In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [46]
I must have been tired. Because I fell asleep.
I can imagine you were pretty tired, Enaiat.
It wasn’t only the fact that I was tired. There was something about that place that made me feel calm, you know?
What exactly?
I couldn’t say. Some things you just feel.
After a while, the old lady who lived there came out. She woke me up, but gently. I leapt to my feet, and was going to run away, but she made me a sign to come inside. She gave me some good food to eat, vegetables and something else. She made me take a shower. She gave me some nice clothes, too: a shirt with blue stripes, jeans and a pair of white trainers. It was incredible that she had all those clothes in her house, and in my size. I don’t know whose they were, maybe a grandson of hers.
The lady kept talking all the time, in Greek and English, and I didn’t understand much. Whenever I saw her smile, I’d say, Good, good. Whenever she made a serious face, I’d also make a serious face, and shake my head from side to side: No, no.
In the afternoon, after I’d had my shower and got dressed, the old lady went with me to the bus station, bought me a ticket (yes, she actually bought it for me), put fifty euros in my hand, a whole fifty euros, said goodbye and left. Yes, I thought, there really are some very strange and very kind people in the world.
There you go again.
What do you mean?
You tell me things, Enaiat, and then immediately you go on to something else. Tell me more about this lady. Describe her house.
Why?
What do you mean, why? I’m interested. Other people might be, too.
Yes, but I already told you. I’m only interested in what happened. The lady is important for what she did. Her name doesn’t matter. What her house was like doesn’t matter. She could have been anybody.
How do you mean, anybody?
Anybody could have behaved like that.
So, incredibly, I arrived in Mytilene. It’s a big, busy city, Mytilene, with lots of tourists and shops and cars. I asked the way to the “ship station,” using what I thought were the English words for the port where the ferries left for Athens. The people I asked answered in words, as people usually do, but I looked at the movements of their hands.
This way. That way.
When I got to the port, I came across a whole lot of other Afghan boys who’d been there for days and days wandering around and trying to buy a ticket, and every time they’d tried they’d been chased away, because it was obvious they weren’t normal passengers, but illegals. That depressed me a bit. How long would I have to wait?
But that didn’t happen to me.
Maybe it was because of how I was dressed, because I was clean, because my belly was full and I had that contented look you have on your face when you’ve eaten well. Whatever it was, when I got to the counter and asked for a ticket, the girl behind the counter replied, Thirty-eight euros. I couldn’t believe it at first, so I said, Repeat? And she said again, Thirty-eight euros.
Through the opening, I passed her the fifty-euro note I’d got from the old Greek lady. The girl—who was quite pretty, incidentally, with big eyes and nice make-up—took it and gave me twelve euros change. Incredulously, I thanked her and went out.
You can imagine the other boys’ faces when they saw me with the ticket in my hand. They all gathered around. They wanted to know how I’d managed it and some wouldn’t even believe I’d bought it myself. They said I’d got a real tourist to buy it for me. But I hadn’t.
How did you do it? they asked.
I just asked, I replied. At the counter.
The ferry was huge. There were five decks. I went up to the top deck to get a better view of the horizon and was savoring with every part of my body the fact that I was sitting comfortably and relaxed in a chair, not kneeling in a dinghy or with my legs crossed in the false bottom of a lorry, when suddenly