In the Sea There are Crocodiles (18 page)

Sergio came to fetch me, and that first Saturday was a wonderful day. When I got to the youth group, I found Payam there. He took me by the hand and introduced me to everyone. Danila was also there. So I got a chance to talk to Danila, and tell her, thank you thank you, but I wasn’t really very happy in that place, for these reasons, that I hadn’t come all this way just to eat, sleep and watch television. I wanted to study and work. At that point Danila made a face like someone who’s thinking about something, and the thing they’re thinking about is important, but at that moment, even though it seemed as if she had something to say to me, she didn’t say anything. The following week, though, when I went back to the youth group, she came up to me, took me aside and in a low voice, as if the words weighed on her, asked me if I’d like to go and stay with them, because they wanted to do something to help me, and they had plenty of room, as I’d seen, and if I liked that room they could give it to me. Not only would I like to, I replied, but it was a really fantastic idea.

So Danila and Marco sent off the request. A few days later, the time it took to get through the paperwork, they came and fetched me from the home. They told me I was being fostered. They explained what that meant, that I had a house and a family, three dogs, my own room,
and even a wardrobe where I could put my clothes. They explained that I was the first child they had fostered, but they could see I was the right one.

The thing they didn’t need to explain, because I already knew, was that we were going to get on well with each other.

That’s how it started. What I’d call my new life. Or at least, the first step. Because now that I’d been welcomed in the house of Marco and Danila, I had to try and stay there, and staying there meant not getting myself expelled from Italy, and not getting myself expelled from Italy meant being recognized as a political refugee and granted asylum.

The first problem was the language. I spoke very little Italian. Everyone made an effort to help me. I could barely read the Latin alphabet, and was always confusing zero with the letter
O
. Even the pronunciation was difficult.

It might be better if you did some courses, said Danila.

School? I asked.

School, she said.

I gave her a thumbs-up sign to let her know how pleased I was. I remembered the school in Quetta, the one
where I went to hear the children play. In a fit of euphoria, I chose three courses, because I was afraid that one wasn’t enough. I would leave with Danila in the morning, when she went to work, at eight, then walk around until half past nine, when it was time for my first class at the Parini Adult Education Center, which is something they have in Turin, and also in other cities, too, at least I think so. Then I left, went to another school, attended my second class, came out again, went to the youth group, attended the Italian classes there in the afternoon, and at that point, happy and exhausted, returned home. This went on for six months. In the meantime my friend Payam continued acting as my interpreter when I couldn’t manage by myself, for example at home, when someone had to tell me something and I didn’t understand, they’d phone him and he’d translate. Sometimes Danila even called him to find out what I wanted for dinner, even though I really didn’t mind what I ate as long as it was something that filled my belly.

In June I took the middle school exam (even though the teachers at the Parini Center didn’t want me to, they said it was too early, but that was because of that old question of time, which isn’t the same everywhere in the world).

In September I enrolled in upper school, where I immediately cut a sorry figure. Or rather, I think I did,
because I sometimes don’t notice when something funny or strange happens, because if I
did
notice, I would avoid it happening, would avoid being made to feel a fool, and so on. Once the health education teacher called me to the blackboard and asked me to write things, I can’t remember what, something to do with chemistry, or with sums, but instead of numbers there were letters or something like that. I said I didn’t understand it at all. She explained it to me, but I said again that I didn’t understand, not even her explanation.

What school have you been to? she asked.

I said I hadn’t gone to school.

What? she said.

I said I’d done six months of Italian classes and then the high school exam as an external student and that was it.

What about before that? she asked.

I said I hadn’t done anything before that. Yes, I’d gone to school in Afghanistan, in my little village, with my teacher who wasn’t alive anymore, but that was it.

She got very upset. She went to the principal to complain and for a moment I was afraid I’d be thrown out of the school, which would have been a tragedy for me, because school was the one thing that interested me. Fortunately, another teacher intervened. She was patient, she said, we would take things one step at a time, health education
and psychology could wait, and we’d give priority to the other subjects. So, as there was a boy in my school who was a bit handicapped, and he had special support, while I didn’t, for a few months I took advantage of the opportunity and during the health education and psychology periods I left the class and studied with him.

Language, Enaiat. As you’re talking and telling me your story, I keep thinking you’re not using the language you learned from your mother. At evening classes, right now, you’re studying history, science, math, geography, and you’re studying these subjects in a language that isn’t the one you learned from your mother. The names of the food you eat aren’t in the language you learned from your mother. You joke with your friends in a language you didn’t learn from your mother. You’ll become a man in a language you didn’t learn from your mother. You bought your first car in a language you didn’t learn from your mother. When you’re tired, you rest in a language you didn’t learn from your mother. When you laugh, you laugh in a language you didn’t learn from your mother. When you dream, I don’t know in what language you dream. But I know, Enaiat, that you’ll fall in love in a language you didn’t learn from your mother
.

I remember I didn’t get on too well with my classmates during the first year, because I really liked being at
school. For me it was a privilege. I studied a lot and if I got a bad mark I immediately went to the teacher to say I wanted to catch up, and that was something that bothered the others a lot. Even those who were younger than me said I was a swot.

Then things started getting better. I made friends. I learned a lot of things that forced me to look at life with different eyes, like when you put on a pair of sunglasses with tinted lenses. When I studied health education, I was surprised by what they told me, because when I compared it to my past, to the conditions I’d lived in, the food I’d eaten, and so on, I wondered how it was possible that I was still in one piece.

I was at the end of my second year when a letter came to the house saying that I had to go to Rome to meet the commission that would decide if I could be granted asylum as a political refugee. I’d been expecting that letter. I’d been expecting it because I’d met an Afghan boy at the Parini Center who’d arrived in Italy just before me and whose story was very similar to mine. So everything that happened to him tended to happen to me, too, like being summoned because of his papers and things like that. He’d received the letter a few months earlier, had gone to Rome, had met the commission and the outcome had been that he wasn’t recognized as a political refugee. I remember his desperation when he came back
and told me. I couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t they granted him asylum? If they hadn’t granted him asylum, they wouldn’t grant me asylum. I remember that he put his head in his hands, this friend of mine, and wept, but without tears, wept with his voice and his shoulders, and said, Now where can I go?

One day I left on a train with Marco and Danila and traveled the same route I’d taken to get from Rome to Turin but in the opposite direction. We presented ourselves punctually in this building in an area the name of which I forget. We waited a short while, then they called my name, which echoed down the corridor. Marco and Danila stayed there. I went in.

Sit down, they said.

I sat down.

This is your interpreter, they said, indicating a boy next to the door.

I said I preferred to do without. Thank you.

So you speak Italian well, they said.

I replied that yes, I spoke it quite well. But that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t want an interpreter. If you speak directly to people you convey emotions more intensely. Even if you stumble over your words and don’t get the intonation right, the message you get across is closer to what you have in your head, compared with what an interpreter could repeat—don’t you think so?—because
emotions can’t come from the mouth of an interpreter, only words, and words are just a shell. We chatted for forty-five minutes. I told them everything. I told them about Nava, about my father and mother, about the journey, about how, when I slept in Marco and Danila’s house in Turin, my nights would be disturbed by nightmares, a bit like the wind disturbing the sea between Turkey and Greece, and in those nightmares I was running away from something and, in running, I often fell out of bed, or else I would get up, tear off the blanket, wrap it around my shoulders, go downstairs, open the door of the yard and go and sleep in the car, all without realizing it, or else I would neatly fold my clothes on one side, and lie down in the bathroom, in a corner. I told them I always sought out the corners to sleep in. I was a sleepwalker. I told them all this, and after a while the commissioner said that he couldn’t understand why I wanted political asylum because in Afghanistan the situation wasn’t so dangerous for Afghans, when you came down to it, and I would be perfectly all right if I could be in my own home.

Then I took out a newspaper. It was a daily paper from a few days earlier. I pointed to an article.

The headline was
Afghanistan: Taliban boy cuts spy’s throat
.

The article was about a young boy without a name who’d been filmed cutting the throat of a prisoner and
crying
Allah Akbar
. The sequence had been broadcast by the Taliban as propaganda in the border areas of Pakistan. In the video you saw the prisoner, an Afghan man, confess his guilt in front of a group of militants, many of them teenagers. Then they showed the executioner, a very young boy wearing a combat jacket a few sizes too big for him. He’s an American spy, the boy said straight to the camera. He was carrying a large knife. People like him deserve to die, he said. At that point a Taliban lifted the condemned man’s beard and they all cried
Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, God is great
, and the little boy sank the knife into the man’s throat.

I pointed at the article and said, I could have ended up like that.

A few days later, I heard I’d been granted asylum.

Three years passed. It was during my third year at upper school that I thought the moment had come to try and contact my mother. I could have looked for her before, but it was only after obtaining asylum, only after I’d acquired the necessary tranquillity, that I started thinking again about her and my brother and sister. For a long time I had wiped them from my mind. Not out of spite or anything, but because before coming to terms with other people you have to come to terms with yourself.
How can you give love if you don’t love your own life? When I realized that I really liked it in Italy, I called one of my Afghan friends in Qom, whose father was in Pakistan, in Quetta, and asked him if he thought it was possible for his father to try and get in touch with my family in Afghanistan.

If your father managed to find my mother, brother and sister, I said, I could pay him for his trouble and also let him have enough money to take all of them with him to Quetta. I told him where they lived and so on. He (my friend in Iran) said, It’ll be complicated for me to explain all these things. I’ll give you the telephone number of my uncle and father. Call them in Pakistan and you do it.

All right?

So I called his father and he was very kind. He said not to think about the money. He said that if they were in Afghanistan, in that little valley, and they didn’t know if I was alive or dead, just as I didn’t know if they were alive or dead, then he considered finding them a duty.

I replied that I’d pay for the journey and expenses anyway, even if he did consider it a duty, because a sense of duty is a good thing, but money’s important, too. Plus, it could be a dangerous journey. Through a war zone.

Time passed. I’d almost given up hope. Then, one evening, I received a phone call. The hoarse voice of my friend’s father greeted me: he sounded very close. He told
me it had been difficult to find them, because they’d left Nava and moved to a village on the other side of the valley, but that in the end he’d succeeded, and that when he’d told my mother that I’d been the one to ask for them to move to Quetta, she hadn’t believed it, and didn’t want to leave. He’d had to work hard to convince her to come with him, but she had.

Then he said, Wait. He wanted to give someone the phone. And my eyes filled with tears, because I already knew who that someone was.

Mother, I said.

There was no reply at the other end.

Mother, I repeated.

All I could hear through the receiver was breathing, soft and moist and slightly sharp. I realized that she, too, was crying. We were talking to each other for the first time in eight years, and that sharpness and those sighs were all that a son and a mother can say to each other, after all that time. We continued like that, both silent, until we were cut off.

That was when I knew she was still alive, and maybe it was also then that I realized, for the first time, that I was, too.

I’m not quite sure how. But I was.