In the Sea There are Crocodiles (6 page)

I wasn’t in an indoor restaurant, that was why the longbeard had seen me. I was in a dusty little square and in the middle of the square was the Indian with the pot. Once you’d paid for your bowl of ash, the Indian gave you a bowl and a spoon, and you went into a corner and ate it standing up, then gave everything back to him. You couldn’t have a system like that in this country, Fabio, for hygiene reasons.

I don’t know who that longbeard was exactly. He had a huge white turban on his head, so thick that even if you’d hit him a thousand times he wouldn’t have felt a thing, and his mouth was covered with his beard, so that when he spoke you couldn’t see his lips move, just his cheeks a little, as if he was a ventriloquist, but in all probability he was a Wahhabi, one of those fundamentalists who are always yelling about jihad and so on.

So what does he do? He takes the bowl and turns
it upside down. And I had paid for that soup: it was my soup. But all I could do was look at the soup drying on the ground and a cat eating my beans.

That’s it, I thought.

I was fed up with being treated badly. I was fed up with the fundamentalists, the police who stopped you and asked you for your passport and, when you said you didn’t have one, took your money and kept it for themselves. And you had to give them the money straightaway, otherwise they took you to the police station and punched and kicked you. I was fed up risking my life, like that time I was saved by a miracle from a fundamentalist attack because we boys from the Liaqat Bazaar hadn’t gone to pray in the biggest Shia mosque in Quetta, as we usually did, and I’m not even sure why we didn’t that day, but sometime later we heard a very loud explosion and ran to see. We were told that two suicide bombers had tried to get in. One had been stopped, but the other had succeeded. They’d both blown themselves up. Nineteen people had died inside and outside the mosque, or so I was told.

I met a lot of boys who were going to Iran. Or who had come back from Iran. They said things were better in Iran than in Pakistan (which I didn’t doubt: I’d have sworn that anywhere on earth was better than Quetta)
and that there was much more work in Iran. And apart from that, there was the question of religion. They were Shia—the Iranians, I mean—which was better for us Hazara, for the stupid reason that brothers in religion treat each other better, though as far as I’m concerned you should be kind to everyone and shouldn’t have to check their identity card or religious affiliation.

I heard these voices in the air, as if broadcast through a loudspeaker like a muezzin’s prayer, I sensed them in the flight of birds, and I believed them, because I was small, and when you’re small what do you know of the world? Listening and believing were the same thing. I believed everything people told me.

So when I heard those things—that the Iranians were Shia and they treated you well and there was work—and when I saw Afghan boys in the street who’d been in Teheran or Qom and now had money in their pockets, and clean hair, and new clothes and trainers instead of slippers, whereas we Hazaras who worked at the Liaqat Bazaar stank like goats, I swear to you, when I saw these boys stop for a night at the
samavat
Qgazi, and reflected that they’d been like me once whereas now they wore jeans and shirts, I made up my mind that I would go to Iran, too.

I went back to
kaka
Rahim and asked his advice,
because of all the people I knew he was the one who knew most about traveling. Unsmiling, smoking a cigarette as usual, the smoke clinging to his long lashes, he said I was doing the right thing, going to Iran, but he said it as if doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing were the two halves of a roll which had to be eaten together, without worrying about the filling.

He wrote something on a piece of paper, a name, and handed it to me. Go and talk to him, he said. It was the name of a people trafficker and I had to introduce myself to him as a friend of
kaka
Rahim, so that he would treat me well and not be tempted to cheat me, which was something you always had to reckon with in that kind of situation. Then he went into the kitchen, put some roast chickpeas and raisins in a packet and gave it to me saying that he couldn’t give me anything else, except for his blessing, his wish that I arrive safe and sound.

My mind was made up. There was no turning back.

I went to say goodbye to Zaman and promised him I would always read a bit of the Qur’an, if I happened to find a copy. I went to
osta sahib
and thanked him for everything. Then I went to find the boys in the Liaqat Bazaar and told them I was about to leave.

Where are you going?

Iran.

And how are you getting there?

With a people trafficker. I got his name from
kaka
Rahim.

If they catch you, you’ll end up in Telisia or Sang Safid. Like the old madman in the market, the one with the stones in his pocket, who spends all day rubbing them because he’s convinced there’s gold inside them.

I was familiar with the stories circulating about Telisia and Sang Safid. Stories about beatings and abuse. I don’t care, I said, I don’t want to be here anymore.

They say a whole lot of people die on the border because the Iranian police shoot at you, one person said.

They say there’s a lot of work, said another.

Rumors, I said. The only thing to do is go and see for myself.

Sufi was eating dates, making big chewing movements with his mouth like a camel. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his
pirhan
, slipped the bag from his back and put it down on the ground. With a leap backward he jumped onto a low wall, scaring away a lizard that was enjoying the sun. He was silent for a few minutes, the way he usually was, with his arms folded and his legs crossed. Then he said, Are you sure it’s a good idea?

I shrugged my shoulders. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to leave.

Ba omidi khoda
. I don’t want to stay here either, said Sufi.

I didn’t say anything, because I was hoping he’d be the one to say it.

I’m coming with you, Enaiat.

When we went to talk to the trafficker, in a dark room filled with
taryak
smoke and a whole lot of men drinking
chay
and heating opium on camping stoves, he asked us for the money immediately. But we didn’t have all the money he wanted. We emptied the pockets of our
pirhans
, turning the material inside out, gathered all the coins and crumpled notes we’d managed to save and heaped them on the table in front of him: a little hill of money.

That’s all we can give you, I said. Not even half a rupee more.

He looked us up and down for a long time, as if measuring us for a suit. Your little pile of money isn’t even enough to pay for a bus ticket as far as the border, he said.

Sufi and I looked at each other.

But there might be a solution, he went on, finishing cutting an apple and lifting a piece of it to his mouth with the knife. I’ll take you to Iran, all right, but in Iran you’ll have to work in a place I know.

Work? I said. That’s fantastic. I couldn’t believe my ears: not only was he taking us to Iran, he was also going to find us work.

I’ll take your wages for three or four months, said the trafficker, depending on how much your journey is going to cost me. After that you’ll be able to consider yourselves free and do what you like. Stay there, if you like it. Or leave, if you don’t.

Sufi was so calm and silent, I half expected him to close his eyes and kneel in prayer. As for me, I was dazed by the smoke and the darkness, and was trying to think what the catch might be, because there’s always a catch with traffickers, but the fact of the matter was, we didn’t have any more money, and he had to pay the Baluchis and the Iranians who would get us across the border, and that was the biggest expense, so he wasn’t completely wrong: we weren’t his children, he didn’t want to lose money on our journey. And besides, I’d introduced myself as not just anybody but a friend of
kaka
Rahim’s, and that reassured me more than anything else.

Sufi and I said okay.

Be here, outside the door, tomorrow morning at eight, he said.
Khoda negahdar
.

At eight. Outside the door. But neither of us had a watch, or rather, neither of us had ever, and I mean ever, owned a watch in our lives. In Nava, to know what time it was, I measured the shadows with my steps and when there was no sun I had to guess. You woke up when it was
light, and you heard the chanting of the muezzin and the crowing of the roosters. In Quetta, the noise of the city going to work would wake me, but never at a particular time. For this reason, Sufi and I had decided not to go to sleep that night.

We walked around, saying goodbye to the city.

In the morning the trafficker took us to a place about twenty minutes’ walk away, where we stayed until midday and ate yogurt and cucumbers: I remember it well because it was our last lunch in Pakistan. Then we left.

First we traveled on a bus as far as the border, a bus with lots of seats. We traveled not as illegals, hidden under the seats, but with tickets like important people. We were very happy. We could never have imagined that our journey to Iran would be so comfortable, and in fact the rest wouldn’t be. But we’d certainly got off to a good start.

At the border we joined another group of people. In all there were seventeen of us. We got into a Toyota pickup truck: there were four seats in front, which were taken by the trafficker and his companions, while the seventeen of us crammed into the back, packed as tightly as olives. There was even one of those longbeards—among the illegals, I mean—a fat, tousle-haired man who seemed to take an instant dislike to me, even though I hadn’t done anything to him, and who during the journey tried constantly
to shove me out of the truck with his knee, pretending he wasn’t doing anything. After a while I had to say to him, Stop it, don’t do that, don’t do that, but it was like talking to a mountain, what with all the noise of the wheels and the engine. The Toyota was climbing along mountain roads, with ravines below, and even without his shoving I was already in danger of falling. I started begging him, saying I hadn’t done anything wrong. Sufi didn’t know what to do either, he wanted to help me, but how? At that point, without saying anything, another man, who might have been a Tajik, stood up calmly, as if he was going to go and drink a little water, punched the longbeard in the face and told him to leave me alone, because I hadn’t done anything to him and we both had a long journey ahead of us and wanted to reach our destination, and there was no reason to make trouble for each other.

The longbeard calmed down.

After hours of traveling, we arrived and they made us get out. I couldn’t say where we were: a low, bare, arid mountain, where the ground crunched underfoot. It was dark and there were no lights. Even the moon had hidden. The people traffickers made us hide in a cave because the order was to take only five people to the city at a time.

When it was our turn, mine and Sufi’s, the traffickers made Sufi get in the back of the truck and me in the
front, in the passenger seat next to the driver. They told me to squat down. Then two other people got in, so that instead of being able to look out of the window, as I’d really been hoping to do, I spent the short ride into the city between the feet of those two passengers, with the soles of their shoes resting on my back.

The city we came to, when we came to it, was called Kerman.

Iran

A
two-story house. A yard with trees and a low stone wall separating it from the street, but obviously we couldn’t go out there to play
buzul-bazi
or football. On the first floor there was a bathroom with a shower and two spacious living rooms with cushions and rugs and a lot of windows, all of them blacked out. The ground floor was the same. Except for the toilet, which was outside, in the yard, hidden by a cypress tree. In short, that house in Kerman was a nice house.

We and our trafficker weren’t the only people there but also other groups of people, all illegals in transit, I had no idea where from. Some people were sleeping, or eating, or talking in low voices, or cutting their nails. A man was consoling a child who was lying on the floor in a corner, crying desperately. A trafficker was sitting at the table, cleaning a long knife. A lot of people were smoking
and the room was shrouded in smoke. Not a single woman. Sufi and I sat down against a wall to rest. They brought us something to eat: rice with fried chicken. The rice was good, and so was the fried chicken. And maybe it was because of the fact that I was alive, in a nice house in Iran, or because of the tasty rice and fried chicken, or because of all these emotions together, but I started shaking.

I felt hot and cold at the same time. I was sweating. When I breathed, I produced a thin whistling sound, and I was shaking so much, not even an earthquake could have shaken me to the core like that.

What’s the matter? said Sufi.

I don’t know.

Are you ill?

I think so.