“Anyway, two weeks ago, one of the guys, Kareem — he’s a nice enough guy from Mazar — he had gotten a potato from somewhere and ate half. He was saving the other half. He wakes up in the morning and realizes the other half of his potato is gone. And then, what do we see? Plain as day, there goes Saboor, with a half-eaten potato in the far end of the park. Kareem was furious. He marched straight up to Saboor, something no one had done until that point, and accused him of taking his potato. Saboor, straight-faced, told him that he had gotten the potato from a church handout. But there hadn’t been a church handout that week.
“Kareem kept on him. Accused him of lying, telling him to give the potato back, to apologize to everyone for all the things he had taken since he came. Saboor looked Kareem dead in the eye and said, ‘If anyone else wants to cause trouble like this bastard here, let me warn you. You all have families in Afghanistan and I know your names. My friends back home would not mind paying a visit to people you’ve left behind. Try me and see what happens.’ Since that day, we all just avoid him.”
“If he’s got such powerful friends, why would he have left?” Saleem asked, his body turning away from the man instinctively.
Abdullah shrugged his shoulders. “It’s probably a lie, but no one wants to find out. Just stay away.”
Abdullah next took Saleem to a group of six boys playing cards. Some of the boys were young, just barely older than Samira. As a newcomer, Saleem was welcomed and everyone was willing to share with him bits of refugee wisdom.
They had arrived together, a group of about fifteen young men. They’d been directed to go to “the ministry.” The ministry bounced them to another place, an office called the Greek Council of Refugees. The council was largely uninterested in the boys. They were told that they could apply for asylum if they got a job, but, they were warned, no one would hire refugee boys. And there would be no food or shelter provided.
The young men, along with a few families, had come from a place called Pagani, a name they spat out with a shake of the head. Pagani was a detention center for immigrants on one of Greece’s many idyllic islands. The building was a cage, as the boys described it, the biggest cage any of them had ever seen. It teemed with refugees who’d struggled to leave their countries, only to be trapped in Greece. Men, women, and children overwhelmed the building’s capacity three times over. The modest courtyard could hardly accommodate a fraction of the residents. People went for days without stepping outside. There were at least a hundred people to each toilet.
No one knew how bad it was here until it was too late. For a few, Pagani had been so damaging that, even in the open air of Attiki Square, their breath turned into a nervous wheeze at the mention of the detention center.
As unaccompanied minors, Pagani awaited them, but the boys refused to go back to the cage. Jamal, Hassan, and Abdullah had decided to live together in an apartment they shared with nine others. They had dreamed of going to Germany where they’d heard refugees were granted asylum, given housing, and fed. But in Greece, police officers stopped them and asked for “papers.”
“The papers do not mean anything,” Jamal explained. “They gave us ‘papers’ in Pagani and told us to keep them on us at all times. Be careful with the police here. Even with those papers, we are targets for them, like dogs in the street. Even at some of the churches that give out food, the police may be there. There is no asylum here.”
Saleem spent the day listening, disheartened. Outwardly charming and beautiful, Greece was a hostile place, and many of the young Afghans Saleem met regretted the money they’d spent to reach her shores.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, SALEEM RETURNED TO ATTIKI. THE boys told him the places to avoid and brought him along to the churches where food and water were distributed.
Once he learned about Pagani, Saleem became very reluctant to let Madar-jan wander off on her own with his sister and brother. Though they had passports, they were false ones and would likely be detected. He could not risk the family being deported to Turkey or, even worse, Afghanistan.
Saleem continued to steal food and staples like soap, but he loathed doing it and was growing more and more paranoid every day. It was a calculated risk he had to take if they were to have enough money to get them to England.
Periodically, a local Greek humanitarian organization came by Attiki Square. Volunteers would talk to the refugees, attempt to assist with document issues, and hand out food and water. A nurse came along with them and placed a Band-Aid here or there or offered a course of antibiotics. The group’s resources were limited too. They were young idealists, mostly, indignant that their government could subject refugees to such degrading conditions. They wanted to set things right and they were, oftentimes, the only reliable source of information and food.
Some of the young men in the square were reluctant to trust even the aid workers. Saleem was one of those people. He avoided making eye contact with the young people who walked through the park with their purple T-shirts, their organization’s name and logo printed in large type to identify them from afar. They asked many questions and even wanted to take pictures.
Saleem felt safer questioning their motives. He felt his chest puff to think he had outsmarted the aid workers, as if he had more street sense than those boys who let their stories be scribbled into tiny notepads or voice recorders. He did his best to steer clear of every one of them.
Until he saw Roksana.
CHAPTER 28. Saleem
“WE CANNOT GO ON THIS WAY, SALEEM-JAN,” MADAR-JAN WHISPERED to him. Samira and Aziz had fallen asleep.
“What do you mean?”
“In a matter of days, we will have no more money and we still have a long road ahead. We cannot wait for a miracle.”
“I know.”
“Thank goodness you have at least found a way to work for food.”
Saleem bit his lip, thankful for the darkness. He’d told his mother that he’d been hired by a café in town to sweep floors and unload boxes in exchange for food. It was a plausible explanation, especially to willing ears. In reality, no one would hire him. Saleem had returned several times to the market and snuck through other shops, taking what he needed to feed his family. It was a sin imposed upon him, he felt. To make himself feel better about it, he ate just enough food to keep his hunger at bay. It was not easy.
“This job may not last. We need to get to England before the money runs out,” Saleem agreed.
“Yes, we do. We’ll also soon need more medicine for your brother. I cannot take him to any doctors or get him medicines here. It will cost more than we have and someone might turn us in to the police.”
“You’re right, Madar-jan,” Saleem admitted.
Deciding when to embark on the next leg of their journey was a difficult decision. It was a gamble either way.
“We need to find a way to get to England. I think the train would be best, as Hakan had told us. Airports are full of checkpoints. Perhaps if we stay on the ground, our chances at slipping through will be better.”
“I’ll go tomorrow to find the train station and I’ll see if the Afghans know anything about the trains.”
“There’s something else, Saleem. We’ve got to make some hard choices now, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. We cannot stay here in this room any longer. Even the price they have given us is more than we can afford. Our money is running out faster than I had imagined it would.”
This simple room with its exposed wires and badly cracked plaster, the decrepit sink from which water trickled — all this was a palace to Saleem. When he left Attiki and walked into this space, when he lay on the bed and felt the coils dig into his back, when he looked over at the second bed and saw his mother and sister sleeping two feet off the floor instead of outside, he was a king. This room let him rise in the morning without the hopelessness the boys in Attiki felt. It gave him reason to believe that fate had something more in store for his family than a rickety ship that would capsize in open waters. To give up this room was to give up so much. But to stay — to stay was to choose to bleed slowly and have no strength left to reach the tomorrow they hoped for.