Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  ‘That’s not true,’ Kabir says. ‘I work hard too.’

  ‘He says because we get this place to sleep and food at night then I only get ten and you only get eight because you are too slow.’

  ‘But you said we could get fifteen!’ Kabir says. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’

  ‘And where would you like to go? We don’t even know where we are right now. At least here there is a truck to Italy.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When the work is finished, the farmer said.’

  ‘And when’s that?’

  Aryan shrugs. ‘When there are no more oranges, I suppose.’

  Every day they leave the farm hours before sunrise and drive in the battered pick-up truck to the orchard in order to start work before dawn. Sometimes they are so tired they don’t even hear the engine running. The farmer leans his impatience into the horn.

  Aryan reckons it’s been six weeks since they arrived. He marks down the days in his notebook with four lines and a stroke, the way his father showed him, to make them easier to count.

  The oranges have been harvested, but there is still more work on the farm. The grass is no longer furry with ice crystals in the mornings; there is a shy warmth in the sun in the middle of the day.

  There are rows and rows of potatoes to dig up. Then there will be turnips. And then onions that need to be pulled by nimble hands.

  They are given digging forks, and green plastic crates to fill.

  Other men come to work on the farm but Aryan only sees them in the distance. They stoop over the furrows, unkempt hair in their eyes. A tractor crawls across the land like a rusted scorpion; trucks back up to the gate for loading.

  By the end of the day the pads of Aryan’s hands are tender with blisters. Kabir’s nails are black from grubbing out the roots in the soil Aryan has overturned; smears of dirt mark his face with warpaint.

  In the mornings, the wind bores straight at them over the hill; they have to keep working to keep warm.

  The farmer comes to see them during the afternoon. He wades into the furrows like a bulldog, the same rope holding up his trousers.

  Aryan decides to ask him why, except that once, they haven’t been paid.

  ‘I changed my mind,’ the farmer says. ‘If I give you cash you have to keep it somewhere. You will lose it in the fields or it will get stolen. It’s better if you work to pay the next part of your journey.’

  Aryan swallows. ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘You work hard here, and soon you will be on your way.’

  ‘But when?’ Aryan insists. ‘How many more weeks?’

  ‘Just a few,’ the man says. ‘Less if you work hard. Then you will get on your truck.’

  The fields stretch away down the valley. Aryan thinks it will be more than just a few weeks.

  Aryan’s blisters harden to calluses. His shoulders burn from the digging. Kabir grows silent, the mischief absent from his eyes.

  ‘It was better in the sewing factory, wasn’t it,’ Aryan says.

  He can still feel the air vibrate with the incessant hum of the needles, the stifling heat as they bent over the noisy machines. The rucking of fabric he had to take care not to stain with his sweating hands. They blinked and squinted at the material under light bulbs roped to the ceiling with cobwebs. There were five rows of men from different places, from Afghanistan, Iraq, and distant parts of Turkey, who couldn’t all communicate with each other.

  Mohamed liked Afghans. ‘Afghans are very good workers,’ he used to say, surveying his factory floor.

  Ahmed was one of them. He kept an eye out for Aryan and Kabir, and explained how things worked in Greece, and gave them an address in Rome of an Afghan man if ever they needed help. Aryan kept the paper safe in his wallet, then copied it into the pages of his notebook, between the sketches he sometimes did of people or the places they’d seen, where he kept important things.

  It was Ahmed who introduced them to Hamid. Hamid worked next door, in another of Mohamed’s factories, cutting pieces of leather for shoes. His workshop reeked of animal skins and the choking stench of dyes.

  There were mornings when some of the men had left without warning and a new team would already have arrived to replace them. One day, Aryan supposed, Ahmed too would be gone.

  Kabir was the youngest in the workroom. While Aryan sewed he collected the offcuts of cloth, refilled the holders when the spools ran out, and chased the threads and scraps and tumbleweeds of dust into sacks with a long-handled broom. The men ruffled his hair and joked with him, hiding the empty bobbins and then producing them like magic from behind his ears.

  Sometimes Aryan felt a stab of jealousy. Sometimes he would have liked to have been the centre of attention, everyone’s favourite boy.

  But here Aryan was treated like an adult. Every day he had hundreds of buttonholes to sew, stop-start, stop-start, his foot controlling the speed with a switch so sensitive that the merest touch would fling it on a hungry riff of its own. Once, at the beginning, he sewed up his fingers. With a lurch he remembers the needle’s silver lick that had done its deed before he could even register the danger. He’d watched the white calligraphy slowly turn pink as if it were someone else’s hand, the maroon dewdrops blooming like living things. Then, in the airless room, he’d nearly fainted. He was kept alert by a smack over the ear from the supervisor, who yanked out the threads with scissors.

  He could still read the scribble of the needle’s faint staccato on his skin.

  They started at eight a.m. and didn’t finish until nine at night. By the end of the day they did not even have the energy to watch the football games with the Turks on the television that they thwacked with a slipper whenever the picture fragmented. They never had enough to eat. But after thirteen weeks, Mohamed had kept his word.

  ‘Tomorrow, at dawn, you go,’ he had told them one night.

  They had risen in the dark with the first call of the muezzin, and stood in the doorway waiting for his cousin to complete his prayers and roll up his mat, watching with identical sets of black eyes.

  Then the cousin drove them from Istanbul to the mechanics’ yard near the border in an old truck laden with spare tyres. Hamid was already in the back when they clambered on board.

  Everything in the Internet café is black: the windows, the walls, the chairs, even the cubicles where rows of men sit, joystick in hand, heads bulbous as insects under shiny headphones, faces illuminated blue in the glow of the screen.

  Every now and then there is a whoosh and a zing as someone’s game comes screeching to an end. It is Hamid who has taken him there, who is standing on one side of him, while Kabir stands on the other, in the dark.

  Aryan is sitting at station 21. He touches the keyboard and a box flips up asking for a password. Carefully, he copies in the word that the Turkish woman at the counter gave him on a piece of card. The keys stick to his fingertips, the plastic discoloured with dirt.

  The word ‘welcome’ flips up in a box beside the face of a ticking clock. He has only paid for fifteen minutes and he knows from school in Iran how fast time disappears on the Web.

  It takes several tries to drag the clock to the corner of the screen. The mouse has no traction on the laminated tabletop.

  Thirteen minutes left.

  Aryan bites his bottom lip in concentration.

  He recognizes some of the symbols from the computer they used at school, and he clicks on to the familiar blue ‘e’. In the blank space he types the word ‘Evros’, insisting on the letter ‘s’ that is jammed with grime. Then he selects ‘map’ from the top of the screen.

  A list comes up in Turkish; he trawls down till he can find some English lettering, and clicks.

  There it is. The border.

  Eleven minutes left.

  The clock must be rigged.

  He peers under the line of red markings at the river. It squeezes its way like a blue question mark between Turkey and Greece before fraying into a light-brown delta on the e
dge of the sea. ‘Sanctuary,’ he reads. There is a symbol for migratory birds.

  He examines the green shading on either side of the question mark: the river’s wide floodplain. One small bridge spans the watery expanse. Higher up, where the contours narrow along the question mark’s curved back, he sees a line of yellow and black triangles. He down-arrows till he finds the legend.

  Nine minutes to go.

  The seconds are vanishing faster than water down a drain.

  ‘Landmines.’

  His breath catches. No one has said anything about landmines. He has seen what they could do to villagers back home, to kids who thought they were toys; it never occurred to him they might also have them in Europe.

  He scrolls back up. The border zone looks very wide. He tries to measure it with his thumb against the scale at the bottom of the screen. Seven kilometres, maybe. On foot, and with variations in the terrain, it must be more.

  Six minutes left.

  He zooms in to enlarge the border crossing at Kipi. He guesses that the river is narrowest there if that’s where they decided to build a bridge. But it would be too dangerous for a pick-up on the road that fed the crossing and too far to get to the highway beyond. His eye runs upstream; further north, there are places where the highway in Greece runs so close to the river that it looks like the two of them touch. The bank there must be very steep, he thinks, or the highway raised, otherwise the road would flood. He wonders if there are trees or if it’s open ground; he can’t tell from the map whether the land is rocky or muddy or of clay.

  Four minutes.

  He looks for lettering. The last villages on the Turkish side; the towns that control the borderlands in Greece: Orestiada halfway up, Alexandroupoli right on the sea, the small places in between: Feres, Tychero, Soufli, Didymoticho. A river with two names: Evros, and Meric Nehri. He wonders if they mean the same thing. And far beyond all of them, green fading to brown, more mountains, tighter contours, another country: Bulgaria.

  WARNING: save data now! Your session will expire in two minutes!

  Print, he should try to print. There is no printer symbol on the map page. Try the menu. Liberated from the cursor, the tractionless mouse slides gaily over the desktop. He shoves an Internet flyer beneath it till finally it engages, then shoots the cursor to the top of the screen. A drop-down menu appears, and then another. The words are all in Turkish. He can’t find the printer command.

  THANK YOU: your session is now over!

  Aryan drops his hands in defeat.

  Whoosh. Zing. The boy in the next-door cubicle punches the air as he scores against the machine.

  There is an old dog on the farm who follows them out to the fields.

  Every day they go, even when it rains, and the old dog always goes with them. She is a mongrel, black and white, hopeful eyebrows raised above despondent eyes. She runs sideways like a crab from adult men, neck extended, shying away like a creature too often kicked. Kabir plays with her whenever he gets the chance, and she follows him around like a disciple.

  Their clothes grow stiff with soil. They wear their anoraks when it rains but that doesn’t stop the mud from caking their trousers.

  Aryan goes to the house and mimes a request for a bucket. The old woman flicks the curtain behind her and disappears.

  Kabir catches him up. He peers through the crack in the curtain and enumerates what he sees: potatoes covering the table, metal pans on hooks, tall saucepans steaming on a wood stove. There is a television screen covered with an old lace cloth.

  He steps backwards.

  The old lady is holding out a metal tub with handles at each end. Inside she has put a cake of cracked yellow soap.

  Aryan fills the tub from the tap, scrubs Kabir’s T-shirt and spreads it over the stone wall in the morning, waiting for the anaemic sun. In the meantime he lends Kabir his own, and laughs at the way it hangs off his shoulders like a dress.

  Kabir’s T-shirt lies out there for a whole day without drying.

  Finally Aryan sets some old crates and a couple of fence palings alight. The T-shirt balloons over the fire like a sail. Kabir’s body heat finishes off the drying process; for the next two days he trails the scent of smoke.

  They can never get their hands completely clean. Their calluses have grown yellow and thick. Their fingernails are circles etched in dark, indelible dye.

  For lunch the old woman gives them black tea and bread. At night they get transparent soup with strips of cabbage in it. They always feel hungry at the end.

  Aryan has a sudden longing for the pomegranate juice they used to get in season back home. He tries to remember the taste, the dark-pink sweetness. The last time he drank it was in Istanbul, when Ahmed in the factory brought them a glass, walking slowly, his workman’s paw cupping the rim like a chalice of rubies.

  At first Aryan hid a few of the smaller potatoes in his pocket. When they were hungry at night they ate them raw, but they made their stomachs cramp.

  Now, when they rise before dawn, the air smells different. It is something Aryan recognizes from home: the tingle of life stirring under the soil as winter gives way to spring.

  One day the dog doesn’t follow them into the fields. Kabir is distraught.

  ‘Old Dog! Old Dog!’ he calls, but the familiar haunches do not appear.

  Two days later he finds her in a rusting barrel at the back of the machine shed. At her side, two pups are nuzzling her teats.

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t so old after all,’ Aryan says.

  Kabir can’t stop smiling. When the pups are strong enough to walk, their mother brings them with her to the field to watch the boys uproot the potato plants. He rolls a potato towards them and watches them bat it around like kittens with a freshly killed mouse.

  Kabir’s laughter fills the entire field as the old dog teaches the puppies to dig. They send the earth flying and fall over, legs pedalling each other like cyclists. He can’t understand why the dirt doesn’t stick to the pink-and-brown pads under their feet. They follow their noses in loops along invisible maps and pat at worms and roll around in the soil the boys overturn.

  Kabir calls them Tom and Jerry after the cartoon characters they saw in a book in Iran. He saves his bread and feeds them pieces that they nudge from his hand with their noses and the flick of soft tongues. They lie on their backs with their paws in the air, offering their velvet underbellies. He carries them around on his shoulders and giggles when they lick his ears.

  He drops them from a height to see if they will land on their feet and laughs when they yelp in shock.

  Aryan clips him on the ear for his cruelty.

  It is roughly then that the bad dreams start to come back.

  There has been a rocket attack on the market. The world is dim and Aryan is wading through a haze of dust. His hair is wet and he is staggering across the dry riverbed, to the place where the market used to be. A girl is dragging herself on her hands through the debris, a white bone poking out of her leg. There is blood all over the apples.

  Aryan is searching, searching, but there are no bodies left, just pieces of bodies, and apples everywhere, and blood seeping into the sand.

  He knows he is there, but he can’t find his father anywhere. His uncle orders him to keep looking.

  He wakes up, heaving.

  One morning Kabir gets out of bed, black eyes shiny as oil, and throws up. Afterwards, he is too weak to stand.

  Aryan knows without the farmer’s telling them that this is one day more they will have to stay.

  Aryan sits by Kabir all day. When he shivers, Aryan wraps him in their blankets. When he sweats, he pushes water to his lips in an enamel cup.

  Kabir can’t even hold the water down.

  His face is hot and his hair sticks to his forehead. Aryan wets his T-shirt and washes his brother’s face. He observes the soft profile a long time, the round cheeks flushed with fever, the eyebrows black against pallid skin, and his heart constricts.

  The old woman brings a
jug of water with salt and sugar in it from the house. The grains lie insoluble as sand on the bottom.

  ‘I’m so thirsty,’ Kabir mutters. But the water just reactivates the retching. It is not until the afternoon that Aryan can get him to take a few sips. His fingerprints evaporate in slow-shrinking clouds on the glass.

  He sleeps. Aryan leans against the wall beside him, listening to the shallow breathing. Outside, the hills turn blue and soften in the twilight. Far away, across the valley, the smudge of another village; at night, faint pinpricks of light wink across the darkness.

  Sometimes Kabir talks in his sleep. Long incoherent ramblings. Sometimes he asks about Ali, about what happened to Bashir. Sometimes their mother. Sometimes it’s the Kurdish horsemen who frightened him so much. Sometimes he asks for Hamid, and mumbles about the day they set out to explore Istanbul.

  ‘You can’t leave Istanbul without having seen the Golden Horn,’ Hamid had said, and he had led them on a merry dance, propelling them down the vertiginous streets to the filthy Bosporus, leaping on and off the crowded ferries, cruising past the palaces and towers and mosques, pinching candied fruit from the bazaars and rings of sesame bread from the market stalls under the bridges. He took them to the Blue Mosque where they peeled off their shoes and lay on a sea of carpets and gazed up at the stained glass windows. They slipped into a palace where sultans once lived to admire daggers encrusted with emeralds.

  Aryan never learned how Hamid first found his way down to the water, and back through the maze of streets to the hole in the wall where he worked – nor how he did it without Mohamed finding out. He just seemed to have a flair for risk. Or maybe Mohamed had grown fond of Hamid and simply turned a blind eye.

  On the second day Kabir looks a little better, and the retching stops. He sleeps nearly all day long. To pass the time Aryan takes his notebook and sketches his brother’s face, then sketches him from memory playing with the puppies in the field.