In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [5]
To force him to go, they said to my father, If you don’t go to Iran to get that merchandise for us, we’ll kill your family, if you run away with the merchandise, we’ll kill your family, if when you get back any of the merchandise is missing or spoiled, we’ll kill your family, if someone cheats you, we’ll kill your family. In other words, if anything at all goes wrong—we’ll kill your family. Which isn’t a nice way to do business, in my opinion.
I was six—maybe—when my father died.
Apparently, a gang of bandits attacked his lorry in the mountains and killed him. When the Pashtun found out that my father’s lorry had been attacked and the merchandise stolen, they came to my family’s house and said he’d made a mess of things, their merchandise had got lost and we had to pay them back for it.
First of all they went to see my uncle, my father’s brother. They told him he was responsible now and he had to do something to compensate them. For a time, my uncle tried to find a solution, like sharing his land, or selling it, but nothing worked. Then one day he told them he didn’t know what he could do to compensate them and it wasn’t his business anyway, because he had his own family to think about. I don’t blame him for that, because it was true.
So one evening the Pashtun came to see my mother, and said that if we didn’t have money, instead of the money they would take me and my brother away with them and use us as slaves, which is something that’s banned all over the world, even in Afghanistan, but that was what it amounted to. From that point on, my mother lived in fear. She told me and my brother to stay outside the house all the time, surrounded by other children, because on the evening when the Pashtun had come to our house we hadn’t been there and they hadn’t seen our faces.
So the two of us were always outside playing, which we didn’t mind at all, and the Pashtun who passed us on the streets of the village didn’t recognize us. For nighttime we had dug a hole in the fields, next to the potatoes, and whenever anyone knocked, even before going to find out who it was, we would go and hide there. But I wasn’t very convinced by this strategy: I told my mother that if the Pashtun came for us at night, they certainly wouldn’t bother to knock.
Things carried on like that until the day Mother decided I ought to leave because I was ten—maybe—and I was becoming too big to hide, so big that I could hardly get into the hole anymore without squashing my brother.
To leave.
I’d never have chosen to leave Nava. My village was a good place. It wasn’t technologically advanced, there was no electricity. For light, we used oil lamps. But there were apples. I would see the fruit being born, the flowers opening in front of my eyes and becoming fruit. I know flowers become fruit here, too, but you don’t see it happen. Stars. Lots and lots of them. The moon. I remember there were nights when, to save on oil, we ate in the open air by the light of the moon.
My house had one big room for all of us, where we slept, a room for guests, and a corner for making a fire and cooking, which was below floor level, and in winter pipes would take the heat from the fire all through the house. On the second floor there was a storeroom where we kept feed for the animals. Outside, a second kitchen, so that in summer the house didn’t get even hotter than it was, and a very large courtyard with apples, cherries, pomegranates, peaches, apricots and mulberries. The walls were made of mud and very thick, more than a meter. We ate homemade yogurt, like Greek yogurt but much, much better. We had a cow and two sheep, and fields where we grew corn, which we took to the mill for grinding.
This was Nava, and I would never have chosen to leave it.
Not even