Hinterland: A Novel (7 page)

Aryan never learned how Hamid first found his way down to the water, and back through the maze of streets to the hole in the wall where he worked – nor how he did it without Mohamed finding out. He just seemed to have a flair for risk. Or maybe Mohamed had grown fond of Hamid and simply turned a blind eye.

On the second day Kabir looks a little better, and the retching stops. He sleeps nearly all day long. To pass the time Aryan takes his notebook and sketches his brother’s face, then sketches him from memory playing with the puppies in the field.

Then it is Aryan’s turn.

Fever, sweating. His skin itches under the blankets. He can’t sleep. He is cold then hot. He shivers and sweats. He can’t hold anything down.

Sometimes Kabir is beside him. He remembers the puppies playing at his feet, the sound of lapping as they drank water from the old pan Kabir found lying in the yard.

He dreams. There is strangeness and violence but no conclusions.

They are back on the Turkish border, crossing the river. They are in a boat that is leaking, but they have nearly reached the shore. There are soldiers among the trees ahead of them. More come out up and down the banks. He can see the silhouettes of their guns, and there is nowhere to land. Water fills the front of the dinghy which is heavy with the weight of men. Aryan is scared that the soldiers will shoot them, or shoot holes in the boat and they will drown. The boatman flails with the pole, trying to turn back. But the dancing lights on the bridge are spreading out, bobbing through the trees, getting closer on the shore they have just left. Hamid is with them in the boat. ‘We’ve got to swim,’ he says, and leans over the writhing current. ‘Come on!’ But Kabir won’t jump and Aryan will not leave him. Suddenly the boatman strikes the bottom, the dinghy skids sideways, and there’s a splash. Hamid’s head is bobbing in the water as the current ferries him downstream. There is a shot, and a burning sensation, and Aryan is bleeding from his side.

Other dreams take its place. He is in Afghanistan again, and somehow he already knows what is coming because he has dreamt it before. There is dust everywhere and the mangled half-body of a car. Half of the street has disappeared; it looks like the mouth of a friend with the teeth knocked out. The police station wall has collapsed on to a watermelon stall and the fruit have split like skulls, spilling their red pulp over the road. There are slicks of blood as black as engine grease, and people dragging the injured into doorways. Rescuers are trying to lever up the fallen masonry; he can hear the sound of moaning like an animal caught in a trap. And then even the moaning stops. When he gets close he recognizes the sensible shoes, and the clothes under the blood-soaked burka.

What he can’t understand is why the foot in the shoe is not attached to his mother’s body any more.

Suddenly he is in the street outside the house in Tehran. His mother is in the doorway holding Kabir. Aryan is going to school and the bigger boys are waiting for him. They don’t like Afghans in their neighbourhood. There is a maths test and he has stayed up half the night to prepare for it. They are lurking with slingshots in the alleyway. A stone the size of a walnut hits him in the heart.

The layers of danger mingle with pictures so fantastical that later he can’t distinguish which ones were real.

They are back in Istanbul and have stolen away once more with Hamid. They are inside a giant mosque with a dome made of a million gold mosaics. Viking warriors are leaning out over the balcony, looking down into the biggest building they have ever seen. Their knife-blades flash as they carve Nordic graffiti into the stone. On the walls, high above the gaping Norsemen, are pictures of people with peaceful faces making strange Christian signs with their hands. Only the hardest-to-reach faces are left; the others have been chiselled away. The three of them, he, Hamid and Kabir, are looking up at them from beneath the highest dome. There is a flapping in the rafters, and a pigeon splices the shafts of sunlight, pale feathers golden in the slanting sun. Then, with no announcement, a single mosaic falls, and then another, and another, and the bird claps an incantation of dust and then hundreds of golden squares are tumbling down beside them and all around them – a waterfall of ancient tiles of glass shimmering and flashing as they fall in slow revolutions, splintering on the flagstones in a tinkling kaleidoscope of light.

Aryan doesn’t know how long he is like this, drifting between fever and nightmare and fantasy and memory and sleep.

When he starts to come out of it, Kabir and the puppies bring him a hard-boiled egg.

Afterwards, they go back to the fields, Aryan, Kabir, and the three dogs. Kabir’s puffy cheeks are white and Aryan’s limbs feel leaden in the sunlight.

Aryan scores the passing days in the notebook that he rarely has time to sketch in now. The big potato fields are nearly finished, the scraggly stalks ripped from the soil and stuffed into rubbish sacks, the speckled nuggets salvaged from the sheltering earth.

At first Kabir is thrilled with every find, guessing how many tubers each plant will yield. He imagines himself an archaeologist and whoops with excitement when he spots the tiniest ones hidden like golden beads in the lumps of dirt. But soon he grows bored, and Aryan has to shout at him to stop him from playing with the puppies rather than sift through the clods he has overturned with the fork.

Aryan’s back is stiff with always being bent to the earth the same way. The muscles in his neck complain when he turns to look over his shoulder. The digging fork is too big for his frame and every new swing tires him; his hands grow sore from pulling the dying plants from the soil. There are always more boxes to fill, always more rows to work.

He reckons that nearly five months have passed. He is impatient to be on their way.

On a new page in his notebook Aryan tries to work out some numbers.

In Istanbul, Ahmed told them that the smugglers were asking two thousand five hundred euros for a place in a truck that would go through Patras to Italy. Aryan has no idea how far they are from the Greek port, but calculates they would have to work five months to earn that much.

Aryan says nothing to Kabir. But he is starting to wonder if the farmer really is going to organize their ride.

‘When are we going to England?’ Kabir keeps saying.

The farmer cuts Aryan off mid-sentence when he asks.

‘Look,’ the farmer says, with a gesture that sweeps the hills.

Beyond the rise, the onion fields stretch before them, green leaves spiky as pencils that recede into a distant, knee-high wall.

It is night and Kabir can’t sleep. The moon streams light into the room. Far away a dog is howling. Not-So-Old Dog answers from somewhere behind the house.

‘Aryan?’ he says.

‘Mmmm.’

‘Are you asleep?’

‘Yes,’ Aryan says.

‘Then how come you’re talking to me?’

‘I’m not talking to you. I’m sleeping.’

A small silence.

‘Aryan?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Am I an Afghan?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Am I?’

‘Are you what?’ Aryan clambers up through his tiredness.

‘Am I an Afghan?’

‘What do you mean, are you an Afghan?’

‘Can you still be an Afghan if you can’t remember anything about it?’

‘Of course you’re an Afghan. I’m an Afghan, you’re an Afghan, our family is from Afghanistan.’

‘But if someone asks, I can’t tell them what it’s like. I can remember more about Iran and Istanbul and this farm than Afghanistan.’

‘That’s because you were only four when we moved to Iran. What would you be if you weren’t an Afghan?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m not anything at all.’

‘Of course you’re an Afghan. Do you think you’d be here if you were an Egyptian or an American or an Eskimo?’

‘OK, so tell me about Afghanistan,’ Kabir says.

Aryan pauses. ‘Can you remember the house?’

Kabir is silent for a moment. ‘I can’t see it in my head any more,’ he says. In his voice there is something bordering on distress.

Aryan is fully awake now. ‘Of course you can. You remember the pigeons that Grandpa used to look after, don’t you? He used to take you up there sometimes, when you were still a yowling baby, so you could see the rooftops of the town.’

Kabir hesitates. ‘I remember the white feathers and the pink claws, and their shiny, orange eyes. But I don’t remember where it was. I can’t even remember what Grandpa looked like.’

‘He was very old. He had a wiry white beard and he had one funny leg. It used to take him ages to get up the stairs to the roof. His hands smelt of soap and he always wore a
pakol
,’ Aryan says.

‘I remember the
pakol
,’ says Kabir. ‘He used to put it on my head and it covered my eyes and prickled.’

‘You see?’ Aryan says. ‘You do remember.’

‘What else?’

‘What about the bazaar where Baba used to go to buy pine nuts and pomegranates? You must remember that,’ Aryan says. ‘Madar used to go crazy when he took you. She yelled at him saying he’d put you down some place and you’d wander off and get lost. But you wanted to go on his shoulders, and you screamed so much if you couldn’t go that he took you along just to stop your yelling. Surely you haven’t forgotten that!’

Kabir wrinkles his nose, trying to summon the earliest pictures of his short life.

‘And the TV, remember the old TV? There was no electricity so Baba linked it up with jump leads to a car battery under the table – there were all those wires – and it made a sound like hissing, and the picture looked like it was being beamed through a dust storm.’

‘I remember the battery!’ Kabir says, his face lightening. ‘Yes, now I remember. The pincers on it were red and blue.’

‘You see?’ Aryan says. ‘Even though you were only four you do remember.’

‘So I am from Afghanistan,’ Kabir says.

‘Yes,’ Aryan says. ‘Now go to sleep like any normal Afghan.’

‘But, Aryan?’

‘Yes, Kabir.’

‘I can’t remember Baba any more.’

Aryan is caught offguard. He doesn’t want to think about the last time he saw his father, the nightmare scenes with the spilled apples that creep up on him even when he is awake. He swallows, puts on his cheerful voice.

‘He was very tall, so tall he laughed at you when you wanted to go anywhere with him because you only came up to his knees. He called you his grasshopper because you were forever leaping up to follow him around.’

Kabir says nothing. He has heard these stories before but Aryan knows he wants him to tell them again.

‘He had big hands, and a scratchy face where he used to shave his beard till the Taliban came,’ Aryan said. ‘Then he grew a beard too, like all the men. It had colours in it that were different from his hair. When he’d been to the bazaar his clothes came back smelling of tobacco smoke. And he played chess better than anyone in the whole town.’

‘I don’t remember him playing.’

‘He didn’t play at home. He played in the bazaar after he lost his job when they burned down the school. They drank tea and smoked and played chess and he was always the best. That’s why he tried to teach me.’

‘Did you get good at it too?’

‘He nearly always beat me. Sometimes I won – though maybe he just let me. He got cross when I missed the obvious moves and then he had no mercy, and punished me by wiping out all my men.’

‘Can you teach me to play chess too?’

‘You wouldn’t like it. It’s for grown-ups. There are lots of pieces and they all go different ways.’

‘I forget faces but I’m good at remembering things like that.’

‘When you are bigger and we find a board I’ll show you the rules. Then I can use all Baba’s tricks to give you a thrashing.’

‘Not if I get better than you!’

‘Well I haven’t heard of any grasshoppers that can play chess, so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. Now be quiet and try to get some sleep.’