The Escape

by Kamila Shamsie

(Extract from “Burnt Shadows” – a man in Afghanistan has to find a way into America without being caught by the authorities. This is the story of the route he takes, after paying a large sum of money.)

Raza left Kandahar at sunrise in a pick-up truck, squeezed between the driver and an armed guard.

The guard and driver in the pick-up were taciturn, showing no more interest in Raza’s attempts to engage them in conversation than they did in the NATO convoys that hulked past as they made their way out of Kandahar. He slept, and when he woke there was no road, only sand and at least a dozen pick-ups – each one identical in its tinted glass, its gleaming blue paint. More armed guards had appeared from somewhere and had taken position at the back of the pick-up. The vehicles raced across the desert at unnerving speeds – a pack of animals evolved in a world where nothing mattered but chase and escape.

‘All this for me?’ Raza said to the guard beside him.

The men gestured to the back where the other guards sat on gunny-sacks piled on top of each other, and Raza thought of the effete quantities of heroin which he used to personally deliver to the most valued hotel guests in Dubai as part of his duty to give them whatever it took to ensure they returned.

At a certain point, when it seemed to Raza that his eyes would never see anything but sand outside the window something extraordinary happened. The convoy passed a group of nomads, making their way across the desert on foot. And there they were – finally, miraculously: women.

Faces uncovered, arms laden with bangles, clothes bright. He always thought they had to be beautiful – those women of fairy-tale who distracted princes on mythic quests with a single smile. Now he saw it was enough for them to simply be.

‘Stop,’ he said to the driver, but of course no one did, and within seconds the landscape was sand again.

But just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy – no, not melancholy. It was uljhan, he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and disquiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word.

Raza didn’t know that even as he was thinking this he was nearing the edge of Afghanistan. The pick-up climbed a sand-dune, and on the other side there was a habitation of sand-coloured structures.

‘You’ll get out here,’ the guard said. He pointed to the men who were watching the convoy approach. ‘They’ll take you now.’ The guard had answered all Raza’s questions with monosyllables and shrugs but now he looked at him with compassion. ‘Just remember, it will end. And the next stage will end.’

By early morning the next day, Raza was repeating those words to himself as though they were a prayer to ward off insanity.

He was in another pick-up – one with a covered rear compartment -  though this one was decades and several evolutionary steps behind the gleaming blue desert racers; it bore a comforting resemblance to the pick-up in which the Pathan driver had ferried Raza and the other neighbourhood boys to and from school. Then he used to laugh at the other boys squeezed together on the two parallel benches that ran the length of the rear compartment while he was in the front end learning Pashto

from the driver, a tiny window between the driver and passenger seat allowing him to look back at the other boys who made obscene gestures in his direction without malice. If he’d only stayed in the back of the pick-up with them, he now thought, he would never have learnt Pashto, never have talked to Abdullah, never set off everything that led him to be sitting in a cardboard box at the back of a pick-up while young Pathan boys bowled cabbages towards him.

‘Vegetables can cross the border without paperwork, so you must become a vegetable,’ one of the men from the sand-coloured houses had explained to Raza.  So here he was trying to contain his panic as the cabbages piled up in the back of the pick-up reaching his knees, his chest, his eyes…

‘I’ll suffocate in here,’ he called out.

‘You’ll be the first,’ replied a voice that seemed to find this notion intriguing.

For most of the journey he stood, stooped beneath the canopy, hemmed in by chest high cabbages. But as the border approached the driver rapped sharply on the partition that divided them and with long, deep breaths Raza lowered himself into the cardboard box. Within seconds, with the motion of the pick-up, the cabbages had rolled over him, cutting off light and air. And so, in the company of cabbages – breathing in cabbage air, pressed in by cabbage weight – Raza reached Iran.

Time had never moved so slowly as in the dark dankness of cabbages. The pick-up seemed to stop for a long time before the border guards approached. The cabbages muffled all sound except that of his heart.

When the pick-up moved again, Raza still dared not stand up. He had been firmly instructed to wait for the driver to signal an all-clear. But there was so little air.

Finally the driver stopped the pick-up and rapped again on the partition. Raza burst out of the cabbages, displacing the ones that were covering him with such energy they went thud-thudding against the canopy, and gulped in great mouthfuls of air. While the driver watched him, laughing, he  clambered into the space between the cabbages and the canopy and, like a swimmer, propelled himself outward.

‘Had fun?’ the driver asked, taking Raza’s hand and helping him down to the ground. ‘Cabbage soup for dinner!’

After the guards in the pick-up, Ahmed the Driver was a joy to sit with. His family were nomads, he explained, as he drove Raza south toward the coast. But drought and war had brought an end to the lifestyle his family had known for centuries, and now they had grudgingly settled near the border and become drivers if they were lucky, stone-pickers if they weren’t. ‘The land mines are the worst,’ he said, while Raza was still trying to work out what ‘stone-pickers’ might mean. ‘Once we used to travel in large groups for protection. Then we started to move in groups or three or four so if anyone steps on a powerful mine it can only have so much impact and others following behind will see the bodies – or the birds swarming around – and know to avoid that place.’ He smiled jauntily as he said this, and Raza didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but was glad just for the camaraderie.

He wanted to ask Ahmed the Driver, where – or what – is home for your people? But though he knew how to ask where someone was from, or where they lived, the word for ‘home’ in Pashto eluded him. As he tried to think of ways to explain it, the meaning receded.

He was so caught up in talking to Ahmed that it took him a while to understood why Iran felt so strange, despite its topographic similarity to Afghanistan.

‘No war,’ he said near sunset to Ahmed, when he finally understood.

Ahmed nodded, for once forbearing from jokes. He didn’t need to ask what this statement was doing in the middle of a conversation about poisonous snakes in Dasht-e-Margo – the Desert of Death – which Raza had travelled across in the pick-up truck without knowing its name.

They stopped for the night in a hotel where Raza amazed Ahmed with his command of Farsi, and set off again the next morning. They’d hardly gone any distance when a car drew up alongside them filled with women wearing head-scarves and dark glasses, calling to Raza’s mind all those Hollywood actresses of the 50’s who Harry had loved. For a few seconds the car and pick-up travelled alongside, Ahmed shouting out questions to the women, which Raza translated with a disarming smile: Which of you will marry me, which will marry my friend? Why are you travelling by road, don’t angels fly?, the women shouting back in response, ‘We don’t want husbands who smell of cabbages. Women are superior to angels, why are you insulting us!’, all the while looking at Raza.  All too soon they turned off the road with waves and air-kisses, leaving Ahmed to clutch his heart while Raza mumbled, ‘I think I love Iran.’

He had begun to think the worst part of the journey was over, was already starting to think of the cabbages as his test of fire, and for the first time since Harry died he felt a certain lightening within. They’d left the desert behind by now, and at his first glimpse of the sea Raza hollered in delight. Karachi, Dubai, Miami – all seaside cities, though until he saw the Iran coast he didn’t know that had any meaning for him.

But the closer they drew to the coast, the quieter Ahmed became.

‘Why don’t you just stay here,’ he said, by the time they were close enough to the docks to smell the sea air. ‘If you’re running from the Americans, Iran is a good place to be. You even speak the language. And the women are beautiful – and Shia, like you Hazara.’

He didn’t understand quite what it was that made Ahmed worry so much until nearly an hour after he’d embraced the nomad goodbye and promised that in happier times he’d return and together they would traverse Asia in a pick-up without cabbages.  Then the ship’s captain into whose charge Ahmed had delivered him took him to a wooden boat with a tiny motor, and when Raza asked if there was any place in particular he should sit the captain pointed to the wooden planks underfoot and said, ‘Beneath there.’

Raza laughed, but the captain didn’t join in.

‘Have you pissed?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Go on. Over the side of the boat. You’re not coming out until Muscat. And there’s no room for your bag down there.’

Raza clutched his knapsack. ‘There are holy artefacts in here. I swore to my mother – ‘

The captain made a dismissive gesture. ‘Just hurry up.’ While Raza emptied his bladder into the sea, the captain pulled up a section of the floorboards. Raza could hear voices beneath. How many people were down there?’

Many. Too many. Raza looked into the bowels of the ship and all he saw were prone men looking up at him, more than one crying out – in Farsi and in Pashto – ‘Not another one. There’s no room.’

‘Go on.’ The captain pushed at his shoulder blades. ‘Get in. We’re late already because of you.’

Raza peered down. There was no space between one body and the next, the men laid out like something familiar, but what? What did they remind him of? Something that made him back up, into the ship captain who cursed and pushed him forward, into the hold, onto the bodies which groaned in pain, pushed him this way and that until somehow, he didn’t know how, he was squeezed into the tiny space between one man and the next and his voice was part of the sigh – of hopelessness, of resignation – that rippled through the hold. It was only when the captain slammed down the hatch, extinguishing all light, that he knew what the line of bodies made him think of – the mass grave in Kosovo.
In the darkness, the man to his left clutched Raza’s hand. ‘How much longer?’ the man said, and his voice revealed him to be a child.

Raza didn’t answer. He was afraid if he opened his mouth he would gag from the stench – of the oil-slicked harbour, of damp wood, of men for whom bathing was a luxury they had long ago left behind. The boards he was resting on were slick, and he didn’t want to know if anything other than sea water might have caused that.

When the boat set off, things got worse. The motion of the sea knocking beneath the men’s head was a minor irritant at first – but when they left the harbour and headed into the open sea, the waves bounced their heads so violently the men all sat up on their elbows. It wasn’t long before they started to suffer sea sickness. Soon the stench of vomit overpowered everything else. The Afghan boy next to Raza was suffering the most, weeping and crying for his mother.

Raza closed his eyes. In all the years he had sat around campfires with the TCN’s listening to their tales of escape from one place to another, in the holds of ships, beneath the floorboards of trucks, it had never occurred to him how much wretchedness they each had known. And Abdullah. Abdullah had made this voyage once, would make it again. Across the Atlantic like this – it wasn’t possible. No one could endure this. What kind of world made men have to endure this?

He placed his knapsack beneath his head and, lying down, lifted up the boy who was weeping and retching next to him and placed him on top of his own body, buffering the boy from the rocking of the waves.

The boy sighed and rested his head on Raza’s chest.

The hours inched past. No one spoke – conversation belonged to another world. By mid-afternoon, the hold felt like a furnace. Several of the men had fainted, including the boy who was now a dead weight on Raza’s chest. But Raza didn’t attempt to move him. He thought, Harry would have done for me without question what I’m doing for the boy. Then he thought, Harry would have kept me from a place like this.

At a certain point it started to seem inevitable they he would die in the hold. All he could think of was his mother. She’d never know he had died. No one would put a name to the dead piece of human cargo. So she’d keep waiting for news of him. For how long? How long before she understood that she’d lost one more person she loved? He whimpered softly, uncaring of what the other men might think of him.

When the boards lifted up and moonlight streamed in he didn’t understand what it meant until the captain’s head appeared.

‘Quiet!’ the captain warned in response to the ragged cheer that ran through the hold. ‘Raza Hazara, where are you? Come out. The rest of you stay here. We haven’t reached yet.’

Nothing in Raza’s life had felt as shameful, as much of a betrayal, as the moment when he identified himself as the man who was leaving. The boy on his chest, conscious again, clutched his shirt and said, ‘Take me with you’ and Raza could only whisper brokenly, ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached into his knapsack, lifted out wads of hundred dollar bills, and pressed them in the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t let anyone know you have this,’ he said, before crawling over the other men and holding out a hand for the captain to lift him out.  For a moment he considered dropping the knapsack in the hold, but he knew there was something else he needed the money for so he looked away from the men in the hold breathing in as much fresh air and moonlight as they could before the boards came down again.

A small rowing boat was alongside the ship, and a voice emerged from it saying, ‘Raza Hazara? Hurry. The plane’s been delayed already for you.’

Raza climbed into the boat, but before he could sit down the man in the rower’s seat swung an oar and knocked him into the water. He had barely enough presence of mind to throw his knapsack into the boat as he fell.

He emerged spluttering and bone-cold. The man with the oar held up a bag. ‘Clothes in here. Take those ones off. And use this – ’ he threw a bar of soap at Raza.

Despite the man’s urgency to get going he allowed Raza a few moments to float, naked, in the cold cold water, looking up at the expanse of sky.

I will never be the same again, Raza thought. He watched his vomit-slimed clothes float away, holding on only to Harry’s jacket and changed that to, I want never to be the same again.

On the rowing boat there was water and food and a shalwar-kameez only slightly too big for him. It was as much as he could bear – any further luxury would have been repellent.

Near dawn the boat reached shore. There, another blue and gleaming pick-up truck was waiting. This time Raza didn’t attempt to speak to the driver and armed guard inside. He kept thinking of the boy whose head had rested on his chest.

Beautifully paved roads lined with palm trees led to a private air-strip. A plane was on the runway.

One of the guards from the pick-up accompanied Raza up the steps and grinned as he opened the plane door. ‘Welcome to the zoo,’ he said. The sounds issuing from the plane were extraordinary.

Raza stepped in, cautiously.

A blue heron unfurled its wings  white peacock snap-closed its fan-tail  macaws squawked  baby ant-eater fell off its mother’s back and protested shrilly  African wild dogs bared their teeth  winged things flew about under a black sheet   meercats sat up on their hind legs and watched. And to one side, a baby gorilla slept.

The guard pointed to the cage with the gorilla in it. ‘You’ll be travelling inside the monkey,’ he said.

And that’s when Raza realized his mind had definitely broken apart.

 

* This extract is from ‘Burnt Shadows’, Ms. Shamsie’s fifth novel and is reprinted here with permission from the author.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of five novels, including “Burnt Shadows” which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and translated into more than 20 languages. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.