In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read Free Page A

From that point on, my mother lived in fear. She told me and my brother to stay outside the house all the time, surrounded by other children, because on the evening when the Pashtun had come to our house we hadn’t been there and they hadn’t seen our faces.
    So the two of us were always outside playing, which we didn’t mind at all, and the Pashtun who passed us on the streets of the village didn’t recognize us. For nighttime we had dug a hole in the fields, next to the potatoes, and whenever anyone knocked, even before going to find out who it was, we would go and hide there. But I wasn’t very convinced by this strategy: I told my mother that if the Pashtun came for us at night, they certainly wouldn’t bother to knock.
    Things carried on like that until the day Mother decided I ought to leave because I was ten—maybe—and I was becoming too big to hide, so big that I could hardly get into the hole anymore without squashing my brother.
    To leave.
    I’d never have chosen to leave Nava. My village was a good place. It wasn’t technologically advanced, there was no electricity. For light, we used oil lamps. But there were apples. I would see the fruit being born, the flowersopening in front of my eyes and becoming fruit. I know flowers become fruit here, too, but you don’t see it happen. Stars. Lots and lots of them. The moon. I remember there were nights when, to save on oil, we ate in the open air by the light of the moon.
    My house had one big room for all of us, where we slept, a room for guests, and a corner for making a fire and cooking, which was below floor level, and in winter pipes would take the heat from the fire all through the house. On the second floor there was a storeroom where we kept feed for the animals. Outside, a second kitchen, so that in summer the house didn’t get even hotter than it was, and a very large courtyard with apples, cherries, pomegranates, peaches, apricots and mulberries. The walls were made of mud and very thick, more than a meter. We ate homemade yogurt, like Greek yogurt but much, much better. We had a cow and two sheep, and fields where we grew corn, which we took to the mill for grinding.
    This was Nava, and I would never have chosen to leave it.
    Not even when the Taliban closed the school.
    Fabio, can I tell you about when the Taliban closed the school?
    Of course
.
    You’re interested?
    I’m interested in everything, Enaiatollah
.
    I wasn’t paying much attention that morning. With one ear I was listening to my teacher and, with the other, to my thoughts about the
buzul-bazi
contest we had organized for the afternoon.
Buzul-bazi
is a game played with a bone taken from a sheep’s foot after it’s been boiled, a bone that looks a bit like a die, although it’s all lumpy, and in fact the game you play with it is a bit like dice, or like marbles. It’s a game we play all year round, whereas making kites is more a spring or autumn thing, and hide-and-seek a winter game. When it gets really cold in winter, it’s nice to hide among the sacks of corn or in the middle of a heap of blankets or behind two rocks, huddled up close to someone else.
    The teacher was talking about numbers and teaching us to count when we heard a motorbike driving round and round the outside of the school as if looking for the front door, even though it wasn’t all that difficult to find. Then we heard the engine being turned off. A huge Taliban appeared in the doorway. He had one of those long beards they all have, the kind we Hazaras can’t have because we’re like the Chinese or the Japanese, we don’t have much facial hair. A Taliban once slapped me becauseI didn’t have a beard, but I was only a child and even if I’d been a Pashtun and not a Hazara I don’t think I could have had a beard at that age.
    The Taliban came into the classroom, carrying a rifle, and said in a loud voice that the school had to be closed immediately. The teacher asked why. My chief’s orders, the man