In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [27]
Come with me, he said. He didn’t even ask me who I was.
Where?
He didn’t reply. He looked at me and put on his sunglasses, even though it was quite dark inside the bus.
I picked up my bag. I apologized to the girl next to me and asked if she could let me through, and as I passed her I got an even stronger whiff of her perfume. Everyone watched me as I walked down the aisle, and I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my neck. As soon as I stepped down onto the ground, the bus closed its doors with the same pneumatic hiss as before and set off. Without me.
There was a small police station, with a car parked outside it.
Telisia. Sang Safid.
Drums in the night.
Telisia. Sang Safid.
I can pay, I said immediately. I can pay for my repatriation. I did in fact have money with me that I’d earned on the site. But for some reason they wouldn’t listen to me. One of the policemen, a huge Iranian, pushed me through a door. For a fraction of a second I imagined a torture chamber caked with blood and strewn with fragments of bone, a deep well filled with skulls, a pit going down into the bowels of the earth, little black insects crawling over the walls and acid stains on the ceiling.
What was inside?
A kitchen. That’s what.
Mountains of filthy plates and pots, waiting to be washed.
Get down to work, said the huge Iranian. The sponges are over there.
It took me hours to win the battle against the remains of sauce and caked rice. I don’t know how many years those pots had been there, waiting for me. As I was washing the cutlery and plates, four other Afghan boys arrived. When we’d finished in the kitchen, they took all five of us and set us to work loading and unloading cars and vans and so on. Whenever there was a boot or a trailer to be checked, the policemen called us and we started emptying it. When they’d finished their checking, they called us again: there were crates and suitcases to be put back, boxes to be stacked, and so on.
I stayed there for three days. Whenever I was tired, I sat down on the ground with my back against the wall and my head on my knees. If someone arrived and there was unloading and loading to be done, a policeman would come and kick us and say, Wake up, and we would get up and start again. On the evening of the third day they let me go. I don’t know why. The four other boys stayed there and I never saw them again.
I got to Qom on foot.
Qom is a city with a population of at least a million—I found out later—but if you counted all the illegals in the stonecutting factories, I think the number would be double that. There are stonecutting factories everywhere. Thanks to Sufi, I started working in the same factory where he worked.
There were forty or fifty of us. They put me in the kitchen. I made meals and did the shopping. Unlike Isfahan, in Qom I was the only one to leave the factory—in order to do the shopping—which was very, very risky for me but something I couldn’t get out of.
Apart from cooking, I washed and cleaned the factory manager’s office. And if there was anything else to do, like standing in for workers who were ill or moving stuff, they would call me. Ena, they would shout. Sometimes they would just call without even turning around, as if I was already there in front of them, as if I had the ability to materialize as soon as my name was uttered. In other words, I was a jack of all trades. That’s what you call it, isn’t it?
Whenever rocks arrived in the factory, they were cut using these huge machines, some as big as my house in Nava. The noise was incredible, and there was water everywhere. You put on boots (it was obligatory) and a plastic overall and some people even covered their ears with headphones, but with all that water on the ground and that stone dust in the air, it was difficult staying healthy and avoiding getting sick. Not just staying healthy, it was difficult staying alive. Or in one piece.
From time to time, one of the workers operating the machines, those huge machines that broke up the stones like terra-cotta and