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Nothing.

You’re lying.

I’m not lying, jenab sarhang.

Do you want me to show you you’re lying?

I’m not lying, jenab sarhang. I swear.

Well, I think you are.

Now if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s being hit, so, having seen him hit the others, I thought I could keep him happy somehow. I had two spare banknotes in a little pocket I’d cut in my belt. I took them out and gave them to him, hoping they’d be enough.

You have something else, haven’t you? he said.

No. I don’t have anything else.

He slapped me across the face, hitting my cheek and ear. I hadn’t seen it coming. My cheek caught fire, my ear whistled for a few seconds. I had the impression it was swelling like a loaf of bread. You’re lying, he said.

I threw myself on him, bit his cheek, tore out his hair … No, I showed him my wrist.

He grimaced with disappointment. To him, my watch wasn’t worth anything. He angrily unfastened it from my wrist and put it in his pocket, without a second glance at me.

They let us go.

I heard them laughing in the bleak light of morning.

After that unexpected customs check, we walked for a few hours toward the nearest town, but by now it was clear that something wasn’t right. Indeed it wasn’t, because a police jeep suddenly appeared, its wheels sending the stones flying, and all these policemen came rushing out, yelling, Stop. We all started running. They started firing with their Kalashnikovs. As I ran, I heard the bullets whistling past me. As I ran, I thought about the kite contests on the hills of Ghazni province. As I ran, I thought about the women of Nava and how they mixed qhorma palaw with a wooden ladle. As I ran, I thought about how useful a hole would have been at that moment, a hole in the earth, like the one my brother and I hid in to avoid being found by the Taliban. As I ran, I thought about osta sahib and kaka Hamid and Sufi and the man with the big hands and the nice house in Kerman. And as I ran, a man running beside me was hit, at least I suppose he was, because he fell to the ground and rolled a bit and then stopped moving. In Afghanistan, I had heard lots of shooting. I could distinguish the sound of a Kalashnikov from the sound of other rifles. As I ran, I thought about which rifle was shooting in my direction. I was small. I was smaller than the bullets, I thought, and faster. I was invisible, I thought, or as insubstantial as smoke. Then, when I stopped running—because I was far enough away—I thought about leaving Iran. I’d had enough of being afraid.

That was when I made up my mind to try and get to Turkey.

* A little note on the question of language, in order not to break the flow of the story. If you’re not interested, just carry on reading: no one dies in the next few lines, and no information is provided that’s essential to the story. The thing about language is that, at first, it was difficult for me to speak to Iranians. Their language, Farsi, is similar to Dari (which is an Eastern dialect of Farsi, spoken in Afghanistan), but the accent of Farsi isn’t exactly like that of Dari. They are in exactly the same way, but Farsi and Dari (pronounced with a stress on the last syllable: Farsī and Darī) have very different accents.

Turkey

Now let’s see where I was in time and in my story. I’d reached a point of no return, as you say here—because we don’t say it, at least I never heard anyone say it—I was at such a point of no return that I’d even stopped remembering things, and there were whole days and weeks when I didn’t think at all about my little village in Ghazni province and my mother or my brother or my sister, the way I did at the start, when their image was like a tattoo on my eyes, day and night.

Since the day I’d left, about four and a half years had passed: a year and a few months in Pakistan and three years in Iran. You have to weigh things properly, as a lady says who sells onions in the market near where I’m living now.

I was about fourteen when I decided to leave Iran: I’d had my fill of that life.