In the Sea There are Crocodiles (9 page)

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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 police 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.

The bus driver pressed a button and the doors opened wide with a hiss. Centuries passed, the air was still, nobody spoke, not even those who had nothing to fear because they were Iranians or because their papers were in order, then the first policeman got on. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He had one arm of his sunglasses in his hand, the other in his mouth.

When the police get on a bus, they don’t ask everyone
for their papers: they know perfectly well who’s Iranian and who isn’t. They’re trained to recognize Afghans, illegals, and so on, and as soon as they see one they go straight to him and demand to see his papers even though they know perfectly well he doesn’t have any.

I had to become invisible. But that wasn’t one of my powers. I pretended to be asleep, because when you sleep it’s as if you aren’t there, and also because pretending to sleep is like pretending everything’s all right and that things will work out. But this policeman was a smart one, and he saw me even though I was asleep. He tugged at my sleeve. I kept pretending to sleep and even shifted a bit in my sleep, which I tend to do during the night. The policeman kicked me in the shin. At that point I woke up.

Come with me, he said. He didn’t even ask me who I was.

Where?

He didn’t reply. He looked at me and put on his sunglasses, even though it was quite dark inside the bus.

I picked up my bag. I apologized to the girl next to me and asked if she could let me through, and as I passed her I got an even stronger whiff of her perfume. Everyone watched me as I walked down the aisle, and I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my neck. As soon as I stepped down onto the ground, the bus closed its doors
with the same pneumatic hiss as before and set off. Without me.

There was a small police station, with a car parked outside it.

Telisia. Sang Safid.

Drums in the night.

Telisia. Sang Safid.

I can pay, I said immediately. I can pay for my repatriation. I did in fact have money with me that I’d earned on the site. But for some reason they wouldn’t listen to me. One of the policemen, a huge Iranian, pushed me through a door. For a fraction of a second I imagined a torture chamber caked with blood and strewn with fragments of bone, a deep well filled with skulls, a pit going down into the bowels of the earth, little black insects crawling over the walls and acid stains on the ceiling.

What was inside?

A kitchen. That’s what.

Mountains of filthy plates and pots, waiting to be washed.

Get down to work, said the huge Iranian. The sponges are over there.

It took me hours to win the battle against the remains of sauce and caked rice. I don’t know how many years those pots had been there, waiting for me. As I was washing
the cutlery and plates, four other Afghan boys arrived. When we’d finished in the kitchen, they took all five of us and set us to work loading and unloading cars and vans and so on. Whenever there was a boot or a trailer to be checked, the policemen called us and we started emptying it. When they’d finished their checking, they called us again: there were crates and suitcases to be put back, boxes to be stacked, and so on.

I stayed there for three days. Whenever I was tired, I sat down on the ground with my back against the wall and my head on my knees. If someone arrived and there was unloading and loading to be done, a policeman would come and kick us and say, Wake up, and we would get up and start again. On the evening of the third day they let me go. I don’t know why. The four other boys stayed there and I never saw them again.

I got to Qom on foot.

Qom is a city with a population of at least a million—I found out later—but if you counted all the illegals in the stonecutting factories, I think the number would be double that. There are stonecutting factories everywhere. Thanks to Sufi, I started working in the same factory where he worked.

There were forty or fifty of us. They put me in the
kitchen. I made meals and did the shopping. Unlike Isfahan, in Qom I was the only one to leave the factory—in order to do the shopping—which was very, very risky for me but something I couldn’t get out of.

Apart from cooking, I washed and cleaned the factory manager’s office. And if there was anything else to do, like standing in for workers who were ill or moving stuff, they would call me. Ena, they would shout. Sometimes they would just call without even turning around, as if I was already there in front of them, as if I had the ability to materialize as soon as my name was uttered. In other words, I was a jack of all trades. That’s what you call it, isn’t it?

Whenever rocks arrived in the factory, they were cut using these huge machines, some as big as my house in Nava. The noise was incredible, and there was water everywhere. You put on boots (it was obligatory) and a plastic overall and some people even covered their ears with headphones, but with all that water on the ground and that stone dust in the air, it was difficult staying healthy and avoiding getting sick. Not just staying healthy, it was difficult staying alive. Or in one piece.

From time to time, one of the workers operating the machines, those huge machines that broke up the stones like terra-cotta and sliced through them like butter,
would lose a piece of his body: an arm, a hand, a leg. We worked long hours, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and when you’re tired it’s easy to get distracted.

One day an Afghan boy a little bit older than me came to me and said, What’s your name?

Enaiatollah.

Can you play football, Enaiatollah?

Yes, I thought, I could play football, even though I was better at
buzul-bazi
, not that I’d played it since I left Nava. Yes, I said, I can.

Really? Then be at the gate tomorrow afternoon at five. There’s a tournament. We need more players.

A tournament?

Yes. Between the factories. Will you come?

Of course.

Good.

The thing is, the next day was Friday. That’s important because, although life in the factory consisted of nothing but working, eating and sleeping, we did have one half-day of rest: Friday afternoon. Some people used the time to wash, and some went to see their friends. From that Friday onward, I played on the football team. We were all Afghans, as you can imagine, workers from three or four neighboring factories. There were more than two thousand Afghans working in the stonecutting factories.

I did myself proud, in those games, as far as I could.
Though sometimes I was a bit tired because my working day usually finished at ten at night.

One afternoon, after I’d been in the factory for a few months, I was lifting a really heavy stone—more than two meters long—when I lost my balance and the stone fell and shattered on the ground, with a crash you could hear all over the factory, and one sharp piece hit my foot.

It tore my trousers, sliced through my boot, scraped my calf and made a deep cut in the back of my ankle. You could see the bone. I screamed and sat down clutching my leg. One of the factory foremen came running. He told me the stone was for an important delivery, and heads would roll because it was broken. In the meantime, I was losing blood.

Get up, the man said to me.

I pointed out that I was injured.

We have to think of the stone first. Pick up the pieces. Now.

I asked if I could dress the wound.

Now, he said. But he was referring to the stone, not dressing the wound.

I started to pick everything up, hopping on one leg with the blood soaking my trousers and dripping out of the boot. I didn’t even faint, just think of that. I don’t know how I managed, I mightn’t be able to do it today.
I finished picking up the scattered pieces, then, still hopping, went to disinfect and bandage the wound. To do that, I had to peel off a piece of flesh. I still have the scar today. And for a while I couldn’t play football.

Given the gaping wound and everything, for a while I worked only in the kitchen. One day, as I was going to do the shopping, I saw a beautiful watch in a shop window. It was made of rubber and metal, and didn’t cost too much. I’ve already said—if I’m not mistaken—that I’d often thought about having a watch, just to give some meaning to the passing of time, a watch that would show the date and tell me how much I was aging. So, when I saw that particular watch, I counted the money I had in my pocket and even though I didn’t have much I realized I could buy it.

So I went in and did it. I bought the watch.

Leaving the shop, I swear, I was beside myself with joy. It was the first watch I’d ever had in my life. I kept looking at it and lifting my wrist so that I could see the sun reflected in the dial. I would have run all the way to Nava just to show it to my brother (how envious he would have been), but running all the way to Nava would have been a problem, so I ran to have it blessed at the shrine of Fatima al-Masuma, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam and one of the most appropriate (so I believed) for
blessing something that means a lot to you, the way my watch did to me.

I rubbed the watch against the wall of the shrine, to purify it, but taking care not to scratch it.

I was so happy with my watch, there was a moment when I even thought that, despite the danger of losing a finger or whatever, I might stay in Qom for a long time.

Then, one night, the police came to the factory. They were well organized. They had lorries, so that they could take us straight to the border without having to go to a temporary detention center. Repatriation. Again. I couldn’t believe it. It was really depressing. The police knew lots of illegals worked in that factory. They broke down the door of the shed where we were sleeping and started kicking us to wake us up.