Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  Allah is praised, the Lord of all worlds. The Owner and Giver of Mercy, the King of the Day of Repayment. We serve only You and ask only You for help, guide us the straight path, the path of those You have favoured, not those deserving anger, nor of those who lose their way.

  The bolt slid once more and this time three Baloch men came, one not seen before with tattoos on his face: a moon and stars inside barbed wire. He held a butcher’s knife. The Bengali man’s arms were held and the butcher’s knife was thrust into his side. He froze like a manikin, then slumped and finally cried out. They left without saying anything to anyone. The blood began seeping from him. In the darkness it looked like oil or soup, and for once people were glad they couldn’t see. But they could hear. The man cried out loudly at first, then long and low and continuous, telling the room, ‘I am still alive.’ The Pashtun water boss tore the sleeves from his shalwar to pack the wound, but the Indian cotton was saturated in seconds. He stayed alive for three days. People stood in his blood as they prayed.

  Twelve

  Pakistan-Iran Border

  They had been walking for half the morning, or so it seemed. Farood didn’t have a watch, nor had he been taught how to use one; he read the time in brightness and dimness, the length of shadows. Time, his time, was now in the hands of whatever agent they were to be with on each part of the journey. But that didn’t stop everyone wondering how much longer this was going to go on for. They were in the foothills of Iran’s eastern mountains, the Makran: a Martian-like landscape of ash and reddish rubble, its highest peak a dormant volcano. They were straddling the edge of Persia, the ground sinking beneath them as they walked. Below them ran the highway from Pakistan into Iran – the so-called ‘London Road’ – a drug and human smuggling route into the West. Heroin left Pakistan in the lining of seats and boots and bags and behind headlights. For those who were caught, like the man who has only a piece of bread to his name, or whose family will be murdered if he doesn’t drive the car, the dusty little border town of Taftan is often the last they see of the outside world.

  This particular day the road on the Iranian side was busy with police patrol cars, driving back and forth from the horizon to the town, as if they had repeatedly forgotten then remembered something. Ordered out of cars a kilometre east of the town, Farood and the others had been handed over to an Iranian agent who had then led them into the hills on foot. The agent was a short, barrel-chested, swarthy-faced man, who carried a stick and a Bulgarian-made Arcus pistol. Following and watching him attentively was an unpredictable Rottweiler dog. The agent had met the two cars where they had run out of road, handed over three cartons of water to the occupants without saying a word and made for the mountains. They had been in his company for the best part of a morning, but he was yet to speak a word to the eight illegals he was dragging towards a better life. Before the overnight car journey from Quetta, anyone not in Western clothes had been made to change, all except the Hazaras.

  The Makran was an ocean of crevices, crags and caves. Although it was winter, by noon the pinkish rocks were warm to the touch. Prickly ash and grit scratched at their ankles. There was no wind, even at altitude. They progressed in a ragged single file with Farood in front, close behind the agent. Behind him was Misha, then Jamal, then the Hazara woman, striding ahead of her son, who was running to catch her but afraid of leaving his grandfather too far behind. Next were the two Bengalis whose companion had died beside them in the room in Quetta. They had been rickshaw cyclists and the taller one, like a lot of rickshaw men, carried a pronounced limp. His name was Padman and he had been towing people round Chittagong since the age of twelve, stricken by osteoarthritis by the time he was twenty-five. By mid-morning his limp had become a swing and the swelling around his knee could be seen bulging underneath the denim. He was at the back of the line and the agent’s dog ran up and down, herding him along.

  Misha delved into his chewing gum supply and wiped his sunglasses on his baggy white tee shirt. There was snow on the peaks above them, but the sun in the foothills had them trekking in twenty degrees.

  ‘So, where will you live, Turkmen?’ Jamal asked Misha.

  ‘In Athens. Eventually I’ll run a restaurant.’

  ‘You have a restaurant in mind?’

  ‘The first one I see, I walk in, I offer to wash dishes, take out the rubbish, whatever they want. Then I offer to cook, whatever they want, whenever they want. They make me their chef, I make a name for the restaurant, for myself, for my food. One day I open my own place.’

  Jamal conceded with a few nods of his head.

  Misha halted. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me, I don’t have any dreams.’

  Misha shook a forefinger by way of correction. ‘Dreams are no use; they always stay dreams. Ambitions is what I have. And I’m going to achieve them.’

  The dog trotted up to them with a look of disapproval. They carried on. Water provision was tribal and thus uneven: Jamal carried a carton for the three from Baghlan, the Hazaras had their own, as did the two Bengalis. The Iranian agent had his own flask; what the others did was not his concern. It was up to people to keep themselves alive. Farood believed that if he kept close to the agent, he would win his respect, so he walked in competition with the dog. He wanted to show the agent he was not like the Bengalis or the Hazaras; he was tough and he could walk in his sleep. In the family treks to pasture the sheep, his father had praised his son’s growing stamina whilst Karam shouted, ‘You’re sure you don’t want me to carry you?’ The family would walk for three days, beyond the temple ruins of Sorkh Kowtal, as far as Kondoz, with four to five hundred sheep, until they found enough grass for a month. They slept under Russian tents, impregnable to the wind on the plain.

  His father once showed him the ruins of a Shia warlord’s house, destroyed by the Taliban. ‘Afghans kings are always killed in the end.’

  The Iranian had walked many Afghans through the Makran, admittedly never one so young as Farood before, but the boy’s spirit just reinforced the agent’s view of the Sunnis to the east; they were mal, animals. Even the Shia Hazaras were unworthy of respect, and when the grandfather halted for his noon prayers, the dog barked and the Iranian waved his stick at the grandfather. ‘Move, mal!’

  ‘Leave him!’ exclaimed his daughter in Farsi the agent understood.

  So, he did. He stepped up his pace. Losing one or two in the mountains was inevitable.

  It was noon and yet there was no sign of the car below that would take these people to Shiraz. There were, however, police vehicles on the highway. The agent whipped his stick against his leg, then against the rocks and then the dog. From a side pocket halfway down his combat trousers, he took out a paperback book, a novel; opening it midway his eyes traced the right-hand page until they reached a point he marked with his thumb. He then sat down and shut himself in. The Rottweiler also rested.

  Presently all the illegals arrived and stood in front of him awaiting instructions, too frightened to sit. ‘Wait here!’ he said, brushing out his hand, eyes to his book.

  Every few minutes he would cup his hands around his eyes and scan the highway below. Once or twice he sprang to his feet, believing this might be the car. Misha and Farood looked with him. Misha offered the agent his sunglasses. The agent examined them and put them on.

  ‘You get a bit of glare,’ volunteered Misha.

  ‘You think so?’ said the agent.

  He raised them on to his forehead and returned to his book.

  ‘May I have them back, please?’

  The agent’s lips silently traced the prose on the page.

  ‘I’m going to need them in Athens.’

  ‘Shush,’ commanded the agent.

  The Hazara boy was searching for breath and holding back his tears. ‘Why won’t you wait for me?’ he asked his mother, standing beneath her unsure eyes until his grandfather swept him up with his arm and kiss
ed the back of his head. Once he would’ve laughed, as would Farood, remembering how his father’s long arm had pulled him out of a river when he had waded in to his waist to save a lamb.

  The Hazaras’ two-pint water carton was nearly empty. The Bengalis were sweating more than the rest and looked exhausted. The younger one asked Padman about his leg; he nodded, stood on the other leg and slowly revolved his knee before taking out a jar of liniment which he began pressing in, breathing slowly as he did. Farood was leaning under an outcrop opposite the Hazara boy, who was sheltered by his grandfather. He was tucked inside the old man’s arm, his eyes shut tight, shaking a little in silence, tears held behind his eyelids.

  ‘I’m called Farood.’

  ‘His name is Hassan,’ his mother shouted.

  ‘Hassan, walk at the front with me. You walk the same distance as everyone else, but you feel less tired because no one is in front of you.’

  A muffled reply came from inside his grandfather’s embrace. ‘I can’t walk that fast.’

  His mother walked over and dried his eyes. ‘Why don’t you do that, Hassan? Walk in front of me?’

  He nodded.

  ‘We will be the leaders,’ Farood told him.

  Farood lay down, folding an arm around himself like a cat’s tail. Hours passed. Shadows distended. The agent watched every plume of dust on the road below, but it was never the right one.

  He had almost finished his paperback when Jamal walked up to him. ‘Be sure to let us know what happens in the end.’

  ‘In the end, either the agent from Shiraz comes or you die up here.’

  He folded the page, closed his book; the dog stirred and they began walking again.

  For a while the terrain made it barely possible; crevices aspired to be gorges and everything underfoot was hostile, cut by ice and wind. Nowhere was flat; people were scrambling, climbing, sometimes falling. The Bengalis took it slow; Padman lowering himself down the jumps and dragging himself up the rises, pushing everything off his right leg. They lost sight of the others, Jamal glancing back impassively for the last time. He understood how people could decide to lie down and give up. Hassan’s mother was close by her son now.

  As dusk began to emerge, they finally reached a gap in the hills, the land dipping away in all directions to smaller hills and eventually to the open plain. Beneath them to their right, a shallow, dried-up river valley meandered towards the highway. The Iranian halted. His dog turned to do a head count and half a dozen desert larks burst free from the rocks at their feet.

  He sipped from his hip flask and then pointed to the ground, confiding in Farood. ‘We will stay here tonight.’

  Farood brought the news to the others as they arrived. They questioned him.

  ‘Where? Stay where?’

  ‘Sleep on a mountain?’

  The younger Bengali grabbed him by the shirt. ‘Go tell the Iranian, we didn’t pay to walk to London.’

  But the agent wasn’t taking questions; he was talking to Farood and only Farood.

  An inky blue wash was bleeding through the remains of an orange light. More buoyant than the rest, Farood found Hassan in the twilight and put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Hassan, come with me; we will find a place to sleep.’

  Farood led him away from the group and eventually levered himself up onto a smooth platform. Lying on his front, he lowered his arm for Hassan. They were about twenty feet above the others and a breeze fell onto their faces.

  ‘I have slept in mountains lots of times. Have you?’

  Hassan shook his head, guiltily, but he could also tell there was no cover on this tabletop of stone and wondered if this Pashtun was even more of a fool than the rest of his tribe. Farood was peeking between boulders, pushing his nose into shadows. Doesn’t he know a cave when he sees one? Does he think I’m a lizard? Suddenly Farood, who had been no more than a yard away, had disappeared.

  ‘Farood! Farood!’

  Hassan was surprised to find himself in a panic and then amazed to find himself peering into cracks to see the source of the cries from below.

  ‘Hassan, Hassan… underneath!’

  Farood had slid down a three-foot-wide, thirty-degree slot into a hole with a sandy basin and a skylight. It was the most perfect of cave-cum-traps. Better, even, than anything he had been in with his father or brother on their summer months in Kondoz.

  ‘Hassan, come down here. We can sleep here.’

  Farood crawled back up to show Hassan he would not be trapped.

  ‘It’s dry and with plenty of room.’

  Hassan was suddenly sucked the other way. Peering over the rim of the hollow, Farood looked into the face of Hassan’s mother, who was squatting with both hands firmly on Hassan’s tunic. ‘Leave him alone, he’s not going into any hole with you.’

  ‘It will be safer and warmer down here.’

  ‘Safer than what? He’s not some rat.’

  ‘My father was killed too.’

  But they were gone and he had no idea why he had said that. Alone, he lay down in the basin, looking up to the crescent moon. They will be cold out there tonight, he thought, and then they will wish they are in my cave. If they asked, he wouldn’t let them in. This was the first time he had slept in a cave alone; before he had been with his father, lying next to him on a sheepskin. With a skylight like this Father would have lit a fire. And his mother would’ve made flatbread as Father told him how he fought the Russians and reminded him once more that three of his brothers, three of the boy’s uncles, had been killed in one day. This is what his family had given up for his land; now he had left it behind – perhaps he deserved to be hidden away in a hole.

  The sky in the skylight became a shroud of darkness. Farood dug out the stones from the sand to make a profile for his body as the warmth of the day evaporated. He slept, and as he did, he felt his father’s fingers envelop his hand – they were icy and he awoke wondering why there was no fire. Alone, he brought his knees up to his chest.

  Dawn arrived with gunfire: a drawn-out stutter, like the slow closing of a corrugated shutter over a distant shop. Then a whole street of shutters. In between the gunfire the revving of a jeep could be heard. He climbed up the spout and crawled across the rocks, wet with dew. There were soldiers on both banks of a gulley – Iranian commandos dressed from head to foot in black, the noses of their assault rifles jerking as they advanced, tarantula-like, downhill. Under their fire a bronze jeep began to sway and slow, and a man riding in the back toppled and spilled out as if he had fallen asleep. Another man jumped out from the front and immediately fell to his knees with his hands above his head. He faced up the bank towards his captors; the commandoes raced down towards him. Three of them circled him, then their nozzles flicked up and the brisk crackles reached Farood as the man sank to the dust. The commandoes had come through the mountains and, like illegals, had probably slept the night there awaiting the drug traffickers.

  Whilst Farood and the others watched on, the Iranian agent searched the road below to the west, ignoring the gunfire. There at last was the car, the white VW Estate, winking its headlights at him. He waved back, but the light continued to flash recklessly up the mountain.

  Padman felt obliged to point something out. ‘He hasn’t seen you.’ Padman hoisted himself onto a boulder above the agent and waved in long semaphore swings.

  ‘Get down, you idiot. You want to let the soldiers know we’re here?’

  Padman could not decode the warning and began to yell. The dog pounced onto the boulder to enforce his master’s command.

  ‘I’ve done enough mountain-climbing in Iran for now,’ continued Padman.

  The agent dragged Padman off his pedestal. The dog remained until a rifle crack jolted its hindquarters sideways. It yelled for its master, tried to grip the rock with its front legs, but the dead weight of it rear-dragged the rest of it down the precipice t
owards the road below. The agent and Padman ducked down. The agent knew the commandoes would have spotted the car by now and would be deciding whether to radio in their corpses or advance on the illegals. The agent pointed his pistol at Padman’s head then pointed it at the distance behind him. The agent strode off, back in the direction of Taftan, where they had started from the day before.

  The walk back down took less than half the time. That was the only mercy. It was only a four-hour walk without any water. Around noon they arrived at a barn about two kilometres east of the border town. They were in Pakistan once more. Inside the barn the air was thin, as after a fire; there were some dusty foam mattresses and army-issue rough blankets. Jamal and Farood shared a mattress, Misha lay on the stone ground, Hassan slept in his mother’s lap. The two Bengalis were slumped in the corner, Padman holding his knee with his eyes shut. The Iranian agent was outside, making a telephone call. His routine had been disrupted and he had lost his dog, a companion and a workmate, so he was phoning in a contingency. This was by no means a difficult part of the overall journey to Milan, or to Athens or to London, but Iran was working hard to make it more difficult. They were building a wall, miles long, either side of Taftan. And since bandits had acquired fleets of 4x4s to cart heroin through the Makran, Iran had sent commandoes to ambush them.

  The agent’s contingency arrived within the hour: a jeep with water, flatbreads and eggs, driven by a man in a leather jacket with a rifle. Farood guessed he was the agent’s son. His face was sullener than his father’s, angry at being summoned, but he obeyed his father all the same. He had brought with him enough water for people not to squabble over and while some gulped and others drank slowly, father and son conferred in a corner.

  ‘Up! Up!’ The agent flicked his finger. ‘Get up!’

  Padman, the rickshaw man, couldn’t make it; his friend walked over to the Iranian and pointed to his own knee, shaking his head.