Then it is Aryan’s turn.
Fever, sweating. His skin itches under the blankets. He can’t sleep. He is cold then hot. He shivers and sweats. He can’t hold anything down.
Sometimes Kabir is beside him. He remembers the puppies playing at his feet, the sound of lapping as they drank water from the old pan Kabir found lying in the yard.
He dreams. There is strangeness and violence but no conclusions.
They are back on the Turkish border, crossing the river. They are in a boat that is leaking, but they have nearly reached the shore. There are soldiers among the trees ahead of them. More come out up and down the banks. He can see the silhouettes of their guns, and there is nowhere to land. Water fills the front of the dinghy which is heavy with the weight of men. Aryan is scared that the soldiers will shoot them, or shoot holes in the boat and they will drown. The boatman flails with the pole, trying to turn back. But the dancing lights on the bridge are spreading out, bobbing through the trees, getting closer on the shore they have just left. Hamid is with them in the boat. ‘We’ve got to swim,’ he says, and leans over the writhing current. ‘Come on!’ But Kabir won’t jump and Aryan will not leave him. Suddenly the boatman strikes the bottom, the dinghy skids sideways, and there’s a splash. Hamid’s head is bobbing in the water as the current ferries him downstream. There is a shot, and a burning sensation, and Aryan is bleeding from his side.
Other dreams take its place. He is in Afghanistan again, and somehow he already knows what is coming because he has dreamt it before. There is dust everywhere and the mangled half-body of a car. Half of the street has disappeared; it looks like the mouth of a friend with the teeth knocked out. The police station wall has collapsed on to a watermelon stall and the fruit have split like skulls, spilling their red pulp over the road. There are slicks of blood as black as engine grease, and people dragging the injured into doorways. Rescuers are trying to lever up the fallen masonry; he can hear the sound of moaning like an animal caught in a trap. And then even the moaning stops. When he gets close he recognizes the sensible shoes, and the clothes under the blood-soaked burka.
What he can’t understand is why the foot in the shoe is not attached to his mother’s body any more.
Suddenly he is in the street outside the house in Tehran. His mother is in the doorway holding Kabir. Aryan is going to school and the bigger boys are waiting for him. They don’t like Afghans in their neighbourhood. There is a maths test and he has stayed up half the night to prepare for it. They are lurking with slingshots in the alleyway. A stone the size of a walnut hits him in the heart.
The layers of danger mingle with pictures so fantastical that later he can’t distinguish which ones were real.
They are back in Istanbul and have stolen away once more with Hamid. They are inside a giant mosque with a dome made of a million gold mosaics. Viking warriors are leaning out over the balcony, looking down into the biggest building they have ever seen. Their knife-blades flash as they carve Nordic graffiti into the stone. On the walls, high above the gaping Norsemen, are pictures of people with peaceful faces making strange Christian signs with their hands. Only the hardest-to-reach faces are left; the others have been chiselled away. The three of them, he, Hamid and Kabir, are looking up at them from beneath the highest dome. There is a flapping in the rafters, and a pigeon splices the shafts of sunlight, pale feathers golden in the slanting sun. Then, with no announcement, a single mosaic falls, and then another, and another, and the bird claps an incantation of dust and then hundreds of golden squares are tumbling down beside them and all around them – a waterfall of ancient tiles of glass shimmering and flashing as they fall in slow revolutions, splintering on the flagstones in a tinkling kaleidoscope of light.
Aryan doesn’t know how long he is like this, drifting between fever and nightmare and fantasy and memory and sleep.
When he starts to come out of it, Kabir and the puppies bring him a hard-boiled egg.
Afterwards, they go back to the fields, Aryan, Kabir, and the three dogs. Kabir’s puffy cheeks are white and Aryan’s limbs feel leaden in the sunlight.
Aryan scores the passing days in the notebook that he rarely has time to sketch in now. The big potato fields are nearly finished, the scraggly stalks ripped from the soil and stuffed into rubbish sacks, the speckled nuggets salvaged from the sheltering earth.
At first Kabir is thrilled with every find, guessing how many tubers each plant will yield. He imagines himself an archaeologist and whoops with excitement when he spots the tiniest ones hidden like golden beads in the lumps of dirt. But soon he grows bored, and Aryan has to shout at him to stop him from playing with the puppies rather than sift through the clods he has overturned with the fork.
Aryan’s back is stiff with always being bent to the earth the same way. The muscles in his neck complain when he turns to look over his shoulder. The digging fork is too big for his frame and every new swing tires him; his hands grow sore from pulling the dying plants from the soil. There are always more boxes to fill, always more rows to work.
He reckons that nearly five months have passed. He is impatient to be on their way.
On a new page in his notebook Aryan tries to work out some numbers.
In Istanbul, Ahmed told them that the smugglers were asking two thousand five hundred euros for a place in a truck that would go through Patras to Italy. Aryan has no idea how far they are from the Greek port, but calculates they would have to work five months to earn that much.
Aryan says nothing to Kabir. But he is starting to wonder if the farmer really is going to organize their ride.
‘When are we going to England?’ Kabir keeps saying.
The farmer cuts Aryan off mid-sentence when he asks.
‘Look,’ the farmer says, with a gesture that sweeps the hills.
Beyond the rise, the onion fields stretch before them, green leaves spiky as pencils that recede into a distant, knee-high wall.
It is night and Kabir can’t sleep. The moon streams light into the room. Far away a dog is howling. Not-So-Old Dog answers from somewhere behind the house.
‘Aryan?’ he says.
‘Mmmm.’
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Yes,’ Aryan says.
‘Then how come you’re talking to me?’
‘I’m not talking to you. I’m sleeping.’
A small silence.
‘Aryan?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Am I an Afghan?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Am I?’
‘Are you what?’ Aryan clambers up through his tiredness.
‘Am I an Afghan?’
‘What do you mean, are you an Afghan?’
‘Can you still be an Afghan if you can’t remember anything about it?’
‘Of course you’re an Afghan. I’m an Afghan, you’re an Afghan, our family is from Afghanistan.’
‘But if someone asks, I can’t tell them what it’s like. I can remember more about Iran and Istanbul and this farm than Afghanistan.’
‘That’s because you were only four when we moved to Iran. What would you be if you weren’t an Afghan?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m not anything at all.’
‘Of course you’re an Afghan. Do you think you’d be here if you were an Egyptian or an American or an Eskimo?’
‘OK, so tell me about Afghanistan,’ Kabir says.
Aryan pauses. ‘Can you remember the house?’
Kabir is silent for a moment. ‘I can’t see it in my head any more,’ he says. In his voice there is something bordering on distress.
Aryan is fully awake now. ‘Of course you can. You remember the pigeons that Grandpa used to look after, don’t you? He used to take you up there sometimes, when you were still a yowling baby, so you could see the rooftops of the town.’
Kabir hesitates. ‘I remember the white feathers and the pink claws, and their shiny, orange eyes. But I don’t remember where it was. I can’t even remember what Grandpa looked like.’
‘He was very old. He had a wiry white beard and he had one funny leg. It used to take him ages to get up the stairs to the roof. His hands smelt of soap and he always wore a pakol,’ Aryan says.
‘I remember the pakol,’ says Kabir. ‘He used to put it on my head and it covered my eyes and prickled.’
‘You see?’ Aryan says. ‘You do remember.’
‘What else?’
‘What about the bazaar where Baba used to go to buy pine nuts and pomegranates? You must remember that,’ Aryan says. ‘Madar used to go crazy when he took you. She yelled at him saying he’d put you down some place and you’d wander off and get lost. But you wanted to go on his shoulders, and you screamed so much if you couldn’t go that he took you along just to stop your yelling. Surely you haven’t forgotten that!’
Kabir wrinkles his nose, trying to summon the earliest pictures of his short life.
‘And the TV, remember the old TV? There was no electricity so Baba linked it up with jump leads to a car battery under the table – there were all those wires – and it made a sound like hissing, and the picture looked like it was being beamed through a dust storm.’
‘I remember the battery!’ Kabir says, his face lightening. ‘Yes, now I remember. The pincers on it were red and blue.’
‘You see?’ Aryan says. ‘Even though you were only four you do remember.’
‘So I am from Afghanistan,’ Kabir says.
‘Yes,’ Aryan says. ‘Now go to sleep like any normal Afghan.’
‘But, Aryan?’
‘Yes, Kabir.’
‘I can’t remember Baba any more.’
Aryan is caught offguard. He doesn’t want to think about the last time he saw his father, the nightmare scenes with the spilled apples that creep up on him even when he is awake. He swallows, puts on his cheerful voice.
‘He was very tall, so tall he laughed at you when you wanted to go anywhere with him because you only came up to his knees. He called you his grasshopper because you were forever leaping up to follow him around.’
Kabir says nothing. He has heard these stories before but Aryan knows he wants him to tell them again.
‘He had big hands, and a scratchy face where he used to shave his beard till the Taliban came,’ Aryan said. ‘Then he grew a beard too, like all the men. It had colours in it that were different from his hair. When he’d been to the bazaar his clothes came back smelling of tobacco smoke. And he played chess better than anyone in the whole town.’
‘I don’t remember him playing.’
‘He didn’t play at home. He played in the bazaar after he lost his job when they burned down the school. They drank tea and smoked and played chess and he was always the best. That’s why he tried to teach me.’
‘Did you get good at it too?’
‘He nearly always beat me. Sometimes I won – though maybe he just let me. He got cross when I missed the obvious moves and then he had no mercy, and punished me by wiping out all my men.’
‘Can you teach me to play chess too?’
‘You wouldn’t like it. It’s for grown-ups. There are lots of pieces and they all go different ways.’
‘I forget faces but I’m good at remembering things like that.’
‘When you are bigger and we find a board I’ll show you the rules. Then I can use all Baba’s tricks to give you a thrashing.’
‘Not if I get better than you!’
‘Well I haven’t heard of any grasshoppers that can play chess, so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. Now be quiet and try to get some sleep.’
Aryan lies awake for a long time, thinking. It worries him that it is getting harder, whenever Kabir asks, to dredge up his own memories of their father. It is as if the definition of Baba’s profile, in the dust-scratched photo in his wallet, is already fading, its power to evoke the scent of his father’s skin, the rough feel of his hands, evaporating. Digging back through the past, clutching at stories that seem to ossify into something more lifeless with each retelling, is becoming more exhausting each time. Yet without the retelling, some vital thread will be broken; it is as if in reminding Kabir of their past he is also reminding himself, and in that way each becomes the keeper of the other’s identity. Without Kabir, Aryan feels some part of him would cease to exist, and that his life before this journey would have no substance that even he could believe in. Sometimes he feels he could float off into space like an astronaut tethered neither by orbit nor gravity, and that he has such slim purchase upon the Earth that it would make no difference to anyone.
It is the end of the afternoon when an old truck pulls up covered in a green tarpaulin. Aryan is standing shirtless at the tap in the dying light of the day. There are rivulets of dirt down his arms and tiny moon craters in the dust.
Aryan hears the driver rip at the handbrake and swing himself out of the cabin and into the yard. The pigs grunt behind the rotting slats of their pen.
When Aryan looks up again the man is staring at him with the small, hard eyes of a lizard; his mouth is arranged in a strange half-smile. He doesn’t turn away when Aryan sees him watching, but holds his gaze as if in expectation.
Something cold slithers down Aryan’s spine. His mouth turns dry and his tongue feels thick inside it.
Kabir comes out of their sleeping place. He is looking for the stick he throws to the dogs. He stops when he sees the figure beside the truck.
The man gazes a moment longer, then turns and walks into the house.
‘Who’s that?’ Kabir asks.
Aryan shrugs.
When the man comes outside again, he is arguing in Greek with the farmer. He strides across the yard, boots flinging small pieces of mud into the air, and flicks a half-smoked cigarette into the dirt; a thread of smoke unfurls like a small act of defiance. He swings himself back into the driver’s seat. The wheels spin as he reverses past the gate.
Stony-faced, the farmer stands in the doorway, arms crossed, watching the truck disappear. He looks at the boys for a moment with an expression Aryan can’t decipher, then goes inside.
It is first light, and the rows of onions beckon to them, rippling like a lake in the early summer breeze.
The farmer has given them wide, flat-pronged forks to dig around the bulbs. In the cool of the dawn he shows them how to pull them out carefully without damaging the skin, and then strip the dirt off with their hands. With a handheld scythe they lop off the leaves and fill the mesh sacks with brown balls.
‘Small hands are good for this work,’ the farmer says. ‘This is a good job for you boys.’
Kabir squats close to the stalks, pulling them up with both hands and dusting them off. The puppies tangle between his feet. Sometimes he slaps them away.
The weather is getting hot. By the middle of the day they’ve peeled down to their T-shirts. They are sunburnt on their faces and necks and on their arms where their T-shirts end. They slap at mosquitoes and stinger wasps.
Crouched for hours in the same position, Aryan thinks his back is going to break. He also notices how the muscles in his arms are filling out and growing hard.
At noon they take a breather in the transparent shade of the olive trees. Small flies buzz around their faces, excited by the smell of sweat. The plastic bottles they refill for water are warm despite being buried up to their necks in the soil.
Men who arrived soon after them are working the nearby fields. They don’t speak, but toil right through the hottest part of the day, turning each row into a knobbly ridge of red bags. A trail of discarded leaves floats behind them like a wake.
They must be paid by the sackful, Aryan thinks. That must be why they don’t stop. He wonders where they go at night, and whether he and Kabir will be travelling with them when the farmer finally sends them on their way.
By the end of the day, all Aryan can think about is lying down. As soon as he is horizontal, he rolls off a precipice into sleep.
A conversation is taking place between their parents. They are in the
house with the dovecote on the roof; the pigeons have filled the perches and the breeding boxes with their feathers and their warm beating hearts. Aryan is coming downstairs to get another blanket. It is early summer and he is sleeping outside, under the open sky, under the stars.
‘If we don’t leave he will end up just like them,’ his father is saying.
Their mother is crying softly. She says she doesn’t want to leave Afghanistan. She doesn’t want to leave the house, nor the area around it where all her family are, nor the place where they buried Bashir. But Baba is telling her that soon they will have no choice.
There has been another rocket attack. Young men are being recruited. The commanders are again pressuring families for their sons.
‘In the villages they are offering money to the fathers,’ Baba is saying. ‘They are taking boys as young as eleven and twelve.’
Aryan knows his father wants them to leave because of him. He has never been to Iran and doesn’t want to go. There has been no school for months but he likes playing chess with Baba in the bazaar, and games of marbles with his friends in the dusty streets.
At the end of the day they sometimes see the old woman at the washing line. She never comes to talk to them, not even when she shuffles across the yard in her worn cloth shoes to bring them their food at night. She never smiles, her expression darkened by the map of lines and nodes on her face.
Aryan notices little things at first, and they are so small he doesn’t know whether to believe it’s a change at all.
First it is just a flicker of the curtain that makes him wonder whether the old woman has been watching them return from the fields.
Then there is the matter of the ice for his ankle, and the ancient aspirin. And the salt-and-sugar water for Kabir when he was sick. And Aryan’s hard-boiled egg.
One day Kabir goes to the house to ask for soap, and returns with an apricot in each hand.
At dusk, when they come in from the fields and the puppies are leaping all around, Kabir starts taking them to the house to be fed. The old woman tosses them some scraps from the table, and when he steps over the threshold, she lets him spend a few minutes inside.
Hinterland: A Novel Page 5