Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘That’s why we’re going to England.’

  ‘Why don’t we go there then? Why do we have to stay here?’

  ‘It’ll be like Istanbul. First we have to work and then they will put us on a truck,’ Aryan says.

  ‘How long will we have to stay?’

  ‘I didn’t even know we were coming here, Kabir. But if it’s like in Turkey, maybe we will have to stay a few months.’

  Exhaustion bears down on Aryan like an edifice. He desperately wants to succumb, and let oblivion sweep his worries back across all the plains, back across all the mountains and plateaux and villages and cities and roads and checkpoints and borders and rivers and deserts that they have crossed. The frisson of elation he felt when they got to Europe has retreated under a new layer of anxiety. He supposes that it will be months before he can really relax, sleep deeply, and not awaken with worry about money or time or how far they are from their goal, or how they will manage the next step. He wishes their father were still alive, or that he could speak to Omar back there in Iran, or to some adult who would know what to do.

  He hears Kabir’s breathing steady, and soon slips over the soft cliff of unconsciousness too.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Kabir whips the blankets off.

  ‘Something bit me,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’ Aryan peers at his brother’s shape in the dimness. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  Then he feels it himself. The sudden sting. The burn. The itch.

  He leaps to his feet, and tosses the blankets to the floor. Aryan pushes Kabir towards the window. He inspects his torso, sees nothing. Then he discovers an angry weal flowering on his rib.

  Then he sees two more. And then two on his own leg.

  He gives Kabir one corner of the blanket to hold.

  ‘Higher!’ he says. Kabir is too short and half of it crumples on the floor. There is an old rake leaning against the wall. Aryan grabs it and, holding the other end of the blanket, uses it to beat the cloth. They do it for all four blankets, and sweep the mattress clear with their hands.

  ‘Try not to scratch,’ Aryan says. ‘Put saliva on it where it is itchy. We will ask for different bedding in the morning.’

  They try again to sleep, jumpy with real and imagined insects every time the blanket moves. It prickles with their body heat.

  After a while Kabir’s breathing deepens. Aryan listens to it for a long time.

  Hours later Aryan loses the debate with himself and gets up to go outside. Kabir doesn’t stir as he pushes the curtain aside.

  He pees against the side of the outhouse, folds his arms around himself, and lingers in the cold night air. Stillness enfolds the land and the sky is alive with stars. One hanging low on the horizon is so bright it hurts his eyes. Somewhere a farm dog barks, and another answers. A shooting star streaks swift as rocket fire across the heavens.

  He gazes up the road where their truck disappeared. Even if they could run away, there are no trees in this bald land, no forest, no place to hide. He doesn’t know from what direction they have come, let alone which direction to take.

  He thinks about Hamid and wonders where he is now. He misses his daring and his jokes, tries to imagine what he would do if he were here.

  In the morning when the old woman comes they show her the bites and ask for new blankets. She looks fiercely at them and barks something in Greek they don’t understand.

  She sets down a tray with cheese and some pieces of cucumber and sweetened black tea in mugs. She returns to the house and flicks the curtain shut behind her.

  Aryan follows her to the door and waits. He blows on his hands to warm his fingers, then hugs them under his armpits. She doesn’t come out again.

  In their outhouse, Kabir has left him half the food. Aryan notices his face still shows the creases where he has slept on the edge of the blanket. He cradles the mug of tea in his hands, trying to coax its warmth into his fingers.

  Suddenly they hear the sound of an engine. The farmer’s old pick-up truck is idling in the yard.

  ‘Get in,’ the farmer says. He is leaning out the half-opened door. ‘Today we go to another place.’

  Aryan hesitates. ‘What other place?’ he says.

  ‘For working,’ the farmer says. ‘Many trees.’

  The dashboard is cracked from the sun and covered in dust but the clock still works, even if the time shown by its glow-in-the-dark hands can’t be right. There is no heating in the truck; Kabir leans into Aryan for warmth.

  They drive for over an hour, watching the landscape change. The earth becomes stonier and redder. They pass groves of stunted olive trees, the trunks spaced evenly as chessmen. Aryan half-closes his eyes; the winter trees flicker light-dark, light-dark through his eyelids as they pass. Bamboo thickets shiver along the roadsides. Plastic-sheeted hothouses dot the desolate landscape; idle watering systems poise angular as stick insects in the fields. In the distance, the mountains are hard and white, not like the ochre ridges that dissolved in the rains where he was born. The road signs are all in two languages, English characters beneath strange Greek symbols, but Aryan doesn’t recognize any words.

  They turn into a bumpy dirt road that leads to an orchard. The trees are dark and laden with golden orbs.

  The farmer tears at the handbrake.

  Outside the truck, the air is cold and still. Though the sun has finally risen, a lacework of frost still decorates the dead leaves on the ground. Aryan jogs on the spot to warm his feet, like they did before Omar’s games. Kabir is blowing on his hands.

  A couple of ladders lean on their sides against a low stone wall. There is a shed with wooden crates; more tumble in a pile outside it. A blue tarpaulin flattens the grass where it lies, rolled up under the trees.

  The farmer pulls one of the ladders upright; it squeals as he kicks its feet apart and plants them in the soft soil. He pulls the tarpaulin round its base, then climbs up to show them how.

  He twists the oranges off the branches and drops them into a bag slung across his chest. Loosened fruit fall like outsized hailstones on to the sheet below.

  He passes the bag to Aryan; Kabir’s job is to collect the falling oranges, fill the crates and stack them along the wall, and to pull the fruit from the branches he can reach from the ground.

  At the top of the ladder, Aryan leans into the foliage. Before him the luminous spheres are white with frost; they hang from the branches like planets under their polar caps. Waxy leaves slap him in the face as the too-heavy fruits resist, then suddenly give.

  The watery sunshine releases a faint tanginess from the leaves that immediately wafts out of reach. Quickly Aryan’s fingers grow red and numb and wet from handling the frozen globes. He drops his arms to his sides to let the blood flow back, then squeezes his hands under his armpits. He hangs his head to ease the muscle-ache in his neck.

  Later, when the farmer has retreated to the end of the property, Aryan half-slides down the ladder to rest. With blunt fingers he tears open an orange from a lower branch. The skin is thick and easy to peel; inside, capsules of sweetness rear up like feathers. Their teeth jar with the citric cold as they melt the icy segments in their mouths. There is nothing of the sourness of the oranges they had back home.

  Aryan tries to concentrate on the flavour, probing with his tongue the bits of fibre caught between his teeth as he tries to remember what the taste reminds him of. He blows the pips at Kabir, and they skiffle pieces of skin into the grass as if they were pebbles on the surface of a lake.

  Kabir tries to peel a whole orange into a word in Afghan writing but the loops break apart in his hands. He wears stickiness from his eyebrows to his chin.

  ‘The ants will be after you,’ Aryan says.

  Kabir wipes his shiny face on his sleeve. ‘No they won’t,’ he says with a grin. ‘They’re hibernating.’

  The farmer shouts and Aryan scurries back up the ladder. The man yells insults and scowls at him from the foot of the tree.

  As he
works Aryan tries to identify a memory that hovers like a dragonfly just out of reach. He explores the recesses of his mind, then lets it go blank, pretending he is not searching for anything at all, just pulling and reaching and pulling the fruit from the recalcitrant trees. And then it comes to him.

  The house when he was small. A celebration. Sitting altogether under the tree-trunk beams of the ceiling. His father coming in from the bazaar, emptying his pockets of the cigarette lighters and batteries and the mobile phones he hawked in the street after he lost his post at the school. Aunts and uncles and cousins crowding into the small room. His grandfather making his way through them, favouring his aching joints, washing his hands in an enamel bowl and drying them on a white cloth. The blind television under its rug in the corner, its jump leads disconnected from the battery. His cousin Zohra and their mother were passing around a deep ceramic bowl filled with pomegranate seeds. There were mandarins, too, and grapes that exploded with sugar, the sweetest fruits he had ever tasted. A long time ago, before they left Afghanistan.

  At nightfall they stuff oranges into their anoraks in case they get hungry later on.

  It is still dark when the long blast of a horn awakens them the next morning. The icy air is filled with petrol fumes as the farmer waits behind the wheel. The hogs in their enclosure grunt their disapproval at his headlights.

  Aryan catches a glimpse of the farmer’s watch as he works the gear-stick. It says four thirty a.m.

  In the pre-dawn darkness the oranges gleam like silver cricket balls.

  Rows of trees stretch out before them. Up in the leaf canopy Aryan fills the bag and lowers it to Kabir. It is so heavy he has to watch it doesn’t tip him off balance as he descends. He feels the legs of the ladder sinking into the soil as he shifts his weight.

  Kabir scurries to gather the fruit that escape on to the tarpaulin. He rolls them like giant marbles when the farmer is out of sight, before packing them into the crates. Aryan leans into the top rung of the ladder as he works, periodically stopping to rub the metal dents out of his knees.

  Though it’s cold in the orchard, the work gives them a raging thirst. They have no water so they suck the juice from the oranges, but the sweetness just makes it worse.

  Sometimes, at the far end of the orchard, other men show up to strip the trees. Taciturn, they come by the shed from time to time to pick up more crates before hurrying back to work. Their clothes are grubby and their faces are dark like they haven’t had time to sleep, and they move fast to fill the containers. Once Aryan called out to one of them, but he couldn’t understand the language of the reply.

  The men light a fire among the orange trees and thaw their hands over the warmth. Aryan and Kabir can smell the smoke weaving between the branches but the flames are too distant for them to share.

  Every night in the truck on the way back to the farm, Kabir collapses into Aryan’s shoulder, falling into a sleep from which not even the potholes can rouse him.

  They harvest oranges even in the rain.

  Hands mottled with cold, Aryan zips Kabir into his anorak. Their clothes are too thin, and the leaves slap water into their faces and down their necks. The rungs of the ladder turn slippery in the wet.

  Kabir complains. The hard fabric of his anorak chafes his chin and rubs it raw.

  In the mid-afternoon drizzle, Aryan stretches for a branch just out of reach. His weight shifts on the ladder, and its front foot digs deep into the earth, leaning it sideways. As his shoe searches its way along the metal rung, the orange comes away suddenly in his hand and the branch slaps back into his face. Blinded, he loses his grip, and falls.

  He lands heavily on his ankle, yelping with pain. Kabir drops his crate, oranges bouncing like lottery balls, and comes running.

  Nostrils flared, Aryan is breathing hard. He rolls from side to side on the blue tarpaulin, one knee hard up against his chest. Electric currents of pain shoot through his leg.

  ‘Tell the farmer,’ he says through clenched teeth.

  They drive home in silence. Aryan’s ankle has swollen like a marrow. He can hardly keep on his shoe.

  When he is lying on his freezing pallet, the old woman brings him aspirin so old that the blue writing on the tinfoil wrapping has almost worn away. It fizzes and dies in the water at the bottom of a chipped china cup.

  She also brings him ice in a kitchen cloth. Aryan winces as she lays it on the swelling.

  ‘I can’t work tomorrow,’ Aryan tells the farmer.

  The man frowns. ‘We’ll dock it from your pay.’

  In a week they go back to the orchard. Aryan walks gingerly, testing the ligaments. The swelling has gone down, but he is afraid to trust his ankle with his full weight. The oranges glow like suns against the blue winter sky.

  Up the ladder again he leans into the branches, trying to concentrate, despite the cold that deadens his hands, on not falling.

  In the middle of the afternoon there is a plop-plopping on the leaves. It starts to rain.

  One evening, the farmer comes to see them after he has driven them back to the house and they are washing their hands under the protesting tap. He is wearing a sweater that zips up at the neck.

  ‘One week’s work,’ he says, putting a scroll of cash into Aryan’s dripping hand. Then he goes back indoors.

  Aryan unrolls the bills and counts them. Two gold fifty-euro notes, one blue twenty-euro note, a tattered five-euro note, plus one euro coin.

  He counts them again, the notes making a nest as Aryan lays them on the bed, placing the silver coin in the middle like an egg.

  ‘We’re rich,’ Kabir says with a grin.

  Aryan ignores him. ‘I think he’s made a mistake,’ he says. ‘A hundred and twenty-six euros isn’t right. Ahmed said you could make fifteen euros a day on the farms in Greece.’

  He pauses to calculate, and writes the numbers in his notebook to make sure.

  ‘It should be two hundred and ten euros for the two of us,’ he says.

  Outside the house Aryan stops a moment, and swallows. He is not used to having to stand up to people. Hamid, he knows, wouldn’t hesitate. His ankle is starting to throb, but thinking about Hamid helps to steel him, and anger about being cheated propels him.

  He knocks on the wooden doorframe. The door is shut but a corner of the curtain is caught in the jamb like the petticoat of someone in a rush. The farmer opens up immediately – he must have been leaning against the inside of it to take off his boots. He squints at Aryan with squirrel eyes.

  Aryan can smell woodsmoke and charcoal and onions and his stomach concertinas with hunger.

  ‘This isn’t the right amount,’ he says, holding out the notes. His hand is shaking. ‘It should be fifteen euros a day.’

  ‘No,’ the farmer says. ‘Not fifteen. Fifteen is the price for a man. You are only a boy and boys don’t do the work of a man.’

  Aryan flushes. ‘I know the price is fifteen,’ he says.

  ‘I give you ten euros,’ the farmer says. ‘Ten is a very good price – and on top of that I give you bed and food. That costs me money that I am paying for you!’

  Aryan’s throat tightens. ‘I work hard for you, as hard as a man, and you should pay me the same price,’ he says.

  ‘And where are you going to sleep? Where will you have a bed, food, shelter? Where are you going to find these conditions? You think these things are free? In Greece life is very expensive; no one will let you stay as cheaply as me. You don’t have any idea how much a hotel costs. Then you need transport. You will have to pay for a bus, then walk, and now your ankle is weak. Ten euros is a good price, you don’t know how good it is.’

  Aryan reflects for a moment. What the man says is true – they don’t know where they are or where else they can go, or what they would have to pay to sleep elsewhere. At least he is giving them some money, even if it’s less than he should. He does some fast calculations. Ten euros a day for seven days is a hundred and forty euros for the two of them, yet still the man ha
s only paid a hundred and twenty-six.

  ‘What about my brother? He works hard too. You say ten euros a day but this money is not ten euros a day,’ Aryan says. ‘We are two.’ Aryan clenches his hand in his pocket, as if extra courage were to be found in the threadbare cloth.

  ‘Your brother, he is too small,’ the farmer says, eyes glowering under heavy brows. ‘He can’t do the work of a man either. He only plays all the time. For him I pay eight euros a day. And that’s a good price.’

  ‘My brother works hard. He is all day with me, collecting oranges, putting them in crates, dragging them to the wall. You pay him the same as me, ten euros a day exactly,’ Aryan says.

  The man laughs. ‘This boy your brother, he is no use to me. I could take one man and get the work done three times as fast as I do with you two boys. I’m doing you a favour by letting you work here. But maybe you don’t want to work at all. Maybe you don’t want to wait for the truck to Italy,’ he says.

  ‘When is the truck coming?’ Aryan says.

  ‘Only when the work is done,’ the farmer says.

  Kabir is lying on the pallet with his shoes on when Aryan returns. The floor is covered in footprints like the dance-steps of ghosts.

  ‘What happened?’ Kabir says.

  Aryan shoves his brother’s feet off the bed. ‘Take your shoes off first,’ he says.

  Kabir puts his feet back.

  ‘Have it your way,’ Aryan says. ‘Sleep like those pigs do in the dirt.’

  Aryan flops down on the other pallet. His arms and legs feel heavy. His head is tired and his ankle hurts.

  ‘So what did he say?’ Kabir asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Aryan says.

  ‘He must have said something.’

  ‘There’s no more money. He is paying less because we are not men, and less for you because you are only a kid and spend all day mucking around.’