In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [23]
It was about that time that Sufi decided to leave. We even fell out because of it. I don’t really remember how it happened, I just remember that for a while we didn’t talk to each other and I felt bad about it. We might not see each other again. You never know what life has in store for you.
I’m going, he said one evening. Isfahan is too dangerous.
Where are you going? Qom.
Why Qom? What’s the difference between Qom and Isfahan?
There are lots of Afghans in Qom. They work with stones, and they’re all together and everything.
He wanted to leave me. I couldn’t believe my ears. You can’t go, I said.
Come with me.
No. I like it here.
Then I’ll go on my own.
Who told you about the Afghans in Qom? What if it isn’t true?
Some boys who are working in the building for another firm. They even gave me a telephone number, look.
He showed me a piece of paper. On it was a number, written with a green felt-tip pen. I asked kaka Hamid for a biro and wrote down the number in an exercise book he had brought me from the shop as a gift, an exercise book with a black cover where I wrote things down so that it didn’t matter if I forgot them because I had them written down. It was kaka Hamid who’d taught me to read and write better than I could before.
Then one morning, when I woke up, Sufi was gone.
I was starting to think that sleeping wasn’t a good idea, that maybe it was better to stay awake at night, to avoid people close to me vanishing into thin air.
It’s the small things that make you notice someone’s absence.
I missed Sufi most at night, when I turned over in my sleep and my arms and hands didn’t find him on the rug next to me. And during the day I missed him most at break time, which we used to spend together, throwing stones at jars and buckets and things like that.
One evening I finished work feeling really sad and sat down in front of the little black-and-white TV, one of those with an aerial you turn by hand, so you spend more time tuning it than watching the programs. On one channel there was a film of towers collapsing. I hopped to another channel, and they were showing the same film. A third channel: still the same film. I called kaka Hamid for help, and he told me it wasn’t a film. That in America, in New York, two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. They said it had been the Afghans. Then they said that it had been Bin Laden and that the Afghans were protecting him. They said it had been al-Qaeda.
I watched for a while, then had some soup and went to bed. What had happened may well have been serious, and of course I now know how serious it was, a terrible tragedy, but at that moment it seemed to me that being without Sufi was more serious.
When you don’t have a family, your friends mean everything to you.
And all the while, time was passing. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. Months. My life was ticking away. I would have liked to buy a watch, just to make sense of the passing of time, a watch that showed the hours and the date and the growth of my fingers and my hair, that would tell me how much I was aging. Then the day arrived, a special day, when we stopped work on the building, because everything had been installed, even the door handles: all that remained to do was hand over the houses to their owners. So we went to work somewhere else.
We moved to a village on the outskirts of Isfahan called Baharestan. I was getting better and better at this house-building business and was often entrusted with tasks that required great expertise and responsibility (at least that’s what they told me, but maybe they were making fun of me), for example, hoisting material on a rope to