The Marsh Birds (26 page)

‘Well!' Janine said, holding Carrie close.

Carrie heard the shock in her mother's voice. She heard, dimly, that Janine was severing all ties with the form lying on the glass. She thought she should go and stroke Dhurgham's shiny hair but knew it would be bloody. She knew her mother desperately didn't want her to go. She was repulsed and ashamed of her repulsion. She struggled slightly then gave up, turning her face into her mother's chest, knowing what her mother's response would be. Janine tightened her grip and turned her daughter's face and body away, as if they had just witnessed a stranger fall from a great height to the pavement in front of them.

Mr Johns called the ambulance. He was relieved to see the unconscious form of the boy blanketed in white and driven away. The paramedic said he thought the boy had fainted, nothing more. The cuts were superficial. But Mr Johns saw the despair. He knew that Dhurgham had just lost more than freedom. Mr Johns felt like a traitor, old and shifty. He saw himself as if from the outside and pushed away the idea that he had not fought much for Dhurgham this time, that he had just let things happen because he wanted to retrieve his daughter. It was only a moment. Carrie comes first, he told himself. He wanted that volcanic pain as far from his family as possible.

‘Well!' Janine said again.

Dhurgham hurt all over. He lay in the yellow light of the prison cell, probing his confusion, pain and rage for something. He didn't want Carrie. He had dimly seen her face as he broke the Johns' furniture and he had smashed harder when he felt himself smashing their love. Yes, he saw in her eyes that he was not human. His heart stilled. Not Human. Mr Hosni had called him an Angel. And Birdie. The winged boy. Shaitan. Monster.

He wanted Nura.

To have no easy space against the skin and limbs of another, to have no known sister body, itself linked to all the rest of the world! That was worse than being an orphan, worse than having the lover turn her face from you in horror. He fought a rising fear that he was really not human; not male, not female. He lay in the dark and fingered his belly button, feeling for his babyhood, his birth, remembering Nura. He bedded his memory with her. He found her body suddenly with unbearable clarity. It was Nura (rarely his mother, never his father) who had cuddled him, always had her hands on him. Feeling back into memory, he knew his own child thigh pressed against hers, his child spine clasped tight between her ribs and knees, his ear pressed to hers, listening for the mysteries of the sea in her ear shell. He had had her once, his older sister, his trailblazer, his scout, his link into life.

He held up his cut and scratched hands against the cream brick wall. He noticed that the beautiful watch was broken. The glass was gone and the hands were grotesque and motionless, twisted up off the face like the antennae of an alert insect.

He began to weep.

Dominion Post

NZ HOODWINKED BY CRIM—
ASSAMARRAI NO REFUGEE

Thurgam Assamarrai, the Iraqi convention claimant from Australia, is to be deported, whether he likes it or not.
    Mr Assamarrai will be returned to Australia to face charges for various crimes, including damage to property and inciting to violence.
    He has been described by AID Australia as a ‘ringleader' in riots in 2001 in which more than a million dollars worth of damage was done to government property at Mawirrigun Aliens Processing Centre.
    ‘These people can't just decide they don't like Australia after all and give New Zealand a try,' Ted Harwood, Deputy to the Minister for Immigration said today.
    Mr Assamarrai, aged 18, made a failed bid for refugee status in Australia after arriving illegally in 1999. He then escaped from the Kanugo Kagil APC in Sydney last December and attempted to sneak into New Zealand in the stowage of a luxury yacht. Once apprehended, in a bizarre twist, he claimed persecution by Australia under the 1951 Convention to which New Zealand is a signatory.
    ‘New Zealand has been a bit naive with its touchy-feely approach to illegals,' the Australian Immigration Minister Ross Cowell said today. ‘It has now made itself into a target for these people.'
    Mr Assamarrai will be returned to custody in Australia, although where, the minister would not say. He will be placed under maximum security, following his escape.
    ‘Processing is as pleasant a place as we can make it,' Minister Cowell said, ‘but if you break the rules, we are left with few options.'
    When asked whether Mr Assamarrai would be incarcerated in an ordinary prison, the Minister said, ‘That remains to be seen. He has been involved in a number of criminal activities in Australia, beginning with entering illegally.'
    Minister Cowell has direct responsibility, in his capacity as Protector of Aliens, for Mr Assamarrai's wellbeing. It is not a guardianship he takes lightly, he assured the
Dominion Post
today.
    Mr Assamarrai is among a number of failed convention claimants awaiting deportation to their countries of origin. However, as Iraq has no arrangement with Australia to accept deportees, Mr Assamarrai must wait. For how long? Until Minister Cowell finds someone who will have him.
    It could be a long wait.

Dhurgham awoke with a terrible headache. He was in a tiny plane which was banking steeply over a strange land. He had been slumped sideways, with saliva running from the corner of his mouth onto his T-shirt. His temples throbbed and he was very cold. There was one other person there, seated directly across the toy-sized aisle from him. An AID official, judging by the uniform. The plane dropped and glided over some shabby sheds with
Towilla Marsh Air Base
in white letters painted on the tin roof, then skimmed just above tall reeds and golden grasses in a bare wet land.

At the steps of the plane he was still in a daze. The three men waiting looked like Australian police and AID. They all had pistols. One of the police officers stepped forward and Dhurgham noticed dimly that he had that familiar alertness of the very new. He reached for Dhurgham's limp hand, turning and talking to the Australian guard as he tried to flick a handcuff onto Dhurgham's wrist. It slid off the first time, then gripped.

The clicking sound and the metal against Dhurgham's skin galvanised him. Before anyone could register what was happening, he was away, ducking under the still-whining wing of the airplane, just missing the deadly shadow of the prop, then trotting fast over the dilapidated tarmac and towards the golden sedge and reeds. The brief blast of wind from the whirring blade had fully woken him. The flurry and frantic shouts the other side of the propeller barely touched him. The wet land stretched away before him as far as he could see, scattered with fragments of white plastic bags and other desiccated rubbish caught in grass stalks. Irregular sheets of water glittered silver between the grasses. He was at the edge of the bitumen in seconds and strode out. A marsh smell rose to his nostrils as the spongy ground gave beneath his feet. A lone bird hovered, moving and motionless, so near that he could see its clear eye and steady, detached regard. It was a peregrine—so familiar! Other, smaller birds rose into the sky with a faint whirring sound. The empty seed heads on golden stalks sang in the wind and he felt his body thrumming with something altogether unexpected.

Distantly he heard a voice calling him to stop and the sound of pounding feet on asphalt. He trotted on without turning.

He suddenly saw Mr Hosni, body bowed over that familiar kitchen table, silently weeping. Mr Hosni's mother was stroking her son's sparse hair with long gentle strokes, her face still and calm. Dhurgham saw again, as if he were in that room, the old woman's hand and its loving stroke. It was a wrinkled, heavy hand with thickened hooked nails, stern with grief. He hovered with that hand, almost felt it himself, as fatherloss welled up into the world around him. He saw Mr Hosni's unassuagable pain and the frailty of a beloved but castaway son's shoulders. And he saw again but without envy how terrible and precious it was to be loved. He saw Mr Hosni as if from far away, yet right there in his heart, with his own hand settling inside that old woman's. He felt himself touch the remote world that was Mr Hosni's head, not to hold, not to belong, not to ask or beg. A lightest touch before take-off.

A hard grip on his heart opened and something flew away with the rising birds, leaving him in bliss. Of course! Mr Hosni had returned. First it had to be Mr Hosni.

‘I am the dot!' he said.

He passed Mr Hosni and looked to the ground at his spattering feet. The marshes were clear and limpid ahead, their fresh wet smell rising in his nostrils. He squinted into the light, seeking that darkness.

A shot was fired into the air and all the marsh birds rose with a sudden uprush and the whistle and percussion of beating wings. He was running hard now, in long skimming strides, his heart as full and as empty as the sky.

He felt a sharp pain in his chest and felt himself lift with the birds; and then he was in that other darkened, deeper marsh, glinting in unrevealed starlight, not the morning sun.
I am the dot!
he sang without words.

He thought he saw Nura's hijab, gleaming white just ahead. Beyond her, maybe, the distant white sails of the
Morning Star
gliding in the stillness of a mosaic. Then he heard his mother's voice, clear and close. He felt her breath on his neck, her kiss on his earlobe:
Be the first! Run, Dhurgham darling, run!

And, completely happy, he ran.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special acknowledgment and thanks to Nuha al Radi for her time, her vibrant correspondence, and her intense, honest, critical warmth towards my writing. Her death on 31 August 2004 is a huge loss. A much needed voice is now silent.

Many people contributed in different ways to this book. They are: Amal Abou-Hamden, Fayrouz Ajaka, Annette Barlow, Deslie Billich, Vivian Bradley, Neil Brown, Nyssa Brown, Julian Burnside, Juan Cole, Rose Creswell, Mary Crock, Azadeh Dastyari, Sonja Dechian, Adeeb Kamal ad-Deen, Jenni Devereaux, Abbas El-Zein, Raimond Gaita, Hamida, Hawraa Hamami, Mariana Hardwick, Winton Higgins, L'hibou Hornung, Sue Hosking, Annette Hughes, Linda Jaivin, Raed Jarrar, Joe Laino, Gina Lennox, Alan Lindsay, Tom Mann, Peter Mares, Sarah Margan, Lesley McFadzean, Don McMaster, Tim Materne, Khalid Melhi, Heather Millar, Ann Mitcalfe, Kate Mitcalfe, Alex Mitcalfe Wilson, Gavin Mooney, Jeremy Moore, Gaylene Morgan, Christa Munns, Walid Mutawakkil, Raghid Nahhas, Mohamed Moustafa Nassar, Abdallah Osman, Salam Pax, Lindy Powell, Cathy Preston-Thomas, Nuha al Radi, Riverbend, Meki al Saegh, Muneera Sallis, Roger Sallis, Yahia As-Samawi, Arwa Shamhan, Tom Shapcott, Jack Smit, Sandy Thorne, Heather Tyler, Philip Waldron, Rod Wells, Teresita White.

A special thanks to Dr Raghid Nahhas, editor of
Kalimat
, for field research in Damascus and for much thoughtful advice.

Australian and international government departments, companies, NGOs and other community organisations, groups and projects provided invaluable source materials, including detailed reports and commentaries. These organisations, groups and projects include: Ausnews Global Network, Australian Education Union, Australian Refugees Association, Australians Against Racism Inc, Australia IS Refugees! Schools Competition 2002 and There is No Place Like Home 2004, the Catholic Commission for Justice Development and Peace, Children Out of Detention (ChilOut), Department of Immigration Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA), Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Human Rights Watch, Project Safecom, Refugee Advocacy Service South Australia (RASSA), Refugee Council of Australia, Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR), Salt Writers, Seeking Asylum Alone,
SIEVX.com
, United Nations Association Australia, UNHCR, Victoria Chambers, and Vue Pty Ltd. Finally, a number of asylum seekers' court proceedings provided important and valuable source materials.