In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [28]
One day an Afghan boy a little bit older than me came to me and said, What’s your name?
Enaiatollah.
Can you play football, Enaiatollah?
Yes, I thought, I could play football, even though I was better at buzul-bazi, not that I’d played it since I left Nava. Yes, I said, I can.
Really? Then be at the gate tomorrow afternoon at five. There’s a tournament. We need more players.
A tournament?
Yes. Between the factories. Will you come?
Of course.
Good.
The thing is, the next day was Friday. That’s important because, although life in the factory consisted of nothing but working, eating and sleeping, we did have one half-day of rest: Friday afternoon. Some people used the time to wash, and some went to see their friends. From that Friday onward, I played on the football team. We were all Afghans, as you can imagine, workers from three or four neighboring factories. There were more than two thousand Afghans working in the stonecutting factories.
I did myself proud, in those games, as far as I could. Though sometimes I was a bit tired because my working day usually finished at ten at night.
One afternoon, after I’d been in the factory for a few months, I was lifting a really heavy stone—more than two meters long—when I lost my balance and the stone fell and shattered on the ground, with a crash you could hear all over the factory, and one sharp piece hit my foot.
It tore my trousers, sliced through my boot, scraped my calf and made a deep cut in the back of my ankle. You could see the bone. I screamed and sat down clutching my leg. One of the factory foremen came running. He told me the stone was for an important delivery, and heads would roll because it was broken. In the meantime, I was losing blood.
Get up, the man said to me.
I pointed out that I was injured.
We have to think of the stone first. Pick up the pieces. Now.
I asked if I could dress the wound.
Now, he said. But he was referring to the stone, not dressing the wound.
I started to pick everything up, hopping on one leg with the blood soaking my trousers and dripping out of the boot. I didn’t even faint, just think of that. I don’t know how I managed, I mightn’t be able to do it today. I finished picking up the scattered pieces, then, still hopping, went to disinfect and bandage the wound. To do that, I had to peel off a piece of flesh. I still have the scar today. And for a while I couldn’t play football.
Given the gaping wound and everything, for a while I worked only in the kitchen. One day, as I was going to do the shopping, I saw a beautiful watch in a shop window. It was made of rubber and metal, and didn’t cost too much. I’ve already said—if I’m not mistaken—that I’d often thought about having a watch, just to give some meaning to the passing of time, a watch that would show the date and tell me how much I was aging. So, when I saw that particular watch, I counted the money I had in my pocket and even though I didn’t have much I realized I could buy it.
So I went in and did it. I bought the watch.
Leaving the shop, I swear, I was beside myself with joy. It was the first watch I’d ever had in my life. I kept looking at it and lifting my wrist so that I could see the sun reflected in the dial. I would have run all the way to Nava just to show it to my brother (how envious he would have been), but running all the way to Nava would have been a problem, so I ran to have it blessed at the shrine of Fatima al-Masuma, one of the holiest places in Shia Islam and one of the most appropriate (so I believed) for blessing something that means a lot to you, the way my watch did to me.
I rubbed the watch against the wall of the shrine, to purify it, but taking care not to scratch it.
I was so happy with my watch, there was a moment when I even thought that, despite the danger of losing a finger or whatever, I might stay in Qom for a long time.
Then, one night,