Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  He remembers how happy Madar was to be going home. Her tired face was smiling for the first time in months as she packed their things and brushed Kabir’s hair and put on what she called her sensible shoes. He couldn’t have guessed that one month later she would be dead, that through his grief and anger he would have to sell everything, her gold jewellery and the silk carpets and the house, and take the dangerous route with Kabir all the way back to Iran, and bring him on the journey they were now on.

  They stop at a roadside café selling bags of pistachio nuts and industrial cakes displayed behind finger-smeared glass. Irradiated purple, flies fizz and drop inside a fluorescent grill. Two men with seafarers’ faces play backgammon in a corner by the window, the counters click-clicking as they fly under quick-moving hands.

  Ardi smokes a cigarette outside and doesn’t even acknowledge them with a look.

  It is several hours before they arrive in the town. They follow Ardi to the back of a truck that is parked on a quiet road.

  They waste no time. Aryan gives Kabir a leg-up, and takes a last glance at the late-afternoon sky before he too slithers inside, slipping between the cartons that disguise a false wall.

  Ardi presses himself against the boxes to let them pass. He speaks rapidly. ‘You don’t move, you are silent, you wait. You make no attempt to get off – you do that only when the driver decides.’

  The truck sways slightly as he jumps off and slams the doors.

  Aryan feels like a cave-dweller in the darkness. He waits for his eyes to adjust, but nothing happens. He switches on his mobile phone and its small green rectangle glows like the end of a tunnel.

  With a start he realizes that the compartment is packed with people. There is a family from Bangladesh – a man and a woman, two children and a baby – some Iranian Kurds, and at least six other Afghans. They may be twenty-four people in all, arranged opposite each other, legs outstretched like a railway. The confined space is already warm and pungent with human sweat.

  Aryan feels his heart sink. No wonder the price was cheap: there are too many people inside, and they have no guarantee of success. The children, the baby with its cries, are sure to give them away.

  ‘It’s stifling in here,’ Kabir says.

  In the blackness, Aryan places his palm on Kabir’s forehead. He can’t tell if Kabir has a temperature or whether it’s his own hot hand.

  Aryan swallows. He feels his claustrophobia mounting, tries to bat away the terror of suffocation prickling at his throat. He concentrates on the truck’s ceiling, imagines it soaring above them in the darkness, and outside, the arch of blue sky. His Turkish cellphone is slippery in his hand. He clutches it like a lifeline, checking the emergency numbers he has recorded there for both Italy and Greece after he talked with the men in the park, and the receptionist sold him a new card.

  Someone hisses at him. ‘Make sure that thing’s turned off.’

  The green rectangle shrinks and disappears.

  In his other hand Aryan has the litre-bottle of water he bought when they got off the bus.

  ‘You mustn’t drink,’ someone says in English, eyes better accustomed than his are to the dark. ‘If you pee in the truck when we’re on the ferry, you’ll give us all away.’

  ‘I didn’t think we were going on the ferry,’ Aryan says.

  ‘What did you think this was, an aeroplane?’

  ‘We are going to Italy?’ Aryan says, suddenly worried Ardi has put them on the wrong truck.

  ‘Sure,’ comes the voice, scratchy and dry. ‘At least that’s the plan.’

  ‘They told us we weren’t going through Patras,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Well how did you think we were going to get there?’ the scratchy voice says.

  Aryan takes that in. Through the port, then, he thinks. He wonders how long it will take, and where they are going to end up.

  ‘Don’t worry about the water bottle,’ he says. ‘We have an empty one too.’

  Someone grumbles about the baby. ‘One cry out of him and we’re done for,’ the voice says.

  Perhaps the mother has drugged it. It is sleeping soundly, making no noise.

  Behind them, inside the truck, someone is sliding more packing crates against the compartment wall.

  Gravel crunches and scatters, and the vehicle lurches on to the road.

  It is hot in the truck and gradually even the whispering peters out.

  In the gap opened up by the silence, Aryan finds himself thinking about Bashir.

  He is not sure what has made him suddenly remember the brother whose presence he recalls more clearly than his face. Maybe it is the darkness in the truck, the way that no matter how hard he stares, how widely he stretches his eyes, he cannot even see his own hands. But suddenly Bashir is there in his mind, the gentle brother who was good at fixing things, and the picture of him the last time he saw him, his body dumped beside the graveyard without any eyes.

  Though he was small he clearly remembers the day the Taliban came. There were insects crucified in the radiators of the four-wheel-drive Toyotas that pulled up in the street outside the house, and the entrails of a video tape trampled in the dirt beside the wheels. He remembers the men’s dark turbans, and their car-antennae whips, and them asking for Ali and taking Bashir when Ali was nowhere to be found.

  He remembers Baba’s desperation, how he went first to the mullah, then to the jail and pleaded, how Madar went with her sister and begged, and their telling Baba they would give back Bashir only when he brought them Ali.

  Nothing Baba told them made any difference: that they’d disowned Ali; that Ali had fled; that he wasn’t part of the family any more. Still they kept him, until the day the neighbours came to tell them that they’d seen Bashir’s fifteen-year-old body lying by the cemetery gate.

  He remembers the day they buried him, the sound of his mother’s wailing that bored deep into his chest, the way the light went out from Baba’s eyes.

  And he remembers the night a few weeks later when Ali crept home to tell them he was going to Pakistan. His face was dark and his eyes were hollow like he’d forgotten the very meaning of sleep. There were low males voices murmuring, the men of the family conferring. They said it didn’t matter that the Taliban were wrong, that Ali had had nothing to do with the foreigners; if they believed he did then it was perilous for him to come home, and perilous for anyone to shelter him.

  Madar couldn’t stop crying when she saw Ali and hugged him till they thought he would break. Being pregnant with Kabir was no comfort for losing Bashir, and now she was losing another son.

  That same night he left, and they never heard from him again.

  Aryan doesn’t look at the photo very often. But sometimes, when he pulls it out of his wallet, he wonders whether Ali is still alive; whether he knows that Baba was killed; whether he knows that they went to live in Iran. He wonders if he knows that Madar died when a car bomb exploded a month after they arrived back in Afghanistan.

  Mostly Aryan is sure that Ali is dead. But sometimes he likes to imagine that he made it to Pakistan, and is living somewhere safe, and that one day he will hear about them and track them down to wherever they’ll be living in England.

  The truck deposits them on a roadside in the middle of nowhere before dawn.

  ‘OUTOUTOUT!’ the driver yells. He hits the nearest of them with a wheel wrench to make sure.

  Spitting stones, the truck accelerates immediately into the fading night.

  They stagger into the roadway, and break up into groups, and scatter in all directions. They are hunger-cramped, disoriented, cold. The baby, Aryan realizes, never once let out a cry.

  Fleetingly, he wonders what will become of them, where each of them will go.

  He and Kabir set off across a field, leaving a trail of footprints in the dew. There is the suggestion of sunrise beyond the mountains and a pale mist curtains the land. Like sleepwalkers they advance through the milky light, keeping parallel to a side track, detouring to steer clear o
f a farmhouse. They stay inside the fences and off the road.

  Beyond a hill there is a crossroads. They follow the direction of the heaviest traffic. Aryan guesses it is heading towards a town.

  ‘Wait here,’ Aryan says. He heads down the slope towards a sign on the edge of the road.

  He returns, kicking up clods of grass. He squints as the sun lifts over the hills. ‘Genova,’ he says to his brother’s blurry outline.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  Aryan shrugs. Then he turns on his mobile phone. After a moment the letters ‘TIM’ appear on his screen. He shows it to Kabir.

  ‘Italy,’ he says.

  By the time they reach the centre, the city is awake. The streets get narrower and narrower until no car, no shaft of sunlight, can penetrate; even the rain, Aryan thinks, would have trouble getting in. There is so much stone encasing the earth that there are no cracks left for even the thinnest blade of grass. They wander, subdued, between the imposing buildings that nearly touch overhead as if striving to seal off the sky. Some are joined by vertiginous bridges that make Aryan think of tightrope walkers; his knees feel watery when he imagines what it would be like to go across.

  There are antique shops with gold-edged furniture and tarnished chandeliers in the windows, and workshops where armchairs are having their stuffing put back in, and sweet shops with small white stones the shape of flattened eggs.

  Other buildings, hewn from blocks of stone, loom as impenetrable as jails. They have brass rings on the outside as if ready to be towed away, or moored in case of floods. Squeezed beneath them are bars so narrow they have no room for any chairs; the aroma of coffee assaults them as they pass the open doors.

  They come to a stripy church whose black-and-white stonework is repeated on the buildings around it, so that the whole square looks like it was decorated by a painter who didn’t know when to stop.

  Bent almost double, an old man is filling a plastic bottle at a stone fountain. When the bottle bubbles over he extracts a lid from his pocket and, with trembling hands, screws it into place. Slowly he reaches between his feet and fills another, but fumbles and drops the pink top, which peels away down the sloping cobbles in a hiccuping curve. Aryan darts after it and hands it back to the old man, who blinks myopic thanks. When he has sealed the second bottle the old man still doesn’t straighten up, but shuffles off stuck in his right-angle, eyebrows raised over rheumy eyes as he peers into the day.

  When he has gone, they lean their mouths into the fountain’s blackened spout. They shiver as the icy water traces the map of their insides.

  Suddenly they burst into sunlight. Where the old town spills on to the seafront they find themselves on the edge of a freeway; they can hear traffic speeding by on an overpass above their heads. There is a car park, and a paved waterfront, and the carved prow of an old wooden ship that looks like it has sailed out of a legend.

  On two long lines of sheets, African men are planting handbags and wooden figurines the way Afghan women set out tomatoes to dry in the sun. Aryan has never seen faces so black; Kabir hangs back, fascinated and a little scared.

  Aryan approaches one of the men. He is plumping up his handbags with bubble-wrap and arranging them beside a menagerie of wooden frogs; strings of beads drape in thick lianas over his forearms.

  ‘Can you tell me how to go to Rome?’ Aryan says.

  The man looks down at them. He has the whitest teeth Aryan has ever seen, and bloodshot eyes, and a leather thong of red, yellow and green beads around his neck.

  The man calls over to another in a red baseball cap. ‘Suleymane! Come here and tell me what these kids are saying.’

  Aryan feels suddenly uneasy. The men are lean and tower over them. Others desert their wares to listen.

  ‘Rome, can you tell us how to go to Rome?’ Aryan says. He hopes the men don’t notice the break in his voice.

  ‘Rome is very far away, especially if you are going on foot,’ the man in the baseball cap says with a laugh. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Afghanistan,’ Aryan says.

  He whistles, and Aryan hears the men pass the word around among them, the four-syllable name rolling off pink tongues.

  ‘And where are you going?’ he says.

  ‘England.’

  ‘Then Rome is the wrong direction,’ the man says. ‘You’ve already passed it.’

  ‘I have to see my friend, one Afghan man, and he is there,’ Aryan says. He clings to the address Ahmed gave them. He only trusts capital cities, the litany of stepping-stones he has forced Kabir to learn, the string of names that ensured they wouldn’t get lost.

  ‘Then you will have to take the train,’ the man says. ‘But be careful, there are many police about. If you like I can take you to the station.’

  Aryan doesn’t know whether to trust him. But in this town they have nowhere to go and no one else to ask.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  ‘Do you have money for the ticket?’ the man asks.

  ‘Yes.’ Aryan fingers the two twenty-euro bills in his pocket.

  ‘How much have you got?’ the man says.

  Aryan produces the notes he has folded into blue, origami squares; they stretch like waking butterflies unwrapping their wings in his palm.

  The man plucks them from Aryan’s hand, flattens out the creases, and slides them into a plastic wallet.

  ‘Don’t you worry, man, your money is safe with me,’ he says.

  Aryan’s mouth feels dry; it has already forgotten the water of the old man’s fountain.

  The man tells them he will get their tickets. ‘The night train is cheapest,’ he says.

  Aryan wants his money back. But he feels he cannot ask for it now.

  ‘My name is Solomon, like the king,’ the man says with a smile, extending an empty hand.

  From the outside the station is a pink cake with frosting, balanced on a jumble of pillars and arcades. Aryan and Kabir follow Solomon inside. Its steep steps and brass balustrades feel sinister in the artificial light.

  ‘Wait here,’ Solomon says. He leaves them outside a shuttered newspaper kiosk and disappears.

  Five minutes later he returns. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘The train leaves just before midnight.’

  Kabir is stumbling with tiredness. Aryan is relieved they will soon be on their way.

  Solomon stands with them on the platform watching the train lumber in. The windows are opaque with the dirt of European cities; graffiti Aryan cannot read has been etched into the dust on its sides. Some of the cars are in darkness. They hurry along the platform until they find an illuminated carriage full of compartments that look like private rooms, with people sitting upright under luggage suspended overhead. The blinds on most of them are drawn but Solomon chooses one anyway and slides open the door. They are greeted by the scowls of an old lady in black and the snores of a man whose grey-stubbled jowl is compressed against the window. The tide of his breathing advances and recedes on the mirror of the glass. The air is ripe with the smell of salami and tinkles with the whisper of music. It emanates from a set of earphones being shared by a teenage couple, their heads resting together in a nest of hair. Aryan and Kabir sit side by side on the two empty seats that face the wrong way down the track.

  ‘Have a nice journey,’ Solomon says, shaking their hands.

  He is gone before Aryan realizes that he has forgotten to give them their tickets.

  Aryan jumps to the corridor window but it is cemented shut with grime. He presses his cheek to the glass as the train starts to move, but the red cap is nowhere in sight.

  It is only later, when Kabir has passed out and the train is swaying and grinding through the darkness, through tunnels and along highways and past the back lots of dimly lit towns, that it dawns on him, through the hunger cramps in his belly and his exhaustion, that Solomon never even paid their fares.

  Everyone in the carriage is dozing or asleep; Aryan imagines that he and the driver are the only people awake in the whole train.
Kabir has found a blue plastic soldier buried in the crease between the seats and clutches it in his moist hand. He has curled up on the hard green vinyl and put his head on Aryan’s lap. Aryan is tired too, but sleep won’t come; he is angry about Solomon and their money, and worried about what lies ahead, and how they will find the people at the address in Rome. But there is also something about the inevitability of the train, as it rocks and sways and draws the future closer, that brings him a semblance of calm.

  He rests his head against the glass of the compartment wall, and looks into its reflection. As he explores the reverse world he is suddenly aware that a pair of eyes is staring at him – the young girl with the headphones, her head on her boyfriend’s shoulder. Aryan feels himself flush and looks away, wondering how long she has been watching him. But then he lets his gaze drift slowly up-up-up towards the luggage rack and down-down-down towards where she is sitting. Her eyes are closed again; she is breathing softly; she has fallen back to sleep.

  Aryan can’t help looking at her, at the moulded shape of her breast, the honey-coloured skin that disappears into the curve of her T-shirt. Her jeans are cut low, exposing a small sapphire in her navel. He is fascinated. It reminds him of the pictures of belly dancers pinned up outside restaurants that they giggled at in the streets of Istanbul; he couldn’t fathom the attraction of their corpulence. But this girl is nothing like them.

  The Afghan girls he knew would be shocked to see how women in Europe dressed out in the street, but to Aryan the sapphire is intriguing. He imagines the softness of the skin it nestles in, the fold of flesh against the cold, hard stone. His gaze moves up to her face. Her eyes are iridescent with eye-shadow that has smudged beyond their almond corners, and the colour of her lips reminds him of the poppy fields back home. He is entranced. He stares and looks away and stares again, nervous that the weight of his gaze might rouse her. He drags his eyes back to the glass where he can watch her reflection instead. Suddenly, in its mirroring surface against the blackness of the tunnels and the flickering night, he sees that her eyes are open, looking at him again. Something flutters in his stomach and he averts his gaze, hoping she hasn’t noticed his stare. But, little by little, his eyes return to the glass. With disappointment and relief he sees that her reflected self is looking out the other window, and then she shuts her eyes again, drowsily, exposing the iridescent lids.