Hinterland: A Novel (2 page)

‘I’d love it if the guards were out fishing and hooked that big jellyfish up,’ Hamid says.

They stab their dinghy too. The rubber hisses as the air rushes out; it subsides into a limp black membrane. Still they cannot sink it, so they dispatch it after the other one, out into the racing stream.

Battling the undergrowth, they make their way a few yards upriver, and begin to climb through the aqueous night. Aryan’s hair sticks to his forehead. Bracken scratches his hands and water runs down the back of his neck. Low branches tear at his anorak, snag on the clothing of the man in front and whip into his face. He hears Kabir puffing and tries to slow his pace to match his brother’s, to stop fear speeding his own ascent. Hamid stumbles once and swears. Someone behind them growls at him to keep his voice down.

There is no path, but Aryan tries to still his nerves by thinking of those who must have taken this route before them, imagines he sees the markings of their feet in the clay.

On the highway above them the trucks whizz by, pepper-spraying gravel. Silhouetted branches claw at shifting cones of light. He prays no border police are patrolling the road tonight.

Presently, just as the boy has said, they reach a low wall. They insert themselves into the narrow gap between it and the rain-lashed vegetation, and wait.

Aryan concentrates on his breathing as Omar has taught him, stilling the accelerated pounding of his heart. Someone struggles to smother a cough. His empty stomach complains. He tries to muffle it before the sound of it echoes and reverberates down the valley, loud enough to wake the sleeping houses, rouse the border guards, alert the watchdogs and the farmhands and the truck drivers smoking on the leeward side of their semi-trailers, betraying to the world the presence of fifteen men huddled on a lonely bend in a highway between two worlds.

His mind leaps back to the map he looked up on the Internet, the line of red hatching that was the border wriggling down from the mountains, through the landmine zone, skirting the length of the river to the sea. After that, their journey becomes an illegible tangle of possibilities, of railway lines, shipping routes and roads.

‘How long do we wait here?’ Hamid says.

Aryan shrugs. ‘Dunno, Birdsnest,’ he says, plucking a curled-up leaf from Hamid’s fringe.

Hamid shakes the debris from his hair. ‘They better not have forgotten to send the truck.’

‘They’ll come,’ Aryan says. ‘It’s bad for business if they let us down.’

‘I’m glad you’ve got such faith in them.’

Kabir leans back against Aryan.

‘You’re a good soldier,’ Aryan says to him. ‘Just make sure you don’t fall asleep.’

Kabir grins up at him through shut lids. ‘Just resting my eyes,’ he says.

‘Good thing he’s not our lookout,’ says Hamid.

‘I’m wide awake even though my eyes are closed,’ says Kabir.

‘Well don’t forget to open them when the truck comes,’ says Hamid. ‘We’re not coming back for anyone who’s slept in.’

Aryan squirms, pretending to shrug Kabir off. ‘Remind me where we’re going, Soldierboy.’

‘We’re going to school.’

‘Where?’

‘To school!’

‘And when are we going to get there?’

‘At half past nine!’

‘When?’

‘On time!’

‘And
how
are we going to get there?’

‘KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon!’ says Kabir.

‘Bravo,’ Aryan says. ‘But I bet you I’ll get there first.’

Hamid grins at Aryan through the drizzle. He has heard it before, the way Aryan has taught his brother to recite the names of the capitals like stepping stones across the map of the sentient world, a songline of seen and imagined places that points to where they’re going and where they’ve been and gives them a hold on the memory of who they are.

Aryan would never tell Kabir that the ritual for him is more than banter; he would never admit to him how much it is inspired by fear. Sometimes he wakes in panic, dreaming his little brother is being swept away from him in a crowd. Sometimes they are separated by smugglers or by uniformed men. Sometimes it’s a checkpoint, sometimes a truck stop – each time, he is forced to abandon his brother on the road. If anything happens, Aryan thinks, Kabir will still stand a chance if he can remember where to go, if the names of the cities become coordinates he can navigate by, like the sailors who once set their journeys by the stars.

They fall silent, listening to the dripping trees and the rubber kiss of tyres on the asphalt.

‘What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we get to Europe?’ Hamid says after a while.

Aryan ponders. ‘Eat the biggest lamb kebab you’ve ever seen,’ he says. ‘Then sleep in a proper bed, and get a new card for my phone.’

‘That’s three things, you fool. In that case I want a giant kebab too, plus a steaming hot shower, and to see Bruce Willis on a big screen. And after that I’ll borrow your phone.’

‘Sure, then you can pay for the card,’ Aryan says.

‘True friend,’ Hamid says, pinging a pebble at his foot.

‘Who’s Bruce Willis?’ says Kabir.

‘Bruce Willis is one big Afghan hero,’ Hamid says. ‘I saw him in a TV store in Istanbul – twenty of him, all at once, right up to the ceiling – one mighty action man.’

‘Bruce to the power of twenty,’ Aryan says, surprising himself with the memory of a long-ago class in maths.

‘Maybe they’ll have
Titanic
too, and films from Bollywood,’ Kabir says. He has dislodged a rock from the soil, checking to see whether the centipedes and mudeyes and larvae here are the same.

‘What do you know about Bollywood?’ says Hamid.

‘Lots,’ says Kabir. ‘There were guys selling DVDs on the street in Iran.’

‘Can’t you boys shut up?’ The voice comes from further down the wall.

‘Who’s listening?’ Hamid shoots back. ‘Or do the trucks in Greece have ears?’

Aryan catches Hamid’s eye and pulls a face, willing his friend’s anger to dissipate. Since they met in Istanbul, Hamid has always been like that, able to reduce grown men to laughter but also quick to take offence, and volatile around authority he cannot charm.

Hamid mutters under his breath, but holds his tongue.

Aryan rests his forehead against the rough concrete wall. He can see crystals of sand like sugar in the cement, the cracks almost wide enough to hide something, to slip a message inside. He traces the jagged line with his fingertip. The adrenalin of the crossing is ebbing now, replaced by an overwhelming desire for sleep. To stay awake, he tries to conjure up the faces of everyone he played football with on Omar’s team.

Now that they’ve stopped moving, his body is starting to chill. His clothes seem to soak up the ambient dampness of the night. He starts to shiver again.

After what seems like hours they hear a semi-trailer slowing as it takes the bend, its wheels crunching on gravel. It growls to a halt. No one dares breathe. Maybe it’s not their truck; maybe it’s just a driver who has stopped to piss. Aryan feels a desperate urge to shift; anything to ease the cramp in his legs. Suddenly, he hears a low whistle.

He peers over the barrier. The truck’s tail lights glow bloodshot on either side of its number plate. Exhaust swirls like illuminated breath.

‘Let’s go!’ someone says.

One of the men vaults over the wall and swings open the doors. One by one they leap up and dive inside. The wheels are taller than Kabir; Hamid hauls him up by the armpits. Aryan nearly lands on top of them. Seconds later the dark square of sky is obliterated; the bolts of the door squeal as they are locked in. They are still arranging themselves on the boxes in the blackness when the engine engages, the wheels grind, and the vehicle lurches on to the highway. They throw their hands out and grab at whatever they can catch to steady themselves.

Someone coaxes a flame from a cigarette lighter. Weird and distorted against the shadows, their faces are tight as masks.

‘Welcome to Europa,’ somebody says.

The driver cranks down through the gears until the truck slows to a stop. Voices. Footsteps. The low growl of a dog. The men freeze.

Aryan doesn’t know how long they have been driving, or where they are. He reaches for Kabir, finds his shoulder in the dark, and grips it.

The doors of the truck swing open and the night air rushes in. Torchlight rakes the inside. Aryan ducks and shrinks into the boxes but knows he is not concealed. He can’t see who is wielding the beam of light – soldier, border guard, customs officer, trucker, police. It sweeps the rafters, probes the piles of cartons, then locks on him. He can hear his blood thudding in his ears. The light considers him a long moment, bleaching the world white behind tight-clenched eyes. Anxiety fingers his spine. He wonders whether they are going to let the dog loose inside.

‘ForgiveMeForgiveMeForgiveMe,’ he says to himself, the simplest prayer he ever learned.

After a moment the doors slam shut. Blindfolded again by the darkness, his eyes open to sliding diamonds of red and black.

There is a brisk exchange with the driver, and the vehicle drags itself back on to the road.

They are on their way.

Aryan loses all sense of time. In the closeness of the truck’s belly none of them has any idea how far they have travelled, whether it is day or night, what country they are in. In the hours that pass the dimensions of the world are reduced to the sound of the road: the stickiness of wheels on bitumen, the wind-rush of passing vehicles. The men doze, stretch the pins and needles from their legs, fit their bodies to the angles of box and wall. The truck’s metal rib feels like a stake running the length of Aryan’s back.

Once, the truck pulls over and the driver descends. Tension ripples through the darkness. Above the thrum of the idling engine comes the rustle of a man relieving himself by the roadside. The endless journey resumes.

Kabir is unconscious, his head warm and heavy on Aryan’s thigh. Aryan strokes his brother’s still-damp hair. It is getting cold and he pulls the hood of his anorak over his ears. The corner of a box is digging into his side but if he moves he will wake the sleeping boy. He shifts anyway, and Kabir stirs.

‘It’s OK,’ Aryan says to him. The boy’s steady breathing resumes.

In the dark he can hear someone snoring gently, and smiles. There is nowhere Hamid cannot sleep.

Aryan’s body is tired but his mind won’t let him rest. His body rocks with the movement of the lorry. He listens to it swallowing up the miles as it carries them deep into the backcountry, far from the borderland. He tries to remember how many trucks they have been on since they left Afghanistan: sheep trucks, fruit trucks, once, the fume-filled bins of a fertilizer truck – each reeking of dung or decay or chemicals that took days to get out of his hair. Some of the men talk softly.

‘Do you know where they are going to leave us?’ Aryan can’t pair the face with the anxious voice.

‘Somewhere outside Patras, I would say.’ The rasp of a smoker.

‘The problem there is the police,’ a third voice says. ‘If they catch us they’ll send us back across the river.’

‘We should break up into smaller groups, just twos and threes.’

‘The thing is to find the sea and follow it to the port,’ the smoker says.

‘It will all depend on where they dump us,’ says another voice.

Their urgent whisperings are sucked away in the tunnel of highway wind.

After a while the truck slows. It leans into a long curve, and the men and boxes slide with the motion.

‘Why are we leaving the highway?’ someone says.

‘Maybe it’s a detour.’

‘Maybe it’s another checkpoint.’

‘Maybe they’re gonna let us out for a piss.’

‘Only in first class, my friend.’

The next road is less well made. There is a different rhythm under the tyres, a regular double bump as the wheels hit the joints in the surface. The change in tone wakes men who have learned to listen in their sleep; from the crinkle of their clothes and their silence Aryan can tell they are alert and straining for clues.