The Marsh Birds (12 page)

‘That is because you are very young,' he said.‘You fill it as you get older. You have beautiful handwriting— you should mention that you are a talented artist.'

Dhurgham's shame receded, and he wrote,
I am a talented artist
.

Abu Nizar was still writing furiously. Dhurgham began to read over his shoulder. Abu Nizar's CV was the most beautiful anyone wrote that day.

Curriculum Vitae and Resume
Personal details:

Full Name: Ahmad Hassan Abdul Samit al Salih. Known as Abu Nizar after my son. It means Father of Nizar.

My First Name: Ahmad. My Middle Name: Hassan Abdul Samit. My Last Name: al Salih. My nickname:Abu Nizar.

My Date of Birth: 21 August 1964, a Tuesday, at midday.

My Place of Birth: Byala City, Kafr al Shaykh Governorate, Republic of Egypt.

My Gender: Straight Male, Non Smoker, Non Drinker, I do not wear any Glasses. 173 cm (5 feet 8 inches) 79 kilos (174 Pounds) foot wear size 44 European, light brown skin, black hair, brown eyes. I am widower, my wife died in 1987. I have a son Nizar Ahmad Hassan Abdul Samit al Salih, born 3 March 1986. God-willing I will marry again soon and live decently. I have two brothers, two sisters and I'm the eldest. I'm a Liberal, Open Minded Muslim.

Nationality: My Only Native Nationality is Egyptian.

My Egyptian National Identification (ID) Number: 3 24 978 056 01 737.

Education: I am very well-educated. I am a man of the world, not just of Egypt, thanks to my parents, who supported me in everything, no matter the hardship to themselves. I have Elementary, Primary, Secondary Certificates and a University Degree. I have a Bachelor of Arts from the Cairo University, Egypt. I learned to love, not to hate.

Work Experience: My Egyptian Company for Trade and Repair Watches Licence Number 1024 with Shirbin City Council, Al Dakahlia Governorate, Arab Republic of Egypt, and that means that I'm horologist.

Skills: Mending Watches, horology and My Native Language is Arabic, English is my second language, and I love learning.

Interests: My interests are many. I love Honesty, Clearness, Transparency, Sincerity, Accuracy—as I'm horologist I see time as Gold. I want to learn languages in Australia, do bushwalk, build, think. I love Peace.

Hopes: I hope to join any job suits me as a Native Arabic Speaker, or mending Watches, I hope to be in good health, to help in making Peace in every place I'll be, and I hope that Peace be all over the world and violence, Wars stop all over the world, I hope that full mutual understanding become a reality in the world.

References: My Mother and Father and Brothers and Sisters can speak for me and my good bodily health and moral being. My trust too in God is complete.

Dhurgham had never guessed there was so much to meek Abu Nizar. Abu Nizar was no doctor, professor, minister or pilot. These were the jobs Dhurgham generally thought of when he thought of educated people. He had written them himself under ‘Hopes'. Abu Nizar was a peace-loving horologist who was firmly anchored in place in the world. Abu Nizar could even remember his ID number and his business registration number off by heart. Australia would welcome such a solid, gentle man. Abu Nizar was what every employer would want. He looked down at his own life laid out in double-spaced blue pen on half a page. How could he compete with an educated horologist?

Dhurgham lay awake on his bunk. The heat was stifling, making it hard to breathe. Life would be easier if the donga was more crowded. He avoided looking across at al Haj. He knew that he would see two points glimmering in the darkness, swinging to meet his gaze, watching his every move. He was waiting for al Haj to sigh, groan deeply and turn to the wall. Until then, he wouldn't look that way. He hoped they wouldn't be left as just four in the room. With Mr Maamer gone (to prison, some said), Mr Mahmoud and Mr Bassam transferred, and Mr Hussein probably deported, the room was too empty with just four. Mostly it was just three, like now, because Abu Nizar went for long walks out in the starlit compound, looking for constellations and probably for Mrs Azadeh. The worst would be if Aziz were given a visa before another boatload arrived and made it to Hawaii. Aziz below him was breathing heavily, quickly, in the darkness. They probably had two hours before the guard came by for headcount. Dhurgham wanted to hit Aziz. He imagined leaping off the bunk and ripping the skinny body off the sweaty bed below, throwing him to the floor and kicking, kicking, kicking. He tensed, as if to leap, but just exhaled his strange fury at the ceiling. The fan went round and round, gleaming in the shadow. On and on without effect. He wanted to throw something at the fan, leap up and in the darkness, bend, break its arms and make its slow circling twisted, broken. Round and round, but idle. A slight whispering creak repeated over and over again. The bunk began to rock slightly in rhythm with the fan. Dhurgham stared more peacefully, rocking too with the fan, deliberately rocking Aziz below him. He found himself tuning in with the urgent rhythm beneath, and rocked Aziz to the end. He often despised Aziz these days but if tonight Aziz had offered to touch him in the darkness, he would have stared at the fan and almost gratefully let him. But Aziz stayed where he was, locked in his private cradle.

Dhurgham felt like crying, he was so lonely. He heard al Haj smiling or grimacing through a sigh in the dark.

One morning Dhurgham woke up and wanted his freedom. He wanted to be out and away from the wire and the red earth and never see them again. He wondered briefly whether they would just let him go if he pleaded eloquently enough. He didn't think Mr Chris was a bad man, just a man with a difficult job. Mr Peter had told him so many times. He didn't like to think about it, but he had a lot of money in his belongings. Mr Hosni's money would pay for it. He would tell them, it's OK. I'll leave here and go somewhere else. I'll go to … Africa. Or Sweden. He wondered whether he should do something with lawyers. It couldn't be that he was supposed to stay here for the rest of his life. It couldn't possibly be what they intended.

He wanted to see Mr Chris.

Dhurgham had never been in the centre manager's office. He was surprised by its settled, civilised feel. It gave a sense of being a permanent space, in which a work life took place, day in day out, a space ornamented with personal belongings, but with no air of impermanence or desperate clinging. It was as though Mr Chris's office were in another country. He sat down with Mr Peter in matching blue cloth armchairs. Only the red desert and stumpy casuarinas outside the window placed this office in the world of the centre. Three different photos of a beautiful golden haired woman and two teenage children about Dhurgham's age stood on the desk, and Dhurgham wondered whether Mr Chris missed them.

Chris Jensen had until this point barely noticed Dhurgham. There were a lot of dark-haired, dark-eyed swarthy boys in the centre. There were more than eighty who looked pretty much the same. Dhurgham stood out only because he was tall. The faces blurred into one another.

But anyone who proposed to drop their protection claim and to volunteer to return was different.

He saw a thin boy of perhaps fifteen. Strikingly tall. That was his first impression. And, separated from the rest, it was a distinctive face. Beautiful, angular, slightly fierce. But the boy's proposal was naïve and preposterous. Mr Jensen rested his hands on the desk and flashed Peter an annoyed glance. Peter should have known better, really, and counselled the boy without bothering him.

‘You know we can't just send you off to any country,' he said kindly. ‘We have to find one that will have you first, or wait and see whether something changes in Iraq and makes it possible to send you back home.'

The boy flushed. ‘I have money,' he said softly.

‘Well, that's not a solution to everything,' Mr Jensen said coldly.‘Being locked up here should make that clear to you.'

The boy stood up and bowed with otherworldly courtesy, hand on his heart.

‘You try to help me,' he said through suddenly pale lips, and Mr Jensen was unsure whether it was an exhortation or irony, or just a formal thank you. He sighed. The phone rang and he reached for it, relieved, waving to Peter and Dhurgham to go.

From that day on Dhurgham saw his imprisonment differently. The idea that it would be hard to find a country that might want him rang on as a discovery, an awful one. It had never occurred to him how little he might matter. He lay awake that night in his bed, feeling diminished. Even to Mr Hosni he had been special, wanted. He wondered with a rising unease whether it was true that all the boys like him were just so much unwanted refuse. All the lost boys hugged by the sailors on the great ship, wrapped around with blankets, spoon-fed by gentle hands, meaning … nothing. Tears seeped from his closed eyes. You needed parents, you really did. You needed a sister. His self-pity calmed him and moved him to new vistas.
It is good
, he thought,
that I can weep for myself. A very good sign
. Then he opened his eyes; he was sure, now, that he simply had to find them, even if it took his whole life. And he would love himself as much as possible to keep himself whole until they could take over again. He would get out and find Marwa and she would help. Then he fell asleep.

The boredom of every day dragged at him and the hours scraped away his good spirits. He had too much time. Time to kick sand at the sky. Time to scratch the paint off the wall by his bed; time to chew his fingernails off; time to pick holes in himself fossicking for nonexistent pimples and time to pick endlessly at the scabs; time to goad and annoy other people; time to think.

He sat on the steps of his donga watching others play soccer. Three little girls whose names Dhurgham couldn't remember walked purposefully up to an unfamiliar officer who was standing legs apart, hands clasped behind him, eyes on the middle distance: the distinctive over alert pose of the very new. They looked out sideways from their hijabs at him and swung their bodies side to side, hands clasped behind their backs.

‘Hello Officer!' the oldest said.

‘Hello Officer!' chimed the younger two.

‘Hello little girls,' he said, leaning down, smiling. ‘Don't you look nice today!'

‘Fuck you, Officer!' all three shrieked and ran away laughing. ‘Fuck Australia!'

Dhurgham smiled nastily.

‘Why do Australians do this to us? We are not criminals.' Aziz's voice had a panicked edge to it. Aziz, Dhurgham and Abu Nizar were sitting in Mrs Azadeh's donga, which she shared with another woman, Lina, and her daughter Suha, and two other families. Suha was about sixteen and very shy. She had large green eyes and, from what Dhurgham could tell from the hair that fanned like a bird's wing by her ear, she had fine black hair, probably very long, as there was a bunch at the back of her head.

It was a lovely donga. A fine red silk sari embroidered with gold thread, traded from someone, was hung in carefully designed folds over the window, and paintings done by the children in the art centre, selected for their rich colours, were arranged above the beds. There was even a painting done by Dhurgham prominently hung. It was a portrait of Mr Peter and a little girl who had long ago left the centre, laughing together behind a mist of thrown red sand. A small upturned box covered in blue velvet was the table for a leather-bound Koran, a hand-carved water jug and the fine scroll of a rolled prayer rug. Everyone liked Mrs Azadeh's donga. Bunk beds were pushed to the far wall and mattresses and pillows thrown down to create a comfortable living room spacious enough for at least twelve people to recline in a circle. And if her sessions went late into the night, the guards were lenient, at least for a while, and conducted headcounts in good spirit without making them get up and straighten the room.