As we ate, an argument broke out. It was clear we had to risk crossing from Italy to France without passports, and while buying tickets within Italy wasn’t such a problem, the moment we tried to cross a border we needed to show a valid passport or ID to buy a ticket. None of us had any. Added to that, none of the men wanted to go to the ticket office.
‘I’ll go,’ I said, confident of my ability to win the sales people over. Although Shafique was sixteen, three years older than I was, I had assumed the role of boss. I think because I had been on the journey longer than he had, I felt more experienced. But no way was I doing this for free: ‘I’ll sort it out, but you all have to contribute to pay for my ticket.’
I circled the station entrance, scouting for the policeman who had stopped me earlier. He wasn’t there, although a number of his colleagues were patrolling.
Adopting my most nonchalant of walks, I strolled past the officers, being sure to keep my head low. In my new clothes and bright yellow ski jacket courtesy of Hodja, I was nothing more threatening than a sulky Italian pre-teen.
I approached a middle-aged lady sitting behind a glass screen and gave her a broad smile that I calculated was both charming and vulnerable. Women had been kind in the past, and I hoped this would prove to be true once more.
My Italian vocabulary was still very limited, but I did have the few phrases learned in the children’s home. I also had a map of the rail network which Hodja had given me in Rome, which helped make the point.
After a lot of effort, I succeeded in making her understand that I wanted to know how much a ticket was to Cannes.
At first she wasn’t willing to even tell me that: ‘Sorry, ID please.’
I tried to gesture and explain my friends were waiting for me. She wasn’t happy, but I just continued to give her my best pleading face and, in the end, she wrote down the price for me.
I left the station and found the others.
‘Here’s the deal,’ I said. Their eyes were fixed on me. The simple act of buying tickets was very stressful for migrants, and I knew they couldn’t do this without me. ‘It’s fifteen euros each for your tickets, plus the cost of my ticket spread over the five of you – but not Shafique – that’s three euros. Think of it as a booking fee. Total eighteen euros each.’
There was some grumbling, but they had no choice.
I knew my little money-making scheme was immoral. I tried to justify it to myself, although it still troubled my conscience.
I went back to see the lady. I can’t say she looked thrilled to see me.
I’m not sure if it was because I was persistent, or persuasive – probably it was my youth and vulnerability tugging on her heart-strings – but she began to soften slightly. I got the feeling she would sell me a ticket, but the issue was the other six.
‘Why seven?’ She shook her head. ‘Too many people.’
I just shrugged and continued to give her my best pleading face and, in the end, amazingly, she sold me the tickets. Although, if I understood her Italian correctly, she did give a stern warning that we were likely to be arrested.
She pushed the tickets across the counter, looking around a little nervously. It was then that I realized that she was probably risking her job to help me. I gave her a genuine smile. She looked scared, but her eyes spoke of her emotion. I was beginning to realize that there were kind people around who were truly moved by the plight of us migrants.
I knew that a group of migrants was more likely to attract unwanted attention, so I took control and ordered everyone to board the train in pairs, and get on different carriages. My days of moving around the different musafir khannas in Istanbul had taught me something.
When the conductor came into the carriage, he stopped and checked our tickets. I didn’t like the way he looked at us, but he moved on quickly.
I panicked when two police officers walked through the carriage.
‘Shafique, police.’
We dropped our heads. Shafique pretended to sleep.
I stared at the Italian countryside sliding past, all the while carefully checking their reflection in the window.
They went past us without a second look.
Shafique raised his head and grinned.
An announcement then crackled out over the speaker system. I didn’t really pay any attention – my Italian was so limited I only understood a few words – but this time it was different. ‘Shafique, I think he is talking French. I think we are in France.’
We sat and listened to the rhythm of the address.
‘I think I love the sound of this language,’ Shafique said.
We burst out with relieved laughter.
We weren’t out of the woods yet, though. We listened for any announcements that mentioned our destination, Cannes, but neither of us could understand the accent.
I was puzzling what to do when we had a stroke of luck – a man entered our carriage. It was a young guy, with a rucksack slung over one shoulder. I didn’t know him, but I could tell he was an Afghan Hazara.
‘Hey,’ I said in Dari.
He turned. ‘Salaam.’
‘Do you speak Pashtu?’ I ventured.
‘Yeah. A bit.’
We beckoned him to join us.
He sat opposite us, his bag in his lap. He told us he was a university student studying in Marseilles.
He was generous with his advice, giving us a crash course on French pronunciation and useful phrases, telling us what time the train was expected in Cannes, and what to expect on the journey to Paris. As we slowed into Cannes, his final advice stuck in my mind: ‘Be careful of the police. They will give you a very bad time.’
I wanted to know more, but we only had a few seconds before our stop.
‘Will they put us in prison or deport us?’ I said.
‘Probably not – even if you want them to. Good luck.’
That confused me.
‘Gulwali,’ Shafique called from the train’s open door. ‘Let’s go.’
The other guys had made it too. I half expected not to find them on the platform at Cannes, but I was happy they were.
The station was full of police. We headed outside and found a grimy Turkish café near the back.
‘We met a guy on the train who said tickets to Paris are one hundred euros,’ I said.
The others blew out their cheeks at the price. An argument erupted, with everybody shouting over each other, trying to be heard.
‘Hey. Heeeeey.’
We all turned. The owner – a heavy Turkish man with impressive black caterpillars marching across his brows – leaned over the counter, waving a long kebab knife. ‘Enough of your noise. Keep it down or get out of my restaurant,’ he shouted, in a mix of English and Kurdish. ‘And you can all buy some more food, too. I’m not running a charity. Bloody Afghans,’ he muttered, turning his attention back to the rotating slab of grilling meat.
We lowered our heated bickering to a loud whisper.
Everybody would pool their finances, and I would buy the tickets again. I had hoped I could get another free ticket, but at 100 euros no one would agree to it.
We only had enough money for four tickets.
That was a major problem – but I had a plan. When the seven of us climbed aboard the train later that afternoon, three of the men went and hid in the toilets.
Shafique and I sat near the other two guys, trying to look innocent and unthreatening. A game of cat and mouse ensued with the conductor. We swapped seats and tickets on several occasions, the guys in the toilets trading places with those in the carriage.
I tried to look confident and relaxed when the conductor came past, knowing that although he had already checked my ticket, it was now in the hand of one of my travelling companions two carriages further along the train.
One of the guys got caught, though. As we pulle
d away from a rural station, there he was on the platform, looking horribly dejected, a policeman standing next to him.
It was a long journey.
Chapter Twenty-Five
My gritty eyes slowly opened. We had been travelling for over half a day on this train, since leaving Rome around forty-eight hours ago.
‘Paris,’ said Shafique.
The train carriage rocked gently from side to side.
‘Why is there so much writing on the walls?’ I asked, as if Shafique might have an idea what the cartoonish images and words I saw through the carriage windows might mean. I had seen similar graffiti, although I didn’t know what it was called, in the poorer parts of Greece, Turkey and Italy, but I hadn’t expected to see it in Paris.
For some reason, I had a notion that Paris was the poshest and most beautiful city in the whole world. I don’t recall from whom I had heard this – maybe one of my teachers at school – but as a child in Afghanistan I’d been told that every morning an aeroplane sprayed a fine rain of pure perfume over the city so that the air always smelled fresh and beautiful.
As the train slowed into the station approach, it hit me that this was a lie. We pulled into the biggest station I had ever seen – a vast, steel-framed hangar, bustling with people. In the public toilets, I looked in the mirror on the wall. The face staring back at me looked broken. I hardly recognized the boy in the reflection, his cheeks sunken, dark bags beneath his eyes. He needed a haircut.
As we made our way out of the station and on to the streets of Paris, we looked about us in wonder. The busy streets were lined with pale stone buildings with shiny shop fronts. There were restaurants and cafés everywhere, with smartly dressed people scurrying along so quickly it looked like a matter of life and death. Cars drove bumper to bumper as motorbikes buzzed past them like wasps.
‘We need to find the park,’ I said, unsure of how we might actually achieve that.
Hodja had counselled that when we reached Paris, we were to make our way from the Gare du Nord station to a park, where, just as in Rome, migrants gathered. We hoped we could make contact with people, possibly even agents, who would help us get to Calais.
I had half a mind to ask a passer-by the way. I hoped I could manage to communicate using a mix of sign language and English. But the Parisians who brushed past shot us looks as though we were something unpleasant to be avoided – a nasty smell that polluted the Parisian air, scented or not.
An older man, with the instantly recognizable craggy features of a life spent in the Afghan weather, squatted near one of the station entrances, rattling a paper coffee cup at the rushing commuters.
‘Salaam, kaka,’ I said in Pashtu. ‘Where is the park, please?’
‘That way,’ he said, pointing to a busy intersection. ‘Seven blocks away. But don’t expect too much help, boys. It’s every man for himself.’
He dismissed me with a shake of his cup, wrapping a blanket more tightly about him. It was cold, and I was beginning to shiver now, too – I was grateful for the jacket Hodja had bought me. The grey sky was heavy with fat clouds.
‘Come on,’ Shafique said. ‘It’s going to snow.’
I feared he was right as I stamped my feet to shake some blood into my cold toes. I felt wretched – exhausted and hungry. After twelve months of travelling, this was the reality of my existence, and the persistent discomfort didn’t make it any easier. Lingering in my recent memory was the fact of the days spent in the children’s home, where I had been clean, fed and slept in a warm bed. The memory seemed to mock me.
Tiny little flakes of something between rain and snow started to fall from the sky as we shuffled in the direction we’d been given. I should have felt excited: Paris meant that Great Britain was tantalizingly close now. Just a little further, and I would be there.
What ‘there’ meant in reality, I still wasn’t sure, but all that mattered was that Hazrat was there, and I would be running no longer.
‘Gulwali, look.’
I followed Shafique’s gaze.
Three other Afghan-looking men had rounded the corner just ahead.
‘Brothers,’ Shafique yelled over the road. ‘Where is the park?’
‘Around the corner and you are there,’ one shouted over the traffic. ‘But you had better hurry – the charity people only serve the food until six.’
Food. We broke into a run. We hadn’t really eaten on the train, and we’d only had snacks in the Turkish café.
We only just made it in time, as they were packing up. A few glorious minutes later, I was bathing my face in fragrant steam. The smell of white beans and chicken made me drool.
Shafique had almost finished his stew already.
‘It’s too hot to eat. You must have a stomach of iron.’
‘It’s too good not to,’ replied Shafique, wiping broth from his lips. ‘Très bien, monsieur.’
‘Nice French.’
Small groups of migrants were scattered around the park. A short line spilled from the tin shed that served as a soup kitchen.
‘You finish your food,’ said Shafique, throwing his empty plastic bowl into a bin. ‘I’m going to see where we sleep.’
We had heard about a homeless shelter where they would let migrants stay overnight. Hodja had said that because we were so young, we might get lucky.
I was mopping the last juices up with a piece of bread when he returned.
‘Bad news.’
‘What?’
‘I asked some people. The shelter is closed.’
This was a blow.
‘So what do we do?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Shafique. ‘Some of the others are sleeping together at the far end of the park. We can go and join them.’
‘In the snow?’ I was inwardly groaning.
‘It’s not that cold,’ Shafique said. ‘Look, it’s barely even snowing now.’ I had begun to love Shafique for his optimism, which I knew was for my benefit. ‘There’s a tree over there,’ he went on. ‘It’s practically dry underneath, and the branches will keep the weather out.’
We tried to get comfortable under our shelter. It smelled of ash and damp. Shafique was right: the earth beneath the tree was almost dry, but that was little cause for celebration as the temperature dropped over the coming hours, bringing bigger, fatter flakes of snow with it. We lay back to back, trying to preserve our body heat.
Shafique was soon snoring. My eyes got heavy a handful of times, but there was no way I could sleep. The cold and the strange sounds of the city kept me awake – sirens and traffic noise, voices calling out through the night, as though no one was sleeping and the great mass of humanity of the city was continuing to go about its business as I and the other homeless migrants lived like a sub-species.
I had had such high expectations of Paris, the city where perfume rained from the skies. And yet all I had witnessed was a dirty, smelly and cold city, filled with Parisians who shied away from us in horror.
I got up to go to the toilet. I guessed it was around midnight. My hips and shoulders ached with cold, and I limped with pain as I tried to get my blood moving.
I looked for somewhere to relieve myself. It felt good to be moving after the cold ground, so I wandered in no particular direction. Piles of bodies lay dotted around the park – mostly on benches, sheathed in cardboard. The low glow of a telephone box hung in the distance, snowflakes caught in its light like moths. It almost looked warm. I let its glass door slam shut behind me and my breath began to fill the space.
I leaned against the steel case of the telephone and closed my eyes.
Fleetingly, I imagined using this phone to ring someone – perhaps my mother. But I realized how stupid that was. She didn’t have a phone, and I hadn’t been able to contact her once on this journey.
A group of drunk young French men rolled past, talking boistero
usly and waving their glowing cigarettes around with extravagant flourishes.
I shrank down, trying to hide. They passed without seeing me.
I dozed for a little. I was warming up a bit now, as I crouched in the bottom of the phone box; despite being forced to squat with my arms across my chest, this was the most comfortable I had been all night. A snow-covered lump rattled along the street towards me, rousing me. A man in a heavy coat and hat pulled low shoved along a shopping trolley, his little dog trotting beside him. I watched him, puzzled. He didn’t look like a migrant. I had seen other such homeless people throughout my journey, especially in Rome and Athens. I couldn’t understand how this happened in European capitals.
The aluminium edge of the door suddenly crashed into my right ankle. Two black-clad figures loomed over me, the muzzles of their guns staring me down. For a second I thought I was back in Turkey or Iran.
Police.
I said nothing, frozen into silence.
The shorter one summoned me with a black-leather-clad finger, indicating that I should come out.
I rubbed my shoulders to try to make them understand I was cold and had nowhere else to go.
‘Halas, finish,’ the taller shouted, and shoved me down the street. ‘Yallah. Come.’
These were basic Arabic words, which he obviously thought all migrants might understand.
He shooed me away like a dog, making a tksss tksss sound with his tongue and teeth.
I put my wrists together and held them up. I was trying to gesture to them to arrest me. Right then, a warm cell seemed preferable to dying of cold.
‘Go. Move.’
I skulked away like the animal I felt, retracing my fading footsteps in the snow. I made my way back to Shafique. He was still sleeping, but now shivering uncontrollably. I lay down next to him and tried to sleep.
When I woke up, Shafique was still sleeping. I sat there trying not to shake. I began to move around for warmth, eventually crossing the road to a sort of fire hydrant with a tap on top. People were washing their faces and hands in it. I did the same. The temperature of the water sucked the air out of my lungs.
The Lightless Sky Page 26