In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [32]
McDonald’s?
Yes, McDonald’s.
It’s funny. Sometimes you say things like: he was as tall as a goat. At other times, when you make comparisons, you come up with McDonald’s, or baseball.
Why is that funny?
Because they belong to different cultures, different worlds. At least, that’s how it seems to me.
Even if that was true, Fabio, both those worlds are inside me now.
He told me that the transit van on which he’d been traveling across Cappadocia had been involved in an accident. At a bend on an unpaved mountain road in Aksaray province, it had collided with a van loaded with lemons. He’d been thrown out and had scraped his face on the ground. Then the Turkish police had arrested him and beaten him up. And then they handed him over to the Iranians, and they’d beaten him up, too. So his journey to Europe (he wanted to get to Sweden) had turned into a bloody mess, along with his dreams. I’d lend you the money to leave, he said, but I can’t because I don’t want to be responsible for your pain. And there were others who said the same as him, but I’m not sure they were genuine, they might just have been skinflints.
And yet all I needed was one story that ended well. All I needed to hear was, He made it, he got to Turkey, or Greece, or London, and I immediately felt encouraged. If he had made it, I thought, then so could I.
In the end there were four of us who’d made up our minds to leave. Then we found out that Farid, a boy who was working in a factory around the corner from ours, was also planning to leave Qom. But that wasn’t all. The trafficker he was going to use was his cousin.
This sounded like an opportunity not to be missed. If the trafficker really was his cousin we could trust him, and if he left with us, we would become friends of the cousin and be treated accordingly.
One day, a day like any other, we finished our shift, put our things in canvas rucksacks, said goodbye to the manager of the factory, asked for the wages due to us and (risking the usual roadblocks) took a scheduled bus to Teheran. At the station, we found our friend’s cousin waiting for us. He took us to his house in a taxi, one of those collective taxis with a lot of people inside.
In the dining room, over a cup of chay, he told us we had two days to get some food for the journey—simple but nutritious food, like dried fruit, almonds, pistachios—and buy a pair of heavy mountain shoes and warm, waterproof clothes. They have to be waterproof, he said. And also nice clothes to wear in Istanbul. We certainly couldn’t walk around the city wearing the same clothes we’d been wearing during the journey, which would be torn and smelly by then. We had to buy all that, but especially the shoes. Our friend’s cousin was really insistent about that.
So we went around the bazaars doing our shopping, and there was a euphoria in the air that I can’t describe. When we got back, we showed the shoes to the trafficker to know if they were all right. He lifted them, checked the seams, bent the soles, looked inside them and everything, and said yes, they were fine.
It wasn’t true.
He said it in good faith—I’m certain of that, because of his cousin—and the reason he said it in good faith was because he thought he knew what our trek across the mountains would be like, but he didn’t know at all, because he’d never been there. He just had to hand us over to others. He was a go-between. He was the person we had to phone once we got to Turkey and say, We’ve arrived. So that the friends in Qom we’d left the money with could hand it over to him.
Holding the shoes up to the light coming in through the window, he said, Your journey will last three days. These are solid shoes, just what you need. You’ve done well. Excellent purchase.
The following morning an Iranian picked us up in a taxi and took us to a house outside the city, where we waited. After an hour, a bus arrived. The driver was an accomplice, and the passengers had no idea what was going on. The driver tooted his horn and we