In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [38]
Three days later, they blindfolded me and made me get in a car together with some other Afghan boys. They drove us around the city for a while so that we wouldn’t know where we’d come from, which hole had spewed us out, and then they left us in a park. But not all together. One here and one there.
I waited until the car had left before taking off my blindfold. Around me were the lights of the city. Around me was the city. I realized—and I only really became aware of it at that moment—that I’d made it. I sat down on a low wall and stayed there for a few hours, motionless, staring straight ahead of me, in that place I didn’t know. There was a smell of fried food and flowers. And the sea. And maybe I’d changed, or maybe it was Istanbul that was different, or Turkey, I don’t know, but the fact is that, having always liked to have a roof over my head at night, from the samavat Qgazi onward, now that I was here I didn’t even look for a place to stay but was content to spend my nights in the park, and I did that for quite a while.
I tried to make contact with the Afghan community, but without much success. But I did discover that there was a place near a bazaar in a rundown area over toward the Bosphorus where you could go early in the morning in the hope of finding work. You sat and waited until someone arrived in a car and got out and said, I can offer you such and such for such and such money. If you said yes, you got up and went with him. You worked all day, you worked hard, and in the evening you were paid what had been arranged.
It was much harder trying to live a decent life in Istanbul than in Iran. And sometimes I wondered, What have I done? Then I remembered the repatriations to Herat and everything, the roadblocks, the shaved hair, and it struck me that, when you got down to it, I was fine in that park in Istanbul. There were people, other migrants, who let me take a shower in their house. I could pick up a bit of food here and there. The days flowed over me and life around me, like a river. I was turning into a rock.
Then one evening, after a game of football in the back alleys, some Afghan boys who were younger than me told me they would soon be leaving for Greece. A man had put them in touch with a clothing factory, where they were going to work for nothing, and after a few months this man would help them get to Greece.
How?
In a dinghy.
Another journey? I thought of the mountains. I thought of the fake bottom in the lorry. I thought, Now the sea. It scared me. I could barely stay afloat in a river. In the open sea, the Mediterranean, I would drown. I had no idea what was in the sea.
I want to find work in Istanbul, I said.
You won’t find any.
I want to try.
There’s no work for us here in Turkey. We have to go west.
I want to find work in Istanbul, I repeated. And for another couple of months that was what I tried to do. I tried as hard as I could, but it wasn’t easy, it really wasn’t. And when something’s so hard that it becomes impossible, all you can do is stop trying and think of an alternative. Don’t you agree?
By the time the fateful day was approaching when those Afghan boys were supposed to leave for Greece, I was beginning to think that I might have done better to accept their invitation. But it was too late now. They’d worked to pay for the journey.
So I made up a lie. If you want to go to Greece, I said, it’s better if I come with you, because it’s likely you’ll need someone with you who can speak English, and I speak English. If you pay for me, too, I said, and I come with you, you’ll be able to communicate with the Greeks, ask them for help or information or whatever. What do you say? I’d be useful to you. I hoped they’d fall for it, because they were all a bit younger than me, and much less wise about the ways of the world.
Really? they said.
Really what?
Do you really speak English?
Yes.
Let’s hear.
What do you want to hear?
Say something in English.
So I said one of the few words I knew: house.
What does that mean?
I told them.
And they accepted.