Free In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda

city and played football with the other Afghan boys. It was really nice there, but I wasn’t ready to move, now that I’d found a permanent place to live. So, at the end of the week that I had taken off work, I went back to Baharestan.
    Just in time to get myself repatriated.
    It happened by day. We were working. I was busy preparing plaster, mixing the lime with the cement, and wasn’t looking anywhere, just inside the drum of the mixer and inside myself—which is a thing I do sometimes, look inside myself—and I remember I heard a car pull up, but I assumed it was the suppliers, because I knew the foreman was waiting for them.
    In Iran, buildings that are side by side often have a little square in the middle which they share, a little square with only two entrances. And that helped the police. Strategically—the police are full of strategies—two cars and a van blocked one entrance, while a large number of officers walked around to the other entrance.
    It was impossible to escape, and nobody tried. Those who were holding bricks and trowels put down their bricks and trowels. Those who were on their kneesconnecting cables for the electrical wiring let go of the cables and got to their feet. Those who were hammering nails, with the hammer in their hand and the nails in their mouths in order not to have to bend down each time to get them from the box, stopped hammering, took off their gloves, spat the nails into the sand (or just spat) and followed the policemen without a word. Not even a murmur of complaint.
    Telisia. Sang Safid.
    When I saw the policemen spreading out through the site and yelling, with their weapons in their hands, that was all I could think of.
    Telisia. Sang Safid.
    I thought of the two mad boys I’d seen in Afghanistan.
    A policeman ordered me to leave everything and follow him. They herded us into the little central square, then, one at a time, led us out on the side blocked by the cars and, as soon as we were out, put us in a van.
    They took hold of
kaka
Hamid, and I was afraid they would hurt him in front of us, to show what they were capable of. Instead of which they said to him, Go and get the money.
    Kaka
Hamid crossed the yard and went inside. We waited in silence. When he came back, he had an envelopewith enough money for our return to Afghanistan. Because in Iran, when they repatriate you, it’s up to you to pay for your return journey home. The State certainly won’t pay for it. If they stop you in a group, as happened to us that day, you’re lucky, because then the police release one of the group and tell him to go and get the money to pay for everyone’s repatriation. But if they stop you when you’re on your own and you have no way of paying for the journey to the border, then things turn nasty, because you’re forced to stay in a temporary detention center and you have to earn the money to return home by being a slave, the slave of the center and the policemen: they make you clean up all the dirt, and I’m talking about a place which is the dirtiest place in the world, or so I’ve heard, a place where just to smell the fumes you’d think it was the cesspit of the earth, a place not even a cockroach would want to live.
    If you don’t pay, there’s a risk the temporary detention center will become your home.
    That day, we paid. And that wasn’t all.
Kaka
Hamid told me later, in the van, that when he had gone to get the money he had found two of the boys making dinner—they hadn’t noticed a thing—and asked them to stay there and look after our stuff until we came back.
    Unless they took us to Telisia. Or Sang Safid.
    ———
    Fortunately, they took us somewhere else.
    They shaved our heads in the camp. To make us feel naked. And so that, afterward, people would know that we had been in Iran, as illegals, and had been expelled. They laughed as they shaved off our hair. They laughed while we stood in line like sheep. To stop myself crying, I just watched the hair piling