In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [7]
The school was a big building and there were a lot of us, maybe more than two hundred. Years earlier, when it was built, every parent had contributed a number of days’ work, each person doing what he could, some making the roof, others finding ways to stop the wind coming in at the windows so we could have lessons even in winter, although they never really managed to do much about the wind: whenever we put up sheeting, the wind always tore it off. The school had several classrooms and a headmaster.
The Taliban made everyone, children and adults, go outside. They ordered us to form a circle in the yard, the children in front, because we were shorter, and the adults behind. Then they made our teacher and the headmaster stand in the middle of the circle. The headmaster was pulling at the material of his jacket as if trying to tear it, and weeping and turning this way and that, looking for something he couldn’t find. But our teacher was as silent as usual, his arms hanging by his sides, and his eyes open but turned inward. I remember he had beautiful eyes that dispensed goodness to everyone around him.
Ba omidi didar, boys, he said. Goodbye.
They shot him. In front of everyone.
From that day on, the school was closed, and without school, life is like ashes.
This matters a lot to me, Fabio.
What does?
Making it clear that Afghans and Taliban are different. I want people to know this. Do you know how many nationalities they were, the men who killed my teacher?
No. How many?
There were twenty of them in that jeep, right? Well, there may not have been twenty different nationalities, but almost. Some couldn’t even communicate among themselves. Pakistan, Senegal, Morocco, Egypt. A lot of people think the Taliban are all Afghans, Fabio, but they aren’t. Some of them are, of course, but not all of them. They’re ignorant, ignorant of everything, and they stop children from studying because they’re afraid those children might come to understand that they don’t do what they do for God, but for themselves.
We’ll say it loud and clear, Enaiat. Now where were we?
In Kandahar.
Ah, yes. Kandahar.
———
Let’s get back to Kandahar.
It was morning when we left—did I already say that?—on the lorry with the electricity poles in the back. We passed through Peshawar on our way to Quetta, but Mother and I didn’t get off. In Quetta we went looking for somewhere to sleep, one of those places we call samavat or mosafir khama—house of guests—with large dormitories where travelers stop on the way to Iran and look for guides for the rest of the journey. For three days, we didn’t leave the place. Mother was talking to people, trying to organize her return journey, but I didn’t know that. It wasn’t difficult. Getting back to Afghanistan was much easier than leaving it.
In the meantime, I had nothing to do but wander around the place. Then, one night, before putting me to bed she took my head in her hands, and hugged me tight, and told me three things I shouldn’t do, and that I should wish for something with all my soul. The next morning she wasn’t there on the mattress with me and when I went to ask kaka Rahim, the owner of the samavat Qgazi, if he knew where she was, he told me yes, she had gone back home to be with my brother and sister. Then I sat down in a corner between two chairs, not on the chairs but on the floor, squatting on my heels, thinking that I had to think. My teacher always said thinking that you have to think is already a big step. But there weren’t any thoughts in my head, only a light that swallowed everything and stopped me from seeing, like when you stare straight at the sun.
When the light went out, the streetlamps came on.
Pakistan
Khasta kofta means “as tired as a meatball,” because the women where I used to live made meatballs by rolling them and rolling them and rolling them for a long time in the palms of their hands. And that was how I felt, as if a giant had taken me in his hands and made me into a meatball: my head hurt, and my arms, and another place, somewhere