Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  ‘You want cigarettes?’

  ‘If I had any money, I’d be wearing two shoes. But I know who does,’ said Farood.

  ‘Who?’ asked the cigarette boy.

  ‘I’ll tell you if you get me some shoes to wear.’

  ‘How do you know who has money here?’ The cigarette boy sat down, laid his tray by his side.

  ‘Because I saw this man take money from someone last night,’ explained Farood.

  ‘Who? Who is he?’

  ‘Look at my feet. Look at what size they are. I want shoes that will fit me.’

  The cigarette boy looked around for signs, looked for men wearing jewellery, anything he had missed on his rounds. For a moment the bigger boy, looking down on a captive that could barely walk, was in the weaker position. He recovered his sureness. ‘You show me the man – I’ll get you the shoes.’

  They shook hands; Farood pointed. ‘That big Punjabi above us. But you must search his room, his friends. He will have a lot of money somewhere.’

  In the centre of the room, Misha was doing press-ups with his feet elevated onto the chair. He had taken off his shirt, and his forearms were lashed with scars, so much that no one cared to ask. The cigarette boy lugged his tray along the balcony and met the eyes of the Punjabi.

  That night, the agent, his Alsatian, the driver and an Uzbek man in a woollen hat carrying a machete made their way into the Punjabi’s room and the rooms either side. They closed the door on each occasion but only twice were there raised voices and only once barking. The next morning, before he began his round and while the other two were asleep, the cigarette boy walked over to Farood in a new pair of Adidas trainers and gave him his old shoes.

  Fifteen

  Central Iran, December 2002

  Farood was resting his head against the scented upholstery of the car, rubbing his face on it like a cat. The smell reminded him of pears. The world beyond the tinted window looked grey. They were heading west to Tehran. He pulled down the armrest and looked to Jamal and Misha, who appeared confused by the comfort, the luxury afforded to them. The driver’s stare was frozen on the road ahead. It was the same fat-headed man who had picked them up at the border and put Farood and Hassan in the boot, but this was a brand-new car; this was the journey he had been promised outside his cave. He wasn’t just being taken to a better life – he was already living one. Quetta and the mountains were behind him.

  In the rear-view mirror, the driver’s eyes found him. ‘Put the window down if you want.’

  Misha zipped his window up and down until he had just enough air rushing in to the back. A gazelle dashed through a lozenge of light. The driver was taking them to an overnight stay in Tehran. From there, the following day, they would be in Turkey – one step away from the West.

  The driver tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to a song in his head. ‘So, what’s everyone’s plans when you get to the West?’ His eyes found Jamal.

  ‘I don’t mind what I do, as long as I get there.’

  The driver laughed. ‘Of course you’ll get there. People always get through. I’ve never known anyone fail to get to the West, one way or another.’

  Jamal noticed something through the tea-coloured window to his left. It was a man selling apples from a roadside stall. They had to be last year’s apples. Even as they flashed by Jamal could see how stale they were. For once, he volunteered something. ‘I was a student when I left Baghlan. I’d like to finish my studies.’

  ‘You didn’t work?’ The driver disapproved.

  ‘I worked in a clothing factory half the week. With my wife.’

  Farood asked him privately, ‘Where is your wife?’

  Jamal explained to the whole car. ‘The Taliban bombed the factory, killed a lot of people.’

  Farood’s voice was softer still. ‘What were you studying?’

  ‘Engineering. I like machines. Prefer them to people.’

  Farood smiled up at him. ‘If the car breaks, then you can fix it.’

  By mid-afternoon they had arrived in Isfahan. The windows of the people carrier were down. The passengers adjusted their eyes to the brightness and the palatial mosques. Parking off the central square, the driver led them to a café facing a horseshoe of raised rose beds. Small birds were feeding beneath the bushes. Despite the sunshine they felt December’s coolness as they waited for food. The agent smiled and raised his coffee cup to everyone.

  Misha told him how his sunglasses had been taken in the mountains. ‘That agent, he wasn’t like you. He didn’t look after us.’

  Jamal grinned at Misha’s naivety. The agent lit a cigarette and strolled inside to the counter. A few minutes later, the lamb salad arrived and the waiter also placed a pair of sunglasses on the table. The driver handed them to Misha. Though they tried not to, they ate fast, Farood sucking dribbled yoghurt off his tee shirt.

  ‘How are your feet, little one? Clever of you to get those shoes.’

  Farood nodded, eyes on a plateful of meat.

  Jamal wondered about the fate of the drug dealer – the Punjabi wrestler – in Shiraz. He guessed that would now be the cigarette boy’s job. He thought about the factory: sitting over a machine, struggling to concentrate, gazing down the aisle at his wife. His work was sloppy; the supervisor reprimanded him daily. His wife tried to teach him, but he didn’t concentrate, and in the end, they had sacked him. If they hadn’t, the bomb blast would have taken him as well. Many times he had envisaged making this journey with his wife, but had never mentioned it to her.

  He turned to the driver. ‘How will we get across the border?’

  ‘There will be no walking.’

  The driver’s phone rang. He slipped it from his outside pocket, his eyes on his passengers, his smile wide. ‘They are with me now. See you very soon. That was the owner of the house. Everyone had enough to eat?’

  The driver switched on the fan to warm the car. The sun was dipping. Thousands of geese, low in the sky, crossed the horizon ahead of them. Misha and Farood turned to one another, smiling at the spectacle.

  ‘Sleep if you want. When you awake, you’ll be in Tehran,’ said the agent.

  Farood and Misha slept peacefully, Jamal fitfully, and he awoke when he heard the driver’s door slam shut and the locks bolt down. He leaned forward, shaking Misha’s head from his shoulder. The driver was walking towards a white and green police car parked ahead of them. Behind – dirty white houses, chickens on the pavement. They were in a small town, maybe a suburb of somewhere else. A policeman was leaning on the front of the van, arms folded, yawning. He greeted the driver, who went to the passenger side window, where an envelope was handed over. Surely it should be the other way around, thought Jamal. Maybe it wasn’t money in the envelope. But then two policemen headed for the people carrier.

  They were taken to a police station on the outskirts of Tehran, to the underground car park for the three-storey complex of cells and offices, where two more police officers were waiting with a van. Before the three were loaded in, they were pushed up against a wall with the four officers facing them. One of them drew a baton. Misha cowered; the officer laughed. Then, one by one, each of the four policemen kicked the three illegals hard in the shins. After the second policeman had finished, Farood and Jamal fell to the ground and had to be held up for the other two to take their turn. With their wrists tied behind their backs with plastic ties, they were thrown into the darkness of the van. They felt every undulation of the road on their faces until they swivelled onto their backs and leaned against the sides of the cage.

  Nothing was said between them for the first hour; finally Misha asked, ‘Where are they taking us? Across the border?’

  ‘You better hope so,’ cautioned Jamal.

  Jamal had heard of a camp, Tal-e Seeya, close to the border with Afghanistan. There were always lots of Afghans in Iran, and Jamal had met men who had bee
n sent back who had been kept in Tal-e Seeya. They all said the same thing – Afghans were killed there. Another hour, then they were vaulted off the floor of the van as it drove down an unmade road before jerking to a halt. The back doors parted to an avalanche of light, from where they were beckoned out by the two police officers.

  Farood’s legs buckled under him and he fell face down. Jamal took a few steps away from the van and looked around. They were in a compound on a desert plain; in one direction he could make out a road. Behind him, soldiers were being drilled. He looked to the nearest policeman. ‘Tal-e Seeya?’

  He shook his head and got back in the van, which jolted away. The three were left, hands tied behind the backs, with Farood on his knees. He raised his head. ‘Jamal. Where are we?’

  ‘Still in Iran.’

  Jamal looked about, expecting someone to come and strong-arm them somewhere, but they remained unnoticed.

  A hundred metres away a group of men were working the other side of a fence, the chip of pickaxes echoing towards them. Misha walked over and tried to talk to the men, but he was ignored. He limped back, shaking his head. ‘That driver was a bastard.’

  ‘I thought you liked him,’ said Jamal. ‘He bought you a pair of sunglasses, a nice salad.’

  ‘The lamb was coated in lemon juice. I didn’t like that.’

  ‘You know what?’ said Jamal. ‘The thing I didn’t like about him most was that he sold us like slaves. Farood, can you stand? Get up.’

  Farood hobbled towards Jamal. ‘This journey is crippling me.’

  ‘Something tells me you’ll have plenty of time to get better.’

  The door of an adjacent building opened and out came a soldier in uniform with a moustache and sunglasses. ‘In here!’ he ordered.

  The guard led them upstairs to a balcony of barred cells, all empty. Their hands were cut free, then they were locked up: Jamal in one cell, Misha and Farood in another. There was a thin layer of straw on the floor and one arrow-slit window.

  ‘Hey, Jamal, you’re lucky, you have a cell of your own,’ shouted Farood.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, they heard the main door downstairs open and a crowd entering. Farood awoke and shuffled over to the bars. The guard led a group of nine men trudging up the stairs. They were nearly all Afghans, in bare feet, coated in peach-coloured dust. None of them even noticed the new captives. One was pushed into the cell with Misha and Farood. He was breathing deeply and slowly, and his right arm hung limp by his side. He slumped into a corner and closed his eyes. Farood studied his face and picked out the small scraps that had survived free of dirt. He reminded Farood of the miners at Pol-e-Khomri.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Digging. Digging and shovelling all day.’

  ‘What for?’

  The man opened his eyes and gave Farood his full attention. ‘That’s why I’m here. It’s why you’re here.’ He spat. ‘We’re here to work for them until they’ve finished with us.’

  Flatbread was shoved through the bars by an Iranian boy. Farood had to wake his cellmate to eat, but the following morning the two Baghlan boys were still asleep when the cell door opened and their cellmate nudged them with his foot.

  ‘Time to go, you two.’

  Misha and Farood joined the slow procession down the wooden stairs and into the open compound. Farood looked up the line and called out to Jamal, who didn’t respond. It was drizzling and the sun was camouflaged. The party headed a few hundred metres across the camp between blocks of soldiers exercising in unison on one side and crawling under barbed wire with rifles on the other. Whistles were being blown and targets shot at. The work party picked up tools and carried on from the day before. Misha, Farood and their cellmate were pointed over to a head-height pile of hard core, Jamal to a trench. They were given a shovel each.

  The cellmate shovelled with one arm, scooping hard core into a wheelbarrow. ‘Half full,’ said the cellmate.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’ asked Farood.

  ‘Lifted too much.’

  When the barrow was half full, Misha hoisted the handles up to his chest and forced it into motion all the way over to Jamal’s trench. He hurried back.

  ‘They’re not going to let you out of here if you work any faster,’ said his cellmate.

  ‘What happens if we just refuse to work?’ asked Misha.

  ‘You won’t stay alive for long.’

  ‘What are we building?’ asked Farood.

  ‘Barracks for soldiers.’

  Farood attempted the next wheelbarrow load, but he could not raise the back off the ground. Misha took one handle, Farood the other. They faced each other and spoke in unison. ‘One, two, three.’

  They walked a few paces on the spot before grinding their way forward.

  The guard watched from his office. He considered the Afghans. They spend all night sleeping on straw, get up like dogs and go straight to work without food or coffee. He could work them all day and still they wouldn’t ask for food. They’d rather fall over, or steal or kill you. He watched Farood hobbling back and forth, a near cripple who would’ve been left to the wolves in his own country. He went and spoke to the soldier watching over the work party with his baton drawn.

  Misha noted their attention.

  ‘Heads down, keep working.’

  The guard made his way over and pointed at Farood. ‘You, come with me.’

  Misha threw down his shovel. ‘Hey, mister guard. We need him here. I can’t carry this on my own.’

  ‘Yes, you can. You’re a tough little animal. You’re going to build for us; he’s coming with me.’

  Farood smiled back at Misha as he was led to the guardroom.

  The guard sat down behind his desk and took off his cap, brushed what hair there was back, and shuffled some papers into a tray. ‘Sit.’

  The armrests of the leather upholstery were frayed; the boy’s heels were off the ground. On the wall behind the guard was a photograph of a general. Rain was pelting the window.

  ‘You know how to make tea?’

  ‘Yes. Good tea.’

  ‘Heat bread, cook eggs, rice?’

  ‘Cook everything, anything.’

  ‘Good. Much better to be in here, than out there in the dirt and the rain.’

  The boy’s spirits lifted. He was shown into the kitchen, told about the boiler and the oven. ‘You just press a switch, no flames.’ He would need to carry the urn using a tea towel. ‘A little tea will go a long way.’ The cups, though plastic, could be washed.

  ‘Your legs – what happened to you?’

  Cautiously he told the guard what the police did to him in the car park and the mountain journey.

  The guard shook his head in dismay. ‘You know some police officers, they are cowards. We soldiers here, we think it’s a disgrace to beat someone your age.’

  They prepared the food and tea together. Farood swept the wooden floor. The guard told him how he had lost two brothers in the war with Iraq and that he had no children of his own. The guard allowed the boy to eat an egg whilst the tea was brewing. ‘You need to build up your strength for this.’

  By the time Farood carried out the tea urn, Jamal was standing ankle-deep in water. Farood beckoned people towards him, seizing his status as an orderly.

  Misha marched straight to the front of the queue. ‘Farood, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve got this job now.’

  ‘You’re working for the guard?’

  ‘He says I’m too young to work outside and I don’t want to be locked up all day.’

  ‘You think he doesn’t know how to boil an egg?’

  The cellmate laughed. Misha remonstrated with Jamal, who was lying flat on this back with fatigue. ‘The sky has nothing but rain for us.’

  When the work party returned to their ce
lls, Farood wasn’t there. The guard brought him up later and Farood was carrying a blanket.

  ‘Guard looking after you, is he?’ said Misha.

  ‘I’ve been helping him.’

  ‘Helping him do what? Beat some prisoners?’

  ‘Make tea for soldiers.’

  ‘I bet the guard is real nice to you, isn’t he?’

  ‘He told me about his family.’

  ‘I’d love to hear about them. Farood, we need to get out of here. You need to watch the guard.’

  ‘You know what I think. I think you’re just jealous because I have a better job than you.’

  ‘Yeah, and you have a blanket too.’

  The next morning the guard came to collect Farood before sending the work party out. Wooden posts were being driven into the trenches – Misha and his cellmate were mixing cement.

  When the tea arrived Farood acted like a veteran of his round. ‘One cup each, take it easy now, take your turn.’

  People jostled; the bigger men stood at the urn taking their time, more than their share, smiling at the new tea boy. Jamal, Misha and his cellmate waited at the back. It was the same when he returned with the food. The soldier had gone to eat somewhere else.

  Still swallowing what was left for him, Misha strode into the guard’s office. ‘The tea boy is no good. I know him. He’s too young.’

  ‘You want to take his place?’ asked the guard.

  ‘No. He needs my help.’

  ‘Why does he need your help?’

  ‘I’m a good cook,’ insisted Misha. ‘I could make everyone happy.’

  ‘This is a labour camp, we don’t want people to be happy, and Afghans don’t know how to be happy – the shock would kill them. Go back to work and be miserable.’

  It was dark by the time Farood was returned to his cell. The guard walked ahead of him, twisting his key into the lock. Farood reached the top of the stairs, halted, looked at no one in particular, gripped the bannister and began walking again, very slowly. Misha raised himself to his feet and made for the open gate. The guard’s eyes transfixed Misha, then directed Farood into his cell. He walked with the tiniest of steps, moving one leg at a time. The cellmate handed him his blanket. Farood walked over to a far corner and stood there clenching it.