Free In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio Geda Page A

up on the floor. It’s a strange thing, hair, when it isn’t on your head.
    After that, they put us in lorries, and we set off at high speed. The driver seemed to be looking for potholes in the road deliberately: it was hard to believe he could hit so many without doing it on purpose. Maybe this treatment was all part of the repatriation, I thought, and I even said so to the others, but nobody laughed.
    After a while they yelled at us to get out, because we had arrived. If they’d had one of those lorries for transporting sand, with a trailer that tips up, they would have tipped us out like that and let us roll onto the ground. Instead of which, they just beat us with sticks.
    Herat, Afghanistan. The nearest place to the border between Afghanistan and Iran. Everyone soon made arrangements to get back to Iran, which wasn’t difficult. Herat is full of traffickers waiting for people who’ve been repatriated. You barely have time to get beaten by thepolice before the traffickers pick you up and take you back.
    If you don’t have money with you, you can pay later. They know that if you’ve been working in Iran for a while you have money stashed in a hole somewhere, or that if you don’t have it you can ask someone to lend it to you, without having to be enslaved for four months, the way Sufi and I were the first time. They know that.
    To get back to Iran, we used another Toyota pickup truck. But this time the journey was more dangerous, because the road was one used by smugglers for transporting illegal merchandise. Including drugs. And there were drugs on the Toyota. In Iran, if they find you with more than a kilo of opium they hang you. Of course, many policemen along the border were corrupt, fortunately, and they let you pass because you paid them, but if you happened to run into an honest one (and they did exist) then you were dead.
    That time everything went well, and we got back to Baharestan.
    I went straight to the site to find
kaka
Hamid, but he hadn’t got back yet. My money was in its place, in the hole. The two workers who’d stayed behind had stood guard. But from that day on, everything changed. There were rumors going around that Isfahan wasn’t safe anymore,and nor was Baharestan, because the police had received orders to repatriate everyone. So I called Sufi at the stonecutting factory in Qom, and he told me that, for the moment, things were quiet there.
    That was when I decided to join him. I waited for
kaka
Hamid to get back, said goodbye to him, collected my things and went to the bus station.
    How can you just change your life like that, Enaiat? Just say goodbye one morning?
    You do it, Fabio, and that’s it
.
    I read somewhere that the decision to emigrate comes from a need to breathe
.
    Yes, it’s like that. And the hope of a better life is stronger than any other feeling. My mother, for example, decided it was better to know I was in danger far from her, but on the way to a different future, than to know I was in danger near her, but stuck in the same old fear
.
    When I got on the bus, I sat down at the back, alone, holding my bag tight between my legs. I hadn’t made any arrangements with anyone—any trafficker, I mean—because I didn’t want to pay money again to someone to get me to a destination where there were no problems, and after all when I’d been to Qom before, to see Sufi, everything had gone smoothly.
    It was a lovely day and I curled up in my seat, my head against the window, ready to doze off.
    I had bought an Iranian newspaper. I thought that if we were stopped by the police and they saw me sleeping peacefully with an Iranian newspaper on my lap, they would think I was clean. Next to me was a girl in a veil, wearing a nice perfume. Three minutes later, we left.
    We were almost halfway—two women were chatting to the girl next to me, talking about a wedding they had been to, and a man was reading a book while a little boy sitting next to him, who could have been his son,