“Police! Police! Run, boys!” a panicked voice yelled out.
Saleem turned around. A police car was coming down the road. They picked up their pace and climbed over the fence as quickly as they could. The car pulled up a few yards away and the doors swung open. Two officers sauntered out.
Saleem jumped over with the others, his ankle stinging from the impact. He scrambled to his feet and ran, breaking off in a different direction from the others. Everyone scattered. The police picked two of the boys to halfheartedly chase for a few meters, enough to make a point. Saleem cut a sharp turn to duck behind some trash bins alongside an apartment building. He panted, his chest burning.
When ten minutes had passed, he walked back to the camp. Ali was sitting outside the room with four other men. They had overturned buckets and plywood crates for chairs.
“Where’ve you been, Saleem?” Ali called out.
“Went to the port,” Saleem replied, taking a seat with the others. They were not surprised. There was nowhere else for them to go in Patras, especially with the rising hostilities.
“No luck, eh?” Saleem had met these guys before but he could not remember their names. Was this Fareed? Or Faizal?
“No. The police came and chased us away.”
Haris shook his head. He was in his thirties, a veritable elder in this community of juveniles. His perspective was a little different from that of the others.
“Can you blame them? Have you looked at this camp? People don’t want to look out their windows and see this.”
There was silence. Haris was right, but it felt better to be angry. Resentment was a unifying sentiment among the refugees. It felt good to sit around and agree, to have a common enemy and a shared struggle. It felt good to be understood. Haris’s rationality would not give them the charge they needed to keep going.
Ali looked at the sky. “It does look like it is going to rain today.”
“For God’s sake, what is it with you and the rain!” Saleem exploded with the force of an agitated bottle of cola. The talk about the camps and running from the port this morning had riled him and he unleashed it all on Ali in that moment. “Always, every single day!”
There was a pause. Saleem’s outburst had surprised the others. Ali’s face froze, then turned red and splotchy. Saleem regretted his words immediately, but it was too late. He looked down, ashamed and unable to face Ali.
Ali stood up and went inside.
“You don’t know anything about him, do you?” Hakeem asked in a castigating tone.
Saleem looked up.
“Do you have any respect for a guy who shared his space with you?”
“I didn’t—”
“You want to know what happened to him? Ali lived on my street in Kabul. He was outside his house when his mother called for him and his brother to come back in. She told them it looked like it was going to rain and that they should get back inside. His brother listened. Ali didn’t. He said he would find other people to play with and went down the street. And that was when the rockets flew right into his house. Killed his entire family. Ali came running back to find his brother stumbling into the street, falling to the ground in flames. Ali tried to put them out, but it was too late.
“It broke him. All he remembers is his mother warning him to come into the house because it looked like it was going to rain. All he hears is her voice and it repeats in his head over and over again. I think he wishes he had gone back into the house and been crushed by those rockets instead of living with the memory of watching them die.”
Saleem stared at the earth. His face burned with remorse.
“So leave him and his crazy talk alone.”
“I didn’t know—”
“Of course you didn’t. But do you think anyone here has a happy story?”
Saleem kept his mouth shut. Hakeem stood up and sighed in frustration. The others stood up too but for a different reason. A crowd was starting to gather nearby. A few men were jogging over and calling out to the others.