NEXT UP! 3 162 discouragement, it may have been that we felt too small, infinitely too small not to succumb to all of these things – but at that point we fell asleep. By the time we opened our eyes again, it was dawn. The water around us was dark, almost black. We rinsed our faces, spitting out the salt. We looked along the horizon and saw land. A strip of land, with a beach and a hill. It wasn’t too far away. We could make it. We started rowing quickly and painfully, without knowing whether it was Greece or Turkey. We simply said, Let’s row in that direction. After being on our knees for so long, our legs had gone numb. We had tiny little cuts on our hands: we didn’t know how we’d got them, but they burned every time the salt water made them wet. As we approached the island, the sky grew lighter, and it was then that Soltan saw a flag on a hill. All he said, in a thin voice, was, A flag. He pointed with his index finger. It kept flapping in the wind, but at those moments when it was fully stretched we could see the horizontal stripes, alternately blue and white (nine stripes in all), starting with a blue stripe at the top, and in the upper corner, on the same side as the pole, a square, also blue, with a white cross in the middle. The flag of Greece. […] UNDERSTANDING 12 Enaiat’s journey Enaiat comes from the Ghazni province in Afghanistan, where the Hazara people live. When he is just six, his father is killed. When he is ten years old, his mother smuggles him into Pakistan, where she leaves him. In the novel, Enaiat explains the situation for the Hazaras like this: There’s a saying among the Taliban: Tajikistan for the Tajiks, Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks, and Goristan for the Hazara. That’s what they say. Gor means ‘grave’. discouragement – uppgjöf infinitely – óendanlega to succumb to – láta undan dawn – dögun to approach – nálgast an index finger – vísifingur alternately – til skiptis
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