‘You see, these notes do not exist,’ said Ajatashatru, lifting his hands in the air so that the three folded-up notes in his sleeve could fall down inside his shirt. ‘They are magic notes. Which really just means fake notes.’
‘I don’t understand,’ admitted the man, beginning to take the bait.
‘It’s very simple. These notes are made from unleavened bread, a one hundred per cent organic product with no yeast and no sugar,’ the fakir lied. ‘The same procedure as for Catholic priests’ wafers, basically. The notes melt in my hands, which are warmer than the air in the room, and they vanish without a trace.’
‘Amazing!’
‘So that is why, although I appear to be in possession of a vast fortune, I cannot pay for my journey, captain, because this pile of cash is just a mirage, an illusion. And a tasty one, into the bargain.’
UNFORTUNATELY FOR AJATASHATRU, Captain Aden Fik was a big food lover. So, in the end, the price paid by the shipwrecked Indian for crossing the Mediterranean was three purple millefeuilles, which were in reality three wads of €500 notes, amounting to a grand total of €15,000. It could have been worse, though: had the fakir not used his famous gift of the gab to preach the benefits of a balanced diet and to warn about the outrageously high calorie content of unleavened bread, the captain would have taken the entire briefcase.
So that was why, as soon as the Malevil dropped anchor in the port of Tripoli the next day at 2 p.m., Ajatashatru ran down the pontoon as quickly as possible and disappeared into the quayside crowds. He was imagining the Libyan’s face when he started chewing his money and discovered that it did not melt in his mouth, and particularly when he realised that these were real notes, and that he had let slip a briefcase stuffed full of cash.
The Indian found himself in the middle of a mosaic of unfamiliar smells and colours that reminded him how alone he was here. For a moment, he felt homesick for his village, his loved ones, his ordinary daily life. These days spent in strange lands were beginning to weigh heavily on him.
In this part of the world, people had olive skin just as they did in his country. But they did not wear turbans or moustaches, and that made them look younger. There were also a lot of black people like Assefa, eyes full of hope, who appeared to be waiting for boats to take them to that yearned-for continent of Europe, which he had just left so easily. Around them, men – some dressed in military uniform, others in civilian clothes, but all of them carrying machine guns – walked around smoking contraband cigarettes, to remind you that you were on the wrong side of the Mediterranean.
In his posh suit, incongruous amid the local dress code of tracksuit and sandals, Ajatashatru attempted not to draw too much attention to himself. In the last twenty-four hours, he had already been threatened with an ice cooler, a knife and a pistol. As the weapons wielded by his enemies seemed to be exponentially increasing in power, he might soon, if he wasn’t careful, find himself staring down the barrel of a rusty old machine gun. So the magician became, for a little while, a small beige-coloured mouse, scurrying towards what it thought was the way out of the port while carrying a briefcase containing €85,000.
When it arrived at the guard post, the little Indian mouse found itself looking on helplessly as two soldiers, armed to the teeth, took advantage of a young black man. One of the soldiers had slammed the foreigner against a wall and the other one, cigarette dangling from his mouth, was nonchalantly going through his pockets. They took the little cash that they found, as well as his passport. They would get a decent sum for that on the black market. Then the soldiers spat on the ground and went back to their sentry box, laughing loudly.
The young man, robbed of his identity and the small amount of money he’d had to pay for his crossing to Italy, slid hopelessly down the wall like a hunted animal that is so badly wounded it no longer has the strength to stand upright. When his arse touched the dusty ground, he buried his head between his knees to disappear from this hell.
A chill ran down Ajatashatru’s spine. Had he not, in his banker’s suit, been as conspicuous as the Great Wall of China on Google Earth, he would have knelt down next to the poor man and helped him to get up again. But it was better not to draw more attention to himself. Yes, he would have knelt down next to him and talked to him about Italy or France; he would have told the African that the journey was worth all the difficulties. That he, Ajatashatru, had friends in the same situation, who must, at that moment, have been jumping into a truck bound for England, their pockets stuffed with chocolate biscuits bought in France, from a supermarket where there seemed to be so many things in abundance, all within reach for the price of just a few banknotes printed on both sides. That he had to keep going, not to give up; that the promised land was there, on the other side of the sea, a few hours’ journey in a hot-air balloon. That, over there, there were people who would help him. That the ‘good countries’ were a box of chocolates, and that the most likely scenario was not that he would be greeted by the police. And that, even if he was, the police there did not hit you with big sticks, like they did in Ajatashatru’s village. There were good guys everywhere.
But he would also want to tell the young African that life was too precious to be risked, and that it would do him no good to reach Europe dead, whether drowned in the sea, or asphyxiated in a cramped hiding place inside a delivery van, or poisoned in the tank of a fuel truck. The Indian thought again about a story told to him by Assefa, about some Chinese people that the police had found piled ten high in the seven-square-foot false ceiling of a bus, all of them wearing incontinence nappies to piss in. And some Eritreans who had been forced to call the police themselves with a mobile phone because they were suffocating inside a truck, having been locked in there by a human trafficker. Because for the traffickers, who made money from the vulnerability of migrants, all that mattered was the price. A price that could range from €2,000 to €10,000, depending on which border was being crossed. They were paid for the result, and so, as the result was that the migrant reached their destination, it didn’t really matter whether they did so whole or chopped into little pieces, or whether the first thing they saw in the good country was a hospital room. If they were lucky.
Ajatashatru remembered how he had felt when he fell into the sea in his hot-air balloon: the fear of dying alone and anonymous, of never being found, of vanishing from the surface of the Earth under a single wave, like being erased from a page, just like that. The young black man almost certainly had a family waiting for him somewhere, on this continent, on this side of the great divide. He could not die. He must not die.
The Indian wanted to say all of this to him. But he didn’t. The crowds of people had stopped looking at the young man and were going about their business like ants. Ajatashatru glanced towards the sentry box. The soldiers were still laughing heartily inside their fish bowl. If they didn’t rob him, it would be the captain who had brought him here who would soon come rushing from his ship like a fury, his eyes filled with hate and greed, giving the signal to all the mercenaries who were hanging around here – and Buddha knew there were plenty of them! He could not stay here.
Ajatashatru took out one of the €500 notes that he had kept in his pocket and walked straight towards the guard post. On the way, he brushed past the young black man and let the note fall to the ground next to him, whispering ‘Good luck’ into his beard, though the young man surely didn’t hear him.
But he’d done it. He had helped someone. His first human. And it had been disconcertingly easy.
Having achieved this, Ajatashatru was overcome by a feeling of well-being, as if a radiant little vapour cloud had appeared inside his chest, and was spreading throughout his body, to the end of each limb. Soon, the cloud enveloped him completely and Ajatashatru felt as if he were floating up from the dusty ground of Tripoli’s harbour on an enormous and extremely comfortable armchair. It was easily the best levitation he had ever performed. And it was also the fifth electric shock he received to his heart during thi
s adventure.
He would have risen into the Libyan sky, above the border patrol and the barbed-wire fence of the port, if, at that moment, a loud voice had not hailed him from behind. Startled, he fell back to Earth with a bump.
IT TOOK AJATASHATRU a few seconds to react.
Behind his back, the voice spoke again.
‘Hey!’
This is it, I’m really done for now, the Indian thought. The ship’s captain must have sent his henchmen after me. His heart began to bang like a tambourine inside his chest. What should he do? Turn round as if everything were fine? Ignore the voice and run like crazy towards the exit? They would catch him easily.
‘Hey, Aja!’
At first, the Indian thought he must have misheard.
‘Oh gosh!’
Ajatashatru turned his head slowly. Who was this person who knew not only his first name but his second name too?
‘Aja, don’t be scared – it’s me!’
Finally, the writer recognised that cavernous voice that he had heard for the first time through the door of a wardrobe in a swaying truck. That powerful voice which had told him all its owner’s secrets without even trembling.
It was really him.
It was Assefa.
Ajatashatru was almost in tears. His lips stretched into a wide smile and the two men leapt into each other’s arms.
It was with mixed feelings that he saw his friend again. On the one hand, the Indian was happy to finally see a familiar face in a part of the world where everything was strange. But on the other hand, if Assefa was here, that meant he was not in Spain, or in France, that he was not about to cross the border into England as he had imagined. And that made the Indian sad.
‘Ajatashatru, you have an amazing knack for turning up where I don’t expect to see you!’ exclaimed the big African, ending their hug with a pat on the shoulder.
‘The world is a handkerchief, as the Spanish say. An Indian silk handkerchief.’
‘It seems as if things are going well for you,’ said Assefa, nodding at the Indian’s new suit and his briefcase. ‘You look like a wealthy Indian industrialist. Where did you come from?’
Ajatashatru pointed to the Malevil.
‘That ship is coming from Italy!’ Assefa said, baffled. ‘Aren’t you going in the wrong direction?’
The ex-fakir explained for the third time in his life that, unlike Assefa, he was not an illegal alien and he was not attempting to reach England.
‘Listen,’ he said to the African, who was looking at him sceptically, ‘I owed you an explanation in the truck. For reasons that you know about, I wasn’t able to tell you my story. But now, fate has brought us back together, and I think the moment has come.’
‘Mektoub,’ said Assefa. ‘It was written.’
THE TWO MEN sat at a table in a seedy bar in the port area, sipping warm beer and taking refuge from the soldiers and the tumultuous chaos of the city, and had a heart-to-heart.
Having left Barcelona, Assefa, who was now travelling alone, had been retracing his footsteps, at the mercy of international readmission agreements. He had been sent flying from country to country as if he were a grenade with the pin removed. First Algeria, then Tunisia, and finally Libya. Which was a little odd, as he had not been through any of these countries on his original journey. But whatever . . . All that mattered to the authorities was to pass this problem on to someone else as quickly as possible. You might even say that they had succeeded in inventing their gigantic immigrant catapult.
The African, who would never give up – because going back to Sudan empty-handed would be not only an immense humiliation and a personal failure, but also a flagrant waste of money for his village, which had gone into debt to pay for his journey – was now getting ready to cross the Mediterranean again for the small Italian island of Lampedusa. It was so frustrating when you thought about it! Only a few days before, he had been standing in the promised land of Great Britain. He had got there. If only the police hadn’t stopped that damn truck . . .
‘But, you know, there’s always someone worse off than you. During one of those repatriation flights, I talked with a Chinese guy who told me how they had to pay an astronomical amount to get to Europe by plane, with high-quality false passports, and when they reached France they had to work all day and all night in illegal sweatshops in a Paris suburb to pay back their trafficker. And because the Chinese place so much importance on the culture of respect, they don’t even try to escape, they don’t say ‘Up yours’ and run away. They would lose face and it would be a great humiliation for them not to pay back the cost of their passage. It’s a sort of moral obligation. So they sit down at their sewing machines and work. Apart from the pretty girls, who are not so lucky. The girls are locked away in filthy apartments and forced to prostitute themselves to pay for their journey to this heaven, which soon turns out to be a short cut to hell.’
Assefa said all of this, apparently unaware that the same thing happens to young African girls.
‘So, you see, there’s always someone worse off,’ he concluded. ‘White, black, yellow . . . all of us are in the same boat.’
‘I don’t know who is the worst off, Assefa, but I’m pretty sure most white people are not in the same boat.’
‘So what about you, Aja? I want to hear your story now.’
The Indian swallowed a mouthful of warm beer and, as they had plenty of time, began at the beginning.
‘I was born between the tenth and the fifteenth of January 1974 (no one knows the exact date) in Jaipur, in India. My mother died giving birth to me. A life for a life. That is often the price of a baby for someone from a poor family. My father, incapable of looking after a kid on his own, sent me to live with his sister, the mother of my favourite cousin Parthasarathy (who is like a brother to me). My aunt, Fuldawa (pronounced Fold-away), lived in the little village of Kishanyogoor, on the border with Pakistan, in the desert of Tharthar. That is where I grew up, in the middle of nowhere. But my aunt thought of me as one more mouth to feed rather than a real member of the family, so she did everything she could to make me feel unwanted. That’s why I was always holed up with the next-door neighbour, Adishree, who raised me like I was her own son. It can’t have been easy for her. I was a wild child, although also curious and affectionate. Lulled by the tales she invented for me, I dreamed about becoming a writer or a storyteller myself. At the time, we hardly had enough to eat. We had no money. We lived like cavemen. One day, an Englishman who was passing through – a geologist who was studying the Tharthar Desert; the only guy I’ve ever met who was interested in a pile of sand – showed me a cigarette lighter, and gave it to me in exchange for a blow job. Back then, I had no idea what a cigarette lighter was, never mind a blow job. I was only nine years old. I did eventually learn what it was, and that it was bad. But I had already been thoroughly abused by then. Anyway, the Englishman made little sparks burst from his thumb, and I found that magical. A beautiful blue flame appeared, there in the middle of the desert. He could see that I was interested in the object. “You want it, don’t you?” he asked me. And that was how I found myself on my hands and knees between his legs, doing something I didn’t understand, happy at the thought that I would receive this magical object in return. I sucked a guy off for a cigarette lighter! Can you believe it? A fucking lighter! And I was just a kid. That makes me want to throw up. So, anyway, one blow job later, I ran off to show the lighter to my friends. You always have a feeling of superiority when you perform a magic trick. Simply because you are the only one who knows the secret. And because people admire you. That feeling quickly becomes an addiction, believe me. Me, a poor kid from the desert, being admired . . . can you imagine? And so I became a fakir. I was so good at ripping off the people in town, especially the intelligent ones! Because intelligent people are easier to fool. They are sure of themselves, so they don’t pay attention. They think nobody can make a fool of them. And, just like that, you’ve got ’em! Their self-confidence is their
undoing. It’s different with the idiots. They’re used to people thinking they’re stupid, so as soon as they come across a smooth talker, they’re immediately on their guard. They analyse all your movements. They never let you out of their sight. They don’t let anything go. And so, paradoxically, it is much harder to confuse them. Robert-Houdin said that. A French magician. And he was right. But, anyway, during my adolescence, I lived for a while with a venerable Rajasthani yogi. I learned everything from him. The art of eating packs of fifty-two cards (I was a difficult kid: I only ever ate Bicycle-brand cards), of walking on cinders and broken glass, of piercing my body with kitchen utensils, and providing my master with good blow jobs, as instructed. I concluded that this was just the standard way of showing your appreciation to grown-ups. I devoured every book written on the subject (magic, I mean, not blow jobs): Houdini, Robert-Houdin, Thurston, Maskelyne. I made a rope dance with the sound of my flute, then climbed up it and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I was so skilful that people soon came to believe I had supernatural powers. I became a demigod in the village. If only they’d known . . . In reality, my only power was to avoid being found out! But, anyway, my reputation took me, at the age of twenty-five, to the golden palace of the maharaja Abhimanyu Ashanta Nhoi, where I was hired as a fakir and jester. My job was to entertain the court. By any means necessary. So I lived a life of falsehood and trickery. And that trickery soon turned against me. I had to play the part, you see. As it was much more spectacular to claim that I lived on a diet of rusty screws and nails, rather than ordinary food, well, that was all they gave me to eat. I was dying of hunger. I lasted a week. One day, unable to take it any more, I stole a few bits of food from the kitchen and devoured them in secret. They caught me red-handed. The maharaja was appalled. Not because I had stolen, but because I had lied. I had taken him for a fool, basically, and that was difficult for a man of his rank to accept. First they shaved off my moustache, the supreme humiliation, and then the maharaja asked me to choose between teaching schoolchildren about the perils of theft and crime, or having my right hand cut off. ‘After all, a fakir fears neither pain or death,’ he said to me with a big smile. Naturally, I opted for the first solution. To thank him for giving me a choice of punishment, I offered him a blow job. My intention was wholly innocent. Wasn’t this how adults were thanked? Nobody had told me it was bad. I was still a virgin. Outraged, he literally kicked me out of the palace. I understand that now. When I think about it, I feel ashamed. Penniless, I began working as a wandering con man. I cheated everyone: my own people, tourists, everyone I saw. Recently, I made everyone believe that it was essential for me to buy the latest bed of nails from Ikea. And they all fell for it! I could have told them I was going off to find the Golden Fleece. The whole village contributed. Of course, I don’t sleep on a bed of nails. I have a nice, cosy bed hidden in a wardrobe in my living room. But I thought I could sell it afterwards. Perhaps it was just a whim, I don’t know, or perhaps I just wanted to see how far those gullible idiots would go to pay for anything I wanted. The village went into debt for me, just like yours did for you, Assefa. But with me, it was just trickery. Selfishness. I didn’t want to help anyone. People I had known since childhood gave me money when they didn’t even have enough to eat. All in the hope of helping me, helping this demigod I had become. But this journey has changed me. I am no longer the same person. First there was your story, which moved me deeply, and there have been other encounters, caused by the unexpected events that have marked my journey: finding love with Marie (I’ll tell you later), making friends with Sophie (ditto). And then the eighty-five thousand euros in this briefcase. Hang on, don’t look at me like that, Assefa, I’m going to tell you about that too.’
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe Page 14