Breach

by Olumide Popoola

  They all drift off. Farrukh is thinking about his own father.

  ‘I had no option. The Taliban came for me too. My mum told them I wasn’t home. But she knew they would eventually find me. So she told me to leave and get to the UK.’

  Farrukh puts his hand on Ramzi’s shoulder. Ramzi smiles at him, his eyes narrowed. Farrukh pats him on the back.

  ‘I’ll be right back, need to take a leak.’

  It’s dark but Farrukh knows his way around. The sporadic fires, for cooking and to keep warm, help.

  Here is the mound that leads to the clearing. It is quiet at this end of the camp. Mainly family tents. Farrukh climbs over the rise and waits. The barber’s shack stands tall; its white walls are visible even now. Enitan’s place is not that obvious, it blends into the night. He steps carefully until he touches one of the corner poles with outstretched hands. His breathing is quick. Weird. He didn’t run, he didn’t even rush down here, there is no reason. He takes a few mouthfuls of air, looks around. Tents and shacks are sticking out against the night sky. The air feels good after the stuffy café. He moves his foot along the bottom of the construction to the opening that will become the door. It’s easier to step over there. He doesn’t need anything in particular but he knows he needs something, here and now.

  His phone shines a dim light onto the grass in the middle of the hut-to-be.

  ‘What is it you want?’

  The voice surprises him. He stumbles and falls onto his backside.

  Enitan’s friend is sitting in almost the same position that he did in the afternoon. Only now he is inside the blue tent that matches his jacket. A torch is switched on, throwing his shadow against the thin walls.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he repeats. He looks as tired and beaten as earlier, opening the zipper. But he doesn’t look shy.

  ‘Nothing.’ They stare at each other while Farrukh backs away slowly. ‘Thought I’d lost my screwdriver here earlier.’

  ‘You did not have a screwdriver. You said Enitan has to give you his stuff.’

  ‘Borrow.’

  ‘He said no.’

  ‘My mistake.’

  ‘Don’t come back here.’

  ‘Or what?’

  Farrukh can’t help himself.

  Enitan’s friend comes out of the tent. Farrukh scrambles down the rise, his head pounding. Some guys, so full of themselves, no consideration, just trying to get ahead themselves. Not like Enitan bought the stuff himself. It didn’t really belong to him.

  Ramzi and Sébastien are still talking. A couple of others have joined them. There is a plate of food between them. Farrukh is sweating. He brushes off the grass from his trousers, his fingers shaking. Ramzi introduces him to the new crowd that has joined them.

  ‘Farrukh? Old-fashioned,’ a plump guy observes.

  ‘Yep. Mum named me after some poet.’

  Farrukh’s eyes focus on the entrance to the café; he’s pulling at his collar.

  ‘You know any of his work?’

  ‘No.’ Farrukh is still avoiding him. ‘Like you said, old-fashioned.’

  ‘Come on,’ the plump guy challenges. ‘You must know something –’

  Boom!

  The air splits. An explosion rattles the tent. For a second there is nothing, just silence, then the shouting starts, the sound of falling debris. Everyone runs outside and down the street towards the flames.

  *

  ‘Careful, careful.’

  People run with water and help to pull whatever they can out of the fire. It’s busy, consuming everything in its way. There are orange flames: they reach into the sky, jumping to a nearby tent.

  ‘No one is hurt so far, but watch it, everyone.’

  People are shouting and scattering the burning things to starve the fire. Farrukh walks back to the café. The cook returns behind the counter.

  ‘Too dangerous here.’

  ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘Let me know if the fire spreads. I’m taking care of the food here, otherwise I would be helping.’

  ‘There are enough people. Nothing you can do anyway. Already contained.’

  ‘Dangerous place. This time we’re lucky.’

  ‘Guess so.’

  Farrukh sits back down. It’s completely empty inside. The cook hands him another tea.

  ‘Don’t worry. No one is hurt. Tomorrow it will be repaired, you’ll see.’

  ‘Sure.’

  It takes a while until the others return. The plump guy comes straight over and pats Farrukh on his back.

  ‘Always fires, so easy here.’ He sits down next to him. ‘A poem would help us all now, you know.’

  ‘Don’t think so. Told you it was my mum, I don’t even know nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’ The café is filling up with smoke again. ‘For us. For tonight.’

  Farrukh is not going to make a fool of himself, not here, not now. Ramzi and Sébastien arrive. Ramzi is all over the place, his eyes wide open again.

  Farrukh shifts on the platform. ‘Fire out yet?’

  ‘Almost.’

  The plump guy tries again, but Farrukh doesn’t look like he is going to change his mind. So the plump guy stands up, raises both arms, then lowers the left hand down on his heart. His voice carries over the noise in the small shack. Words about the sky, and descending, abandoned, into exile.

  ‘Do you know it?’ Ramzi whispers to Farrukh. ‘It’s that poet he was talking about.’

  ‘Probably.’ Farrukh leans closer. ‘My father disappeared as well. Just went missing. No one knows where.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The things he said. I was young, I don’t know everything. But in my country you can’t even change your religion. That’s why my mum doesn’t want me to come.’

  The plump guy is stepping forward, his eyes closed now, making a show of it. The men laugh but their eyes are fixed on him. His face is full of it. Dramatic pauses. These things resonate, the memories, fate, all that brought them here. Especially when the longing is heavy in each word. Exile.

  When he stops, the last sentence hanging in the air, the whole shop starts clapping. Sébastien looks even younger, his face glowing.

  ‘What happened? You were gone for a while.’

  Ramzi is acting like they’re good friends now. The plump guy shakes a fist and thanks his audience.

  ‘Well done. My mum would be proud.’ Farrukh raises his palm and they slap their hands together.

  Ramzi can’t leave it, leans over again. ‘Where did you disappear to?’

  The men go back to their little groups, mood raised. A poet, here, now, in between all the smoke, inside and outside.

  It’s not like they are friends, really. He doesn’t owe Ramzi anything. Least of all an explanation.

  ‘To take a piss, like I said.’

  Oranges in the River

  I. THE SAME SKY

  Refrigerated trucks are the best bet. If the smuggler is skilful, if he can open the padlock to let them in and then close it again so that no one can tell it’s been tampered with, then the police are less likely to check a freezer than any other kind of truck. But fate is frowning down on Dlo with heavy eyebrows. The freezer door isn’t even open yet and Dlo’s breath is already seizing up, coming in quick, shallow gasps.

  ‘With my luck,’ he says, ‘the driver will lower the thermostat. We’ll die.’

  ‘You’d rather live in the camp for ever?’ Jan asks him.

  He wants to shout but they must murmur. If the smuggler hears them, they’re in trouble. And if the truck drivers hear them, the whole night is a bust.

  ‘Trust me,’ Jan says into his friend’s ear. ‘How’s my luck, Dlo? Tell me. My luck is good, right? So trust me.’

  He holds Dlo’s skinny shoulders in his big hands He grips them through to the bones. His luck is strong like his hands are strong. He’d carry his friend if he could. He’d breathe for him.

  In the four hours they’ve been waiting, Jan has kept still while the cold
has risen like a river, icing his wet feet and climbing his ankles, then his calves, then his knees. Jan wants to stamp feeling back into his feet but he’s learned to shiver instead, to make no sound. Beside him, Dlo trembles. Fear and cold, both, Jan thinks.

  Clouds cover the sliver of moon. They can hear rather than see the smuggler at work on the padlock, the faint clicks of the screwdriver on metal. They wait for the louder clank of success as the shackle releases. Instead, one of the smugglers loses his grip on the wrench and it clatters against the metal door. A trucker shouts out. The smuggler is on his feet and gone, sprinting with his partner into the darkness. Jan, Dlo and the others dart away too, taking different directions, truckers shouting behind them as they crash through the wet bushes.

  Arrive together, flee on your own.

  There’s a kind of freedom in moving at last after the hours of waiting, the beat of blood in Jan’s ears, the thud of his feet on the ground, but it never lasts long, this exhilaration. He runs and runs, as he has on so many other nights, until he must stop. Where is he? No compass, and he dare not switch on his mobile for GPS. The rest of the night stretches ahead of him, endless, empty of anything but cold and confusion. Where’s the damn moon, his only clue? He listens for cars or trains or people. As he trudges along, fists jammed into damp pockets, he tries the usual memory games, but they’re fading with overuse. He can’t conjure up the idea of sunshine and heat – they’re some fantasy he once read about somewhere. Like home. Like Hasakah. While his feet walk France, he’s remembering the neighbourhood square. Himself and Dlo, fourteen years old? Fifteen, sixteen? Half a lifetime ago. They’re out after midnight, free under the street lights, sprawled on the tiered seats, replaying Real Madrid’s latest match move by move, waving their arms, jumping up to celebrate. Teenage Dlo munches on cashew nuts, offers the bag. Jan shakes his head. Grins in the French dark and shakes his thirty-two-year-old head. Dlo and his cashews.

  At last Jan sees the fierce white fences that line the railway tracks and the road to the ferries, spotlit in the dark winter dawn. In the shadows below the motorway, the camp. He and Dlo often laugh about this moment, finding the camp after a night’s wandering, the relief of being back in this sorry collection of tents and huts.

  ‘It’s like we found Canada!’

  ‘Hello, New York!’

  Will Dlo already be back in their tent, trying to fall asleep in his wet clothes, or is he, Jan, the first to get home and Dlo still walking?

  At the edge of the camp, Jan switches on his mobile to read the anxious texts from his mother. She doesn’t sleep until she hears from him. He and Dlo, fully night creatures now, will sleep much of the day and into the afternoon, and Jan hopes his mother can too.

  He types: I am safe, Mama, under the same sky. Go to sleep now.

  II. BONJOUR!

  The truck is parked off the road, in a lay-by beside a river, almost half a kilometre away from the place where the truckers eat and sleep. Ideal. But it’s another freezer truck and Dlo’s panic is rising.

  ‘It’s not a meat truck,’ Jan tells him. ‘It’s not meat and it’s not fish, so it won’t be too cold.’

  ‘Minus four or minus six maybe,’ says one of the others, ‘but not minus ten or minus thirteen.’

  They speak a little louder than usual, the five men standing in the shadows while the smugglers open the truck.

  ‘And Dlo, if it’s too bad, if you can’t breathe, we just bang on the side,’ Jan says. ‘Right, guys?’

  The others nod. The smugglers aren’t Kurdish but one understands enough. He turns from the truck door to threaten Jan.

  ‘You bang,’ he says in English, ‘I lose money.’

  Jan says nothing.

  ‘You make me lose money,’ the smuggler says, ‘I’ll find you.’

  He’s young, this guy, skinny, maybe around twenty-two years old. He doesn’t need to make his threat more specific. Everyone in the camp has heard stories about a fool who crossed a smuggler, or one who didn’t pay – how the smuggler found the double-crosser in the camp and beat him, how another smuggler found the family of the man who didn’t pay and forced them to hand over double. You hate them and fear them, the smugglers, and you have no chance without them. Smugglers got Jan and Dlo from Iraq and Turkey – no way to cross directly from Syria into Turkey, the border guards shoot you if you try – and then, after days in Istanbul and Izmir, and days crossing Turkey, it was more smugglers who got them into the dinghy and across the sea to the Greek island, a gang of them, Kurds together. And a smuggler was a priority when they reached Calais all those weeks ago, Jan and Dlo. Other refugees showed them where to go to get a tent, where to line up for a coat, for boots, for a meal, but no one wanted to introduce them to a smuggler. Suspicion clouded the air. Who was a spy for the French police? Who dared risk a smuggler’s wrath? No one at first and then, finally, Walat.

  Dlo calls him Fearless Walat, with some envy.

  ‘Fuck the smugglers,’ Walat said. ‘Come.’

  They followed him through the camp, quiet with their own doubts and fears. Who was this guy, with his unrealistically dapper clothes, smoothing the flick of his jet-black pompadour as he sauntered down the dirt track? Striding behind Walat, Jan set his shoulders back and lengthened his pace, clenching his fists, with Dlo almost keeping up. Walat smoked, all nonchalance, as he led them to the far edge of the camp, to the crest of a small dune. Below, they could see several men moving in an encampment under the trees. Fearless Walat flicked the butt of his cigarette over his shoulder and called out, ‘Sir! Sir!’

  A man approached them.

  ‘These guys are looking for a smuggler,’ Walat told the man.

  The nerve of Walat. The man said they must wait. When he came back, he gestured for them to follow him to the opening of the leader’s tent, there in the centre of his undercover empire. He’s safe there, the smuggler kingpin, invisible as a refugee or a migrant, with his forces around him. Dispatching drivers to earn his money and take his risks, drivers who’ll be locked up if they’re caught with a carload of ‘illegals’.

  The price was high. Jan stared directly at the smuggler king as he named it, making sure not to glance at Dlo beside him. They had enough left, but only just, in the accounts in Syria. Every possible family asset sold off to feed those accounts, to fill them with enough money to transfer to the smuggler once the sons reached UK.

  ‘The police and immigration officials are stopping more vehicles these days,’ Walat told them later, ‘and searching with dogs and flashlights. They hold a piece of equipment,’ he said, ‘against the side of a truck to detect human heat.’

  Dlo walked heavily back into the camp, weighed down by his father’s sacrifices, but Jan squared his shoulders and drove himself forward, drilling towards the future, relentless and unstoppable. He recognised something in Walat. Admired him. Fuck the smugglers! Fuck the French! Fuck this lousy Sleeve of sea!

  Now the skinny smuggler, the padlock shark, has the door of the truck open. Even colder air wafts out of the freezer into the cold night. They all stare up at the wall of boxes in there. One smuggler leaps in and starts throwing boxes out for his accomplices to hoist into the river running beside the road. A box splits open as it lands, spilling oranges that roll out along the tarmac and into the bushes. Dlo picks one up and slips it into his pocket. Like a man who isn’t going to climb into a truck full of oranges, like a man who isn’t going to sit surrounded by thousands of oranges for many hours. Like a man who needs just one orange for his thirst.

  Jan and the others pick up the loose oranges and throw them into the river. There go boxes, floating downstream under the moon. There go oranges, bobbing one by one in the current and rapidly out of sight. Irrigated and fertilised, then picked, graded, wiped shiny and packed – in vain. To float away down some French river and then what? Rot, probably.

  Jan follows Dlo and the three other men into the cave the smugglers have made in the midst of the orange boxes. He can’t allow f
ear. Dlo has taken all the fear available and in turn he, Jan, must carry all the courage. But his jaw is rigid as he takes his last breath of the open air. Then the heavy steel slab closes them into utter dark. He puts his hand forward to feel the cold metal of the door in front of his face. He imagines – because he can’t hear – the skinny smuggler replacing the padlock. Beside him, Dlo takes abrupt sniffs of air. The freezer is sealed, airtight, and Dlo will be calculating again and again the volume of the space and how long they have before the oxygen runs out.

  ‘We’ll bang on the sides if it gets dangerous,’ Jan reminds him.

  ‘We will if we have to,’ says one of the others.

  ‘Fuck the smugglers!’ Jan says.

  ‘We’ll tell the smugglers that the police stopped the truck,’ says the other guy.

  But would anyone hear them? Jan wonders. If it comes to that, banging on the insulated sides of the truck might not save them. He rubs his cold fist in circles on his chest. Beat, heart. If this isn’t worse than staying in Syria – and so far, heart still beating, it isn’t worse – it isn’t much better either. He has swapped one potential grave for another.

  The truck engine turns over and revs. When the vehicle lurches forward onto the road, a couple of boxes topple on top of them, the sound dulled by the buffer of their bodies. Jan herds loose oranges with his feet in the dark, to stop them rolling. Nothing must alert the driver to his illicit cargo until they’re over the Channel, the Sleeve, through Dover, in the UK.

  While they were moving across Europe, he and Dlo, Jan kept alive an image of their destination, an imaginary hostel in Britain, in London or Birmingham. He emphasises the last syllable as he pronounces ‘Birmingham’ in his mind. London, London – everyone wants London, but someone from Jan’s home village lives in Birmingham. He didn’t know the guy well back in Syria, but everyone knows his story – the visa, the language classes, the opportunities to earn money, the safety. Even if you break the law, you have rights. A lawyer will speak for you, there in Birmingham. And, needless to say, no bombs are falling, no gunfire rocks the night. There, modestly at first, Jan will begin. The room he pictures is not large or luxurious. He sees a bed, a table where he will prepare food and eat, and a desk where he will study to improve his English. OK, maybe the desk is asking too much. The desk can come later. In the early days, he will study at the table where he eats. He will move the plates to the sink and wash them immediately. Water will flow from the tap and his room will be spotless. The bed is covered, he doesn’t know why, with a pink quilt. Where did it come from, this pink coverlet in his mind? He doesn’t like it. Perhaps he once saw a photograph in a magazine and, at least for now, in his imagination, in the quiet room he dreams of, he is stuck with it. It was on the pink quilt that he rested his head at the end of each long day of their trek. It was for the cup, the English china cup, that he reached in his imagination, there where it stood on the table beside the pink bed in Birmingham.