In the Sea There are Crocodiles (10 page)

Get your things together. We’re taking you back to Afghanistan.

I was just in time to collect my things from the cabinet, with the usual envelope full of money, before they dragged me away. We paid for the repatriation, as usual. This time, though, the journey by lorry was horrible. There were so many people that those who were on the sides were in constant danger of falling out and being run over, while those in the middle were in danger of suffocating. Sweat. Breathing. Yelling. People may have even died during that journey, and nobody noticed.

We were dumped across the border, like garbage dumped on a landfill site. For a moment, I thought the thing I had never dared think: I thought of not turning back, of continuing eastward. In the east was Nava, and my mother, sister and brother. In the west was Iran, and the same old insecurity and suffering and everything else. For a moment I thought of going home. Then I recalled the words of a man I had once tried to give a letter to, a letter for my mother, when I was living in Quetta almost three years before. In the letter I asked her to come and get me. But the man had read it and said, Enaiat, I know your people’s situation, I know what’s happening in Ghazni province, and how the Hazaras are treated. You should consider yourself lucky to be living here. True, things aren’t great, but at least you can leave home in the morning with the expectation of getting back alive in the evening. There, you never even know, when you go out, which will get back first, you or the news of your death. Here, you mix with other people and sell your things, whereas the Hazaras in your country can’t even walk in the street, because if a Taliban or a Pashtun comes across them and takes a good look at them, he always finds something wrong: a beard that’s too short, a turban that’s not on properly, lights still on in the house after ten at night. They’re in constant danger of dying for the slightest thing, being killed because of a careless word or
some meaningless rule. You should be grateful to your mother that she got you out of Afghanistan, the man had said. Because there are lots of people who can’t do it and who’d like to.

So I stuck my hands in my pockets, wrapped my jacket around me, and set off to find the traffickers.

But this time, at one of the roadblocks on the way back—one of the roadblocks where the traffickers paid the police to turn a blind eye—something went wrong. As well as taking the money agreed on, the police started body-searching us, looking for things to steal. What was there to steal? you may ask. You were all penniless. But even from someone who has nothing you can always take something. I had my watch, for example. It was
my
watch, and it meant more to me than anything else. Yes, of course, I could always buy another one, but it wouldn’t be the same thing, it would be a
different
watch: this was my
first
watch.

A policeman made us stand in a line against a wall and passed along the line checking that we’d all emptied our pockets. Whenever he saw someone behaving oddly, or moving without permission, or making that odd kind of face—do you know what I mean?—the face of someone who has something to hide, he would go up to him and stick his nose right up against the person’s face and
spit out threats and pieces of his dinner, and if the threats and spitting weren’t enough he’d go further and slap him or hit him with the butt of his rifle. When he reached me, he was about to walk right past me, but then he stopped and turned back and came and stood in front of me with his legs wide apart. What have you got? he asked. What are you hiding? He was thirty or forty centimeters taller than me. I looked up at him the way you look up at a mountain.

Nothing.

You’re lying.

I’m not lying,
jenab sarhang
.

Do you want me to show you you’re lying?

I’m not lying,
jenab sarhang
. I swear.

Well, I think you are.

Now if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s being hit, so, having seen him hit the others, I thought I could keep him happy somehow. I had two spare banknotes in a little pocket I’d cut in my belt. I took them out and gave them to him, hoping they’d be enough.

You have something else, haven’t you? he said.

No. I don’t have anything else.

He slapped me across the face, hitting my cheek and ear. I hadn’t seen it coming. My cheek caught fire, my ear whistled for a few seconds. I had the impression it was swelling like a loaf of bread. You’re lying, he said.

I threw myself on him, bit his cheek, tore out his hair … No, I showed him my wrist.

He grimaced with disappointment. To him, my watch wasn’t worth anything. He angrily unfastened it from my wrist and put it in his pocket, without a second glance at me.

They let us go.

I heard them laughing in the bleak light of morning.

After that unexpected customs check, we walked for a few hours toward the nearest town, but by now it was clear that something wasn’t right. Indeed it wasn’t, because a police jeep suddenly appeared, its wheels sending the stones flying, and all these policemen came rushing out, yelling, Stop. We all started running. They started firing with their Kalashnikovs. As I ran, I heard the bullets whistling past me. As I ran, I thought about the kite contests on the hills of Ghazni province. As I ran, I thought about the women of Nava and how they mixed
qhorma palaw
with a wooden ladle. As I ran, I thought about how useful a hole would have been at that moment, a hole in the earth, like the one my brother and I hid in to avoid being found by the Taliban. As I ran, I thought about
osta sahib
and
kaka
Hamid and Sufi and the man with the big hands and the nice house in Kerman. And as I ran, a man running beside me was hit, at least I suppose he was, because he fell to the ground and
rolled a bit and then stopped moving. In Afghanistan, I had heard lots of shooting. I could distinguish the sound of a Kalashnikov from the sound of other rifles. As I ran, I thought about which rifle was shooting in my direction. I was small. I was smaller than the bullets, I thought, and faster. I was invisible, I thought, or as insubstantial as smoke. Then, when I stopped running—because I was far enough away—I thought about leaving Iran. I’d had enough of being afraid.

That was when I made up my mind to try and get to Turkey.

Turkey

N
ow let’s see where I was in time and in my story. I’d reached a point of no return, as you say here—because we don’t say it, at least I never heard anyone say it—I was at such a point of no return that I’d even stopped remembering things, and there were whole days and weeks when I didn’t think at all about my little village in Ghazni province and my mother or my brother or my sister, the way I did at the start, when their image was like a tattoo on my eyes, day and night.

Since the day I’d left, about four and a half years had passed: a year and a few months in Pakistan and three years in Iran. You have to weigh things properly, as a lady says who sells onions in the market near where I’m living now.

I was about fourteen when I decided to leave Iran: I’d had my fill of that life.

Sufi and I had gone back to Qom, after that second repatriation, but he had left a few days later, because in his opinion it had become too dangerous. He’d found work in Teheran, on a building site. Not me. I had decided to stay and work a while longer in the same stonecutting factory, to work hard and not spend any money, so that I could put enough aside to pay for the journey to Turkey. But how much did it cost to leave for Turkey? Or rather, to arrive, which was the most important thing (anyone can leave): how much would I need to spend? Sometimes, if you want to find something out, all you have to do is ask, so I asked a few friends I trusted.

Seven hundred thousand
toman
.

Seven hundred thousand
toman
?

Yes, Enaiat.

That’s ten months’ work, I said to a boy called Wahid, who had once thought of leaving and then hadn’t. My salary at the factory is seventy thousand
toman
a month, I said. So that’ll be ten months without spending even small change.

He nodded, fishing with his spoon in the chickpea soup and blowing on it in order not to burn his tongue. I also dipped my spoon in the soup. Tiny black seeds were floating forlornly on the greasy surface, along with crumbs of bread. First I moved them with the tip of the spoon, creating eddies and currents, then gathered them
together, swallowed them, and finished off the soup by drinking it straight from the cup.

How to find all that money?

One afternoon, a Friday, which as I already said was our time to do what we wanted and which I spent in an endless, indeterminate—is that the right word?—football tournament against teams from the neighboring factories, anyway, one Friday this friend of mine I’d talked to at dinner about traffickers came up to the stone where I was lying with one hand on my stomach, trying to get my breath back, and asked me to listen to him for a second.

I sat up. He wasn’t alone. There were other Afghans with him.

Listen, Enaiat, he said. We’ve talked. We want to leave for Turkey, and we’ve put aside enough money to pay for the journey and to pay for you, too, if you want. And we’re not only doing it because you’re our brother and all that, but also because when you leave with friends, the chances of everything going right are better than when you leave on your own without anyone to help you in an emergency. At that point, the team that had gone out on the field after us scored and everyone yelled for joy. What do you say? he asked after a pause.

What do I say?

Yes.

I say thank you and I accept. What else can I say?

It’s a dangerous journey, you know.

I know.

Much more dangerous than the other journeys.

The ball bounced off the stone and stopped between my feet. I kicked it back with the tip of my shoe. The sun had seized every corner of the sky, the blue wasn’t blue but yellow, the clouds were golden and bleeding where the mountains cut into them. The rocky peaks where stone can crush and snow can wound and suffocate.

I didn’t yet know that mountains can kill.

I pulled up a blade of dry grass and started to suck on it.

I’ve never seen the sea, I said. There are a whole lot of things I haven’t yet seen in my life and that I’d like to see. Plus, even here in Qom, it’s dangerous every time I set foot outside the factory. So you know what I say? I’m ready for anything.

My voice was firm. But only because of my ignorance. If I’d known what was in store for me, I wouldn’t have left. Or maybe I would. I don’t know. I certainly would have said it differently.

We’d all done it. We’d all listened to the stories of those who had gone and come back. And we knew about
those who hadn’t made it from the accounts of their traveling companions. Maybe those companions had survived only to share their horror stories with us. It was as if the government left one or two people alive in every group to scare the others. Some had frozen to death in the mountains, some had been killed by the border police, some had drowned in the sea between the Turkish and Greek coasts.

One day, during the lunch break, I talked to a boy who had a disfigured face. Half of it looked like a McDonald’s hamburger that’s been left too long on the griddle.

McDonald’s?

Yes, McDonald’s
.

It’s funny. Sometimes you say things like: he was as tall as a goat. At other times, when you make comparisons, you come up with McDonald’s, or baseball
.

Why is that funny?

Because they belong to different cultures, different worlds. At least, that’s how it seems to me
.

Even if that was true, Fabio, both those worlds are inside me now
.

He told me that the transit van on which he’d been traveling across Cappadocia had been involved in an accident. At a bend on an unpaved mountain road in Aksaray
province, it had collided with a van loaded with lemons. He’d been thrown out and had scraped his face on the ground. Then the Turkish police had arrested him and beaten him up. And then they handed him over to the Iranians, and they’d beaten him up, too. So his journey to Europe (he wanted to get to Sweden) had turned into a bloody mess, along with his dreams. I’d lend you the money to leave, he said, but I can’t because I don’t want to be responsible for your pain. And there were others who said the same as him, but I’m not sure they were genuine, they might just have been skinflints.