The Names We Gave the Sea

On a small Greek island that has become a frontline of Europe's migration crisis, Lena Marisi records what is vanishing. A sound archivist who returned home from London to preserve her island's dying dialect, she spends her mornings with the last old fishermen who know the names of things no longer fished, and her evenings broadcasting three hours of silence and song on a radio station that almost no one listens to. She is also, though she will not say this, a woman who has been standing on the same shore for eight years waiting for her brother's body, and the sea has never sent it back.

On the morning a rubber boat capsizes off the north shore, Lena goes to help. She pulls a young man from the water. He will not leave the shallows. He is calling a name across the surface of the sea, the name of his seventeen-year-old sister who was in the water beside him until she was not, and he is calling it in Arabic, which Lena does not speak, and she cannot stop him from going back in except by doing the thing she did not do eight years ago on her own beach: she wades in beside him and stands there, in the cold, facing the same water, until he turns.

His name is Samir Haddad. He was a literature student in Homs, Syria, a lover of poetry and a keeper of words. He crossed Europe on foot with his sister Yara and crossed the sea in the dark and lost her hand in the water, and he is alive and she is missing, and the difference between those two words is the only thing he has left in the world. He carries a notebook of his own poems, half-dissolved by seawater. The salt is eating them. He is trying, against the salt, to remember them before they are gone.

What begins between Lena and Samir is built, word by impossible word, through a cracked translation app, a red light burning in a recorder, and the oldest grammar there is: hunger, fear, tenderness, the wish to be known. She records his voice in a language she cannot speak. He teaches her the Arabic words for bread and water and light and sister. She teaches him the Greek words the island is about to forget. Together, they translate his drowned poems from memory, line by line, into three columns, because the salt can have the paper but it cannot have all three columns at once.

But the clock is running. The camp on the island is to be cleared. Samir will be transferred to the mainland, then into the machinery of the European asylum system, then into a future that the state has not yet decided whether to let him have. And Yara is still missing, and the search for her will take them from the island to Athens to the refugee camps of northern Greece and toward the borders of a continent that receives some people with open arms and others with paperwork and others with nothing at all.

The Names We Gave the Sea is a love story about language and its limits, about what survives translation and what drowns, and about two people from opposite ends of the same water, both of them learning, at last, how to stand on the shore.