In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [3]
To leave the area, or Ghazni province, was extremely dangerous for us (and I only say was because I don’t know how things are today, though I don’t suppose they’ve changed much), because what with the Taliban and the Pashtun, who aren’t exactly the same thing but both used to treat us badly, you had to be careful who you ran into. I think that’s why we left at night, the three of us: me, Mother and the man—I’ll just call him the man—because Mother had asked him to go with us. We set off on foot and for three nights, under cover of darkness, with only the light of the stars to guide us—and in a place like that, without any electricity, starlight is a very powerful light—we walked to Kandahar.
I was wearing my usual gray pirhan: long trousers and a knee-length jacket of the same material. Mother walked in a chador, but she had a burqa in her bag to put on for when we met people, which was useful for hiding the fact that she was a Hazara, and also for hiding me.
At dawn on the morning of the first day, we stopped at one of the huts where caravans of traders break their journeys, though to judge by the bars on the windows, it must have been used for a time as a prison by the Taliban or someone. There was no one there, which was a good thing, but I was bored, so I used a bell hanging from a beam for target practice. I gathered some stones and tried to hit it from a hundred paces. I finally managed, and the man came running, grabbed me by the wrist and told me to stop.
On the second day we saw a bird of prey circling over the body of a donkey. The donkey was dead (obviously). Its legs were trapped between two rocks and it was no use to us at all because we couldn’t eat it. I remember we were near Shajoi, which was one place in Afghanistan that Hazaras really had to avoid. In that area, it was said, passing Hazaras like us were captured by the Taliban and thrown alive into a deep well or fed to stray dogs. Nineteen men from my village had vanished like that on their way to Pakistan, and the brother of one of them had gone to look for him. He was the one who’d told us about the stray dogs. All he had found of his brother was his clothes, with a pile of bones inside.
That’s how things are in my country.
There’s a saying among the Taliban: Tajikistan for the Tajiks, Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks, and Goristan for the Hazara. That’s what they say. Gor means “grave.”
On the third day we met a whole stream of people on their way to some unknown destination, escaping from some unknown threat: men, women and children on wagons filled with hens, rolls of fabric, barrels of water and so on.
Whenever a lorry appeared going in our direction, we would ask the driver for a lift (even for a short distance). If the drivers were nice people they would stop and pick us up, whereas if they were unpleasant, or angry with themselves or at the world, they would speed up and drive past us, covering us with dust. As soon as we heard the noise of an engine behind us, Mother and I would run and hide in a ditch or among the bushes or behind some stones, if there were big enough stones. The man would stand at the side of the road and signal to the driver to stop, just like a hitchhiker, but he didn’t use only his thumb, he waved his arms, to make sure they saw him and didn’t run him over. If the lorry stopped and everything was safe, then he would tell us to come out of the ditch, and Mother and I would climb aboard, either in front (which happened twice) or in the back, with the merchandise (which happened once). The time we climbed in the back, the trailer was full of mattresses. I slept very well that time.
By the time we got to Kandahar, after crossing the river Arghandab, I’d counted three thousand four hundred stars (a pretty good number, I’d say) at least twenty of which were as big as peach stones, and I was very tired. Not only that. I’d also counted the number of bridges blown up by