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

was quietly singing a little song, a kind of tongue twister—we were almost halfway, like I said, when the bus slowed down and came noisily to a halt.
    I thought it must be sheep. What’s going on? I asked. I couldn’t see anything on my side.
    A roadblock, the girl replied.
    Telisia. Sang Safid.
    The bus driver pressed a button and the doors opened wide with a hiss. Centuries passed, the air was still, nobody spoke, not even those who had nothing to fear because they were Iranians or because their papers were in order, then the first policeman got on. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He had one arm of his sunglasses in his hand, the other in his mouth.
    When the police get on a bus, they don’t ask everyonefor their papers: they know perfectly well who’s Iranian and who isn’t. They’re trained to recognize Afghans, illegals, and so on, and as soon as they see one they go straight to him and demand to see his papers even though they know perfectly well he doesn’t have any.
    I had to become invisible. But that wasn’t one of my powers. I pretended to be asleep, because when you sleep it’s as if you aren’t there, and also because pretending to sleep is like pretending everything’s all right and that things will work out. But this policeman was a smart one, and he saw me even though I was asleep. He tugged at my sleeve. I kept pretending to sleep and even shifted a bit in my sleep, which I tend to do during the night. The policeman kicked me in the shin. At that point I woke up.
    Come with me, he said. He didn’t even ask me who I was.
    Where?
    He didn’t reply. He looked at me and put on his sunglasses, even though it was quite dark inside the bus.
    I picked up my bag. I apologized to the girl next to me and asked if she could let me through, and as I passed her I got an even stronger whiff of her perfume. Everyone watched me as I walked down the aisle, and I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my neck. As soon as I stepped down onto the ground, the bus closed its doorswith the same pneumatic hiss as before and set off. Without me.
    There was a small police station, with a car parked outside it.
    Telisia. Sang Safid.
    Drums in the night.
    Telisia. Sang Safid.
    I can pay, I said immediately. I can pay for my repatriation. I did in fact have money with me that I’d earned on the site. But for some reason they wouldn’t listen to me. One of the policemen, a huge Iranian, pushed me through a door. For a fraction of a second I imagined a torture chamber caked with blood and strewn with fragments of bone, a deep well filled with skulls, a pit going down into the bowels of the earth, little black insects crawling over the walls and acid stains on the ceiling.
    What was inside?
    A kitchen. That’s what.
    Mountains of filthy plates and pots, waiting to be washed.
    Get down to work, said the huge Iranian. The sponges are over there.
    It took me hours to win the battle against the remains of sauce and caked rice. I don’t know how many years those pots had been there, waiting for me. As I was washingthe cutlery and plates, four other Afghan boys arrived. When we’d finished in the kitchen, they took all five of us and set us to work loading and unloading cars and vans and so on. Whenever there was a boot or a trailer to be checked, the policemen called us and we started emptying it. When they’d finished their checking, they called us again: there were crates and suitcases to be put back, boxes to be stacked, and so on.
    I stayed there for three days. Whenever I was tired, I sat down on the ground with my back against the wall and my head on my knees. If someone arrived and there was unloading and loading to be done, a policeman would come and kick us and say, Wake up, and we would get up and start again. On the evening of the third day they let me go. I don’t know why. The four other boys stayed there and I never saw them again.
    I got to Qom on foot.
    Qom is a city with a population of at least