In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda Read Free Book Online Page A

backward he jumped onto a low wall, scaring away a lizard that was enjoying the sun. He was silent for a few minutes, the way he usually was, with his arms folded and his legs crossed. Then he said, Are you sure it’s a good idea?
    I shrugged my shoulders. I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to leave.
    Ba omidi khoda
. I don’t want to stay here either, said Sufi.
    I didn’t say anything, because I was hoping he’d be the one to say it.
    I’m coming with you, Enaiat.
    When we went to talk to the trafficker, in a dark room filled with
taryak
smoke and a whole lot of men drinking
chay
and heating opium on camping stoves, he asked us for the money immediately. But we didn’t have all the money he wanted. We emptied the pockets of our
pirhans
, turning the material inside out, gathered all the coins and crumpled notes we’d managed to save and heaped them on the table in front of him: a little hill of money.
    That’s all we can give you, I said. Not even half a rupee more.
    He looked us up and down for a long time, as if measuring us for a suit. Your little pile of money isn’t even enough to pay for a bus ticket as far as the border, he said.
    Sufi and I looked at each other.
    But there might be a solution, he went on, finishing cutting an apple and lifting a piece of it to his mouth with the knife. I’ll take you to Iran, all right, but in Iran you’ll have to work in a place I know.
    Work? I said. That’s fantastic. I couldn’t believe my ears: not only was he taking us to Iran, he was also going to find us work.
    I’ll take your wages for three or four months, said the trafficker, depending on how much your journey is going to cost me. After that you’ll be able to consider yourselves free and do what you like. Stay there, if you like it. Or leave, if you don’t.
    Sufi was so calm and silent, I half expected him to close his eyes and kneel in prayer. As for me, I was dazed by the smoke and the darkness, and was trying to think what the catch might be, because there’s always a catch with traffickers, but the fact of the matter was, we didn’t have any more money, and he had to pay the Baluchis and the Iranians who would get us across the border, and that was the biggest expense, so he wasn’t completely wrong: we weren’t his children, he didn’t want to lose money on our journey. And besides, I’d introduced myself as not just anybody but a friend of
kaka
Rahim’s, and that reassured me more than anything else.
    Sufi and I said okay.
    Be here, outside the door, tomorrow morning at eight, he said.
Khoda negahdar
.
    At eight. Outside the door. But neither of us had a watch, or rather, neither of us had ever, and I mean ever, owned a watch in our lives. In Nava, to know what time it was, I measured the shadows with my steps and when there was no sun I had to guess. You woke up when it waslight, and you heard the chanting of the muezzin and the crowing of the roosters. In Quetta, the noise of the city going to work would wake me, but never at a particular time. For this reason, Sufi and I had decided not to go to sleep that night.
    We walked around, saying goodbye to the city.
    In the morning the trafficker took us to a place about twenty minutes’ walk away, where we stayed until midday and ate yogurt and cucumbers: I remember it well because it was our last lunch in Pakistan. Then we left.
    First we traveled on a bus as far as the border, a bus with lots of seats. We traveled not as illegals, hidden under the seats, but with tickets like important people. We were very happy. We could never have imagined that our journey to Iran would be so comfortable, and in fact the rest wouldn’t be. But we’d certainly got off to a good start.
    At the border we joined another group of people. In all there were seventeen of us. We got into a Toyota pickup truck: there were four seats in front, which were taken by the trafficker and his companions, while the seventeen of us crammed into the back, packed as tightly