Chapter Twenty-Five
My sisters flailed their hands, screaming ‘Mour’.
‘Please save my daughters!’ Mour cried above the deafening outboard motor noise. She banged her head against a man to the right; her headscarf had slipped to her shoulders. The man wouldn’t release his grabbing of Mour’s arms. Another asylum seeker held the man’s belt with both hands.
‘Ahmad, tell the godless people in their language,’ Mour told me, the rain hitting against her face.
‘Stop the boat,’ I said to the smuggler in Russian. My body had already half sunk into the ice-cold water because the son of a bitch had squeezed 23 asylum seekers in a dinghy designed to fit eight.
The smuggler carried on grappling with the trolling motor in the torrent shadowed by trees as formidable as the Hindu Kush mountains. They shut off the stream from everything and everyone, even from the dark sky of the early morning.
Zarghuna let go of Nazo’s shirt and went motionless as though she had given up hope and accepted her fate without a fight. The current swallowed her in a tiny mouthful.
‘My sister’s drowned. Stop the damn boat,’ I said and kicked the rubber edge, water splashing on my face and into my mouth.
The man next to me tightened his arm around me, squeezing me against his sweaty chest.
Nazo shouted ‘Agha’, her throat contracting.
The dinghy wobbled. The sound of someone jumping overboard. To my horror, it was Agha.
‘He can’t swim. He’s drunk. Stop the bloody boat,’ I said and caught my breath.
The inflatable dinghy drifted away.
I bit the hairy arm and untangled my right hand. Threw my fist against the smuggler’s face, feeling his teeth and lips with my middle knuckle.
He shouted something in Hungarian to the man next to me.
‘Have you gone mad?’ the man said in broken Russian and secured his grip. Another arm, as large as an electricity pole, placed itself against my throat and pressed it against his sweaty chest. I threw kicks, the cutting water raising my belly button. I felt my oesophagus closing. Agha, with flailing hands pushing towards his daughter, blacked out. I was relaxed. Peaceful.