Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘Let’s go!’ someone says.

  One of the men vaults over the wall and swings open the doors. One by one they leap up and dive inside. The wheels are taller than Kabir; Hamid hauls him up by the armpits. Aryan nearly lands on top of them. Seconds later the dark square of sky is obliterated; the bolts of the door squeal as they are locked in. They are still arranging themselves on the boxes in the blackness when the engine engages, the wheels grind, and the vehicle lurches on to the highway. They throw their hands out and grab at whatever they can catch to steady themselves.

  Someone coaxes a flame from a cigarette lighter. Weird and distorted against the shadows, their faces are tight as masks.

  ‘Welcome to Europa,’ somebody says.

  The driver cranks down through the gears until the truck slows to a stop. Voices. Footsteps. The low growl of a dog. The men freeze.

  Aryan doesn’t know how long they have been driving, or where they are. He reaches for Kabir, finds his shoulder in the dark, and grips it.

  The doors of the truck swing open and the night air rushes in. Torchlight rakes the inside. Aryan ducks and shrinks into the boxes but knows he is not concealed. He can’t see who is wielding the beam of light – soldier, border guard, customs officer, trucker, police. It sweeps the rafters, probes the piles of cartons, then locks on him. He can hear his blood thudding in his ears. The light considers him a long moment, bleaching the world white behind tight-clenched eyes. Anxiety fingers his spine. He wonders whether they are going to let the dog loose inside.

  ‘ForgiveMeForgiveMeForgiveMe,’ he says to himself, the simplest prayer he ever learned.

  After a moment the doors slam shut. Blindfolded again by the darkness, his eyes open to sliding diamonds of red and black.

  There is a brisk exchange with the driver, and the vehicle drags itself back on to the road.

  They are on their way.

  Aryan loses all sense of time. In the closeness of the truck’s belly none of them has any idea how far they have travelled, whether it is day or night, what country they are in. In the hours that pass the dimensions of the world are reduced to the sound of the road: the stickiness of wheels on bitumen, the wind-rush of passing vehicles. The men doze, stretch the pins and needles from their legs, fit their bodies to the angles of box and wall. The truck’s metal rib feels like a stake running the length of Aryan’s back.

  Once, the truck pulls over and the driver descends. Tension ripples through the darkness. Above the thrum of the idling engine comes the rustle of a man relieving himself by the roadside. The endless journey resumes.

  Kabir is unconscious, his head warm and heavy on Aryan’s thigh. Aryan strokes his brother’s still-damp hair. It is getting cold and he pulls the hood of his anorak over his ears. The corner of a box is digging into his side but if he moves he will wake the sleeping boy. He shifts anyway, and Kabir stirs.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Aryan says to him. The boy’s steady breathing resumes.

  In the dark he can hear someone snoring gently, and smiles. There is nowhere Hamid cannot sleep.

  Aryan’s body is tired but his mind won’t let him rest. His body rocks with the movement of the lorry. He listens to it swallowing up the miles as it carries them deep into the backcountry, far from the borderland. He tries to remember how many trucks they have been on since they left Afghanistan: sheep trucks, fruit trucks, once, the fume-filled bins of a fertilizer truck – each reeking of dung or decay or chemicals that took days to get out of his hair. Some of the men talk softly.

  ‘Do you know where they are going to leave us?’ Aryan can’t pair the face with the anxious voice.

  ‘Somewhere outside Patras, I would say.’ The rasp of a smoker.

  ‘The problem there is the police,’ a third voice says. ‘If they catch us they’ll send us back across the river.’

  ‘We should break up into smaller groups, just twos and threes.’

  ‘The thing is to find the sea and follow it to the port,’ the smoker says.

  ‘It will all depend on where they dump us,’ says another voice.

  Their urgent whisperings are sucked away in the tunnel of highway wind.

  After a while the truck slows. It leans into a long curve, and the men and boxes slide with the motion.

  ‘Why are we leaving the highway?’ someone says.

  ‘Maybe it’s a detour.’

  ‘Maybe it’s another checkpoint.’

  ‘Maybe they’re gonna let us out for a piss.’

  ‘Only in first class, my friend.’

  The next road is less well made. There is a different rhythm under the tyres, a regular double bump as the wheels hit the joints in the surface. The change in tone wakes men who have learned to listen in their sleep; from the crinkle of their clothes and their silence Aryan can tell they are alert and straining for clues.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Kabir says.

  Aryan pats his chest pocket and pulls out a wad of silver paper. He hands Kabir a pillow of Turkish chewing gum. He will feel ravenous afterwards, but the explosion of sugar, and the illusion of food, will trick his stomach for a while.

  Aryan folds the last piece back into his anorak, nursing his own hunger like a secret. To distract himself, he makes a mental inventory of his pockets.

  * One brown vinyl wallet with the telephone number of their uncle’s house in Iran written on a torn edge of newspaper, and the mobile phone number of the nephew of the tailor who was living in England.

  * Two twenty-euro notes, which is all his Iranian money came to when Mohamed changed it for him in Istanbul.

  * One photograph, folded once, of him and his brothers posing with their parents and their grandfather, taken by an aid worker his father once knew in Afghanistan, many years ago, before Kabir was born.

  * One notebook with sketches from along the journey, and the bits of Afghan poems that come back to him, and, on a scrap of paper, an address in Rome that Ahmed in the sewing factory gave them before they left.

  * One pen he found on the footpath in Istanbul beside a man selling lottery tickets.

  * One last piece of chewing gum rolled up in silver paper.

  * One red mobile phone without a SIM card – thrown away to remove any sign they have crossed through Turkey.

  He feels for his belt. Inside it, stitched between the layers of leather, the last of their travel money.

  The hours slip by. Aryan cannot tell if he has dozed or slept.

  The road is growing rougher. The big tyres lurch into the potholes. The wind that accompanied them on the highway has dropped.

  Finally they stop. Kabir sits up. Aryan’s stomach tightens. He hears the sound of men’s voices outside.

  The doors swing open. For the first time he sees the driver, his dark bulk silhouetted against a pale rectangle of sky. He is a big man with short-cropped bottlebrush hair, small eyes in a ruddy face.

  Aryan blinks in the pastel light, sees the smudge of blue hills beyond, wonders if it is dawn or dusk. The smell of cold and oxygen and the outside world invade the truck’s fuggy cave.

  Looming in the doorframe, the man searches, then points to Kabir.

  ‘You, come,’ he says.

  The men in the truck stand up. Maybe this is the drop-off place for Patras. Kabir doesn’t move.

  ‘No, no,’ the man says. ‘Just the two brothers.’

  He lunges at Kabir, and grabs him by the arm.

  Kabir yowls as the man swings him over the edge of the truck and on to the ground. Aryan hurls himself behind him like a creature gone wild.

  Hamid kicks over the boxes and throws himself after Aryan.

  The driver catches Hamid hard with his fist and sends him sprawling backwards on to a tower of boxes that topple against the truck’s inside wall. Then he slams the doors shut.

  For a few moments all is silent; then Hamid is shouting and banging on the truck’s metal sides. Somebody stifles his protests.

  Outside, a thickset man is gripping Kabir by his arms. A white
singlet stretches over his belly and a piece of rope holds up his trousers. He looks at the driver with nervous eyes, while the boy twists like a pinioned kitten in his grasp.

  ‘Here’s your merchandise,’ the driver says to the Greek man. He nods.

  The driver hoists himself into the cabin with a movement surprisingly lithe for a heavy man. He sends a rosary and a pair of dice swinging madly above the dashboard as he reverses back up the road.

  Aryan runs after the truck, feet skidding in the mud as he loses his balance and recovers it beside the churning wheels. He thumps the vehicle’s side.

  ‘Hamid!’ he shouts.

  ‘Aryan!’ comes the muffled reply.

  The wheels spin and gain traction. The truck accelerates, and disappears over the rise.

  Only when Aryan comes back does the man release the child.

  Aryan pulls Kabir towards him and folds his arms across his brother’s chest, holding him tight to stop his shaking. Kabir rubs his arms where the man’s grip is already starting to flower into a purple tattoo of bruising.

  The air is pungent with earth and manure. Ragged farm buildings sprawl around a rusting tractor abandoned in the yard. It has Greek lettering across the windscreen and its tyres have herringboned the soil like army tanks. Ploughed fields recede in the failing light, and, behind the rotting slats of an enclosure, pigs with mud-caked ankles root around an overturned pail.

  Beyond them, the sky hangs low over a wide valley with bare, undulating hills. Aryan shivers as the breeze that has swept over Hamid’s truck reaches him bereft of any message. It must be nightfall, he thinks, but he cannot remember which day.

  ‘Where are we, Aryan?’ Kabir says.

  Aryan’s tired mind is whirring. He is trying to recall whether Mohamed said anything about working in Greece when they set off from Istanbul. Surely he would have remembered. In the village near the Evros, the father of the boy with the withered arm said only that the truck would take them far across the border. He thought they were going to Patras, where all the Afghans were.

  On bowlegs, the man in the singlet approaches.

  ‘Come with me,’ he says, his knobbled fist in the small of Aryan’s back.

  They are inside a small white building. Two pallets of straw fill the recess of a whitewashed concrete ledge. There is peeling green linoleum underfoot, and a dripping tap outside. A washed-out curtain hangs across the doorway, sagging in the places where it has torn through its hooks. Across the yard, smoke leaks upwards from the farmhouse chimney and smears the darkening sky. Their breath curls like writing in the air and disappears. In the outhouse there is no fireplace nor any source of heat.

  ‘Wait.’ The man crosses the yard and disappears inside the house.

  Presently an old woman in black woollen stockings emerges. She wears a dark-blue apron whose pocket is torn and carries a tray with bread, two slabs of white cheese, and two bowls of broth. She has barnacles on her face like the nodes insects make under bark. Silently she sets the tray down on an upended log outside the building, scarcely looking at them. She shuffles back across the yard in shoes of cloth folded under at the heels like slippers.

  The tap squeaks as Aryan washes Kabir’s hands, then his own. The water comes out in a thin, twisted ribbon. There is almost no pressure. Aryan takes off his T-shirt and wets it and scrubs Kabir’s face and ears and neck. The water splashes their feet and leaves spidery tributaries in the soil.

  They have eaten nothing since Turkey. Aryan thinks of the pigs and does not touch the soup. But Kabir is too ravenous to hold back.

  ‘It doesn’t taste of anything, Aryan,’ Kabir says. ‘Just salt.’

  Aryan sniffs the bowl. There is no sign of meat of any kind. ‘Maybe it’s just vegetables,’ he says.

  The rising steam and the sight of his brother eating are too much. Aryan lifts the bowl and sips gingerly, his hollow stomach contracting. There is none of the richness of lamb or goat or chicken, none of what he imagines would be pork. There is just hot water with coins of yellow oil on the surface, and grains of rice among the crescent moons of celery beneath.

  They lick the grains from the bottom of their bowls, and demolish the bread and the last crumbs of the sour-tasting cheese. The liquid warms them, but when they have finished their hunger hasn’t gone away.

  Aryan leans back on the pallet. Lying down stretches his stomach flat, he tells himself; that way he won’t feel so empty.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ Kabir says after a while.

  ‘Well it’s not my idea of paradise either,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Where do you think we are?’

  ‘Somewhere in Greece, I suppose. We could be anywhere.’

  ‘Why did they bring us here?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kabir. I guess it’s to work.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Probably farm work.’

  ‘Why didn’t Hamid come too?’

  ‘Maybe they only need two people.’

  ‘How long do we have to stay?’

  ‘Kabir, I have no idea. Probably till we’ve earned our passage and they are ready to move us on.’

  Aryan is suddenly tired of his little brother. He is tired of having to think for the two of them. Tired of being held back by his brother’s short legs. Tired of having to be reassuring when he is riddled with foreboding. Tired of having to provide answers to things he doesn’t understand.

  Then immediately he feels guilty. On the long walk over the mountains between Iran and Turkey Kabir had hardly complained, though his jeans were chafing and their feet were on fire in the rocky terrain and their mouths were sandpaper dry. Aryan was amazed that he didn’t protest and just kept walking as fast as he could so the smugglers wouldn’t hit him with their guns. It was only later that Aryan saw how thin his sneakers had become after all that shredding on the rocks. Kabir can’t help asking questions – he’s always been like that – and with Hamid gone, he will have no one but Aryan to ask.

  ‘What about Hamid?’ Kabir says as if on cue. ‘Do you think he’s got any injuries?’

  Aryan sighs. ‘He might be a bit sore,’ he says. ‘You heard him hollering in the back of the truck.’

  ‘He might have a good black bruise,’ Kabir says.

  ‘Or a big black eye.’

  ‘Or two black eyes and a bruise.’

  ‘Well maybe not all of them,’ Aryan says.

  Hamid is tough, Aryan knows. Tougher than he is. He is impetuous and his temper gets him into trouble but he is also fearless, and quick to seize an opportunity. A Tajik, he made it all the way to Istanbul on his own after fleeing the Taliban; Aryan has always been a little in awe. He also felt they made a team, he and Hamid and Kabir. It was Hamid who led them through the steep streets of Istanbul to watch the tankers gliding past the minarets along the Bosporus, and used them as decoys while he filched pastries from café tables so they could devour them, out of sight, in the twisting alleys. With a rush Aryan misses him, and feels unsteady without him, aware that all the decisions he will have to make for him and Kabir he will now have to take on his own.

  ‘Why didn’t they let Hamid stay with us?’ Kabir says.

  ‘Why do you keep asking questions I cannot answer?’ says Aryan.

  There are times when Aryan wonders if he shouldn’t have left Kabir behind. He could have stayed with their cousins in Iran and Aryan would have sent for him once he made it to Europe. But after everything that had happened Kabir was distraught at the idea of separation. And Aryan hadn’t known how long it would be before Kabir could join him, and in the end he had put together the money from all the things he had sold, and relented.

  But now he wishes he could be alone to think. He doesn’t understand why they were thrown off the truck, or why they were separated from the others. He is starting to wonder whether some arrangement hasn’t been made concerning them – in Istanbul, maybe, or by the people who took them across the river to Greece.

  Kabir turns his back. His frustratio
n ripples through the silence in invisible waves. Aryan knows he has hurt his feelings, but for the moment he doesn’t care.

  Since they arrived, something unexplained has been flickering at the back of Aryan’s mind. Now it rises towards the surface like a diving bird swimming upwards through the waters of a lake, and formulates itself into a question.

  How did the driver know they were brothers?

  A thumbnail moon hangs in the darkening sky and a pale light emanates from one of the windows in the house. It is too cold to undress. Aryan doubles one of the blankets over the straw pallet and makes Kabir crawl inside. Aryan folds the other blankets over the top of him, and spreads their anoraks over his shoulders. Then he huddles under the covers beside him and hugs his brother to keep them both warm.

  With a start he realizes Kabir is crying.

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong, Soldierboy?’ Aryan says.

  Kabir is silent.

  ‘Tell me,’ Aryan says.

  He doesn’t respond.

  ‘Is this the brother who was strong enough to cross the desert and the mountains, like Rostam in the stories Baba used to read to us back home?’ Aryan says.

  The boy sniffs wetly.

  ‘You can’t be sad for no reason. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I want to go back,’ Kabir says after a while.

  ‘Back where?’

  ‘Back to Iran. Back to our cousins’ place. Back to Zohra and Masood.’

  Aryan sighs. ‘Me too,’ he says. ‘But we can’t go back now, Kabir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not after what we’ve spent to get this far. They’d laugh at us, and then they’d be ashamed. Everyone would say we were cowards.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Kabir says. ‘I hate it here.’

  ‘I don’t like it either, but you were the one who insisted on coming. You knew it was going to be tough. Anyway, I thought you wanted to go to school.’

  ‘I do. But we’re in Europe now and I can’t see any schools.’