as they hiked farther into the countryside. At some place he’d picked from the map on his iPhone, Mahmoud’s father led them off a dirt road into a dark forest. It was late, well after midnight, and Mahmoud was weary from walking. But they still had two hours to walk to the Macedonian border.
Waleed raised his arms to be carried, and Dad hefted him up against his shoulder. Mahmoud bristled. Waleed was being a baby. He was too big to be carried. Mahmoud was tired too, but nobody was carrying him.
They walked along in silence, their way lit only by the occasional glow of the phone screen as Dad checked their position. The forest was full of tall pine trees that crowded almost everything else out, and the ground was covered with brown pine needles that smelled like a car freshener. Somewhere in the forest an owl screeched, and Mahmoud heard the scurrying of small animals. Every rustle made Mahmoud jump, every scuffle gave him goose bumps. He was a city boy, used to the lights and sounds of traffic. Here, every sound was like a gunshot in the unearthly dark and quiet. It terrified Mahmoud.
At last they emerged from the dark woods and found the train station. It was a small, two-story, mustard-colored building, with a burgundy roof and rounded gables.
It was also packed with people.
Hundreds of people slept outside, using their backpacks and trash bags as pillows. They filled the train platform and the sidewalks in front of the station, and some even slept between the tracks. Plastic bottles and empty bags and discarded wrappers littered the ground.
Mahmoud watched his father’s shoulders sag. Mahmoud felt the same way. But then his father stood taller and hiked Waleed up higher on his shoulder.
“Hey, at least we know we’re on the right track,” he said. He grinned at Mahmoud. “The right track. Get it?”
Mahmoud got it. He just didn’t think any of this was funny.
“No? Nothing?” his father said. “I guess I need to train you better.”
Mahmoud still didn’t laugh. He was too tired.
Mahmoud’s mother had already left them, stepping carefully among the sleeping refugees like a ghost. Searching for Hana.
“The train station looks closed,” Mahmoud’s father told him. “We’ll have to find someplace to sleep. We’ll come back in the morning and see if we can buy tickets.”
They found a nearby hotel listed on TripAdvisor, and they collected Mahmoud’s mother and set out for the inn on foot. Mahmoud couldn’t wait to climb into a real bed. He felt like he could sleep for days.
A car came up behind them, and this time Mahmoud didn’t jump out in front of it. But it slowed down and stopped beside them anyway.
“You need taxi?” the man said in broken Arabic.
“No,” Mahmoud’s father said. “We’re just going to the hotel.”
“Hotel much money,” the man said. “You go to Serbia? I take you in taxi. Twenty-five euros each.”
Mahmoud did the math. A hundred euros was a lot of money—almost 24,000 Syrian pounds. But a taxi ride straight to Serbia, without spending the night—or longer—in Macedonia? Mahmoud’s parents huddled together, and Mahmoud listened in. Train tickets were likely cheaper, and Mom worried about accepting a ride from a strange man in a country they didn’t know, but Dad argued there wasn’t another train until at least tomorrow, and there were already so many people waiting for the train at the station.
“We’re all tired, and a taxi gets us closer to Germany. Sleeping on the ground doesn’t,” Mahmoud threw in.
“That’s the deciding vote, then,” Dad said. “We’ll take the car.”
It was a good decision. Two hours and one hundred euros later, they were at the Serbian border. It was still dark, but there were no border guards where the driver dropped them off. No roads, either. Mahmoud had slept a little in the car, but he felt like a zombie as he shambled with his family along the railroad tracks that would take them across the border from Macedonia to the nearest Serbian town. Since they were traveling, they were permitted to skip their early-morning prayers.
They staggered into a town just after sun up. Mahmoud thought that if he didn’t lie down somewhere and sleep he would pass out on his feet and fall flat on his face. But there were even more refugees at this train station than there had been in Macedonia, and here there were no tents and no hotel rooms. People slept on the platform of the station or outside in the fields. There were no toilets, either, and no markets or restaurants. What little the local Serbs had they were charging a fortune for. One man was selling water bottles for five euros apiece.
A group of men sat around a power strip charging their phones as though they were huddled around a campfire. Mahmoud had seen scenes like this everywhere along the route from Athens to Germany. He and his family paused just long enough to recharge their own phones again, and then they were on the move once more.
Mahmoud was so tired he wanted to cry. His father found them a bus to Belgrade, and Mahmoud was thankful for the few hours’ sleep, uncomfortable though they were. It was almost sundown when they arrived in the Serbian capital, but they still couldn’t stop. The police there were raiding hotels for illegal refugees, so Dad found another taxi driver who promised to take them the two hours farther to the Hungarian border.
Taxis were expensive, but so was trying to stay overnight in a city that didn’t want you.
The silver four-door Volkswagen was driven by a middle-aged, olive-skinned Serbian man with a neatly trimmed black beard. He promised to get them to Hungary and keep them away from the police for thirty euros apiece—more than it had cost them to cross all of Macedonia.
It was a tight fit in the car, with Mahmoud, his mother, and his father crammed into the back seat and Waleed in his father’s lap. This new driver seemed to find every rut and hole in the road and send them flying into each other. But none of that mattered to Mahmoud. He was asleep almost as soon as he’d closed his eyes, and he only woke again when he realized the car wasn’t moving. Had it really been two hours already? He felt like he’d just gone to sleep.
Mahmoud’s eyelids fluttered and he looked out the windows. He expected to see the lights of a Serbian border town. Another tent city. Instead, they were stopped in the middle of a lonely stretch of highway surrounded by dark, empty fields.
And the taxi driver was leaning over the backseat with a pistol aimed straight at them.