Hinterland: A Novel (11 page)

Two thousand eight hundred euros, Aryan thinks. The number makes him feel weak. That is not the price they had calculated back in Iran, when he had discussed the cost of the journey, including bribes and agents’ fees, with a man his uncle knew who had made it as far as Austria before getting sent back.

‘Beware of the kidnap places inside Iran,’ the man had said. ‘Beware of the hostage takers who will beat you and imprison you until your relatives send more money. Beware of the intermediaries along the way, the heroin addicts and the small-town profiteers who will try to make you pay a second time for things already included in the price. And above all, beware of the smugglers. Your life is in their hands – remember to never, ever look them in the eye.’

The receptionist sets up a meeting with another agent. Aryan kicks Kabir under the counter; he cannot stop staring at the man’s scar.

A six-foot Kurd, the agent looks more like a warrior than a smuggler. He reminds Aryan of the gun-swinging horsemen who led them, on foot, over the mountains into Turkey, toting drugs with their barrels of oil. The man leers when he speaks and proposes a deal that Aryan instinctively mistrusts: two thousand nine hundred euros to guarantee their arrival in Rome.

When a third one sets the same price, tapping the figure into his calculator with a carpet seller’s practised panache, Aryan tells the man it’s too much. He hasn’t got any solutions, but they will find some other way.

‘How much have you got then?’ says the man. A long-toothed Pakistani, he looks like a door-to-door salesman. A pod of cellphones nestle in the purple satin pockets of his briefcase.

Aryan has learned not to give any numbers away. ‘Not as much as you’re asking,’ he says. He resists the urge to pat the side of his belt.

The salesman is undeterred. ‘I will send you my colleague,’ he says. ‘He has a cheaper way.’

A young Pakistani with different-coloured eyes meets them in a metro station with a map. He stands with his back to the wall, on the lookout for any policemen on patrol.

‘We go here, to this town, and this is where you get on the truck. This truck will take you to Italy.’

‘Through Patras,’ Aryan says.

‘Not through Patras,’ the man says. ‘Inland. Fewer controls that way.’

‘It looks very far by road,’ Aryan says, looking at the red line of the highway, the backlands in green, the light-blue sweep of coast.

‘For you it is better. It is safer,’ the young man says. Aryan is unnerved by the way his blue eye seems larger than the brown. ‘Out of sight of the police.’

Aryan looks at Kabir and hesitates.

‘I can do a special deal for you, since your brother is small. We take many families this way. It is less because we can put more people on board.’

‘How many people are you taking?’ Aryan asks.

‘A maximum of sixteen. I have two places left so I will do you a special offer, just one thousand two hundred euros for the two of you. One thousand two hundred is a very good price.’

Aryan reflects. ‘When would we go?’ he says.

‘When the families are ready we will go. It’s a matter of a couple of days.’

Aryan tells him he will think about it overnight.

‘Don’t take too long,’ the smuggler says. He introduces himself as Ardi, but Aryan knows it’s a false name. ‘You’re not the only ones wanting to go.’

‘Tomorrow I will tell the receptionist,’ Aryan says. ‘He will let you know.’

Aryan still has one thousand four hundred euros sewn into the lining of his belt. If they use one thousand two hundred euros to get to Italy, that will leave only three hundred and forty-six euros to get them from Italy to England if he includes the money they got on the farm. It won’t be enough. But at least they will be closer to their goal.

In the morning he asks the receptionist to tell Ardi they accept.

A week goes by before Ardi comes to find them in their new sleeping place, with a group of Afghan boys in Attiki Park.

The morning heat was already stifling when Aryan had met them, rummaging among the T-shirts in a street market that barrelled through a tunnel of trees. In the lime-green shade of the branches that wove into a cathedral overhead, Kabir had marvelled at the chandeliers of grapes, and the gargoyle faces of the curly-tailed fish.

‘You can stay with us,’ one of the boys had said when he realized Aryan and Kabir had just arrived. ‘You can come with us when we go to the church for food.’

Watermelons were piled in precarious pyramids on the ground. Aryan’s stomach churned as they went past.

Though the boys are kind, Aryan is impatient to leave. He is scared of the police, scared of the boys’ tales, scared of getting stuck again when they have already lost so much time.

‘Tomorrow morning, early, we go,’ Ardi says. ‘You will meet me by the metro station at six.’

Ardi sits several rows behind them in the bus and doesn’t address them a single word.

They had hung back as he lined up at one of the windows of the low-roofed bus station, its destinations pressed in blue letters against the glass. Overhead, a pair of unsynchronized fans made half-hearted revolutions in the heat. Old ladies in black perched at plastic tables while the younger women, with prams and revealing tops, bought gnarled cheese rolls and fluorescent drinks for their kids. Busmen and taxi drivers embroidered the blinding day with tobacco smoke.

When Ardi was done, they followed him outside. He handed over their tickets with instructions: not to speak to him or show any sign they recognized him once they boarded the bus; to follow him at a distance when he got off.

Aryan had given him a third of the money and left the rest with the receptionist with the shiny scar. When they reached Italy he would call the hotel and tell the man to give Ardi the remainder.

The sun beats down on the side of the bus and the overhead air vents don’t work. Kabir pulls the orange curtain across the window and leans against it, drowsy with heat. Amid the wasps and the mosquitoes and the cicadas they have slept badly in the park, but Aryan forces himself to stay awake, watching for when Ardi gets off.

Kabir’s thick lashes look like feathers when his eyelids are shut, Aryan thinks; they cast shadows on his cheek where the sunlight filters through the curtain. Tenderness clutches his heart like a rabbit trap.

He stares at the sun-bleached landscape. The endless road reminds him of another journey, the last trip they made with their mother, on a dusty bus back to Afghanistan. He hadn’t wanted to leave Afghanistan in the first place, but Baba was worried about the commanders; when he was killed they no longer had any choice. Then, after four years at school in Iran, Aryan hadn’t wanted to return. But the UN had said it was safe, and Madar was missing her family, and they couldn’t keep living in the tiny apartment with their cousins – even with Madar washing clothes all day and Aryan sewing in the afternoons with the tailor.

He remembers how happy Madar was to be going home. Her tired face was smiling for the first time in months as she packed their things and brushed Kabir’s hair and put on what she called her sensible shoes. He couldn’t have guessed that one month later she would be dead, that through his grief and anger he would have to sell everything, her gold jewellery and the silk carpets and the house, and take the dangerous route with Kabir all the way back to Iran, and bring him on the journey they were now on.

They stop at a roadside café selling bags of pistachio nuts and industrial cakes displayed behind finger-smeared glass. Irradiated purple, flies fizz and drop inside a fluorescent grill. Two men with seafarers’ faces play backgammon in a corner by the window, the counters click-clicking as they fly under quick-moving hands.

Ardi smokes a cigarette outside and doesn’t even acknowledge them with a look.

It is several hours before they arrive in the town. They follow Ardi to the back of a truck that is parked on a quiet road.

They waste no time. Aryan gives Kabir a leg-up, and takes a last glance at the late-afternoon sky before he too slithers inside, slipping between the cartons that disguise a false wall.

Ardi presses himself against the boxes to let them pass. He speaks rapidly. ‘You don’t move, you are silent, you wait. You make no attempt to get off – you do that only when the driver decides.’

The truck sways slightly as he jumps off and slams the doors.

Aryan feels like a cave-dweller in the darkness. He waits for his eyes to adjust, but nothing happens. He switches on his mobile phone and its small green rectangle glows like the end of a tunnel.

With a start he realizes that the compartment is packed with people. There is a family from Bangladesh – a man and a woman, two children and a baby – some Iranian Kurds, and at least six other Afghans. They may be twenty-four people in all, arranged opposite each other, legs outstretched like a railway. The confined space is already warm and pungent with human sweat.

Aryan feels his heart sink. No wonder the price was cheap: there are too many people inside, and they have no guarantee of success. The children, the baby with its cries, are sure to give them away.

‘It’s stifling in here,’ Kabir says.

In the blackness, Aryan places his palm on Kabir’s forehead. He can’t tell if Kabir has a temperature or whether it’s his own hot hand.

Aryan swallows. He feels his claustrophobia mounting, tries to bat away the terror of suffocation prickling at his throat. He concentrates on the truck’s ceiling, imagines it soaring above them in the darkness, and outside, the arch of blue sky. His Turkish cellphone is slippery in his hand. He clutches it like a lifeline, checking the emergency numbers he has recorded there for both Italy and Greece after he talked with the men in the park, and the receptionist sold him a new card.

Someone hisses at him. ‘Make sure that thing’s turned off.’

The green rectangle shrinks and disappears.

In his other hand Aryan has the litre-bottle of water he bought when they got off the bus.

‘You mustn’t drink,’ someone says in English, eyes better accustomed than his are to the dark. ‘If you pee in the truck when we’re on the ferry, you’ll give us all away.’

‘I didn’t think we were going on the ferry,’ Aryan says.

‘What did you think this was, an aeroplane?’

‘We
are
going to Italy?’ Aryan says, suddenly worried Ardi has put them on the wrong truck.

‘Sure,’ comes the voice, scratchy and dry. ‘At least that’s the plan.’

‘They told us we weren’t going through Patras,’ Aryan says.

‘Well how did you think we were going to get there?’ the scratchy voice says.

Aryan takes that in. Through the port, then, he thinks. He wonders how long it will take, and where they are going to end up.

‘Don’t worry about the water bottle,’ he says. ‘We have an empty one too.’

Someone grumbles about the baby. ‘One cry out of him and we’re done for,’ the voice says.

Perhaps the mother has drugged it. It is sleeping soundly, making no noise.

Behind them, inside the truck, someone is sliding more packing crates against the compartment wall.

Gravel crunches and scatters, and the vehicle lurches on to the road.

It is hot in the truck and gradually even the whispering peters out.

In the gap opened up by the silence, Aryan finds himself thinking about Bashir.

He is not sure what has made him suddenly remember the brother whose presence he recalls more clearly than his face. Maybe it is the darkness in the truck, the way that no matter how hard he stares, how widely he stretches his eyes, he cannot even see his own hands. But suddenly Bashir is there in his mind, the gentle brother who was good at fixing things, and the picture of him the last time he saw him, his body dumped beside the graveyard without any eyes.

Though he was small he clearly remembers the day the Taliban came. There were insects crucified in the radiators of the four-wheel-drive Toyotas that pulled up in the street outside the house, and the entrails of a video tape trampled in the dirt beside the wheels. He remembers the men’s dark turbans, and their car-antennae whips, and them asking for Ali and taking Bashir when Ali was nowhere to be found.