Magic Bus (13 page)

A month after Sahar's sixteenth birthday, after the brothers had helped for the last time to bring the family to Sartog, their father made the arrangements. No contract needed to be signed. The local broker was a respected elder in Aminabad – ‘Honest Town' – and the organization for which he worked was powerful and not to be betrayed. Neither boy slept that last night on the roof of the world, in excitement more than doubt or trepidation. Money was needed to find a better life; their role in its acquisition could not be questioned.

In the stillness before dawn, the old rooster crowed. The sheep bleated in their deep, guttural voices. A woman's bare feet padded on the earth. Then, the bellies of the clouds turned silver. The rising sun traced the tops of the tents and stirred the breeze. The shadows of sparrows flitted across the tent flaps. Flies buzzed from their crevices. It was time to go.

‘
Bei salamet
,' the father wished his sons. Go honestly. Ali cried. Sahar wrapped his arms around him. Their mother had packed in their bags dried apricots, nuts, lentils and leaves of her bread. They carried a single change of clothes. Nothing else.

On horseback the brothers rode off the plateau, away from the goat herds and oases of apricots and cherries, down on to a flat plain, featureless but for the scrub bushes. Behind them, the haze distorted distances, sucking colour and detail from the receding ranges until their peaks seemed to dissolve into the sky. There were no road signs, of course, no notable features for the alien eye, only sharp stone slopes and spiralling dust devils. The sand covered their clothes, settled in their hair, crunched between their teeth.

At dusk, they reached Aminabad's narrow lanes, drank tea with the broker's family, slept their first night under a solid ceiling.

‘I have many friends who live there,' the broker's grandmother said to them.

‘Live where?' asked Sahar.

‘Where you will live,' replied the senile old woman. ‘But no one can tell me if there are any goats in paradise.'

The next morning, a van carried Sahar and Ali to Tehran where, without papers but with a sense of adventure, they were hidden beneath crates of oranges on an ancient lorry. Their euphoria survived the day's drive west along the trail to Tabriz, despite the boredom and a leaking exhaust, and even lasted through the long, tedious week in a rough, alpine village, waiting for the snows to clear on the pass over the Turkish border.

Their hosts were kind enough, giving the boys a place beside the stove to sleep, but – for the first time in his wandering and rooted life – Sahar felt dislocated. He couldn't understand the Kurds when they spoke between themselves. Their food was unfamiliar. The village policeman demanded a bribe which, although expected, unnerved him. On the muddy edge of Asia Minor, Sahar realized that he and his brother had been born on the wrong side of an invisible line. In the turbid hamlet, he first understood that a passport enabled any man to cross over it. Through the cold nights, he gazed at his hosts' identity papers, studied the befriended policeman's ID card, looked at the designation of opportunity in tamper-proof typefaces, watermarks and official stamps. He saw that the right documents, in order and unquestioned, could change one's future, opening the door on to a luckier world.

The brothers went with the new moon, under a black sky, stepping into the nightmare. Their guide was Cemil, a pale boy of about Ali's age, who didn't own proper boots. He'd walked over the pass many times but never on such a bitter night. The path out of the village ran through fast, meltwater streams and their feet were sodden and icy before they even reached the border hills. They climbed quickly, wary of using a torch, losing their footing on the steep, starlit slopes. The piercing cold cut through their thin jackets. The air was still, every noise echoing for miles in the darkness. Ali looked over his shoulder and searched the sky for the dark disc of absent stars but, as yet, it was too early in the night.

With the altitude, the drifts began to thicken, closing in on them, muffling all sound except the soft crunch of their footsteps.
There were no trees or scrub on the barren slope, no lights below or in front of them. Around midnight, by which time the silent snow blanketed every slope, Cemil lost the path.

With a little fall of heart, the boys pressed together against a boulder to share each other's warmth. Sahar was determined not to retrace their steps. Instead, they'd push straight uphill, toward the pass which must open somewhere above them like a nick in the rocky horizon. But, just as it had obscured the path, the snow hid foot-width fissures and blade-sharp stones. Ali started to lag behind, falling and tearing his trousers, cutting his knee. Their clothes were stiff with dirt and sweat. It took them almost an hour to scale the last few hundred metres to the pass.

Turkey spread below them, ice-black but for the lights of a far-off town. They zigzagged down the slope, trying to make up time, anxious to reach the safe house before dawn. As their legs whirred out of control, a sound rose out of them, half laughter half fear, wild relief in their moment of greatest vulnerability. Then, out of the darkness, the dogs fell on them, outrunning a patrol. Cemil panicked and turned back the way they had come. Sahar and Ali lost their footing, cartwheeled over the lip of a ledge and fell twenty feet into a snow bank. The cold was numbing but the brothers didn't dare to move, barely to breathe – their limbs wrapped around each other, snow crystals in their mouths – as the dogs cantered back and forth along the ridge, trying to pick up the scent. The Turkish guards were close enough for the brothers to hear their breathless voices. When shots were fired into the air, the boys started, nearly giving themselves away. At last, the men moved on and the night fell quiet again. With bare, frozen hands, Sahar and Ali dug out into the bitter air. They fled downhill stooped like chimpanzees, in terror and silence, to the shuttered Kurdish farm.

An hour later, with clothes still wet, they were in a van. Two hours after that, they were on a truck. At a depot in an industrial city, they changed vehicles again, this time into a big trailer, empty but for an Afghan couple and a miserable, red-eyed Iraqi. Sahar and Ali were pleased to have company, sharing out their apricots,
making conversation in broken English. The couple were heading for Denmark. She was pregnant. The Iraqi told them he hated Americans. The transport drove all day and through the night. The brothers tried to sleep, tucked womb-like into a breezy corner, lulled by the engine's pulse and the numbing distance. They took turns gazing through a tear in the tarpaulin at the lights of passing towns. Despite their tiredness, they were excited again, each new destination beckoning, every new place promising them strangers to befriend, hot food to share, a place to sleep. But the driver only stopped once in twelve hours for a meal at a roadside canteen. No one had told the boys the length of each stage of the journey and soon they ran out of water.

Ten days after leaving the roof of the world, they reached sea level in Istanbul. They were given a room in a low-built concrete warehouse, not far from the ferry landing where Penny had first set foot in Asia. But the boys wouldn't have seen her light, even if it had still been burning in the Maiden's Tower. Their window was nailed shut. To pay the rent, they worked downstairs in a pencil factory until the arrival of a second truck of refugees. Only once did they venture out along the narrow asphalt alleys and post a card home, care of the broker in Honest Town, to relay their pride at having reached the Bosphorus. ‘The journey here took longer than expected,' Sahar wrote simply.

Ali added, ‘I miss seeing the moon.'

All week, people arrived – a Syrian, an Azerbaijani, two more Iranians – until there were ten of them snatching brief, static sanctuary behind the bare doors along the dark corridor. Without a word the Afghan woman cooked for them, preparing an evening pan of
pilau
. The frowning men stole back to their cubicles with their portions, eating in solitude like starved animals, feeling grateful and shamed. Later, the woman's husband took up a collection to buy the next day's rice. She was cooking it when a driver came to take them away.

In the van, the Syrian argued for repayment of his dinner money, the meal having been left uneaten. At the depot, the nine men and one woman were led into the trailer and locked inside a hidden
steel cubicle. There was room only for them to sit down – no one could stand or stretch out – so all were thankful that Ali and the woman were quite small. Pallets of tinned fruit and house paint were loaded against the false partition. The doors were sealed by a customs officer. An hour later, a cab was coupled to the trailer. In the pitch darkness the refugees rocked, rolled and tried not to touch on the drive to the port.

Sahar never discovered how the air vent became blocked. Or how long it was until the first of them died. Those who had a watch could not read it in the darkness. The cab's engine had been switched off and their metal cell swayed with the ship's movement.

The woman's breathing was the first to quicken. Between short, shallow gasps she whispered to her husband. He soothed her in intimate, reassuring tones. Then the Iraqi started to cough. Fear rose hot and dry in the metallic air and Sahar's throat. The husband pushed at the door as the walls seemed to contract around them. Other men, it was impossible to tell which ones, also uncurled their limbs and scrabbled forwards. The Syrian started to kick at the door, calling out for help. The woman was now panting, wailing. Sahar clawed at the corner of the door, hoping to find a sliver of an opening, telling Ali to relax and conserve oxygen. Together, they turned their backs on the shouting and pushed their faces into the jamb. Behind them, the others fought for breath, pulled at their throats, died.

Forty hours after leaving Turkey, the steel door was unlocked in a Brindisi warehouse. All the refugees were dead but Sahar. He ran away from the metal tomb and the Italian industrial estate. He left behind his brother's little body. In a central café, he snatched a diner's wallet and bought a rail ticket to Paris. At Calais, he hid beneath an articulated container lorry. He stole in to Britain.

Every year, an estimated 500,000 people are smuggled into Europe in a trade more profitable than drug-trafficking. Few illegal migrants are victims at the start of their journey, apart from women and children trafficked in the sex trade. Most choose to leave home, desperate for the chance to improve their lives. No more than fifty gangs handle the bulk of the world's human trade. Most
illegals reach their destination heavily in their debt. Some are forced to work as prostitutes or ‘soldiers' for the smuggling rings.

So it was for Sahar. His skills made him a valued forger. He paid back his dues without feeling, out of desperation, living on the frayed fringes of society. The once-gentle fruit-farmer's son grasped at whatever handfuls of life came within his reach. He financed his parents' new orchard. He never told them that his beloved brother was dead.

Rubble roads run eastwards toward Dasht-é Kavir, a wasteland of parched riverbeds and salt pans. A sweep of low scrub clings to a gorge cut by the last rain, three years ago. A shepherd in a white shirt, buttoned to the collar, waistcoat and jacket draped over his shoulders, stands at the edge of the desert, his flock far out of sight.

‘Last year, I was arrested in London,' Sahar complains to me, not taking his eyes off the road. ‘The police seized all my equipment and told me I must go to a British prison for two years – or go home. So I came back to drive this taxi. In some months, I'll have enough money again to leave.'

In the sixties, all along the trail, cash-strapped Intrepids sold their passports on the black market, knowing that their embassy would replace them. It was a practice which hadn't died out.

Sahar asks to see my passport. I reach into my money belt and hand it to him, too disturbed by his story to deny him. He turns it over, picks at the corner of my visa, studies the lamination around my photograph. I scrutinize those pale, distant eyes, living a separate life. I notice his hard-lipped mouth, high cheekbones and broad Mongol features.

‘Good quality,' he says. ‘These biometric chips are the new challenge.'

‘Not for sale,' I say.

‘$200,' he smiles, showing his teeth.

Mist-blue and melon-green tulip domes bloom in the desert. Indigo mosaic monuments rise above lines of white poplars. In the soft light of late afternoon, I'm dropped off in the most splendidly
proportioned city in the world. I planned to come to Isfahan to see its sublime Royal Square, but now the story of Sahar's tragic journey – and the desperate need which motivated it – casts a shadow over the city.

In 1934, Isfahan's beauty gave Robert Byron, the English aesthete and travel writer, ‘one of those rare moments of absolute peace, when the body is loose, the mind asks no questions, and the world is a triumph'. Thirty years later, knowledgeable Intrepids came here also to wonder at ‘the pearl of Islam'.

The immense
maidan
spreads beyond a labyrinthine, vaulted bazaar, enclosed by tiered arcades the colour of pale honey. Its two great mosques – with majestic, recessed portals flanked by minarets – are positioned in near-perfect symmetry with the buff, brick Ali Qapu Palace. Byron wrote that the square's beauty lies in the contrast between a formal space and a romantic diversity of buildings. I'm reminded both of St Peter's in Rome, but with none of its bellied weightiness, and a soaring, tiled Jardin des Tuileries.

I walk its half-kilometre length among ice-cream vendors, tourist calèches and picnicking families. Fathers and sons gnaw on cobs of chargrilled corn. Mothers laze on tartan rugs, loosen cumber-some
chadors
, offer a glimpse of red hem or tight denim. Daughters release long braids of brown hair from beneath their scarves, then wade barefoot in the fountains.

Ahead of me is the Masjid-a-Shah mosque, the culmination of a thousand years of Persian architecture, virtually untouched since its completion in 1638. Almost the entire surface of the vast, airy building is covered with exquisite glazed tiles. Swallows sweep across its tranquil inner courtyard, the arc of their flight as elegant as the line of receding arches. In a sunken porch, two young school friends sketch the intricate arabesques, adding dark-blue and golden-yellow watercolour, re-rendering the inscriptions. A caretaker arrives on an old bicycle, his reflection rippling in the wide ablutions pool.