In the Sea There are Crocodiles Page 6

  Ba omidi khoda, Enaiatollah jan.

  Watch out for the police, I said.

  And you watch out for the lime. Your bag’s leaking.

  The lime was spilling on my shoe. I ran to the foreman. At the end of the day I stood by the gate waiting for kaka Hamid, and I was thinking they must have arrested him—I could already imagine him rolling down the hill at Telisia—when I saw a cloud of dust rising from around the bend and the same taxi I’d seen him getting into in the afternoon came shooting along the wall of the site and stopped in front of me. The boot was crammed full of bags. I helped him to take them out and carry them upstairs.

  Thanks, Enaiatollah jan.

  Don’t mention it, kaka Hamid. Was everything all right? Did you see the police?

  I didn’t see anyone. Everything was fine.

  Were you scared?

  Hamid, who was piling up boxes of rice and vegetables, stopped for a second and stood there, motionless. I’m never scared, Enaiat, he said. And I’m always scared. I can’t tell the difference anymore.

  Did you ever visit Isfahan, Enaiat?

  No.

  I’ve heard it’s very beautful.

  I looked for pictures on the Internet, once. I found lots of photos of the square named after Imam Khomeini, the Sheikh Lotf Allah mosque, and the Si-o-seh Pol bridge. I also discovered that the ruins of Bam are not far from there, with a citadel that’s the largest brick structure in the world, and which was almost destroyed in an earthquake not long after I left.

  They must be wonderful places.

  But I didn’t know that at the time. There’s a saying in Iran: Esfahān nesf-e jahān, which means: Isfahan is half of the world.

  Right. Half your world, too, Enaiat?

  I have to tell the truth, because if anyone ever reads these words, any of the men I met in Isfahan, I want them to know, because I don’t think I ever told them: I liked it there, on the site. So, thank you.

  It’s true that we worked very hard. We worked all the time, sometimes ten or eleven hours a day. Not that there was much else to do.

  As far as money was concerned, everything worked out fine. After four months the foreman stopped giving our pay to the trafficker, as agreed, and started paying us.

  I remember the first wages I got: forty-two thousand toman.

  When I’d paid my share of the monthly expenses, I had thirty-five thousand left, which was about thirty-five euros, because if I’m not mistaken, a thousand toman were worth one euro at that time. Those thirty-five thousand toman were all in notes. So, even though I was afraid, I sneaked out of the site for the first time, looking right and left and behind every corner, creeping between the houses, and went to a nearby shop and changed all the banknotes into coins, because that way I felt I had much more. I found an iron box with a padlock to keep them in. In the evening, when I finished work and went and lay down in my little corner, I would open the iron box with the padlock, take out the coins and count them—one, two, three—even though I’d already counted them a billion times. Paper money was easier to count, but coins I could pile up like towers. It was amazing.

  When the money started to grow—because every month I would get my salary and there wasn’t much to spend it on—and my nest egg wouldn’t fit in the box anymore, I adopted a different system. I would take the notes, put them in a little plastic bag, tie it with an elastic band, nice and tight, and bury it somewhere on the site, in a place that only I knew. I wrapped the notes so they wouldn’t get wet and the mice wouldn’t gnaw them.

  It was about that time that Sufi decided to leave. We even fell out because of it. I don’t really remember how it happened, I just remember that for a while we didn’t talk to each other and I felt bad about it. We might not see each other again. You never know what life has in store for you.

  I’m going, he said one evening. Isfahan is too dangerous.

  Where are you going? Qom.

  Why Qom? What’s the difference between Qom and Isfahan?

  There are lots of Afghans in Qom. They work with stones, and they’re all together and everything.

  He wanted to leave me. I couldn’t believe my ears. You can’t go, I said.

  Come with me.

  No. I like it here.

  Then I’ll go on my own.

  Who told you about the Afghans in Qom? What if it isn’t true?

  Some boys who are working in the building for another firm. They even gave me a telephone number, look.

  He showed me a piece of paper. On it was a number, written with a green felt-tip pen. I asked kaka Hamid for a biro and wrote down the number in an exercise book he had brought me from the shop as a gift, an exercise book with a black cover where I wrote things down so that it didn’t matter if I forgot them because I had them written down. It was kaka Hamid who’d taught me to read and write better than I could before.

  Then one morning, when I woke up, Sufi was gone.

  I was starting to think that sleeping wasn’t a good idea, that maybe it was better to stay awake at night, to avoid people close to me vanishing into thin air.

  It’s the small things that make you notice someone’s absence.

  I missed Sufi most at night, when I turned over in my sleep and my arms and hands didn’t find him on the rug next to me. And during the day I missed him most at break time, which we used to spend together, throwing stones at jars and buckets and things like that.

  One evening I finished work feeling really sad and sat down in front of the little black-and-white TV, one of those with an aerial you turn by hand, so you spend more time tuning it than watching the programs. On one channel there was a film of towers collapsing. I hopped to another channel, and they were showing the same film. A third channel: still the same film. I called kaka Hamid for help, and he told me it wasn’t a film. That in America, in New York, two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. They said it had been the Afghans. Then they said that it had been Bin Laden and that the Afghans were protecting him. They said it had been al-Qaeda.

  I watched for a while, then had some soup and went to bed. What had happened may well have been serious, and of course I now know how serious it was, a terrible tragedy, but at that moment it seemed to me that being without Sufi was more serious.

  When you don’t have a family, your friends mean everything to you.

  And all the while, time was passing. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. Months. My life was ticking away. I would have liked to buy a watch, just to make sense of the passing of time, a watch that showed the hours and the date and the growth of my fingers and my hair, that would tell me how much I was aging. Then the day arrived, a special day, when we stopped work on the building, because everything had been installed, even the door handles: all that remained to do was hand over the houses to their owners. So we went to work somewhere else.

  We moved to a village on the outskirts of Isfahan called Baharestan. I was getting better and better at this house-building business and was often entrusted with tasks that required great expertise and responsibility (at least that’s what they told me, but maybe they were making fun of me), for example, hoisting material on a rope to the upper floors of the building.

  Except that, although it’s true that I was getting better and everyone trusted me, I was still just as small. So what happened was, as I pulled on the rope the material got heavier than me. The load would start going down and I would start going up. Everyone laughed, and I had to shout and yell for someone to help me, shout and yell without letting go, otherwise the load would have fallen and broken and it would have been my fault.

  But the best thing, what we might call my little revolution in Baharestan, was that I started leaving the site. That was because Baharestan is only a little village, and much less dangerous than Isfahan. Apart from that, I’d learned to speak Farsi* well, and lots of the people there were kind to me, especially the women.

  When I saw them coming back from the shops with their bags full of shopping, I offered
to carry the bags up the steps for them. They trusted me, stroked my head and sometimes gave me a sweet or something like that. I was almost starting to think that this might be a place where I could settle permanently. A place I could finally call home.

  People in the area gave me a nickname: felfeli, which means chili pepper. The owner of a shop where I went to do the shopping, or, from time to time, to get an ice cream, always said to me felfel nagu ce rise, bokhor bebin ce tise, which means something like, Don’t say how small the chili pepper is, but taste how spicy it is. The man was fairly elderly, and I got on well with him.

  ———

  After a few months I decided to pay Sufi a visit.

  Since his departure, I hadn’t heard from him, but I’d had news of him from some friends who had been to his factory in Qom.

  I had kept the telephone number written in the exercise book, the way you keep something precious, and one afternoon I phoned the factory. A switchboard operator replied. Sufi who? he said. There’s no Sufi in our company.

  Gioma, I said. Not Sufi, Gioma.

  Gioma Fausi? the switchboard operator asked.

  Yes, that’s him.

  So we said hello to each other, a bit awkwardly because it was over the phone. But although he was as calm as usual, I realized he was just as thrilled as I was.

  I promised I would go and see him.

  So, one hot morning, when there was hardly any wind, I took the bus to Qom. Maybe because I had been in Iran for a while and nothing had happened to me, it didn’t occur to me that if I’d run into a police roadblock, my journey might have ended badly. But because it never occurred to me, everything went smoothly, as often happens when you don’t think too much about things.

  Sufi came to meet me at the bus station. In those months, both he and I had grown (him more than me), and we only recognized each other after giving each other the once-over at a distance for a few seconds.

  Then we hugged.

  I stayed in Qom for a week. He sneaked me into the factory to sleep and we went around the city and played football with the other Afghan boys. It was really nice there, but I wasn’t ready to move, now that I’d found a permanent place to live. So, at the end of the week that I had taken off work, I went back to Baharestan.

  Just in time to get myself repatriated.

  It happened by day. We were working. I was busy preparing plaster, mixing the lime with the cement, and wasn’t looking anywhere, just inside the drum of the mixer and inside myself—which is a thing I do sometimes, look inside myself—and I remember I heard a car pull up, but I assumed it was the suppliers, because I knew the foreman was waiting for them.

  In Iran, buildings that are side by side often have a little square in the middle which they share, a little square with only two entrances. And that helped the police. Strategically—the police are full of strategies—two cars and a van blocked one entrance, while a large number of officers walked around to the other entrance.

  It was impossible to escape, and nobody tried. Those who were holding bricks and trowels put down their bricks and trowels. Those who were on their knees connecting cables for the electrical wiring let go of the cables and got to their feet. Those who were hammering nails, with the hammer in their hand and the nails in their mouths in order not to have to bend down each time to get them from the box, stopped hammering, took off their gloves, spat the nails into the sand (or just spat) and followed the policemen without a word. Not even a murmur of complaint.

  Telisia. Sang Safid.

  When I saw the policemen spreading out through the site and yelling, with their weapons in their hands, that was all I could think of.

  Telisia. Sang Safid.

  I thought of the two mad boys I’d seen in Afghanistan.

  A policeman ordered me to leave everything and follow him. They herded us into the little central square, then, one at a time, led us out on the side blocked by the cars and, as soon as we were out, put us in a van.

  They took hold of kaka Hamid, and I was afraid they would hurt him in front of us, to show what they were capable of. Instead of which they said to him, Go and get the money.

  Kaka Hamid crossed the yard and went inside. We waited in silence. When he came back, he had an envelope with enough money for our return to Afghanistan. Because in Iran, when they repatriate you, it’s up to you to pay for your return journey home. The State certainly won’t pay for it. If they stop you in a group, as happened to us that day, you’re lucky, because then the police release one of the group and tell him to go and get the money to pay for everyone’s repatriation. But if they stop you when you’re on your own and you have no way of paying for the journey to the border, then things turn nasty, because you’re forced to stay in a temporary detention center and you have to earn the money to return home by being a slave, the slave of the center and the policemen: they make you clean up all the dirt, and I’m talking about a place which is the dirtiest place in the world, or so I’ve heard, a place where just to smell the fumes you’d think it was the cesspit of the earth, a place not even a cockroach would want to live.

  If you don’t pay, there’s a risk the temporary detention center will become your home.

  That day, we paid. And that wasn’t all. Kaka Hamid told me later, in the van, that when he had gone to get the money he had found two of the boys making dinner—they hadn’t noticed a thing—and asked them to stay there and look after our stuff until we came back.

  Unless they took us to Telisia. Or Sang Safid.

  ———

  Fortunately, they took us somewhere else.

  They shaved our heads in the camp. To make us feel naked. And so that, afterward, people would know that we had been in Iran, as illegals, and had been expelled. They laughed as they shaved off our hair. They laughed while we stood in line like sheep. To stop myself crying, I just watched the hair piling up on the floor. It’s a strange thing, hair, when it isn’t on your head.

  After that, they put us in lorries, and we set off at high speed. The driver seemed to be looking for potholes in the road deliberately: it was hard to believe he could hit so many without doing it on purpose. Maybe this treatment was all part of the repatriation, I thought, and I even said so to the others, but nobody laughed.

  After a while they yelled at us to get out, because we had arrived. If they’d had one of those lorries for transporting sand, with a trailer that tips up, they would have tipped us out like that and let us roll onto the ground. Instead of which, they just beat us with sticks.

  Herat, Afghanistan. The nearest place to the border between Afghanistan and Iran. Everyone soon made arrangements to get back to Iran, which wasn’t difficult. Herat is full of traffickers waiting for people who’ve been repatriated. You barely have time to get beaten by the police before the traffickers pick you up and take you back.

  If you don’t have money with you, you can pay later. They know that if you’ve been working in Iran for a while you have money stashed in a hole somewhere, or that if you don’t have it you can ask someone to lend it to you, without having to be enslaved for four months, the way Sufi and I were the first time. They know that.

  To get back to Iran, we used another Toyota pickup truck. But this time the journey was more dangerous, because the road was one used by smugglers for transporting illegal merchandise. Including drugs. And there were drugs on the Toyota. In Iran, if they find you with more than a kilo of opium they hang you. Of course, many policemen along the border were corrupt, fortunately, and they let you pass because you paid them, but if you happened to run into an honest one (and they did exist) then you were dead.

  That time everything went well, and we got back to Baharestan.

  I went straight to the site to find kaka Hamid, but he hadn’t got back yet. My money was in its place, in the hole. The two workers who’d stayed behind had stood guard. But from that day on, everything changed. There were rumors going around that Isfahan wasn’t safe anymore, and nor was Baharestan, because the pol
ice had received orders to repatriate everyone. So I called Sufi at the stonecutting factory in Qom, and he told me that, for the moment, things were quiet there.

  That was when I decided to join him. I waited for kaka Hamid to get back, said goodbye to him, collected my things and went to the bus station.

  How can you just change your life like that, Enaiat? Just say goodbye one morning?

  You do it, Fabio, and that’s it.

  I read somewhere that the decision to emigrate comes from a need to breathe.

  Yes, it’s like that. And the hope of a better life is stronger than any other feeling. My mother, for example, decided it was better to know I was in danger far from her, but on the way to a different future, than to know I was in danger near her, but stuck in the same old fear.

  When I got on the bus, I sat down at the back, alone, holding my bag tight between my legs. I hadn’t made any arrangements with anyone—any trafficker, I mean—because I didn’t want to pay money again to someone to get me to a destination where there were no problems, and after all when I’d been to Qom before, to see Sufi, everything had gone smoothly.

  It was a lovely day and I curled up in my seat, my head against the window, ready to doze off.

  I had bought an Iranian newspaper. I thought that if we were stopped by the police and they saw me sleeping peacefully with an Iranian newspaper on my lap, they would think I was clean. Next to me was a girl in a veil, wearing a nice perfume. Three minutes later, we left.

  We were almost halfway—two women were chatting to the girl next to me, talking about a wedding they had been to, and a man was reading a book while a little boy sitting next to him, who could have been his son, was quietly singing a little song, a kind of tongue twister—we were almost halfway, like I said, when the bus slowed down and came noisily to a halt.

  I thought it must be sheep. What’s going on? I asked. I couldn’t see anything on my side.

  A roadblock, the girl replied.

  Telisia. Sang Safid.