In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [25]
Telisia. Sang Safid.
When I saw the policemen spreading out through the site and yelling, with their weapons in their hands, that was all I could think of.
Telisia. Sang Safid.
I thought of the two mad boys I’d seen in Afghanistan.
A policeman ordered me to leave everything and follow him. They herded us into the little central square, then, one at a time, led us out on the side blocked by the cars and, as soon as we were out, put us in a van.
They took hold of kaka Hamid, and I was afraid they would hurt him in front of us, to show what they were capable of. Instead of which they said to him, Go and get the money.
Kaka Hamid crossed the yard and went inside. We waited in silence. When he came back, he had an envelope with enough money for our return to Afghanistan. Because in Iran, when they repatriate you, it’s up to you to pay for your return journey home. The State certainly won’t pay for it. If they stop you in a group, as happened to us that day, you’re lucky, because then the police release one of the group and tell him to go and get the money to pay for everyone’s repatriation. But if they stop you when you’re on your own and you have no way of paying for the journey to the border, then things turn nasty, because you’re forced to stay in a temporary detention center and you have to earn the money to return home by being a slave, the slave of the center and the policemen: they make you clean up all the dirt, and I’m talking about a place which is the dirtiest place in the world, or so I’ve heard, a place where just to smell the fumes you’d think it was the cesspit of the earth, a place not even a cockroach would want to live.
If you don’t pay, there’s a risk the temporary detention center will become your home.
That day, we paid. And that wasn’t all. Kaka Hamid told me later, in the van, that when he had gone to get the money he had found two of the boys making dinner—they hadn’t noticed a thing—and asked them to stay there and look after our stuff until we came back.
Unless they took us to Telisia. Or Sang Safid.
———
Fortunately, they took us somewhere else.
They shaved our heads in the camp. To make us feel naked. And so that, afterward, people would know that we had been in Iran, as illegals, and had been expelled. They laughed as they shaved off our hair. They laughed while we stood in line like sheep. To stop myself crying, I just watched the hair piling up on the floor. It’s a strange thing, hair, when it isn’t on your head.
After that, they put us in lorries, and we set off at high speed. The driver seemed to be looking for potholes in the road deliberately: it was hard to believe he could hit so many without doing it on purpose. Maybe this treatment was all part of the repatriation, I thought, and I even said so to the others, but nobody laughed.
After a while they yelled at us to get out, because we had arrived. If they’d had one of those lorries for transporting sand, with a trailer that tips up, they would have tipped us out like that and let us roll onto the ground. Instead of which, they just beat us with sticks.
Herat, Afghanistan. The nearest place to the border between Afghanistan and Iran. Everyone soon made arrangements to get back to Iran, which wasn’t difficult. Herat is full of traffickers waiting for people who’ve been repatriated. You barely have time to get beaten by the police before the traffickers pick you up and take you back.
If you don’t have money with you, you can pay later. They know that if you’ve been working in Iran for a while you have money stashed in a hole somewhere, or that if you don’t have it you can ask someone to lend it to you, without having to be enslaved for four months, the way Sufi and I were the first time.