In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [35]
On the sixteenth day, for the first time, I talked to a Pakistani boy who wasn’t much older than I was (Afghans and Pakistanis didn’t usually talk much to each other). As we walked—we were in one of those areas where the wind wasn’t too bad and we were able to speak—I asked him where he was heading, what he planned to do and where he planned to go after we got to Istanbul. He didn’t reply immediately. He seemed lost in thought. He looked at me as if he wasn’t sure he’d understood the question, with the kind of expression on his face that seemed to say, What an idiot! London, he said, walking faster to get away from me. Later, I discovered that all the Pakistanis were the same. They never said Turkey or Europe. They just said London. If any of them was in a good mood and asked me, How about you? I would say, Somewhere.
On the eighteenth day I saw a group of people sitting on the ground. I saw them in the distance and couldn’t figure out at first why they’d stopped. The wind was like a razor and my nose was clogged with snow, but when I tried to wipe it away with my fingers, it was no longer there. All at once, we turned a sharp bend and there they were, that group of people sitting on the ground. They’d be sitting there forever. They were frozen. They were dead. I have no idea how long they’d been there. All the others sidled silently past them. I stole the shoes from one of them, because mine were ruined and my toes had turned purple. I couldn’t feel them anymore, even if I hit them with a stone. I took the shoes and tried them on. They fitted me well. They were much better than mine. I raised my hand in a gesture of gratitude. I think about him every now and then.
Every day, twice a day, they gave us an egg, a tomato and a piece of bread. New supplies arrived on a horse. But now we were too high for that. On the twenty-second day they handed out the last rations. They told us to divide them into pieces to make them last, but an egg, a boiled egg, is a hard thing to divide.
The others summoned up the courage to push me forward. Ask, they said.
What’s the point? I replied.
Never mind, just ask.
Are we nearly there? I asked one of the traffickers.
Yes, he said, we’re nearly there. But I didn’t believe him.
And yet, on the twenty-sixth day, the mountain came to an end. One step, another, then another, and all of a sudden we stopped climbing. There was nothing more to climb, we’d reached the top. This was where the Iranians handed us over to the Turks. At that point, for the first time since the beginning of our trek, we did another head count. Twelve people were missing. Twelve, out of the group of seventy-seven, had died during the walk. Mostly Bengalis and Pakistanis. Vanished into the silence, and I hadn’t even noticed. We looked at each other as if we’d never seen each other before, as if it hadn’t been us walking. Our faces were red and in ruins. The lines were cuts, the cracks bled.
The Turks who were waiting for us there made us sit down on the ground in concentric circles, to protect ourselves from the cold. Every half hour we had to change places. Those in the middle had to move to the outside so that everyone could take turns getting warm and feeling the cold wind of the world on their backs.
On the twenty-seventh day—I know it was the twenty-seventh because I carry each and every one of those days around my neck like the beads of a necklace—we came down off the mountain and the mountain slowly turned into hills and woods and meadows and streams and fields and all the wonderful things there are on earth. In the spots where there weren’t any trees, they made us run in groups, keeping our heads down. Sometimes they open fire, they said.
Who?
It doesn’t matter who. Sometimes they open fire.
After two days—two more days, two days that could have been two years or two centuries—we reached Van.
Van is also on a lake. Lake Van. Our journey had been a journey from one lake to another. On the outskirts