In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [39]
Where did you learn English?
From people I met. When you get it into your head that you’re going to emigrate it’s good to know a bit of English. Lots of people were trying to get to London, and sometimes I helped friends to rehearse a few useful phrases.
So you really could speak it.
No, I couldn’t. I knew a few words. Like ship, and port, things like that.
Did they ever find out?
Wait and see.
That week, while waiting to leave, I worked for three days—I was lucky—and earned enough to buy new clothes to wear in Greece. You always need new clothes when you arrive in a place where you’re a nobody.
There were five of us: Rahmat, Liaqat, Hussein Ali, Soltan and me.
Hussein Ali was the youngest, he was twelve.
From Istanbul we went to Ayvalik, which was on the Turkish coast opposite the Greek island of Lesbos. We were taken from Istanbul to Ayvalik by the trafficker, a mustached Turk with pockmarked skin, who had said—I don’t remember the exact words, but this was the gist of it—that he would tell us how to get to Greece.
And he did. When we got to Ayvalik, he switched off the engine of the van, took from the bonnet a cardboard box gnawed by mice, dragged us up a hill at sunset, pointed at the sea and said, Greece is that way, good luck.
As I’ve said, whenever anyone wishes me good luck, things go wrong. And anyway, what did it mean, Greece is that way? All I could see was sea.
But he was just as scared as us, because what he was doing was illegal, so he abandoned us at the top of the hill and left, mumbling something in Turkish.
We opened the cardboard box. It contained the dinghy (the deflated dinghy, of course), the oars (there were even two spare ones), the pump, the adhesive tape—at the time I thought: adhesive tape?—and the life jackets. It was like an IKEA flatpack for illegals. With instructions and everything. We divided the things among us, put on the life jackets, because it was easier to wear them than to carry them, and walked down toward the woods that divided the hill from the beach. We were something like three or four kilometers from the beach, and in the meantime darkness had fallen. In those years, now that I think of it, I lived more in the dark than the light.
So anyway, we started walking toward the beach and there was this big wood with darkness filling the spaces between the trees and not even twenty minutes had gone by when we heard noises, strange noises, not the wind in the branches and the leaves. No, something else.
Must be cows, Rahmat said.
Must be goats, Hussein Ali said.
Goats don’t make a noise like that, stupid.
Hussein Ali punched Rahmat in the shoulder. Neither do cows for that matter, idiot.
They started pushing each other and fighting.
Be quiet, I said. Stop it.
They must be wild cows, said Liaqat. A kind of wild cow you only find in Turkey. But we didn’t have time to comment on this statement by Liaqat, because just then these cows of his suddenly appeared on the path, running toward us. They ran like devils, these wild cows, and they were short, short and squat. Run, cried Hussein Ali, the wild cows are coming. And we started running hell for leather until we found a ditch, or something like that, and dived in and hid among the shrubs.
We waited for silence to fall again and after a while Liaqat put his head out and said, Hey, they aren’t cows. They’re pigs.
Wild pigs, Hussein Ali said.
Wild pigs, Liaqat repeated.
They were boars. But none of us had ever seen a boar. We waited until they’d gone away, then climbed out of the ditch and set off again along the path to the beach.
Ten minutes later, we heard barking.
Those are dogs, said Hussein Ali.
Congratulations, said Liaqat. I can see you’re educated. Can you also recognize the noise a sheep makes? And a horse?
They started pushing each other and quarreling, but immediately stopped because, just then, a dog appeared from behind a tree. First one, then another. Then a third one. Then the barking of the dogs got closer and we saw them on our right, standing on a rock. They weren’t behind a gate or anything,