I feel like I know you,
Saleem wanted to say. But he resisted and followed the man’s lead. They walked through the main pathway that crossed through the Jungle.
“A Kabuli family. Your father’s name?”
“Mahmood Waziri.” Saleem fiddled with the worn watchband on his wrist.
“Waziri. Mahmood Waziri? That name sounds awfully familiar. Let me see, do you mean Mahmood Waziri, the engineer? Worked for the Ministry of Water and Electricity?”
Saleem felt a tingle in his chest.
“Yes, yes! Did you know my father?” He stopped in his tracks and looked up at the old man’s face. His thin lips parted in a half smile.
“Do you not see these white hairs, my friend? I am old enough to have known more than just a few men. I know generations of men. I dare to say, much of Kabul’s history fills the space between my ears.”
Saleem grinned.
“Of course I knew your father. He’s not here with you.” A gentle statement more than a question.
“No, he was . . . taken.” Saleem said it quickly, not wanting the words to linger.
“A shame, a true shame. Such an intelligent man. And your mother? She was a teacher. Where is she?”
“She is with my younger sister and brother. I think they’re in London. We were separated during our travels.”
“Ah, I see. God willing, your family is safely in London and anxiously awaiting your arrival. You’re brave to have made this voyage on your own. You must have seen many difficulties on your way here.”
“No more and no less than anyone else,” Saleem said, thinking of Ali. Naeem. The boys in Attiki. Patras. Pagani. The ones whose
journey ended in the rocky waters. The ones who never made it out of Kabul.
“Wise of you to know this. We all cross a hundred peaks to get even this far. And there will be more before we each make it to whatever destination God has fated for us.”
“I worry about what God has fated for my little brother,” Saleem confessed, digging in the ground with the toe of his shoe. “He has a bad problem with his heart. We were able to get him some medicine in Turkey, but after that we couldn’t take him to any doctors.”
“There are things beyond our control, but there is reason behind the system, whether or not we choose to believe it. Let’s sit.” He led Saleem to some small boulders a few yards away. “Let us talk of things more pleasant than the fate of the Jungle. Saleem-
jan,
I knew your father by his reputation. He was a brilliant engineer, one of Kabul’s finest talents. Are you familiar with the work he was doing?”
“No, Uncle,” Saleem said respectfully. His face reddened at his own ignorance when it came to his father’s projects. “I only know it had something to do with water.”
The man was forgiving.
“You were young, no doubt. Your father’s area of expertise was bringing water to the outlying parts of Kabul and the surrounding areas. He had several ingenious irrigation projects that he pushed through the mountains of bureaucracy. And mountains of bureaucracy was when things were good.
“Later, there were much bigger obstacles in the way of his projects. There was no use trying to accomplish anything in Kabul at that time. People were scared. Nothing was happening. People were just trying to stay alive. When your father was killed, that left you and your mother to tend to the younger children?”
“Yes. We had no money. We weren’t sure if they would come after us and we felt trapped. We had to leave Kabul.”
“It’s never easy to leave one’s home, especially when there are only closed doors ahead of you.”
“My father left us with nothing. It was useless to stay there. Most of our family had already left. My aunt and uncle have been living in London. A normal life. Not like . . . not like this. My cousins never saw things get bad in Kabul. That could have been our story too.”
Saleem hadn’t meant to sound as resentful as he did. It was a sentiment he tried to keep buried, but it resurfaced from time to time, especially when he felt exhausted by their journey.
“It is possible that if your father had led his family out of Kabul earlier, maybe your story would be different. Perhaps you would be living somewhere in Europe, accepted as asylum seekers. But only if that was the destiny that Allah had in store for you. And there’s something else you should realize. You think that it was futile for your father to stay in Kabul, to continue his work, but there are hundreds of people who would disagree with you.”
“What do you mean? Which people?”
“Which people? Why, the hundreds of people who had
water
because of him. The hundreds of people were able to
survive
because of him. He was the only person insisting on these projects, demanding them. Other people looked for their own interests, money and guns fattening their bellies instead of helping to feed the people of Kabul. That is the difference that your father made. He changed people’s lives. He never knew their names. He never saw their faces. But he saved their lives.”
“I didn’t know,” Saleem said, his voice muffled with guilt.
“You would not have known,” the old man gently replied.
Saleem stared at his shoes and blinked back tears.
It takes a lifetime to learn your parents. For children, parents are larger than life. They are strong arms that carry little ones, warm laps for sleepy heads, sources of food and wisdom. It’s as if parents were born on the same day as their children, having not existed a moment before.
As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied.
Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls. Saleem had only bits and pieces of his father, mostly the memories of a young boy. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, trying to reconstruct his father with the scraps he could recall or gather from his mother.
But first, he had to admit the last year’s worth of memories were tainted by a discreet anger he harbored for Padar-
jan
for keeping them in Kabul when they should have escaped. Now Saleem had learned his father had done so because he knew the importance of his work. When he’d realized his family was in danger, he’d made plans to escape but by then it was too late.
Reap a noble harvest, my son.
Saleem stuttered. “I . . . I loved my father very much.”
“Of course you did. You are asking questions. You want answers. That is natural. That is exactly as your father would have done.”
The old man had said something else earlier.
“You knew my mother as well?” Saleem asked, steeling his voice back to its normal cadence.
“Your mother, her name is . . . oh, my failing memory . . . what is it again?”
“Fereiba.”
“Ah, yes, Fereiba-
jan,
” he said. But to Saleem it sounded like he knew her name all along. “A delightful woman. As I said, I remember when she was a teacher. She made each student and each lesson important. You know, when she was young, the world treated her callously. But she did not let an unjust beginning spoil her. If you ever meet a former student of hers, you will be honored to hear what kind of teacher she was.”
“How did you know her?”
“I guess you could say I was a friend of her grandfather’s. He had a beautiful, bountiful orchard that was the envy of all in Kabul. But as she became a young woman, I saw her less and less. I was pleased to hear of her happy marriage to your father. Their success made me proud. You know, my son, you’re fortunate. I see both your parents in you.”
“Fortunate” was not the word Saleem would have chosen if asked to describe himself. He had felt anything but fortunate in the last year.
“So, my boy, I can see in your face that you’ve traveled a rough road. But how will you get to England?”
“I don’t know exactly, but this tunnel is probably the best route. I’ve been to the port and the fences are too thick. I just don’t see how it’s possible. Nearly everyone’s been caught trying to get across there.”
The old man stood up and stared off into the channel. From here it was easy to see the currents, linear streams of water a shade different from the rest of the ocean, like secret passages within the depths.
“However tall the mountain, my son,” the old man said. “There is a way to the other side.”
FOR TWO WEEKS, THE JUNGLE BOYS LINGERED IN THE UNKNOWN,
a more tightly wound time than the years they’d passed in covert transit. In those two weeks, the old man seemed to have vanished. Saleem asked Ajmal about him, but his roommate only shrugged his shoulders and said he did not know every one of the hundreds of Afghans in their settlement.
Every day, men in wind jackets and neatly pressed slacks came to the camp. From a distance, they pointed, made notes on clipboards, and snapped photos before they would shake hands with one another and head off in different directions. Something was in the works.
One group of boys had hatched a plan. A holiday was coming up in a few days. Two men had amassed quite a following of about two hundred refugees. The idea was to take advantage of the day. The skeleton crew on duty would be distracted, with conciliatory festive meals and a few libations on the job. No one in the camp knew exactly what the holiday signified, and no one really cared. All that mattered was
that while the French guards were observing the holiday, they would be observing little else.
They talked about it every day, churning the theory into a hard plan.
“If we all go through at once, how many could they possibly catch? Maybe a few, but most of us will make it.”
“You see! Even you say a few will get caught.”
“Every day a few try to get through and how many actually succeed? Our chances will be much better. The Jungle is about to disappear. This may be our best chance.”
Saleem debated the idea himself. It was a decent plan, he decided. But to brave the tunnel with hundreds of refugees seemed counterintuitive. All his other passages had been done alone, attracting as little attention as possible.
Saleem listened from afar, wishing for an opinion from someone he could trust, but the voices he most wanted to hear were too distant to be audible.
Make up your mind. Time is running out. This money won’t last much longer.
WITH SUNSET, THE BUZZ BEGAN. PEOPLE FIDGETED, LEGS WERE
restless. Saleem and Ajmal watched from a distance.
“They look like they’re going to mess themselves already,” Ajmal said. “They’re crazy to do this.”
Saleem chewed his lip as he paced. Though he’d not yet decided if he would follow the others, his legs were restless too.
“Maybe they are. But maybe they’re not,” Saleem said. In a snap decision, he ran into the shack he shared with Ajmal, got his backpack, and pulled the straps over his shoulders.
“Wish me luck, brother. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come back. But I need to at least try.”
At quarter past eleven, with a pale, orange moon hanging low in
the sky, the boys, a straggling crowd of a hundred, began their walk to the tunnel. They fractured into small groups, speaking in whispers and occasional laughs to break the tense mood. Most were grim and silent.
Saleem rushed to catch up with the stragglers. The path was familiar to him. He’d sat on the hilltop and stared at the tunnel entrance several times but never worked up the nerve to approach it. The boys reached a line of metal fences. The links were broken in two or three spots, inviting further trespass. Like the others, Saleem scraped through, wincing as the fence clawed at his back.
The tunnel entrance, concrete bored through the base of a grassy plain, was a valley flanked by verdant hillsides. There were open-mouthed entries for trains moving in either direction, a network of tracks leading into the black holes. A narrow, graded median divided the train entry from that of the automobiles. The valley, as a whole, was a bed of metal, pavement, and concrete, set aglow by rows of sodium lamps.
There were few cars on the road tonight.
Saleem let the others lead the way. The walk here had been long. He rubbed his hands together to warm them. He was grateful for the parka he’d been given by one of the men in the camp. Dark shadows jogged toward the entrance, watching for guards, lights, or sirens. The night was still.
Go with them. They’ll be in England soon. This is that chance.
Two or three at a time, they filtered into the tunnel and disappeared from view. Saleem stood behind a tree and watched from the vantage point of a boy unnerved. Frustrated, he punched at the bark.
Enough of this. I am going to follow them.
And just as he resolved to push aside his fears and grab the low-lying fruit, the shouts rang out. White lights broke the soft orange haze. Three police cars peeled into view and screeched to a stop by the entrance. Flashlights led the way.
Saleem’s heart dropped. There were so many. For hours, it continued. Men were led out, their hands tied behind their backs, their feet dragging with disappointment. The boys had considered the possibility that a few would be caught, but it was much worse. They’d rounded up at least half by Saleem’s count. Everything those boys had done, all the money they’d paid and the risks they’d faced and the cold nights they’d endured—all of it had been in vain.
The others would likely be caught on the other side by the British authorities. What would become of them? Would they be given the chance to apply for asylum or would they be shuttled back to France?
Tonight had not been the right night to chase the moon. When all but one police car had finally left the scene, Saleem turned around and hiked back to the Jungle.
NAJIBA-
JAN
HAS BEEN GOOD TO US. I CAN SEE THE LOOK ON HER
husband’s face. Hameed would like nothing more than for us to be gone. Germany offers much better benefits to its refugees, he says, though he has no good explanation for why he does not want to move there himself.