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By Root 394 0

and my muscles were weeping. My fatigue and my bones were weeping. Smells. I remember the smells. Pee and sweat. Screams, from time to time, and voices in the dark. I don’t know how much time had passed when I heard someone moaning horribly, as if they were having their nails pulled out. I thought it was a dream at first, I thought the hoarse voice mixed with the noise of the engine wasn’t real. Water, he was saying. That one word: water. But he was saying it in a way I can’t describe. I knew who it was, I’d recognized him. I also started to cry out, Water, just to do something, to say, Help, there’s someone dying, but nobody responded. Drink your own pee, I said, because he wouldn’t stop crying, but I don’t know if he heard. He didn’t reply, just kept on moaning. It was unbearable. So I started crawling on my belly through the mass of bodies, with people punching and pinching me as I passed, which is understandable, because I was squashing them. I reached the boy. I couldn’t see him, but with my hands I groped for his face, his nose, his mouth. He was moaning, repeating, Water, water, water. I asked someone nearby if they still had any left in their bottle, because mine was finished, but everyone had drunk every drop. I slid over the bodies again until I found a Bengali boy who said, Yes, he still had some water at the bottom of his bottle, but no, he wouldn’t give it to me. I said, I beg you. He said no. I implored him, Just a sip. He said no, and as he was saying no I was trying to figure out where his no was coming from. I threw a punch at the no. I felt his teeth against my fist and when he cried out I slapped him over and over, not to hurt him, just to find the bottle. As soon as I felt it, I grabbed hold of it in my hand and disappeared—which was the easiest thing in the world to do in that place. I took the boy the remaining water, which made me feel good, if only for a short time, it made me feel human.

It lasted three days. We never got out. The door was never opened.

Then a light.

An electric light.

———

I’ve been told that it’s like waking up from a general anesthetic. The outlines of things are blurred, and you feel as if you’re rolling down a hill, inside a wheel, the kind of thing that happened in Telisia and Sang Safid. They made us roll out onto the ground because nobody could move even the little finger of one hand. Our blood had stopped flowing, our feet were swollen, our necks stiff. They started with those closest to the hatch, letting them fall like sacks of onions. Then two Turks clambered right inside the space under the false bottom and grabbed those of us who hadn’t yet moved. Every movement we made was extremely painful.

They pushed me into a corner and I stayed there, huddled up, for I don’t know how long. I was a tangle of flesh.

Then my eyes gradually became accustomed to the light, and I saw where I was. It was an underground garage, filled with hundreds and hundreds of people. A kind of marshaling yard for immigrants, or something like that, a cave in the belly of Istanbul.

When I was finally able to move and breathe I looked for a place to pee, all the pee I hadn’t been able to pass during the journey, all the pee I’d held in for three days. They showed me the (only) toilet, a hole in the floor. But when I tried to pee, a searing pain shook my legs and stomach, and I was afraid I was going to faint. I closed my eyes to summon up strength, I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I saw that my pee was red.

I was peeing blood. I peed blood for the next few weeks.

The others were standing in line to use a telephone. Each person had to call his trafficker in Iran, the one he’d made arrangements with before the journey, in my case Farid’s cousin. We had to phone both the trafficker and the person who was looking after the money so that the trafficker could get paid.

Only when the Iranian trafficker had his money, and only then, would he call his Turkish accomplices, here in the garage in Istanbul, to say that everything was okay and they could free the prisoners: us.

Hello? Enaiatollah