Alexandria just blinked at me, stunned by the ferocious onslaught of Pashtu. She must have registered my anxiety and frustration, which was quickly turning to anger. The two boys smirked, however, barely trying to hide their amusement. I disliked them immediately.
She gestured to them to leave the room. They laughed loudly all the way down the hall.
I could feel tears building behind my eyes. I was a coiled spring of confusion – I knew this was a safe place, but I couldn’t relax. I didn’t want to be there.
Alexandria beamed her kind smile and gestured to me to sit. She switched the television to Al Jazeera Arabic, and signalled that I should watch and wait, while she made a phone call. I think she thought I understood Arabic, but aside from knowing the Quran in Arabic I didn’t. But I watched the pictures.
She returned and leaned over me. ‘Gulwali? Farsi?’
I smiled. Did this mean they were bringing someone to talk to me? ‘Pashtu?’ I looked up at her hopefully.
She shook her head.
I tried again. ‘Dari?’ I pointed to my chest. ‘Gulwali. Pashtu. Dari.’ I was trying to say to her that I spoke Pashtu and Dari.
She smiled ruefully and shook her head again. ‘No. Farsi.’
I nodded, then shook my hand from side to side as if to say, ‘OK, a little bit.’
She smiled and left the room. She soon returned, making steering wheel signs. Time for a drive.
‘Where are you taking me?’ I wanted to know.
She just smiled. I could feel my frustration growing again.
A short time later, I was sitting in another beige-coloured office in a local government building, with Sabina by my side.
A stern-looking woman in a tailored suit sat across the desk from us. To me she looked so smart and important I thought she might be the governor of the town. She and Sabina were talking in bouncy, rhythmic Italian. ‘I am Fabiana,’ she said to me. ‘Hello, Gulwali.’
She spoke English, so I could make out a little bit of what she said. I couldn’t help but like her, but that didn’t change my feeling of mounting fear and anger. Physically, I was better off than I had been in months; emotionally, I was imploding.
Fabiana picked up her telephone receiver and dialled a number. She turned on the speaker phone, so we could all hear it ringing.
More Italian followed, before the voice on the line switched to Farsi. ‘Salaam, Gulwali.’
I sat upright, jolted with surprise.
In my best Farsi I said hello back. I told him I was a Pashtu speaker but I could understand some Farsi. But I asked that if he couldn’t speak my language of Pashtu, could he try speaking to me in Dari – the Afghan version of Farsi?
The speaker replied that he spoke zero Pashtu, but suggested that I should try and explain myself in Dari and he would respond in Farsi.
Throughout the journey and my time in Iran, my Farsi pronunciation had improved greatly, but on the road I’d got used to the different smugglers and agents speaking a bastardized version of Farsi mixed with Kurdish. I was mixing all my languages together. In a gabble of blurted-out Dari, Farsi and Kurdish in my native Pashtu accent, I tried to tell him everything. That I had lost my brother and was trying to find him; that I wanted to know how long I had to stay in the home; that I wanted to know what was going to happen to me; and that I wanted to know how long I had been on the road already.
Unsurprisingly, he struggled to understand a word. ‘Calm down. Speak slowly. Calm.’
The whole thing was made even more frustrating because his Farsi was spoken with such a strong Italian accent, I couldn’t really follow him either.
My head was bursting with questions and I desperately needed answers to stem the turmoil inside, but there was no way I was going to get them. I persisted for a while, but it soon became apparent we were making little headway.
When the call began, Sabina and Fabiana had looked expectantly hopeful; I think the dejected look on my face told them the real story. After I handed the receiver back to them, the man on the other end spoke in Italian, probably confirming we hadn’t achieved much.
‘Sorry, Gulwali,’ said Fabiana I felt bad for them. I know they really wanted to help, but if we couldn’t communicate, how could they explain the processes to me?
When we got back to the children’s home, Davide was busy in the kitchen. Everybody was sitting around the dining table. They stared as I joined them, making me feel self-conscious.
Davide placed a large platter of spaghetti and meat sauce in the middle of the table. He returned with a basket of bread, and put a brimming bowl of pasta and vegetables in front of me.
‘Halal,’ he said triumphantly.
The three girls who had ignored me in the common room chatted in Italian. The Russian girl just stared at her plate. I ate in silence. It was lonely.
That night I settled down in my little room. Despite my exhaustion, I had trouble going to sleep. I had suffered fear, hunger, thirst, brutality, even cruelty through my travels, but I had never been alone. I had always been in a group of men and always had someone looking out for me. At home I had shared my grandparents’ room.
This was the first time I had ever slept by myself.
Every day continued pretty much in the same boring, depressing way. They wouldn’t let me go outside and at times I paced the floors like a caged animal. Every night I awoke to the nightmares.
It felt as though I had been there for ages. I started to get disruptive. They took me to see the lady in the smart suit, Fabiana, at her office a second time – something that made me even more furious, because it was patently obvious that although she was trying to further reassure me, it wasn’t working.
The person to whom I felt the most connected was Alexandria. I used to stand on the third-floor balcony looking down at the car park, waiting for her to come to work. Whenever I saw her, I felt some measure of relief and comfort, but usually this came out in angry emotion. She bore the brunt of my frustration.
‘I have been here one month,’ I managed to say in English. ‘One month. Why?’
She shook her head patiently and gestured me into the kitchen. There she poured me a glass of juice and sat me down. She took the calendar off the wall and pulled up a chair next to mine.
‘Gulwali. No. Ten days you have been here. Ten. Only ten.’ She gestured with ten fingers, then pointed at the date on the calendar. ‘See? You came this day. Today is this day.’
I looked at her in disbelief. Could it really have only been ten days?
The following afternoon, Sabina ushered us all into a waiting minivan. The others seemed really happy and excited, but continued to ignore me. Sabina tried her usual mime routine, this time making her hands rise and fall, accompanied by spluttering sounds. Then she flapped her hand through the air, screeching so that the others all burst into fits of laughter.
I smiled and nodded as though I understood.
As we parked on the sea front, I worked out that Sabina had been trying to act out a beach scene for me. We had come to a nearby seaside town.
The beach was rocky, with large boulders. It was early October, and the wind was picking up and the waves were large. I froze with fear as flashbacks from the boat came flooding back. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the water.
The others started running along the beach, chasing each other. All I remember is that I wanted to get away from there. I wanted to run. To get as far away as possible.
Later, up on the promenade, near some shops, Alexandria stopped me outside a clothing shop, and held a red sweatshirt to my chest.
‘Bella?’ she said, deliberately inflecting the word to convey her question.
I nodded.
The two Italian boys stood some distance away, laughing and aping my every movement. I shot them a self-conscious glare.
There were a lot of people walking
around, with dogs on leads. I also looked at the pavement cafés, with people sitting outside drinking coffee. In the central square, teenagers were rushing past us on skateboards. I’d never seen these before and fully expected one of them to hit me or slice my feet off with it.
It should have been a pleasant, interesting afternoon out, but for me it was a trip filled with terror, confusion and loneliness.
I started plotting. I had decided I was going to run away.
Sabina returned with the girls, and ice creams. Mine was pistachio – it was delicious. In Jalalabad, the city near my childhood home, my grandfather used to take us to an ice-cream parlour where they made the best-ever homemade ice cream. The taste of this took me right back there, and to being six years old again and happy.
We walked back down to the beach, to where the minivan was parked.
I hung back from the others a little. A bus had caught my eye. I thought about trying to climb aboard. The driver was standing outside having a cigarette and chatting with some local people.
I could have easily sneaked on unnoticed. I had, thanks to the agent returning to me my family’s 300 euros in Greece, more money than I’d ever had before.
I was torn. As desperate as I was to get away, I didn’t really have a plan, and nor did I want to get Alexandria, Sabina or the other staff in trouble. If I ran, surely they’d be blamed.
We went home and I took a shower. Alexandria had made it her mission to get me washing every day. At first I had thought she was crazy: in an Afghan winter I might have washed my entire body once a week. Our winters were so cold none of the children wanted to wash much; it also took my mother and aunties a long time to heat the water over the fire. In summer, I would swim and bath every few days in one of the many rivers that flowed through our district. To me, showering every day seemed like a huge bad waste of water. ‘But I’m clean,’ I would protest to Alexandria in my best English. She would just shake her head and point at the bathroom door. I liked her so much that at these little moments, she did find a way to burst some of that boiling anger inside me. I think she may even have persuaded me to laugh.
Her persistence was such that I almost began to enjoy the daily ritual. And, as I grew more mentally withdrawn and trapped, the shower also became a good place to cry. I felt like tearing the world apart, just so it would know how I felt.
Another few days blended into more. I had a sense of time based on when I had last fasted: it had been Ramadan in Greece, and that meant that Eid, the celebration that comes after a month of fasting and is a bit like the Muslim Christmas, was just around the corner.
As a child, Eid had been something I looked forward to all year. We got new clothes and money as presents, and the whole family would dress up and go out to picnic sites for the day. Eid had been some of the happiest and best moments in my childhood. I called to mind bittersweet snapshots of playing egg fights – like playing conkers, but with a boiled egg – with my brothers. Whoever broke the egg got to eat it. Time and again Noor and Hazrat beat me. I remember glaring at them as they shamelessly stuffed my eggs into their mouths after winning. One time I had been so angry at Hazrat I thumped him, and my father had told us all off. Now all I could think about was finding him.
With the smugglers we had been like cattle, but at least we were cattle being herded, constantly on the move and in a group. This confinement was torture.
The night before I put my plan to escape into action, I had yet another nightmare. I stared at the ceiling, my whole body convulsing with sobs and shakes. I just couldn’t cope with this any more.
I ate breakfast as normal, but inside my heart was racing. I was preparing myself. I was nervous, but I told myself if I could run away from the Iranian police, I could easily escape a children’s home.
Back in my room I carefully packed my new clothes into my bag, along with the toiletries. Then I pushed my window as far open as it would go, and climbed on to a ledge that ran beneath it.
I had to do this. Anything to stop the feeling of being caged.
I took a big gulp, said a prayer and dropped three storeys to the car park.
I landed with a thump. The adrenalin was surging so much I didn’t feel any pain. I looked up at my window, a little shocked at what I had just done. After a few seconds, however, the pain kicked in: the back of my heel was throbbing. But there was no time – I had to get away.
I exited the car park – the road ahead had three different junctions. I had no idea where I was going other than to try and find a bus or train station. I ran blindly down one of the roads.
Once I had gone some distance from the home, I slowed down and tried to act casually. I managed to make myself understood by using a bit of English: ‘Excuse me. Where is station?’
An old man directed me to the left.
I saw train tracks and knew I was headed the right way. Escape was imminent. Crossing the roundabout at some traffic lights, I saw the station building just ahead.
Just then Alexandria screeched up in a car, screaming from the window: ‘Gulwali. What are you doing?’ She leapt out of the car and grabbed me by the shoulders, shouting at me in a stream of Italian. She was shaking as tears streamed down her cheeks, and I could see that she was as worried about me as she was angry. She kept pressing my shoulders and arms to feel if I was injured.
I had picked up a bit of Italian in the fifteen days I had been there, so I had a good sense now of her flurry of urgent words. I was a boy, I had nowhere to go. What would I have done?
I felt really guilty, but I still tried to resist getting in her car. ‘No. I am leaving.’
At this she got really angry, making a telephone-to-the-ear gesture. ‘Polizia, Gulwali. I will call the police.’
I got in the car. She was still crying, and by now her tears set me off too. We both cried all the way back to the centre. She was shaking so much, in fact, that she lost grip of the steering wheel and we almost had an accident, bumping into another car.
When we walked back into the building, it was into a sea of shocked, ashen faces. I felt as if I was walking into the lions’ den. They were all judging me, but none of them understood my pain.
I went back to my room from where not even Davide’s cooking could lure me out. I lay on my bed trying to calm myself down, but my anger wouldn’t subside. I felt humiliated. If anything, I was even more determined to leave. I could hear Alexandria on the phone. Her voice was nearly hysterical. I guessed she was either talking to Sabina or Fabiana about my attempted escape. I felt really guilty for putting her through that, but I also feared she wouldn’t like me after this. Now I’d probably lost my only friend in this place too.
I had to go.
I came out of my room and into the main sitting room. Courage swelled inside me like a balloon. The other kids were in there, watching TV.
‘I am going,’ I shouted in Pashtu. The girls all looked at me like I was crazed. The two boys looked a little scared, which pleased me. ‘I am leaving. Goodbye.’
So fuelled was I by a sense of righteous anger, I couldn’t resist a final flourish in Italian for their benefit. ‘Ciao.’
I unlatched the main door and stormed out.
I was in the car park when I heard Alexandria’s voice shouting from the balcony above: ‘Gulwali. Gulwali. Stop.’
I looked up at her briefly, imploring. I wanted her to let me go. In my head, I willed her not to come and look for me.
I knew she’d be following any second, so I broke into a sprint.
This time I knew where the train station was.
I think I had expected to see cars full of police waiting to arrest this escaped convict, but the station was quiet except for a couple of pensioners and a woman with two young children.
Breathlessly, I spoke to the man at the ticket desk, using a mixture of my limited English with the few words of Italian I had picked up in the ho
me: ‘Rome, please. I wish to go Rome.’ It was the place I knew Hazrat had been – I could start there.
He printed me a timetable and, as I tried to calm my panicked breathing, he managed to explain to me that I needed to get a connection to a town called Bari, from where I could get a direct train to Rome.
He looked at me curiously as I handed him a 50 euro note for what was a 5 euro ticket to Bari. I feared he might try and stop me.
The train pulled into the platform. I ran and jumped on.
On the train I sank into the seat. As the Italian landscape sped past the window I was relieved to be free, but in the back of my mind I was worried about myself. I kind of knew that this was a silly thing to do – these people had been caring for me, so why couldn’t I accept that? Why was I running away from the first genuinely safe place I had known? I felt oddly discombobulated, almost like a feral version of myself, trusting no one.
I think if they had outlined what had been happening to me, and what would continue to happen to me, it would have been easier.
It didn’t take too long to get to Bari. Once there, I managed to buy myself a ticket to Rome, which cost me 40 euros. I also bought myself a sandwich, some chocolate and a drink. This little journey had cost me 50 euros so far, leaving me with 250.
There was a couple of hours to wait before the Rome train left. I cowered on a bench on the platform, feeling really scared. I was still expecting the police to come and find me at any second.
I regretted Rome almost the minute I arrived. It was late, and darkness had fallen. The station was huge and scary. People flowed back and forth in all directions; I so desperately wanted to ask someone for help, but I didn’t dare.
I had been told in Greece that in Rome I needed to find the park, where all the migrants stayed. As I left the station I could see a few migrants – I think Eastern Europeans, but I wasn’t sure – begging by the side of the road. I walked closer towards them and noticed a group of men, Afghans, walking down a side street. I followed them. They were stopping passers-by and showing them a piece of paper, asking for directions to whatever was written down. I had a hunch they were looking for the park too. A lady directed them to a certain bus stop. I followed. When they got on the bus, I did too.
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