The Marsh Birds (7 page)

‘He's not your nephew. You've told me as much yourself. Who calls a child “Dhurgham” these days anyway? He's an upper-class Baghdadi, who arrived at your doorstep laden with money. No doubt in Syria illegally. What does that make him, Hani?

‘You tell me.'

‘A liability. Get rid of him before he grows to manhood and takes a close look at you.'

Mr Hosni laughed. But later he worried over Mr Hilton's words. Mr Hilton was no Damascene. He was one of those strange British men who had travelled all over, including, in Mr Hilton's case, Baghdad, and who then stayed semipermanently, settling in to a world in which their outsider status and diplomatic connections were just enough for them to live outside the law; and their knowledge, experience, contacts and practised Arabic were enough to give them access to subterranean circles. He was a procurer, a man who gave other westerners tours. Mr Hosni had kept Dhurgham well away from that circle, protecting him from such men, and Mr Hilton was, he was sure, offended. But Mr Hilton knew more than he was letting on. Maybe he even recognised the boy. Maybe Mr Hilton would try to poison his birdie's mind against him. And Mr Hosni was startled to realise that he had never really thought about what would happen when Dhurgham grew up and thought about everything. Would Dhurgham really see it his way? Could the boy hate him for what he had done? There was the money—but what was money when it came to love? He could not desert the boy. He had never felt such love for anyone. Did his boy love him in return?

He thought hard about it. The reaction to his announcement that the money was gone had always irked him. If the boy loved him, would he have cared so much? Birdie had really failed that test. Mr Hosni had always comforted himself that the other suggestion had triggered it and had been cross with himself for bringing that up at the same time. But what if some vestige of the boy's past still tainted him?

Mr Hosni worried for three nights. The problem of Dhurgham grew in urgency the more attention he gave it. What would happen? Could Dhurgham creep into this room in the darkness with a shining knife in his hand? Mr Hosni felt a frisson of delicious, sensual fear. Then he felt spooked. After the romantic image, there would of course be the plunging knife, again and again, the convulsion and then … oblivion. His mother's tears. He lay quiet, thinking more coldly. If not the knife, then what? The Police? This thought filled him with a cold, leaden fear. There was nothing sensual about al Mazzeh prison.

He had to get rid of him. But the boy would be better off dead than cast out. Unwanted and betrayed. No. That would be too cruel. And he had sworn he would never cast him out. In the early hours of the third morning he almost screwed up his courage to organise the boy's disappearance. But it was a phantom. As soon as he put the proposition seriously to himself, he knew that he couldn't possibly really contemplate it. Then, at the call to prayer of the third dawn, he had an inspiration.

Mr Hosni knew he would miss Dhurgham, but with the threat of Dhurgham's manhood disrupting everything, even proving dangerous, he couldn't keep him.

He slept all morning. It was perfect.

At breakfast, a week later, Mr Hosni let himself look appropriately tired, drawn and worried. Dhurgham noticed straight away.

‘Sit down, Birdie.'

Dhurgham sat opposite Mr Hosni at the kitchen table, as they had so many times before.

Mr Hosni leant forward. Tears started involuntarily in his eyes. He really did feel immeasurably sad. He blenched and said in a low voice,‘They have found you out. They know who you are. We have to get you out of the country as soon as possible!' He watched with inner satisfaction as Dhurgham jumped fearfully.

Dhurgham stared speechless, his eyes wide. The past seemed so dreamy, such an unlikely story to carry with one as a half-held memory. And ‘they' had always been shadowy, dream figures. But what opened in his heart was a trickle, then a growing clamour for action, for leaving. It was as if Mr Hosni had painted a door on a picture, and said,
Go on, open it
. His heart thumped, and he watched his benefactor suspiciously.

‘I know a man, a
Mr Leon
,' Mr Hosni said, leaning forward and whispering the name, then sitting back again.‘I've paid for
everything
, because I love you, B— Dhurgham. I am sending you to a new life in Australia. You leave in two days. Once you are settled, you might send for me, your old Uncle, send me a visa—' He trailed off in a daydream. Birdie would never blame him. Birdie would have a new life, in a country where a boy could have a real job and would forget bad things. Birdie might marry and name his firstborn Hani … The plan was absolutely perfect. He felt so good about himself that the expense didn't bother him. He noted this with surprise and pleasure. Yes, that was it! No expense would be spared. A strangely enchanting sadness filled him. He had never felt quite so virtuous, quite so much the hero character—relinquishing all, selflessly, and righting wrongs at the same time. Dhurgham would love him, always. Alone in the kitchen, after Dhurgham went out for a walk, he sat silent, more sad now than happy. It was going to be a lonely house.

Dhurgham went first to the mosque. He hadn't been there for nearly two years. It looked smaller and grimier than he remembered, until he entered. The vista of the great courtyard opened up, vast and calm, the marble flagstones gleaming. He walked around the arcades slowly, glancing cursorily at all the familiar textures and images. He felt nothing at all. He could remember all this and it seemed that it had nothing to say to him now, or that it was unwilling to give him anything for his journey. He left again in minutes, vaguely relieved and disappointed.

He walked with long strides without direction through the streets. Slowly, he began to feel dizzy with joy, as if his legs were making huge bounds that were the clumsy preliminaries to graceful take-off, to long-distance migratory flight to the south. To the West. To the lands of the setting sun.
Australia
.

He was going to see a kangaroo.

He found himself on a street that seemed familiar —not from his time with Mr Hosni; this was a street of dreams, not of the real world. This was a street from before the mosque, his earliest clear point of continuous memory. His heart hammered and he felt sick and dizzy. Then he felt a stranger's sad kiss burn into his forehead before he even fully remembered. He crept stealthily along the street, sneaking up on his memories, on lost secrets. He came to a stop in front of the safe house before he recognised it.

He stared up at a blackened, pock-marked façade. It was a shell, burnt out and uninhabited. Destroyed some time before and overgrown with weeds. Part of the high wall was pushed down, as if by a bulldozer. The front door was gone, the interior fire-scarred in the shadows. He had a sudden revelation that his fleeting seconds on this same pavement two and a half years before had marked the house. That this was all part of his story and he had only the flimsiest hold on who he was in the world. The loss washed over him, pummelled him before he could deflect it. He was choking, again, again. A passing old man with broken teeth chanted in a singsong voice, ‘
Tears of parting sorrow over the cold ash of the beloved's campfire
,' and then winked at him. ‘You're too young, sonny!'

He walked away, still feeling the ghostly press of Ali's lips, feeling his sight darken and blister, and his legs weaken.

Who was Ali?
Who was Dhurgham Mohammad As-Samarra'i?

II

D
hurgham stepped off the plane into a buffet of humid heat. Indonesia. Indonesia leapt in to greet him with the call of the muezzin floating over lush green palms, heady green verges. Green. He felt the joy of it course through him. He was just fourteen; he was in a new land, beginning a new life. He had been on an aeroplane for the first time in his life. He could feel Damascus leaving him like an old stink peeling off under a hot shower.

He walked into the sudden cool of the terminal building with the others and stood with a kind of happy uncertainty in a sequence of queues.

The Indonesian official looked him in the eye and stamped his false passport without looking at it. Dhurgham came down to earth. He walked away with something nagging him. That official, he
knew
. His happy sense of freedom drained away. Mr Hosni and Mr Leon had of course arranged it.

Finding Mr Leon's contact in the car park was easy. A cluster of bewildered Iraqi and Afghan boys, covered women and shy, exhausted-looking children huddled together, eyeing everyone who passed. A dirty white minibus pulled up with Hotel Intan Sunray written on the side in English. The lettering formed the calyx of a magenta and orange flower. They were herded on by a hand-flapping Indonesian who seemed to know only rude words in Arabic. Their driver, by contrast, spoke Arabic and Dari, and said everything in both. Mr Leon, their driver said, had it all arranged. Mr Leon was the best travel agent, the best. They would be staying at the beautiful Hotel Intan Sunray in glorious Indonesia. They were to relax, recuperate until their boat was made ready to take them to freedom and prosperity in Australia.

‘Boat?' a voice interjected with a rising inflection. She was a thin young woman in chador, clutching two children in a white-knuckled grip.

‘Not boat, madame—ship! A Titanic, with three swimming pools,' the driver said waggishly, ‘Not to forget the bathers!'

The Hotel Intan Sunray was halfway between a hotel and a hostel. It was owned, their driver had said, by Mr Leon's brother-in-law. It was beautiful to Dhurgham but he couldn't enjoy it. All the staff knew. He heard ‘taliby-l-luju',‘asylum seekers', muttered here and there.

He became acutely conscious of the difference between his clothing and that of genuine tourists. He blushed as only fourteen year olds can over his sneakers, his jeans, his shirt, his hairstyle, his downy upper lip, his Arab eyes, his language, his overgrown fingernails and his lack of swimming trunks. He pestered his fellow travellers for a set of nailclippers and made a mess of his own hair trying to cut it. He tried to wear a keffiyeh to cover his damaged hair but took it off almost in tears after he got a filthy look from a beautiful American backpacker. The week spent on the gracious lawns and around the shining pool, in the foyer under the woodcarvings or with six others in the room, was agony.

The food was strange—rice, bean shoots, peanut sauce. He was curious and asked what everything was. He ate everything. He stole the menu in the restaurant of the Hotel Intan Sunray and pored over it, wondering at the impenetrable array of strangeness that might be laid out for him to try.
Nasi Campur, Selada Ayam, Lumpia, Gado-Gado
. The menu was bound by a green ribbon. The front cover showed a green terraced mountain with huge blooms and bamboo in the foreground, with people working near palm trees, backs bent, in the middle distance. Nothing could make Indonesia seem real to him. Even these fellaheen, working hard in the fields, were considered picturesque, ornamental.

The words on street signs were a strange language in European letters. He had enough English from primary school to see which bits were English but not enough to know exactly what they said or meant.
Safari Taylor
, one sign said; another,
Big Enjoy: Ketut Raja, Wood Carver
. Indonesian was somehow soft and ringing at the same time. Words of greeting were almost Arabic, familiar and strange, their known shapes wrapped in strange mouths and altered.

The throng on the beach was very quiet. The sun shone on the glittering blue water. Out towards the horizon Dhurgham could see that the ocean was speckled with white. Coloured pennants lined the sandy track behind them and snapped faintly in the breeze, swaying on their bamboo poles. Chickens pecked without ardour under the palm copses at the edge of the sand, ignoring the crowd. He had expected that their boat would be special, bigger and more modern than the fishing boats he had seen. He had a mental picture of something with sleek lines, white-hulled and with blue striping. Something clearly made for speed, as indestructible as a bullet and of course large enough to have a swimming pool. And beyond all this, he had expected it to be marked as special for him. It would have a special name and would be rigged with arcane Indonesian charms and silk flags fluttering in the breeze. It would have music and some strange, foreign ceremony which recognised that it was to carry a cargo beyond price to a new land. It would be charged with the nobility of its mission and the glory of the dangers it would face and overcome. Whatever their individual stories, he knew by now that his fellow travellers shared something. The boat would make the crossing from despair to hope; for some, from death to life.

He did not believe the fishing boat was their boat even as they were harried into the warm water to wade out to it. It was exactly the same as all the other larger fishing boats he had seen tossing and tugging at their ropes in the bay. It had the same battered, flaking blue paint, the same weathered wood, low gunwale and open deck. It was larger than it looked—once he had clambered and slithered aboard in his wet clothes, he found that it also had a lower hold rigged with a decking floor, in which most people could just stand. He had to stoop a little to fit. Even as they headed out towards that gaily speckled ocean, Dhurgham and some others kept looking for the boat they thought they were being ferried to.