In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [31]
Sufi and I had gone back to Qom, after that second repatriation, but he had left a few days later, because in his opinion it had become too dangerous. He’d found work in Teheran, on a building site. Not me. I had decided to stay and work a while longer in the same stonecutting factory, to work hard and not spend any money, so that I could put enough aside to pay for the journey to Turkey. But how much did it cost to leave for Turkey? Or rather, to arrive, which was the most important thing (anyone can leave): how much would I need to spend? Sometimes, if you want to find something out, all you have to do is ask, so I asked a few friends I trusted.
Seven hundred thousand toman.
Seven hundred thousand toman?
Yes, Enaiat.
That’s ten months’ work, I said to a boy called Wahid, who had once thought of leaving and then hadn’t. My salary at the factory is seventy thousand toman a month, I said. So that’ll be ten months without spending even small change.
He nodded, fishing with his spoon in the chickpea soup and blowing on it in order not to burn his tongue. I also dipped my spoon in the soup. Tiny black seeds were floating forlornly on the greasy surface, along with crumbs of bread. First I moved them with the tip of the spoon, creating eddies and currents, then gathered them together, swallowed them, and finished off the soup by drinking it straight from the cup.
How to find all that money?
One afternoon, a Friday, which as I already said was our time to do what we wanted and which I spent in an endless, indeterminate—is that the right word?—football tournament against teams from the neighboring factories, anyway, one Friday this friend of mine I’d talked to at dinner about traffickers came up to the stone where I was lying with one hand on my stomach, trying to get my breath back, and asked me to listen to him for a second.
I sat up. He wasn’t alone. There were other Afghans with him.
Listen, Enaiat, he said. We’ve talked. We want to leave for Turkey, and we’ve put aside enough money to pay for the journey and to pay for you, too, if you want. And we’re not only doing it because you’re our brother and all that, but also because when you leave with friends, the chances of everything going right are better than when you leave on your own without anyone to help you in an emergency. At that point, the team that had gone out on the field after us scored and everyone yelled for joy. What do you say? he asked after a pause.
What do I say?
Yes.
I say thank you and I accept. What else can I say?
It’s a dangerous journey, you know.
I know.
Much more dangerous than the other journeys.
The ball bounced off the stone and stopped between my feet. I kicked it back with the tip of my shoe. The sun had seized every corner of the sky, the blue wasn’t blue but yellow, the clouds were golden and bleeding where the mountains cut into them. The rocky peaks where stone can crush and snow can wound and suffocate.
I didn’t yet know that mountains can kill.
I pulled up a blade of dry grass and started to suck on it.
I’ve never seen the sea, I said. There are a whole lot of things I haven’t yet seen in my life and that I’d like to see. Plus, even here in Qom, it’s dangerous every time I set foot outside the factory. So you know what I say? I’m ready for anything.
My voice was firm. But only because of my ignorance. If I’d known what was in store for me, I wouldn’t have left. Or maybe I would. I don’t know. I certainly would have said it differently.
We’d all done it. We’d all listened to the stories of those who had gone and come back. And we knew about those who hadn’t made it from the accounts of their traveling companions. Maybe those companions had survived only to share their horror stories with us. It was as if the government left one or two people alive in every group to scare the others. Some had frozen to death in the mountains, some had been killed by the border police, some had drowned in the sea between the Turkish and Greek coasts.
One day, during the lunch break, I talked to a boy who had a disfigured face. Half