Selim’s first view of Europe was a vast, thick carpet of shit. Layered on the waves before him, bobbing on the water, there loomed an impenetrable barricade made of tons and tons of excrement pumped out by the generous stomachs of southern Italy; as if the shores of Europe, fed up with thousands of washed-up refugees, had decided to surround themselves with a man-made security cordon of slime and stench. Better turn around now, said the slime. And please don’t come back, said the stench.
But Selim, his ears full of saltwater, limbs struggling to keep his body afloat, sight blurred by a wig of seaweed, did not hear the message. The heat on the creaking boat had not stopped him, the watchful coastguards had not stopped him, his own fear and seasickness had not stopped him. A stinking mass of digested pasta would not stop him now.
And so, holding his head high like a splashing dog, leading a trail of men, women and a toddler strapped to her mother’s back, Selim broke through the barrier before him, parted Europe’s soft defences with his bony chest and hands, and swam right through to the other side.
Closer to the beach, the green water became warmer, the foul smell gave way to a nose-tingling mix of fresh air, surf and seaweed, and the brown suds turned into white foam that tickled his stiff neck.
Selim swam on and, when he could feel his legs brushing against the sand, collapsed then crawled on, his fingers clawing the moist grains, his elbows sinking into the ground. He dragged himself ashore, and, panting and sobbing, his left hand clutching a fistful of damp Puglian sand, curled up on his side.
He had arrived.
“Get up.” A hand grabbed his shoulder. “GET UP. Quick quick quick.”
Selim sat up. The man had moved on to the next tired body, giving it a quick shake, rounding up the creatures that littered the beach like corpses. They rose to their feet, grouped in a wet tangle and shifted through the gentle light of dawn towards the waiting trucks.
The traffickers barked nervous orders. They ran up and down to steer their flock, hurrying the slow ones, restraining the fast ones, looking even more afraid than their charges. Selim had been told they would be rowed ashore in the middle of the night, under the cover of darkness. Instead, the men on the boat had told them to jump, and here they were, dozens of Kurdish refugees brightly illuminated by the early morning sun like so many incriminating pieces of evidence.
The group stopped. Selim looked back at the beach. Two thin figures, a man and a woman, remained there, saltwater dripping from their hair and blackened clothes, their backs bent over something on the sand. Hurry up, people, Selim thought. Let’s get going. A few of the traffickers detached themselves from the group and jogged down to the couple.
The man turned around to face them, and now Selim could make out the thing lying at his feet. The traffickers motioned towards the trucks, but the man shook his head. The traffickers motioned towards the trucks again.
“Just leave it,” one of the traffickers shouted. “Come.”
The man shook his head, again. And all of a sudden, the woman, who had been perfectly still, dropped to her knees and started digging a hole in the sand with her hands. Selim, shivering in his clammy jeans and jumper, walked away from the trucks and towards the beach, the fabric chafing against his thighs. He felt a hand on his shoulder, shook it off, broke into a trot.
Someone seized his arm: “Come, quick, here, COME!”
But Selim, used to people trying to pull him this way and that, easily twisted his slippery twig of an arm out of the trafficker’s big hand and ran to the mourning couple.
He knelt down next to the woman and pushed his fingers into the cold sand. The father and the traffickers had formed a circle around them. It did not have to be a big hole. A small hole was enough.
The mother took the limp toddler into her arms, tenderly, as if she had fallen asleep and needed to be carried to bed.
A sand-coated limb slipped loose, dangled, was tucked back in. The mother lowered her child into the hole. Her lips moved silently as they raked the sand back with their hands and smoothed it over the little body.
* * *
Officially, Selim’s truck was loaded with crates of tomatoes: the Taste of Sunny Puglia, ripe, red and fragrant, destined for canning factories in foggy northern Italy, where they would be packaged and stacked into trucks rumbling through Switzerland all the way to Germany, unloaded in dark warehouses, sold to pizzerias, mixed with olive oil, herbs and rotten tomatoes from rusty tins, spread onto sickly pale dough, baked in the seventh circle of hell until all the germs were killed off, served to lip-licking German owners of holiday homes in southern Italy who would frown, take a bite, smile and sigh: “Ah! The Taste of Sunny Puglia!”
Unofficially, secretly, illegally, Selim’s truck was loaded with Selim and his fellow sufferers: the Taste of Sunny Kurdistan.
They were exhausted, grey and smelt of shit. They would be unloaded, washed and dressed in dry rags somewhere in the north. Crammed into another truck. Waved past indifferent Italian border police. Better not check the trucks; not our problem anyway; chi se ne frega; good thing they’re off to Germany. Bye!
Rattling through Switzerland’s winding roads, the man to Selim’s left started to retch. A pool of vomit licked at his feet.
The mother had not spoken since they left behind the little mound of sand on the beach.
The father hid his face in his hands.
Back in the village, they were Selim’s neighbours. He had a photo of the little girl, Evin. She was in the big group shot of his family and all the neighbours. It was his only photo of home, but he’d already decided to give it to Evin’s parents. It was in his bag. He’d give it to them when he got his bag. Come to think of it, where was his bag?
It was dark now. The thin line of light along the top of the back doors had disappeared. The truck stopped. Selim held his breath and willed it to move again. Instead, the back doors swung open and a torch shone brutally inside. The Kurds cowered in the far corner like mice. Satisfied, the torch disappeared, the doors slammed shut, the truck roared on.
The Sunny Taste of Kurdistan spilled out of the truck, onto the concrete floors of a dark warehouse in Germany and was portioned out into manageable bites: Selim’s neighbours into one vehicle, he into another.
“We’ll find each other later’’ Selim told the father, who briefly looked up from his hands and ruffled Selim’s hair: “You’re a good boy. We’ll find each other.”
The mother did not hear him. She climbed into the truck, a dead woman walking.
And then Selim was alone. He did not know any of the other men in his truck. The clothes he was wearing were not his clothes. His bag was somewhere between his village, the town of Cizre, Istanbul, an unnamed secret port, Puglia, Switzerland and Germany. He had three passports, none of them real. He did not possess any health records or a birth certificate. Since he swam through the putrid moat and entered the magic fortress, he had ceased to exist. You would have to travel all the way to the mountains of Kurdistan, to the wild and remote region where Turkey knocked against Iraq and Syria, all the way to Selim’s village, and talk to his mother, his father, his neighbours, to find out the most basic details such as when he was born.
Even then, the question would prompt a lot of head-scratching and murmuring and: “I think it was the night after Newroz and before Cevim’s wedding…”
“No, it was long before that, after we bought the second goat but before we fixed the hole in the roof, no, not the new roof, the old roof.”
“No, it was the new roof.”
“No, it was the old roof.”
“The old roof didn’t have a hole! I laid it with my own hands, these hands, look.”
Hands would be examined, calluses admired.
“I’m not saying it was a bad roof, but one day we noticed there was a hole in it and you climbed up there to fix it, remember?”
“That was the new roof, the one your brother put up when I was in prison.”
And so on.
And eventually, after many glasses of sugared tea and stories about happy days at weddings and terrible nights in Turkish prisons, a consensus would emerge on the year when Selim was born, and give or take a few days or weeks or months, that estimate would mean that when Selim swam through the sewage and crawled ashore and helped bury his neighbours’ child, on that first day of his bright new life in Europe, he was about thirteen.