In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read online

  Copyright © 2010 Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore/B.C. Dalai editore

  Translation copyright © 2011 by Howard Curtis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in Italy as Nel mare ci sono i coccodrilli by B.C. Dalai editore, Milan, in 2010. This translation first published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket illustration by Edel Rodriquez

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Geda, Fabio, 1973–

  [Nel mare ci sono i coccodrilli. English]

  In the sea there are crocodiles : based on the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari:

  a novel / by Fabio Geda; translated by Howard Curtis. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Akbari, Enaiatollah—Childhood and youth. 2. Afghanistan—History—1989–2001—Biography. 3. Akbari, Enaiatollah—Travel. 4. Boys—Afghanistan—Biography. 5. Political refugees—Afghanistan—Biography. 6. Afghans—Italy—Biography. 7. Political refugees—Italy—Biography. 8. Immigrants—Italy—Biography. I. Title.

  DS371.33.A32G4313 2011

  305.9′06914092—dc22

  [B] 2011012171

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53474-1

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Afghanistan

  Pakistan

  Iran

  Turkey

  Greece

  Italy

  About the Authors

  Author’s Note

  I met Enaiatollah Akbari at a book presentation where I was speaking about my first novel, the story of a Romanian boy’s life as an immigrant in Italy. Enaiatollah came up to me and said he’d had a similar experience. We got talking. And we didn’t stop. I never tired of listening to his experiences, and he didn’t tire of dredging them from his memory. After we’d known each other for a while, he asked me if I would write his story down, so that people who had suffered similar things could know they were not alone, and so that others might understand them better.

  This book is therefore based on a true story. But, of course, Enaiatollah didn’t remember it all perfectly. Together we painstakingly reconstructed his journey, looking at maps, consulting Google, trying to create a chronology for his fragmented memories. I have tried to be as true to his voice as possible, retelling the story exactly as he told it. But for all that, this book must be considered to be a work of fiction, since it is the re-creation of Enaiatollah’s experience—a re-creation that has allowed him to take possession of his own story. At his request, the names of some of the people mentioned have been changed.

  Fabio Geda, Turin 2010

  Afghanistan

  The thing is, I really wasn’t expecting her to go. Because when you’re ten years old and getting ready for bed, on a night that’s just like any other night, no darker or starrier or more silent or more full of smells than usual, with the familiar sound of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the tops of the minarets just like anywhere else … no, when you’re ten years old—I say ten, although I’m not entirely sure when I was born, because there’s no registry office or anything like that in Ghazni province—like I said, when you’re ten years old, and your mother, before putting you to bed, takes your head and holds it against her breast for a long time, longer than usual, and says, There are three things you must never do in life, Enaiat jan, for any reason … The first is use drugs. Some of them taste good and smell good and they whisper in your ear that they’ll make you feel better than you could ever feel without them. Don’t believe them. Promise me you won’t do it.

  I promise.

  The second is use weapons. Even if someone hurts your feelings or damages your memories, or insults God, the earth or men, promise me you’ll never pick up a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or even the wooden ladle we use for making qhorma palaw, if that ladle can be used to hurt someone. Promise.

  I promise.

  The third is cheat or steal. What’s yours belongs to you, what isn’t doesn’t. You can earn the money you need by working, even if the work is hard. You must never cheat anyone, Enaiat jan, all right? You must be hospitable and tolerant to everyone. Promise me you’ll do that.

  I promise.

  Anyway, even when your mother says things like that and then, still stroking your neck, looks up at the window and starts talking about dreams, dreams like the moon, which at night is so bright you can see to eat by it, and about wishes—how you must always have a wish in front of your eyes, like a donkey with a carrot, and how it’s in trying to satisfy our wishes that we find the strength to pick ourselves up, and if you hold a wish up high, any wish, just in front of your forehead, then life will always be worth living—well, even when your mother, as she helps you get to sleep, says all these things in a strange, low voice as warming as embers, and fills the silence with words, this woman who’s always been so sharp, so quick-witted in dealing with life … even at a time like that, it doesn’t occur to you that what she’s really saying is, Khoda negahdar, goodbye.

  Just like that.

  When I opened my eyes in the morning, I had a good stretch to wake myself up, then reached over to my right, feeling for the comforting presence of my mother’s body. The reassuring smell of her skin always said to me, Wake up, get out of bed, come on … But my hand felt nothing, only the white cotton cover between my fingers. I pulled it toward me. I turned over, with my eyes wide open. I propped myself on my elbows and tried calling out, Mother. But she didn’t reply and no one replied in her place. She wasn’t on the mattress, she wasn’t in the room where we had slept, which was still warm with bodies tossing and turning in the half-light, she wasn’t in the doorway, she wasn’t at the window looking out at the street filled with cars and carts and bikes, she wasn’t next to the water jars or in the smokers’ corner talking to someone, as she had often been during those three days.

  From outside came the din of Quetta, which is much, much noisier than my little village in Ghazni, that strip of land, houses and streams that I come from, the most beautiful place in the world (and I’m not just boasting, it’s true).

  Little or big.

  It didn’t occur to me that the reason for all that din might be because we were in a big city. I thought it was just one of the normal differences between countries, like different ways of seasoning meat. I thought the sound of Pakistan was simply different from the sound of Afghanistan, and that every country had its own sound, which depended on a whole lot of things, like what people ate and how they moved around.

  Mother, I called.

  No answer. So I got out from under the covers, put my shoes on, rubbed my eyes and went to find the owner of the place to ask if he’d seen her, because three days earlier, as soon as we arrived, he’d told us that no one went in or out without him noticing, which seemed odd to me, since I assumed that even he needed to sleep from time to time.

  The sun cut the entrance of the samavat Qgazi in two. Samavat means “hotel.” In that part of the world, they actually call those places hotels, but they’re nothing like what you think of as a hotel, Fabio. The samavat Qgazi wasn’t so much a hotel as a warehouse for bodies and souls, a kind of left-luggage office you cram into and then wait to be packed up and sent off to Iran or Afghanistan or wherever, a place to make contact with people traffickers.

  We had been in the samavat for three days, never go
ing out, me playing among the cushions, Mother talking to groups of women with children, some with whole families, people she seemed to trust.

  I remember that, all the time we were in Quetta, my mother kept her face and body bundled up inside a burqa. In our house in Nava, with my aunt or with her friends, she never wore a burqa. I didn’t even know she had one. The first time I saw her put it on, at the border, I asked her why and she said with a smile, It’s a game, Enaiat, come inside. She lifted a flap of the garment, and I slipped between her legs and under the blue fabric. It was like diving into a swimming pool, and I held my breath, even though I wasn’t swimming.

  Covering my eyes with my hand because of the light, I walked up to the owner, kaka Rahim, and apologized for bothering him. I asked about my mother, if by any chance he’d seen her go out, because nobody went in or out without him noticing, right?

  Kaka Rahim was smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper written in English, some of it in red, some in black, without pictures. He had long lashes and his cheeks were covered with a fine down like those furry peaches you sometimes get, and next to the newspaper, on the table at the entrance, was a plate containing a pile of apricot stones, along with three succulent-looking, orange-colored fruits, still uneaten, and a handful of mulberries.

  There’s a lot of fruit in Quetta, Mother had told me. She had said it to entice me, because I love fruit. In Pashtun, Quetta means “fortified trading center” or something like that, a place where goods are exchanged: objects, lives. Quetta is the capital of Baluchistan: the fruit garden of Pakistan.

  Without turning around, kaka Rahim blew smoke into the sun. Yes, he replied, I saw her.

  I smiled. Where did she go, kaka Rahim? Can you tell me?

  Away.

  Away where?

  Away.

  When will she be back?

  She’s not coming back.

  She’s not coming back?

  No.

  What do you mean? Kaka Rahim, what do you mean, she’s not coming back?

  She’s not coming back.

  At that point I ran out of questions. There must have been others I could have asked, but I didn’t know what they were. I stood there in silence looking at the down on kaka Rahim’s cheeks, but without really seeing it.

  It was kaka Rahim who spoke next. She told me to tell you something, he said.

  What?

  Khoda negahdar.

  Is that all?

  No, there was something else.

  What, kaka Rahim?

  She said not to do the three things she told you not to do.

  My mother I’ll just call Mother. My brother, Brother. My sister, Sister. But the village where we lived I won’t call village, I’ll call it Nava, which is its name and which means gutter, because it lies at the bottom of a narrow valley between two lines of mountains. That’s why, when I came back one evening after spending the afternoon playing in the fields and Mother said, Get ready, we have to leave, and I asked her, Where? and she replied, We’re leaving Afghanistan, that’s why, when she said that, I thought we were just going to cross the mountains, because as far as I was concerned the whole of Afghanistan lay between those peaks. Afghanistan was those rushing streams. I had no idea how vast it was.

  We took a cloth bag and filled it with a change of clothes for me and one for her and something to eat, bread and dates, and I was beside myself with excitement about the journey. I’d have liked to run and tell the others, but Mother didn’t want that and kept telling me to be good and keep calm. My aunt, her sister, came over and they went off into a corner to talk. Then a man arrived, an old friend of my father’s, but he didn’t want to come into the house. He said we should go now, because the moon hadn’t come out yet and the darkness would deceive the Taliban or whoever else we might run into.

  Aren’t my brother and sister coming with us, Mother?

  No, they’re going to stay with your aunt.

  My brother’s still little, he won’t want to stay with my aunt.

  Your sister will look after him. She’s nearly fourteen. She’s a woman.

  But when are we coming back?

  Soon.

  When soon?

  Soon.

  I have the buzul-bazi tournament.

  Have you seen the stars, Enaiat?

  What have the stars got to do with anything?

  Count them, Enaiat.

  That’s impossible. There are too many of them.

  Then start now, said Mother. Otherwise you’ll never finish.

  The area where we lived, in Ghazni province, is inhabited exclusively by Hazaras, who are Afghans like me, with almond-shaped eyes and squashed noses, well, not exactly squashed, but a bit flatter than others, flatter than yours, for example, Fabio: typically Mongol features. Some people say we’re descended from Genghis Khan’s army. Some say our ancestors were the Koshan, the ancient inhabitants of those lands, the legendary builders of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. And some say we’re slaves, and treat us like slaves.

  To leave the area, or Ghazni province, was extremely dangerous for us (and I only say was because I don’t know how things are today, though I don’t suppose they’ve changed much), because what with the Taliban and the Pashtun, who aren’t exactly the same thing but both used to treat us badly, you had to be careful who you ran into. I think that’s why we left at night, the three of us: me, Mother and the man—I’ll just call him the man—because Mother had asked him to go with us. We set off on foot and for three nights, under cover of darkness, with only the light of the stars to guide us—and in a place like that, without any electricity, starlight is a very powerful light—we walked to Kandahar.

  I was wearing my usual gray pirhan: long trousers and a knee-length jacket of the same material. Mother walked in a chador, but she had a burqa in her bag to put on for when we met people, which was useful for hiding the fact that she was a Hazara, and also for hiding me.

  At dawn on the morning of the first day, we stopped at one of the huts where caravans of traders break their journeys, though to judge by the bars on the windows, it must have been used for a time as a prison by the Taliban or someone. There was no one there, which was a good thing, but I was bored, so I used a bell hanging from a beam for target practice. I gathered some stones and tried to hit it from a hundred paces. I finally managed, and the man came running, grabbed me by the wrist and told me to stop.

  On the second day we saw a bird of prey circling over the body of a donkey. The donkey was dead (obviously). Its legs were trapped between two rocks and it was no use to us at all because we couldn’t eat it. I remember we were near Shajoi, which was one place in Afghanistan that Hazaras really had to avoid. In that area, it was said, passing Hazaras like us were captured by the Taliban and thrown alive into a deep well or fed to stray dogs. Nineteen men from my village had vanished like that on their way to Pakistan, and the brother of one of them had gone to look for him. He was the one who’d told us about the stray dogs. All he had found of his brother was his clothes, with a pile of bones inside.

  That’s how things are in my country.

  There’s a saying among the Taliban: Tajikistan for the Tajiks, Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks, and Goristan for the Hazara. That’s what they say. Gor means “grave.”

  On the third day we met a whole stream of people on their way to some unknown destination, escaping from some unknown threat: men, women and children on wagons filled with hens, rolls of fabric, barrels of water and so on.

  Whenever a lorry appeared going in our direction, we would ask the driver for a lift (even for a short distance). If the drivers were nice people they would stop and pick us up, whereas if they were unpleasant, or angry with themselves or at the world, they would speed up and drive past us, covering us with dust. As soon as we heard the noise of an engine behind us, Mother and I would run and hide in a ditch or among the bushes or behind some stones, if there were big enough stones. The man would stand at the side of the road and signal to the driver to sto
p, just like a hitchhiker, but he didn’t use only his thumb, he waved his arms, to make sure they saw him and didn’t run him over. If the lorry stopped and everything was safe, then he would tell us to come out of the ditch, and Mother and I would climb aboard, either in front (which happened twice) or in the back, with the merchandise (which happened once). The time we climbed in the back, the trailer was full of mattresses. I slept very well that time.

  By the time we got to Kandahar, after crossing the river Arghandab, I’d counted three thousand four hundred stars (a pretty good number, I’d say) at least twenty of which were as big as peach stones, and I was very tired. Not only that. I’d also counted the number of bridges blown up by the Taliban, and the burned-out cars, and the blackened tanks abandoned by the army. But I’d still have liked to go back home, to Nava, and to play buzul-bazi with my friends.

  I stopped counting the stars when we arrived in Kandahar. I stopped because it was the first time I’d ever been in such a big city and the house lights and streetlamps would have been too distracting, even if I hadn’t been too tired to keep count. Kandahar had tarred roads. There were cars and motorbikes and bicycles and shops and lots of places where men could drink chay and talk, and buildings as much as three storys high with aerials on the roofs, and dust, wind and dust, and so many people on the streets, there couldn’t have been anybody left in the houses.

  After we’d been walking for a while, the man stopped and told us to wait while he made arrangements. He didn’t say where, or who with. I sat down on a low wall to count how many colored cars passed, while Mother just stood there, so still it was as if her burqa was empty. I could smell fried food. A radio was broadcasting news about lots of people disappearing in Bamiyan and the discovery of a large number of dead bodies in a house. An old man passed with his arms raised to the sky, crying khodaia khair, begging God for a bit of peace. I was starting to feel hungry, but I didn’t ask for food. I was starting to feel thirsty, but I didn’t ask for water.