Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani

Assad stood in front of the fat man, the proprietor of the office that undertook to smuggle people from Basra to Kuwait, and burst out: "Fifteen dinars I'll pay you. Fine! But after I arrive, not before."

The man looked at him from under his heavy eyelids, asking stupidly: "Why?"

"Why? Ha! Because the guide you send with us will run away before we get halfway there. Fifteen dinars, fine, but not before we arrive."

Folding some yellow papers in front of him, the man said reproachfully: "I'm not forcing you to do anything, I'm not forcing you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you don't like our conditions, you can turn around, take three steps, and find yourself in the road."

The road! Were there still roads in this world? Hadn't he wiped them with his forehead and washed them with his sweat for days and days? They all say that: "You'll find yourself in the road. " Abul-Abd, who smuggled him from Jordan to Iraq, had told him:

"You've only got to go round H4,* it doesn't matter if you stray a little into the interior. You're still a boy and you can take a bit of heat. Then come back, and you will find me waiting for you in the road. "

"But that wasn't one of the conditions. You told me, when we were in Amman, that you would take me to Baghdad, and I paid you twenty whole dinars. You didn't tell me I was to walk around H4."

Abul-Abd hit the dusty bonnet of his lorry, so that his five fingers made a mark and the vivid red of the lorry showed up under them. The big truck was standing by the house near Jebel Amman when he negotiated with him, and he remembered exactly the conditions that were mentioned.

"It's a difficult business. They'll take me to prison if they catch you with me. All the same I'll do you a very great service because I knew your father, may God have mercy on him. In fact we fought together in Ramleh ten years ago."

Abul-Abd said nothing for a while. His blue shirt was damp with sweat, and his hard face gave Assad the feeling that he was one of those men who do not expect the head of a family to accomplish miracles. "I'll take twenty dinars from you. And you will find yourself in Baghdad."

"Twenty dinars?"

"Yes, and you must help me the whole of the way, too. We'll set off the day after tomorrow. I must deliver a small car to a rich Baghdadi who spent part of the summer in Ramallah and then decided to return to Baghdad by plane."

"But. twenty dinars?"

Abul-Abd looked at him intently, and then exploded: "I'll save your life for twenty dinars. Do you think you'll spend your life here in hiding? Tomorrow they'll arrest you."

"But where from? Where can I get you the twenty dinars from?"

"Borrow them, borrow them. Any friend will give you twenty dinars if he knows you are traveling to Kuwait."

"Twenty dinars?"

"Twenty, twenty."