My brother was out there somewhere too. Thinking about him, where he might be or what difficulties he was going through, was like a raw, gaping wound in my mind. But at least I would have the support of the three new friends I had made in Hamid, Ahmad and Engineer.
When we first arrived on the wing we were put in separate cells, but after a day we showed we could behave well, so the guards relaxed a little bit and let us share rooms and have our meals together. Hamid and I became cellmates, while Ahmad and Engineer were just a few doors away.
When you are travelling, life becomes all about survival. Days and dates are of little importance when food, shelter and personal safety are the daily priority. But, one morning, we realized it was 12 September – the first day of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.
The governor agreed to let us fast during daylight hours, as is the requirement during Ramadan, and we were allowed to eat our meals at night, when food is permitted.
I was greatly touched by this. Greece isn’t a Muslim country, and even though we were in a prison or detention centre, I didn’t really know which, the staff went out of their way to make us comfortable. It was very kind.
A group of young Albanians was also being detained in our section. They were loud and noisy, and weren’t allowed to eat their meals together. The guards seemed to take great care to keep them locked up. It didn’t go down well with them that not only were we allowed to eat together, but we got special privileges too. I think we probably also woke them up when we were eating in the middle of the night. Each time we walked past their cell, they would scream and throw their shoes at us, or lunge at us if we walked too close. They were just bored, I think – picking fights and intimidating the Afghans seemed more fun than anything else they could do. A prison guard called Dimitri took it upon himself to stand up for us: he would tell them to shut up, and threaten to send them to the adult wing. I think he had real sympathy for our plight – as though he understood our pain and was genuinely concerned.
He became a regular and welcome feature of our day. Dimitri’s English was good, so thanks to Hamid we could share stories of the lives we’d left behind in Afghanistan. He was genuinely interested. We were talking one day, and I told him about the events leading up to my journey. I couldn’t help becoming very emotional and crying, while he listened carefully, his face etched with sadness. It felt good to talk to someone about what I had been through.
We showed him the case documents we had been given so he could explain them to us.
‘Are we going to be deported to Turkey?’ asked Hamid. This was the burning question.
Dimitri stared for a time, his eyes dancing over the paper, then he threw his hands in the air, and made a noise as though he was exasperated.
Hamid translated. ‘Bureaucracy. It’s idiotic,’ he said.
‘But what does it say?’ I replied, desperate to get to the bottom of the paperwork.
Dimitri was speaking again.
‘He says this is a permit allowing us to stay in Greece for one month. After that, we must leave the country or face deportation,’ translated Hamid.
We shrugged. It could have been worse.
Dimitri left the cell promising to check our files to see if there was anything further he could do. The next time he was on duty, his face told me that we were in for bad news.
‘He says we are sentenced to three months in jail,’ said Hamid.
‘But we haven’t been to court,’ I protested.
‘It seems we were sentenced anyway. He says the court found us guilty of entering Greece illegally, and we need to stay in here for our own protection because we are young.’
‘Protection? From what? The crazy Albanians who want to beat us up the first chance they get?’ I was incensed. ‘And after three months, what then? Can we stay in the country?’ I asked.
Hamid and Dimitri resumed their conversation. It was frustrating doing it this way. I concentrated hard to see if I could pick up any of the English.
‘He says he doesn’t know. That we need to talk to a lawyer about that.’
‘Oh, great,’ I said. I was really angry now. ‘You got a lawyer? Anyone? A lawyer going spare? Check under my bunk, I think I might have left one there.’
Hamid was more thoughtful. ‘This doesn’t make sense. Three months in prison, but the other letter says we have to leave Greece in one month.’
Dimitri said something.
‘What did he say?’ I demanded. I was cooling down a bit now – my mind beginning to focus on the problem in hand.
‘He says it doesn’t make sense.’
‘I know that. Why are you telling me something I already know?’
We were just going round and round in circles.
My health was very poor in those days. My stomach had become distended through malnutrition, and my body was covered in pimples from the long periods of being unable to wash properly. At night, too, my sleep was filled with terrible dreams and flashbacks. I used to dream I was drowning, or wandering lost in the mountains. Sometimes I would wake just as I relived that terrifying leap from the moving train in Bulgaria. Night after night I would wake up shaking and so scared it took me minutes to realize where I was.
Dimitri arranged for us to see a doctor. Poor Ahmad’s skin disorder was really bad – his hands looked as though they were falling off. My nightmares were common knowledge: when they happened I woke the whole cell block up with my screaming, so I was taken to see a psychologist.
Once I would have been horrified to sit and talk to a woman whose head was uncovered. But I had changed. Some things really weren’t that important to me any more. And the nightmares were so bad that I knew I needed help.
Hamid came with me to translate. ‘She says to tell her about your dreams.’
‘Well,’ I said, talking to Hamid. I found that strange, as though he was the psychiatrist, so I turned towards her instead. ‘They happen almost every night. The dreams end the same – I wake up and I think I am at home, but I am screaming for my mother.’
She nodded the whole time I talked, even though I was speaking in my native Pashtun. She listened for about an hour. I’m sure it was as frustrating for her as it was for me. Hamid did his best, but it’s very hard to talk freely and openly in a situation like that. Not that I had huge expectations of her: I was a twelve-year-old Afghan boy – in my culture, we don’t go to psychologists. If something like that happened you’d either keep it quiet and tell no one, or go and see a religious scholar instead.
In the end she prescribed me some sleeping pills. They helped me sleep better, but I could still feel the demons in my head. A few pills weren’t going to magically make them silent.
Another doctor gave me some cream for my spots and some other medicine for my stomach. All the medical people we saw in Greece were so helpful. We wore a uniform which was like a kind of tracksuit, but the doctors also gave us some second-hand clothes to wear for when we got out.
The best medicine, in fact, was talking to Dimitri. Even though Hamid had to translate, he always took the time to listen. I could talk freely to him, and he didn’t mind when I cried occasionally. Sometimes he would tease me and rub his eyes, pretending to be me crying. The teasing didn’t upset me; if anything, it made me feel more comfortable with him.
‘I wish I could take you boys home with me,’ he would say.
That made me cry even more.
Just over ten days had passed before Dimitri came in looking very pleased, and immediately started talking to Hamid.
‘Good news. He says the doctors have convinced someone senior to let us go to a UN refugee camp,’ Hamid translated. ‘Dimitri says there’s a football pitch and it’s much better than here.’
He was only sort of right. A UN representative came to collect us from the prison. As we stood with our bags and new clothes in the car park, the UN official looked
us all up and down, as if carefully checking us over. Then he turned to Dimitri and a second prison guard who were with us, and gestured to one of our group, a youth called Aman.
‘I’m not taking this one. He’s too old.’
Aman looked shocked; we all were. We all started arguing and trying to say we wouldn’t go without him.
Dimitri reasoned with us. ‘It was hard to persuade these people to take you. You others have to go. He has to stay here. I am sorry.’
Reluctantly, the remaining ten of us went. I hugged Dimitri, who promised us he’d come and try to visit us.
The camp was in a rural area about forty-five minutes outside Athens. There were some large communal buildings with a kitchen and offices, then row upon row of small container cabins for sleeping in, as well as shower and toilet blocks. The four of us good friends were able to share a cabin together.
It was comfortable, although I was aware that we had really only traded steel bars for wire mesh. The official had told us we were not allowed to leave the camp without his permission, and he made it clear that Dimitri had guaranteed we would behave ourselves.
Because we were still fasting they gave us a choice of either having pre-cooked food or to be given a daily allowance of ingredients which we could cook ourselves in a communal kitchen. We took the second option and shared the responsibilities between us.
Some of the residents – mainly Arabs and Afghans – had been in the camp for months and even years while they were waiting for their paperwork to be sorted out. Some were trying to claim asylum in Greece, while others were trying to claim asylum in European countries where they had family connections. They warned us that if we started the process there, it could take a very long time.
Although I knew I could get legal advice from the UN or claim asylum in Greece, I didn’t want to get trapped anywhere. Hazrat was still out there somewhere, and I had to find him. The others didn’t want to stay there either. Everyone was worried about the documents saying we had to leave Greece within one month – we’d decided we couldn’t risk being sent back to Turkey if we were still in Greece when that time limit was up. Besides, no one had yet asked us if we had wanted to claim asylum, and without that security there was no way any of us were going to put trust in the system. We’d seen enough to know there was little logic to what happened, and even less effort to communicate it.
We’d been in the camp for two days when Dimitri brought his wife to visit us.
It was good to see him, if only for a little while. He sat with us in our cabin and seemed really concerned about how we were. We confided in him that we wanted to leave. Dimitri tried to dissuade us against leaving, assuring us the UN would sort out any problems. I didn’t believe this but, by the end of his visit, we assured him we wouldn’t leave.
As we waved him off he promised to come and visit us again soon. I suspect he knew our assurances not to try and leave were probably just to make him happy.
An hour after he left, we escaped from the camp.
We had it planned. We would go to the nearest bus stop, from where it would be back to Athens and then on to Patras, a shipping port where trucks and lorries go to Italy.
Late that afternoon, we walked to the volleyball pitch at the far end of the camp, near the outside gate. After messing around on the pitch for a while, we jumped over the wire barriers – they weren’t very big – and ran into the surrounding trees. No one saw us or stopped us.
We made for Athens. One of our group had a relative in the capital who he had managed to call from the camp. He had told us where to go in Athens – a certain square where newly arrived migrants would congregate and be picked up by their agents. We’d been instructed to contact him again once there.
I think I had about US$150 left at this stage. I had a feeling that was not going to get me far; indeed, when I exchanged my remaining money for euros a few days later, I was dismayed to see that in the new currency it seemed a lot less.
In Athens, we managed to find the square we’d been told about; there were so many Afghans congregating there it felt almost like a street in Jalalabad. Our friend contacted his relative, who told us to wait there for a few hours.
It must have been obvious that we were newcomers, as all sorts of people approached us offering advice and help, such as arranging transport to Patras.
We didn’t want to trust anyone at this stage. The whole scene seemed so bizarre. Even more worrying was that some of these people appeared to have information on us, asking us if we were the people from the boat that had sunk, or the boys who had left the prison. One man even told us he knew we had just come from the UN camp. I could not understand how these strangers seemed to know so much about us. It was really unsettling. But I don’t know why I was surprised, given how tightly I knew these networks worked.
One man came up to me and took me aside. Hamid stood in discreet attendance, keeping me under his watchful eye.
‘Are you one of Qubat’s people?’
I couldn’t believe it. I was scared. ‘No. I don’t know what you are talking about?’
‘So you don’t know the name “Shir Aga” then?’
At this I got even more worried. How the hell did this guy know all this? I clammed up completely.
He carried on talking: ‘I am here to help. I am a representative of Qubat. Shir Aga is my relative. His brother, who I believe you know, is staying with me.’
This was beginning to make a bit more sense, but I still felt very wary.
‘What happened to the others you were with on the boat?’
‘I don’t know. They were in the prison.’
‘Some of the men haven’t paid their bill to Qubat. Their families want confirmation they arrived safely before they pay the next due instalment. I need you to contact them and tell them to inform their families to pay.’
Why was this up to me? ‘I can’t. They are in the prison. What can I do? I just got here. Please leave me alone.’
His tone was threatening. He told me he needed to meet again here in two days, otherwise he would come and find me.
As I went back to Hamid I realized my hands were shaking.
Fortunately, our friend’s relative arrived and took us all to a flat nearby. We had food and tea there. His relative stayed with him, and the others went their own way. He helped Hamid, Ahmad, Engineer and me find a cheap, Afghan-run guest house to stay in.
The guest house was populated by Afghan labourers. Their life was so tough. It was still Ramadan, and as soon as they had eaten suhur, while it was still dark, they would leave the building and go and wait by the side of a road to be picked up by locals who needed daily labour. They wouldn’t return until very late in the night, exhausted and dirty. They earned only a few euros a day, barely enough to pay for their food and rent. Sometimes, even worse, they came back disappointed, because no one had picked them up.
For the first time on this journey I wasn’t entirely illegal: the same paper telling me to leave Greece within a month also served the purpose of allowing me to stay. We had two weeks of it left. So, walking around didn’t feel scary, and for the first time I could relax and be a tourist. We had proper haircuts and hot towel shaves – I didn’t have any hair on my face to shave but the others did and I didn’t want to be left out, so I insisted on having one too. We walked to all the famous sites and I distinctly remember going to Chinatown. I had never seen anything like it. For the first time in my life I tried Chinese food. We found some cheap clothes shops and bought ourselves new clothes and shoes. My boots – my old best friends – had served me well for the last ten months, but they had finally given up the ghost.
Two days later, even though I was really scared, I went back to the square to meet the man who had threatened me. He impressed on me that I do as he said, ‘Look, boy, don’t worry about them now. Now, what is your plan?’ He pointed at Hamid and the others. ‘Tho
se people are your friends?’
‘I don’t know. But that’s their business, not yours.’ I felt like I had to stand up to this man.
He told me that he’d been instructed by Qubat as well as Shir Aga, to meet me and explain to me the different options I had now.
‘Your family has paid eight thousand dollars for us to arrange passage to Italy, including your expenses.’
This was complete news to me. Until this moment, I had had no idea how much money had been paid, or for what. Now I realized why some agents had been giving me money along the way.
My family had paid all this up front. It was a huge amount. But all I could think about at that second was talking to them.
‘Can you help me contact my family?’
‘Do you have a number for them?’
‘If I did, would I be asking you for help?’
‘Don’t give me cheek, boy.’
I checked myself and tried to be a bit politer, but I still didn’t like this man. ‘What about my brother? He was supposed to travel with me. I know my family wanted this. So where is he now?’
‘I don’t know about your brother. I was only informed about you.’
He went on to say that because my family had paid up to Italy, he would now arrange for me to get to Patras, and then to Italy.
‘You can leave tomorrow. It’s guaranteed you will be out in a lorry and in a ship. You will be in Italy in no time.’
That word again: ‘guarantee’. It made me very wary. And the idea of getting back on a ship made me too terrified to even think about it.
‘Do I have another option?’
‘Yes, boy. I can give you some money back instead, and you can make your own way, which you will, no doubt, regret.’
I somehow doubted that. I definitely preferred to stay with my friends than to go with this creature.
‘I’ll go with my friends, thank you.’
‘Your choice.’ He sucked in his cheeks, fished in his pocket and handed me 300 euros.
The Lightless Sky Page 22