Shams, a young Afghan guy, knelt beneath Jalaluddin, a smuggler, on the rocky slope. Loud silence between them. Shams’ throat was parched from thirst and pleading.
Jalaluddin smoked a joint from Kandahar. “Have you finished your prayers, my son?” he asked. “May God forgive me for what will happen soon. Oh, my dear son, Shams, don’t curse me in your pure heart, as God will hear you.”
Meanwhile, Shams’ eyes dimmed. He peed himself, forming a small puddle beneath his feet. Everything went still—the world, the soaring birds, the wind. A brief, eerie silence lingered before a gunshot rang between the surrounding mountains. Thick, warm blood flowed from the hole in Shams’ head, mixing with the puddle of urine as his large legs twitched, kicking dust into the air. Jalaluddin pinned down Shams’ legs with his feet until they stopped moving.
Jalaluddin returned to us, the group. Calmly, he tossed Shams’ bag into the valley, and its contents—kaluja, Naan bread, cheese, and tomatoes—spilled out of it. Shams had kept them for eating later.
“Let’s pray for him before we head to the Iranian border,” Jalaluddin said.
We reverently read Al-Fatiha.
At dawn, we arrived in Vantaa, a suburb of Helsinki, Finland. We were taken to various reception centers. My friends were assigned to the nearby Arouma Building, while I was taken to the Robert Huberin Street 1 Reception Center.
Konsta, an employee, led me to Room 155 on the fourth floor. In English with a Finnish accent, replacing Sh to S, he said, “I’ll sow you.” They then gave us fresh towels and sheets, but kept our Schengen fingerprint documents, obtained when we entered Finland through Sweden.
The building that they sent me to, located in the Avipolis area, near Helsinki Airport, was four stories high with two wings, connected by a ground-floor corridor containing administrative offices, a reception, and the main entrance. I told Konsta, “I want to be with Afghans. I don’t speak Arabic or Kurdish, and I’ll be misunderstood here.”
“This is the only available room now. You can change it later when you make friends,” he replied, walkie-talkie in hand. He then hurried off. The situation was chaotic. Thousands of refugees were arriving, and there seemed to be no specific plan to manage the overwhelming influx. Everything was improvised. There were only ten employees and four toilets. There was no nurse, no kitchen, no surveillance cameras. The staff also seemed to have no experience whatsoever with dealing with refugees. Translators didn’t understand refugees’ dialects, further adding to the confusion. It was clear this whole ordeal would drag on, with constant clashes between the administration and the refugees.
My assigned room had three other people. Two shared a metal bunk bed, while the third was lying on an extendable bed with an extra mattress. I had to sleep on the top bunk. I felt uneasy, as I needed English to communicate with these Iraqis, and my Arabic wasn’t even enough to form a sentence. Still, they welcomed me warmly, which was slightly reassuring. This was just a transitional phase—maybe a few months, or a year, until I could get residency and move into my apartment.
Room 155 was on the third floor, with a window overlooking the entrance. At first, I was a little shy, and it took me two weeks to get used to my roommates. I was cautious, confused, and mostly anxious. They were flexible and sociable, so gradually things fell into place.
Latif, an Iraqi mid-level practitioner, shook my hands with both his. In his mid-thirties and tall, he carried an invisible sadness I’d later come to understand. In the room with us was Marwan. He was in his twenties, and he was cheerful, with orange highlights and streaks in his hair, and wearing bracelets and accessories. He often hummed Justin Bieber, Enrique Iglesias, or Ricky Martin. Saad was another roommate of ours. Broad-shouldered with a short beard, he was quiet and deep in thought. He was probably around thirty-five.
“Hello, I’m Sarmad,” one of them said in understandable Persian.
I was surprised. “How do you speak Persian so well?”
“Oh, my son. I speak five languages. Don’t mention it. You’ve got enough to think about without worrying about me.” He smiled gently before his brief smile dissolved, his welcoming eyes now not as inviting. He had high charisma, white hair, and glasses that seemed fixed to his face.
“I’m Amir Ait Ghaznavi, an Afghan.”
Latif joked. “Welcome! Our hashish just became free!”
Everyone burst into laughter. Sarmad translated for me, and I chuckled as I shifted my feet, not knowing exactly what to expect. “Not every Afghan is a hashish dealer,” I replied.
The room fell silent for a moment, then resumed its usual chatter—conversations about the journey to Finland, the immigration office, and political issues in Iraq.
I sat by the window, watching autumn release all its yellowness, as leaves blanketed the streets in chaos. Then the first winter came, and we braced for it as if we were facing an enemy. Those who had lived here for years warned us: “Your blood will freeze. You’ll breathe air at minus twenty, your lungs will stop, and the cold will cut through to your bones. Why did you come to Finland? Why don’t you think about going back?”
Sarmad and I shared the Persian language. Latif and Sarmad shared loud snoring. Saad and Latif shared a smoking addiction. Marwan and Saad shared a love for vodka, especially the cheap kind that comes from Estonia. Latif and Marwan shared their Baghdad roots, while Saad and Sarmad shared their southern Iraqi dialect. We all shared tea, sugar, and the responsibility of cleaning the room.
When we received our first monthly allowance of ninety euros, we celebrated, each in their own way—vodka, kebabs at Itäkeskus’s oriental restaurants, new pants, new glasses, new headphones. Saad celebrated by going to a Thai massage parlor and paying an extra fifty euros to a sexual masseuse with an agreed “happy ending”.
Our money ran out quickly, and we returned to the reality of hard rice, undercooked beef, and sweet lentil soup, poorly prepared by the cook and his two assistants. We complained often but to no avail. In a meeting at the reception, Mika, the Estonian-born manager, said, “There are Syrians right now that are eating grass from all the bombing in rural Aleppo. Isn’t your situation here in Finland better?”
Anger erupted, and security had to step in.
“This is a refugee shelter, not the Hilton!” Mika said.
We were served dinner at four, which stretched to seven. As the long winter nights grew colder, our hunger deepened. We shared dry toast, softening it with tea and conversation. We exchanged dreams of homes, schools, jobs—if we got residency, God willing.
Later, Konsta found me a room with new roommates, saying they were Iranians so that I wouldn’t struggle with communication. They turned out to be Kurds from Kermanshah and Ilam. “I’ll stay in room 155 with my Iraqi friends,” I told him.
He scratched his balding head in confusion. “You’re the one who asked for this, remember? But, as you wish.”
Three months later, a camp taxi took me to the Tikkurila Police Station to have my fingerprints taken again and officially submit my asylum application, which would later be used in the immigration interview. Hours felt like days, days like weeks, filled with calm boredom, occasional fights, shouting, and blood on the floor. Some relied on patience. Others on God, dreams, alcohol, or hashish. The wait was like a pressure cooker—you either tame it or it erupts in your face.
A thousand Iraqis had applied for voluntary return, while others disappeared, escaping to other European countries.
Saad prayed daily. Irregularly. Latif was consistent in his prayers. Sarmad and I did not pray. Then the first holy month of Ramadan came. Latif fasted, but Saad only fasted the first five days, justifying it with, “If I go twenty hours without smoking, I’ll lose my mind.”
Some 800 people filled the dining hall for iftar. There weren’t enough chairs or tables, so we sat on black garbage bags. Not everyone was fasting. They divided us by cards—those who weren’t fasting had yellow cards, and those fasting had green. The yellow-card holders received the usual three meals but weren’t entitled to the 11 p.m. iftar. No one adhered to that rule, though; it was an opportunity for the young men to eat four meals. It all passed quickly, like the time in a music game, with a spinning record and a Coke machine playing melodies that drifted by like fast breezes.
One day, I saw our neighbor, a Somali, in the adjacent room—154. He was very upset. When I asked him why, he said, “The Finnish Parliament voted to stop granting any humanitarian residency. At least 20,000 people will be rejected because of this decision. Things have become tough. Residency papers have become just a dream.”
That was in July 2016. The Finnish forests were lush and green in the summer, while the lakes around us shimmered with dazzling blue under a sunny sky, full of hope despite everything. “Whatever happens is what God has decreed,” I told myself. Anxiety is deadly ground for dreams and the body.
I consumed the spacious fabric of time, watching planes take off and land, imagining stories of the people onboard and comparing them to us—no papers, no right to travel. The planes were free. I recalled the paper planes that filled the sky of Ghazni and their runners, turning the sky into a canvas of colors. Every paper plane was a butterfly, spinning around itself and others.
I noticed that Sarmad seemed eager to write about every refugee he met. The journalist inside him had been awakened. He prepared a thick black notebook. On the first page, he wrote, “My Story.”
“Shall I start talking?” I asked him.
“Yes, after you drink your tea. Of course, it’ll be cool if you let it sit there while you go back in memory to your Afghanistan. All right, let’s begin with the Ghazni chronicle: The Thorny Path and Silk Road. Begin, Amir, tell your story.”
“On the last evening of the month of Sagittarius, according to the Afghan calendar, it rained heavily, which was unusual for this time of year in Afghanistan. I walked, seeking shelter under pistachio trees. The greenery was glowing like fireflies. The evening was soft, peeling away with a breeze, carrying an intoxicating scent—like the smell of happiness. It pulled me higher, through the skies of my city, Ghazni. I saw it through the eyes of a hawk ready to depart. I saw its alleys, its minarets, and its old star-shaped towers. I saw my brother, Mashallah, turning in his sleep, a naive smile stretching across his lips, while my aunt Niloufar helped my blind grandmother Behesht with her pre-dawn ablution for prayer. My aunt then returned to bed without joining the prayer. I saw my friends Mohseni, Karimi, Nasirzadeh, and Agha Jan. I saw the perpetually sad Hazara faces intersecting with the harsh Pashtun ones. I rose higher, the more I tried to descend. I was in a hanging field of flute tunes emerging from nowhere, while the swirling pistachio mist transformed me into a luminous galaxy. I rested my head on the pillow and rushed, headless, toward the sleepless cities of the West—cities that don’t dream.”
The voice of Rumi hovered around me like a green flag without a pole: “I will tear through seven heavens . . . and cross seven seas I will pass. If you’re gonna go without me, do not do . . . O soul of my soul, do not go.”
I was born in the city of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan—AFGHANISTAN the first country alphabetically in the world, according to the United Nations. It’s also the world’s number one producer of opium, the country’s plant-based petroleum, the magic liquid that can make you a king in a second and turn you into a pauper in the next. I’ve seen its effects on others—and, to be honest, I tried it before. But it didn’t suit me, so I stopped.
On my birth certificate, Shenasnameh Melli, my name is Amir Ait Ghaznawi. My blind grandmother spoke of our royal blood every time she took us, as children, to visit the star-shaped victory towers, remnants of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni’s Kingdom, which stretched from Ghazni to parts of India and Iran in the 10th century. I don’t revere history, no matter how great it is. For me, the present is more important, and the future is unreliable, like a roll of dice.
I was born in the month of Sunbula, 1389—August 1999—according to the Afghan calendar. Some call it the Horoscope of Luck, starting with Aries on March 21 and ending with Pisces on February 21. Except for the month I was born in, instead of Virgo, we call it Sunbula, associated with the harvest.
When I was four, I moved in with my aunt Niloufar, whose name means “water lily”. She was as beautiful as her name, but she never tasted a man’s love in her entire life. Her femininity withered away once, and she grew a light mustache. She was unmarried for some reason, claiming it was God’s will. I didn’t believe her, and neither did she. But she imitated what the other women around her were doing. She often cried in the silent depths of the night. The body, like well-baked bread, cools down, its edges harden.
Whenever my grandmother fought, she’d open the sack of wheat a little, and tales of my aunt’s lover would spill out—how he was executed when the Taliban rose to power, and how his intestines, alongside cassette tapes of songs, were hung on the light poles of Kabul in the early 90s. He was an artist, close to President Najibullah. My grandmother said he got what he deserved for being a communist. I asked her, “What’s a communist? Is it an insult, or a bad profession?”
I later called Mashallah a communist whenever he annoyed me. “Shut up, you communist! You should be disgraced.”
My brother and I would hear these stories under our blankets, as if we were thieves of tales. My aunt would sob every time, drowning our small house in tears and sorrow, reciting a Pashtun landay: “Lord, what have I done to remain a bud, while others blossom?”
My grandmother passed away at eighty. I imagined her as God—ancient and eternal, never dying. She wore the Afghan chador and never removed it, even in front of us children. She loved me and my brother and used to spoil us with pastries stuffed with dates or with handfuls of fresh green pistachios. I miss her, but I miss my Aunt Niloufar more. She was our mother and father after everything that had happened when the Taliban rose to power.
There were two versions of every event in our house. The first came through my aunt’s government-like radio—an official, polished narrative tailored to our young hearts. The second came from my grandmother, the opposition’s voice in the household parliament. My grandmother said my parents were killed in Helmand, while my aunt claimed they died together, at home in Ghazni.
“Why did they die together? Why didn’t one of them survive?” I asked innocently.
My aunt replied with confidence, “Because God willed it, my dear.”
She was busy preparing dinner, answering me with her back to me, so I wouldn’t see her tearful eyes. “They died because God sent an American airstrike that bombed the area. The Taliban were there. It happened in the month of Al Aqrab, during the autumn of 2002. You and Mashallah were too young to understand. We told you they went to a wedding in Helmand, got lost on the way, and never returned.” Grandma Behesht laughed. “In reality, they had gone to fetch genetically modified poppy seeds—koknar—which could yield three harvests. After the fall of the Taliban, who had monopolized the poppy trade for their funding and prohibited its cultivation by other Afghans, opium extraction became a source of income.
“You make a small incision on the poppy flower jar early in the morning, and after a few hours, it oozes out its thick sap. This was enough for Afghanistan to become the highest opium-producing country in the world. They were buried there in a graveyard, and over time, a poppy field grew inside it because of the desperate need to plant more land. They deserved it.”
Grandma Behesht believed, as Rumi said, that “What you seek seeks you.”
My aunt owns half a hectare of land, planted with wheat and a few pistachio trees, enough for our needs for half the year. We get by on whatever remains, however we can. That’s how we grew up, and I started school, with my brother following two years later. During that time, my aunt aged rapidly—the exhaustion of working the field with the women, the weight of old age, and the burial of sexual desires. I understood this when I reached adolescence. It all wore her down like a wrestler in the final round, facing life’s relentless difficulties. She once told me, “My little bird, Amir, I’ll open the cage for you with the money I’ve saved for my funeral and my grave. Take it. Funerals won’t stop, and the dead will be buried sooner or later.
“People will handle it, for no matter how wolfish they become, they won’t leave your blind grandmother or your little brother if I die one day.”
“What about my grandmother, that dead-yet-alive withered tree that lingers around the house like an eternal spirit?” I asked.
“Remember, spirits never die, my little Amir.”
I fell silent, swallowing this unexpected news, trying not to choke on it.
“I sold my necklace and half the field too, for you to travel to Europe. Once you arrive there, remember us and work hard to root yourself in that frozen land for the sake of these mouths that God has created, and you will become the reason for their sustenance. Go in body, but don’t go in spirit. Here . . .” She handed me a sum of money and added, “Go to your paradise as long as you’re alive. Others go to their paradises through bullets, diseases, or bus crashes on our treacherous mountain roads. There are imagined paradises for everyone, even for the communist I once loved; he, too, has some kind of paradise. You are now a man, and I am speaking to you from the depths of my thoughts. Find a paradise you can enter alive, not dead, like me or the communists. The communist, my dear boy, is neither an insult nor a source of pride, as you’ve been taught. Everything exists in between. Seek the truth for its own sake, not for its external effects. Humans taint pure ideas, shaping them to their own desires.”
She hugged me the way the Earth hugs the Moon. Eventually, I sadly broke free. As I sat on the bus before it took off, I thought about going back. I might do it at any moment.
“Shall we stop for a while? It’s four o’clock. Time for dinner in the dining hall. Take a break, Amir. We’ll continue your story later,” interrupted Sarmad, patting my shoulder.
We got off to eat, but our noses were assaulted by the smell of boiled rancid meat. Someone vomited after just two spoonfuls. The rice was half-cooked, and the white bread was the only edible thing. This was common, and we lost a few kilos. We resorted to cheap tuna cans to stave off the hunger. The food was served in such an unappetizing way that it seemed intentional, perhaps to force people to return to their countries. Who knows?
After Latif volunteered to work in elderly care homes, I suggested to Marwan that we look for jobs. I tried to convince him.
“So you can drink as much alcohol as you want, and I can buy food other than what they serve here.”
He agreed with my idea. We searched the internet and asked the staff, but the condition for work was that we speak Finnish. The six months we’d spent here weren’t enough to even learn daily greetings.
Marwan received regular money transfers from his family in Baghdad, but when they stopped, he found another source—sex with men in exchange for food and alcohol. I refused to do the same.
“It’s snowing heavily. I won’t go out today or tomorrow. Sarmad, should I continue?”
“Of course, go ahead,” he said as he was preparing his notebook and pens for writing.
The bus moved at three in the morning. Ghazni was still asleep, despite the crowing of her rooster. I got out of her womb now, and I may never return, just as what had happened to my parents. They must have left at three in the morning as well, the usual time for buses leaving from the local market. The twenty minutes until the bus moved felt agonizingly slow as half-asleep passengers filled the seats. I sat by the window, while my two friends Mukhtar and Nasiri were squeezed beside me. I saw my anxiety reflected in their eyes under the dim bus lights. We hadn’t slept that night, the three of us, I think. A long, narrow cloud like an open coffin would accompany us under a clear summer sky. It would follow us to Zabel’s sky before disappearing into the dark, blue Kandahar sky, tinged with red stains, where death had clotted too often in the air and still lingers.
I remembered the last time I kissed my blind grandmother’s eyes while she slept near the wall, wrapped in a white shroud. I remembered my aunt, who had played the roles of both mother and father for nearly fifteen years on the humble stage of our village home. She hugged me with a mix of pain and silence, said so much with her body, and then pushed me away so I could escape everything but her. The scent of that final embrace would cling to me, and not even the waters of the world’s seven seas could wash it away. A single tear fell—the flood always starts with a drop.
Outside, the drizzle traced winding paths on the bus window, stirring yet another urge to cry. Accompanying this was a mournful song by Afghan singer Naghma, flowing from an old cassette player near the bus driver. Mukhtar handed me a piece of bread and cheese. I told him I wasn’t hungry. He knew that but wanted the food to serve as a distraction from the tears.
After three hours of winding through the mountains connecting Ghazni to Zabul, we all felt pins and needles in their legs. “We’ll reach Zabul soon,” said one of the villagers. They were heading to visit relatives, some carrying green pistachios, yellow apricots, or “qurt” as gifts. Qurt is made from fermented yogurt, dried in the sun for two days, and then shaped into balls. It is deliciously sour. One of the men sitting in the front row handed me a qurt ball. He was my mother’s relative, and he asked about my destination. I told him the truth.
“I wish you a better life. Go,” he said. “This land is no longer fertile for young people like you. Leave. Die a thousand times, but don’t come back.”
The engine groaned like a bull struggling to ascend a narrow, winding path carved between a jagged rock face and a yawning abyss. From the bus window, I gazed down, feeling like a hawk soaring over the majestic landscape. Villages, trees, animals, and streams far below appeared shrunken, zoomed out a hundred times. I could smell the wheat, pistachios, and poppies planted in geometric patterns, their colors fading from beige to dark green.
The bus approached a cloud and then brushed against it like an animal seeking its mate. It clung to the rocky slope as if by sheer will, and a sharp mountain breeze could have easily sent it careening down the incline, now lined with thickening trees. Other than the ominous silence and the presence of Taliban gunmen, there was no authority here. The militants often claimed these isolated landscapes as their earthly paradise—a place to rehearse for the heavenly afterlife they imagined for themselves as martyrs. Meanwhile, those same paradises, in other supposed forms, were populated by the innocent civilians, police, and soldiers they had killed. The remnants of the Taliban International Corporation for Jihadist Manufacturing were still scattered, handing out tickets to their heaven free of charge and for an unlimited time, offering permanent residence.
Suddenly, there were gunshots, bullets whizzing around us, as the bus narrowly escaped the jaws of death. Were it not for the skilled driver—whom they called “Pashto Schumacher”—some of our brains would have stained the chairs around us. We ducked beneath the seats for two minutes. Everyone was murmuring, apparently asking God and His Prophet to keep these self-proclaimed religious soldiers away.
My heart thudded like a school drum, and I was trembling from head to toes. Fear forced gas from some of the elderly passengers in this tin can they called a bus—though it felt more like a moving coffin. We survived the ordeal, thanked God, and ate some sweets and naan.
The journey took eleven hours, and by the time we disembarked, we were as crumpled as unpressed shirts, with legs and faces etched with exhaustion. Everyone seemed to be on high alert, as if bracing for what lay ahead.
“What do you think, Sarmad, of this as a title: ‘The Road From Ghazni to Helsinki’?”
“Good idea,” he replied. “Keep writing. We can come up with a better title later.”
“We passed the slopes of Helmand, draped in dull gray. The new hybrid seeds, which look like sesame seeds, have shortened the required time for growing them, yielding three harvests a year instead of the single spring harvest in the month of Sonbula. I thought of my parents, buried side by side no doubt, somewhere in the vast expanse of these poppy fields. I recited Al-Fatiha for their souls, my palms open like the pages of a Qur’an.
We arrived at a bus stop in Farah, where we paused for a short break. Some of us bought food; others prayed or went to the public toilets, overrun by more flies than travelers. I recharged my phone at a nearby café. The driver honked the bus horn three times as a final signal to those lagging behind, then said, “Bismillah,” before starting the engine. I was surrendering to drowsiness, as the bus’ snores and Afghan folk songs playing reminded me keenly of the present.
We could have crossed directly into Iran from the border town of Nimroz, but the Iranians were always on high alert on this side of the frontier. It was easier to enter Pakistan without going through its cities, simply walking through the barren borderlands to the Iranian border. It would take three days on foot to circle the region. Border police patrolled the area relentlessly to cut off the opium routes that stretched like the old Silk Road, with Afghan opium crossing Iran to the world beyond. This made smugglers wary, even of their valuable cargo.
Smuggling is straightforward: one person in the exporting country and one in the importing country act as guarantors for the trafficked goods, whether me or someone else. Human cargo is equipped only with food and a pre-purchased Iranian cellphone. We do not use Pakistani networks since we are in rural areas, nor do we carry around any money—payment is made when we arrive in Zahedan, Iran. Someone there will notify another party of our arrival and collect the transportation fees. Trust is essential in this business. The worst happens when something slows us down. Just thinking about it terrifies me now.
We were a group of twenty-six young men, each with a different level of physical strength. After a day of trekking with a smuggler who said he knows the paths like the back of his hand, we were all exhausted. He depended on high-grade, costly opium to energize his legs as if powered by a stampede of horses. Shams, whose stature rivaled that of a young elephant, sensed the journey would be challenging for him. At first, the smuggler declined to include him, but a decisive call from someone higher up changed his mind, suggesting he might agree to take Shams for an additional fee. Consequently, Shams paid a premium to secure the smuggler’s support, his size and mobility posing a significant challenge.
When Shams slipped on a rocky slope and tumbled down like a wounded ibex, I saw the smuggler’s eyes flare with anger. Shams was no longer able to walk, which would mean we would miss our rendezvous with the Iranian smuggler at the border. Had I dwelled on what happened next, I would have not stopped crying.
In this game, those who fall are neither carried nor helped. They aren’t abandoned, but they aren’t shown any mercy either. Three of us volunteered to carry him, but the smuggler, with the calmness of a neurosurgeon, refused. Two members of our group cursed at him in protest, and the smuggler beat them with a bamboo stick. Only then did I realize the same fate awaits me if I fall.
“Leave Shams behind,” the smuggler snapped.
After his words, the only sound around was the harsh mountain wind, whistling like a warning. Like the rest of the group, I was exhausted, my breath shallow. I felt my heart pound with the fear of what was coming. Like sheep a minute before the slaughter, I could sense the final moment before it came.
We turned away from Shams. Ethereal beings in woolen robes began to whirl in circles as far as the eye could see, while a melancholic melody adorned the air with the golden verses of Rumi’s poetry. It was an intoxicating euphoria. I felt like my soul, rather than my body, was dancing.
The spiritual ecstasy was short-lived, shattered by the sound of a gunshot piercing the silence. We all dropped to the ground, falling like birds whose wings had suddenly vanished. Shams lay there, motionless in a pool of blood, his fingers still twitching, his legs kicking the air slowly, like a playful kid.
We continued on our way, barely able to talk—barely living. Three days of walking followed, enduring our pain and silence. When we finally reached Zahedan, we were shifted to another new smuggler. He hid us in a small local hotel for a day. The rule was to never leave anywhere, and someone provided us with everything we’d.
We crammed with five goats and bales of hay into a pickup truck. The stench of the animals, the lack of air, and the cramping in my legs nearly made me faint. We sat in fetal positions for ten hours, traversing rough rural roads to avoid the Iranian authorities. We ate with the goats and peed in bottles.
We arrived in Tehran. I could hear the buzz of the big city. After some time, we finally reached Tabriz. My body groaned from the cramped ride. After reaching a small rural house, I slept like the dead. In the morning, we set off for the Turkish border. The smuggler made a call to his boss, confirming our safe arrival. After saying goodbye, he handed us over to a Turkish smuggler, who drove us to Izmir in a sedan. The trip was far easier than in Iran—Turkey is an open bazaar for smuggling, with government consent.
Time drags painfully in refugee centers. Sarmad suggested that I learn Finnish, while Saad proposed I start to collect bottles and cans to exchange for euros at the recycling machines. “What’s the harm? Even Finns with high salaries do it,” he told me.
“Sure, but they return their cans and bottles, not ones they pick out of the trash,” I objected.
“Same principle,” he said, tossing an empty beer can at me with a grin. “You’ll be earning at least five euros a day, enough to send to your aunt or maybe buy an apartment in downtown Helsinki someday.”
I laughed at his remark.
The next morning, I set out timidly, carrying a black bag and a backpack, my face half-hidden beneath a woolen cap. Oh, God . . . I was shocked. A quarter of the refugees here were doing the same thing. I hadn’t imagined it, especially after hearing them boast about their family fortunes and the lies they’d grown accustomed to. I joined them with overwhelming joy. We rummaged through every trash can, from east Helsinki to west. We stood near lovers, waiting for them to toss their drink bottles. We even annoyed kids by grabbing their soda cans before they’d finished drinking. We were like a tide spreading through the streets, alleys, and public squares.
Our only competition in this disruptive activity was the thieving seagulls. In summer, it’s rare to enjoy an ice cream or hamburger near the sea without these pesky birds swarming and snatching food right from your hand. It starts with one bird, which calls for its group. By the time you leave, you’d be cursing the moment you had decided to hang out near the coast. Sometimes, the seagulls seem to enjoy harassing and chasing you off, even if you have no food.
My friend Muradi stifled a weary smile and whispered to me, “Even the seagulls don’t welcome us here.”
Days later, the police chased Muradi, trying to deport him to Afghanistan. On a cold evening, he tried to hang himself with a rope from an old tree branch in a public square near Helsinki’s Central Station, close to the refugee protest tent. A young Iraqi saved him at the last moment. The young man disappeared afterward, or perhaps he hanged himself too when it was his turn to be deported.
At the refugee center’s reception, an employee told me, “You’ve got mail from Afghanistan.” I hadn’t heard from Mashallah in almost a month. He was the only one at home who knew how to use a mobile phone. My aunt and grandmother never did. My heart immediately jumped at the thought of my grandmother Behesht passing away. I opened the letter. I recognized the handwriting—it was my aunt’s. “God, please protect my family in Ghazni,” I prayed with my small, worried heart.
***
Dear Amir,
My little one, I only ask God to keep you well. Are you alright? Have you gotten your residency yet? Your grandmother Behesht sends her regards. Every morning after dawn prayers, she whispers, “Oh Lord, help Amir,” her light in the darkness, even though she cannot see.
Amir, my love, we are fine, but your brother Mashallah… I don’t want you to worry. He’s a man like you, and God willing, he’ll return. When you left, he went to work in the nearby fields during the school holidays. Twice I’ve seen death while still alive, from the slopes of Helmand. Why didn’t I stop him? A Taliban unit came and took him and the others, either as recruits or prisoners. Sultan Walad, his friend who escaped two days later, says they’re fine and will be released if Kabul’s government frees some Taliban prisoners. They also took Habibullah, the 10-year-old son of our neighbor. The poor boy had just gone with them to have fun, nothing more. My son, you know what happens in such cases. He’ll be sold as bacha bazi to wealthy men who’ll use his body for pleasure. My heart weeps for him and for his mother, who couldn’t bear the shock and died two days later. May God have mercy on her.
Tell the people in Europe what happened to your brother so they can help speed up your residency process. Send them this letter. My little Amir…
God be with you,
Niloufar Ghaznavi
Year of the Ram, 1395
***
I decided not to work that day. The letter and my worries about Mashallah’s fate weighed heavily on me. But Xiao, the Kurdish man, persuaded me in his way. “Worrying won’t help you. It’ll defeat you quickly,” he told me. “Think of your family, who expects a lot from you. Today is May Day (Vappu Päivä), and Helsinki will turn into one big open bar tonight—cans, bottles, drunkards, kisses, hats, and temporary nighttime madness.”
Indeed, everyone was celebrating in the cool summer air. At midnight, it rained lightly, barely noticeable on anyone’s face. I was half-submerged in the pavement, my torso bent into a trash can. I managed to grab two plastic vodka bottles and five assorted metal cans, from Cola to beer. As I lifted my head from the trash, I accidentally bumped into a young woman in her twenties who was trying to toss a wine bottle. She was drunk. I apologized.
“It’s okay,” she replied. After two steps, she collapsed to the ground. She was delicate and pink, like a flamingo. I tried to help her up, lifting her gently by her soft shoulders. She looked at me with eyes like fresh pistachios as she stood up and thanked me. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Amir.” I paused. “Can you help me find my bus? It’s not far, I guess. Bus 18N, I mean.”
“Why not? Sure.” She said slowly, her voice slurred.
I set my bag full of bottles aside, behind a small bush, and held her firmly by the waist, helping her to find the right bus. She asked me to open her bag and get her bus card to activate it on the machine near the driver. I hesitated at first, fearing she might accuse me of stealing something. But then I thought, “The drunk bears no guilt.” I retrieved the pass deliberately in front of the driver. She collapsed again in the aisle between the bus seats.
The driver shouted in English, “Sit her down, or take her home if you’re her friend. She’s not in a good state.”
“But I don’t have a bus ticket,” I told the driver.
“No problem,” he said, motioning for me to sit and make room for the other passengers.
I took her to her apartment by using her phone’s GPS. She slipped from my arms at the door, and I helped her inside, laying her on the bed. My senses ignited—desire, weakness, the temptation to steal a moment of physical pleasure, then flee. Who would know? Not even her. But no, I won’t. Her skin was soft like a rabbit’s. I covered her with the blanket, looking at her, then at my reflection in her mirror on the wall. How far away I am, yet how close.
“Who am I? What am I?”
I won’t be vile. Without consent, it wouldn’t be sex It would be theft, rape. She looked like a Catholic angel, her half-closed eyes like roses at dawn. No, I won’t do it. “Be quiet,” I said to the voice buzzing in my head.
I walked back to the city center. Forty minutes through the snow. When I arrived, I found that my collection of empty bottles had been stolen. The bag had been full. I might have made a hundred euros or more.
On the train, I dozed off. I dreamed I was flying over green hills dotted with poppies, fluttering like slow-moving butterflies, having tasted a bit of opium from my wounds. I saw my school, my canvas bag, and my grandmother Behesht sweeping the doorstep with her long broom while adjusting the shawl wrapped tightly around her hunched torso. My aunt was combing her hair, perfumed with white jasmine. My little brother, as usual, was hungry, flipping through the pots for any leftover soup or porridge from the night before. I moved among them, unseen, speaking to them without a voice. I was stunned. I shook their shoulders—my aunt, my brother, my grandmother. I shook harder and harder. Someone shook my shoulder with the same force, waking me up.
I took off my headphones. “Oh, God,” I thought. It was the ticket inspector. I was used to riding without a ticket, so they fined me eighty euros. The day was spoiled, like rotten eggs, ruined right from the start, and no one was to blame. I took the fine receipt and stuffed it into the nearest trash can. I didn’t have the money to pay, nor did I have a national ID number to register among those who refused to pay.
Many Finns ride without tickets too. I learned from one of them how to dodge the inspectors. There’s even an illegal Facebook page called “Smurffitutka” (Smurf Radar) in which people, both Finns and foreigners, post about the movements and locations of the inspectors on public transport. Everyone shares their sightings to help others avoid the fines. I’d just been asleep.
I stepped off the train as it came to a slow halt. Passengers spilled out of its belly like a massive white serpent—magnified two hundred times—from whose glassy sides smaller snakes emerged. At that moment, I lost my motivation to collect bottles. I decided I would walk to her address instead. Maybe I would spot her tossing bottles out, or perhaps heading out for groceries. But, first, I needed a hash joint to trudge like a mule through this snowy weather without feeling a thing—and to float to her window, just to catch a glimpse of her, perhaps still asleep as I had left her.
I arrived, and my head spun. I couldn’t find the building. It felt as if the scenery had changed to fit a new one. I circled the area. The bus stop was the same, so was the street, but now it was broad daylight. Did I make a mistake? Where’s the bus? Oh, right, the 80N bus only runs at night. Fine. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have passed by here now. In truth, the snow had piled up since the night I had dropped her off, creating small mounds that blocked the usual pathways. So maybe her house wasn’t exactly here.
I told Sarmad everything when I returned late, around 11 p.m.
He scratched his chin. “Maybe the snowfall messed with your memory while you were looking for the place. I suggest you wait until spring and try again to find her home.” He then added, “But why are you even looking for her? Are you going to tell her you love her? Will her reaction be ‘Oh, wow, Amir loves me! Let’s get married right now, on the doorstep, on the bus, or in the street’? ‘Should I bear your child, a boy to carry your name? Four children? Ten? What do you think if I wear a headscarf and you start calling me Hajja Laura?'”
I didn’t even know what I wanted anymore. She wasn’t Najla or Suhaila—village girls I had convinced to fall in love with me, with marriage promised later. I had touched their marble-covered, domed breasts. I rubbed them until they were wet, and I rubbed myself until I was hard. But this was different. As much as the geographic distance between Kabul and Helsinki.
“So what do you want from this girl? Why go to her address?”
“Nothing. I don’t know what I want. I just want to see her. Is that too much to ask for?”
Don’t avoid seeing someone, because they’ll always end up right in front of you. The one you’re expecting, fate won’t put in your path. I say this now after deciding to distance myself from her. This isn’t about her though; it’s about Serpa Sutainen. I was hungry, really starving, and frozen like a shrimp in a supermarket freezer. It was a winter night, and the sky had dumped all its snow at once, leaving only the sound of the wind whistling between the high-rise buildings. This was Helsinki at two in the morning. My bag of empty cans slung over my shoulder was half-full. Weekends usually blessed us with plenty of beer cans and empty whiskey bottles smiling amid the snow’s whiteness. We’d race to grab them—twenty cents per bottle, fifteen per can. How charming it was…
She looked around seventy years old. She stopped her red Peugeot, rolled down the window, and called out to me in English, laced with a Finnish accent, struggling with the “sh” sound. She barely pronounced it. “Do you need help? Can I take you somewhere?” she asked.
I had laid my bag down beside me and stretched out on a bench near the bus stop, looking like a dead fox with one eye half-open, keeping watch. I walked toward her, warmth flowing from her voice and her car. “Yes, ma’am. I’m tired and don’t have a bus card to get back to the dorm. I’m hungry too, and no place is open at this hour.” She responded mischievously, “That’s typical for this late hour. Yes, I know. But there are some fast-food places open. Do you want me to take you to one?”
I left my bag of cans behind and got into her car. “What’s your name? Where are you from? Yes, I see . . . do you have a friend? A girlfriend?” She began to stroke my neck with one hand while steering with the other. I was hungry, though I didn’t use that as an excuse. She was my grandmother’s age, but everything happened swiftly. I remember the headlights of the cars we passed and the way she sped up the car, like she knew I had no time to waste. I was still a little drunk from drinking from the leftover whiskey and vodka bottles I had collected. She raced against time and my drunkenness. If only I had sobered up sooner. If only, just if . . .
“Will you come with me? I live nearby. Sorry, I can’t park here; all the parking spots are blocked by snow, as you can see. I’ll take you to a warm place, a bed, and food—maybe more,” she said, giggling like one of the witches from Macbeth.
I warmed myself in her home, and with her body. I was desperate for anybody, even someone like a bloated garbage bag—something I could hold, cling to. I ate, had sex, and slept. In the morning, she dropped me off where she had picked me up.
“Every weekend, you can come and do what we have done. I’ll help you find a job, any job. Here’s my number. Don’t forget to call me.” She waved goodbye and drove off.
I forgot what had happened, or maybe I chose to forget. I didn’t repeat it. But Helsinki is a small city. Saad, the Iraqi, teased me. “But you enjoyed it, didn’t you? If you want, give me her number.” I didn’t, of course.
I wandered through central Helsinki, near the Kiasma Museum. The cold slapped my face as I waited for someone—a young African. He handed me a gram of hash and disappeared. It’s all arranged via the Wickr Me app under fake accounts. The seller scopes out the area from afar for half an hour, making sure it’s not a police trap. The sale happens swiftly—twenty euros for top-quality hash, fifteen for the mixed stuff. Through it, I smell Afghanistan, the damp bones of my ancestors, now fertilizer for the poppy fields.
I remember when a French military delegation had visited Ghazni. They talked about the dangers of drugs and the need to report dealers, saying it was a major concern. An old man interrupted them: “For whom? For you, or us?” The Afghan interpreter hesitated to translate this into French, fearing it might upset the delegation members. The situation escalated into an argument, noise filling the tin-roofed hall next to the police station.
When the French military pulled out of Afghanistan, they left their interpreters unprotected. The Taliban swallowed them whole. One morning, an interpreter was found hanging from a walnut tree on a cold morning.
The immigration investigator asked me over and over again. My answer was always the same: I was in danger due to my father’s involvement in poppy cultivation. I told her the Taliban had executed him for this reason. I handed her my aunt’s letter, translated into Finnish. I finished the interview and returned to the camp.
I went back to collecting bottles from the trash. I told Latif what had happened. He laughed. “I think if you’d asked her for help finding a job, it would’ve been better than nothing.”
“Yeah, but I’d have to pay for that with another night of being raped,” I said.
“But you did it once already, so it should be easy to do it again,” he said, watching my face for a reaction.
“No. I won’t do it. I’m a free man, Latif. I’m not a pervert. What happened before was because I was drunk and out of my mind. Understand that, my friend.” I then asked him, “Would you do it?”
Before he could answer, Saad entered, carrying two kilos of sugar and a box of Lipton tea. “Each of you owes me a euro and a half, my friends.”
“Why not consider it an offering for the souls of your ancestors?” I told him. “Wouldn’t that be better?”
“None of us deserves blessings,” he said.
“You’re lying!” I told him. ”Why don’t you go after Marwan, huh? He sleeps with men for pizza or even just a glass of beer! You’re blind! You say this to me now? I’m the best of you all in this room, in the camp, in Finland, in the world!”
I threw my words at them like stones.
I pushed Marwan. I don’t know why. I remember the gleam of the stainless steel iron base. It was hot, burning Sarmad’s hand as he intervened, preventing me from striking Marwan with the hot iron. Sarmad, whom I had cursed earlier, was now protecting me, taking the burns to his fingers, shielding me, and pleading with Marwan to calm down and understand that I was half-conscious. “Please leave or something worse could happen,” he said.
I was the first to walk out. I smoked in the dim courtyard, with faint light seeping in from the office windows, fractured by the wooden blinds. From a distance, I saw Marwan leave the center.
I noticed I wasn’t upset when he said that Laura was a figment of my imagination. It was true—my mind hadn’t deceived me. I was the one who tricked it so that I could endure the pitiless Serba, like someone forced to put honey on excrement and eat it. Without Serba, there would be no money; without money, no hash; and without hash, there would be no Amir. I’d end up like a forgotten piece of bread, burnt to a crisp in the oven, burning myself like Sadiq did. Unlike a camel, I’m not built for endurance. My emotional stability is nonexistent. I’m a child who wanted to be a man.
I smoked another gram of hashish in the courtyard to forget what had broken between me, Sarmad, and Marwan, to forget my foolishness and the shouting in their faces. Tomorrow, I’ll look for another room. I can’t face them. Things will never be the same. It’s over for me. I went back to my bed, my eyes sneaking a glance at Sarmad’s bed. He was tossing and turning, agitated. That only deepened my pain. I curled up in bed like a guilty cat and closed my eyes.
I dreamed of Laura, her face glowing like street lamps. We kissed. So why does Sarmad say, “Laura doesn’t love you”?
“You love me, don’t you?” I asked.
She responded with Serba’s rough, smoker’s voice, “Yes, I love you.”
I looked at her body. She was slowly turning into Serba, trapping me in bed like a drunken mouse facing a healthy cat.
A strange dream. My lips were parched, and my heart was painted like a hunting dog chasing prey. I kept kissing Laura’s face, but I was making love to an aged body that belonged to Serba. Everything was mixed up: the taste of milk with soap, glass with sugar, crazy sensations—pleasure with pain, disgust with desire, escape with surrender.
I woke up screaming. No one noticed. My face was drenched in sweat. I had the urge to pee in bed. Should I do it? My limbs trembled. Disoriented, I got up and peed in the sink before heading to the toilet. Someone cursed at me, maybe even kicked me, but I didn’t care. I was out of it. No amount of Kandahar hash would fit into a single cigarette to stabilize me. I staggered and collapsed into the puddle of urine that had spilled from the sink.
When I woke up, Saad was washing my face and hands, while Sarmad supported me from behind.
I said to him in Persian, “I’m sorry, brother Sarmad.”
“It’s all right.”
They helped me to bed. Saad handed me a cup of hot tea. I drank and went back to sleep. How will I face them in the morning? I’m deeply ashamed. Not even all of the poetry of Rumi with its sweetness can help me utter a single word of apology to these two true friends.
“What are you writing, my little Amir?” Serba asks, pretending to be feminine, something she left behind long ago during the days of John F. Kennedy.
“Nothing. Just a letter to my family.”
“Oh! Maybe you’re writing to some Afghan teenager? I’m not jealous, but if that’s true, I’ll send you back to the nearest trash can you collected soda cans from. Understood, my dear? Come here. Come to Mama. Where’s that pink thing standing up? Put it up on my cheek. Let me feel its roughness. Come here, come.” She removed the last piece of clothing from her body, which looked like a full white trash bag. Her voice echoed in my head—”Come, come”—until I was completely trapped between her thighs.
I told myself that one of us must die tonight. Only one of us should live.
***
“Dear Madam Niloufar, dearest,
How are you, everyone? How is my younger brother? Did the Taliban release him? Or did they sell him as a bacha bazi to some tribal leader—from the Pashtuns, the Hazaras, the Tajiks, or the Uzbeks? Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I live with a respectable woman called Serba. She officially adopted me and gave me her family name. I call her Mama. Yes, just like her child, nothing more. She found me a job. She has become my third mother. What else can I write? The days all look the same. Do you need money? I’ll send it to you. What else do you need? I don’t know how else I can help. Are you all alright?”
Amir Ait Ghaznawi
Month Libra, 1397
Painting Courtesy of Amjad Alkaabi
