The Marsh Birds (11 page)

Florida and Hawaii were in an uproar. Angry men and women shouted and waved their arms helplessly as heavily kitted guards held them back. Donga by donga, all their belongings were searched and anything suspicious confiscated. A knife had gone missing from the mess hall. Dhurgham was bundled out of bed and down the steps to wait with everyone else while all their things were thrown into the middle of each room. Nearly every donga had small souvenirs—food stores, cups, forks, spoons and homemade washing vessels, some fashioned from plastic bottles or even cartons. Guards who just half an hour before had chatted in a friendly way in the mess hall glared at them all and took everything, shouting out their disgust and crowing over finds, while the helpless men and women growled and yelled in impotent rage.

‘Bloody thieving goat herders!'

‘The filthy fuckers—look at this!'

‘The bleedin' hearts oughta see this—'

‘Phuuoh—the smell in here!'

The vessels attracted the most attention. Guards emerged carrying them at a distance between thumb and forefinger. The anger rose from a rumble to a cacophony of open shouting from the men around Dhurgham. A few voices managed to make themselves heard, first in Arabic and Dari:

‘Where are you from, you no-brains, no-manners?'

‘Where is freedom?'

‘Shame on you, shame on your families!'

‘Ignorant thieves!'

Then, in broken English:

‘Wash! Clean! Need for clean!'

Officer Terrill held up his hand from the steps of Dhurgham's donga.

‘You are in Australia now,' he said. ‘Old habits die hard but you are in a civilised country now and can't do this sort of thing.'

‘Fucken use toilet paper!' shouted a guard beside him. ‘Disgusting!'

The vessels were all thrown with a pantomime of distaste into a garbage bag.

A battle raged between guards and inmates over washing vessels in the first six months of Dhurgham's incarceration. After a while there were ‘toilet training' raids on any pretext and the guards conducted them more and more heavily armoured as the fury of the inmates increased to a mob roar. Guards made rude comments about Muslim toilet habits whenever they could be overheard (and regardless of whether their listeners were Muslim or not) and a trio of young Muslim men went out of their way to hover close and threaten guards with death and dismemberment. The older Muslim inmates finally managed to send a delegation to Mr Jensen, the centre manager. And then the whole thing faded: people kept and used their washing vessels unhindered, the strange became familiar to the guards and general staff and it was forgotten. Mawirrigun was like that.

Dhurgham was moved into Hawaii Compound. Hawaii was for those who were not expected to be accepted and its atmosphere was tense and strange at first. Hawaii was a brand on you, a statement about your worthiness and your prospects. You were shown up to all the others as one of the rejects.

‘Now you are a refusee,' the grinning young guard said as he escorted Dhurgham to his new donga.

Dhurgham looked darkly at him. He understood, but the guard took his look to mean incomprehension. The guard rolled his eyes upward. He gestured elaborately at Florida.‘Refugees,' he said slowly. He then bowed to Dhurgham, and gestured as if flicking something from his fingers at Hawaii and said very slowly,‘Refusees.'

Dhurgham reddened and couldn't think of anything to say.

‘Fuck you,' he said after a pause.

In Hawaii he was marked down as eighteen years old and housed with the men, not the unaccompanied minors. People in Hawaii sometimes got visas after their appeals, so they were better off than those long-term in Vanuatu, who had been screened out on arrival. But this added to the unusual tension of Hawaii. They had little hope, but some hope made life agony. A second fence covered in hessian was erected to prevent easy discussion through the fence between Vanuatu and Hawaii compounds. A riot in Vanuatu was triggered, guards said, by Hawaii inmates telling those in Vanuatu what their rights were and what they should have said at first interview.

The communal rooms in Florida had had posters of surf waves and palm trees on the walls. In Hawaii there was nothing.

Florida Compound had been ruled by waiting, by hope and expectation: Hawaii was ruled by rumour.

What Dhurgham liked about Hawaii in the first week was that he was free of the boys' silliness. And he loved that he was treated as a man. He was mustered and hassled and shouted at and befriended all as though he was eighteen or more, and he was hugely flattered. He was uncomfortable in his donga because of the slightly frightening press of men all around, but that didn't dim his spirits during daytime. Slowly, after the first month, he got to know them and to privately rank them for their harmlessness or otherwise. They were all Iraqi: Sunni, Shia and Kurd; several, like him, a mix of all three. He found that in Hawaii, Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans were generally separated from each other into discrete autonomous groups of demountables. Sabaeans were placed in a separate compound altogether. There was too much anger, too many recriminations and ultimately too many fights. Many guards were dismissive and hostile, but a few of the inmates were more scary, made worse by the fact that they could speak three or four languages, and could usually find a shared language through which to torment, frighten and humiliate others.

The men smelt bad. Some groaned all night and one ground his teeth. Some wandered in and out. Some cried or moaned and made him think uncomfortably about Mr Hosni. He found it hard to sleep.

He was relieved when Aziz, one of the UAMs from his former home, was rejected a month after him and moved into the bunk below him. They talked as if they were meeting for the first time.

Hawaii was not so crowded when Dhurgham was moved there. Not many had been rejected. Aziz had only been rejected because they had mixed up his case file with another, and had found his story to be bizarrely inconsistent. His lawyer told him not to worry about it. Aziz told Dhurgham, laughing nervously, that the interviewer had thought he was a Kurd with five children. He played with the idea, jokingly inventing names for his five daughters, praying loudly for a son. He patted his genitals, remonstrating with them, ‘A son, is that too much to ask?' while Dhurgham rolled on the floor, crying from laughter.

Aziz wasn't afraid of the men in their donga and bit by bit Dhurgham got to know them through him. They stopped being a threatening conglomerate and became individuals. Abu Nizar, the quiet little man from Egypt who had been in Florida in the donga next to the boys, was his favourite. Al Haj, who smiled in the wrong way at the wrong times, was the one he feared and hated.

There were no girls in Hawaii yet. Only Mrs Azadeh, who was thirty-one and so didn't count. Both Dhurgham and Aziz were bitterly disappointed at this and kept praying that various girls from Florida and Vanuatu would make it to Hawaii. They spent happy hours inventing the many ways Mariam, Suzy, Shadia, Haifa, Sahar, Phuong or Lucia might fail dismally in their interviews. They giggled together delightedly. They saw themselves as the potential cheer to be offered the downcast and humbled girls.

The lack of women and girls drove all the men and boys closer to each other and for a while storytelling became the major pastime.

While in Hawaii Dhurgham learned of an Iraq he had never known or imagined. He carried with him a happy impression, the warmth of his mother, father and Nura, the atmosphere of singing to Beloved Uncle Abu Uday in school, but no sensual or even seemingly real memories. It was as if, in leaving, his memory had shut Iraq away from him and left him with only moods.

The Iraq he could barely remember was not a place of fear.

Nothing anyone told him gave him back the land, the city, the feelings he had known. Their Iraq reached out a terrible shadow over him, until their stories, vivid and horrible, came to meet him whenever he tried to remember. The people he was with, including seventeen year old Aziz, had stories of such grimness and such loss that his own absent narrative seemed a mere myth, misty, evanescent and mutable. It was not possible that his family was dead the way theirs were. Death was so major, so terrible, so violent, that one would know of it. It could not have taken place surreptitiously, behind your back, in a split second in the dark. He was reassured, oddly, by their stories. His could not possibly be as bad, or he would know.

Mrs Azadeh asked him, too, what had happened.

‘I don't know,' he said softly and said no more. He smiled. In that moment he was sure they were alive. Mrs Azadeh hugged him, and for once he didn't mind that he was not really a man to her. In a strange way her hug confirmed his impression. It was a hug to tie him through until he was in a real mother's hug.

By cheek and good spirits, Dhurgham softened the guards, making them laugh when they least expected it. He discovered that they were, after all, quite different, each from the other. The younger Australian boys were easy to befriend:their aggression was bravado and their training recent, and Dhurgham instinctively saw through it. Some of the women were hard, always aggressive, and some of the men dangerous. But most softened for a time and even became friendly, especially if they were alone. This was before the centre filled beyond capacity and the stress of thousands of unhappy people set everyone on edge, made all programs in the centre impossible to manage, and frayed all tolerance.

And friendships with guards were fragile, especially in Hawaii. The constant insults and humiliation wore people's spirits:one only had to have a bad day, and snap or not smile, and the guards would feel that their friendliness was betrayed and would redouble the insults and indignities, not realising that the pleasantries, antics or forced friendliness of a captive to a captor can never dissolve the wrong of their relationship, or heal the damage done by abuse. The older guards felt that their extended hand was spurned by the fickle moods of their captives, that these people could not be trusted, and they became more certain in their distaste for their captives than if they had remained detached and encouraged no conversation, as their training instructed.

Mr Peter was no guard. He was the director of the education facilities. He was the nicest man in Australia—in fact probably in the world, Aziz said, as he was also the nicest man in Hawaii, Vanuatu, Bali, Florida. In fact, he was also the closest to God, Dhurgham added, as he was also the nicest man in Paradise, the isolation block. The two boys giggled until everyone frowned at them.

Mr Peter was much loved by everyone. Two of the new babies, born in the centre over the course of the year, were named after him. Peter Mohammad and Peter Muhsin.

Mr Peter ran a class for the older boys and young men that dealt with job applications in Australia. Even though they were refusees, many in Hawaii would get visas on appeal. These classes were run at Mr Peter's insistence, as they had a calming effect on the men as a group.

‘You will need a resume, or curriculum vitae,' he told them. ‘This will tell your employer everything about you that he or she needs to know. Don't assume an Australian employer will automatically understand the education system or even the naming system in your country. You will need to provide some explanations. Tell them a little bit about yourself too, don't be shy.'

The interpreter, Issam Dawsary, who was also taking the class with them, turned in his chair and translated in three languages for those whose English was still weak. They could write in Arabic or Farsi or Dari first, then get help in translating it into English.

Mr Peter asked them to write first everything they could under the headings he gave them: Personal Details, Education and Training, Work Experience, Skills, Interests, Hopes and Ambitions.

Dhurgham looked at the headings in dismay. His was finished in a few minutes. He wrote his CV in Arabic and then on a new page in English. In English it was even shorter than in Arabic. Abu Nizar sitting next to him was writing page after page in deep concentration. Dhurgham's life added up to very little. He hung his head over his page, reddening. Mr Peter strolled by. He put his hand on Dhurgham's shoulder and pointed to the half-filled page.