Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  This time, Aryan allows himself to take everything in. His eyes follow the nape of her neck and the line of her cheek and the chestnut hair that falls over her boyfriend’s shoulder. He traces the indent of her waist and the slight mound of her belly and the shape of her calf where it leans against her boyfriend’s leg. The timpani pulse of the earphones has stopped, though the earbuds are still in place; perhaps they have run out of songs. He wonders how they met, what he did to charm her, what words he used to persuade her to be with him. In Afghanistan he would be able to think of something to say, but here? He sees the girl’s chest move gently with her breathing, the curve of her breast like the soft swollen chest of a bird, and feels a pang of jealousy, and wishes the boy were anywhere but here.

  He thinks of his cousin Zohra, and the Afghan girls he knew at home and in Iran – ardent, but kept in check by the consequences of allowing a boy too near. He lets his mind wander, lulled by the train and mesmerized by the girl’s shape beneath the close-fitting clothes, by the sapphire and the symmetry of her reflection in the glass, until suddenly she opens her eyes. She sees Aryan looking at her reflected self and, catching his gaze in the glass, neither blinks nor turns away. Aryan swallows and feels he will faint and holds her stare, mortified at the stirring he tries to hide, trying to find the courage to turn and look at her in person. Finally, he manages it. And in that same instant she closes down again, shutting him out, so all he can see is the movement of her eyeballs like small marbles beneath their peacock-feather lids.

  It takes them some time to find the place.

  The train arrives in Rome at dawn and no one stops them or asks for their tickets as they find their way out of the station. They weave through the rush-hour throng, intoxicated by the scent of aftershave and pollution. They watch trams rounding cobbled corners snapping with electricity. They stare at short-skirted women on motor-scooters pausing at the traffic lights in helmets and spindly high-heels.

  In the narrow streets somewhere behind the station they come to a window where, with practised strokes, a man is shaving the inverted cone of a kebab spit, exposing the pink flesh beneath.

  Aryan passes Ahmed’s scrap of paper to him through the glass.

  A gauze hat perches on the man’s mahogany forehead like the prow of the ship in Genova. He squints at Aryan’s paper, at the dots and scratches of the writing, at the picture of a railway line, a traffic light and a bridge; his fingers leave a watermark of grease. Through the window Aryan can see a small room with four plastic tables, each empty but for a metal cube of serviettes. The man nods them inside.

  ‘Sit, wait here a moment,’ he says, and disappears with the piece of paper out the door. The scent of meat is almost overwhelming; Kabir is over at the counter staring at the falafel balls with giant eyes.

  A few moments later he returns, accompanied by a stooped old man in glasses and a white crocheted cap.

  ‘I am Pakistani – but this man speaks Farsi,’ the younger man explains.

  ‘Are you from Iran?’ the old man asks.

  ‘Afghanistan,’ Aryan says. ‘But we lived in Iran for a while.’

  The younger man looks at Kabir. ‘Would you like to eat?’ he says.

  Speechless with hunger, Kabir nods.

  ‘We have only a little money,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says the man. ‘You pay me one day when you come back.’

  He shears layers of meat off the spit and heats the pieces on the grill, pressing them and flipping them over with the spatula, before shovelling them into an envelope of warming bread. He stuffs in onion and tomato and a fistful of shredded lettuce, drenches the lot in yoghurt, and hands one to each of the boys.

  They devour them so fast that the man frowns and makes them two more. Kabir’s cheeks and hands are glistening and he is grinning despite himself; Aryan cannot remember better food in his life.

  The old man squints at Aryan’s piece of paper. ‘Your friends,’ he says, ‘they are not so far from here. I will show you the way.’

  At a traffic light the old man points down an alley. A roadway passes overhead. ‘You cross here, and turn left at the tabacchi on the corner,’ he says. ‘After that, the street is two down on your right.’

  They shake the man’s hand and wait for the lights. The gutter is gushing with water on the other side and they hop over it like a mountain stream.

  Aryan turns to wave goodbye, but already the sunlight is glancing off the man’s white cap as he disappears into the rush-hour noise.

  When he turns back, Kabir has vanished.

  Aryan spins around. The traffic lights are changing but the cars are already ramming through. Pedestrians are banking up on the corner, jabbering on mobile phones. A bus pulls out of the kerbside, releasing a jet of black smoke and an irritable cacophony of horns.

  A movement catches Aryan’s eye. It is so fast he can’t tell what it is. He pushes between the pedestrians, sprints past newspaper vendors and fruit stores and dusty, boarded-up windows, till he comes to a laneway lined with garbage bins and skips. Kabir is standing between two of them, so short he is almost concealed, rifling through the contents of a handbag.

  ‘What are you doing, Kabir?’ Aryan says.

  His brother looks up, abashed but also defensive.

  ‘It was just sitting there on the top of her pram,’ Kabir says. ‘She didn’t even notice.’

  ‘We don’t steal, Kabir! We don’t do that! Are you trying to get us thrown into jail?’

  ‘Well how are we going to get to England? How are we going to eat? I’m not going to work on any more farms.’

  ‘We still have some money,’ Aryan says. He hasn’t told Kabir about the last notes in his belt. ‘We are not beggars; we’re not thieves.’

  Kabir finds what he has been groping for amid the make-up and crayons and receipts. A blue leather wallet opens in his hand. There is a photograph of a baby on one side, and in the pockets there are euro notes, and shiny coins with gold edges and silver insides.

  Aryan looks at the money: two hundred and twenty-five euros. He feels ill. Baba would have been angry and ashamed. But another part of him sees how much it would help.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Drop it. Let’s get out of here.’

  Kabir stuffs the money in his pockets and kicks the handbag under the skip. They turn out of the lane and into the roadway, taking the direction the old man had indicated. Aryan forces back the instinct to run.

  The building when they reach it is derelict.

  The outside windows are broken and boarded up with plywood. No one can have lived there for a very long time.

  Aryan checks the number Ahmed had written down; the crumbling façade next door is marked 46 so this must be the right one. There is an overflowing skip in the narrow street, and behind it, a hole where an entire building once stood. It looks like the result of an explosion. Huge wooden struts bolted into triangles are all that prevent its neighbours from collapsing into the void.

  Aryan sits on the step to think. A motorbike revs past, too close, splashing them with dirty water.

  ‘We should go,’ Kabir says. ‘This is the wrong place.’

  As they stand, a door opens in the next building. A man with the thinnest face Aryan has ever seen steps out. He starts at the sight of them and waves his arms and says something aggressive-sounding in Italian.

  Aryan unfolds the paper where Ahmed has scrawled the address. He holds it out to the man.

  He peers at the words beneath the grease marks, at the blue lines of the paper and Ahmed’s sketched-in clues. ‘Who are you?’ he says, speaking in Farsi now.

  Aryan swallows. ‘Ahmed sent us. In Istanbul. We are Afghan. He told us to ask for Rahim.’

  The man narrows his eyes. ‘What do you want with Rahim?’ he asks.

  ‘Ahmed said he could help us,’ Aryan says. ‘We are going to England. Do you know where we can find him?’

  The man pauses for a moment, assessing them. ‘You’d better come i
nside.’

  The staircase, when the man shuts the door, is so dark that Aryan has to feel his way with his feet. They clutch the banister, which is a stone ridge carved into the wall and worn as smooth as a waterfall by thousands of hands. Each step has been eroded in the middle by shoes cascading down the centuries; the wan glow of a skylight many storeys above peters out before it reaches the lower floors.

  Aryan is counting. After fifty-six steps, the man unlocks a door.

  A woman is inside, ironing sheets; the room smells of washing powder and steam. A baby whimpers among some cushions on the bed.

  The woman sets down the iron and covers her hair and looks at the boys with wide eyes.

  The man closes the door behind them. ‘I am Rahim,’ he says.

  He asks them their names and how they met Ahmed.

  ‘And how do you think I can help you?’ he says. ‘You can’t stay here and we don’t have any money to give you.’

  Aryan feels his courage ebb. It has been a mistake to come to this place.

  ‘Ahmed said you could tell us how to get as far as France,’ he says. His voice carries no conviction.

  His wife looks at Kabir, and Aryan is suddenly conscious of how ragged and dirty they are, how much like vagabonds they must appear. They have been wearing the same jeans and sweatshirts since Iran; everything they own is on their backs and full of dust. The woman says something to her husband in a language Aryan doesn’t understand. The man’s eyes flash; the woman keeps hers lowered. His words jab like fists; her voice is low but insistent.

  ‘One night then,’ the man says at the end of it. ‘You can stay one night. But only because my wife says you look so young. After that you go. Tomorrow you go to the station. You get on the train to France. I will tell you the best way.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Aryan says.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ Rahim says. ‘We already have big problems. They will get even bigger if the landlord sees you here. As soon as possible you leave.’

  The apartment is just one room. There is one bed, one divan, and one window looking straight out on to a wall. The family eats, sleeps, cooks and washes in a single space. Above a cracked, yellowed sink there is a tap with hot water, and the woman uses it to fill a plastic tub so they can wash behind a curtain in the corner. She gives them each a hand towel and a T-shirt of her husband’s, and when they are done she washes their clothes. The clear water quickly darkens as the Greek dirt embedded in their jeans billows in inky clouds; she has to refill the bucket several times, and empty it in the toilet down the hall, before she can rinse them clean. Both of them are wearing two sets of clothes, a tip they learned from Ahmed, so they can reverse them after the dirt of the trucks if suddenly they need to look clean.

  Kabir takes one end of each pair of trousers and helps her wring them out; the four of them hang, pat-patting on to newspaper, from a line strung diagonally across the room.

  ‘You know people in England?’ Rahim asks.

  ‘We will go to the nephew of a tailor I worked with in Iran who was born in my father’s village. He is twenty and lives in London. He has a job in a restaurant with Pakistanis.’

  ‘And what are you going to do there?’

  ‘I want to go to school. My brother too.’

  ‘And what do you plan to study?’

  Aryan hesitates. He feels uncomfortable being the target of so many questions. There is something intrusive in the asking that makes him feel the way his father’s brothers used to make him feel – powerless, pried upon, inadequate. But the family is being kind to them, and he and Kabir need their help.

  ‘Computers,’ he says softly.

  The man guffaws. ‘What do you know about computers?’

  Aryan is confused, stung more by his tone than the words. ‘We had one at school in Iran. In Istanbul I looked up the border on the Internet,’ he says.

  He feels his face colouring.

  How can he explain that what he really loves is maths? He loves the cool, clean numbers that resolve things without the heat of emotion. He loves the way a whole equation can be pared down to a single number, as if it were hidden inside all along. He loves the way formulas can turn into geometry or graphs. But above all he loves its certainties, the way its answers exist in a quiet world impervious to anger or conflict or grief or revenge or loss.

  ‘Well after all, why not – computers are the future, aren’t they,’ the man says. Aryan can’t tell if his words are sarcastic or sincere. ‘Even Afghanistan one day will need computers. What about him?’ He nods at Kabir.

  Kabir puffs up his chest. ‘I’m going to be a musician,’ he says. ‘I will play songs for the English people at their weddings.’

  The man laughs, his angular face relaxing for the first time. ‘I hope they appreciate Afghan songs in England,’ he says.

  The woman nods towards Kabir and speaks to her husband.

  ‘She says she will cut your hair, both of you,’ Rahim says. ‘She is right. They will never let you into school in England looking like goats straight down from the hills.’

  Later, Rahim tells them about the trains. That they might have to get off in Nice, or Cannes, and get another train to Paris. If the police send them back to Italy they can wait and try again, or cross on foot from Ventimiglia, an Italian town on the road that runs next to the sea.

  Then, in Aryan’s notebook, the man draws them a map of Paris in thick green ink that clots and smudges under his fist. He puts in a station, and a river, and a canal. He adds arrows that show where they have to walk for a couple of kilometres, until they reach a park. Beside the park he draws another station.

  ‘This park,’ Rahim says, stabbing green ballpoint dots on to the page where he has just drawn a clump of stick trees, ‘is where all the Afghans meet.’

  He presses so hard that the next day Aryan finds duplicate maps furrowed into the following two pages.

  The intimate sound of scissor blades is close to his ear; Aryan is trying not to move. Dark crescents of hair settle on his knees like apostrophes. In his nostrils there is a tickling that wrinkling his nose won’t alleviate; finally he throws up a hand, and the scissors hesitate before resuming their journey. Delicate fingertips brush his neck, tug at the hair behind his ears, check that the length is even on both sides; he is betrayed by a sudden flush of embarrassment. It is the first time anyone has touched him with such gentleness since he can remember; the feel of it mingles with the image still on his retina of the girl in the railway carriage; he wants it to last and last, and then feels ashamed at his longing. He prays the woman hasn’t seen his flaming cheeks; is glad that, unlike in the barber’s shop where he used to go with his father, there is no mirror here.

  Kabir has already had his turn. When Aryan runs his hand upwards against the grain of his short-cropped hair, it reminds him of the puppies back on the farm. Kabir’s giggles come in contagious ripples.

  The tension lifts as his muscles relax in the safety and warmth of their refuge.

  In the end they have to wait two days for their clothes to dry. Then Rahim directs them to the station.

  In the train to France, Aryan peers at his new reflection in the lamplight, his features appearing and disappearing against the black backdrop of night.

  They are still his eyes peering back at him, though the shadows around them look deeper. Perhaps his newly shortened hair is making his face look different. He knows he is changing but he can’t identify exactly how. It is not only the down on his lip. He can’t tell whether it is just the light, or whether his cheeks have grown thinner, his eyes larger, his jaw more gaunt.

  He runs his hand along the nape of his neck, remembering the dangerous lisp of scissors, the woman’s hand grazing his cheek. He remembers the girl in the night train to Rome. Their images overlap and blur, and the thought of them makes him feel happy and empty at the same time.

  They awaken more than an hour from the terminal in Nice.

  Their carriage rocks through tunnels and creeps
through sleeping stations. They crawl past the rear of apartment blocks where women in bathrobes reach into kitchen cupboards, and shadows move behind windows thickened with steam. There are hothouses full of pumpkins and tomatoes, and carpets of cacti, and plantations of beach umbrellas where the rails pass close to the shore. Tent awnings stretch beside caravans, and rambling villas perch on headlands, among pine trees growing at perilous right-angles to the cliffs.

  ‘Why do people have swimming pools if they live so close to the sea?’ Kabir says. The aqua rectangles flash past them like postage stamps of sky.

  Aryan has wedged their tickets into the net above their folded table and doesn’t answer. He is thinking about the disused fountain they used to splash in after it rained, how they used to dry off by lying on the roof of an old Russian tank that heated up in the sun. How that was where he had gone to play with his friends on the day that Baba was killed.

  They have followed Rahim’s advice and picked out a family in the train. They plan to tag along beside them when they alight, in case there are any police.