Hinterland: A Novel (5 page)

Every night in the truck on the way back to the farm, Kabir collapses into Aryan’s shoulder, falling into a sleep from which not even the potholes can rouse him.

They harvest oranges even in the rain.

Hands mottled with cold, Aryan zips Kabir into his anorak. Their clothes are too thin, and the leaves slap water into their faces and down their necks. The rungs of the ladder turn slippery in the wet.

Kabir complains. The hard fabric of his anorak chafes his chin and rubs it raw.

In the mid-afternoon drizzle, Aryan stretches for a branch just out of reach. His weight shifts on the ladder, and its front foot digs deep into the earth, leaning it sideways. As his shoe searches its way along the metal rung, the orange comes away suddenly in his hand and the branch slaps back into his face. Blinded, he loses his grip, and falls.

He lands heavily on his ankle, yelping with pain. Kabir drops his crate, oranges bouncing like lottery balls, and comes running.

Nostrils flared, Aryan is breathing hard. He rolls from side to side on the blue tarpaulin, one knee hard up against his chest. Electric currents of pain shoot through his leg.

‘Tell the farmer,’ he says through clenched teeth.

They drive home in silence. Aryan’s ankle has swollen like a marrow. He can hardly keep on his shoe.

When he is lying on his freezing pallet, the old woman brings him aspirin so old that the blue writing on the tinfoil wrapping has almost worn away. It fizzes and dies in the water at the bottom of a chipped china cup.

She also brings him ice in a kitchen cloth. Aryan winces as she lays it on the swelling.

‘I can’t work tomorrow,’ Aryan tells the farmer.

The man frowns. ‘We’ll dock it from your pay.’

In a week they go back to the orchard. Aryan walks gingerly, testing the ligaments. The swelling has gone down, but he is afraid to trust his ankle with his full weight. The oranges glow like suns against the blue winter sky.

Up the ladder again he leans into the branches, trying to concentrate, despite the cold that deadens his hands, on not falling.

In the middle of the afternoon there is a plop-plopping on the leaves. It starts to rain.

One evening, the farmer comes to see them after he has driven them back to the house and they are washing their hands under the protesting tap. He is wearing a sweater that zips up at the neck.

‘One week’s work,’ he says, putting a scroll of cash into Aryan’s dripping hand. Then he goes back indoors.

Aryan unrolls the bills and counts them. Two gold fifty-euro notes, one blue twenty-euro note, a tattered five-euro note, plus one euro coin.

He counts them again, the notes making a nest as Aryan lays them on the bed, placing the silver coin in the middle like an egg.

‘We’re rich,’ Kabir says with a grin.

Aryan ignores him. ‘I think he’s made a mistake,’ he says. ‘A hundred and twenty-six euros isn’t right. Ahmed said you could make fifteen euros a day on the farms in Greece.’

He pauses to calculate, and writes the numbers in his notebook to make sure.

‘It should be two hundred and ten euros for the two of us,’ he says.

Outside the house Aryan stops a moment, and swallows. He is not used to having to stand up to people. Hamid, he knows, wouldn’t hesitate. His ankle is starting to throb, but thinking about Hamid helps to steel him, and anger about being cheated propels him.

He knocks on the wooden doorframe. The door is shut but a corner of the curtain is caught in the jamb like the petticoat of someone in a rush. The farmer opens up immediately – he must have been leaning against the inside of it to take off his boots. He squints at Aryan with squirrel eyes.

Aryan can smell woodsmoke and charcoal and onions and his stomach concertinas with hunger.

‘This isn’t the right amount,’ he says, holding out the notes. His hand is shaking. ‘It should be fifteen euros a day.’

‘No,’ the farmer says. ‘Not fifteen. Fifteen is the price for a man. You are only a boy and boys don’t do the work of a man.’

Aryan flushes. ‘I know the price is fifteen,’ he says.

‘I give you ten euros,’ the farmer says. ‘Ten is a very good price – and on top of that I give you bed and food. That costs me money that I am paying for you!’

Aryan’s throat tightens. ‘I work hard for you, as hard as a man, and you should pay me the same price,’ he says.

‘And where are you going to sleep? Where will you have a bed, food, shelter? Where are you going to find these conditions? You think these things are free? In Greece life is very expensive; no one will let you stay as cheaply as me. You don’t have any idea how much a hotel costs. Then you need transport. You will have to pay for a bus, then walk, and now your ankle is weak. Ten euros is a good price, you don’t know how good it is.’

Aryan reflects for a moment. What the man says is true – they don’t know where they are or where else they can go, or what they would have to pay to sleep elsewhere. At least he is giving them some money, even if it’s less than he should. He does some fast calculations. Ten euros a day for seven days is a hundred and forty euros for the two of them, yet still the man has only paid a hundred and twenty-six.

‘What about my brother? He works hard too. You say ten euros a day but this money is not ten euros a day,’ Aryan says. ‘We are two.’ Aryan clenches his hand in his pocket, as if extra courage were to be found in the threadbare cloth.

‘Your brother, he is too small,’ the farmer says, eyes glowering under heavy brows. ‘He can’t do the work of a man either. He only plays all the time. For him I pay eight euros a day. And that’s a good price.’

‘My brother works hard. He is all day with me, collecting oranges, putting them in crates, dragging them to the wall. You pay him the same as me, ten euros a day exactly,’ Aryan says.

The man laughs. ‘This boy your brother, he is no use to me. I could take one man and get the work done three times as fast as I do with you two boys. I’m doing you a favour by letting you work here. But maybe you don’t want to work at all. Maybe you don’t want to wait for the truck to Italy,’ he says.

‘When is the truck coming?’ Aryan says.

‘Only when the work is done,’ the farmer says.

Kabir is lying on the pallet with his shoes on when Aryan returns. The floor is covered in footprints like the dance-steps of ghosts.

‘What happened?’ Kabir says.

Aryan shoves his brother’s feet off the bed. ‘Take your shoes off first,’ he says.

Kabir puts his feet back.

‘Have it your way,’ Aryan says. ‘Sleep like those pigs do in the dirt.’

Aryan flops down on the other pallet. His arms and legs feel heavy. His head is tired and his ankle hurts.

‘So what did he say?’ Kabir asks.

‘Nothing,’ Aryan says.

‘He must have said something.’

‘There’s no more money. He is paying less because we are not men, and less for you because you are only a kid and spend all day mucking around.’

‘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.