The Marsh Birds (14 page)

He remembered her hands turning the pages of his schoolbooks and her windy voice in his ear.

He was suddenly so rich in memories that they seemed to tumble out of control and out of sequence as he tried to hold and hoard them.

He tried to honour his parents with everything he did. He became dogmatic and serious as he struggled with the living pull their loss now had on his body and mind. He studied the rush of memories he now had of his father, reeling in grief but thriving on it. His house and his childhood came back to him in full sound and colour, filled with their voices, their bodies. He could remember Ahmad and the narjeela workshop. He could hear and see how his father acted, spoke, interacted with others. He tried to use the same quiet voice, the same sideways tilt to the head, listening; he tried to quieten his limbs into an older man's step and school his mind to older men's higher purposes. He tried to avoid watching the girls and young women, schooling his passions, concentrating on his sister, on her face, her arms, her laughter. He stopped visiting Mrs Azadeh and Suha, and the mothers and children, remembering that his father never played with children except diffidently; never played with Dhurgham except for a few delicious minutes while he drank coffee. Children came to his father, not the other way round. But the children didn't seek Dhurgham out, spooked by his new self, so he stopped playing altogether. He let his memory train and dominate him, needing his father but, as time went by, missing his sister more and more bitterly.

The others mistrusted Dhurgham's transformation, seeing it, rightly, as a performance, as somehow dissembling, and of course they preferred his former easy, charismatic charm or rowdy playfulness.

‘Let him be,' Abu Rafik said quietly when they teased Dhurgham for what they called his fundamentalism. ‘He is trying to please dead parents. It takes time.'

Dhurgham's stiffness, his unexplained internal protocols, were all blamed on Abu Rafik. Both inmates and AID staff watched the influential old man uneasily. The centre had swelled, rumoured now to house thousands, and tension flickered like lightning between them and across the compounds.

About this time, Abu Rafik, partly inspired by Dhurgham's intensity and partly grieving for all the bored and wasted boys and young men, did something that made perfect sense to him. He started an Islamic school. Only boys attended. He had not ever said anything against girls attending, but, when the boys took to the school with a kind of possessiveness, the girls sensed it and, under pressure of ridicule from their brothers and from the overwhelming numbers of boys there would have been to each girl, they stayed away. Dhurgham was pleased. Girls were a huge distraction.

At first only the teachers knew of Abu Rafik's school and treated it as an asset and a relief from their own impossible teaching loads. They knew the children and many of the young men, and liked Abu Rafik, so the sight of several rows of unusually well groomed and cleanly dressed boys seated in front of Abu Rafik didn't at first bother them. Many of the guards, however, were deeply disturbed, particularly by the recitation in unison of the Koran by the frighteningly well-behaved group. To some of them Abu Rafik's class had the look of an army. They were disgusted and outraged that girls didn't attend.

Abu Rafik taught the Koran, Islamic history, literature and philosophy. Attendance was high and some boys began to practise recitation in meditative poses at times outside class. Within four weeks, what had started as a once a week event had become daily. On Fridays they did just Koran. Those members of the male population who had been branded as troublemakers had never been more quiet. The centre seemed to be running very smoothly, and Abu Rafik's class rose to over two hundred.

Dhurgham washed his clothes assiduously and carried himself with quiet pride. The highlight of his day was kneeling in that precise formation of men, watching the backs in front of him and to the sides, sensing the rustling, living whole behind him. He absorbed Abu Rafik's lessons with intense concentration and purpose. Prayer made him flood with grief and with openness, and, as he bent his face to the ground, he felt the tears rush unchecked. Poetry of heroism made him think of his father, and his heart swelled painfully with the glory and tragedy that his life would have to emulate. Death was not so bad a thing, he told himself, if you died well, if you died with nobility and as a great human being. He wept as he gloried in what he imagined to have been his father's story. He pieced together every tiny part, every word Ahmad had said, every word Abu Rafik had said, and he saw it all in shining legend. He imagined some terrible unequal battle in which his father's last stand became intertwined with the murder and martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala.

In moments of twilight, comforted by Abu Nizar now sleeping under him in Aziz's bunk, he found that there was no way his father could really be dead. The legend was about someone else, not his father.

It was one of the happiest times of Dhurgham's life. He felt manly and good, calm at heart. He loved calling Abu Rafik ‘Ammu', Uncle. He loved it that Ammu called his father Abu Dhurgham. He felt himself slip into a proper place in the company of men. Mr Hosni vanished altogether for a time from his worries and his dreams. He felt how fine a thing it was that he was lucky enough to be born Arab and Muslim. He felt that he was catching at the shadow of his father, becoming everything he, Dhurgham, could be. He thought about the Great Mosque, about its history and its beauty, and he felt overwhelmed by the thought of such beauty. He studied hard, obsessively, determined to catch up with all he had lost. He concentrated on those philosophers and pieces of Islamic history he thought his father would have admired most. He was sure that his father's heroism and goodness could be transmitted through arcane and miraculous means if they touched each other through the same texts. Abu Rafik encouraged him to think like this; even, cautiously, occasionally revealing that he knew Abu Dhurgham had read this or that thinker.

The school had to be conducted in the open air within two months of its inception, late in the afternoons and early in the morning. Dhurgham's heart swelled with pride as he sat out in the red earth, surrounded by the shining fences. He felt the potency of patience steady him. He was glad that there was some vicissitude against which he could prove himself. He was glad there were fences. Abu Rafik took care to tell the stories of those imprisoned and how nobly they endured it.

Abu Rafik had a motley collection of Arabic books, and Mr Peter allowed him to keep them with him to prepare lessons. The Australian Arab Council for Culture and Community had donated a collection of hardcover books, including a number of Korans, and several sets or part sets of some of the great classics of Arabic literature: part of the twenty-five volume collection of the
Kitab al Aghani
, the complete four volume
Tales of the Arabs
, the
Maqamat
of al Hariri, some al Jahiz, half of al Tanukhi's
al Faraj ba'd al Shidda
, and Ibn Khaldoun's
Muqaddima
. Abu Rafik also had a prodigious memory and could recite innumerable poems from the great age of Arabic poetry. He could have taught on the Koran without a copy to hand.

Someone sent a detailed, highly critical description of Abu Rafik's school to AID in Canberra without consulting the Arabic interpreters or Mr Peter and the other teachers. The report included photos of rows and rows of mostly white-clad men and boys praying. But for the red sand and the dongas and razor wire, it could have been in Afghanistan. In the conclusion the report stated that the school had all the makings of a terrorist training camp, ironically fully funded by the Australian Government.

The school came to an abrupt end.

‘You are a dangerous man,' Chris Jensen said to Abu Rafik in front of Dhurgham.‘One of those types who hype up suicide bombers with hashish and brainwashing talk. We won't be giving visas to men like you, that's for sure. If I see you with more than this puppy hanging off your words, I'll slap you in solitary faster than you can say AllaAkbar. And if there is a riot over this, I'll be blaming you.'

‘If there is a riot, you will have caused it!' Dhurgham said, but he said the last two words in Arabic. Mr Chris looked at him coldly and Abu Rafik silenced him with an eyebrow.

Dhurgham was back to private lessons with Abu Rafik. The spell was broken and he struggled daily to find the peace and sad glory with which the school had filled him. He chafed at the lessons and sometimes would rather have been playing soccer with the other boys and young men.

‘What would you like to be when you grow up?' Abu Rafik asked him one day at the end of the lesson.

‘Free,' Dhurgham said. It wasn't even his answer— it was everyone's first thought. He had soaked it up from the atmosphere.

‘You'll be free from here in five minutes, when the time comes. Just as in death, ya Ibni.'

Dhurgham didn't listen to the last part. He was thinking about the first. Being free was so easy, and so out of his control, that it obviously couldn't be a lifelong goal.‘Then, when I'm free, I want to fight,' he said, blushing as he searched for his war.

‘Fight what?'

He couldn't say,
just fight
. ‘Jihad. The Isra'ili,' he said.

‘What do you know of jihad?' Abu Rafik was looking him firmly in the eye.

Dhurgham squirmed, then recited a line from the Koran in a faint voice.

Abu Rafik sighed. ‘Tell me the meanings of the verb form jahada, other than to fight for something.'

‘To endeavour, to strive, to struggle, to overwork …' Dhurgham said.

‘There are many ways to fight injustice. Your art can be jihad, ya Ibni.'

Dhurgham couldn't let the idea go. The idea of heroism, righteousness
and
the song in his body of destruction. He fantasised about killing all the guards, Mr Chris; how quickly and absolutely his wrath would come down upon them! In their shocked dying glances they would see that they had been wrong to misjudge him as a stripling, a weakling; to humiliate the men and women in front of him, to torment the defenceless children, to shut down the only good thing. He practised his moves in the donga. What strength these arms! This torso! If he saw Mr Hosni now, he would strike him down with one blow of his fist and khalas! all would be over and cleansed between them.

‘Who took care of you in Syria?' Abu Rafik asked one day.

Dhurgham twisted in misery and was silent. Abu Rafik stared at him, silent too, until Dhurgham said, ‘A man. Mr Hani Hosni,' and felt his throat tighten until no more sound could come out.

Abu Rafik was no fool. ‘It is all closed now,' he said, and continued with the mathematics lesson.

But it was not closed. Dhurgham had shut that part of his life away, now, for months. But after the school closed Mr Hosni came back, agreeing in his soft voice, insisting: ‘No, it is not closed, is it, Birdie?' He could not think of Mr Hosni's too-moist eyes and smooth face without feeling a wave of shame. Not for what Mr Hosni had done. No. Quite the reverse. Dhurgham would have given anything to undo their parting; to smile into the older man's eyes, to hold out his hand and to thank him in a considered but nonetheless warm voice for all he had done. He writhed, thinking of his new clothes, his brand-new western backpack, his Nike sneakers. Dhurgham blushed a furious red every time he remembered the $10 000 US dollars he had found in his pack in Indonesia. Even though he knew it was his money, it was so shockingly generous, so unlike Mr Hosni not to have crowed about it. The money still lay untouched in its brown Syrian envelope in the centre somewhere with his name on it, with his belt and his gold chain, all presents from Mr Hosni.

Dhurgham cringed inside. Their parting loomed over him, increasing in proportion over time. He imagined again and again the hurt look he had not let himself take in and imagined with crawling horror a clinging Mr Hosni travelling to Australia to find him and exact absolution from him.
You have forgiven me, Birdie? Your old uncle? You've found another uncle to replace me, I see.

Dhurgham had stood, face averted, and had said nothing. His skin had been shrinking away from Mr Hosni, from Syria, and he was impatient for his freedom, there waiting for him on the plane to Jakarta. He had wanted to hurt Mr Hosni. He had said nothing into the yawning, yearning silence between them. He had felt it pull with desperate fingers at his mouth and throat; yet, despite the pain of holding the words pent in his chest, he had said nothing. Nothing at all. The dialogue that should have been quietly closed in a manly way was left open, longing for repair. He felt the unspoken words and Mr Hosni haunting him, as if this, a moment of rejection of a
bad
man, was the worst crime, the thing his father would not have done, yet another thing he could not bear Abu Rafik to know about him. Deserting his family, leaving them destitute, seemed now less certain and accusing than this. He even wept over Mr Hosni and then raged at him, telling himself again and again that Mr Hosni was filth and should be killed.