Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  The sky is the deepest blue and the streetlights are still on when Aryan peers through the gap he has opened in the canvas. The truck has stopped at a service station; he is assailed by the odour of petrol that always made him feel queasy, even when he has had enough to eat.

  The driver slams the cabin door. Aryan waits a moment, then takes a chisel he has found in the truck and tears a slit in the tarpaulin. Sliding the crates apart, he looks out. All he can see is the bitumen of a car park and the wall of another truck.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he tells Kabir. He pushes his brother through the opening, then slithers down beside him, favouring his strong ankle. His vertebrae scrape on the truck’s metal ridge as he drops.

  On creaking legs they stumble into a salt-sticky dawn. From the sound of seagulls he guesses they are near a rubbish dump, or somewhere along the coast. They hover between the semi-trailers, and duck under the wheels of one to wait till their driver returns. He starts the engine and pulls back on to the highway; they watch till the green tarpaulin is eclipsed by the traffic.

  There is no soap or paper towels in the men’s restroom and the water is cold.

  Side by side they piss into a reeking urinal. Aryan steps over the leaking floor and uproots two handfuls of paper from a cubicle. They wash their faces and dry them off and look at themselves like startled strangers in the spotted mirror.

  ‘Where is this place?’ Kabir says.

  ‘I think we’re still in Greece. At least all the number plates are Greek.’

  He flattens his brother’s springy hair with water and straightens his clothes.

  ‘We have to try not to look too obvious,’ Aryan says.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Kabir says. Aryan ignores him and the dragging emptiness of his own stomach.

  Aeroplanes cruise low overhead, landing gear extended like talons. From the airport, Aryan thinks, there must be transport into a city.

  ‘You got your marching shoes on?’

  Kabir nods.

  Aryan is worried by how quiet he has become. He hopes that every kilometre he puts between them and the farm will help him forget.

  ‘We’ll get something to eat in the city, don’t worry,’ he tells Kabir.

  Around them the land is bald. Treeless mountains brood at the far edge of a flat industrial plain that is spliced by freeways. They skirt the back of the petrol station and walk along a road that merges up ahead with a highway. A railway line divides its two arteries of traffic; a train ambles into a deserted platform.

  Aryan grabs Kabir by the hand. They clamber on to the motorway shoulder. ‘Ready?’ he says, searching for a break in the traffic.

  At the first gap between the vehicles they run. There is a wailing of horns as cars and trucks speed by in a surge of wind. Aryan’s heart pounds as they clamber over the road divider and flatten themselves against the waist-high metal barrier. Whistling vehicles whip their hair into their eyes and tear at their clothes in both directions now. Shapes like metallic walls roar by so fast that their colours bleed; the world is streaked with sound and light and the rush of exhaust-laden air. Kabir slips but steadies himself on the barrier.

  ‘Ready?’ Aryan shouts again above the roaring. His brother is leaning backwards like a man unhinged. The vehicles thin out momentarily, and they hurl themselves across the tide.

  Another blasting of horns, but they’re across.

  They jump over a concrete wall and land on a sandy path that runs beside the railway tracks. Ahead, a few low steps lead up to the platform. On one side of it hangs a blue sign with a picture of an aeroplane. On the other, the word ‘Athina’.

  They pause for a moment, catching their breath. Kabir rolls up his trouser leg; his shin is bleeding where he has skinned it on the barricade.

  ‘We’d better get a ticket,’ Aryan says. A staircase to the ticket office soars over their heads.

  At the window Aryan pulls out a twenty-euro note.

  ‘Two,’ he says.

  A young woman, black hair streaked blonde, says something at high velocity they don’t understand. ‘Airport, or Athens?’ she repeats in impatient English through a gap in the glass.

  ‘Athens,’ he says. With relief, he recognizes the name.

  Speaker-buds in her ears, she barely looks at them as she taps a machine with fingernails ornamented with intricate flowers. Kabir can just see over the counter; he squints to watch the miniature decorations rise and fall as she works.

  Bored, the woman slaps two tickets from a wooden holder on to the counter. She slides their change under the glass without a glance.

  Copying a young man in front of them, they feed their tickets into a greedy turnstile that spits them out again with a whirr of mechanical disdain.

  Back on the platform, they sit cross-legged on the sun-warmed concrete to wait. They pitch pieces of gravel at a discoloured soft-drink can discarded on the far side of the rails.

  They get off with the tourists from the airport at a station before the end of the line. The train has left the lighted world behind and burrowed deep underground; the platform is aswirl with people.

  Aryan stands aside to let the tourists wheel their oversized suitcases past. In the dimness and the crush he has lost his bearings; the weight of earth and concrete oppress him; he just wants to go onwards, or up.

  In the carriage he has shown Kabir the piece of paper where Ahmed wrote ‘Victoria Park’. There were pictures of a ship and a temple and the Olympic rings on the diagram above the doors, but no sign of any parks. On the platform he cannot decipher the maps in frames on the walls.

  He stops an old man in too-long shoes clutching the arm of his wife. A transparent pyramid of plastic dangles from her finger; Kabir peers at the biscuits arranged inside. They argue, they point and gesticulate, but Aryan cannot make out their Greek.

  All bra straps and flashing jewellery, a woman clatters past too hurried to notice Aryan’s appeal. A man with a white cane tap-taps along the platform as if sweeping it for mines. Finally they intercept a young man who looks like a student, with holes in his jeans and hair glued into a miraculous point.

  ‘There is no Victoria Park in Athens,’ the student says, when at last he understands where they want to go.

  Ahmed had been so definite. Aryan insists.

  ‘There is Victoria metro station and that is not far from a big park in Alexandras Street,’ the student says. ‘Maybe that’s the one you want.’

  Aryan hesitates. Maybe he is right. If there is no Victoria Park, perhaps Ahmed meant the park that’s near the station.

  ‘Yes,’ Aryan says. ‘I think it’s OK.’

  The student leads them up escalators and through passageways of gleaming stone.

  Kabir gazes with amazement at the moving staircases. He pauses a second before jumping on, loses his balance, and steadies himself on the handrail that goes at a different speed from the stairs.

  ‘Two stops only,’ the student says, illustrating the information with his fingers when they reach the platform. ‘Omonia, Victoria. There you get out. The park is very close. Just ask for a street called Alexandras if you get lost.’

  He makes Aryan repeat the name.

  Aryan touches his heart and shakes his hand, and Kabir solemnly follows suit. The student is surprised, then smiles. In moments he is enclosed by the crowd; it is like he never existed, or did so, ephemeral as a firefly, only to light their way.

  Almost immediately they run into a group of Afghans sitting under the trees. They are Hazaras from the south. One of them leads Aryan and Kabir across the park and through the streets to a hotel where the rooms are €3.50 a night.

  ‘You need a travel agent?’ asks the man behind the desk. Aryan stares at the shiny scar that links his right nostril to his eye.

  He hadn’t imagined it would be so simple.

  They take a room for one night. Kabir drags his feet up the interminable staircase, pushing himself from wall to wall. The number on the key leads them to a room, little bigger than th
e two narrow beds inside it, pungent with stale cigarettes. There is one small window almost at the level of the ceiling. Aryan works its wooden shutter open by pulling on a dirty string; the light it lets in is grey, reflected off an outside wall.

  The twin beds sag even before they collapse on to chenille bedspreads rubbed thin by the countless bodies that have lain there before them.

  Aryan pulls from his inside pocket the pieces of bread that he has saved from the farm, and hands one to Kabir. The crusts are so hard their gums bleed.

  Later, Aryan shows Kabir how to work the shower, and waits for him in the room. When he comes back, pink-skinned and dripping-haired, Aryan takes his turn.

  Aryan stands under the running water a long time. The tiles are cracked, and some are missing, and when he turns the hot tap a rusted pipe swings out from the wall. Brown veins marble a decaying cake of soap. But the lukewarm water washes the dust from his hair, prises the stiffness from his shoulders, and slowly eases the tiredness from his mind.

  Pictures flash up and disintegrate like slides on a crumbling wall – the puppies batting potatoes between Kabir’s feet; the old woman feeding them in silence at the kitchen table; Kabir’s face in the dashboard light when the truck driver brought him back to the farm. He remembers the smell of earth under the truck’s tarpaulin and Kabir awash in the aquarium light, and the student with the pointy hair who helped them in the metro. He lets his thoughts run with the water until it starts to turn cold and washes them down the half-choked drain.

  Flowers of rust decorate the mirror that is covered in fog. Aryan traces a line across it with his finger and watches the drips race to descend. He dries himself with the scratchy towel that is too meagre to wrap around his hips, and pulls his dirty clothes back on. For the first time in months his body feels almost relaxed.

  He pads back to their room along the tiled corridor and pushes open the door.

  The room is empty.

  Aryan seizes the key, slams the door behind him and flings himself down the staircase three steps at once. He slips on the foot-polished surface; manages to clutch the banister just in time. His heart slams against his ribcage like a drowning man.

  Between gasps for air he tries to calculate how many minutes have passed, how far a small boy could have gone.

  There is no one in the foyer; even the scar-faced receptionist has disappeared.

  In the street he looks left and right, blinking in the glare, scanning the known world for a sign. Where, he thinks, where? The road is choked with traffic; his view is blocked by a stream of yellow taxis and white-windowed delivery vans. The sick feeling he remembers from the last time they were separated overwhelms him. The only place he can imagine is the park; panicked, he retraces their steps.

  And then he sees him, sitting on a bench between the trees. He is watching a gang of children chase a football, a black-and-white dog yapping at their heels. In the glaring sunshine, Kabir looks forlorn.

  Aryan leans forward, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He can feel his heart pounding through the wash of relief.

  He sinks beside his brother on the bench. It is a while before he can talk; his mouth is sour with the aftertaste of panic.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Aryan says after a while.

  ‘I only went for a walk.’

  ‘I thought I’d lost you again.’

  The first agent they meet looks scarcely older than Aryan. He has slicked-back hair and a nervous tic and mobile phones he juggles in each hand. He promises to get them to Italy for two thousand eight hundred euros.

  Two thousand eight hundred euros, Aryan thinks. The number makes him feel weak. That is not the price they had calculated back in Iran, when he had discussed the cost of the journey, including bribes and agents’ fees, with a man his uncle knew who had made it as far as Austria before getting sent back.

  ‘Beware of the kidnap places inside Iran,’ the man had said. ‘Beware of the hostage takers who will beat you and imprison you until your relatives send more money. Beware of the intermediaries along the way, the heroin addicts and the small-town profiteers who will try to make you pay a second time for things already included in the price. And above all, beware of the smugglers. Your life is in their hands – remember to never, ever look them in the eye.’

  The receptionist sets up a meeting with another agent. Aryan kicks Kabir under the counter; he cannot stop staring at the man’s scar.

  A six-foot Kurd, the agent looks more like a warrior than a smuggler. He reminds Aryan of the gun-swinging horsemen who led them, on foot, over the mountains into Turkey, toting drugs with their barrels of oil. The man leers when he speaks and proposes a deal that Aryan instinctively mistrusts: two thousand nine hundred euros to guarantee their arrival in Rome.

  When a third one sets the same price, tapping the figure into his calculator with a carpet seller’s practised panache, Aryan tells the man it’s too much. He hasn’t got any solutions, but they will find some other way.

  ‘How much have you got then?’ says the man. A long-toothed Pakistani, he looks like a door-to-door salesman. A pod of cellphones nestle in the purple satin pockets of his briefcase.

  Aryan has learned not to give any numbers away. ‘Not as much as you’re asking,’ he says. He resists the urge to pat the side of his belt.

  The salesman is undeterred. ‘I will send you my colleague,’ he says. ‘He has a cheaper way.’

  A young Pakistani with different-coloured eyes meets them in a metro station with a map. He stands with his back to the wall, on the lookout for any policemen on patrol.

  ‘We go here, to this town, and this is where you get on the truck. This truck will take you to Italy.’

  ‘Through Patras,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Not through Patras,’ the man says. ‘Inland. Fewer controls that way.’

  ‘It looks very far by road,’ Aryan says, looking at the red line of the highway, the backlands in green, the light-blue sweep of coast.

  ‘For you it is better. It is safer,’ the young man says. Aryan is unnerved by the way his blue eye seems larger than the brown. ‘Out of sight of the police.’

  Aryan looks at Kabir and hesitates.

  ‘I can do a special deal for you, since your brother is small. We take many families this way. It is less because we can put more people on board.’

  ‘How many people are you taking?’ Aryan asks.

  ‘A maximum of sixteen. I have two places left so I will do you a special offer, just one thousand two hundred euros for the two of you. One thousand two hundred is a very good price.’

  Aryan reflects. ‘When would we go?’ he says.

  ‘When the families are ready we will go. It’s a matter of a couple of days.’

  Aryan tells him he will think about it overnight.

  ‘Don’t take too long,’ the smuggler says. He introduces himself as Ardi, but Aryan knows it’s a false name. ‘You’re not the only ones wanting to go.’

  ‘Tomorrow I will tell the receptionist,’ Aryan says. ‘He will let you know.’

  Aryan still has one thousand four hundred euros sewn into the lining of his belt. If they use one thousand two hundred euros to get to Italy, that will leave only three hundred and forty-six euros to get them from Italy to England if he includes the money they got on the farm. It won’t be enough. But at least they will be closer to their goal.

  In the morning he asks the receptionist to tell Ardi they accept.

  A week goes by before Ardi comes to find them in their new sleeping place, with a group of Afghan boys in Attiki Park.

  The morning heat was already stifling when Aryan had met them, rummaging among the T-shirts in a street market that barrelled through a tunnel of trees. In the lime-green shade of the branches that wove into a cathedral overhead, Kabir had marvelled at the chandeliers of grapes, and the gargoyle faces of the curly-tailed fish.

  ‘You can stay with us,’ one of the boys had said when he realized Aryan and Kabir had just arrived. ‘You c
an come with us when we go to the church for food.’

  Watermelons were piled in precarious pyramids on the ground. Aryan’s stomach churned as they went past.

  Though the boys are kind, Aryan is impatient to leave. He is scared of the police, scared of the boys’ tales, scared of getting stuck again when they have already lost so much time.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, early, we go,’ Ardi says. ‘You will meet me by the metro station at six.’

  Ardi sits several rows behind them in the bus and doesn’t address them a single word.

  They had hung back as he lined up at one of the windows of the low-roofed bus station, its destinations pressed in blue letters against the glass. Overhead, a pair of unsynchronized fans made half-hearted revolutions in the heat. Old ladies in black perched at plastic tables while the younger women, with prams and revealing tops, bought gnarled cheese rolls and fluorescent drinks for their kids. Busmen and taxi drivers embroidered the blinding day with tobacco smoke.

  When Ardi was done, they followed him outside. He handed over their tickets with instructions: not to speak to him or show any sign they recognized him once they boarded the bus; to follow him at a distance when he got off.

  Aryan had given him a third of the money and left the rest with the receptionist with the shiny scar. When they reached Italy he would call the hotel and tell the man to give Ardi the remainder.

  The sun beats down on the side of the bus and the overhead air vents don’t work. Kabir pulls the orange curtain across the window and leans against it, drowsy with heat. Amid the wasps and the mosquitoes and the cicadas they have slept badly in the park, but Aryan forces himself to stay awake, watching for when Ardi gets off.

  Kabir’s thick lashes look like feathers when his eyelids are shut, Aryan thinks; they cast shadows on his cheek where the sunlight filters through the curtain. Tenderness clutches his heart like a rabbit trap.

  He stares at the sun-bleached landscape. The endless road reminds him of another journey, the last trip they made with their mother, on a dusty bus back to Afghanistan. He hadn’t wanted to leave Afghanistan in the first place, but Baba was worried about the commanders; when he was killed they no longer had any choice. Then, after four years at school in Iran, Aryan hadn’t wanted to return. But the UN had said it was safe, and Madar was missing her family, and they couldn’t keep living in the tiny apartment with their cousins – even with Madar washing clothes all day and Aryan sewing in the afternoons with the tailor.