Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  But when the train pulls into Nice, Kabir gets blocked in the aisle by the crush of passengers, and the family disappears down the steps.

  The crowd is washing them towards the exit when anxiety suddenly clutches Aryan’s throat. Peaked hats and dark-blue uniforms are moving towards them; he is gripped by an involuntary fear.

  ‘Papers,’ one of the policemen says. He and Kabir are hemmed in by a sea of official blue.

  Aryan produces their train tickets.

  The policeman takes them, examines them, holds them up to the light. Then he rips them in half.

  ‘Where is your passport?’ he says.

  ‘No passport,’ says Aryan. His mouth is dry and he stumbles over the English words.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  Aryan tries to ignore the truncheon and the pistol at his waist, and the heavy boots like the ones that soldiers wear. He looks to the female officer instead. She carries the same weapons as the men, and her hair is tied back so tightly that it pulls all the expression from her face.

  ‘Fourteen,’ he says. His heart is beating fast.

  The man barks something into a two-way radio. The reply comes in a screech of static.

  ‘You know to come to France you need a passport and a visa,’ the policeman says. ‘You have to go home to your country and get them.’

  Aryan looks at him with a kind of disbelief. In his mind their journey unspools like the ribbon of a broken cassette. He thinks about all the terrain they have covered: the months of unpaid labour in Greece, the long hours in the workshop in Turkey, the way they crossed Lake Van in a leaking boat. He thinks of the night-time struggle across the mountains, and the Kurdish peasants they stayed with, and the smugglers who left anyone who couldn’t keep up by the side of the trail. He remembers the trek across the desert in Iran, his palpitating heart as they crossed the frontier by night to avoid the border patrols, and their last journey out of Afghanistan. He thinks about the things that he sold, and the money that has gone, and the things that can never be reversed.

  ‘We don’t want to stay in France,’ Aryan says.

  But the policeman is already pulling handcuffs out of his pocket. Aryan’s stomach contracts. He looks wildly around but the police officers are standing very close. He can feel Kabir trembling at his side.

  Aryan’s wrists are so thin that the handcuffs have to be adjusted to the narrowest setting; the policewoman does the same for Kabir.

  Blank with fear, they watch another policeman stretch his hands into skin-coloured surgical gloves. Then he pats down their bodies, searching for weapons.

  Kabir is white-faced. He recoils at the man’s touch. Aryan has never seen him so afraid.

  They are led to the back of a police van with plastic coverings on the seats. They are driven back across the border to Italy.

  ‘Couple more for you,’ the French officer says as they enter an Italian police station. Aryan can see red-and-black playing cards aligned in columns on a computer screen.

  ‘Where are you going then?’ the Italian policeman asks when the French van has pulled away. The buttons of his jacket strain over his paunch. Beside him, a young lieutenant scrutinizes them with the eyes of a ferret.

  ‘England,’ Aryan says.

  ‘How old’s he?’ he asks, nodding towards Kabir.

  ‘Eight,’ Aryan says.

  The man swears. ‘They’re getting younger all the time,’ he says to his colleague. ‘I’m not locking up kids.’

  He turns to Aryan. ‘Make yourself scarce,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to see you ever again.’

  Aryan guesses they are in one of the small Italian border towns they had seen from the window of the train. Maybe it is Ventimiglia, the town that Rahim mentioned. He knows Kabir will feel better if they can find something to eat.

  In a narrow street they come across a shop selling takeaway pizzas and fries. Counting their coins, Aryan adds a can of Coke from the refrigerator. They sit dangling their feet on a low wall outside and ignore the seagulls clamouring for a share of their spoils.

  Kabir licks the salt off his fingers and wipes his greasy hands on his trousers.

  ‘We’re going to have to walk,’ Aryan says, ‘like Rahim said. You feel up to it?’

  ‘How far is it?’ Kabir asks.

  ‘The same distance we did in the van.’

  Kabir ponders. ‘What about your ankle?’ he says.

  ‘It’s OK. We’ll go slowly if it starts to hurt.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll be shorter if we go along the beach.’

  They follow the cantaloupe-coloured streets to the sea. A yacht struggles to make it into shore. A trio of women gossip over prams with hoods like refugee tents. They button their cardigans to their necks as the breeze whips their skirts against their legs.

  No one takes any notice of the two boys.

  It is the first time they have seen the sea, apart from the glimpses they had had from the train, and the patch of blue they saw on the waterfront in Genova.

  Kabir is thrilled. He gallops through sand and reefs of pebbles and calls back over his shoulder to Aryan.

  ‘I’ll race you to the water,’ he says, his too-long trousers flapping against his too-short legs.

  At the water’s edge, where the sea-stones clatter and slide, he tangles in his own momentum and trips. He comes up frowning, rubbing the imprint of pebbles off dented knees.

  Aryan laughs. ‘Nice dive!’ he calls.

  ‘I won!’ Kabir says when he catches his breath, raising his fist in triumph at Aryan’s approach. ‘Do you think it’s really salt?’

  ‘Check and let me know.’

  Kabir spits out the briny water with a grimace.

  ‘You may as well go all the way in now,’ Aryan says, observing the high-water mark on Kabir’s jeans.

  ‘Brrrrr – too cold!’ he says. ‘Why is the sea two-colours blue?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Aryan says. ‘Maybe the dark part is where the sharks are waiting for you to come in.’

  ‘Or you, if I push you in first!’

  They tussle on the sand where the pebbles end, Kabir twisting Aryan’s fingers to win the advantage. But Aryan easily slides a knee on to his chest.

  ‘Mercy, do you beg for mercy?’ Aryan asks. ‘Or shall I feed you to the sharks?’

  ‘Never!’ says Kabir, squirming.

  Aryan leans more weight on to his knee. ‘Will you eat sand?’ His hand forms a funnel above Kabir’s face.

  Kabir wriggles his head from side to side. ‘Peace!’ Kabir says. ‘Peace! You win.’

  ‘Promise to be my slave?’ The hand hovers.

  ‘Yes, anything!’ Kabir says.

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘I promise to be your slave!’

  ‘For ever?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I promise to be your slave for ever!’ Kabir cries.

  Aryan relinquishes his grip.

  Coming up breathless, Kabir pulls the cone of a seashell from under his back.

  ‘Just tricking,’ he says. ‘I’ll never be your slave!’

  Aryan fells him again and tickles him till they are distracted by the valiant yacht, which finally manages to ground itself in the shallows.

  It is late afternoon when they start walking. Occasionally they see a train flash between the houses or vanish into a tunnel with a flick of its silver tail.

  The breeze picks up and caps the blue sea white.

  It is heavy going through the sand. Their shoes fill up and every step takes more effort than they had thought. After a while the beach turns completely into pebbles but their feet wobble on the rickety stones and Aryan is worried he will twist his ankle again.

  When they come to a stream feeding effluent into the sea they leave the beach and walk along the quiet roads between the holiday homes. The summer has faded, and many of the cottages are already boarded up.

  As evening draws in they take some late tomatoes
from an unwatched market garden and make a nest out of newspapers and dried grass.

  Aryan is dreaming. It is night and he is on his own, outside a strange villa, high above the sea.

  He has slipped over the wall, over the tripwire, and crunched across stones unfazed by the sudden flash of floodlights, a trespasser on a continent not his own. The howling of neighbouring dogs jars in the scented night air but they are too far off to trouble him now. Dappled in the artificial light, he stands in the shadow of a magnolia; bathed in its perfume, he drapes his clothes over the shrubbery like an offering. His naked skin puckers in the cool evening air; the tiles are smooth under his ruined feet. For a moment he pauses on the edge, just for a heartbeat, just for a breath. Then, in one luxurious movement, he arches and dives, shredding the silver blueness and the anxiety that never leaves him now into splinters of shuddering light.

  The shock of the water winds him. He has never learnt to swim yet he is swimming; only if he keeps moving will his muscles fool him into forgetting the cold. Slipstreams of bubbles slake off his hands in whirling mercury pods; the dirt that seems to fill every pore dissolves with his exhaustion, so that all that aches inside him is momentarily soothed. He feels his tiredness lifting like the ghost of the dead. The pool is lit from the sides, behind bulbous fish-eye glass; where the tiled floor drops away it seems like he is swimming upward through space, powering towards the light of distant suns.

  He wakes early and sits up, his back to the gnarled bark of a tree, watching the ants, waiting for Kabir to open his eyes. His brother’s plump cheeks are damp with the moisture of his breathing. The dawn is tangy with iodine and the smell of tomato leaves.

  A caterpillar pleats and stretches itself along the length of a branch like a tape measure with audacious stripes.

  Not the dream but the feeling of the dream floats back to him as the day unfolds; he was the swimmer but it also wasn’t him – like a strange voice from the future, it seems to Aryan to be an intimation of the person he is yet to become.

  The feeling of it accompanies him all day, this presence of his future self. It walks with him as they follow the road into France, skirting the craggy mountains whose outcrops tumble into the sea.

  Guard dogs rear on their hind legs in a paroxysm of barking as they pass.

  They reach the outskirts of Nice in the middle of the afternoon.

  They follow a tramline past orange apartment blocks and manicured parks where palm trees and pines compete. Aryan can’t work out what the climate here must be, with desert plants and mountain trees growing side by side as if the land itself were uncertain whether it was a place of heat or ice.

  Suddenly, through a gap in the apartment buildings, the sky begins to open out; beyond them, he senses, must be the sea.

  A chill breeze tugs at their clothes and whips the hotel flags. White sun loungers bask in empty rows on the pebbles, waiting for better days. Aryan is amazed that no one has stolen them; not one of them is locked up.

  Aryan hasn’t got a plan. He just wants to be invisible while they work out how to get to the station, and how to buy a ticket to Paris without encountering the police.

  ‘Let’s walk along a bit,’ he says.

  The sea wall rises high above them, and above that, the waterfront hotels of Nice. A woman jogs by on the promenade; Aryan is embarrassed at the sight of her lycra-clad body. An old man throws a stick to a dog that retrieves it despite the fringe over its eyes.

  ‘I wish Tom and Jerry were here,’ Kabir says. It’s the first time he has mentioned the puppies since they escaped from the farm in Greece.

  ‘They’d have gone crazy with all the seaweed,’ Aryan says. ‘Dogs like smelly stuff like that.’

  ‘Maybe we can have a dog when we get to England,’ Kabir says. ‘They love dogs over there. Even the Queen has dogs.’

  ‘The Queen! What do you know about the Queen?’ Aryan asks.

  ‘She takes them hunting. Hamid told me. She even lets her dogs inside her castle.’

  ‘And how would Hamid know that?’

  ‘He showed me a photograph in a Turkish magazine. She was sitting on a blue sofa and the dogs were on the sofa next to her.’

  ‘Hamid and his stories,’ Aryan says. He is amazed at the things Kabir remembers, and wonders when it was that he and Hamid had found time to discuss the Queen of England’s pets.

  ‘It’s true!’ Kabir says. ‘Why would he make up something like that?’

  ‘I didn’t say he made it up,’ Aryan says. ‘I’d just like to see that picture too.’

  They sit on the pebbles on the waterfront lobbing smooth grey missiles into the waves.

  ‘Maybe we could go to England by speedboat,’ Kabir says.

  ‘Oh yes, and where are we going to get a speedboat?’ says Aryan.

  ‘There’s one right there.’

  Aryan laughs and jabs him in the ribs. ‘Can someone as crazy as you really be my brother?’

  ‘Why not? I think it’s a good plan.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how far it is? We’d have to go right across the Mediterranean, and all around the outside of Europe,’ he says. ‘It’s miles and miles and miles.’

  ‘I guess we’d need a lot of petrol,’ Kabir says.

  ‘Not to mention navigation equipment. And supplies. And a boat so strong it could withstand the Atlantic storms. We’d end up like the Titanic.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be like the Titanic because it’s too warm for icebergs.’

  ‘Icebergs would be the least of our worries,’ Aryan says. ‘But hey, let me know when you get any other bright ideas.’

  ‘OK, so you think of something better.’ Kabir’s shoulders slump and he turns his back the way he always does when he feels sulky or hurt.

  Hunger is making them irritable. Aryan is beginning to wonder where they will spend the night.

  ‘Come on,’ Aryan says, wobbling to his feet on the clackety stones.

  They climb the steps in the sea wall and follow a narrow street behind the promenade in search of a bakery.

  ‘How many euros have we got left?’ Kabir says. Most of the money Kabir stole in Rome went to pay for their train tickets to France.

  ‘We’ve still got a few,’ Aryan says. The large silver coins nestle flat and warm in his hand. He has €46.50 distributed among his pockets and shoes, and €340 in his belt, and if what Rahim said was right, they will need all of it and more when they get to Calais.

  Noses pressed to a window, their eyes stretch in wonder. There are fantastical constructions that look too beautiful to eat – glazed strawberries pinned to rafts of meringue with the tiniest seam of orange; circular cakes iced with chocolate as shiny as mirrors and smudged with fragments of gold; small battalions of raspberries marshalled on biscuit plains.

  ‘Are people here so rich they eat gold?’

  ‘Maybe it just looks like gold,’ Aryan says. ‘Or maybe they’ve invented some sort of edible gold paint.’

  Before they have time to consider it, Aryan is spinning on his heels.

  A man in a suntan and slip-on shoes is walking past, arguing in Farsi with a woman in a bright floral skirt.

  ‘The view of the sea was fantastic, just like in that Matisse painting,’ the man is saying in an accent Aryan recognizes from Tehran. ‘But the bathroom was terrible, like all these bathrooms in Europe.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with that shower,’ the woman says. ‘You were just too impatient with the settings.’

  Aryan grabs Kabir by the arm and hurries after them.

  ‘Sir, sir,’ Aryan says to the man’s retreating back.

  The man doesn’t hear and walks on.

  ‘Sir,’ Aryan says again. He darts to one side, dares to tug the man’s sleeve.

  The man halts in surprise. The woman takes a step backwards.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, are you from Iran?’ Aryan says.

  ‘No, we’re American. Though you are right, we are originally from Iran. What can we do for you?’ />
  ‘Please,’ Aryan says. ‘Can you help us?’

  The man looks at the woman beside him. ‘Are you boys in some kind of trouble?’

  ‘We are hungry,’ says Aryan.

  The man and the woman exchange glances.

  ‘This is my wife,’ the man says. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Afghanistan,’ says Aryan.

  ‘And what are two boys from Afghanistan doing here in Nice?’

  ‘We are going to England,’ Aryan says.

  ‘So we can go to school,’ adds Kabir.

  ‘Is this your brother?’ the woman asks.

  Aryan touches his heart with his right hand and extends it to the man and to the woman, and tells them their names.

  ‘How old are you?’ the woman says.

  ‘I’m fourteen and my brother is eight,’ says Aryan.

  ‘And where are your parents?’ the woman asks.

  The question comes as a jolt. No one has asked him this before.

  ‘They both died,’ Aryan says. ‘In the war.’

  The man and woman speak to each other in English. The woman smiles at Kabir and tousles his short-cropped hair.

  Only Aryan noticed Kabir flinch when the man went to shake his hand.

  They are seated inside a noisy bistro in a square ringed with restaurants overlooking a fountain. Outside, the breeze nags at the corners of tablecloths pegged down with metal clips, and teases the coloured napkins folded into empty glasses. Heaters on tall poles beam wastefully down at the tables, but the breeze defeats the feeble sunshine. All the metal chairs are empty; even the seagulls look forlorn.

  The woman is running a finger down the menu; Kabir stares at her cyclamen-pink nails. ‘What do you boys feel like eating?’ she says. ‘They have everything here: schnitzel, fettuccine, steaks . . .’

  Aryan swallows. The Americans-from-Iran are kind but he doesn’t know any of these things. Kabir is swinging his feet from the chair.

  Her husband sees Aryan’s confusion. ‘Why don’t you order for the two of them?’ he says.

  The woman brightens. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I think minestrone, and then beefburgers for the boys. And maybe apple juice. How does that sound?’