Hinterland: A Novel (17 page)

A man with gold braid on his sleeves is loading the Americans’ luggage into the back of a taxi. He holds the door open as they clamber inside.

At the station they wait with the American woman while her husband goes to the ticket window. Then they stand all together on the platform.

Two policemen in dark glasses lean on the bars around the exit, watching passengers get on and off the trains. There is a dog on a leash at their side.

Aryan’s mouth goes dry and his stomach tenses. Their truncheons hang like unspoken threats from their belts; the butts of their black revolvers sit sinister as reptiles at their hips.

‘Don’t look at them,’ Aryan tells Kabir. He is relieved they are not the same officers who sent them back before.

Following its silver snout along the rails, the fast train to Paris slides in. With the Americans, they scramble up the steps.

The train winds along the coast for ages before heading north. They pass wide rivers, and churches on distant outcrops, and endless open plains. Aryan thinks France must be the flattest country he has ever seen.

Disappearing through the carriages, the woman returns with cheese sandwiches and tins of orange drink.

They say goodbye to the Americans on the steps of the Gare de Lyon station in Paris.

‘We’ll be staying on the Champs-Elysées for three days,’ the man says. ‘That’s where we’ll be if you come by.’

Aryan touches his heart and shakes their hands and thanks them. They have to find the other Afghans and work out how to get to England, he says. Then they will come and say hello.

‘Are you sure you have a place to go now?’ the woman asks.

Aryan nods. He has Rahim’s green-pen map in his notebook.

The couple wave to them from the side window of their taxi as it sweeps in a wide arc down the concourse.

A man at a bus stop points them towards the river. They walk between it and a flyover until they find the place where the canal empties into the Seine. They take a metal staircase down to a walkway along the water’s edge, where pleasure craft and longboats lie anchored along the sides of the canal.

People are sitting on the decks laughing and drinking. It takes Aryan a moment to work out why it all looks back to front: the plants are growing on the inside, the tables and chairs are on the outside, and the bicycles are parked up on the roofs.

Up ahead, there are trains going past above the water but under the road; out of sight, a chorus of police sirens wails.

When the water disappears they climb another staircase to an enormous traffic circle with a golden angel on top of a pillar. People in long scarves sit smoking on café terraces; a curved building made of metal and glass reflects the autumn sky.

Aryan takes out Rahim’s sketch and shows Kabir. The canal must run under the wide road up ahead, where the traffic flows on either side of the flowerbeds and a double row of trees. Curled leaves lie upturned on the pavement like half-open hands.

Several times they stop. Kabir’s new shoes are giving him blisters and Aryan is walking too fast. He ties Kabir’s laces tighter to stop the rubbing but still he drags his feet. Aryan piggybacks him till he gets too tired. They stop to watch a group of men playing a game with metal balls. Further on, fountains of water shoot skywards like a pod of underground whales.

Steering wide of the wild-eyed men shouting abuse at invisible demons, they find an empty bench where Kabir can undo his laces. He shakes a pebble out of his shoe.

Through the trees up ahead they see an intersection. Beyond it, the water of the canal reappears.

Aryan’s spirits lift. ‘It can’t be too far now,’ he says.

A steep green bridge arches over the water. They climb to the top and lean over the rails. On the edges of the water below, people are smoking and playing guitars. There are restaurant tables on the footpaths, and rollerbladers slaloming between the pedestrians and the waiters. People speed by on bicycles, tinkling their bells.

‘Look at that!’ Kabir says.

A boat half full of tourists appears in the water below them, waiting to pass through the lock. Passers-by gape as a boom falls like the border between two countries, halting the stream of motorbikes and cars. They stand, transfixed, as water rushes in and the heads of the tourists rise to the level of the banks. Suddenly the bridge splits apart and turns on a pivot, and the boatload of tourists floats past under their feet.

Two children about Kabir’s age lean far out over the edge, trying to scoop up the water with their hands. Their mothers, when they notice, shriek and haul them back in.

‘Do you think that boat goes to England?’ Kabir asks.

Aryan laughs. ‘Yeah, sure, twice a week from Kabul,’ he says.

They watch as it disappears into the next lock, and vanishes under the road along which they’ve just walked.

Aryan starts down the steps of the bridge.

‘Come on,’ he says, turning back. ‘See that fence? I think we’ve reached the park.’

Three youths are perched on the low stone wall of the canal. Aryan can tell they are Afghans, even from a distance, even before hearing them speak.

‘Do you know if there is anywhere we can sleep?’ he says. ‘We’ve only just arrived.’

The three look up. ‘For underage boys like you, there is a place, but it’s too late for today,’ says one of them. He disentangles a mobile phone from his pocket and looks at the time inscribed over the photo of a Bollywood actress.

‘You have to be there before eight o’clock to get in,’ says his friend. He has a round face and wide-spaced eyes and a jacket with an enormous number of zips. ‘Otherwise you will have to bed down like us, out here in the park.’

Another night under the stars, Aryan thinks. Luckily they slept a bit in the train.

‘Is there any place we can get something to eat?’ he says.

The youths shrug. Looking at them, Aryan thinks they could be eighteen or nineteen, but the lines on their faces make them seem older. One of them is swimming inside an anorak several sizes too big.

‘There is a soup kitchen further up the canal but you have to go there at half past six. There’ll be nobody there now,’ the man with the zippers says.

The temperature is starting to drop. People sitting along the canal wrap themselves in their jackets and scarves; old ladies, miniature dogs squeezed into the crooks of their arms, punch numbers into the walls of nearby buildings; the heavy doors click open, then slam shut.

‘If you can wait till lunchtime they bring meals for homeless people to the gates of the park,’ says the man with the phone, waving the Bollywood actress towards a bandstand and a cluster of trees. ‘Or there’s a supermarket around the corner that throws out lots of food.’

The youth with the zips holds out his hand. ‘Here, you can have my bread,’ he says.

Aryan thanks him and opens the white plastic bag. Inside are three disks of bread so light they feel weightless in his palm.

Aryan and Kabir demolish the bread where they stand. A few crumbs float like snowflakes on to the flagstones beneath their feet.

As night falls, the youths show them where to climb over the park’s high railings, though Aryan is so thin he can fit between the bars. They drop softly on to the mulchy soil. The man in the anorak stumbles, crushing a clump of irises underfoot.

People sitting under heaters at the outdoor restaurants barely notice the shadows slipping over the rails, or bedding down on the strange rubbery surface beneath the playground swings.

The three slide flattened cardboard boxes from behind the creepers that spill over the park’s stone wall. Silently they extract plastic sacks, swollen into enormous pumpkins with bundles of bedding, from their hiding place in a tangle of shrubs.

Aryan and Kabir have nothing to lie on and nothing to pull over themselves. But there are other sheets of cardboard concealed against the wall by other men. Aryan hesitates a moment, then slides one out and hands it to Kabir. He takes a second one for himself, and they drag them away from where their owners might come looking for them. They position them close to the place the youths have chosen, in a curve of shrubbery that shields them from the wind. Aryan buttons Kabir’s anorak to his chin and pulls his hood over his head and the two of them curl up, waiting for sleep.

‘Tomorrow it will be better,’ Aryan says. ‘We will find the underage sleeping place.’

‘What is underage?’ Kabir asks.

‘It means under eighteen.’

‘What happens when you turn eighteen?’ Kabir asks.

‘That’s when they say you are a man.’

‘And then you can sleep in the park?’

Aryan laughs. ‘Everything’s back to front in Paris,’ he says. ‘They keep their animals inside their houses, the bridges break in half when a boat comes by, and the boats have to go under the roads.’

Kabir ponders the contradictions. ‘What about the lights?’ he says after a while.

‘What lights?’ Aryan says.

‘The lights of the city. Ahmed said Paris was a city full of lights.’

Aryan looks around them; all he can see are the dark trees, and the streetlamps winking through the branches. ‘Maybe you have to go downtown,’ he says.

Paris, he remembers it now, is the bride of all the cities – that’s another thing Ahmed had said. He had imagined a girl in a long white dress with a voluminous train studded with diamonds and crystals.

He stares up at the sky, wondering whether Ahmed is still in Istanbul, or somewhere ahead of them or behind them on the road.

‘Those stars. It’s the charioteer – the one we saw in Iran – do you remember?’ he says.

Kabir follows the line of Aryan’s gaze. Above the trees, the night sky has been erased by the aura of the city. But finally he makes out part of the constellation, beyond the haze of urban light.

‘They’re our stars,’ Kabir says. ‘A charioteer for travellers like us.’

‘Yes just like us – except we don’t have a chariot,’ Aryan says.

Kabir ignores him. ‘Maybe Masood and Zohra are looking at them right now, over there in Iran,’ he says.

Aryan listens with half an ear. He is thinking about the night sky in Afghanistan, how he used to count the shooting stars when, long ago, he slept up on the roof on the hottest nights of the year.

‘Maybe they are even thinking of us,’ Kabir is saying. ‘Maybe if we think hard enough we can send them a message.’

‘What would you say in your message?’

‘I’d tell them about the puppies and that we got new clothes and that soon we’ll be going to school in England.’

There are more than a hundred men lining up for food that comes in a white truck with a big red shield on the doors. It parks between the canal and an overhead railway line, and is filled with shelves of trays that men and women distribute from trestle tables set up behind barricades.

There are not only Afghans in the queue, but Iraqis and Iranians and Kurds, and some French people who don’t have a home. The youths at the back push, and the men from the van shout, and finally they get warm pasta and hot tea.

An Afghan teenager who was behind them in the line takes Aryan and Kabir to the meeting place for the underage camp. There are Hazaras and Pashtuns and Tajiks, and a couple of boys from Africa, and they all give their names to a lady with glasses who puts them down on a list.

It is the first time since school in Iran that Aryan has seen so many boys his own age. He looks at them with a mixture of shyness and fascination. One is slumped miserably inside a phone box; some are clowning and relaxed; some are trying to pretend they’re invisible inside their hoods.

The French lady and a man put Aryan and Kabir with the smallest boys and the ones who are the most tired because they have just arrived. Some of the boys laugh and jostle and try to slip their friends into the queue; the French people when they realize have to start counting all over again.

‘What happens to them?’ Aryan asks, nodding to a dozen others who are turned away once twenty-five of them are marshalled against a wall.

The teenager beside him shrugs. ‘They have to find their own place,’ he says. ‘In the park, or under the bridges, or along the canal.’