Hinterland: A Novel (23 page)

Nobody knows his full name. The Afghans all call him Idris, but no one ever addresses him directly. He is always wearing the same clothes – the only man in white moleskin trousers and leather boots that set him apart both from the Afghans he is constantly circling and from the runners who guide them to the trucks. Idris has people to do that for him now. Some say he is from Morocco, others, a Kurd; he speaks Pashto, and Farsi, as well as Arabic and the language of the Kurds. At twilight he emerges from no one knows where to cruise the camps in a sort of recruitment drive, ingratiating himself with the new arrivals, staking out his territory, joking while obliging them to sign up. Once they do, they become his property and his clan.

If the Afghans respect him they also keep their distance; it is always Idris who suddenly appears among them, jovial but quietly menacing, clocking their moves with an attentive eye. It is not the year-round suntan so much as the swagger that sets him apart; less the ruby on his finger than the miraculously laundered clothes that suggest his power, and the boots with the Cuban heels that prove he never has to run. In his presence Aryan feels grubby, self-conscious, like merchandise of inferior weft.

‘You can still try your luck on the covered trucks but you know it’s riskier now that they’ve doubled the detectors,’ Idris is saying.

There is murmuring among the knot of men gathered under the peeling lighthouse. Aryan thinks of it alternately with affection and suspicion, a landmark but also an echo chamber that hoards their secrets in its caracole insides.

Some of the men are silent, absorbing his latest bulletin to discuss later in private clusters with the old hands who have been here the longest and know how things work.

‘It’s simple mathematics,’ Idris continues. ‘You can work it out for yourself. Double the number of detectors means double the chances of getting caught, and double the time you’ll be stuck here praying tonight’s your lucky night.’

Nobody asks where he gets his information about the inner workings of the port controls. They hear the logic, but they have to take him on trust.

‘Of course there’s always another way,’ Idris says, rubbing his ruby ring as if for luck. A small crowd has coalesced around him. ‘There’s always the guaranteed option. It just depends on how long you’re willing to wait.’

Aryan has been in the port long enough to know what that means; he has always dismissed it out of hand.

But men, stressed by repeated failure, by the debts they owe or their families owe or by their families’ need for help, are starting to listen.

Aryan wills his feet to walk, but inertia anchors him to the spot.

‘How cold would it get?’ asks a man with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.

‘Yes, how long would we have to stay inside?’ says another, his head so thin under its knitted hat that it looks like it’s been squeezed between two doors.

Solemn faces crowd around. All of them are tired, cold to the sinews, exhausted in their minds. Idris sees he has their attention, and spools out his information in languid loops. This time, Aryan can tell, there are men among them who are ready to consider it.

‘If you pick the right one, and that’s why you need me, you can be standing under Big Ben in seven hours,’ Idris says.

Seven hours. The number travels swift as rumour around the circle; the men repeat it under their breath. It seems unreal to them that they could be extricated from this quagmire in so little time, that in so few hours they could pass like ghosts through the walls of glass against which all their hopes have collided until now.

‘Yes but how cold is it inside?’ insists the man with the hollow face.

Idris fixes him with a look. Aryan can just make out the movement of his eyes behind the cold reflective glass.

‘Minus 18, minus 20 at most,’ Idris says. ‘You take a couple of blankets with you and you’ll be fine. Eskimos up in the Arctic live in minus 35 Celsius all winter long.’

Still, there is a murmuring. Seven hours in that sort of cold – you’d want to be sure you could get out when you’d had enough.

‘If we get stuck inside, how long have we got?’

‘Yes, how do we know we won’t end up in an English supermarket – up there on a shelf with the frozen dinners?’

The men laugh. But something darker hovers behind the levity.

‘Look, the ferry crossing takes ninety minutes at the most. Add on a couple of hours for customs at each end,’ Idris says. ‘That’s five and a half hours. It’s another hour to get to London – or two if the traffic’s bad.’

‘But what if the truck isn’t going to London?’

‘Look, this is Europe, you know – you’re not in Pakistan now. Truckers aren’t allowed to drive for more than four and a half hours without a break. So if you think you might feel chilly you throw on a couple more sweaters. If you feel a bit cold after you get through Dover, just bang on the wall – I’m sure the driver will be all too happy to let you out.’

‘How many can you take on one of those trucks?’ someone asks.

‘Maximum of six,’ Idris says. ‘It’s travelling first class, remember. Any more and your body heat will thaw the chickens out, and the driver will get suspicious if he hears them squawking and laying eggs.’

The men see through Idris’s jokes, but they laugh anyway, perhaps because they need to laugh, and for a moment the tension ebbs.

Hamid can’t stand having wet feet. He has moved his blankets into their hut and Aryan is sitting beside him out of the drizzle, watching him roll up wads of newspaper and stuff them into his shoes. In the last of the daylight, Kabir has gone with Khaled to fill the water bottles for the morning.

‘Do you ever think about what life will be like in England?’ Hamid says. A loose-leafed ball of newsprint flowers gently in his hand.

‘It’s hard to imagine,’ Aryan says, ‘except that I think we will always feel safe. And it’s a good country because people believe in things being fair – at least that’s what the tailor who taught me English used to say.’

‘All I know is that it’s very clean,’ Hamid says. ‘My father once said you could walk around London for an entire day and not get any dust on your shoes.’

Aryan ponders the wonder of it. It is a long time since he has thought about Afghanistan’s dust-choked streets.

‘Maybe they will have special buses for driving us to school,’ Aryan says. ‘And they will teach us about computers and the latest things in science.’

‘Kabir tells me he is going to be a musician,’ says Hamid. ‘Maybe he’ll turn into a rock star and we’ll get to see him on TV.’

Aryan laughs. He pictures his brother strutting around a stage beneath a star-shaped electric guitar.

‘Do you ever think about your family, about what they are doing now?’ Aryan says.

Hamid’s eyes drop. Too late, Aryan recognizes he has crossed a line. Like a border without a signpost, the landscape looks the same; he only knows he has passed over it when he realizes the language has changed.

‘There’s not much of it left these days,’ Hamid says.

Aryan swallows. Yet now he has blundered into it, into the private things that no one ever discussed on the road, he senses something in Hamid that wants to go ahead.

‘You never told me what happened,’ Aryan says.

Hamid’s voice when it comes now is soft and low, as if he is opening a hidden cavern in his heart. He weaves pictures for Aryan: a family in a northern village in the mountains, a celebration, a cousin who is about to be wed. But then the colour drains out of his story. Men arrive at the front door after nightfall, black turbans turning the threshold dark.

‘They were on the hunt for traitors,’ Hamid says, ‘and that meant anyone with a weapon in their home.’

Suddenly children, brothers and sisters and cousins were being herded into a single room while the men in the black turbans set to work.

Hamid’s hands are working at the newspaper again, unconsciously rolling wads of it into tight, illegible balls.

He heard it all through the door: the crack of whips, voices pleading, the hammerbursts of automatic weapons. He remembers sitting silently, close to the other children, huddled on the floor in the dark. He remembers hugging his smallest sister tight enough to block out the noise.

‘Even after it stopped, and we heard them take off in their Toyotas, we didn’t dare leave the room,’ he says. ‘It was hunger that finally drove us outside.’

It was the same in all the houses. They had killed all the adults in the village, men and women alike, just going from door to door.

Hamid’s eyes are shiny and his throat is tight. The entire newspaper is shredded now into an arsenal of tiny spheres.

After that he went with his oldest cousin to Pakistan, though on the road they kept meeting other Afghans that Pakistan was pushing back the other way. Eventually they made it to a refugee camp near Peshawar.

‘Because I was small I couldn’t do much, but I carried things, and I worked in a tea-house pouring tea,’ Hamid says. For a time he had a job as a carpet weaver, until even that work disappeared.

‘I still had to send money for my sisters,’ he says. ‘That’s why I had to keep going.’ He went to Iran where first he found work in a light-bulb factory, then carrying boxes in a brewery, then pouring concrete for builders. But when he was cheated of his pay, and beaten and robbed, he abandoned Iran for Turkey. In Istanbul he laboured in different jobs until he found a place in the workshop with Mohamed.

Outside the hut, the wet clouds roll in from the sea and obscure the damaged moon. Aryan shivers under his cape of smoky blankets.

‘What will you do in England?’ Aryan says after a while.

Hamid’s answer comes swift as rocket-fire. ‘I want to study astronomy,’ he says.

Hamid never ceased to surprise Aryan. In his home village, the teacher had shown up for an hour each day before going to another job to earn a living. Yet now he was talking about galaxies and telescopes and planets.

‘You should have seen all the shooting stars I saw in Greece,’ Hamid is saying. ‘When you look at a star you are really looking back into the past because the starlight had to leave millions of years ago to reach us. It left a long time before the Russians and the Taliban and the warlords and the Americans and all the killing at home. It left before the Persians and the Mongols and the Egyptians – maybe that light set off when there were still dinosaurs left on Earth.’

‘So if you study the stars, it will be like travelling backwards in time,’ Aryan says.

‘I just think that if we knew more about the universe, if we could imagine ourselves in space, we would be high off the ground, away from all our troubles, and we could see all of life beneath us. It would make all the fighting seem small and unimportant and pointless, and maybe it would make people like peace more.’

Hamid is a bit crazy, Aryan thinks, but sometimes he has good thoughts.

‘I wish there were a way to turn back time and bring back all the people who died,’ Aryan says. ‘Well not all of them, not the bad ones. Just some.’

Hamid pauses a moment before replying.

‘You lost people in your family too, didn’t you?’ he says.

Aryan nods.

They sit in silence, listening to the wind and the low growl of the trucks on the road to the port, each cloaked in their separate memories like a blanket of sorrow they shared.

Some time later Kabir’s face appears in the triangular doorway.

‘What are these for?’ he says.

‘They’re for keeping people’s little brothers out of our palace,’ says Hamid. He lobs a paper missile at Kabir’s nose.

Outside, the sea wind is starting to pick up. They listen to it worrying the plastic walls of the hut and nagging at its perimeter of thorns. They hear it churning up the waves and sifting through the dunes and whipping the dead campfires into eddies of ash and grit. It swoops past the lighthouse, glances off the roof of the cabin, hurdles the town hall and barrels towards the railway line, swinging the electric cables like skipping ropes and spinning the sign above the sawmill like a fairground attraction on its nail. It prances along the rafters where the Nigerian girls huddle in their third-hand sleeping bags. It rocks the trucks where the hauliers lie snoring in their bunks. It rattles the police barracks’ windows, pries at the roof-tiles on the ferry captains’ houses, and bowls cacophonous beer cans past the doorsteps of the soup-kitchen volunteers.