Sara Alexi - The Illegal Gardener

Two dogs hurry after each other in the road, and a lady leading a ram says good morning. The square has tables taken from the kafenios, and clusters of farmers at each drink small cups of Greek coffee and the occasional ouzo shot. The warmth is bringing the life outside.

Juliet stops to look at some of the headlines on the newspapers that have been pegged on a line outside the shop. She can hear Marina chatting inside.

“Yes, she has met a boy. He is nice boy. His father? He has the land with the mandarins down by the old river. Yes, that’s right, you were at school with him. Well, his boy has been in America for work all these years. Yes, twenty eight and never married! Yes, I know, the same age as my eldest. No, she is still single. One such a baby and married and already divorced and meeting this nice boy and the other such a woman and no thoughts of marriage at all! What can you do? So I arranged for his family to come to me at Easter. It was a very good time, we ate, we drank, we sang, When the evening was finishing I see them sitting quite close and talking quietly. I do not say anything. You know me, I will not interfere. It is best. Ah, here is Tzuliet, Goodbye, Mrs Eleni. Tzuliet, how are you? There is much talk in the village about you.” Marina still struggles with Juliet’s name.

“Really, Marina? What on earth about?”

“They say you are making the old farmhouse into a palace. The postman says the garden is bountiful with food you are growing and you are planting trees and making everything beautiful.”

“It is a palace and the garden is looking amazing, but your garden is the same.” Juliet loves this banter.

“Ah, the same, it is the same, but maybe I did not do it so quickly.”

“I have help.”

“Of course you have. Why wouldn’t you? What can I do for you today?”

Juliet reels off her list, and between them they gather the goods.

Walking back home, the sun directly in her face, Juliet muses on how nice people are and what a nice spot it is in which she lives. The village feels idyllic, just like the dream she searched for when she moved out here, the situation only improved by someone to share it with. It feels perfect, she feels lucky.

That night, Aaman wakes to an unfamiliar sound. He listens. He can sense that some of the other men have woken too. There is a stillness. A snapping of a twig. A bird flaps. A leaf rustles.

A sound of many feet. A shout. Flashlights outside. A burst through the doorway. Light beams on startled eyes. Many shouts. Power wielded. Ugly laughter. Fluent Greek. Guns at the ready.

The men are pulled from their bunks. Aaman scrabbles to check his savings are well hidden. He misses his chance. Pulled away, patted down, handcuffs slapped on, linking them in a chain, pushed through the door to waiting hands. The black shape on the floor is kicked. A small groan but it doesn’t move. It is kicked again. There is no groan. The bunks are cleared. The men lined up outside. Full moon. Sharp contrast.

There is a discussion about the black shape. They turn him over. A shiny black beetle runs out of his beard.

“ Nekros! ” The policeman shrugs.

“ Afiste .” The man in charge pats the air as if telling a dog to drop a bone.

The illegals, blinking in the moonlight, are chained one to another. The cold metal blinks in the starlight. Uncuffed hands wipe sleepy eyes, reshape sleep-torn hair. They foot-scrape the mud floor corners of the barn to see if anything has been left, secreted in the shadows. There is nothing. They march the men to the edge of the orange grove to a waiting van.

Aaman turns to see his last glimpse of the barn, his paper hoard. The orange trees cup the mud building in a quiet embrace. The moonlight slices the tops of the trees, reaching down through the door, spotlighting the floor where the bearded man lies, unmoving, face in the dirt.

And there, behind a tree, a face, a grinning smile. Teeth. Mahmout.

Aaman is in the back of an army truck with all the familiar, and some unfamiliar, faces from the barn. The Nigerians still heavy with sleep, mumbling, limp-boned hands make decisions about what to do with rolled euro notes missed in the pat-down, notes they have had down their trousers whilst sleeping. There are three new Indian faces. They look scared. The two tall Russians are there, which surprises Aaman as he thought they had never been in the barn. They must have fallen on hard times. The rest are the usual Albanians, Romanians, Croatians, and Bulgarians.

Three of the Greek police throw armfuls of shoes and sandals that have been collected from around the barn into the van with them. The chain of illegals pulls against each other in the scramble to reclaim footwear. The men snap and curse each other as the bracelets cut and pinch.

The truck is green, inside and out, mesh at the windows, and smells of stale smoke. No police ride in the back with them. One of the Russians lights up two cigarettes from a pack and a lighter he has hidden under his hat. He passes one to his friend. An Albanian asks for one but is ignored. The Russian says something to his friend, and they both laugh heartily as if they are at a party. The Albanians speak in hushed tones, planning, plotting damage control. The Romanians and Croatians lean back as if this is the thousandth time they have been in this situation and they are thoroughly bored with it. One has a torn jacket which he inspects. It must have happened in the raid. Several are already back on the edge of sleep, heads rolled back, mouths gaping.

Aaman watches through the mesh. The orange grove gives way to a road. They are heading for the nearby town. They pass the nursery where he and Juliet chose the fruit trees, her hair glowing gold in the sun. She had a white, floaty blouse that day and the strap on her sandal broke. She leant against him as she hopped back to the car.

The Russian burps. They slow as they approach a large, square, modern building set back from the road on the edge of the town. Aaman reads phonetically, out loud to himself, the sign on the building. One of the Albanians hears him, translates into English, the common language: Police.

They are unloaded into the car park and taken inside in a line, one handcuffed to the next, through the large, glass front door to the reception beyond. It is bright, marble, shiny with a very high ceiling. It is a useless space. Aaman thinks of all the rooms that could be contained within this room. The jobs it would create to convert it, the men it could house, the income the rooms could earn, the wealth it would generate to employ more men to build more rooms. Aaman concludes that the West has its head on backwards.

The policeman at the desk in the main hall drinks a coffee and eats a slice of cheese pie. He listens intently to the officer leading the men and then waves a dismissive gesture and resumes reading his newspaper. The officer who has brought them in insists on something from the man at the desk and pokes a finger at the man’s newspaper to accentuate his point. The policeman eating his pie, drinking his coffee and reading his newspaper is highly affronted. There commences an argument, and Aaman can see bits of pastry spat into the air. One large piece falls out of the policeman’s mouth onto his jacket, and he picks it off and eats it before continuing to push his point.

Aaman thinks of Juliet drinking her morning coffee. He looks around to find out the time. He is near enough to the arguing policemen to see that the one nearest has a watch on. Aaman waits until he gesticulates, his sleeve rising. It is nearly six a.m. She will not be awake yet. It is only a matter of the minutes ticking past. His time is over, they intend to make him leave the country, he feels sure of that. But to which country will he be sent? No country to the West wants illegal immigrants. They will forbid it. If they take the immigrants to a more Eastern country, they know they will just return to Greece as it is the route to the West. They won’t know where to send him. They may put him in a detention centre. He has heard of people held there for years.