When the Moon Is Low(56)

In a large patch of weeds behind the building, the group of three Saleem had just met multiplied. There were men and boys everywhere, milling about outside makeshift tents or sitting on overturned pails. There were two small fires burning, with people sitting or lying around them, drinking palmfuls of water from five-gallon buckets.

The squalor rivaled that of Kabul’s worst-hit areas. This was the dark side of Athens, the secret world of people who did not exist. They were neither immigrant nor refugee. They were undocumented and untraceable, shadows that disappeared in the sun.

Hassan and Jamal went off in search of food. They would scrounge near restaurants for discarded food. Abdullah told them they were wasting time and took Saleem around to meet some people.

“Even here among your own people, you need to be careful who you talk to. Especially you, since you have a family and all. For instance, you see that guy in the corner with the yellow shirt?”

There was a man sitting on the ground, his back against a tree. Saleem realized that everywhere, people were clustered. This man was alone.

“Yes, I see him.”

“Well, that’s Saboor. Leave him alone.”

“Why should I leave him alone?”

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.

As unaccompanied minors, Pagani awaited them, but the boys refused to go back to the cage. Jamal, Hassan, and Abdullah had decided to live together in an apartment they shared with nine others. They had dreamed of going to Germany where they’d heard refugees were granted asylum, given housing, and fed. But in Greece, police officers stopped them and asked for “papers.”

“The papers do not mean anything,” Jamal explained. “They gave us ‘papers’ in Pagani and told us to keep them on us at all times. Be careful with the police here. Even with those papers, we are targets for them, like dogs in the street. Even at some of the churches that give out food, the police may be there. There is no asylum here.”

Saleem spent the day listening, disheartened. Outwardly charming and beautiful, Greece was a hostile place, and many of the young Afghans Saleem met regretted the money they’d spent to reach her shores.

IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, SALEEM RETURNED TO ATTIKI. THE boys told him the places to avoid and brought him along to the churches where food and water were distributed.