Hinterland: A Novel (3 page)

‘I’m hungry,’ Kabir says.

Aryan pats his chest pocket and pulls out a wad of silver paper. He hands Kabir a pillow of Turkish chewing gum. He will feel ravenous afterwards, but the explosion of sugar, and the illusion of food, will trick his stomach for a while.

Aryan folds the last piece back into his anorak, nursing his own hunger like a secret. To distract himself, he makes a mental inventory of his pockets.

* One brown vinyl wallet with the telephone number of their uncle’s house in Iran written on a torn edge of newspaper, and the mobile phone number of the nephew of the tailor who was living in England.

* Two twenty-euro notes, which is all his Iranian money came to when Mohamed changed it for him in Istanbul.

* One photograph, folded once, of him and his brothers posing with their parents and their grandfather, taken by an aid worker his father once knew in Afghanistan, many years ago, before Kabir was born.

* One notebook with sketches from along the journey, and the bits of Afghan poems that come back to him, and, on a scrap of paper, an address in Rome that Ahmed in the sewing factory gave them before they left.

* One pen he found on the footpath in Istanbul beside a man selling lottery tickets.

* One last piece of chewing gum rolled up in silver paper.

* One red mobile phone without a SIM card – thrown away to remove any sign they have crossed through Turkey.

He feels for his belt. Inside it, stitched between the layers of leather, the last of their travel money.

The hours slip by. Aryan cannot tell if he has dozed or slept.

The road is growing rougher. The big tyres lurch into the potholes. The wind that accompanied them on the highway has dropped.

Finally they stop. Kabir sits up. Aryan’s stomach tightens. He hears the sound of men’s voices outside.

The doors swing open. For the first time he sees the driver, his dark bulk silhouetted against a pale rectangle of sky. He is a big man with short-cropped bottlebrush hair, small eyes in a ruddy face.

Aryan blinks in the pastel light, sees the smudge of blue hills beyond, wonders if it is dawn or dusk. The smell of cold and oxygen and the outside world invade the truck’s fuggy cave.

Looming in the doorframe, the man searches, then points to Kabir.

‘You, come,’ he says.

The men in the truck stand up. Maybe this is the drop-off place for Patras. Kabir doesn’t move.

‘No, no,’ the man says. ‘Just the two brothers.’

He lunges at Kabir, and grabs him by the arm.

Kabir yowls as the man swings him over the edge of the truck and on to the ground. Aryan hurls himself behind him like a creature gone wild.

Hamid kicks over the boxes and throws himself after Aryan.

The driver catches Hamid hard with his fist and sends him sprawling backwards on to a tower of boxes that topple against the truck’s inside wall. Then he slams the doors shut.

For a few moments all is silent; then Hamid is shouting and banging on the truck’s metal sides. Somebody stifles his protests.

Outside, a thickset man is gripping Kabir by his arms. A white singlet stretches over his belly and a piece of rope holds up his trousers. He looks at the driver with nervous eyes, while the boy twists like a pinioned kitten in his grasp.

‘Here’s your merchandise,’ the driver says to the Greek man. He nods.

The driver hoists himself into the cabin with a movement surprisingly lithe for a heavy man. He sends a rosary and a pair of dice swinging madly above the dashboard as he reverses back up the road.

Aryan runs after the truck, feet skidding in the mud as he loses his balance and recovers it beside the churning wheels. He thumps the vehicle’s side.

‘Hamid!’ he shouts.

‘Aryan!’ comes the muffled reply.

The wheels spin and gain traction. The truck accelerates, and disappears over the rise.

Only when Aryan comes back does the man release the child.

Aryan pulls Kabir towards him and folds his arms across his brother’s chest, holding him tight to stop his shaking. Kabir rubs his arms where the man’s grip is already starting to flower into a purple tattoo of bruising.

The air is pungent with earth and manure. Ragged farm buildings sprawl around a rusting tractor abandoned in the yard. It has Greek lettering across the windscreen and its tyres have herringboned the soil like army tanks. Ploughed fields recede in the failing light, and, behind the rotting slats of an enclosure, pigs with mud-caked ankles root around an overturned pail.

Beyond them, the sky hangs low over a wide valley with bare, undulating hills. Aryan shivers as the breeze that has swept over Hamid’s truck reaches him bereft of any message. It must be nightfall, he thinks, but he cannot remember which day.

‘Where are we, Aryan?’ Kabir says.

Aryan’s tired mind is whirring. He is trying to recall whether Mohamed said anything about working in Greece when they set off from Istanbul. Surely he would have remembered. In the village near the Evros, the father of the boy with the withered arm said only that the truck would take them far across the border. He thought they were going to Patras, where all the Afghans were.

On bowlegs, the man in the singlet approaches.

‘Come with me,’ he says, his knobbled fist in the small of Aryan’s back.

They are inside a small white building. Two pallets of straw fill the recess of a whitewashed concrete ledge. There is peeling green linoleum underfoot, and a dripping tap outside. A washed-out curtain hangs across the doorway, sagging in the places where it has torn through its hooks. Across the yard, smoke leaks upwards from the farmhouse chimney and smears the darkening sky. Their breath curls like writing in the air and disappears. In the outhouse there is no fireplace nor any source of heat.

‘Wait.’ The man crosses the yard and disappears inside the house.

Presently an old woman in black woollen stockings emerges. She wears a dark-blue apron whose pocket is torn and carries a tray with bread, two slabs of white cheese, and two bowls of broth. She has barnacles on her face like the nodes insects make under bark. Silently she sets the tray down on an upended log outside the building, scarcely looking at them. She shuffles back across the yard in shoes of cloth folded under at the heels like slippers.

The tap squeaks as Aryan washes Kabir’s hands, then his own. The water comes out in a thin, twisted ribbon. There is almost no pressure. Aryan takes off his T-shirt and wets it and scrubs Kabir’s face and ears and neck. The water splashes their feet and leaves spidery tributaries in the soil.

They have eaten nothing since Turkey. Aryan thinks of the pigs and does not touch the soup. But Kabir is too ravenous to hold back.

‘It doesn’t taste of anything, Aryan,’ Kabir says. ‘Just salt.’

Aryan sniffs the bowl. There is no sign of meat of any kind. ‘Maybe it’s just vegetables,’ he says.

The rising steam and the sight of his brother eating are too much. Aryan lifts the bowl and sips gingerly, his hollow stomach contracting. There is none of the richness of lamb or goat or chicken, none of what he imagines would be pork. There is just hot water with coins of yellow oil on the surface, and grains of rice among the crescent moons of celery beneath.

They lick the grains from the bottom of their bowls, and demolish the bread and the last crumbs of the sour-tasting cheese. The liquid warms them, but when they have finished their hunger hasn’t gone away.

Aryan leans back on the pallet. Lying down stretches his stomach flat, he tells himself; that way he won’t feel so empty.

‘I don’t like it here,’ Kabir says after a while.

‘Well it’s not my idea of paradise either,’ Aryan says.

‘Where do you think we are?’

‘Somewhere in Greece, I suppose. We could be anywhere.’

‘Why did they bring us here?’

‘I don’t know, Kabir. I guess it’s to work.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Probably farm work.’

‘Why didn’t Hamid come too?’

‘Maybe they only need two people.’

‘How long do we have to stay?’

‘Kabir, I have no idea. Probably till we’ve earned our passage and they are ready to move us on.’

Aryan is suddenly tired of his little brother. He is tired of having to think for the two of them. Tired of being held back by his brother’s short legs. Tired of having to be reassuring when he is riddled with foreboding. Tired of having to provide answers to things he doesn’t understand.

Then immediately he feels guilty. On the long walk over the mountains between Iran and Turkey Kabir had hardly complained, though his jeans were chafing and their feet were on fire in the rocky terrain and their mouths were sandpaper dry. Aryan was amazed that he didn’t protest and just kept walking as fast as he could so the smugglers wouldn’t hit him with their guns. It was only later that Aryan saw how thin his sneakers had become after all that shredding on the rocks. Kabir can’t help asking questions – he’s always been like that – and with Hamid gone, he will have no one but Aryan to ask.

‘What about Hamid?’ Kabir says as if on cue. ‘Do you think he’s got any injuries?’

Aryan sighs. ‘He might be a bit sore,’ he says. ‘You heard him hollering in the back of the truck.’

‘He might have a good black bruise,’ Kabir says.

‘Or a big black eye.’

‘Or two black eyes and a bruise.’

‘Well maybe not all of them,’ Aryan says.

Hamid is tough, Aryan knows. Tougher than he is. He is impetuous and his temper gets him into trouble but he is also fearless, and quick to seize an opportunity. A Tajik, he made it all the way to Istanbul on his own after fleeing the Taliban; Aryan has always been a little in awe. He also felt they made a team, he and Hamid and Kabir. It was Hamid who led them through the steep streets of Istanbul to watch the tankers gliding past the minarets along the Bosporus, and used them as decoys while he filched pastries from café tables so they could devour them, out of sight, in the twisting alleys. With a rush Aryan misses him, and feels unsteady without him, aware that all the decisions he will have to make for him and Kabir he will now have to take on his own.

‘Why didn’t they let Hamid stay with us?’ Kabir says.

‘Why do you keep asking questions I cannot answer?’ says Aryan.

There are times when Aryan wonders if he shouldn’t have left Kabir behind. He could have stayed with their cousins in Iran and Aryan would have sent for him once he made it to Europe. But after everything that had happened Kabir was distraught at the idea of separation. And Aryan hadn’t known how long it would be before Kabir could join him, and in the end he had put together the money from all the things he had sold, and relented.

But now he wishes he could be alone to think. He doesn’t understand why they were thrown off the truck, or why they were separated from the others. He is starting to wonder whether some arrangement hasn’t been made concerning them – in Istanbul, maybe, or by the people who took them across the river to Greece.

Kabir turns his back. His frustration ripples through the silence in invisible waves. Aryan knows he has hurt his feelings, but for the moment he doesn’t care.

Since they arrived, something unexplained has been flickering at the back of Aryan’s mind. Now it rises towards the surface like a diving bird swimming upwards through the waters of a lake, and formulates itself into a question.

How did the driver know they were brothers?

A thumbnail moon hangs in the darkening sky and a pale light emanates from one of the windows in the house. It is too cold to undress. Aryan doubles one of the blankets over the straw pallet and makes Kabir crawl inside. Aryan folds the other blankets over the top of him, and spreads their anoraks over his shoulders. Then he huddles under the covers beside him and hugs his brother to keep them both warm.