The Marsh Birds (4 page)

He was decided. He laid the money out in piles on the table and put the clothes in the bin. He knew that when the boy came screaming down the stairs in the morning to accuse, the money had to be out in the open, or they'd never get off on the right foot. It would tell him in an instant, too, whether the boy was a thief or a rich kid. A rich kid would be relieved to have an older man help him look after the money.
A thief
, Mr Hosni told himself happily,
won't hear of it and can be turfed straight out the door
. So when Dhurgham announced himself with an escalating rage down the stairs and erupted into the room, Mr Hosni couldn't help smiling broadly. Naked! Just like that! Only one of those little princes would do that! He didn't even need to scrutinise that face for its relief or fear at the sight of the neat piles.

Mr Hosni's apartment was upstairs above a carpet shop just off al Hariqa Square in the old city, minutes from the Souq al Hamidiya. It was a flaking, chipped and rusted apartment of two floors at the top of one of the newer older buildings. The street was lined with similar buildings, streetside shops and above them offices; indeed Mr Hosni's spacious apartment was made up out of part of the upper floor of an office and a mulhaq, a small courtyard apartment on the roof, designed originally for keeping life and work close together. It was nice inside—well furnished and tasteful. Mr Hosni lived there alone, revelling in his space. He was a fastidious and thrifty man who nonetheless liked fine things and small luxuries when he could afford them. His apartment and his tastes were oddly genteel. They revealed someone who had once lived with wealth and regarded it with sentimentality and nostalgia, as something that could be evoked by this or that object, or a particular arrangement of furniture and old-fashioned decor. He did his own cooking, cleaning, washing, plumbing and motorbike repairs, and, as he could do anything he set his hands to, despised experts and professionals. He kept the apartment clean and pleasant. He insisted Dhurgham clean his own room.

Dhurgham's room was the nicest room on the top floor. It was light and open, looking out both over the street and into the courtyard, which was the rooftop. There were two other rooms on that floor, usually locked. Mr Hosni repaired small electronic toys and digicams in one and had a computer, scanner, DVD burner and photo albums in the other. Work and leisure, he called these two rooms. Dhurgham's room had good furniture of pale gold wood, plain but with subtle style in its rounded and bevelled edges. Mr Hosni bought him a new mattress the week he arrived. He had a white bedspread over clean linen, washed weekly and dried in the sun on the rooftop. The soap powder Mr Hosni used smelt of his early childhood and Dhurgham had torn and troubled dreams in the fug of his own body and those sun-crisped Bonix-fresh sheets.

Dhurgham settled in immediately, suddenly numb. Leaving the mosque and washing the dirt from his body had a strange effect. From the first day, he stopped muttering and reciting and appeared like a normal boy. He stayed attuned to the call to prayer, held by it to the faint thread of his story; but he found he could not pray. Prayer itself seemed utterly bound with the mosque and with his grief. Whenever the adhan rang out he felt a strange mix of heightened anxiety and intense relief, and he often cried as everyone would have been praying. The severance from his other rituals caused him little pain.

He worried that he should be waiting at the mosque but he made no move at first to go back there. After a few days he began to yearn for the mosque as though he had lost a kind of bliss; yet he knew he had never felt anything like happiness there. The shadows and glories flitting through his mind had no tangible resemblance to what he could remember and he did nothing. Indeed, going there also seemed unbearable. The minaret and tower could be seen from his window. He kept his curtains drawn enough to cover them.

It was as though paying board to Mr Hosni (
You are a man now
, Mr Hosni had said), yet letting Mr Hosni look after everything, the money, the food, and his comings and goings, settled something and made him lose all but a fantasy of hope. He would lie awake at night, thinking that Nura and his mother and father were angry with him but sensing something very bad underneath it all that his mind wouldn't touch. A blanket or mist descended on him if he tried to think back further than the mosque. He had almost chosen his forgetfulness while he was waiting by the mosque; but now, when he tried, he found he could not choose to return. His past was taken from him. Occasionally when half asleep he would hear a voice but not what it said, and he would hover, not over his white bed, but as if taking a bird's view of a marsh, looking down in the dim fog-streaked starlight. He would almost feel the rub of heavy swinging clothes. He would sweat and shake, yet all he saw was unbearably beautiful.

After a couple of weeks he forced himself to go to the Great Mosque a few times with Mr Hosni but was so overwhelmed each time that he was physically ill, and Mr Hosni convinced him gently not to go again, saying that when his parents came for him, they would know that the rendezvous was stale and would try other means. Mr Hosni said he knew people who knew people who knew people and if his little bird's parents appeared anywhere in Damascus, he'd hear of it within a week. Dhurgham believed him but still hung onto the days in grief and homesickness.

Mr Hosni explained each expense and stacked the money on the table often in order to show Dhurgham what it took to clothe and feed and house him, what it took to pay the doctor for sleeping tablets and antidepressants, and what it took to pay his scouts who were scouring the city for Dhurgham's parents. Dhurgham, who had never thought of his family's resources, saw the slow shortening of the stacks and the disappearance of the jewellery as the ebbing away of all certainty. When the money was gone, a long time in the future but also inevitable, then his family would have nothing; he would both have lost them, leaving them with nothing, and used up all they had. He wondered what they would think and whether his mother would be angry with him for his mismanagement, whether he should be spending any of it. Mr Hosni pointed out that he would starve if he didn't and they wouldn't want that, and for that Dhurgham had no answer. Dhurgham got completely sick of the sight of it and he was relieved when Mr Hosni, seeming to sense his misery, stopped showing or talking about the money.

Mr Hosni stopped seeing his circle of friends. He stopped fiddling with electronics or staying in his leisure room until late in the night. Looking after the boy became his project. He bought different foods, cooked meals once or twice a day and took Dhurgham to the doctor to get advice and prescriptions, then to the chemist for tablets. He felt a warm glow when the doctor said, ‘Your nephew is a lucky boy that he had you to adopt him.' He regarded himself with some wonder at the end of each happy day. Was this all it took? Why hadn't he picked one up before? In the market he would look at the street boys, but their loud voices, their confidence, their jaunty or broken bodies, their plainness when they looked crushed, filled him with disgust. None of them measured up to his Birdie. He could find no boy that, now he had his sweet sad boy at home, might have tempted him. Then he thought to himself that it was because Dhurgham was sad. These boys looked too brash, too happy; and in any case there was no knowing whether they had parents, brothers and sisters, just like any other impoverished kid who looked abandoned as a strategy.

He took Dhurgham shopping for clothes each time he remembered yet another item that a child might need. He took great pleasure in it. Dhurgham accompanied him, large-eyed and silent, and said nothing at all when Mr Hosni said,‘My Nephew'to every shopkeeper. Mr Hosni bought singlets and three pairs of pyjamas. He bought underpants in several different colours. He bought T-shirts for casual around the house and good shirts for out. His nephew was not going to look like any street urchin. His nephew would show them. When Dhurgham accompanied him in a stylish striped and embroidered shirt and pressed tan trousers, Mr Hosni swelled with pride. He wondered occasionally to himself whether his passion for caring for the boy would wear off and the novelty of playing parent fade, but it didn't. Dhurgham remained just dependent enough and just aloof enough to be charming and mysterious. Mr Hosni found himself planning for a future together.

He didn't want Dhurgham to go to school. School would fill the boy with ideas. School would take Birdie away for six hours of every day. School scared Mr Hosni. At school, the boy would make friends, get cheeky, learn to despise a benefactor. School would fill his lovely little head with things that had nothing to do with the real world. He was delighted to find that the boy was thoroughly literate. That was all it took to live in full enjoyment of the world. He would teach the boy the rest himself. He'd teach him the ways of the world, freed from the swindle of schools and teachers. He'd teach him that a body is nothing to be ashamed of. He'd teach him all there was to know about computers. And as soon as he thought of it, he raced out and bought Dhurgham his own computer, with a slightly secondhand Pentium II. When the boy blushed a fierce red and muttered something about the money, Mr Hosni said, ‘No No No, Birdie, this one's on me. This one's your birthday present. Your old Uncle is going to give you an education.' Dhurgham sat down and began weeping. Mr Hosni hugged him and upped his Prozac dose.

Mr Hosni went to bed blissful. He had never felt so whole, so healed and open of heart.

Mr Hosni sang tunefully as he cooked breakfast. One morning Dhurgham sang with him and they smiled to each other over their tomato, zaater, khubz and labne.

As a young boy Dhurgham had always thought westerners cultured. People of privilege, peace and progress. The only westerners he had met had been diplomats and United Nations people and a Finnish film-maker his father had entertained at their house. His father's stories from his university days in London had been stories of admiration and appreciation. His father's anger at America or the United Nations was not directed at Americans. But with Mr Hosni, Dhurgham began to see westerners as predators. Mr Hosni was intensely conscious of westerners and would whisper about them whenever he saw tourists of any kind. Every time they went out to a coffee shop or restaurant, Mr Hosni would lean in close, his eyes flicking back and forth over the tables and passers-by, and murmur or even whisper a stream of speculation and revelations. Dhurgham would get a run-down on the dress, class and sexual behaviour of the westerners who sat and smoked or walked past. Mr Hosni also knew many of them and knew terrible things about them. Some of them knew him and came over to say hello, and Mr Hosni would behave deferentially and courteously but then tell stories of rape and depravity that made Dhurgham look again at these clean-shaven figures and have nightmares.

Mr Hosni loved people-watching. These excursions into gossip and the frightening world beneath people's façades became a feature of their life together. Mr Hosni, who was himself afraid of people, felt immeasurably strengthened by having someone to whom he could tell all the terrible secrets that had crept into his range of vision. Mr Hosni never forgot anything. The only people Mr Hosni feared and hated more than westerners were the police.

Mr Hosni called off the scouts seeking Mr and Mrs Nasr and their daughter, lost somewhere without money in Damascus. Dhurgham writhed in horror at night, wondering whether his parents had guessed what he had named himself and them; sure, almost sure, that Nura would guess. He could hear his father's voice over and over:
Once we cross the border, never use our real name. We'll get new identity papers as soon as we get to Damascus
. He couldn't bring himself to confide in Mr Hosni. He knew Mr Hosni had guessed from the start that he was lying about his name, for he was an inexperienced liar. He was bewildered by the satisfaction that gleamed from his benefactor at the lie.

‘Birdie by name, Birdie by nature!' Mr Hosni would croon sometimes. Other times he would murmur, ‘My little Eagle will fly, ooh yes. One of these days.'

Dhurgham began to hate the name.
Never use our real name. NEVER use our real name.