“Saleem, stop! Where are you going, Saleem! Wait!”
Saleem’s feet pounded against the ground as he wove through small side streets and in and out of alleys. He stumbled and fell in the dark, tripping on loose stones. There was no mistaking the blood, now dried by the breeze, on his right hand. He could feel it. He could smell it, the metallic smell of life. Saleem remembered Intikal. He saw the bride’s brother, his clothes bloodied, his face twisted with pain.
Saleem wished he could run into his mother’s arms, bury his face in her shoulder, and listen to her soothing voice tell him that he had done the right thing. He wished his father had been sleeping beside him, so that Saboor never would have dared to come near him. But Saleem was also thankful that neither of his parents was here at this moment, to see their son, a fugitive in the night, blood on his hands.
CHAPTER 42
Saleem
SALEEM HELD THE ALUMINUM POT OVER THE MAKESHIFT STOVE, with its bricks laid out in a square, kindling burning within. The handle was hot and getting hotter. Flames licked the blackened bottom. Saleem wiggled his way closer to the fire. A chill in the air made his jacket feel especially thin.
The water was starting to boil.
“Is it ready yet?” Ali called out from inside.
“Yes, just now.” Ali came outside and looked inside the pot. He opened a tea bag and carefully let half its contents tumble into the pot.
“Take it off the flame now. I’ll get the bread so we can have our breakfast. It looks like it might rain later today. What do you think?”
Saleem slipped his sleeve over his hand and used the cuff to grip the handle. He ignored Ali’s last comment. Ali had said the same thing every day for the last two weeks, no matter what the appearance of the sky. Saleem hadn’t noticed on the first day, but on the second, when they were inside listening to raindrops pelt against the plastic tarp overhead, Ali again predicted that it would rain later in the day. Saleem thought he was joking but turned to see Ali’s face looking grim and pensive.
Ali had to be close to Saleem’s age, but he was much shorter. Saleem had spotted him when he found the Afghan camps in Patras and was drawn to him specifically because he seemed young and unthreatening. He was Hazara, a different ethnicity than Saleem. Had they been in Kabul, this would have mattered a great deal. In the refugee camp of Patras, where the men all ate and slept in the same squalor, it mattered very little.
The refugee camp in Patras was very different from Attiki Square. Attiki was a forsaken corner of a city, bordered by buildings and within meters of a normalcy. Patras was a shantytown—better in some ways and worse in others. Instead of cardboard sheets, thin blankets and shopping carts there were actual walls and roofs. One man had even opened a barbershop of sorts, having found a stool and some scissors. Thick tarps functioned as roofs for those who had not found sturdier materials. And the hundreds of people who lived here, mostly Afghans but some wandering Roma and Africans as well, made small stoves from stones and bricks to cook simple meals. The housing was better, but it was bigger and attracted more attention from the surrounding neighborhood. It was a blemish in their city, a place where vagrants huddled in desperate filth. Greeks didn’t know what to do with Patras—raze it to the ground or make it better because it was inevitable that the refugees would just come back.
Patras was supposed to be a transit point. Even before the Afghans, others refugees had come there en route to Italy and the rest of Europe. There was a long tradition of finding ways of sneaking across to Italy, either on trucks or cargo ships. Saleem had become one more person in that shared history.