In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [22]
Yes, but that was three weeks ago. How long is it since you last went, Hamid? Eh? How long? Two months. More than that.
That’s not true. I went last month, don’t you remember?
The dust has clogged up your memory, Hamid.
Anyway, the fact was that one person a week, always one of those who had been there for a long time and knew how to get around the city, did the shopping for everyone. He would take a taxi and go and buy what was needed from a particular shop, a general store where there was a bit of everything and the shopkeeper was a friend, then come straight back. Not even time for a chay or a bit of bread. When he came back, the shopping was divided up. We cooked together, ate together, cleaned together. Each his own task. Each his own turn.
In the end, it was the man called Hamid who went that day. I watched him get in a taxi. Good luck, kaka Hamid, I shouted.
Ba omidi khoda, Enaiatollah jan.
Watch out for the police, I said.
And you watch out for the lime. Your bag’s leaking.
The lime was spilling on my shoe. I ran to the foreman. At the end of the day I stood by the gate waiting for kaka Hamid, and I was thinking they must have arrested him—I could already imagine him rolling down the hill at Telisia—when I saw a cloud of dust rising from around the bend and the same taxi I’d seen him getting into in the afternoon came shooting along the wall of the site and stopped in front of me. The boot was crammed full of bags. I helped him to take them out and carry them upstairs.
Thanks, Enaiatollah jan.
Don’t mention it, kaka Hamid. Was everything all right? Did you see the police?
I didn’t see anyone. Everything was fine.
Were you scared?
Hamid, who was piling up boxes of rice and vegetables, stopped for a second and stood there, motionless. I’m never scared, Enaiat, he said. And I’m always scared. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
Did you ever visit Isfahan, Enaiat?
No.
I’ve heard it’s very beautful.
I looked for pictures on the Internet, once. I found lots of photos of the square named after Imam Khomeini, the Sheikh Lotf Allah mosque, and the Si-o-seh Pol bridge. I also discovered that the ruins of Bam are not far from there, with a citadel that’s the largest brick structure in the world, and which was almost destroyed in an earthquake not long after I left.
They must be wonderful places.
But I didn’t know that at the time. There’s a saying in Iran: Esfahān nesf-e jahān, which means: Isfahan is half of the world.
Right. Half your world, too, Enaiat?
I have to tell the truth, because if anyone ever reads these words, any of the men I met in Isfahan, I want them to know, because I don’t think I ever told them: I liked it there, on the site. So, thank you.
It’s true that we worked very hard. We worked all the time, sometimes ten or eleven hours a day. Not that there was much else to do.
As far as money was concerned, everything worked out fine. After four months the foreman stopped giving our pay to the trafficker, as agreed, and started paying us.
I remember the first wages I got: forty-two thousand toman.
When I’d paid my share of the monthly expenses, I had thirty-five thousand left, which was about thirty-five euros, because if I’m not mistaken, a thousand toman were worth one euro at that time. Those thirty-five thousand toman were all in notes. So, even though I was afraid, I sneaked out of the site for the first time, looking right and left and behind every corner, creeping between the houses, and went to a nearby shop and changed all the banknotes into coins, because that way I felt I had much more. I found an iron box with a padlock to keep them in. In the evening, when I finished work and went and lay down in my little corner, I would open the iron box with the padlock, take out the coins and count them—one, two, three—even though I’d already counted them a billion times. Paper money was easier to count, but coins I could pile up like towers. It was amazing.
When the