Hinterland: A Novel (8 page)

Aryan lies awake for a long time, thinking. It worries him that it is getting harder, whenever Kabir asks, to dredge up his own memories of their father. It is as if the definition of Baba’s profile, in the dust-scratched photo in his wallet, is already fading, its power to evoke the scent of his father’s skin, the rough feel of his hands, evaporating. Digging back through the past, clutching at stories that seem to ossify into something more lifeless with each retelling, is becoming more exhausting each time. Yet without the retelling, some vital thread will be broken; it is as if in reminding Kabir of their past he is also reminding himself, and in that way each becomes the keeper of the other’s identity. Without Kabir, Aryan feels some part of him would cease to exist, and that his life before this journey would have no substance that even he could believe in. Sometimes he feels he could float off into space like an astronaut tethered neither by orbit nor gravity, and that he has such slim purchase upon the Earth that it would make no difference to anyone.

It is the end of the afternoon when an old truck pulls up covered in a green tarpaulin. Aryan is standing shirtless at the tap in the dying light of the day. There are rivulets of dirt down his arms and tiny moon craters in the dust.

Aryan hears the driver rip at the handbrake and swing himself out of the cabin and into the yard. The pigs grunt behind the rotting slats of their pen.

When Aryan looks up again the man is staring at him with the small, hard eyes of a lizard; his mouth is arranged in a strange half-smile. He doesn’t turn away when Aryan sees him watching, but holds his gaze as if in expectation.

Something cold slithers down Aryan’s spine. His mouth turns dry and his tongue feels thick inside it.

Kabir comes out of their sleeping place. He is looking for the stick he throws to the dogs. He stops when he sees the figure beside the truck.

The man gazes a moment longer, then turns and walks into the house.

‘Who’s that?’ Kabir asks.

Aryan shrugs.

When the man comes outside again, he is arguing in Greek with the farmer. He strides across the yard, boots flinging small pieces of mud into the air, and flicks a half-smoked cigarette into the dirt; a thread of smoke unfurls like a small act of defiance. He swings himself back into the driver’s seat. The wheels spin as he reverses past the gate.

Stony-faced, the farmer stands in the doorway, arms crossed, watching the truck disappear. He looks at the boys for a moment with an expression Aryan can’t decipher, then goes inside.

It is first light, and the rows of onions beckon to them, rippling like a lake in the early summer breeze.

The farmer has given them wide, flat-pronged forks to dig around the bulbs. In the cool of the dawn he shows them how to pull them out carefully without damaging the skin, and then strip the dirt off with their hands. With a handheld scythe they lop off the leaves and fill the mesh sacks with brown balls.

‘Small hands are good for this work,’ the farmer says. ‘This is a good job for you boys.’

Kabir squats close to the stalks, pulling them up with both hands and dusting them off. The puppies tangle between his feet. Sometimes he slaps them away.

The weather is getting hot. By the middle of the day they’ve peeled down to their T-shirts. They are sunburnt on their faces and necks and on their arms where their T-shirts end. They slap at mosquitoes and stinger wasps.

Crouched for hours in the same position, Aryan thinks his back is going to break. He also notices how the muscles in his arms are filling out and growing hard.

At noon they take a breather in the transparent shade of the olive trees. Small flies buzz around their faces, excited by the smell of sweat. The plastic bottles they refill for water are warm despite being buried up to their necks in the soil.

Men who arrived soon after them are working the nearby fields. They don’t speak, but toil right through the hottest part of the day, turning each row into a knobbly ridge of red bags. A trail of discarded leaves floats behind them like a wake.

They must be paid by the sackful, Aryan thinks. That must be why they don’t stop. He wonders where they go at night, and whether he and Kabir will be travelling with them when the farmer finally sends them on their way.

By the end of the day, all Aryan can think about is lying down. As soon as he is horizontal, he rolls off a precipice into sleep.

A conversation is taking place between their parents. They are in the house with the dovecote on the roof; the pigeons have filled the perches and the breeding boxes with their feathers and their warm beating hearts. Aryan is coming downstairs to get another blanket. It is early summer and he is sleeping outside, under the open sky, under the stars.

‘If we don’t leave he will end up just like them,’ his father is saying.

Their mother is crying softly. She says she doesn’t want to leave Afghanistan. She doesn’t want to leave the house, nor the area around it where all her family are, nor the place where they buried Bashir. But Baba is telling her that soon they will have no choice.

There has been another rocket attack. Young men are being recruited. The commanders are again pressuring families for their sons.

‘In the villages they are offering money to the fathers,’ Baba is saying. ‘They are taking boys as young as eleven and twelve.’

Aryan knows his father wants them to leave because of him. He has never been to Iran and doesn’t want to go. There has been no school for months but he likes playing chess with Baba in the bazaar, and games of marbles with his friends in the dusty streets.

At the end of the day they sometimes see the old woman at the washing line. She never comes to talk to them, not even when she shuffles across the yard in her worn cloth shoes to bring them their food at night. She never smiles, her expression darkened by the map of lines and nodes on her face.

Aryan notices little things at first, and they are so small he doesn’t know whether to believe it’s a change at all.

First it is just a flicker of the curtain that makes him wonder whether the old woman has been watching them return from the fields.

Then there is the matter of the ice for his ankle, and the ancient aspirin. And the salt-and-sugar water for Kabir when he was sick. And Aryan’s hard-boiled egg.

One day Kabir goes to the house to ask for soap, and returns with an apricot in each hand.

At dusk, when they come in from the fields and the puppies are leaping all around, Kabir starts taking them to the house to be fed. The old woman tosses them some scraps from the table, and when he steps over the threshold, she lets him spend a few minutes inside.

When he comes back he tells Aryan about the big fire in the old wood stove in the kitchen, the blue china plates in the dresser, the different things she has stewing on the hob. Aryan can tell he misses having a home.

Sometimes the old woman asks him to peel apples, wash the fruit she intends to preserve, take potato peelings out to the pigs. They communicate through guesswork and gesture. In return she gives him food to share with Aryan – sometimes cheese and spinach pastries, small meat pies with peas.

Always she sends him away again before the farmer comes indoors.

Aryan isn’t sure what to make of it. Sometimes he is glad for half an hour away from his little brother; he knows the old woman’s company reminds Kabir of things Aryan steels himself against missing. But if Kabir is away too long, anxiety begins its slow ascent of his spine.

Once, beating the mud off his shoes, Aryan looks up to see the old woman in front of the curtain. With an arthritic hand she waves to him, just once, and disappears. Aryan pauses, then crosses the yard.

Inside, the old woman indicates he should wash his hands, and nods towards a chair. They sit around a sturdy wooden table peeling carrots and turnips and the potatoes they have dug from the fields. Aryan is surprised at the simplicity of the house that is not so different from some of those in the place where he was born.

The silence is filled with the bobbing of lids on the stove and the scrape of the peelers as they expose the strips of colour hidden under the vegetable skin.

Then the woman places a bowl of soup in front of them.

When the farmer comes inside he halts in the doorway, staring as Kabir slurps from the spoon. He says something angry in Greek but the woman cuts him off with words that ring out like slaps.

After that, they eat in the kitchen every day, leaving always before the farmer sits down with the old woman for his meal.

Sometimes when they return from the fields they find she has changed the blankets in their room, or put newspaper inside the window frames to stop the wind getting in.

Once, making their way back from the onion fields at dusk, they see the top of the truck with the green tarpaulin swaying down the corrugated driveway as it heads from the house towards the road.

The farmer, bent over a cracked ploughshare, ignores them as they walk past.

It is night when the shadows creep up on Aryan.

Bad dreams must have woken him initially, but it’s the shivering that won’t let him slip back under the blanket of sleep. It begins imperceptibly at first, like ripples in a glass of water, tugging him awake. But soon it builds, and Aryan knows with a sort of inevitability that it will not be stilled. His teeth chatter, and in time, his whole body shakes with it. Terrors he can’t put any name to swirl like flying beasts with velvet bodies and whirring wings that brush against his face. Suddenly he is terrified of suffocation. His body has gone cold and not even the trembling of his limbs will restore his body heat. His mouth is dry and his face is suddenly bathed in sweat.

Through the window pane he can see only four black squares of night. The world is in darkness and from his pallet the hills block out the sight of any stars.

Aryan recognizes his demon fears; he starts to wonder whether they won’t make the entire journey with him. For a while it seemed he had shrugged them off, that they had abandoned him in the shimmering desert, in the stony mountains of Kurdistan, in the hamlet where they were marooned for weeks, hiding from the soldiers while they waited for a guide. In the boat that barely made it across the waters of Lake Van, where fear of drowning lapped at the overwashed sides. There were other demons to displace them then – hunger, the pain of blistered heels and beaten shins, the smugglers who abandoned stragglers by the way. Perhaps they were jealous or just indolent demons; where the going was hardest they left him mercifully alone; there, he fell fitfully asleep, exhausted by the toil of advancing.

But as soon as they stop anywhere they catch up with him again; now, for the first time since Istanbul, the demons of immobility are back. They bore deep into his anxiety about all the days they are wasting; they undermine his resolve with doubt about the future; they gnaw at his strength of mind by rehearsing what it is they have fled.

Where are they heading really? He and Kabir could be stuck in this place for ever. He has heard stories of the missing who are never found, the rumours of body-organ harvesters, child enslavers and prostitution rings. Though things look peaceful here, and there is no war in Europe, he is suddenly aware of how easy it would be to disappear someone who no one knew existed in these lands.

He is ashamed to wish it, but suddenly he longs for his mother. He wishes he were as small as Kabir and could be enfolded in arms that would contain him, and calm him, and see the demons off into the wind.

He can’t remember the scent of her any more, only that it was the same as her clothes.

When dawn comes, Aryan has not slept. He feels ragged and wrung out. The night lies heavy upon him, thick as dew.

The truck with the green tarpaulin starts coming by every second day, and parks on the shady side of the house. The driver talks to the farmer in Greek. Aryan sees his reptile eyes watching him over the top of their conversation. He fixes Aryan directly in his sights as he talks.

Aryan hasn’t got used to seeing him. Even from a distance there is something that makes him recoil.

The man smokes with the farmer while Aryan and Kabir bundle the sacks of onions into the truck; some of them are nearly as tall as Kabir. Aryan shudders under the driver’s stare, hoists the bags mechanically, hopes the tension in his stomach isn’t legible on his face.