Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  Aryan is anxious this French food will have pork inside it.

  ‘It’s OK here,’ the lady says. ‘We don’t eat it either.’

  Kabir’s cheeks are red with the warmth of the bistro and glisten with burger juice.

  Aryan can’t remember the last time he ate like this, hot food in a warm place, his belly taut with contentment. Happiness creeps over him like the dawn.

  He tells the Americans they used to live in Iran and that’s where he went to school, though Kabir was too small to go.

  The lady’s eyes look suddenly sad. Aryan wonders if he has said something wrong.

  The man says they live in Los Angeles now and have been on a Mediterranean cruise. They flew from America to Nice and caught the train to Marseilles, and boarded a big ship that took them to Barcelona. From there they sailed to Tunis, Malta, Alexandria, Athens, Naples, Rome and Genoa. Funny, the man says, how these towns in Europe have more than one name – in Italy they call Genoa ‘Genova’, and in France they call it ‘Genes’.

  ‘We were in Genova,’ Kabir says, eyes shining. ‘The buildings are like jails and there are black men selling handbags and it’s the first time we saw the sea.’

  The woman smiles. ‘We saw the handbag-sellers too,’ she says. Her voice moves up and down and sounds to Aryan like a sort of song. ‘They were in the port. I bought a wooden frog for my daughter.’ And she produces the small carving from her handbag.

  Kabir’s face lights up. ‘Maybe it came from Solomon,’ he says.

  ‘Solomon?’ The woman raises her eyebrows.

  ‘He was one of the handbag-sellers we met,’ Aryan says. ‘He was meant to buy us tickets for the train.’

  On the ship the Americans had a cabin with a porthole and from their bunks they could see the lights of the coastline slipping past them during the night. Every day they woke up in a different country. Finally they disembarked in Genoa and caught the train to Nice.

  Now, the lady says, they are going to spend some days in Paris before flying home.

  Aryan can’t imagine going to so many places just for fun.

  The woman says they have children in America, a daughter just a bit older than Aryan, and a son of seventeen. She shows them a photograph in her wallet. Aryan sees a girl with oval eyes and long straight hair, and a boy in a blue-and-white cap.

  ‘He’s in his sports gear,’ the man says. ‘He is crazy about that game.’

  The woman laughs and says the picture is out of date. ‘They’re both a bit bigger now,’ she says.

  There were no photographs in Aryan’s family, except for the one in his wallet. He thinks about showing it to the Americans, but there would be too many things to explain.

  ‘They are staying with their cousins in Los Angeles,’ the man continues. ‘One day you should come to America to meet them.’

  ‘Can you go there in a ship with portholes?’ Kabir asks.

  The woman smiles. ‘It’s best to fly,’ she says. ‘Otherwise it would take too long.’

  Aryan can’t believe it would take longer than the time it has taken him and Kabir to get from Afghanistan to France. He can’t imagine what it would be like to go to America in a plane.

  After the meal, the man asks when they are travelling to Paris.

  ‘In the next few days, ins’allah,’ Aryan says. He is wondering how they will be able to get a ticket if the police are patrolling the station again.

  ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ the man says. ‘We have a train tomorrow afternoon at two.’

  Aryan hesitates. ‘We don’t have much money for tickets,’ he says. He is worried about their dwindling funds.

  The man waves a dismissive hand. ‘I think we can handle that,’ he says.

  Aryan looks at Kabir’s shining face. They must be the luckiest boys in the world.

  ‘We would be very happy to go with you,’ he says.

  The woman says something elliptical to her husband in English.

  ‘Yes,’ he says to her, and turns to the boys. ‘First we must get you some new clothes.’

  Aryan doesn’t realize how much he has grown until he sees himself in the full-length mirror in the cubicle. He is thinner but taller now. The threadbare jeans that the woman washed for him in Rome hang off his haunches, even despite the second pair he is wearing underneath.

  Aryan’s feet have grown too. His toes have bored holes through the tips of his trainers.

  But above all it’s his face that startles him now that he can see it in the light. It’s thinner, and there are the lines of an old man around his eyes.

  ‘For a fourteen-year-old he’s a bit small,’ the shop assistant is telling the woman in fragmented English, blue jeans draped over her right arm, black jeans over the left.

  The American woman ignores her.

  ‘Which colour?’ she asks Aryan, taking the jeans from the assistant and poking them through the curtain; her cyclamen nails are luminous against the cloth. He is frightened that one of the two will suddenly whip the curtain open and expose him, half naked, in his ragged underwear.

  He pulls the black pair through the gap and unlaces his trainers. He is suddenly embarrassed by the odour released by shoes he has worn constantly for months. The tread on the bottom is worn as smooth as river-stone. He moves quickly, sliding both jeans off together, dragging on the stiff new trousers, flushed.

  ‘Come out and show me,’ the woman says, too polite to comment on the smell. Socks, undershorts, a football shirt and a top with a hood form a soft pyramid in her arms. ‘Turn around,’ she says.

  The fit, she decides, is good. ‘Here, put all of these on, if you like them,’ she says. Aryan is grateful for her briskness.

  He inhales the chemical scent of newness. Aryan has never had clothes from a shop. In Afghanistan their mother made their shirts and trousers, once a year in springtime, from a single bolt of fabric for all her sons. When they moved to Iran, he and Kabir had had to discard their Afghan clothes for Western ones, to blend in better in a place fed up with so many arrivals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The garments their cousins gave them had been washed and worn many times.

  These French clothes have fold lines down the front, and cardboard tickets that scratch his neck, and heavy white plastic triangles that pull them out of shape. Aryan is not sure about the jeans. They are stiff enough to stand up by themselves.

  ‘They’ll get softer as you wear them,’ the American woman says, as if reading his thoughts.

  Kabir has not yet lost all of his puppy fat. The shop assistant is kneeling to fold up the cuffs of his jeans. He is beaming in a red-and-blue T-shirt with Spiderman on the front; over the top he has a dark-blue hooded sweatshirt with the number 42 in yellow on the back.

  The American lady asks the shop assistant to snip off the labels so they can wear their new clothes right away. She takes the cardboard tickets to the till.

  ‘Have you checked the pockets?’ she asks them. She raises an eyebrow but makes no remark at the double sets of clothes they are stuffing into the carrier bags.

  Aryan goes through his and Kabir’s old trousers one more time. He transfers their last euro coins to his new pockets; his belt with its diminished wad of notes he eases through the loops of his new jeans; from Kabir’s pockets he salvages a seashell, and the blue plastic warrior from the train.

  Opposite, in a sports store, they buy new shoes. Aryan’s trainers are black. The soles have so much bounce he feels like a moonwalker defying gravity with every step. Kabir chooses a luminous red with jagged white stripes down the sides.

  ‘Ready?’ the American woman says.

  She drops their old gear into a rubbish bin in the street.

  ‘Aryan, when’s my birthday?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My birthday. You told the Americans I was eight. But if they ask me which day, how will I remember when I was born?’

  ‘I’ve already told you that,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Yes but I want you to tell me again.’r />
  Aryan sighs. ‘You remember,’ he says. ‘First there is the snow. Then the snow melts, and it gets a little bit warm. And then after that is when you were born.’

  Kabir ponders this. ‘So how do you know I am eight?’

  ‘Because I’ve been counting,’ Aryan says. ‘Plus I’m older than you, remember. There have been eight winters since you were born. And in case you don’t believe me, Baba was counting too.’

  ‘Am I the same age here as in Afghanistan?’

  ‘Of course you are. It doesn’t matter that they’ve got another calendar here. In Europe they just start counting on a different day. But the same number of years have still gone by.’

  ‘Aryan?’

  ‘Yes, Kabir.’

  ‘Do they have snow in England?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kabir.’

  ‘But what if they don’t have snow in England? How will I know how old I am?’

  ‘They have months in England. January, February, April, like that,’ Aryan says. ‘When we get there we will choose one that’s after the winter. That way you can keep track.’

  Illuminated by the floodlights, a flock of seagulls bobs in the black water like blown-off paper hats, all of them turned identically into the wind. People sit in small clusters on the beach, watching a pair of fishermen cast oversized rods into the sea.

  The grey pebbles chatter under their feet. Aryan wonders how far down they’d have to dig to reach the sand.

  Kabir stumbles as they make their way back to the place where, earlier, the sun loungers were lying on the stones. Someone has strung them loosely together on a long thin chain. Aryan leans two of them on their sides, face to face, and wedges them into the pebbles to make a windbreak near the beach-café wall. He places a third one beside them, pushing it low into the stones, and covers it with a flattened cardboard box that somebody left in the street.

  Aryan’s back is cold but at least his front is protected. As they lie down to sleep, he hugs his brother for warmth. His hair smells of salt and wind and Kabir.

  ‘I like hearing the waves,’ Kabir says, long after Aryan has explained to him about his birthday, long after Aryan thinks he has gone to sleep. ‘It’s like the sea is breathing.’

  All night, the wind makes a hissing noise in Aryan’s ear as it tries to whip the cardboard away. The cold keeps him awake for a long time. Perhaps he should have told the Americans, when they asked, that he and Kabir did need somewhere to sleep. But the couple had already given them so much, and Aryan didn’t want to feel any further obliged.

  He buries his face in his sweatshirt, breathing in the unfamiliar smell. The clothes make him feel different, the same person but prouder of himself, like someone who doesn’t have to hide.

  He tries to imagine what it would be like to sleep in a cabin on board a ship, to watch the lights of mysterious cities glide by through a porthole, and wake up every morning in the same bed but in a new place.

  Because they are not sure of the time, Aryan and Kabir go early to the park opposite the Americans’ hotel and wait on the benches under the pine trees and the green and orange palms.

  Aryan makes Kabir practise the English words he has taught him to pass the time.

  ‘Eag-le,’ Kabir repeats. ‘Shep-herd. Snow.’

  Then they rehearse English counting.

  ‘I can’t keep any more words in my head,’ Kabir says after they get to twenty.

  ‘But you remember where we’re going, Soldierboy?’ Aryan says.

  ‘KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon.’ Kabir says it all in one breath. ‘You see, Aryan,’ he says. ‘I won’t forget.’

  Aryan only trusted the capital cities, the names he had memorized himself before teaching Kabir. There were other places they had heard of, and places they had passed through in between, like Van, and Genova, and now Nice. But the big cities were where the connections were, where they could always find other Afghans, where there were bus stations and people smugglers and trains.

  It is strange, Aryan thinks, how each place they cross leaves impressions that are different from the pictures he had in his head before they arrive. Tehran was filled with skyscrapers and snow-covered mountains, but what he remembers most is the refuse piled up in the canal, and the thrum of engines belching exhaust at the bus station. Istanbul, where he had imagined men in fezzes and curly-toed slippers, is the whirr of sewing machines, and a mosque of gleaming gold. In Iran he had seen a picture of the Acropolis, but in Athens he only glimpsed the real thing once, rearing above the pollution, at the far end of a street that ran away from Alexandras Park. Instead, what he remembers of Athens is the moving stairs in the metro, and the plumbing in their cheap hotel. Of Rome – city of gladiators and lions – he remembers the one-room apartment of Ahmed’s friend and his wife who cut their hair.

  They stockpile seeds from the flowerbeds and fire them at a beer can with a slingshot they fashion from elastic bands discarded by the postman. They watch the street cleaners go by in long-hosed vehicles that send Kabir into a fit of giggling because they look like small green elephants with oversized trunks.

  When the Americans come out, Aryan jumps up. He sees them looking up and down the street until they spot them in the park and beckon to them to cross.

  A man with gold braid on his sleeves is loading the Americans’ luggage into the back of a taxi. He holds the door open as they clamber inside.

  At the station they wait with the American woman while her husband goes to the ticket window. Then they stand all together on the platform.

  Two policemen in dark glasses lean on the bars around the exit, watching passengers get on and off the trains. There is a dog on a leash at their side.

  Aryan’s mouth goes dry and his stomach tenses. Their truncheons hang like unspoken threats from their belts; the butts of their black revolvers sit sinister as reptiles at their hips.

  ‘Don’t look at them,’ Aryan tells Kabir. He is relieved they are not the same officers who sent them back before.

  Following its silver snout along the rails, the fast train to Paris slides in. With the Americans, they scramble up the steps.

  The train winds along the coast for ages before heading north. They pass wide rivers, and churches on distant outcrops, and endless open plains. Aryan thinks France must be the flattest country he has ever seen.

  Disappearing through the carriages, the woman returns with cheese sandwiches and tins of orange drink.

  They say goodbye to the Americans on the steps of the Gare de Lyon station in Paris.

  ‘We’ll be staying on the Champs-Elysées for three days,’ the man says. ‘That’s where we’ll be if you come by.’

  Aryan touches his heart and shakes their hands and thanks them. They have to find the other Afghans and work out how to get to England, he says. Then they will come and say hello.

  ‘Are you sure you have a place to go now?’ the woman asks.

  Aryan nods. He has Rahim’s green-pen map in his notebook.

  The couple wave to them from the side window of their taxi as it sweeps in a wide arc down the concourse.

  A man at a bus stop points them towards the river. They walk between it and a flyover until they find the place where the canal empties into the Seine. They take a metal staircase down to a walkway along the water’s edge, where pleasure craft and longboats lie anchored along the sides of the canal.

  People are sitting on the decks laughing and drinking. It takes Aryan a moment to work out why it all looks back to front: the plants are growing on the inside, the tables and chairs are on the outside, and the bicycles are parked up on the roofs.

  Up ahead, there are trains going past above the water but under the road; out of sight, a chorus of police sirens wails.

  When the water disappears they climb another staircase to an enormous traffic circle with a golden angel on top of a pillar. People in long scarves sit smoking on café terraces; a curved building made of metal and glass reflects the autumn sky.

 
; Aryan takes out Rahim’s sketch and shows Kabir. The canal must run under the wide road up ahead, where the traffic flows on either side of the flowerbeds and a double row of trees. Curled leaves lie upturned on the pavement like half-open hands.

  Several times they stop. Kabir’s new shoes are giving him blisters and Aryan is walking too fast. He ties Kabir’s laces tighter to stop the rubbing but still he drags his feet. Aryan piggybacks him till he gets too tired. They stop to watch a group of men playing a game with metal balls. Further on, fountains of water shoot skywards like a pod of underground whales.

  Steering wide of the wild-eyed men shouting abuse at invisible demons, they find an empty bench where Kabir can undo his laces. He shakes a pebble out of his shoe.

  Through the trees up ahead they see an intersection. Beyond it, the water of the canal reappears.

  Aryan’s spirits lift. ‘It can’t be too far now,’ he says.

  A steep green bridge arches over the water. They climb to the top and lean over the rails. On the edges of the water below, people are smoking and playing guitars. There are restaurant tables on the footpaths, and rollerbladers slaloming between the pedestrians and the waiters. People speed by on bicycles, tinkling their bells.

  ‘Look at that!’ Kabir says.

  A boat half full of tourists appears in the water below them, waiting to pass through the lock. Passers-by gape as a boom falls like the border between two countries, halting the stream of motorbikes and cars. They stand, transfixed, as water rushes in and the heads of the tourists rise to the level of the banks. Suddenly the bridge splits apart and turns on a pivot, and the boatload of tourists floats past under their feet.

  Two children about Kabir’s age lean far out over the edge, trying to scoop up the water with their hands. Their mothers, when they notice, shriek and haul them back in.

  ‘Do you think that boat goes to England?’ Kabir asks.

  Aryan laughs. ‘Yeah, sure, twice a week from Kabul,’ he says.

  They watch as it disappears into the next lock, and vanishes under the road along which they’ve just walked.