The Best Australian Essays 2014 (32 page)

‘You will go in a taxi with this guy,' Hajji Sahib told me. ‘He will bring you to a safe place.'

We drove in silence, for about an hour, to the northern edge of the city, where gated communities vied for waterfront with ramshackle slums on the garbage-heaped banks of Jakarta Bay. We pulled into the parking lot of a massive tower-block apartment complex and took an elevator to the twenty-third floor. Midway down a poorly lit hallway, our escort knocked on a metal security door. A young girl in a dress decorated with images of Barbie let us in. An Iranian man sat at a glass table, tapping ash from a cigarette into a water-bottle cap. A small boy lay on a bare mattress, watching cartoons. ‘Okay?' asked the Indonesian, and before anyone could answer, he was gone.

The man, Youssef, had been living in the apartment for a couple of weeks with his eight-year-old son, Anoush, and six-year-old daughter, Shahla. (All the names of the asylum seekers in this story have been changed for their protection.) Youssef had been a laborer in Tehran, refurbishing building exteriors. In order to pay Hajji Sahib, he had sold all his possessions and gave up the house he was renting. He left his wife with her parents, planning to bring her to Australia legally once he and the children were settled there. ‘In Iran, there is no work, no life, no future for these children,' Youssef told me, nodding at Anoush and Shahla. ‘I want them to go to school so that they can get a position.'

We were sitting at the table, in one of the apartment's three rooms. A TV and refrigerator stood against the far wall, opposite a sink and counter, with a two-burner camping stove. Whereas Youssef, plainly, was less than thrilled to have new roommates (there were only two beds, one of them a narrow twin), Anoush and Shahla were competing to one-up each other with hospitality. After Shahla complimented Joel and me on our ‘beautiful beards', Anoush set about preparing us a lunch of chicken-flavored instant noodles.

Shahla said, ‘People become thieves there, in Iran.'

‘In Australia, I want to be a policeman,' Anoush announced. ‘I want to arrest thieves, and say, “Hands up!”'

Youssef seemed to disapprove. ‘They will study,' he said.

On different floors throughout the tower block, other apartments housed about thirty more asylum seekers. Some were Hajji Sahib's; some belonged to rival smugglers. A majority, I was surprised to discover, were not Afghan but Iranian. Most were from cities and the lower middle class. They were builders, drivers, shopkeepers, barbers. One man claimed to be a mullah; another, an accomplished engineer. Their reasons for leaving varied. They all complained about the government and its chokehold on their freedoms. A few said they had been targeted for political persecution. They bemoaned the economy. International sanctions – imposed on Iran for refusing to abandon its nuclear program in 2006 and later tightened – had crippled their ability to support their families. They were fathers who despaired of their children's futures, or they wanted children but refused to have them in Iran. The most common word they used to describe their lives back home was
na-aomid
– hopeless.

Shortly after we settled into the apartment, an Iranian named Rashid stopped by for a visit. Rashid had the sickly, anaemic look that I would soon come to associate with asylum seekers who languished in that place for two months or more – a combination of malnourishment and psychological fatigue. As he collapsed into a chair, elbows propped on knees, chin propped on palm, he seemed to lack even the most basic gravity-resisting vigour. After a month in Jakarta, Rashid told me, he got aboard a boat bound for Christmas Island. The engine promptly failed, leaving them adrift for days. In lieu of a bilge pump, Rashid and the other men had to use buckets to bail out the water splashing into the hull and seeping through its wooden planks. They ran out of food and water. People might have begun succumbing to dehydration if the tide hadn't carried them to a remote island. There they were arrested and obliged to pay the Indonesian police before they could be freed.

‘We came back to this place,' Rashid said. ‘The smuggler said, “Don't worry, we will take you again soon.”'

I glanced at Joel. Over the phone, while we were in Kabul, Hajji Sahib urged us to get to Jakarta as soon as possible, saying the next boat was ready to depart.

‘Our smuggler told us we were leaving tomorrow,' I said.

Rashid laughed. ‘Yes, they say that.'

*

The waiting was brutal: doing nothing became the most onerous of chores. The fact that your smuggler could call at any time, day or night, meant that you were forever suspended in a state of high alert. It also meant you couldn't venture far. Most of the asylum seekers, additionally fearful of police, never left the building. Generally, they spent their days sleeping as much as possible, smoking cigarettes and rotating through one another's rooms – for a change of scenery, presumably, though they were all identical. Everyone was broke, and meals, in our apartment anyway, consisted of instant noodles, once or twice a day, on occasion served with bread. To sleep, Youssef, Anoush and Shahla shared one of the two beds, while Joel and I alternated between the other and a thin mattress on the floor. Mattress nights were coveted, because it lay at the foot of the refrigerator, which you could open for a brief but glorious breath of cool air when you woke drenched in sweat, and because, compared with the bed, it was relatively free of fleas.

Although many of the asylum seekers in the building had children, only Youssef had brought his with him. (The others expected to be reunited with their families in Australia.) It's difficult to imagine how Anoush and Shahla processed the whole experience. My sense was that the thrill of the adventure eclipsed its hardships and hassles. With nothing and no one, except each other, to play with, they kept themselves remarkably well entertained. A feather duster found beneath the sink made for a superb tickling instrument; plastic grocery bags were turned into balloons; the hot-sauce packets, included in every ration of instant noodles, could be squirted on the tabletop to create interesting designs. There was also much to explore. The tower block was a kind of self-sufficient microcity, its four lofty wings flanking a private courtyard with shops and fish fries servicing outdoor tables clustered around a concrete bandstand. Every night, wizened Indonesian men belted out karaoke covers of John Denver and Johnny Cash. There was a Muslim mosque, a Christian church, a Buddhist temple. There were giant roaches and tailless cats to chase. And most delightfully, there was a pool.

As neither of the kids had swimming trunks or a spare pair of clothes, underwear had to suffice. Applying their talents for improvisation, Shahla found a used dish rag they could both share for a towel, while Anoush, with a kitchen knife, removed a length of flexible tubing from the back of our air-conditioner (which was broken anyway), repurposing it as a snorkel. Their resourcefulness continued at the pool itself: each day, they seemed to come into possession of some new equipment – a pair of goggles, a bar of soap, an inflatable flotation ring.

While Youssef made the rounds of the rooms, Joel and I would end up watching them at the pool. We were both distressed to see that neither Anoush nor Shahla could really swim.

When I asked Anoush, who had never been on a boat before, whether he was nervous about the journey, he clucked his tongue. ‘I have no fear,' he said. ‘I'll be smiling.'

Their father was less carefree. Not long after we joined them, it became clear that Youssef had no money, and if Joel and I didn't buy food and water, they would simply go without. Whenever the fleas or heat would wake me in the night, I would find Youssef sitting by the window, staring out at the fires – bright islands of flame and eerily coloured smoke – where the slum dwellers were burning trash. Everyone was stressed; the strain of two kids and no cash, however, rendered Youssef especially edgy. He was given to fits of anger and with the slightest provocation could fly into rages at Anoush, as well as at the other asylum seekers, many of whom avoided him.

Then one day Youssef's family wired money. I was sitting with him in the apartment, smoking, when he got the call. The news transformed him. Beaming with joy, Youssef leapt into the air and began to sing and dance.

That night Joel and I found him in the courtyard drinking with Rashid. Anoush and Shahla ran from shop to shop, swinging bags of candy. When he saw us, Youssef insisted we sit down, then shouted loudly, at no one in particular, for more beer. A group of elderly Indonesian men, playing dominoes nearby, regarded him impatiently. Youssef didn't notice. He was slumped over the table, doodling on its surface with a permanent marker.

Rashid seemed embarrassed for his friend. ‘His head is messed up,' he explained. ‘Waiting here, with his kids, not knowing when we'll go. It's hard.'

Youssef nodded glumly.

‘My head is messed up, too,' Rashid said. ‘I'm going crazy. I have two sons in Iran. I haven't seen them or my wife in a year.'

Rashid said that before Australia, he tried to get to Europe via Greece. He made it from Turkey to Athens, where he was fleeced by a smuggler. Rather than return to Iran, he came to Indonesia. ‘Every day, they tell us, “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Rashid said. ‘But tomorrow never arrives.'

Anoush and Shahla appeared and asked Youssef for money. They wanted chips. Youssef pulled out a wad of bills and threw some in their direction. Several fluttered to the ground.

‘Beer!' Youssef yelled at a woman passing by. Then he looked guiltily at Rashid, and added: ‘Please! Thank you!'

*

Australia's decision to send all boat people to Papua New Guinea or the Republic of Nauru only compounded everyone's anxiety. Although no one allowed himself to take it seriously (if he did, he would have no option but to do the unthinkable – give up, go home), the news was never decisively explained away. ‘It's a lie to scare people so that they don't come,' Youssef told me when I brought it up. Another man became agitated when I asked him what he thought. ‘How can they turn you away?' he demanded. ‘You put yourself in danger, you take your life in your hand? They can't.' A third asylum seeker dismissed the policy with a shrug. ‘It's a political game,' he told me.

In many ways, he was right. It's hard to overstate how contentious an issue boat people are in Australian politics. From an American perspective, zealousness on the subject of immigration is nothing unfamiliar. But what makes Australia unique is the disconnect between how prominently boat people feature in the national dialogue, on the one hand, and the actual scale of the problem, on the other. Over the past four years, most European countries have absorbed more asylum seekers, per capita, than Australia – some of them, like Sweden and Liechtenstein, seven times as many. All the same, for more than a decade now, successive Australian governments have fixated on boat people, making them a centrepiece of their agendas.

In the summer of 2001, a Norwegian freighter, the MV
Tampa,
rescued 433 asylum seekers, almost all of them Afghan, from a stranded fishing boat. Rather than return them to Indonesia, the captain of the
Tampa,
Arne Rinnan, consented to their demands to be taken to Christmas Island. Australia forbade the ship to enter its territory, and the standoff that ensued led to Australia's threatening to prosecute Rinnan and Norway's complaining to the United Nations. John Howard, a conservative prime minister, who, in the midst of a re-election campaign, was trailing his opponent in most of the polls, declared, ‘It remains our very strong determination not to allow this vessel or its occupants to land in Australia.' When Rinnan, concerned over the welfare of the asylum seekers on his ship, proceeded toward the island anyway, Howard dispatched Australian commandos to board the
Tampa
and stop it from continuing. The impasse was resolved only when New Zealand and Nauru agreed to accept the asylum seekers instead. Howard's action was widely popular with voters, and two months later he was re-elected.

Diverting boat people to third countries for processing – albeit with the possibility of someday being resettled in Australia – was subsequently adopted as an official strategy. Under an arrangement popularly known as the Pacific Solution, asylum seekers trying to get to Christmas Island were interdicted by the navy and taken to detention centres on Nauru and Papua New Guinea (both of which rely heavily on Australian aid). The Pacific Solution was denounced by refugee and human rights advocates, who criticised the harsh conditions of the centres and the prolonged periods of time – many years, in some cases – that asylum seekers had to spend in them while their applications were considered. Depression and other mental disorders proliferated; incidents of self-harm were common. In 2003, detainees on Nauru protested with a weeks-long hunger strike, during which some of them sewed their lips together. Last September, Arne Rinnan, the captain of the
Tampa,
told an interviewer that he had recently received a letter from Nauru, written by one of the Afghans he had rescued. According to Rinnan, the man said that ‘I should have let him die in the Indian Ocean, instead of picking him up.'

After the Labor Party regained control of parliament in 2007, and the new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, abolished the Pacific Solution – his immigration minister condemning it as ‘neither humane nor fair' – the UN and just about every other organisation involved with refugees lauded the move. Rudd lost his leadership of the Labor Party in 2010, and his successor, Julia Gillard, resurrected the offshore-processing strategy. When Rudd returned to power in 2013, apparently having learned his lesson, he kept Gillard's policies in place. It was in the context of another re-election bid in July that Rudd eliminated the possibility of any boat person ever settling in Australia. ‘I understand that this is a very hard-line decision,' he acknowledged in a national address. He seemed anxious to make sure that voters understood it too.