In the Sea There are Crocodiles (16 page)

Why? I said.

How should I know? He’s stroking me, but I don’t know why.

Is he bothering you?

No, he’s just stroking me. He’s stroking my hair.

Then I remembered what that guy had said in the soup kitchen at the Orthodox church. We jumped up and ran to some older boys. The man with the beard followed us, but when he saw the older boys surround us, and us pointing at him, he shrugged his shoulders and went away.

Once the Olympics started, there wasn’t any more work, and we spent the mornings and afternoons walking around, without knowing where to go or what to do. That was when I started talking about leaving again.

London, they all said. You have to go to London. Or Norway, if you can. Or why not Italy? If you went to Italy
you had to go to Rome and, once you were in Rome, you had to go to Ostiense, which apparently was a station. There was a park there with a pyramid where you could find Afghans. For me, the important thing about Italy was that a boy I knew, someone from my village, from Nava, had managed to get there. His name was Payam. I knew he was in Italy because someone had brought the news to our village. I didn’t know which city he was in and I didn’t have a phone number or anything, but if he was in Italy, maybe I could track him down. It would be difficult, but you never knew.

I’m leaving, I said to Jamal one day. We were with two other friends, having an ice cream. I have some money saved from the work I did for the Olympics, I said. I can buy a ticket and go as far as Corinth, or Patras, and there try to sneak onto a lorry.

I know a trafficker who might be able to help you, said one of the boys.

Really?

Of course, he said. But first, listen, you should still try asking the Greek authorities for political asylum for health reasons.

What do you mean, political asylum for health reasons?

Didn’t you know? There’s a place, a clinic, where
they take care of you if you’re ill, and do tests on you if you think you are. And if they find out there’s something wrong with you, they give you asylum because of your illness.

Is there really a place like that? Why didn’t you tell me before?

Well, for instance, because they have to give you injections. Not everyone likes taking tests and being given injections. But if you’ve already made up your mind to leave, what difference does it make, right?

Do you know anyone who got a residence permit that way? Personally, I mean?

Yes, a Bengali boy. He was lucky. You may be, too.

All right.

All right what?

I’ll go, I said. Tell me where it is.

It was an old building with colored windows, nothing like the other clinics I’d seen. You had to buzz the third floor on the entryphone. Jamal and the others would wait for me outside, because it would take a couple of hours. I buzzed. They opened without a word, and I went upstairs.

The entrance certainly looked like the waiting room of a clinic. There wasn’t a counter or a nurse to ask for
information, but there were four or five men sitting on chairs, two of them reading magazines, the others staring into space. I sat down, too, and waited my turn.

Suddenly a door opened, as if there’d been a gust of wind (there were four white doors) and a woman came out. She was naked. Stark naked. I opened my eyes wide, then lowered them, I would have liked to put those eyes of mine in my pocket, and put out the fire in my cheeks, but her appearance had caught me so off guard that any position I assumed, any move I made, any breath I took would have seemed awkward and out of place. I was petrified. The naked girl passed quite close to me, and I think she gave me a sidelong glance and smiled. Then she went through another door and disappeared. A man stood up and followed her. But then another woman appeared, and she was naked, too. All at once there were something like a dozen of them, coming in and out. In the end—

In the end, Enaiat?

I stood up and ran out. I ran down the stairs, six steps at a time, and opened the front door, still running, and almost got myself knocked over by a car—I heard a Greek horn and a Greek shout—and that was when I saw the others, including Jamal, on the other side of the street, laughing. Holding their stomachs. They were
laughing so hard, they could hardly stand. I swear that was the first and only time I’ve ever been inside a brothel.

I stayed in Athens until the middle of September. One day I shook Jamal’s hand and got on a train for Corinth. It was rumored that the police in Patras were really bad, that some boys had come back with broken legs or broken arms or worse, and that, even though the journey to Italy was shorter from there, it was unpleasant and unhygienic, and you had to share it with the mice. I have a phobia of mice. Corinth, on the other hand, wasn’t so bad, from what I’d heard. I found a Greek trafficker who hid people in lorries. The danger with lorries is that you’re never sure where you’re going to end up. You might think you’re going to Italy and instead you find yourself in Germany, or if things work out really badly you might even end up back in Turkey. The trafficker asked me for four hundred and fifty euros, but I’d left the money for him in Athens, with Jamal.

I can’t give it to you now, I said. When I get to Europe I’ll call my friend and he can bring it to you. That or nothing.

All right, he said.

The thing to do in Corinth is go to the port, find a lorry and hide in the trailer, with the merchandise, or between the wheels. Over the next few weeks I hid several
times, sometimes in quite dangerous places, but the inspectors always found me. The inspectors in Corinth are wily, and clued up to what goes on. They come in with their torches and they even look inside the boxes or sacks or go under the trailers and inspect every nook and cranny, which is what they’re paid for, and I think a lot of them deserve every last cent of their salary. If they catch you, they don’t arrest you, they just grab you by your jacket and chase you away. Sometimes with dogs.

So, after a while, I got fed up with these traffickers who couldn’t organize anything and decided to do it myself. Jamal would hold the money for me.

I moved to the beach (you can sleep well on the beach, and take a shower). I joined a group of Afghans who were also dreaming of leaving, and it became like a kind of game. Every now and again, three or four of us would go to the port and try to get on a lorry. Some days when the weather was nice, and we were in a good mood, we even tried ten or eleven times, in a single day I mean. I managed it once, but the lorry—I told you this could happen—instead of embarking on a ship drove straight out of the port. I had no idea where it was going. I started to beat on the bodywork, from inside the trailer, and when we were about twenty or thirty minutes from the city the driver must have heard me. He stopped, got out and opened up. With a wrench in his hand. Although,
when he saw that I was young (I think that was the reason), he didn’t hit me. He screamed a few insults at me, which was only fair, and chased me away.

One evening, with a lovely sunset over the sea, I said to the boys on the beach, Let’s go and try.

At the entrance to the port there were three containers one on top of the other, like a three-story building. I climbed to the top and, making myself as small as possible, squeezed in through a little hole. Suddenly, a machine hooked the building. I held my breath. The building was moved into the ship. One hour later, the freighter closed its hatches. I was very happy, I swear. I was really bursting with joy. I’d have liked to shout, but now wasn’t the time. And besides, it was quite dark and I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t have anything to eat or drink, so I immediately calmed down and realized that before I could say that I’d made it, I had to see how it was going to end.

I stayed there for three days, shut up inside the belly of the ship. There were weird noises, all kinds of rumbling and roaring. Then the ship stopped. I heard the noise of the anchor dropping, which is a noise that’s easy to recognize. Where am I? I wondered.

Italy

I
mustn’t get up yet. I mustn’t move. Keep still, breathe, wait. Be patient. Patience can save your life.

Once it had left the port—fifteen minutes had passed, I’d say, anyway less than half an hour—the lorry slowed down and entered a yard, a yard crammed full of other lorries and machines and trailers. My friends in Greece had advised me not to get out straightaway, but to wait until the lorry had traveled deep inside the country (whichever country it was), as far away from any border as possible, and then to take advantage of the driver stopping, at a motorway café for example, to slip out. I stayed there, all huddled up, calmly waiting for the lorry to set off again. I went over what I should do, so that I could be quick and accurate when the time came: jump to the ground, land on the tips of my toes, roll over if necessary
to soften the blow, look for a way out, then run, don’t turn around, just run.

But the lorry didn’t set off again. Instead, I felt something like an earthquake. I leaned out. A huge crane had hooked the container I was in. I got really scared. What’s going to happen? I thought. What if I end up in a metal crusher? I had to get out straightaway, I told myself, and jumped down.

Three men were working around the crane. I landed like a sack of potatoes (despite my mental rehearsals a bit earlier), because my legs were like wood and couldn’t cushion the fall. As I landed, I let out a scream. And it may have been because of the scream, or because of the fact that they weren’t expecting to see an Afghan fall out of the sky, but those three men were really scared, and even a guard dog that was there took fright and ran away. I’d fallen on concrete, but I couldn’t let myself be distracted by the pain. Immediately looking for a way out, I noticed that part of the perimeter wall dividing the yard from the street had collapsed. I ran in that direction, on all fours, like a little animal: I couldn’t stay on my feet. I thought the three men would follow me, instead of which one of them started shouting in English, Go, go, and pointing toward the main road. Nobody tried to stop me.

———

The first road sign I saw was a blue one.

On it was the word
Venice
.

I walked for a long time, along a road where there wasn’t much traffic. Suddenly, I saw two figures in the distance, coming quickly toward me. As they got closer, I realized they were riding bicycles. When they saw me, they slowed down and stopped, probably because of my filthy clothes, or my filthy hair, or my face. They asked me if I was all right, if I needed anything, which I really appreciated. We spoke in English, as best we could, and when the first one said he was French I said, Zidane. Then, when the second one said he was Brazilian, I said, Ronaldinho. That was all I knew about their countries, and I wanted them to know how much I liked them. They asked me where I was from. Afghanistan, I said. They said, Taliban, Taliban. That was all they knew about my country.

One of them—the Brazilian, I think—gave me twenty euros. They indicated the direction of the nearest town, which was Mestre. I waved goodbye to them and started walking again, and walked until I found a bus stop. There were two or three people waiting, among them a very young boy. I went up to him and said in English, Train station?

Now I don’t know who that boy was, maybe he was an angel, but he really helped me a lot. He told me to get on the bus with him. When we arrived in Venice, at Piazzale Roma, he bought me a roll because I must have looked as if I was hungry, then he took me to a church where he collected some new clothes for me and where I was able to wash, so that I didn’t disgust people.

I may be stating the obvious, but isn’t Venice beautiful? Everything on water. My God, I thought, I’m in paradise. Maybe all Italy is like this. In the meantime I kept saying to that boy,
Rome, Rome
, until he realized that I wanted to go to Rome. He went with me to the station and even bought me a ticket. Maybe he was related to the old Greek lady, I thought. In my opinion, kindness like that only gets handed on by example.

I had no idea how far it was from Venice to Rome or how long it would take me to get there. I didn’t want to miss my stop, because then I’d be lost, so not surprisingly I was worried. I knew what I had to do when I got to Rome: I had the instructions memorized. I had to leave the central station and look for a number 175 bus in the square. Even in Greece we all knew that.

On the seat facing me was a fat gentleman who immediately opened his laptop to work. Every time we
stopped at a station, or even if the train only slowed down, I leaned forward and said,
Please Rome, please Rome
. But there must have been a serious problem of communication between us, because whenever I said,
Please Rome, please Rome
, he would reply,
No rum, no rum
, because I pronounced
Rome
as
rum
.

After a while, after all this asking
Please Rome, please Rome
, the fat man started shouting angrily,
No rum. No. Enough
. He was really furious. He got up and walked away. I was afraid he was going to call the police. Instead of which he came back a few minutes later with a can of Coca-Cola and slammed it down in front of me and said,
No rum. Coca-Cola. No rum. Drink. Drink
.