The boy’s socks reeked of urine and excrement. Probably he had stepped onto the squat latrine neglecting to wear the communal slippers. In his restless slumber, he would fling his feet in my direction every few minutes, almost always landing a kick on the crown of my head.
Ten of us lay side by side on the floor, in two neat sardine rows. The boy with the fetid feet slept in the spot above mine. I had no choice but to suffer his kicks in silence. Crawling sensations on exposed skin hinted of an insect infestation, but the room was too dark, and the invaders too fast, to pinpoint the exact species. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the frozen air. There weren’t enough blankets to go around; those who had managed to get their hands on them were wrapped like mummies; the rest shivered. Outside, the hollering of drunks and the booming of fireworks announced the new year, 2016.
I couldn’t fall asleep if I tried. I had managed to gain entree to an Afghan smuggling ring in Istanbul, and I was about to tell the story of the European migrant crisis from the inside, as no Western reporter had or could. Unlike most of my journalistic rivals, I spoke Persian, the second language of the migrant trail (after Arabic), and I could fit in with these poor souls. A career-defining triumph was at hand. I pictured myself signing a lavish book deal and, later, delivering an acceptance speech at some journalism awards ceremony.
Fear mingled with these happy thought bubbles. My adventure could go very wrong, very fast. As often as the boy kicked at my head, I would reach inside my peacoat, which I was using for a blanket, to feel for a hidden pocket. There, wrapped in several layers of duct tape, was my U.S. passport, the thin legal tissue that set me apart from the others. An authentic Western passport went for several thousand euros on the black market. I shuddered to think what might happen to me if one of my travel companions found the document.
Or if the smugglers discovered that I was a journalist rather than a bona fide client. At the very least, I would be kicked out and be forced to restart the project from scratch. And what would become of Alireza, the Iranian migrant who had brought me here? Alireza had neither time nor money to spare. He was a man on the run. I felt responsible for his fate.
* * * * *
A friend of a friend of a friend had introduced me to Alireza a few days earlier, after I put out word on Iranian social media that I was looking to accompany a migrant on the journey from the Middle East to western Europe. We spoke by WhatsApp while I was in London and Alireza on a bus heading from Tehran to southeast Turkey. He agreed to let me join him on one condition: Under no circumstances were the smugglers and other “travelers” to know that I was a reporter.
“We’ll say you’re my cousin,” he said. “Otherwise everything will go to rot. Capisce?”
“Understood,” I replied. “We can say we’re cousins who grew up apart.”
“You got it, brother. Bring two thousand dollars. Cash. And pack lightly. You don’t want to be too heavy on the water. Ha ha ha!”
Alireza was due to arrive in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve. I flew there from London. From Istanbul onward, we would travel together. The plan was to make a series of illegal crossings that would take us from Turkey’s western shore to the Greek isles, then through mainland Greece and the Balkan States, until we would reach Germany, the migrant Zion. Known to journalists and officialdom as the Western Balkan corridor, this route had brought more than a million newcomers to Europe by the end of 2015.
The new arrivals included people fleeing the infernal wars in Syria and Iraq, as well as Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and many others who saw a chance to escape the misery and precariousness of life in their homelands. This mass exodus was made possible by highly efficient smuggling networks that operated like any large enterprise but for that their clients and commodities were human beings. I traveled to Turkey to tell this story.
* * * * *
Taksim, the bustling square around which the rest of Istanbul orbits, was buried under half a foot of snow when I got there. A festive mood reigned in the nearby tangle of shops, tourist bars, and hotels. Couples snapped self-ies by snowmen. Burly restaurateurs carved doner kebabs, tempting the crowds with a greasy respite from the frigid temperatures. Stylish young women walked arm in arm, giggling and casting flirtatious glances at passing groups of young men. Syrian children slid down the ice-covered asphalt, making do with cheap sneakers for sleds.
A lonesome Turkish Santa imitated Father Christmas’ signature laugh, poorly: “Ho-ha-he!”
My nerves were shot. I walked over to an Irish pub and ordered a double Jameson, neat, and a Kronenbourg to wash it down. Alireza wasn’t answering my calls and messages. Had he been detained at the border? The mutual friend’s friend who had made the connection was an Iranian dissident. Was Alireza a political case, too? In any event, my cell phone eventually rang. It was him; the snow, not Iranian border guards, had delayed his bus.
He told me to come to the “Usman Peh-leese”. I couldn’t make heads or tails of this, so I headed in the direction of the Ataturk monument at the center of Taksim. There were only two hours left in the year, and hundreds of young people—Turks, Arabs, Iranians—were milling about the monument in anticipation of the countdown. Their various nations were at each other’s throats over Syria, but here, they mixed and made merry under the steely gaze of the Father of Turks—the same gaze that had brought me such comfort all those years earlier at the Turkish-Iranian border.
I had no clue what Alireza looked like. I circled the monument a few times, searching for an unfamiliar face in the throngs. Then I figured it out. “Usman Peh-leese” was the Ottoman Palace hotel, on the southern edge of Taksim. And there he was at the entrance, dressed in an Adidas athletic jacket with matching pants and bright orange running shoes. He was tall and broad shouldered and looked as if he had struggled to fit his muscly bulk into his clothes. His equine face broke into an easy smile when he spotted me, unveiling two rows of large, gapped teeth.
I suggested that we head to my pub to get our bearings. We needed to get in touch with Ehsan, our smuggler. Alireza’s phone was almost out of battery power, so he used my UK cell to make the call. He told the man on the other end—it was unclear whether it was Ehsan himself—that he was borrowing a British tourist’s phone. It was the first of many times that Alireza lied as he did something that could have endangered both our lives: bring a reporter into the inner sanctum of a smuggler. He covered his tracks with heaps of ta’arof, the beguiling Persian art of affected deference and self-effacement. We were instructed to take a taxi from Taksim to a neighborhood called Zeytinburnu.
“Oh, one more thing,” said Alireza as the call came to an end. “Remember I mentioned my cousin who wants to get on the water. Is there still room for one more?”
There was room for one more. Now there was no excuse for backing out of this.
Alireza negotiated hard at the cab stand, but the inclement weather made it a seller’s market, and we had to settle for a gouging fare. The swirling lights and hubbub of Taksim faded into slushy darkness as our taxi made its way through the city’s less touristy precincts, toward Zeytinburnu. By then the infusions of liquid courage had left me more than a little buzzed.
If Alireza was nervous, he didn’t show it. He spoke Persian in the looti vernacular of the south Tehran working class. The tone and cadence were such that, no matter the substance of his speech, he sounded as though he were vaguely objecting or taking issue—with his interlocutor, with the world, with God. “South Tehran” was more than an accent or a sensibility. It was a whole constellation of situation ethics, street wisdom, and survival skills, all of which Alireza appeared to possess in spades.
In the backseat of the taxi, he recounted a life story laden with misfortune. He had been born to a poor and pious Muslim family. His athlete’s physique, and arms and fists made for punching, had propelled him from those humble origins to the kickboxing semipros by the time he was a teenager. Yet his talents had come to naught, and he was a broken man before he decided to try his luck on the migrant trail. At thirty-two, he was only a year older than I was.
The source of his worldly misfortunes was his conversion to Christianity. Last time Alireza was in Istanbul, in January 2015, he and a dozen other young men had been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit at a ceremony organized by one of the many Turkey-based Protestant groups that cater to Iran’s underground evangelical scene. When they flew back to Tehran, security forces arrested them at the airport. A regime mole had infiltrated the group of converts. Alireza was detained for days.
“Sir, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he had blurted at one point, as an interrogator slapped his face over and over. “I love Islam! My life for Islam! My buddies told me this was to be some sort of water-therapy deal!”
The interrogator had burst out laughing at this; the beating went on.
“When they start hitting you,” Alireza recalled, “you’ll say anything to make them stop.”
He would go on to deny Jesus several more times before the authorities released him. Afterward, the railroad company where he worked fired him. He took up odd jobs—construction, fruit picking, scrap metal recycling—but couldn’t make ends meet. The neighborhood boys stopped showing up for the kickboxing classes he taught out of the makeshift gym in his apartment. He considered taking his own life. When word spread that Germany had flung the gates open to migrants from the Middle East, he borrowed enough money from relatives to pay the smugglers and took off.
“The me that left Iran was a corpse,” he told me. “You know, in Iran, Mother is something else. How could I leave my mother behind? Brother, I dragged a corpse out of that house.” But he wouldn’t change anything if he could go back in time. “With Islam, it’s ‘You’re a Muslim, or we kill you.’ With Christianity, there is a real choice, a real touch of God. That’s what I have.”
A real touch of God. His Christianity was as simple as that. Too much so, I thought, and I was inclined to doubt his faith on account of its simplicity. Then it occurred to me that, with his Baptism, Alireza had bound himself to Christ in a way that was infinitely more concrete and meaningful than my bookish half faith could allow. I still only admired the Cross from a polite distance. This simple man had thrown himself at its foot. For him, faith in Jesus Christ was as natural and effortless as being awe-struck by lightening. He was my Ivan Denisovich.
A silence fell between us. Then the taxi driver’s gruff voice jolted us back to the present. “Address?” he asked. “Address!”
“Mister, I want please your phone,” Alireza replied in a broken English.
It was time to get exact directions, and we couldn’t use my foreign cell a second time lest Ehsan get suspicious. The driver obliged. Alireza dialed Ehsan’s number on the driver’s phone and handed it back. Soon driver and smuggler were chatting away in Turkish. Before long, the car came to a gentle stop on an empty road, next to a gated parking lot. “Migros,” the driver grunted. “This, Migros!”
Next to the parking lot was a sign for a supermarket, the only source of light for a mile around. Migros, read the orange letters. This was Ehsan’s meeting spot. Alireza tried to haggle again, but the Turk was having none of it. We paid up grudgingly. Though it appeared desolate on New Year’s Eve, we were, in fact, standing next to the main thoroughfare at Zeytinburnu. The Turkish name, I would later learn, meant “Olive Cape”.
“It’s a good thing we only paid thirty lire for that ride,” Alireza said as we exited the cab.
“We did?” I replied. “I thought it ended up being eighty.”
“No! Remember? We only paid thirty.”
Alireza didn’t want the “others”—meaning the other travelers—to think we were saps. Or that we had extra lunch money.
“When we get there,” he said, “let me do all the talking. You don’t say a word, even if you’re asked a direct question. Got it? Be cool.”
I wasn’t cool. My mouth felt like sandpaper. I lit a cigarette. Alireza didn’t smoke. Five silent minutes passed beneath the Migros sign, but there was no sign of Ehsan. Then a whitish figure emerged out of a dark alley that ran perpendicular to our main road, and before we knew it, he was standing in front of us. He was probably no taller than five-foot-six. His slanted Afghan eyes, small pursed lips, and sinewy neck exuded vigor and malice.
“My brother!” Alireza said, a wide grin crossing his lips. “I kiss your tired hands for waiting up for us so late.” Again, the ta’arof.
The other didn’t reciprocate Alireza’s affability. “I thought you were supposed to be alone,” he said. His glare could cut glass.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” Alireza said, with a hint of a plea in his voice, not that the power dynamics needed clarifying. “Ehsan knows all about him. This is my cousin. Ehsan knows. Ask him.” So this fellow wasn’t Ehsan.
Without another word, the other swiveled in his spot and started back toward the alley from where he had come. He was almost jogging. We followed. I was breathless. Midway, the Afghan turned around and made a lighter gesture at me. I fumbled through my pockets and produced what he wanted. He didn’t say thanks. We arrived at Ehsan’s house in short order.
* * * * *
That was how I ended up spending New Year’s 2016 with Afghan migrants and the smugglers who held the keys to their European dreams.
Dawn broke on January 1, and light from a distant winter sun fluttered through the curtains. I sat up in my spot. I hadn’t slept a wink. I glanced at my nighttime tormentor. He was about fourteen, judging by his size and the peach fuzz above his lips, yet his chubby features and long hair betrayed a certain girlishness. Two other Afghan boys were lying on their backs nearby. Though they were probably about the same age as the first, these two looked rougher and older, more feral. The tough who had greeted us with such warmth and hospitality the previous night wasn’t far, either.
The room was perhaps 150 square feet, and it crawled with cockroaches. These were half an inch long at most, much smaller than the urban roach. Yet what they lacked in size they made up for in sheer numbers. There was at least one and usually many more in each spot that my eyes rested upon. Some raced across the walls, as if competing in some Cockroach Derby. Others milled about languorously, over the blankets, atop the television in one corner, on the bodies and faces of the dozing travelers.
“Man, I nearly froze to death,” Alireza said. He was up.
“I froze, too,” said an old man sitting squat two spots down from Alireza. He was bald, with a leathery sun-beaten face and no front teeth.
“Really?” I chimed in. “I was kind of warm.” I lied to appear hardened.
The whole room was now animated with men’s morning activity. Those who had slept with blankets folded them neatly and piled them in one corner, a quaint gesture toward Middle Eastern fastidiousness amid the filth that engulfed us. We made a valiant but futile effort to shoo away or kill some of the roaches. Then we sat in a semicircle around the television. All the Afghans lit cigarettes, including the trio of boys. I followed suit. Alireza still abstained. Someone turned on the television and flipped through the channels until he found a figure-skating broadcast. No one objected to the sight of a young girl in a short frilly skirt spinning gracefully.
“Is this happening right here, in Turkey?” asked one of the boys.
“Yeah, it’s actually right next door,” answered another. “When she’s done with her routine we can go congratulate her, and you can ask her out.”
“Hardy-har-har.”
“Is this a woman or a doll?” asked one of the men. “I mean, how can a woman look this perfect?” He was short with a round face and a thin mustache. He wore an impossibly unfashionable mullet haircut. His thin arms and legs contrasted markedly with his fat belly.
“When you get to the other side, brother,” said Alireza, “you’ll get yourself a sweetheart just like her.”
“How can a woman look so much like a doll?” the other repeated himself, as if in a reverie. “My God. My God.” Then he turned toward Alireza and me: “Are you gents heading to Germany?”
“God willing,” Alireza said.
If they managed to cross the Aegean, most of these travelers would likely end up in Germany or Sweden, the two countries that were most eager to accept the newcomers. Yet the travelers themselves passionately debated where to settle once they made it to mainland Europe, almost like a family weighing various vacation destinations.
A consensus formed around Britain, mainly because most of them spoke at least a little English. But the travelers also knew that the crossing from France across the Channel was no easy feat. Canada was nice, too, but they had to make it to Europe first and then pay a smuggler an additional $20,000 to hide them aboard a trans-Atlantic vessel. Finland was “too cold, and they don’t pay much welfare”, one of the guys said. Switzerland was too expensive. Alireza mentioned that he had considered trying for Australia but had decided otherwise after he learned that the authorities diverted illegal boats to Papua New Guinea.
“There are so many darkies down there it makes you puke,” he said. “Imagine having to share a hot cell with a darky. Yuck!”
I checked for my passport. It was still there.
“It’s like that in Turkey, too, if you get caught,” said the bald old man. “They’ll dump you in a cell with the Syrians and the darkies. But then they’ll release you a few days later. You can always try again.”
This old man claimed to have spent more than half of his life on various smuggling runs. He had crossed illegally from Afghanistan to Iran numerous times while hiding in the narcotics-stuffed undercarriages of buses and trucks. In the 1990s, he had tried to cross from Turkey to Greece and from southern Iran to the Emirates; he had been caught both times.
“Migration itself is a form of jihad, children!” he said, guffawing to reveal his toothless gums.
“Speaking of which,” Alireza said, “when is this Mr. Ehsan coming here?”
The room went silent. Then the tough spoke up for the first time: “How would we know? Maybe later. Maybe he isn’t coming. Maybe he’s sitting among us.”
“Don’t you work with him?”
“Nah. I’m just a traveler. Like you.” Ah, so he was putting on airs the night before, pretending to mind the smuggler’s safe house.
“And what do you call yourself, brother?” Alireza asked, his affability now shaded by a hint of threat.
“Nader,” the other replied before turning to the group: “Anyway, what do you gents wanna eat? I’ll go pick something up.”
The travelers ordered a sumptuous feast: eggs, cream, cheese, kebabs. But on a budget of one lira per capita, they would have to settle for a more modest breakfast. I chipped in my lira, dreading the prospect of sharing a meal with the cockroach army that swarmed the room. There was no choice, however. If I acted as effete as I really was, it would raise suspicion among the others. A traveler is supposed to be famished at all times; to pass up a full meal is a sure mark of insanity.
Nader and one of the feral boys—they were related, I gathered—returned a few minutes later with a frying pan filled with eggs over easy. Too easy, in fact. Nader set the pan in the middle of the room, and his younger assistant passed out bread rolls to the rest. All sat squat around the pan and began dipping their rolls into the eggs. Alireza cupped one hand around his eggy roll and rammed it whole down his throat, inhaling it in one bite.
“Mif-ter Foh-rab!” he said in a muffled voice between chews. “Come inject fome of thif good-neff right into your veinf!”
I had to do it. I took a small piece of bread and dipped it gently into the slippery mess. I would slowly nibble at the bread to give the impression that I was eating without actually consuming much. I would help myself to the Clif Bars in my backpack once I found a moment away from the others.
Meanwhile, an argument broke out between the boys as the men scraped the bottom of the pan. I couldn’t be sure what was said (the Afghans spoke in their own dialect when they weren’t addressing Alireza and me, the two Persians). I think one of the feral boys attached to Nader had joked about throwing the third boy—the feminine-looking one who had kicked me through the night—into the water during the crossing, and this latter had come back with a sexual epithet.
Nader, who had been listening attentively the whole time, suddenly picked up the near-empty pan and hurled it with great force at the epicene youth. The pan crashed into the wall next to him with a deafening sound. It barely missed the boy, though he caught much of the oil and slop. Shock froze him in place. Nader lunged at him and was about to smack his face with an open palm when the bald old man jumped up and arrested his arm midmotion. The boy cowered into a corner of the room.
“Mr. Nader,” the old man said, “I beg you. This boy is traveling alone. He doesn’t have anyone in this world. He’s learned his lesson. Please don’t punish him anymore. He won’t dare insult your cousins ever again. I beg you! Now, let’s all say a salavaat. Come on, gentlemen!”
At this, we all stood and chanted the familiar Arabic words: “Allah’s blessings be upon Muhammad and the progeny of Muhammad!”
* * * * *
At noon or a little after, Ehsan arrived to meet the latest cohort of clients. Nader had kept us under lock and key until then, claiming that he was under orders from Ehsan to make sure none of us left the safe house. It was possible that he had such instructions but more likely that he enjoyed lording over others and had installed himself as hall monitor for the purpose.
Alireza and I were summoned to Ehsan together. The smuggler’s office, in a small bedroom next to ours, reminded me of a sort of hippy’s lair, with a Persian carpet covering the floor, a guitar on a stand in one corner, a bird’s cage in another. The smell of burning incense filled the air. Ehsan sat cross-legged in the middle, dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt and skinny jeans. He had a Bruce Lee haircut and pronounced Central Asia features. A green warbler balanced its thin legs on his shoulders, and Ehsan now gently shifted his torso and now petted the bird to discourage it from flying away. The warbler’s chirping supplied a pleasant soundtrack.
The smuggler motioned for us to join him on the floor. Quite unlike my mental impression of an Afghan criminal, Ehsan was friendly and polite. He spoke in a silvery voice, and an inscrutable smile remained planted on his lips the whole time. It turned out that the point of this meeting was to upsell us on additional services beyond the basic boat ride to the Greek isles. If we paid him $8,000 each on top of the agreed $2,000 for the Aegean crossing, his men could get us from Athens all the way to Paris or Berlin or wherever else we wished on the mainland, all by car, saving us the hassle of trekking on foot and by train.
“Mister! Mister!” Alireza interrupted Ehsan’s sales pitch. “We don’t have that kind of money. We just want to get to Greece. We’ll figure it out on our own.”
“As you wish,” said the smuggler. His bird flapped its wings and zoomed over to its open cage.
“So. . . what do we do when we get there?”
“Simple. You stop being Iranian and become Afghan war refugees. Iranian is no good for asylum.”
“No good, huh?”
“Well, it’s much better to be an Afghan.” Ehsan peered deeply into Alireza’s eyes, and continued: “Hmm, you might have some trouble. Your Iranian-ness is printed on your face. But you’re not too hopeless. Just come up with a good Afghan story. Learn your Afghan geography. The brothers in there can help.” At this, he tipped his head in the direction of our room.
“As for you,” he continued, now turning to me, “you’re good. You’ll pass.”
You’ll pass. For the first but not the last time, I was reminded that I was closer to these men than I would have cared to admit. It was only by dint of birth and circumstance that I had a U.S. passport, while they had to risk the waters of the Med aboard unseaworthy vessels to get to Europe. You’ll pass. The words created a sinking in my soul that stayed with me long after I parted ways with the smugglers and the migrants.
* * * * *
We spent the rest of the day watching corny Iranian soap operas from the prerevolutionary days and anxiously awaiting word from the smugglers about our crossing. To send a dinghy across, water conditions must be calm. The coast must be clear of Turkish border patrol. And there have to be enough travelers to maximize profits for the smugglers.
The stars aligned for our group the next day, and we were told to get ready. In the evening, a van would take us from Istanbul to Izmir for a crossing at dawn on January 3. The news set off a flurry of activity among the travelers. We now needed to shower and clean up, waterproof our belongings, and purchase life jackets (though I had brought a professional one from London). Someone also mentioned buying honey and lemon juice, the drinking of which was supposed to counteract hypothermia in case our dinghy capsized and we found ourselves in the winter water.
Alireza and I left to buy him a life jacket, and we offered to pick up the honey and lemon juice for the group. Mullet man—he was called Morteza—joined us as we stepped outside for the first time in thirty-six hours. Ehsan’s apartment was on the first floor of a three-story building, in an alleyway strewn with bricks, plastic garbage, and other detritus of working-class life. The surrounding area was thick with impoverished Turks and, Morteza claimed, the kinsfolk of Uzbek, Kazakh, and other Central Asian fighters waging jihad against the Assad regime in Syria.
Travelers overran the streets, especially the market, where every shop seemed to hawk life jackets, waterproof gear, duct tape, plastic bags, and other migration essentials. Alireza quickly settled on one of the more top-of-the-line life jackets on offer. At seventy lire, it might have assuaged the wearer’s fear of the water, but it wouldn’t save his life in a pinch, since it lacked a flotation mechanism. But even that model was too fancy for Morteza, who had to buy jackets for himself and several of the guys at the house. He couldn’t afford to spend more than thirty lire per jacket.
The Afghan took us on a circuitous tour of the market, as he tried on every possible model and haggled with every salesman. By then memory of the passport in my pocket had partially receded from my mind, and I found myself oddly absorbed in this drama. Again the thought crossed my mind that I could have easily switched places with Morteza, for whom even a toy life jacket was out of reach.
After an hour’s bargain hunting, Morteza finally settled on a life jacket. As we were leaving the market, however, a trio of young girls approached us. They were dressed in yoga pants that left little to the imagination, and their fake lashes and glossy makeup stood out sharply in a neighborhood where burkas and jalabiyas were common, and where at midday we had seen worshippers praying in the streets and sidewalks near the local mosque for lack of room inside.
“Excuse me,” said one of the girls to Alireza, “do you speak Persian?” They were Iranian.
“Yes?”
“Do you know how we can get to——?” Here she named a neighborhood none of us had heard of.
“Truth be told, we’re travelers here, too. Maybe a taxi, but I’ve heard there are buses—”
“Oh, really? ‘Cause we’re new here, too!”
“Right. Well, we wish you success. God be with you.”
“Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have a room for us, would you? We’d love to stay with you for a while.” At this, she took a step closer to Alireza and twirled her cheap hair extensions around a finger. The proposition came so fast that I didn’t even catch it in the moment. What struck me, instead, was that hidden beneath the caked-on makeup was the face of a girl-woman, no older than fifteen or sixteen. Alireza declined the offer cheerfully, with lots of ta’arof and expressions of regret.
Afterward, Morteza explained that he had witnessed scenes like that several times since he had arrived in Istanbul: “Before you two sirs arrived, we ran into a couple of them, and just like these three they offered to stay with us. Of course, we had no room. But would you believe it, not a minute after we turned them down, some Turks rolled up in a Beamer and picked them up. They were young girls. Children made up like dolls! Like dolls. . .”
* * * * *
The men were showered and in high spirits when we returned in the late afternoon, life jackets and honey and lemon in tow. An arduous journey still lay ahead. Yet for the Afghans, the hardest part—crossing through the icy mountains of northwestern Iran, where the border guards had shoot-to-kill orders—was already behind them. Alireza and I set about waterproofing our clothing, wallets, cell phones and chargers, and the rest. I caught glimpse of a Persian-language New Testament among Alireza’s belongings, though he was quick to hide it away.
Nader, the tough, was missing. Having waterproofed and squared away my stuff, I went over to the boy who had almost had his ears boxed the day before.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Behnam,” he replied.
“You all right?” I asked him.
No, he nodded his head up and back.
“Well, you’re going to be in Europe soon. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
No, he gestured again.
“Do you regret coming here?”
“I had a good job in Iran,” he said. “I swear, I did. I kept a rich man’s house in Tehran, and he paid good money. All I needed was papers. I should have stayed there.”
“Why did you come?”
He shrugged. Because he could, I suppose. Or because everyone was doing it.
“What’s the score, Mr. Sohrab?” Nader’s voice gave me a jump.
“The score?” I replied. “I’m not sure what you mean. What score?”
“The score, man! The score! What are you, dense?”
“The score’s ten-zero!” Alireza intervened. “Never mind Mr. Sohrab, brother. He’s my cousin, but he’s a bit of a fancy-boy. Grew up uptown. Doesn’t speak our tongue.”
All Nader was asking was “What’s up?” But I didn’t catch the slang.
“Aha,” Nader said, considering this for a while. “And how’s my little kitten doing?” he asked, now turning to Behnam.
The boy was silent—and visibly frightened.
“Come on!” Nader went on. “Kitty, kitty, kitty! Give me a meow!”
He was humiliating the boy.
“Meow,” Behnam said meekly. “Meow. Meow.”
“That’s better. And how does the little kitten clean himself when he’s dirty?”
Behnam stopped meowing.
“Do I need to give the little kitten another beating?”
Now the boy started mock-licking his hands and arms, indeed like a cat.
“Good. Now come on, little kitten. Come help me cook dinner.”
Nader disappeared into the kitchen. The boy followed him dejectedly.
When they returned half an hour later, we set out a picnic blanket on the floor, swept cockroaches and breadcrumbs from the surface, and sat in a circle around it. Nader and Behnam had prepared fried potatoes and onions in the Afghan style. The leftover rolls from the morning were handed out, and we dove in. I was famished. I inhaled the potatoes much as Alireza had done with the eggs at breakfast. I didn’t mind the cockroaches any longer.
“Man!” one of Nader’s cousins exclaimed. “Behnam makes a good kitchen maid, doesn’t he?”
“Hey!” the old man said. “Don’t speak to him like that.”
“I’m just joking,” answered the offender.
“If you can’t make nice jokes, please don’t joke.”
“I’m just saying he’s a good little bitch. Maybe you can cook for me in Europe, too, Narges dear?” (Narges is a woman’s name.)
Behnam whacked his bully with a still-full melamine bowl, drawing a scream. The two were about to tangle when Nader grabbed Behnam by the collar and pinned him against the wall. Having immobilized the boy, Nader jabbed his elbow into his face, hard. Once. Twice. Thrice. The boy cried out in pain. The rest of us were powerless to rescue him—that is, except for the professional kick-boxer. Alireza cleaved apart the two entangled bodies; then he put Nader in a headlock for a few moments till reason returned to him.
Ehsan stood at the doorway with his arms crossed. The warbler on his shoulder chirped. “None of you will get on the water if that happens again,” he said calmly before retiring to his office.
Behnam collapsed as soon as he was freed from Nader’s grip. His face was red, and swollen like a chipmunk’s, and he lay on the floor for some time whelping and whimpering while the rest of us finished dinner. His persecutors had finally reduced the boy to an animal state.
“Now, now, gentlemen,” said the old man. “Let’s say the salavaat and put this behind us.”
“Allah’s blessings be upon Muhammad and the progeny of Muhammad!”
* * * * *
I never crossed the water with that group of travelers. An hour after the brawl, I got a call from the United States informing me that my mother, now living in the suburbs of Boston, had been hospitalized with an epileptic episode. I told Ehsan and the others that I needed to fly home to Tehran, to take care of my mother, which was almost true. All were quite sympathetic. Nader even embraced me when we said farewell. I never saw any of the travelers again, though I later received word from Alireza that they had all made it safely to Germany.
My time in Ehsan’s safe house shattered what was left of my faith in perfectibility and progress and the bland secular universalism that is the lingua franca of Western elites. Human nature was so much more unfathomable, and horrible, than all that. There, in that shabby corner of working-class Istanbul, I discovered a portal to the lower depths of human misery. Ehsan’s house was a kind of charnel pit or Sheol, though the people in it were yet alive. It was a void, though it existed within the boundaries of space and time. It was on fire with degradation—and sin.
How to escape those flames, which had set the whole world of men ablaze ever since that first betrayal in the Garden? That was the only question that mattered to me, really, after I parted ways with the smugglers and migrants.
My father had urged me to be myself, and every philosophy that I had tried on since then stood for the same idea in different guises. But my pure “self”, without more, was insubstantial and purposeless and interchangeable. It lacked a metaphysical home and destination. If what I saw and heard in Ehsan’s house disturbed me, it was only because the goings-on there reflected, in externalized and concentrated form, my own miserable spiritual state. The fires brushed and penetrated my soul. The smoke grew thicker and the searing flames rose higher with each passing year.
There was only one escape hatch that led out of the infernal prison in which my soul was trapped, and it happened to be cruciform in shape. The only way out was through the One who so loved the world that he descended from the austere heights of Sinai down to these lowest depths, who called slaves friends, who allowed himself to be degraded and lifted up again as the paschal Victim for all ages. I had already accepted the truth and necessity of faith in Christ Jesus before I came to Istanbul. The house on the Cape of Olives warned me that there was no time to waste. I, too, had to throw myself at the foot of the Cross without delay.