The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (18 page)

But he would also want to tell the young African
that life was too precious to be risked, and that it would do him no good to reach Europe dead, whether drowned in the sea, or asphyxiated in a cramped hiding place inside a delivery van, or poisoned in the tank of a fuel truck. The Indian thought again about a story told to him by Assefa, about some Chinese people that the police had found piled ten high in the seven-square-foot false ceiling of a bus, all of them wearing incontinence diapers to piss in. And some Eritreans who had been forced to call the police themselves with a mobile phone because they were suffocating inside a truck, having been locked in there by a human trafficker. Because for the traffickers, who made money from the vulnerability of migrants, all that mattered was the price. A price that could range from €2,000 to €10,000, depending on which border was being crossed. They were paid for the result, and so, as the result was that the migrants reached their destination, it didn’t really matter whether they did so whole or chopped into little pieces, or whether the first thing they saw in the good country was a hospital room. If they were lucky.

Ajatashatru remembered how he had felt when he fell into the sea in his hot-air balloon: the fear of dying alone and anonymous, of never being found, of vanishing from the surface of
the Earth under a single wave, like being erased from a page, just like that. The young black man almost certainly had a family waiting for him somewhere, on this continent, on this side of the great divide. He could not die. He must not die.

The Indian wanted to say all of this to him. But he didn’t. The crowds of people had stopped looking at the young man and were going about their business like ants. Ajatashatru glanced toward the sentry box. The soldiers were still laughing heartily inside their fish bowl. If they didn’t rob him, it would be the captain who had brought him here who would soon come rushing from his ship like a fury, his eyes filled with hate and greed, giving the signal to all the mercenaries who were hanging around here—and Buddha knew there were plenty of them! He could not stay here.

Ajatashatru took out one of the €500 notes that he had kept in his pocket and walked straight toward the guard post. On the way, he brushed past the young black man and let the note fall to the ground next to him, whispering “Good luck” into his beard, though the young man surely didn’t hear him.

But he’d done it. He had helped someone. His first human. And it had been disconcertingly easy.

Having achieved this, Ajatashatru was overcome by a feeling of well-being, as if a radiant little vapor cloud had appeared inside his chest, and was spreading throughout his body, to the end of each limb. Soon, the cloud enveloped him completely and Ajatashatru felt as if he were floating up from the dusty ground of Tripoli’s harbor on an enormous and extremely comfortable armchair. It was easily the best levitation he had ever performed. And it was also the fifth electric shock he received to his heart during this adventure.

He would have risen into the Libyan sky, above the border patrol and the barbed-wire fence of the port, if, at that moment, a loud voice had not hailed him from behind. Startled, he fell back to Earth with a bump.

It took Ajatashatru a few seconds to react.

Behind his back, the voice spoke again.

“Hey!”

This is it, I’m really done for now, the Indian thought. The ship’s captain must have sent his henchmen after me. His heart began to bang like a tambourine inside his chest. What should he do? Turn around as if everything were fine? Ignore the voice and run like crazy toward the exit? They would catch him easily.

“Hey, Aja!”

At first, the Indian thought he must have misheard.

“Oh gosh!”

Ajatashatru turned his head slowly. Who was this person who knew not only his first name but his second name too?

“Aja, don’t be scared—it’s me!”

Finally, the writer recognized that cavernous voice that he had heard for the first time through
the door of a wardrobe in a swaying truck. That powerful voice which had told him all its owner’s secrets without even trembling.

It was really him.

It was Assefa.

Ajatashatru was almost in tears. His lips stretched into a wide smile and the two men leapt into each other’s arms.

It was with mixed feelings that he saw his friend again. On the one hand, the Indian was happy to finally see a familiar face in a part of the world where everything was strange. But on the other hand, if Assefa was here, that meant he was not in Spain, or in France, that he was not about to cross the border into England as he had imagined. And that made the Indian sad.

“Ajatashatru, you have an amazing knack for turning up where I don’t expect to see you!” exclaimed the big African, ending their hug with a pat on the shoulder.

“The world is a handkerchief, as the Spanish say. An Indian silk handkerchief.”

“It seems as if things are going well for you,” said Assefa, nodding at the Indian’s new suit and his briefcase. “You look like a wealthy Indian industrialist. Where did you come from?”

Ajatashatru pointed to the
Malevil
.

“That ship is coming from Italy!” Assefa said, baffled. “Aren’t you going in the wrong direction?”

The ex-fakir explained for the third time in his life that, unlike Assefa, he was not an illegal alien and he was not attempting to reach England.

“Listen,” he said to the African, who was looking at him skeptically, “I owed you an explanation in the truck. For reasons that you know about, I wasn’t able to tell you my story. But now, fate has brought us back together, and I think the moment has come.”

“
Mektoub,”
said Assefa. “It was written.”

The two men sat at a table in a seedy bar in the port area, sipping warm beer and taking refuge from the soldiers and the tumultuous chaos of the city, and had a heart-to-heart.

Having left Barcelona, Assefa, who was now traveling alone, had been retracing his footsteps, at the mercy of international readmission agreements. He had been sent flying from country to country as if he were a grenade with the pin removed. First Algeria, then Tunisia, and finally Libya. Which was a little odd, as he had not been through any of these countries on his original journey. But whatever … All that mattered to the authorities was to pass this problem on to someone else as quickly as possible. You might even say that they had succeeded in inventing their gigantic immigrant catapult.

The African, who would never give up—because going back to Sudan empty-handed would be not only an immense humiliation and a personal failure, but also a flagrant waste of
money for his village, which had gone into debt to pay for his journey—was now getting ready to cross the Mediterranean again for the small Italian island of Lampedusa. It was so frustrating when you thought about it! Only a few days before, he had been standing in the promised land of Great Britain. He had got there. If only the police hadn’t stopped that damn truck …

“But, you know, there’s always someone worse off than you. During one of those repatriation flights, I talked with a Chinese guy who told me how they had to pay an astronomical amount to get to Europe by plane, with high-quality false passports, and when they reached France they had to work all day and all night in illegal sweatshops in a Paris suburb to pay back their trafficker. And because the Chinese place so much importance on the culture of respect, they don’t even try to escape, they don’t say ‘Screw you’ and run away. They would lose face and it would be a great humiliation for them not to pay back the cost of their passage. It’s a sort of moral obligation. So they sit down at their sewing machines and work. Apart from the pretty girls, who are not so lucky. The girls are locked away in filthy apartments and forced to prostitute themselves to pay for their journey to this
heaven, which soon turns out to be a shortcut to hell.”

Assefa said all of this, apparently unaware that the same thing happens to young African girls.

“So, you see, there’s always someone worse off,” he concluded. “White, black, yellow … all of us are in the same boat.”

“I don’t know who is the worst off, Assefa, but I’m pretty sure most white people are not in the same boat.”

“So what about you, Aja? I want to hear your story now.”

The Indian swallowed a mouthful of warm beer and, as they had plenty of time, began at the beginning.

“I was born between the tenth and the fifteenth of January 1974 (no one knows the exact date) in Jaipur, in India. My mother died giving birth to me. A life for a life. That is often the price of a baby for someone from a poor family. My father, incapable of looking after a kid on his own, sent me to live with his sister, the mother of my favorite cousin, Parthasarathy (who is like a brother to me). My aunt, Fuldawa (pronounced
Fold-away
), lived in the little village of Kishanyogoor, on the border with Pakistan, in
the desert of Tharthar. That is where I grew up, in the middle of nowhere. But my aunt thought of me as one more mouth to feed rather than a real member of the family, so she did everything she could to make me feel unwanted. That’s why I was always holed up with the next-door neighbor, Adishree, who raised me like I was her own son. It can’t have been easy for her. I was a wild child, although also curious and affectionate. Lulled by the tales she invented for me, I dreamed about becoming a writer or a storyteller myself. At the time, we hardly had enough to eat. We had no money. We lived like cavemen. One day, an Englishman who was passing through—a geologist who was studying the Tharthar Desert; the only guy I’ve ever met who was interested in a pile of sand—showed me a cigarette lighter, and gave it to me in exchange for a blow job. Back then, I had no idea what a cigarette lighter was, never mind a blow job. I was only nine years old. I did eventually learn what it was, and that it was bad. But I had already been thoroughly abused by then. Anyway, the Englishman made little sparks burst from his thumb, and I found that magical. A beautiful blue flame appeared, there in the middle of the desert. He could see that I was interested in the object. ‘You want it, don’t you?’ he asked me. And that was how I found
myself on my hands and knees between his legs, doing something I didn’t understand, happy at the thought that I would receive this magical object in return. I sucked a guy off for a cigarette lighter! Can you believe it? A fucking lighter! And I was just a kid. That makes me want to throw up. So, anyway, one blow job later, I ran off to show the lighter to my friends. You always have a feeling of superiority when you perform a magic trick. Simply because you are the only one who knows the secret. And because people admire you. That feeling quickly becomes an addiction, believe me. Me, a poor kid from the desert, being admired … can you imagine? And so I became a fakir. I was so good at ripping off the people in town, especially the intelligent ones! Because intelligent people are easier to fool. They are sure of themselves, so they don’t pay attention. They think nobody can make a fool of them. And, just like that, you’ve got ’em! Their self-confidence is their undoing. It’s different with the idiots. They’re used to people thinking they’re stupid, so as soon as they come across a smooth talker, they’re immediately on their guard. They analyze all your movements. They never let you out of their sight. They don’t let anything go. And so, paradoxically, it is much harder to confuse them. Robert-Houdin said
that. A French magician. And he was right. But, anyway, during my adolescence, I lived for a while with a venerable Rajasthani yogi. I learned everything from him. The art of eating packs of fifty-two cards (I was a difficult kid: I only ever ate Bicycle-brand cards), of walking on cinders and broken glass, of piercing my body with kitchen utensils, and providing my master with good blow jobs, as instructed. I concluded that this was just the standard way of showing your appreciation to grown-ups. I devoured every book written on the subject (magic, I mean, not blow jobs): Houdini, Robert-Houdin, Thurston, Maskelyne. I made a rope dance with the sound of my flute, then climbed up it and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. I was so skillful that people soon came to believe I had supernatural powers. I became a demigod in the village. If only they’d known … In reality, my only power was to avoid being found out! But, anyway, my reputation took me, at the age of twenty-five, to the golden palace of the maharaja Abhimanyu Ashanta Nhoi, where I was hired as a fakir and jester. My job was to entertain the court. By any means necessary. So I lived a life of falsehood and trickery. And that trickery soon turned against me. I had to play the part, you see. As it was much more spectacular to claim that I lived
on a diet of rusty screws and nails, rather than ordinary food, well, that was all they gave me to eat. I was dying of hunger. I lasted a week. One day, unable to take it anymore, I stole a few bits of food from the kitchen and devoured them in secret. They caught me red-handed. The maharaja was appalled. Not because I had stolen, but because I had lied. I had taken him for a fool, basically, and that was difficult for a man of his rank to accept. First they shaved off my mustache, the supreme humiliation, and then the maharaja asked me to choose between teaching schoolchildren about the perils of theft and crime, or having my right hand cut off. ‘After all, a fakir fears neither pain nor death,’ he said to me with a big smile. Naturally, I opted for the first solution. To thank him for giving me a choice of punishment, I offered him a blow job. My intention was wholly innocent. Wasn’t this how adults were thanked? Nobody had told me it was bad. I was still a virgin. Outraged, he literally kicked me out of the palace. I understand that now. When I think about it, I feel ashamed. Penniless, I began working as a wandering con man. I cheated everyone: my own people, tourists, everyone I saw. Recently, I made everyone believe that it was essential for me to buy the latest bed of nails from Ikea. And they all fell
for it! I could have told them I was going off to find the Golden Fleece. The whole village contributed. Of course, I don’t sleep on a bed of nails. I have a nice, cozy bed hidden in a wardrobe in my living room. But I thought I could sell it afterward. Perhaps it was just a whim, I don’t know, or perhaps I just wanted to see how far those gullible idiots would go to pay for anything I wanted. The village went into debt for me, just like yours did for you, Assefa. But with me, it was just trickery. Selfishness. I didn’t want to help anyone. People I had known since childhood gave me money when they didn’t even have enough to eat. All in the hope of helping me, helping this demigod I had become. But this journey has changed me. I am no longer the same person. First there was your story, which moved me deeply, and there have been other encounters, caused by the unexpected events that have marked my journey: finding love with Marie (I’ll tell you later), making friends with Sophie (ditto). And then the eighty-five thousand euros in this briefcase. Hang on, don’t look at me like that, Assefa, I’m going to tell you about that too.”