by Fabio Geda
The bus driver pressed a button and the doors opened wide with a hiss. Centuries passed, the air was still, nobody spoke, not even those who had nothing to fear because they were Iranians or because their papers were in order, then the first policeman got on. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He had one arm of his sunglasses in his hand, the other in his mouth.
When the police get on a bus, they don’t ask everyone for their papers: they know perfectly well who’s Iranian and who isn’t. They’re trained to recognize Afghans, illegals, and so on, and as soon as they see one they go straight to him and demand to see his papers even though they know perfectly well he doesn’t have any.
I had to become invisible. But that wasn’t one of my powers. I pretended to be asleep, because when you sleep it’s as if you aren’t there, and also because pretending to sleep is like pretending everything’s all right and that things will work out. But this policeman was a smart one, and he saw me even though I was asleep. He tugged at my sleeve. I kept pretending to sleep and even shifted a bit in my sleep, which I tend to do during the night. The policeman kicked me in the shin. At that point I woke up.
Come with me, he said. He didn’t even ask me who I was.
Where?
He didn’t reply. He looked at me and put on his sunglasses, even though it was quite dark inside the bus.
I picked up my bag. I apologized to the girl next to me and asked if she could let me through, and as I passed her I got an even stronger whiff of her perfume. Everyone watched me as I walked down the aisle, and I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my neck. As soon as I stepped down onto the ground, the bus closed its doors with the same pneumatic hiss as before and set off. Without me.
There was a small police station, with a car parked outside it.
Telisia. Sang Safid.
Drums in the night.
Telisia. Sang Safid.
I can pay, I said immediately. I can pay for my repatriation. I did in fact have money with me that I’d earned on the site. But for some reason they wouldn’t listen to me. One of the policemen, a huge Iranian, pushed me through a door. For a fraction of a second I imagined a torture chamber caked with blood and strewn with fragments of bone, a deep well filled with skulls, a pit going down into the bowels of the earth, little black insects crawling over the walls and acid stains on the ceiling.
What was inside?
A kitchen. That’s what.
Mountains of filthy plates and pots, waiting to be washed.
Get down to work, said the huge Iranian. The sponges are over there.
It took me hours to win the battle against the remains of sauce and caked rice. I don’t know how many years those pots had been there, waiting for me. As I was washing the cutlery and plates, four other Afghan boys arrived. When we’d finished in the kitchen, they took all five of us and set us to work loading and unloading cars and vans and so on. Whenever there was a boot or a trailer to be checked, the policemen called us and we started emptying it. When they’d finished their checking, they called us again: there were crates and suitcases to be put back, boxes to be stacked, and so on.
I stayed there for three days. Whenever I was tired, I sat down on the ground with my back against the wall and my head on my knees. If someone arrived and there was unloading and loading to be done, a policeman would come and kick us and say, Wake up, and we would get up and start again. On the evening of the third day they let me go. I don’t know why. The four other boys stayed there and I never saw them again.
I got to Qom on foot.
Qom is a city with a population of at least a million—I found out later—but if you counted all the illegals in the stonecutting factories, I think the number would be double that. There are stonecutting factories everywhere. Thanks to Sufi, I started working in the same factory where he worked.
There were forty or fifty of us. They put me in the kitchen. I made meals and did the shopping. Unlike Isfahan, in Qom I was the only one to leave the factory—in order to do the shopping—which was very, very risky for me but something I couldn’t get out of.
Apart from cooking, I washed and cleaned the factory manager’s office. And if there was anything else to do, like standing in for workers who were ill or moving stuff, they would call me. Ena, they would shout. Sometimes they would just call without even turning around, as if I was already there in front of them, as if I had the ability to materialize as soon as my name was uttered. In other words, I was a jack of all trades. That’s what you call it, isn’t it?
Whenever rocks arrived in the factory, they were cut using these huge machines, some as big as my house in Nava. The noise was incredible, and there was water everywhere. You put on boots (it was obligatory) and a plastic overall and some people even covered their ears with headphones, but with all that water on the ground and that stone dust in the air, it was difficult staying healthy and avoiding getting sick. Not just staying healthy, it was difficult staying alive. Or in one piece.
From time to time, one of the workers operating the machines, those huge machines that broke up the stones like terra-cotta and sliced through them like butter, would lose a piece of his body: an arm, a hand, a leg. We worked long hours, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and when you’re tired it’s easy to get distracted.
One day an Afghan boy a little bit older than me came to me and said, What’s your name?
Enaiatollah.
Can you play football, Enaiatollah?
Yes, I thought, I could play football, even though I was better at buzul-bazi, not that I’d played it since I left Nava. Yes, I said, I can.
Really? Then be at the gate tomorrow afternoon at five. There’s a tournament. We need more players.
A tournament?
Yes. Between the factories. Will you come?
Of course.
Good.
The thing is, the next day was Friday. That’s important because, although life in the factory consisted of nothing but working, eating and sleeping, we did have one half-day of rest: Friday afternoon. Some people used the time to wash, and some went to see their friends. From that Friday onward, I played on the football team. We were all Afghans, as you can imagine, workers from three or four neighboring factories. There were more than two thousand Afghans working in the stonecutting factories.
I did myself proud, in those games, as far as I could. Though sometimes I was a bit tired because my working day usually finished at ten at night.
One afternoon, after I’d been in the factory for a few months, I was lifting a really heavy stone—more than two meters long—when I lost my balance and the stone fell and shattered on the ground, with a crash you could hear all over the factory, and one sharp piece hit my foot.
It tore my trousers, sliced through my boot, scraped my calf and made a deep cut in the back of my ankle. You could see the bone. I screamed and sat down clutching my leg. One of the factory foremen came running. He told me the stone was for an important delivery, and heads would roll because it was broken. In the meantime, I was losing blood.
Get up, the man said to me.
I pointed out that I was injured.
We have to think of the stone first. Pick up the pieces. Now.
I asked if I could dress the wound.
Now, he said. But he was referring to the stone, not dressing the wound.
I started to pick everything up, hopping on one leg with the blood soaking my trousers and dripping out of the boot. I didn’t even faint, just think of that. I don’t know how I managed, I mightn’t be able to do it today. I finished picking up the scattered pieces, then, still hopping, went to disinfect and bandage the wound. To do that, I had to peel off a piece of flesh. I still have the scar today. And for a while I couldn’t play football.
Given the gaping wound and everything, for a while I worked only in the kitchen. One day, as I was going to do the shopping, I saw a beautiful watch in a shop window. It was made of rubber and metal, and didn’t cost too much. I’ve already said�
�if I’m not mistaken—that I’d often thought about having a watch, just to give some meaning to the passing of time, a watch that would show the date and tell me how much I was aging. So, when I saw that particular watch, I counted the money I had in my pocket and even though I didn’t have much I realized I could buy it.
So I went in and did it. I bought the watch.
Leaving the shop, I swear, I was beside myself with joy. It was the first watch I’d ever had in my life. I kept looking at it and lifting my wrist so that I could see the sun reflected in the dial. I would have run all the way to Nava just to show it to my brother (how envious he would have been), but running all the way to Nava would have been a problem, so I ran to have it blessed at the shrine of Fatima al-Masuma, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam and one of the most appropriate (so I believed) for blessing something that means a lot to you, the way my watch did to me.
I rubbed the watch against the wall of the shrine, to purify it, but taking care not to scratch it.
I was so happy with my watch, there was a moment when I even thought that, despite the danger of losing a finger or whatever, I might stay in Qom for a long time.
Then, one night, the police came to the factory. They were well organized. They had lorries, so that they could take us straight to the border without having to go to a temporary detention center. Repatriation. Again. I couldn’t believe it. It was really depressing. The police knew lots of illegals worked in that factory. They broke down the door of the shed where we were sleeping and started kicking us to wake us up.
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.
* A little note on the question of language, in order not to break the flow of the story. If you’re not interested, just carry on reading: no one dies in the next few lines, and no information is provided that’s essential to the story. The thing about language is that, at first, it was difficult for me to speak to Iranians. Their language, Farsi, is similar to Dari (which is an Eastern dialect of Farsi, spoken i
n Afghanistan), but the accent of Farsi isn’t exactly like that of Dari. They are in exactly the same way, but Farsi and Dari (pronounced with a stress on the last syllable: Farsī and Darī) have very different accents.
Turkey
Now 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.