In the Sea There are Crocodiles Page 9

  The Turks who were waiting for us there made us sit down on the ground in concentric circles, to protect ourselves from the cold. Every half hour we had to change places. Those in the middle had to move to the outside so that everyone could take turns getting warm and feeling the cold wind of the world on their backs.

  On the twenty-seventh day—I know it was the twenty-seventh because I carry each and every one of those days around my neck like the beads of a necklace—we came down off the mountain and the mountain slowly turned into hills and woods and meadows and streams and fields and all the wonderful things there are on earth. In the spots where there weren’t any trees, they made us run in groups, keeping our heads down. Sometimes they open fire, they said.

  Who?

  It doesn’t matter who. Sometimes they open fire.

  After two days—two more days, two days that could have been two years or two centuries—we reached Van.

  Van is also on a lake. Lake Van. Our journey had been a journey from one lake to another. On the outskirts of this Turkish town, the first Turkish town we stopped in, we sneaked into a field and spent the night sleeping in the tall grass. Some Turkish peasants, friends of the traffickers, were nice to us and brought us something to eat and drink. I would have liked to change my clothes, the ones I was wearing were dirty and torn, like rags to clean the floor with, but the nice clothes I’d bought in Teheran I had to keep for Istanbul, I couldn’t run the risk of getting them dirty and smelly before time, I really couldn’t.

  Before dawn they had us jumping out of the grass like crickets, loaded us in a lorry and drove us to another place nearby. It was a kind of huge cowshed with a very high ceiling, a cowshed for illegals instead of cows, and they made the Afghans sleep next to the Pakistanis, which is never a good idea. That night there was a quarrel over space and a fight broke out. The Turks were forced to intervene and separate us. They didn’t discriminate: they hit everyone.

  We were stuck in that cowshed for four days.

  One night, while we were sleeping, the roar of an engine started the walls shaking. The Turks told us to gather our things together and hurry. They rounded us up against the wall by ethnic group and started letting us out a few at a time, I assume to stop those inside from seeing what was happening outside and where they were putting us. We stood in a corner for about ten minutes, clutching our rucksacks to our chests, then someone called us and we went out.

  The first thing was, the vehicle with the noisy engine had its lights on, and they were aimed straight at the door, so I was blinded. The second thing was, the vehicle with the noisy engine turned out to be a lorry, a huge lorry with a huge trailer which seemed to be full of stones and gravel.

  Come around this end, they said.

  We walked around to the back of the trailer.

  Get in, they said.

  Where? All we could see was the gravel and the stones, and dust in the beams of light.

  The trafficker pointed downward. I thought he meant we should get underneath the lorry, but then I took a closer look—which should have made me believe what I was seeing, but I didn’t want to believe it—and I realized that between the bed of the trailer, which carried the gravel and the stones, and the underside of the lorry—where the axle shaft was, to make things clearer—there was a small space, maybe fifty centimeters high, or slightly more. In other words, the lorry had a false bottom. A fifty-centimeter-high space in which to sit with our arms clasped around our legs and our knees against our chests and our necks bent to keep our heads wedged between our knees.

  They gave each of us two bottles: one full and one empty. The full one was full of water. The empty one was to pee into.

  They filled the false bottom with us, all of us, the fifty or however many of us there were. We weren’t just cramped, we were very cramped. More than cramped. We were like grains of rice squeezed in someone’s hand. When they closed the hatch, the darkness obliterated us. I felt suffocated. Let’s hope it’s a short journey, I thought. Let’s hope it doesn’t last long. A voice was moaning somewhere. I could feel the weight of the stones on the back of my neck, the weight of the air and the night on the stones, the weight of the sky and the stars. I started breathing through my nose, but I was breathing dust. I started breathing with my mouth, but my chest hurt. I would have liked to breathe with my ears or my hair, like plants, which gather humidity in the air, from the air. But I wasn’t a plant, and there was no oxygen. We’re stopping, I thought at one point. But it was only a traffic junction. On another occasion I thought, We’re there now, we’re there. But it was the driver who’d got out to have a pee. I heard him. (Nothing escapes me, oh, no.) By the time I next said to myself, We’ve arrived, my knees and shoulders were dead. But it was a false alarm: I don’t know why we’d stopped that time.

  After a while, I stopped existing. I stopped counting the seconds or imagining our arrival. My thoughts and my muscles were weeping. My fatigue and my bones were weeping. Smells. I remember the smells. Pee and sweat. Screams, from time to time, and voices in the dark. I don’t know how much time had passed when I heard someone moaning horribly, as if they were having their nails pulled out. I thought it was a dream at first, I thought the hoarse voice mixed with the noise of the engine wasn’t real. Water, he was saying. That one word: water. But he was saying it in a way I can’t describe. I knew who it was, I’d recognized him. I also started to cry out, Water, just to do something, to say, Help, there’s someone dying, but nobody responded. Drink your own pee, I said, because he wouldn’t stop crying, but I don’t know if he heard. He didn’t reply, just kept on moaning. It was unbearable. So I started crawling on my belly through the mass of bodies, with people punching and pinching me as I passed, which is understandable, because I was squashing them. I reached the boy. I couldn’t see him, but with my hands I groped for his face, his nose, his mouth. He was moaning, repeating, Water, water, water. I asked someone nearby if they still had any left in their bottle, because mine was finished, but everyone had drunk every drop. I slid over the bodies again until I found a Bengali boy who said, Yes, he still had some water at the bottom of his bottle, but no, he wouldn’t give it to me. I said, I beg you. He said no. I implored him, Just a sip. He said no, and as he was saying no I was trying to figure out where his no was coming from. I threw a punch at the no. I felt his teeth against my fist and when he cried out I slapped him over and over, not to hurt him, just to find the bottle. As soon as I felt it, I grabbed hold of it in my hand and disappeared—which was the easiest thing in the world to do in that place. I took the boy the remaining water, which made me feel good, if only for a short time, it made me feel human.

  It lasted three days. We never got out. The door was never opened.

  Then a light.

  An electric light.

  ———

  I’ve been told that it’s like waking up from a general anesthetic. The outlines of things are blurred, and you feel as if you’re rolling down a hill, inside a wheel, the kind of thing that happened in Telisia and Sang Safid. They made us roll out onto the ground because nobody could move even the little finger of one hand. Our blood had stopped flowing, our feet were swollen, our necks stiff. They started with those closest to the hatch, letting them fall like sacks of onions. Then two Turks clambered right inside the space under the false bottom and grabbed those of us who hadn’t yet moved. Every movement we made was extremely painful.

  They pushed me into a corner and I stayed there, huddled up, for I don’t know how long. I was a tangle of flesh.

  Then my eyes gradually became accustomed to the light, and I saw where I was. It was an underground garage, filled with hundreds and hundreds of people. A kind of marshaling yard for immigrants, or something like that, a cave in the belly of Istanbul.

  When I was finally able to move and breathe I looked for a place to pee, all the pee I hadn’t been able to pass during the journey, all the pee I’d held in for three days. They showed me the (only) toilet, a hole in the floor
. But when I tried to pee, a searing pain shook my legs and stomach, and I was afraid I was going to faint. I closed my eyes to summon up strength, I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw that my pee was red.

  I was peeing blood. I peed blood for the next few weeks.

  The others were standing in line to use a telephone. Each person had to call his trafficker in Iran, the one he’d made arrangements with before the journey, in my case Farid’s cousin. We had to phone both the trafficker and the person who was looking after the money so that the trafficker could get paid.

  Only when the Iranian trafficker had his money, and only then, would he call his Turkish accomplices, here in the garage in Istanbul, to say that everything was okay and they could free the prisoners: us.

  Hello? Enaiatollah Akbari. I’m in Istanbul.

  Three days later, they blindfolded me and made me get in a car together with some other Afghan boys. They drove us around the city for a while so that we wouldn’t know where we’d come from, which hole had spewed us out, and then they left us in a park. But not all together. One here and one there.

  I waited until the car had left before taking off my blindfold. Around me were the lights of the city. Around me was the city. I realized—and I only really became aware of it at that moment—that I’d made it. I sat down on a low wall and stayed there for a few hours, motionless, staring straight ahead of me, in that place I didn’t know. There was a smell of fried food and flowers. And the sea. And maybe I’d changed, or maybe it was Istanbul that was different, or Turkey, I don’t know, but the fact is that, having always liked to have a roof over my head at night, from the samavat Qgazi onward, now that I was here I didn’t even look for a place to stay but was content to spend my nights in the park, and I did that for quite a while.

  I tried to make contact with the Afghan community, but without much success. But I did discover that there was a place near a bazaar in a rundown area over toward the Bosphorus where you could go early in the morning in the hope of finding work. You sat and waited until someone arrived in a car and got out and said, I can offer you such and such for such and such money. If you said yes, you got up and went with him. You worked all day, you worked hard, and in the evening you were paid what had been arranged.

  It was much harder trying to live a decent life in Istanbul than in Iran. And sometimes I wondered, What have I done? Then I remembered the repatriations to Herat and everything, the roadblocks, the shaved hair, and it struck me that, when you got down to it, I was fine in that park in Istanbul. There were people, other migrants, who let me take a shower in their house. I could pick up a bit of food here and there. The days flowed over me and life around me, like a river. I was turning into a rock.

  Then one evening, after a game of football in the back alleys, some Afghan boys who were younger than me told me they would soon be leaving for Greece. A man had put them in touch with a clothing factory, where they were going to work for nothing, and after a few months this man would help them get to Greece.

  How?

  In a dinghy.

  Another journey? I thought of the mountains. I thought of the fake bottom in the lorry. I thought, Now the sea. It scared me. I could barely stay afloat in a river. In the open sea, the Mediterranean, I would drown. I had no idea what was in the sea.

  I want to find work in Istanbul, I said.

  You won’t find any.

  I want to try.

  There’s no work for us here in Turkey. We have to go west.

  I want to find work in Istanbul, I repeated. And for another couple of months that was what I tried to do. I tried as hard as I could, but it wasn’t easy, it really wasn’t. And when something’s so hard that it becomes impossible, all you can do is stop trying and think of an alternative. Don’t you agree?

  By the time the fateful day was approaching when those Afghan boys were supposed to leave for Greece, I was beginning to think that I might have done better to accept their invitation. But it was too late now. They’d worked to pay for the journey.

  So I made up a lie. If you want to go to Greece, I said, it’s better if I come with you, because it’s likely you’ll need someone with you who can speak English, and I speak English. If you pay for me, too, I said, and I come with you, you’ll be able to communicate with the Greeks, ask them for help or information or whatever. What do you say? I’d be useful to you. I hoped they’d fall for it, because they were all a bit younger than me, and much less wise about the ways of the world.

  Really? they said.

  Really what?

  Do you really speak English?

  Yes.

  Let’s hear.

  What do you want to hear?

  Say something in English.

  So I said one of the few words I knew: house.

  What does that mean?

  I told them.

  And they accepted.

  Where did you learn English?

  From people I met. When you get it into your head that you’re going to emigrate it’s good to know a bit of English. Lots of people were trying to get to London, and sometimes I helped friends to rehearse a few useful phrases.

  So you really could speak it.

  No, I couldn’t. I knew a few words. Like ship, and port, things like that.

  Did they ever find out?

  Wait and see.

  That week, while waiting to leave, I worked for three days—I was lucky—and earned enough to buy new clothes to wear in Greece. You always need new clothes when you arrive in a place where you’re a nobody.

  There were five of us: Rahmat, Liaqat, Hussein Ali, Soltan and me.

  Hussein Ali was the youngest, he was twelve.

  From Istanbul we went to Ayvalik, which was on the Turkish coast opposite the Greek island of Lesbos. We were taken from Istanbul to Ayvalik by the trafficker, a mustached Turk with pockmarked skin, who had said—I don’t remember the exact words, but this was the gist of it—that he would tell us how to get to Greece.

  And he did. When we got to Ayvalik, he switched off the engine of the van, took from the bonnet a cardboard box gnawed by mice, dragged us up a hill at sunset, pointed at the sea and said, Greece is that way, good luck.

  As I’ve said, whenever anyone wishes me good luck, things go wrong. And anyway, what did it mean, Greece is that way? All I could see was sea.

  But he was just as scared as us, because what he was doing was illegal, so he abandoned us at the top of the hill and left, mumbling something in Turkish.

  We opened the cardboard box. It contained the dinghy (the deflated dinghy, of course), the oars (there were even two spare ones), the pump, the adhesive tape—at the time I thought: adhesive tape?—and the life jackets. It was like an IKEA flatpack for illegals. With instructions and everything. We divided the things among us, put on the life jackets, because it was easier to wear them than to carry them, and walked down toward the woods that divided the hill from the beach. We were something like three or four kilometers from the beach, and in the meantime darkness had fallen. In those years, now that I think of it, I lived more in the dark than the light.

  So anyway, we started walking toward the beach and there was this big wood with darkness filling the spaces between the trees and not even twenty minutes had gone by when we heard noises, strange noises, not the wind in the branches and the leaves. No, something else.

  Must be cows, Rahmat said.

  Must be goats, Hussein Ali said.

  Goats don’t make a noise like that, stupid.

  Hussein Ali punched Rahmat in the shoulder. Neither do cows for that matter, idiot.

  They started pushing each other and fighting.

  Be quiet, I said. Stop it.

  They must be wild cows, said Liaqat. A kind of wild cow you only find in Turkey. But we didn’t have time to comment on this statement by Liaqat, because just then these cows of his suddenly appeared on the path, running toward us. They ran like devils, these wild cows, and they were short, short and squat. Ru
n, cried Hussein Ali, the wild cows are coming. And we started running hell for leather until we found a ditch, or something like that, and dived in and hid among the shrubs.

  We waited for silence to fall again and after a while Liaqat put his head out and said, Hey, they aren’t cows. They’re pigs.

  Wild pigs, Hussein Ali said.

  Wild pigs, Liaqat repeated.

  They were boars. But none of us had ever seen a boar. We waited until they’d gone away, then climbed out of the ditch and set off again along the path to the beach.

  Ten minutes later, we heard barking.

  Those are dogs, said Hussein Ali.

  Congratulations, said Liaqat. I can see you’re educated. Can you also recognize the noise a sheep makes? And a horse?

  They started pushing each other and quarreling, but immediately stopped because, just then, a dog appeared from behind a tree. First one, then another. Then a third one. Then the barking of the dogs got closer and we saw them on our right, standing on a rock. They weren’t behind a gate or anything, they were free. And there were lots of them.

  Wild dogs, cried Hussein Ali. This country is full of wild things.

  The dogs jumped down from the rock, with steam coming out of their mouths and their tails up in the air, and we started running again, as fast as an avalanche, and once again we dived into a ditch, which this time was much deeper than we had thought, and we rolled down until we ended up on the bank of a dried-up stream.

  The dinghy, I cried. Don’t make a hole in the dinghy.

  We moved all the stones and debris out of the way, and when we finally managed to get up, none of us were seriously hurt. Scratches and bruises, yes, but nothing permanent. And we still had the dinghy and the pump and everything. That was when I noticed Liaqat’s life jacket.

  Liaqat, I said, your jacket is torn.

  Liaqat took it off and turned it over and over, but there was nothing to be done. It was unusable. He looked at me in desperation, then gave a twisted smile. So’s yours, he said. He approached Hussein Ali. So’s Hussein Ali’s.