by Fabio Geda
Then I took out a newspaper. It was a daily paper from a few days earlier. I pointed to an article.
The headline was Afghanistan: Taliban boy cuts spy’s throat.
The article was about a young boy without a name who’d been filmed cutting the throat of a prisoner and crying Allah Akbar. The sequence had been broadcast by the Taliban as propaganda in the border areas of Pakistan. In the video you saw the prisoner, an Afghan man, confess his guilt in front of a group of militants, many of them teenagers. Then they showed the executioner, a very young boy wearing a combat jacket a few sizes too big for him. He’s an American spy, the boy said straight to the camera. He was carrying a large knife. People like him deserve to die, he said. At that point a Taliban lifted the condemned man’s beard and they all cried Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, God is great, and the little boy sank the knife into the man’s throat.
I pointed at the article and said, I could have ended up like that.
A few days later, I heard I’d been granted asylum.
Three years passed. It was during my third year at upper school that I thought the moment had come to try and contact my mother. I could have looked for her before, but it was only after obtaining asylum, only after I’d acquired the necessary tranquillity, that I started thinking again about her and my brother and sister. For a long time I had wiped them from my mind. Not out of spite or anything, but because before coming to terms with other people you have to come to terms with yourself. How can you give love if you don’t love your own life? When I realized that I really liked it in Italy, I called one of my Afghan friends in Qom, whose father was in Pakistan, in Quetta, and asked him if he thought it was possible for his father to try and get in touch with my family in Afghanistan.
If your father managed to find my mother, brother and sister, I said, I could pay him for his trouble and also let him have enough money to take all of them with him to Quetta. I told him where they lived and so on. He (my friend in Iran) said, It’ll be complicated for me to explain all these things. I’ll give you the telephone number of my uncle and father. Call them in Pakistan and you do it.
All right?
So I called his father and he was very kind. He said not to think about the money. He said that if they were in Afghanistan, in that little valley, and they didn’t know if I was alive or dead, just as I didn’t know if they were alive or dead, then he considered finding them a duty.
I replied that I’d pay for the journey and expenses anyway, even if he did consider it a duty, because a sense of duty is a good thing, but money’s important, too. Plus, it could be a dangerous journey. Through a war zone.
Time passed. I’d almost given up hope. Then, one evening, I received a phone call. The hoarse voice of my friend’s father greeted me: he sounded very close. He told me it had been difficult to find them, because they’d left Nava and moved to a village on the other side of the valley, but that in the end he’d succeeded, and that when he’d told my mother that I’d been the one to ask for them to move to Quetta, she hadn’t believed it, and didn’t want to leave. He’d had to work hard to convince her to come with him, but she had.
Then he said, Wait. He wanted to give someone the phone. And my eyes filled with tears, because I already knew who that someone was.
Mother, I said.
There was no reply at the other end.
Mother, I repeated.
All I could hear through the receiver was breathing, soft and moist and slightly sharp. I realized that she, too, was crying. We were talking to each other for the first time in eight years, and that sharpness and those sighs were all that a son and a mother can say to each other, after all that time. We continued like that, both silent, until we were cut off.
That was when I knew she was still alive, and maybe it was also then that I realized, for the first time, that I was, too.
I’m not quite sure how. But I was.
Enaiatollah finished telling his story soon after turning twenty-one (maybe). The date of his birthday has been decided by the authorities: it is September 1, 1989. His mother is living in Pakistan and he hopes to see her soon. He has recently discovered that there really are crocodiles in the sea.
Fabio Geda is an Italian novelist who works with children who are under duress. He writes for several Italian magazines and newspapers and teaches creative writing at Scuola Holden, the Italian school of storytelling in Turin. This is his first book to be translated into English.
Enaiatollah Akbari graduated from high school in the spring of 2011 and plans to attend university in Italy while continuing to support his mother and siblings, who are now living in Pakistan. He dreams of having the chance to return one day to a democratic and peaceful Afghanistan.
Howard Curtis is a London-based translator of Italian and French texts, for which he has won numerous awards, including the John Florio Prize for Italian Translation. He was short-listed for the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.