It was important to save our lives and the destination was the last thing on our minds

By Clare Moleta

Two brothers got involved in a protest. I’ll call them Daniel and Vincent. There was a heatwave in their city and no water to drink. Security forces opened fire on the crowd, killing more than a dozen people and injuring hundreds. After that, they started going house to house, arresting people.

When their homes were raided, Daniel and Vincent went on the run. The group that had organised the protest told them to get out of the country, so they hid down at the port and tried to find someone with a boat who would help them. Vincent had been badly beaten but it was too dangerous to seek medical help because, by now, hundreds of protesters had been arrested or disappeared and secret police were everywhere. 

Then they met an old friend. I’ll call him Benedict, which is my brother’s name. Benedict was a crewmate on a merchant ship. He’d been at sea when the protest happened, but two of his brothers were already in jail or missing. 

Now his ship was leaving again and Daniel and Vincent asked him to let them stow away in his cabin. Benedict was afraid.  He knew there would be spies on board, too, so he unscrewed a ceiling panel and his friends climbed into a small cavity in the roof. He gave them a pillow and a blanket, a jug of water and some toast. Then he sealed them in.

Daniel and Vincent stayed in the ceiling for a month. They didn’t know where they were going or how they would get off the ship when they got there. They urinated and defacated into plastic bags, lying down, because there was no room to sit up. Vincent’s injuries were causing him a great deal of pain. He found out later that he had kidney damage. The daytime heat was suffocating, at night they froze. Every week or so Benedict let them down to stretch and wash, but they couldn’t speak above a whisper or leave the cabin. And every hour the strain of concealing them took a greater toll on him.

After a month they docked in another country. When Benedict let his friends down from the hole in the early hours of the morning, they told him they couldn’t go back up there. He said it was too dangerous, for all of them, but in the end he told them how to get off the ship and so, at 4.40am, the stowaways jumped off the side onto the dock, ten metres below. Daniel broke his leg in the fall. It was raining and very cold. They walked on broken bones to the town centre where they bought cigarettes, chocolate and juice with American dollars. When it got light they were picked up by Customs and maybe they thought their suffering was over.

All three men ended up in Immigration Detention. Benedict told officials he’d never planned to bring his friends to this country - he was just trying to save their lives.  Immigration said he was a people smuggler and his victims were not real refugees. They would never be granted asylum, they would never bring their families to this country. The system might reward finding a queue and waiting politely, but it would never reward flight. 

After he’d been locked up for a year, Daniel could no longer stand being separated from his wife and children, so he agreed to go home. He got off the plane but he never left the airport. When Vincent told Immigration that his brother had disappeared, they said what happened to him after he left their country was not their concern.

Benedict spent two years in detention before he was put on trial for people smuggling. The Government wanted to transfer him to a real prison for ten more years and then send him back where he came from. He was not allowed to speak for himself, but the defence said it would be immoral to convict him. He was a brave man who had sacrificed his family and career and risked his life to save his friends. The prosecution said he’d broken the law and he wasn’t getting off lightly just because he hadn’t made any money.

Vincent was the prosecution’s main witness. They flew him over from a different detention centre, where he’d been isolated for the last two months to stop him trying to kill himself. They had to sedate him and drag him onto the plane because he thought they were sending him home like his brother. When he was asked how he felt about coming to this country, he started to cry and he couldn’t stop. A guard led him out of the courtroom and we listened to him weeping on the other side of the door.  

Benedict was convicted but his sentence was suspended. The judge said it was clear that his motives were humanitarian. After the verdict, one of Benedict’s guards turned to us and said quietly, ‘It’s a good decision. If I ever need help to save my life, I hope I’ll find someone like him.’ Then he led Benedict out of the room in handcuffs, back to detention.

Vincent was flown back to to his isolation cell. A few days later he was dragged out of there again, drugged again, and deported on the same ship he’d arrived on two years before. I heard that the Minister for Immigration called it ‘poetic justice’ but I can’t say for certain that’s true. Nothing was certain after they put Vincent on that ship. Union officials who tried to board before it left, were told he was being held in a small, unventilated enclosure next to the engine room. He was refusing food and water and the captain didn’t expect him to survive the journey. 

So. We waited. And a few weeks later, we heard that the ship had docked in his home city but Vincent hadn’t been taken off it. 

Benedict was found to be a real refugee in the end. I left that country, freely and by choice, and there have been plenty of times in the years since when I haven’t thought about the brothers or the man who tried to save them. So I didn’t know why this was the flight story I wanted to tell, or what I would be offering you by telling it. It’s not breaking news. It’s not even my story. And there’s no moral in it, no transcendent moment you can take with you when you leave. Would it be enough for me to say, Here’s something I’ve carried. Will you carry it with me?

But then, a couple of weeks ago, I found a report on the outcomes of deportation from that country and it talked about Vincent. It said that later it turned out he had been taken off the ship alive after all. He was arrested and detained for a long time. He was released, then detained again, then released under heavy surveillance. And then he disappeared. 

It said, Friends hope this means he is still alive, and on the run. 

Author’s note: like most stories, this one is much bigger than my telling of it. The most important thing to say is that I left out a whole human being. Another friend of the brothers, who helped organise the protest. I left him out for plot convenience; I was focusing on the brothers and, because the story was written to be read aloud, I wasn’t sure the audience would be able to follow four human threads in under seven minutes. But I also removed him out of a reflexive urge to disguise the specifics, even though commonsense told me that the years that had passed, the existence of other accounts, and the multitudes of forced migration stories (each unlike and exactly the same as this one), meant I wouldn’t be putting anyone in danger by finally telling it. So he’s not here, but of course he is. He’s the third body in that sixty-centimetre-high hole in the ceiling. He broke his toes jumping from the ship. He leaned forward in a noisy detention visiting area and talked to me and my friend about the cinema of his country. And, like Benedict, his flight was found to be justified in the end.

This story had no title when I read it, so I’ve given the title to him. It’s what he said at Benedict’s trial, when he was asked if they knew where the ship was taking them.