In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read online

  How to find all that money?

  One afternoon, a Friday, which as I already said was our time to do what we wanted and which I spent in an endless, indeterminate—is that the right word?—football tournament against teams from the neighboring factories, anyway, one Friday this friend of mine I’d talked to at dinner about traffickers came up to the stone where I was lying with one hand on my stomach, trying to get my breath back, and asked me to listen to him for a second.

  I sat up. He wasn’t alone. There were other Afghans with him.

  Listen, Enaiat, he said. We’ve talked. We want to leave for Turkey, and we’ve put aside enough money to pay for the journey and to pay for you, too, if you want. And we’re not only doing it because you’re our brother and all that, but also because when you leave with friends, the chances of everything going right are better than when you leave on your own without anyone to help you in an emergency. At that point, the team that had gone out on the field after us scored and everyone yelled for joy. What do you say? he asked after a pause.

  What do I say?

  Yes.

  I say thank you and I accept. What else can I say?

  It’s a dangerous journey, you know.

  I know.

  Much more dangerous than the other journeys.

  The ball bounced off the stone and stopped between my feet. I kicked it back with the tip of my shoe. The sun had seized every corner of the sky, the blue wasn’t blue but yellow, the clouds were golden and bleeding where the mountains cut into them. The rocky peaks where stone can crush and snow can wound and suffocate.

  I didn’t yet know that mountains can kill.

  I pulled up a blade of dry grass and started to suck on it.

  I’ve never seen the sea, I said. There are a whole lot of things I haven’t yet seen in my life and that I’d like to see. Plus, even here in Qom, it’s dangerous every time I set foot outside the factory. So you know what I say? I’m ready for anything.

  My voice was firm. But only because of my ignorance. If I’d known what was in store for me, I wouldn’t have left. Or maybe I would. I don’t know. I certainly would have said it differently.

  We’d all done it. We’d all listened to the stories of those who had gone and come back. And we knew about those who hadn’t made it from the accounts of their traveling companions. Maybe those companions had survived only to share their horror stories with us. It was as if the government left one or two people alive in every group to scare the others. Some had frozen to death in the mountains, some had been killed by the border police, some had drowned in the sea between the Turkish and Greek coasts.

  One day, during the lunch break, I talked to a boy who had a disfigured face. Half of it looked like a McDonald’s hamburger that’s been left too long on the griddle.

  McDonald’s?

  Yes, McDonald’s.

  It’s funny. Sometimes you say things like: he was as tall as a goat. At other times, when you make comparisons, you come up with McDonald’s, or baseball.

  Why is that funny?

  Because they belong to different cultures, different worlds. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

  Even if that was true, Fabio, both those worlds are inside me now.

  He told me that the transit van on which he’d been traveling across Cappadocia had been involved in an accident. At a bend on an unpaved mountain road in Aksaray province, it had collided with a van loaded with lemons. He’d been thrown out and had scraped his face on the ground. Then the Turkish police had arrested him and beaten him up. And then they handed him over to the Iranians, and they’d beaten him up, too. So his journey to Europe (he wanted to get to Sweden) had turned into a bloody mess, along with his dreams. I’d lend you the money to leave, he said, but I can’t because I don’t want to be responsible for your pain. And there were others who said the same as him, but I’m not sure they were genuine, they might just have been skinflints.

  And yet all I needed was one story that ended well. All I needed to hear was, He made it, he got to Turkey, or Greece, or London, and I immediately felt encouraged. If he had made it, I thought, then so could I.

  In the end there were four of us who’d made up our minds to leave. Then we found out that Farid, a boy who was working in a factory around the corner from ours, was also planning to leave Qom. But that wasn’t all. The trafficker he was going to use was his cousin.

  This sounded like an opportunity not to be missed. If the trafficker really was his cousin we could trust him, and if he left with us, we would become friends of the cousin and be treated accordingly.

  One day, a day like any other, we finished our shift, put our things in canvas rucksacks, said goodbye to the manager of the factory, asked for the wages due to us and (risking the usual roadblocks) took a scheduled bus to Teheran. At the station, we found our friend’s cousin waiting for us. He took us to his house in a taxi, one of those collective taxis with a lot of people inside.

  In the dining room, over a cup of chay, he told us we had two days to get some food for the journey—simple but nutritious food, like dried fruit, almonds, pistachios—and buy a pair of heavy mountain shoes and warm, waterproof clothes. They have to be waterproof, he said. And also nice clothes to wear in Istanbul. We certainly couldn’t walk around the city wearing the same clothes we’d been wearing during the journey, which would be torn and smelly by then. We had to buy all that, but especially the shoes. Our friend’s cousin was really insistent about that.

  So we went around the bazaars doing our shopping, and there was a euphoria in the air that I can’t describe. When we got back, we showed the shoes to the trafficker to know if they were all right. He lifted them, checked the seams, bent the soles, looked inside them and everything, and said yes, they were fine.

  It wasn’t true.

  He said it in good faith—I’m certain of that, because of his cousin—and the reason he said it in good faith was because he thought he knew what our trek across the mountains would be like, but he didn’t know at all, because he’d never been there. He just had to hand us over to others. He was a go-between. He was the person we had to phone once we got to Turkey and say, We’ve arrived. So that the friends in Qom we’d left the money with could hand it over to him.

  Holding the shoes up to the light coming in through the window, he said, Your journey will last three days. These are solid shoes, just what you need. You’ve done well. Excellent purchase.

  The following morning an Iranian picked us up in a taxi and took us to a house outside the city, where we waited. After an hour, a bus arrived. The driver was an accomplice, and the passengers had no idea what was going on. The driver tooted his horn and we ran out of the house and climbed on the bus. The passengers—mostly women and children but also some men—looked on in astonishment. The men tried to protest, but were immediately silenced.

  We set off for Tabriz (I know because I asked). We were on our way to the border, and once past Tabriz we drove along the shores of Lake Urmia which, for those who don’t know, is in the middle of Iranian Azerbaijan, just to give you some idea, and is the largest lake in the country: at its fullest, about a hundred and forty kilometers long and fifty-five wide.

  I’d almost dozed off when one of my traveling companions nudged me with his elbow and said, Look.

  What? I said, without opening my eyes.

  The lake. Look at the lake.

  I turned my head and slowly opened one eyelid, with my hands between my legs. I looked out of the window. It was sunset and the sun was low over the water. We could see dozens and dozens of rocky little islands against the light and, all over the islands, both on the ground and in the air, dots. Thousands of dots.

  What are they?

  Birds. Birds?

  Migrating birds, the man sitting in front told me.

  Is it true they are birds, agha sahib? I asked the man, tapping him on the shoulder.

  Flamingos, pelicans and lots of other species, the man said. Hulagu Khan, grandson
of Genghis Khan and conqueror of Baghdad, is buried on one of those islands. So there are birds and ghosts. That may be why there are no fish in the lake.

  No fish?

  Not a single one. Bad waters. Only good for rheumatism.

  It was dark by the time we got to Salmas, the last city in Iran and the closest to the mountains. They made us get out, told us to stay close together and keep quiet, and we started walking, without torches or anything.

  Early in the morning, in the silence and the pale light of dawn, we came to a little village.

  There was a little house that we went into as if it belonged to us, though it didn’t, it belonged to a family. It was a kind of collection point for illegals who wanted to cross the mountains. A small group was already there, and soon afterward more arrived. Afghans. In the end there were thirty of us. We were scared. We wondered how so many of us would be able to cross the mountains without being seen. We asked, but didn’t get an answer, and when we insisted they made it clear it was best to stop right there with our questions. We stayed in that house for two days, waiting.

  Then, at sunset on the evening of the second day, they told us to get ready. We set off under a starry sky and a big moon, so we didn’t need lights or torches or eyes like an owl’s. We could see very well. We walked for half an hour between the fields along little paths invisible to those who didn’t know them. As we reached the top of the first slope, a group of people emerged from behind a big rock. We took fright, and some yelled that they were soldiers. But they weren’t, they were thirty more illegals. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Now there were sixty of us, sixty in a line on the mountain paths. But it wasn’t over. Half an hour later, another group appeared. They had been squatting on the ground waiting for our arrival. By the time we were finally able to make a head count, during a brief stop in the middle of the night, there were seventy-seven of us.

  They split us into ethnic groups.

  Apart from the Afghans, who were the youngest, there were Kurds, Pakistanis, Iraqis and a few Bengalis.

  They split us up to avoid problems, insofar as that was possible, given that we were walking all day shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, with different strides, but at the same speed, and when you’re in a situation like that, making a lot of effort in uncomfortable circumstances, with not much food and not much water and nowhere to rest and it’s very, very cold, then squabbles and brawls and even knife fights are always in the cards, so it’s best to keep the hostile ethnic groups apart.

  After an hour spent walking along a very rough dirt path, we were stopped halfway up a hill by a shepherd accompanied by a dog madly chasing his own tail—the dog, not the shepherd. He asked to speak to the leader of the expedition, who without a second thought took some money from his jacket and paid him to stop him giving us away to the police. The shepherd counted the money slowly, very slowly, then put it inside his hat and signaled to us to continue.

  As I passed him, the old man looked me straight in the eyes, as if to tell me something. But I didn’t know what.

  By night we walked.

  By day we slept. Or tried to.

  At the end of the third day, because the trafficker back in Teheran, our cousin’s friend, had told us the journey would last three days and three nights, we wanted to know how much longer it would be before we got to the top of the mountain—to us it still seemed to be as far as ever—and started descending toward Turkey, but we were all too scared to ask any questions, so we drew lots, and I was the one picked out.

  I approached one of the smugglers and said, Agha, please, how long is it before we get to the top of the mountain?

  Without looking at me, he replied, A few hours.

  I went back to my friends and said, A few hours.

  We walked until just before dawn, then stopped. The muscles of our legs were as hard as concrete.

  At sunset, as usual, we set off again.

  He lied to you, said Farid.

  I already realized that, I said, thanks. But your cousin wasn’t very accurate either when he told us how long it would take.

  You have to ask someone else.

  After half an hour I approached another of the Iranians, who had a Kalashnikov across his shoulder. Agha, please, I said, falling into step beside him, how long is it before we get to the top of the mountain?

  Not long, he replied, without even looking at me.

  What does “not long” mean, agha?

  Before dawn.

  I went back to my friends and said, It won’t be long, if we keep up a good pace we’ll get there before dawn.

  They all smiled, but nobody said anything. Any strength we might have had to speak had drained out of us through our feet and our noses and hung in the clouds of steam that materialized in front of our lips. We trudged on until the sun came up over in the direction of Nava, my home. The top of the mountain was there, one step away, so close we could reach it with one bound. We circled it. It didn’t move. We rested. When the rays of the sun lit up its jagged ridges, which looked like a dead man’s spine, the whole group stopped. We all looked for a rock to put our heads under, to keep them in the shade and sleep a few hours. Our legs and feet we left in the sun, to warm and dry them. It was so hot it tore our skin off, but what the hell?

  At sunset they made us get up and we set off again. It was the fifth night.

  Agha, please, how long is it before we get to the top of the mountain?

  A couple of hours, he replied without looking at me.

  I joined the group.

  What did he say?

  Nothing. Shut up and walk.

  We Afghans were the youngest, the most used to stones and heights, the blazing sun, the freezing snow. But this mountain was endless, a maze. The peak was always there, but we never seemed to reach it. Ten days and ten nights dripped away, one after the other, like water dripping from a stalactite.

  Early one morning—it was dark and we were clambering over the rocks on our hands and knees—a Bengali boy got into difficulty. I don’t know what it was, maybe a breathing problem, or maybe his heart, but he fell and slid down over the snow for several meters. We started yelling, Wait, someone’s dying here, we have to stop and help him, but the traffickers (there were five of them) fired in the air with their Kalashnikovs.

  Anyone who doesn’t start walking again immediately stays here forever, they said.

  We tried to help the young Bengali, to take him by the arms and under the armpits, to help him up and get him to walk, but it was too much for us. He was too heavy, we were too tired, too everything. It wasn’t possible. We abandoned him. As we rounded a bend, I could still hear his voice for a moment. Then it faded completely, swallowed by the wind.

  On the fifteenth day there was a knife fight between a Kurd and a Pakistani. I don’t know what they were fighting over, food maybe, or maybe nothing at all. The Kurd ended up the loser. We abandoned him, too.

  On the sixteenth day, for the first time, I talked to a Pakistani boy who wasn’t much older than I was (Afghans and Pakistanis didn’t usually talk much to each other). As we walked—we were in one of those areas where the wind wasn’t too bad and we were able to speak—I asked him where he was heading, what he planned to do and where he planned to go after we got to Istanbul. He didn’t reply immediately. He seemed lost in thought. He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure he’d understood the question, with the kind of expression on his face that seemed to say, What an idiot! London, he said, walking faster to get away from me. Later, I discovered that all the Pakistanis were the same. They never said Turkey or Europe. They just said London. If any of them was in a good mood and asked me, How about you? I would say, Somewhere.

  On the eighteenth day I saw a group of people sitting on the ground. I saw them in the distance and couldn’t figure out at first why they’d stopped. The wind was like a razor and my nose was clogged with snow, but when I tried to wipe it away with my fingers, it was no longer there. All at once, we turned a sharp bend and there
they were, that group of people sitting on the ground. They’d be sitting there forever. They were frozen. They were dead. I have no idea how long they’d been there. All the others sidled silently past them. I stole the shoes from one of them, because mine were ruined and my toes had turned purple. I couldn’t feel them anymore, even if I hit them with a stone. I took the shoes and tried them on. They fitted me well. They were much better than mine. I raised my hand in a gesture of gratitude. I think about him every now and then.

  Every day, twice a day, they gave us an egg, a tomato and a piece of bread. New supplies arrived on a horse. But now we were too high for that. On the twenty-second day they handed out the last rations. They told us to divide them into pieces to make them last, but an egg, a boiled egg, is a hard thing to divide.

  The others summoned up the courage to push me forward. Ask, they said.

  What’s the point? I replied.

  Never mind, just ask.

  Are we nearly there? I asked one of the traffickers.

  Yes, he said, we’re nearly there. But I didn’t believe him.

  And yet, on the twenty-sixth day, the mountain came to an end. One step, another, then another, and all of a sudden we stopped climbing. There was nothing more to climb, we’d reached the top. This was where the Iranians handed us over to the Turks. At that point, for the first time since the beginning of our trek, we did another head count. Twelve people were missing. Twelve, out of the group of seventy-seven, had died during the walk. Mostly Bengalis and Pakistanis. Vanished into the silence, and I hadn’t even noticed. We looked at each other as if we’d never seen each other before, as if it hadn’t been us walking. Our faces were red and in ruins. The lines were cuts, the cracks bled.