Missing in the Mediterranean

By Caroline Moorehead

From the archive: INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May 2014

On good days, Wertane thinks that her husband, Nabil, is still alive, that her mobile will ring and he will tell her he has found work in Italy, or France, that he will soon be home with money to buy them a house. But now that three years have passed since Nabil paid a trafficker to take him on a boat from Sfax in Tuni­sia to Italy, she is less sure. Three years since the evening of March 29th 2011, she says, is too long. She didn’t know he was going, though they had talked, endlessly, about his inability to find work as a qualified mason, and about the relentless poverty in which they lived. They had heard stories of men who had made the journey and come back with cars and money to build houses for their children, and Nabil dreamt of doing the same.