Hinterland: A Novel

by Caroline Brothers

  Sometimes he wonders if, in the unspoken things between them, Kabir can sense how he feels. Though sometimes he weighs upon him like the Earth itself, at others Aryan wonders who was sustaining whom, and whether, without his brother, he would have made it this far at all.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kabir,’ he says. The hand holding his plastic fork is raw and trembling with the cold.

  Puzzled, his brother looks up from his tray of spaghetti. The road is black with water; they are sheltering from the sleet on the leeward side of a warehouse with their handout meal. The top of the lighthouse is invisible in the cloud, as if it has given up on ships and is looking out for aircraft instead.

  ‘I’m sorry for bringing you here,’ Aryan says. ‘I should never have let you come. I should have gone by myself and sent for you from England. Maybe you could have flown all the way in a plane.’

  ‘I wanted to come with you, Aryan,’ Kabir says. ‘I would have run away if you had made me stay in Iran. You’re the only real family I have left.’

  It is so long since they’d lived as a family that the word comes as a shock to Aryan; he can hardly remember the time before everything imploded. For a moment it seems that his brother is referring to somebody else’s life.

  He looks at Kabir, at the overgrown hair, at the rain-slicked jacket over layers of clothes that have buried the Spiderman T-shirt he was once so excited to wear. He has changed, Aryan realizes. He is more serious than the Kabir he remembers with the puppies playing with his shoelaces in the onion fields. His puffy cheeks have thinned, and there are shadows around his eyes like he had when he was sick in Greece. If this journey is wearing him down, Aryan thinks, it is also taking its toll on Kabir; yet he never questions it, never says he wants to go back like he did when they arrived on the farm, never complains any more that he is nearly nine and still hasn’t been to school. He never imagines there is any path other than the one they are on.

  Aryan is anxious about time sliding by, that every day he is getting older and they might not let him into school, about how he should make a life. But Kabir accepts their situation with a sort of stoicism. His brother might have grown quieter, but for the first time Aryan notices how much he has come to rely on having him at his side.

  Something moves inside Aryan, and he smiles. ‘Remind me where we’re going, Soldierboy,’ he says.

  ‘We’re going to school!’ comes Kabir’s reply.

  ‘And when are we going to get there?’

  ‘At half past nine!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘On time!’

  ‘And how are we going to get there?’

  ‘KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon!’ says Kabir.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Aryan says. ‘But I bet you I’ll get there first.’

  With his ruby-ringed hand Idris pulls a mobile phone and a wad of notes out of a bomber jacket that did not spend the night in the dunes.

  ‘Look, if you’re worried, I can get you to talk to someone who’s made it across that way,’ he tells Aryan. Idris is impatient, feigning fatigue. ‘It’s easy. We can ring them in England. Plenty of guys have done it. They go back and forwards whenever they like.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ Aryan says. He does not trust Idris, but right now all he can see is a circle of diminishing options.

  He wants to talk first with Hamid.

  Khaled sells them a card for Aryan’s phone. He got it for them at a supermarket on the edge of the town. Aryan doesn’t ask how much he paid; he knows that the price already includes Khaled’s commission.

  They look for Jonah in the meal line, and find him sharing a cigarette on the African side of the cabin, beside the musical car.

  ‘Still here, my friend!’ Jonah says when he sees them, his tired face made young again by his grin. He slaps his palm against Aryan’s. His hair has grown springier since the night they spent in the rafters beside the sawmill; raindrops nestle in it like diamonds that match the one in his ear.

  ‘You too,’ Aryan says with a smile over the booming music. Faces lean out to see who Jonah is talking to, then pull back inside the car like a tortoise with multiple heads. The vehicle rocks to a reggae beat.

  ‘I need your help again,’ Aryan says. ‘It’s for the phone.’

  ‘You need to charge it up?’

  Aryan nods. He has long since lost his charger but he remembers that the Africans were pirating current for their batteries from a building site next to the sawmill. ‘Would someone have a charger that fits?’

  The phone gleams iridescent as a beetle on Aryan’s proffered hand.

  ‘No problemo, my friend,’ Jonah says. ‘We can do it this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you want to talk to Masood if there’s any time left at the end?’ Aryan asks.

  ‘Sure,’ says Kabir. ‘I’ll tell him about the sea, and that we saw England from the beach.’

  Aryan dials the number of the house in Tehran. There is an echo-filled pause like air rushing down a wind tunnel. There are strange click-clack sounds as the small current of hope races back across all the miles they have traced on foot, by boat, in the back of trucks and semi-trailers, on suspension-shot buses and trains. He imagines the signal beaming up to satellites and bouncing down to the cables that criss-crossed the city, snaking its way to the right street, the right pole, the right house, to the black Bakelite telephone, click-clack, click-clack in the silence as the call patches through.

  He tries to guess who will pick up the receiver; his heart is bound tight with anticipation, joy chasing loneliness chasing anxiety chasing sadness at how long it has been. He pictures ruddy-faced Masood, and his sister Zohra who was teaching Masood to read, and their father Mustapha who scares Aryan a bit. He holds his breath; the line rings and rings into the void.

  He counts nineteen rings before it cuts off.

  ‘Wrong number,’ he tells Kabir. His brother is waiting at his elbow, scuffing the ground with his heel.

  He tries again.

  He can see the phone in the hallway, just outside the living room they also used for eating and sleeping. He can remember the sound it makes which is different from the one carrying now down the crackly line.

  He lets it ring until the line goes dead.

  Something isn’t right. Phone calls are so rare that there is always someone who will leap to pick up the receiver, or at least take a message for the family if no one is in.

  He turns off the phone to save the battery and zips it back into his anorak, its hard shell close to his agitated heart.

  In the evening they try again.

  Aryan counts fourteen rings. Suddenly, a man’s voice.

  ‘Mustapha?’ Aryan says.

  ‘Who is this?’ Aryan doesn’t recognize the speaker.

  ‘Aryan, the nephew of Mustapha,’ he says. ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Mustapha’s gone, the whole family’s gone,’ the voice says.

  ‘Gone where?’ Aryan tries to make sense of the words.

  ‘No idea where. Just gone. All the Afghans have gone.’

  Aryan tries to grasp the news, to think fast as he absorbs the facts. Why would they have gone? Where would they have gone to?

  ‘Who is speaking, please?’ he says.

  ‘I am Izad, the cousin of the owner of this house. My cousin has moved back to the city and needs his apartment again.’

  ‘When did they leave?’ Aryan’s voice constricts. He tries to keep the man talking while he gropes for the right questions to ask, as the last thread connecting him and Kabir with the remnants of their family stretches as thin as the voice undulating feebly down the line.

  ‘Last week,’ says the man. ‘I’m only here because Mustapha is coming back tonight to pay us the last month’s rent.’

  So they are still in Tehran. Aryan tries to think through the buzzing in his ears.

  ‘I need to speak to him,’ says Aryan. ‘What time will he be there? I can call again.’

  ‘He said he was coming tonight. Call back
in an hour,’ the voice says.

  ‘Can you tell him Aryan called from France?’

  But the receiver is already clattering in his ear. With the pip-pip-pip of broken connections something gives way in his chest.

  Numb, he slides the phone shut. He shivers on the gritty black asphalt, gripped again by confusion. Tears needle the back of his eyes. He looks for somewhere private to go, but all he can see is the blurred blue light of a police car.

  ‘What happened?’ Kabir says. ‘I thought you were going to let me talk to Masood.’

  When they call again it is hailing. White stones bounce on the roadway, collect in the mud, turn the blankets that make up the sagging roofs of the huts into nests of crystalline eggs. Aryan’s shoulder muscles hurt from always being hunched against the cold; his hands are so stiff he can hardly press the keys.

  This time, Mustapha comes to the phone.

  ‘We need money,’ Aryan tells him. ‘The agent here wants two thousand dollars. It’s the only way to get across.’

  Mustapha yells down the line. He has troubles of his own. He doesn’t have that kind of money. While he and Kabir swan around Europe they have just lost their apartment and have moved in on top of another family who occupy a single room. There are more Iraqis moving into Iran, and there is no more room for long-term Afghan refugees.

  Aryan doesn’t try to explain. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asks.

  Mustapha relents. ‘I will ask around. Your father was well loved. Maybe there is something we can do.’

  Two weeks later, Mustapha calls. He has the money; a middleman is holding it in trust. Aryan reads Idris’s number down the phone so Mustapha can pass it on.

  Aryan allows himself to think about his father properly for the first time in many months. Wonders about the families so grateful to him for teaching their children, even after he lost his job at the school, that they would agree to assist his orphaned sons. Marvels that he can still help them, though he died so long ago and is buried six thousand kilometres away.

  Aryan saves Mustapha’s mobile number in his phone, adding it to the three he has already stored in its memory: for Hamid, Idris, and the tailor’s nephew in London.

  Inside it doesn’t seem so cold.

  The carcasses swinging in two long lines don’t look as sinister as he had thought. They are just sides of beef, Aryan tells himself, long dead, just chunks of meat destined for the dinner tables of England. They don’t even have any heads.

  There are six of them and they have climbed in at a petrol station on the edge of town. Idris has set it up and, after what they have been through in the previous weeks, Aryan is surprised how smoothly it has gone. He is anxious about getting through the port, but Idris has said it will be a breeze, that they never check these vehicles because most people didn’t like the cold. ‘Bon voyage,’ he’d said as they’d shaken on the deal.

  No, it doesn’t seem so cold inside, not after the weather in Calais. There is a stillness, and Aryan realizes that for once, it’s the lack of wind. In the darkness, under his blanket, he can feel Kabir sitting close beside him, knees to his chest, facing Hamid against the opposite wall. Three other men Aryan doesn’t know are dispersed inside. They are wearing every item of clothing they could find – six sweaters each, two anoraks, and as many socks as they could manage and still fit into their shoes.

  Idris’s information is good; the truck gets under way soon after they clamber in.

  Aryan has never been anywhere so dark. It’s like the world before creation, before any memory of light.

  The hands of Hamid’s watch glow greenly: five forty-five am.

  ‘How will we know when we’re through the controls?’ A voice is whispering in the blackness.

  ‘We’ll only be sure once we’re on the ferry. The truck will park and stay still for a while, but we will feel the swell of the sea.’

  ‘I hope it’s calm. I don’t want to get seasick.’

  ‘Seasick – now you tell me,’ comes the low reply.

  They talk in soft voices, then fall silent. They are taking enough risks as it is. Either they will get through or they’ll be found; they are resigned; there is nothing more to do but hope.

  They hear the truck rumble towards the ferry. It stops and starts and reverses. The hooks with their red and pink carcasses swing and squeak over their heads. There is a grinding of what sounds like metal, and then the truck stands still. The men’s ears strain for the sound of voices, the sound of dogs, trying to imagine where they are in the port they have scoured endlessly from the other side of the wire.

  The adrenalin that kept him warm is ebbing, and Aryan is starting to feel the cold of the metal seep through his clothes. He wraps the blanket around him, tight as a bandage. He has started to shiver, but can’t bind the shivering down.

  At first his mind races. It darts forward and back, rabbiting between anticipation and fear, digging out random moments from the places in which he had imagined a future. He remembers Bashir and Ali, the way he used to trail around with the brothers who are scarcely even memories now. It seems incomprehensible to him that they are not waiting for them to return to Afghanistan, that Bashir and probably Ali too are no longer alive. He reaches further back. He pushes away the horrible time with his cousin on the shores of the lake, before the soldiers came, and thinks instead about the chess games with Baba in the bazaar, about the way he got the old television to work with the car battery and the jump leads with their crocodile jaws. Then the picture surges up of what had happened to his body, gathering him up among the scattered apples, the wrenching sound of his mother’s wails when they buried his remains at dusk.

  Aryan forces himself to think about the house, the day his mother served the pomegranate seeds, the feel of the pigeons’ soft white feathers and the scratching of their prehistoric feet on the roof, the stifling summer nights under the stars.

  He remembers the house in Iran where he and Kabir and their mother lived with Zohra and Masood, and the bus back to Afghanistan, and the last time he saw Madar, the last sight of her sensible shoes. Her fatal choice to go just that day at just that time, just when the car bomber struck. All the events that that decision unleashed. He thinks back over his and Kabir’s flight, the long journey back to Iran, the last moments at their cousin’s house, the Kurdish smugglers in the mountains who were as frightening as the soldiers on the border. In Istanbul, the mechanical whirr of the sewing machines and the smell of cotton dust and the day he sewed up his hand. He remembers the night river crossing with Hamid, and the old woman’s kitchen on the farm, and the puppies learning to dig, and Kabir’s face in the dashboard light when the lorry driver brought him back to the farm.

  He wonders how Solomon used the fares he robbed from them in Genova, and how the lady with the pram got by after Kabir stole her handbag in Rome. He remembers the touch of the woman’s hands as she cut his hair. He thinks of the girl on the train, and her peacock eyelids in the reflection of the window at night. The Americans-from-Iran will be back in California by now, he thinks. He was happy the day they took them to buy new clothes.

  It’s getting cold, he says to Kabir, but his brother is lost in his own world.

  Gradually Aryan’s thoughts become heavy. It takes all his energy now to concentrate on not succumbing to the temperature, on gripping his jaws to stop the incessant chattering of his teeth. He covers his nose with his sweater to breathe his body heat back into his chest.

  He is tired, so tired. It is so much effort to keep warm.

  In his mind’s eye Aryan sees the pigeons again. They are circling the city, white feathers flashing against the dark mountains, against the smoke of the chimneys, against the pastel washing on the lines. They are descending in slow revolutions, lower and lower, until he can feel the wind from their feathers brushing his face, and then the feathers themselves. He can’t see his grandfather or hear his grandfather’s voice but he knows he is somewhere near as the feathers caress his cheeks, and the birds’ s
mall hearts pulse warmly next to his skin. He is not afraid any more of their claws or the beating wings. Still they descend, so many of them they block out the sky and the houses and the wind. There is no place left to roost so they settle on his limbs and his body and his face, gently now, not scratching at all. He can smell their feather scent, like dust and insects and seeds and the mountain wind, as they warm him like a coverlet, pressing down on him, closing in over his eyes and mouth and nose, smothering him with their softness and using up all the air.

  Hamid and I were the only ones to walk out alive.

  I don’t know how long we waited in the end. Even Hamid was unconscious when they opened the truck. What saved us, I think, was that he and I were sitting near the doors; a thin trickle of air must have managed to filter in, and find its way to our noses and into our lungs, and kept up our low, slow breathing despite ourselves.

  The first thing I remember of England was the market stench – rotting cabbage leaves and hosed-down meat – like a forest floor, like a field of compost – invading the metallic vacuum of cold.

  A man in overalls was standing in the open doorway. His overalls were blue, the same colour as the sofa where the Queen was sitting in the photo with the dogs that were allowed inside. We were in some sort of loading zone.

  ‘OhChrist,’ the man was saying. His voice kept getting louder. ‘OhChrist, what’s this in here? OhJesusChrist, they’re blue. Call someone, call an ambulance, JesusChrist, just do as I say, it’s 999, don’t argue with me. Go!’

  Hamid was stirring a little but Aryan was lying slumped over me and he was cold like ice. It wasn’t the temperature, they said later, it was the lack of oxygen. I pushed him off and got on my knees beside him and nearly fell down under those hanging carcasses and then I started slapping him about the face.