The Marsh Birds (10 page)

Marwa and Dhurgham were behind the dongas, resting in the shade. It was a forty-nine degree day and everyone was inside, wilting under the fans while trying to keep small children and babies cool with wet cloths. The guards were nowhere to be seen—it was too hot for patrols.

The heat in the shade sizzled around Dhurgham. He said it was his halo. Marwa said it was his hell cloud. But it was almost too hot for talk and the walls were too thin to talk or shriek. Dhurgham twined Marwa's long sweaty fingers in his and leant back against the donga's stump. They had begun holding hands when no one was watching, outraging themselves at their own daring. They had begun competing for who could be the more daring lover, who could fly closest to the inferno of discovery, who could excite the other more.

Marwa pulled her hand away and faced him.

‘You haven't done this before!' she whispered nervously, her eyes alight. She knelt in front of him, raised her hands, looked quickly along the deserted compound and took off her hijab. She shook out brilliant black curls, flowing from her high brow to her shoulders. With them wafted a perfume, the same as Dhurgham's shampoo, but somehow exotically different. She laughed nervously, breathlessly; she reached for his hand and placed it on her glittering hair.

He knelt facing Marwa knee to knee and stroked her hair in long wondering touches. He was shaking and dizzy. She closed her eyes and leant for a moment into his stroke. Her hair glittered with reflections of the red sand. Her hair made her cheeky face exquisite. This hot, shining hair was such a wonder! He felt as though the sand was rising under him like the waves of an ocean. He thought he might kiss her hair, kiss her.

Then fear overtook them both, fear of their own excitement and fear of discovery. Marwa, gasping, brushed his hands away, slipped on her hijab with trembling fingers and, with one laughing slap, ran out of their shady zone into the glaring white light. Then she was gone.

Dhurgham stared up at the burning blue. How would they manage to marry, here? They just had to. No matter what.

Marwa's family got their visas. Marwa found out at two-thirty on Thursday afternoon and had ten minutes to pack and get on the bus. They weren't allowed to say goodbye to anyone properly. Marwa ran to the fence, in front of her mother and father and brothers, and touched Dhurgham's fingers through the wire.‘I'll write!' she whispered. She looked utterly happy and Dhurgham was bewildered. For a month with Marwa, he had thought that Mawirrigun was the best place in the world.

He wandered back to his donga. All Marwa's words seemed more real and meaningful now she was gone. Of course—how would she study to be a doctor like her father if she lived forever in prison? How would she raise children with him if she couldn't even teach them how to cook? He wondered for the first time what it was like in Marwa's donga. She had once said how embarrassing it was to have unrelated unmarried men sleeping in the same room as her and her mother, but she had never said anything about her parents except how stressed they were. They would have been stressed, waiting for their smart daughter to get on with her education. He had forgotten all about his own visa but of course Marwa hadn't forgotten hers. He knew that. He had just never thought about it. He tried to be happy for her and tried to imagine the Australian house they would have, its kitchen, bedrooms, living room. Verandah. He knew all the parts of a house from Australian culture classes, but he still couldn't imagine it and gave up. He felt lonely. He wondered for the first time what his chances of getting a visa really were. He had been here for four months. He certainly hadn't had a story like Marwa's to tell. All blood and gore and arson and attacks in the night. Lots of dead relatives. He had made his story up, for that matter.

He had a vivid picture of her running towards the shocked faces of her parents with her hand up both to reassure them and to farewell him, her abaya billowing and fluttering around her body, her hair bouncing under her hijab. Then Marwa running up the darkened steps of the open bus and its door hissing shut.

Dhurgham never received a letter from Marwa. There seemed to be a profound gulf between those who were released and those left behind. He felt as though he was in limbo in her past—she could no more have sent a letter than she could have travelled through time.

But Marwa did write. An AID officer wrote
Return to loser
on the envelope and posted it back.

Dhurgham's days after Marwa left were blank and boring. He took a while to get back to watching girls and women with any fervour, as it was such a small stimulation compared with Marwa. And he missed her—her face, her voice and her conversation. Her pinches and slaps. He was bored and cranky.

He picked his first real fight with a guard. He did it on purpose.

It felt really good.

He wasn't sure what he would do. He walked up to one of the new guards, a burly blond young man with spiked hair and black eyebrows who had been strutting back and forth in an annoyingly over alert manner; and then it came to him.

‘Eh, Ustrali,' he said. ‘When I get out I fuck your sister.'

The guard looked young and shocked for a moment, then reacted, to Dhurgham's surprise and strange pleasure, exactly as a boy on the streets of Damascus would have. He leant in quickly with one clenched fist up by his ear and shoved Dhurgham hard in the chest. As Dhurgham staggered back, the guard punched him, not particularly hard, in the face. Dhurgham reeled, but punched back with flailing, joyous arms, his muscles singing with the release of it. It was the two of them, in contest, adversaries. He felt a great appreciation for the blond boy, and tried, hopping around, to land him a good one. ‘Filthy sand nigger,' the guard spat, breathing hard. Dhurgham was aware of guards closing in fast. He had to land just one and they would be equals. The guard blocked a snaking uppercut and then a baton came down and missed. Dhurgham hooked him on the cheek as some other baton hit. He went down flailing as five guards filled his vision. He punched and writhed and kicked, laughing and half sobbing as they beat him down. He caught a glance of the blond guard, standing back as the more experienced men took over. The look on the young guard's face spoilt his pleasure a bit. The boy was holding his cheek, but the look on his face as he stared at Dhurgham was as one might look at a snake. Fascination, and disgust.

Dhurgham lay awake in a solitary cell in Paradise, feeling calm. It would have been better to have seen respect in that guard's face rather than disgust. But it had felt good to punch him. He sighed and sank into a dreamless sleep.

FILE NOTE
RRN 230, UAM, centre of disturbance approx.
1600 PM, 17 July 2000. Punched Officer Doyle with witnesses in Florida. Officers Terrill and Sexton corroborate Doyle's account that Doyle struck first after verbal provocation. No charges laid by either party.

Dhurgham began to wander around the compound at night in between head counts. Night-time was fascinating. The first time he went out to the perimeter fence at night he screamed when he startled three kangaroos in the starlight. But kangaroos, out there in the unreal world beyond the fences, were alien, and ultimately uninteresting. It was not as though he could get out and chase them. He turned his attention inward, to the known weird rub of the world, to the unhappy compound. He avoided the loud sobbing and the misery of domestic arguments that rang out from dongas here and there; rather, he sought out the electric charge that was all around, flickering from donga to donga, embracing guards and inmates alike. He saw men and women meet and whisper; he sprung other children spying on adults kissing; he heard the rustle, the urgency and the moaning of the charged darkness around the laundry; and he listened gleefully to the amplified chatter on the guards' radio transmitters. Night-time dissolved the fences and put him and the guards into an exciting, fantastical conflict, played out on a battleground of dangerous love and lust. He both spied on lovers and protected them. He distracted guards until shadows had parted. He imagined the guards with guns, hunting him; then he imagined himself with a weapon, picking them off when they least expected it. He flitted from shadowed donga to shadowed donga. He threw himself flat as deadly torchlight split the darkness. He was the tribal leader, conducting a one-man guerrilla war, giving his enemies the impression that he alone represented at least one hundred men. He was the sole surviving officer of the Republican Guard. He was selflessly throwing down his life for the pure loves of Qays and Layla, for Romeo and Juliet, for Mrs Azadeh and Abu Nizar.

When this game lost its excitement, which was usually when he found himself despising the lovers, lightly goading guards took over. He would hover where they might notice him. He stared guards down who hassled him to go to bed and laughed when they swore at him. He was a UAM—Unaccompanied Minor. They weren't allowed to touch him. All they could do was follow him around getting more and more huffy and saying nastier and nastier things.

He felt a bit sorry for them but that didn't stop him.

He sat on the stairs of the demountable and stared up at the desert stars. The brilliant spangle arched above him, as if glistening wet and phosphorescent. They looked so remote, so lost to him. He was not alien— this place was, even the stars. Then he found the cross, high in the sky rather than on the horizon. It was, after all, the same sky. He almost felt that he was looking into his past, looking at the stars, mapping something that can never again be. He suddenly recalled watching a faded film of himself as a toddler playing at the edge of the Southern Marshes, but he could not recall what it had been like, that sunny, humid holiday. He could not remember the taste or smell or feel of the reed pillars in the marshland houses, or the smell of the cows' breath. He could only watch himself enjoying them, on a flickering film fading against the night sky. It was as if that land, Iraq, was a land made up, put together soundless, without smell, out of snippets of other places.

If I were a bird
, he thought, staring at the glitter of the universe above the camp,
they could not imprison me. Their luck and our misfortune that we are not birds
.

AID INTERVIEW REPORT
RRN 230, unaccompanied minor, claims to be an Iraqi national, arrived unauthorised with no papers 28 November 1999. Claimed to be aged fourteen.
    When questioned in initial interview, applicant at first claimed that he had no family. Later he amended this and claimed that he had last seen his family in Iraq but believed that they did not want to see him, that they were ashamed of him, that they were scattered in Syria, Indonesia and even in processing centres in Australia. When asked if he had relatives living now in Iraq, said he did not think so and that they all left at the same time. When asked how many people all of his family represented, he answered sixteen but on questioning would not name his immediate family other than repeating the surname he claims is his.
The interviewer at that time recorded that the applicant was extremely uncomfortable and answered with reluctance.
    His claims regarding his departure from Baghdad are pure fantasy. He claims that the family, fifteen of them, crossed certain marshes, in April 1997. He does not recall the date. These marshes could not be near the border, which according to DFAT country information is all desert or saltpans, although the applicant claimed they were ‘quite near'. He also claims now that they were ‘near Baghdad' and that he can't remember how long it took to get there. He claims that he was asleep when they crossed the border and so doesn't know where or how they crossed. He also says that he went to Syria alone.
    Summarising his claims is difficult, as they are so inconsistent. There is nothing in his story that hints at a believable escape route from Baghdad. It is not possible to believe the applicant's testimony, even with the most generous interpretation of the facts as he states them. There is no detail to his story. The above is all he would say.
    Despite what he said in his initial screening interview he now states that he believes his family are all dead, killed in Iraq. When asked if he had ever been imprisoned he said no, he was only twelve when he left. When asked if members of his family had been imprisoned, however, he also said no. When asked why he believed his family had been killed he said that they all fled together.
    According to his testimony, he was instructed by his father to not let anyone know that money was hidden in the lining of his clothes. They left the Karrada district of Baghdad at night, taking nothing with them. He claims that the entire extended family left in the same night. He claims he does not know why.
    Claims that he was in Damascus for two years, helped by ‘friends' not family. All further questions about his family and friends received vague or repetitive answers. When asked if there were any living members of his family or friends who could corroborate his story, he said he didn't know. When pressed about the friends in Damascus, he said they were friends to whom he ‘paid money'. When asked where he got money, he said from his clothes. He flew from Damascus to Jakarta using this same money, helped by his friends, who took care of sourcing a people smuggler and making all transactions. He claims that he fled because his friends told him that ‘bad Iraqi people' were after him and knew who and where he was, even though, as he himself says, he never used his real name in Damascus.
    Needless to say I find much if not all of the applicant's story not credible. I do not find it convincing that the applicant lived from age twelve to fourteen off money he carried out of Iraq on his person, or that he lived away from his family with the help of ‘friends' whom he paid. The applicant's claims about how, why and where he left Iraq are vague and inconsistent, and the information he provides about his family is unclear. The account is also not consistent with DFAT information on the region. A marsh crossing internal to the country itself is purposeless and unlikely, and he has nothing at all to say about how he got from there into Syria. I find these marshes to be a transparent fabrication and that the applicant most likely left Iraq in a completely different manner, or in fact knows nothing of Iraq at all and has made a story out of second-hand exit stories to Iran, not Syria. His only reason for such a fabrication would be to cover up a legal exit and make a false claim for refugee status or a false claim of nationality. If his family were indeed Iraqi, they had not, by his testimony, suffered persecution, and so should have been able to leave Iraq through normal channels; and, if they left legally and openly, there is nothing stopping them returning.
    His account of his departure from Syria is concocted nonsense. He may well be lying in this instance to protect the identities of criminals.
    Finally, I do not accept the applicant is fourteen, or that he was twelve when he left Iraq. He is well grown and unusually tall for an Iraqi fourteen year old. He could be as old as eighteen and, given that he has lied about other matters, I see no reason to accept that he is a minor and am compelled to see his stated age as another instance of an attempt to manipulate the system. A bone scan has not been undertaken but could settle the issue of age.
    It is my view that the applicant, if he ever was in Iraq, left Iraq legally with his family along an ordinary route, and that he has reasons of his own for disconnecting from all who could verify his identity, if in fact he is who he claims to be, on which point there can be considerable doubt. He was evasive and extremely agitated in interview. As I find that he was not an illegal in Syria, the question as to whether he had effective protection in Syria does not arise, nor would return to either Syria or Iraq constitute refoulement in Convention terms.
    The possibility remains that this applicant is a Syrian national with a poorly concocted story. The applicant provides no detail of his life in Iraq. By contrast, his life in Syria is rich in detail and clearly reflects lived experience. Intel that Iraqi nationals seek protection more successfully in western countries than other Middle Eastern nationalities at the present time is readily available. The language analysis notes that he uses many Syrian words and phrases and that he has had a good education, which in Arabic can mask local region indicators. The language analysis was inconclusive, and doubt must remain as to whether he is Iraqi or Syrian. I note this for the record.
    I find that Australia does not have protection obligations under the 1951 Convention in this case.