Hinterland: A Novel (10 page)

‘
Yassas!
’ the farmer shouts back from the field.

It is almost too easy. Aryan has no idea where the truck is going, but at least they are on the move. Kabir looks like he is under water in the green tarpaulin light.

‘Will the puppies be all right?’ Kabir whispers.

Aryan feels a pang. But they could not have taken them.

‘They’ve still got Not-So-Old Dog to protect them,’ he says.

The sky is the deepest blue and the streetlights are still on when Aryan peers through the gap he has opened in the canvas. The truck has stopped at a service station; he is assailed by the odour of petrol that always made him feel queasy, even when he has had enough to eat.

The driver slams the cabin door. Aryan waits a moment, then takes a chisel he has found in the truck and tears a slit in the tarpaulin. Sliding the crates apart, he looks out. All he can see is the bitumen of a car park and the wall of another truck.

‘Let’s go,’ he tells Kabir. He pushes his brother through the opening, then slithers down beside him, favouring his strong ankle. His vertebrae scrape on the truck’s metal ridge as he drops.

On creaking legs they stumble into a salt-sticky dawn. From the sound of seagulls he guesses they are near a rubbish dump, or somewhere along the coast. They hover between the semi-trailers, and duck under the wheels of one to wait till their driver returns. He starts the engine and pulls back on to the highway; they watch till the green tarpaulin is eclipsed by the traffic.

There is no soap or paper towels in the men’s restroom and the water is cold.

Side by side they piss into a reeking urinal. Aryan steps over the leaking floor and uproots two handfuls of paper from a cubicle. They wash their faces and dry them off and look at themselves like startled strangers in the spotted mirror.

‘Where is this place?’ Kabir says.

‘I think we’re still in Greece. At least all the number plates are Greek.’

He flattens his brother’s springy hair with water and straightens his clothes.

‘We have to try not to look too obvious,’ Aryan says.

‘I’m hungry,’ Kabir says. Aryan ignores him and the dragging emptiness of his own stomach.

Aeroplanes cruise low overhead, landing gear extended like talons. From the airport, Aryan thinks, there must be transport into a city.

‘You got your marching shoes on?’

Kabir nods.

Aryan is worried by how quiet he has become. He hopes that every kilometre he puts between them and the farm will help him forget.

‘We’ll get something to eat in the city, don’t worry,’ he tells Kabir.

Around them the land is bald. Treeless mountains brood at the far edge of a flat industrial plain that is spliced by freeways. They skirt the back of the petrol station and walk along a road that merges up ahead with a highway. A railway line divides its two arteries of traffic; a train ambles into a deserted platform.

Aryan grabs Kabir by the hand. They clamber on to the motorway shoulder. ‘Ready?’ he says, searching for a break in the traffic.

At the first gap between the vehicles they run. There is a wailing of horns as cars and trucks speed by in a surge of wind. Aryan’s heart pounds as they clamber over the road divider and flatten themselves against the waist-high metal barrier. Whistling vehicles whip their hair into their eyes and tear at their clothes in both directions now. Shapes like metallic walls roar by so fast that their colours bleed; the world is streaked with sound and light and the rush of exhaust-laden air. Kabir slips but steadies himself on the barrier.

‘Ready?’ Aryan shouts again above the roaring. His brother is leaning backwards like a man unhinged. The vehicles thin out momentarily, and they hurl themselves across the tide.

Another blasting of horns, but they’re across.

They jump over a concrete wall and land on a sandy path that runs beside the railway tracks. Ahead, a few low steps lead up to the platform. On one side of it hangs a blue sign with a picture of an aeroplane. On the other, the word ‘Athina’.

They pause for a moment, catching their breath. Kabir rolls up his trouser leg; his shin is bleeding where he has skinned it on the barricade.

‘We’d better get a ticket,’ Aryan says. A staircase to the ticket office soars over their heads.

At the window Aryan pulls out a twenty-euro note.

‘Two,’ he says.

A young woman, black hair streaked blonde, says something at high velocity they don’t understand. ‘Airport, or Athens?’ she repeats in impatient English through a gap in the glass.

‘Athens,’ he says. With relief, he recognizes the name.

Speaker-buds in her ears, she barely looks at them as she taps a machine with fingernails ornamented with intricate flowers. Kabir can just see over the counter; he squints to watch the miniature decorations rise and fall as she works.

Bored, the woman slaps two tickets from a wooden holder on to the counter. She slides their change under the glass without a glance.

Copying a young man in front of them, they feed their tickets into a greedy turnstile that spits them out again with a whirr of mechanical disdain.

Back on the platform, they sit cross-legged on the sun-warmed concrete to wait. They pitch pieces of gravel at a discoloured soft-drink can discarded on the far side of the rails.

They get off with the tourists from the airport at a station before the end of the line. The train has left the lighted world behind and burrowed deep underground; the platform is aswirl with people.

Aryan stands aside to let the tourists wheel their oversized suitcases past. In the dimness and the crush he has lost his bearings; the weight of earth and concrete oppress him; he just wants to go onwards, or up.

In the carriage he has shown Kabir the piece of paper where Ahmed wrote ‘Victoria Park’. There were pictures of a ship and a temple and the Olympic rings on the diagram above the doors, but no sign of any parks. On the platform he cannot decipher the maps in frames on the walls.

He stops an old man in too-long shoes clutching the arm of his wife. A transparent pyramid of plastic dangles from her finger; Kabir peers at the biscuits arranged inside. They argue, they point and gesticulate, but Aryan cannot make out their Greek.

All bra straps and flashing jewellery, a woman clatters past too hurried to notice Aryan’s appeal. A man with a white cane tap-taps along the platform as if sweeping it for mines. Finally they intercept a young man who looks like a student, with holes in his jeans and hair glued into a miraculous point.

‘There is no Victoria Park in Athens,’ the student says, when at last he understands where they want to go.

Ahmed had been so definite. Aryan insists.

‘There is Victoria metro station and that is not far from a big park in Alexandras Street,’ the student says. ‘Maybe that’s the one you want.’

Aryan hesitates. Maybe he is right. If there is no Victoria Park, perhaps Ahmed meant the park that’s near the station.

‘Yes,’ Aryan says. ‘I think it’s OK.’

The student leads them up escalators and through passageways of gleaming stone.

Kabir gazes with amazement at the moving staircases. He pauses a second before jumping on, loses his balance, and steadies himself on the handrail that goes at a different speed from the stairs.

‘Two stops only,’ the student says, illustrating the information with his fingers when they reach the platform. ‘Omonia, Victoria. There you get out. The park is very close. Just ask for a street called Alexandras if you get lost.’

He makes Aryan repeat the name.

Aryan touches his heart and shakes his hand, and Kabir solemnly follows suit. The student is surprised, then smiles. In moments he is enclosed by the crowd; it is like he never existed, or did so, ephemeral as a firefly, only to light their way.

Almost immediately they run into a group of Afghans sitting under the trees. They are Hazaras from the south. One of them leads Aryan and Kabir across the park and through the streets to a hotel where the rooms are €3.50 a night.

‘You need a travel agent?’ asks the man behind the desk. Aryan stares at the shiny scar that links his right nostril to his eye.

He hadn’t imagined it would be so simple.

They take a room for one night. Kabir drags his feet up the interminable staircase, pushing himself from wall to wall. The number on the key leads them to a room, little bigger than the two narrow beds inside it, pungent with stale cigarettes. There is one small window almost at the level of the ceiling. Aryan works its wooden shutter open by pulling on a dirty string; the light it lets in is grey, reflected off an outside wall.

The twin beds sag even before they collapse on to chenille bedspreads rubbed thin by the countless bodies that have lain there before them.

Aryan pulls from his inside pocket the pieces of bread that he has saved from the farm, and hands one to Kabir. The crusts are so hard their gums bleed.

Later, Aryan shows Kabir how to work the shower, and waits for him in the room. When he comes back, pink-skinned and dripping-haired, Aryan takes his turn.

Aryan stands under the running water a long time. The tiles are cracked, and some are missing, and when he turns the hot tap a rusted pipe swings out from the wall. Brown veins marble a decaying cake of soap. But the lukewarm water washes the dust from his hair, prises the stiffness from his shoulders, and slowly eases the tiredness from his mind.

Pictures flash up and disintegrate like slides on a crumbling wall – the puppies batting potatoes between Kabir’s feet; the old woman feeding them in silence at the kitchen table; Kabir’s face in the dashboard light when the truck driver brought him back to the farm. He remembers the smell of earth under the truck’s tarpaulin and Kabir awash in the aquarium light, and the student with the pointy hair who helped them in the metro. He lets his thoughts run with the water until it starts to turn cold and washes them down the half-choked drain.

Flowers of rust decorate the mirror that is covered in fog. Aryan traces a line across it with his finger and watches the drips race to descend. He dries himself with the scratchy towel that is too meagre to wrap around his hips, and pulls his dirty clothes back on. For the first time in months his body feels almost relaxed.

He pads back to their room along the tiled corridor and pushes open the door.

The room is empty.

Aryan seizes the key, slams the door behind him and flings himself down the staircase three steps at once. He slips on the foot-polished surface; manages to clutch the banister just in time. His heart slams against his ribcage like a drowning man.

Between gasps for air he tries to calculate how many minutes have passed, how far a small boy could have gone.

There is no one in the foyer; even the scar-faced receptionist has disappeared.

In the street he looks left and right, blinking in the glare, scanning the known world for a sign. Where, he thinks, where? The road is choked with traffic; his view is blocked by a stream of yellow taxis and white-windowed delivery vans. The sick feeling he remembers from the last time they were separated overwhelms him. The only place he can imagine is the park; panicked, he retraces their steps.

And then he sees him, sitting on a bench between the trees. He is watching a gang of children chase a football, a black-and-white dog yapping at their heels. In the glaring sunshine, Kabir looks forlorn.

Aryan leans forward, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He can feel his heart pounding through the wash of relief.

He sinks beside his brother on the bench. It is a while before he can talk; his mouth is sour with the aftertaste of panic.

‘Don’t do that,’ Aryan says after a while.

‘I only went for a walk.’

‘I thought I’d lost you again.’

The first agent they meet looks scarcely older than Aryan. He has slicked-back hair and a nervous tic and mobile phones he juggles in each hand. He promises to get them to Italy for two thousand eight hundred euros.