In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [36]
Before dawn they had us jumping out of the grass like crickets, loaded us in a lorry and drove us to another place nearby. It was a kind of huge cowshed with a very high ceiling, a cowshed for illegals instead of cows, and they made the Afghans sleep next to the Pakistanis, which is never a good idea. That night there was a quarrel over space and a fight broke out. The Turks were forced to intervene and separate us. They didn’t discriminate: they hit everyone.
We were stuck in that cowshed for four days.
One night, while we were sleeping, the roar of an engine started the walls shaking. The Turks told us to gather our things together and hurry. They rounded us up against the wall by ethnic group and started letting us out a few at a time, I assume to stop those inside from seeing what was happening outside and where they were putting us. We stood in a corner for about ten minutes, clutching our rucksacks to our chests, then someone called us and we went out.
The first thing was, the vehicle with the noisy engine had its lights on, and they were aimed straight at the door, so I was blinded. The second thing was, the vehicle with the noisy engine turned out to be a lorry, a huge lorry with a huge trailer which seemed to be full of stones and gravel.
Come around this end, they said.
We walked around to the back of the trailer.
Get in, they said.
Where? All we could see was the gravel and the stones, and dust in the beams of light.
The trafficker pointed downward. I thought he meant we should get underneath the lorry, but then I took a closer look—which should have made me believe what I was seeing, but I didn’t want to believe it—and I realized that between the bed of the trailer, which carried the gravel and the stones, and the underside of the lorry—where the axle shaft was, to make things clearer—there was a small space, maybe fifty centimeters high, or slightly more. In other words, the lorry had a false bottom. A fifty-centimeter-high space in which to sit with our arms clasped around our legs and our knees against our chests and our necks bent to keep our heads wedged between our knees.
They gave each of us two bottles: one full and one empty. The full one was full of water. The empty one was to pee into.
They filled the false bottom with us, all of us, the fifty or however many of us there were. We weren’t just cramped, we were very cramped. More than cramped. We were like grains of rice squeezed in someone’s hand. When they closed the hatch, the darkness obliterated us. I felt suffocated. Let’s hope it’s a short journey, I thought. Let’s hope it doesn’t last long. A voice was moaning somewhere. I could feel the weight of the stones on the back of my neck, the weight of the air and the night on the stones, the weight of the sky and the stars. I started breathing through my nose, but I was breathing dust. I started breathing with my mouth, but my chest hurt. I would have liked to breathe with my ears or my hair, like plants, which gather humidity in the air, from the air. But I wasn’t a plant, and there was no oxygen. We’re stopping, I thought at one point. But it was only a traffic junction. On another occasion I thought, We’re there now, we’re there. But it was the driver who’d got out to have a pee. I heard him. (Nothing escapes me, oh, no.) By the time I next said to myself, We’ve arrived, my knees and shoulders were dead. But it was a false alarm: I don’t know why we’d stopped that time.
After a while, I stopped existing. I stopped counting the seconds or imagining our arrival. My thoughts