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By Root 365 0

to me, even though I hadn’t done anything to him, and who during the journey tried constantly to shove me out of the truck with his knee, pretending he wasn’t doing anything. After a while I had to say to him, Stop it, don’t do that, don’t do that, but it was like talking to a mountain, what with all the noise of the wheels and the engine. The Toyota was climbing along mountain roads, with ravines below, and even without his shoving I was already in danger of falling. I started begging him, saying I hadn’t done anything wrong. Sufi didn’t know what to do either, he wanted to help me, but how? At that point, without saying anything, another man, who might have been a Tajik, stood up calmly, as if he was going to go and drink a little water, punched the longbeard in the face and told him to leave me alone, because I hadn’t done anything to him and we both had a long journey ahead of us and wanted to reach our destination, and there was no reason to make trouble for each other.

The longbeard calmed down.

After hours of traveling, we arrived and they made us get out. I couldn’t say where we were: a low, bare, arid mountain, where the ground crunched underfoot. It was dark and there were no lights. Even the moon had hidden. The people traffickers made us hide in a cave because the order was to take only five people to the city at a time.

When it was our turn, mine and Sufi’s, the traffickers made Sufi get in the back of the truck and me in the front, in the passenger seat next to the driver. They told me to squat down. Then two other people got in, so that instead of being able to look out of the window, as I’d really been hoping to do, I spent the short ride into the city between the feet of those two passengers, with the soles of their shoes resting on my back.

The city we came to, when we came to it, was called Kerman.

Iran

A two-story house. A yard with trees and a low stone wall separating it from the street, but obviously we couldn’t go out there to play buzul-bazi or football. On the first floor there was a bathroom with a shower and two spacious living rooms with cushions and rugs and a lot of windows, all of them blacked out. The ground floor was the same. Except for the toilet, which was outside, in the yard, hidden by a cypress tree. In short, that house in Kerman was a nice house.

We and our trafficker weren’t the only people there but also other groups of people, all illegals in transit, I had no idea where from. Some people were sleeping, or eating, or talking in low voices, or cutting their nails. A man was consoling a child who was lying on the floor in a corner, crying desperately. A trafficker was sitting at the table, cleaning a long knife. A lot of people were smoking and the room was shrouded in smoke. Not a single woman. Sufi and I sat down against a wall to rest. They brought us something to eat: rice with fried chicken. The rice was good, and so was the fried chicken. And maybe it was because of the fact that I was alive, in a nice house in Iran, or because of the tasty rice and fried chicken, or because of all these emotions together, but I started shaking.

I felt hot and cold at the same time. I was sweating. When I breathed, I produced a thin whistling sound, and I was shaking so much, not even an earthquake could have shaken me to the core like that.

What’s the matter? said Sufi.

I don’t know.

Are you ill?

I think so.

Really? In what way?

Go and call the man.

Which man?

The one who defended me from the longbeard.

The man who had stopped my bones shattering at the bottom of a ravine during the journey in the Toyota knelt down next to me, placed a hand on my forehead—his hand was so big that his fingers stretched from one ear to the other—and said, He’s burning. He has a fever.

Sufi stuck a finger in his mouth. What can we do?

Nothing. He has to rest.

Could he die?

The man wrinkled his nose. Na ba omidi khoda, little Hazara. Who can say? Let’s hope not, all right? I think he’s just very tired.

Can’t we call anyone, like a doctor?

They’ll see to it, said the man, pointing