Abdullah lowered his voice and began to retell what was probably the camp’s most-oft-told story by now.
“He’s a snake. He steals from his own people, people who are no better off than he is. In a place like this, there are no locks, no gates, just pockets and plastic bags. Usually, the most valuable thing you have is food. Anyway, people would wake in the middle of the night to find him sneaking around like a rat and rifling through their things. Small things were going missing here and there. And when you have nothing, that’s more than everything.
“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.