In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [24]
Except that, although it’s true that I was getting better and everyone trusted me, I was still just as small. So what happened was, as I pulled on the rope the material got heavier than me. The load would start going down and I would start going up. Everyone laughed, and I had to shout and yell for someone to help me, shout and yell without letting go, otherwise the load would have fallen and broken and it would have been my fault.
But the best thing, what we might call my little revolution in Baharestan, was that I started leaving the site. That was because Baharestan is only a little village, and much less dangerous than Isfahan. Apart from that, I’d learned to speak Farsi* well, and lots of the people there were kind to me, especially the women.
When I saw them coming back from the shops with their bags full of shopping, I offered to carry the bags up the steps for them. They trusted me, stroked my head and sometimes gave me a sweet or something like that. I was almost starting to think that this might be a place where I could settle permanently. A place I could finally call home.
People in the area gave me a nickname: felfeli, which means chili pepper. The owner of a shop where I went to do the shopping, or, from time to time, to get an ice cream, always said to me felfel nagu ce rise, bokhor bebin ce tise, which means something like, Don’t say how small the chili pepper is, but taste how spicy it is. The man was fairly elderly, and I got on well with him.
———
After a few months I decided to pay Sufi a visit.
Since his departure, I hadn’t heard from him, but I’d had news of him from some friends who had been to his factory in Qom.
I had kept the telephone number written in the exercise book, the way you keep something precious, and one afternoon I phoned the factory. A switchboard operator replied. Sufi who? he said. There’s no Sufi in our company.
Gioma, I said. Not Sufi, Gioma.
Gioma Fausi? the switchboard operator asked.
Yes, that’s him.
So we said hello to each other, a bit awkwardly because it was over the phone. But although he was as calm as usual, I realized he was just as thrilled as I was.
I promised I would go and see him.
So, one hot morning, when there was hardly any wind, I took the bus to Qom. Maybe because I had been in Iran for a while and nothing had happened to me, it didn’t occur to me that if I’d run into a police roadblock, my journey might have ended badly. But because it never occurred to me, everything went smoothly, as often happens when you don’t think too much about things.
Sufi came to meet me at the bus station. In those months, both he and I had grown (him more than me), and we only recognized each other after giving each other the once-over at a distance for a few seconds.
Then we hugged.
I stayed in Qom for a week. He sneaked me into the factory to sleep and we went around the city and played football with the other Afghan boys. It was really nice there, but I wasn’t ready to move, now that I’d found a permanent place to live. So, at the end of the week that I had taken off work, I went back to Baharestan.
Just in time to get myself repatriated.
It happened by day. We were working. I was busy preparing plaster, mixing the lime with the cement, and wasn’t looking anywhere, just inside the drum of the mixer and inside myself—which is a thing I do sometimes, look inside myself—and I remember I heard a car pull up, but I assumed it was the suppliers, because I knew the foreman was waiting for them.
In Iran, buildings that are side by side often have a little square in the middle which they share, a little square with only two entrances. And that helped the police. Strategically—the police are full of strategies—two cars and a van blocked one entrance, while a large number of officers walked around to the other entrance.
It was impossible to escape, and nobody tried. Those who were holding bricks and trowels put down their bricks and trowels. Those who were on their knees connecting cables for the electrical wiring let go of the cables