The Marsh Birds (18 page)

Mr Donald had almost half the population on high-alert surveillance, or ‘suicide watch', and thirty percent of his staff on stress leave.

Abu Nizar was a quiet man. He never complained. He had been almost completely silent since Mrs Azadeh got her visa and settled in some hypothetical place called Albany, made all the more unreal by her descriptions in her first letter to him. Dhurgham loved him. Abu Nizar was the horologist, after all. The only man who understood in intricate detail the mystery of what they were enduring. When he told Dhurgham three times that his back hurt and there was blood in his urine, Dhurgham forced him to go to a nurse.

Abu Nizar nearly left the queue when he saw Miss Cora was on duty, but Dhurgham cajoled and pleaded, calling him Uncle.

No one liked to see Miss Cora.

Miss Cora looked at Abu Nizar coldly and threw three Panadol tablets at his feet. Abu Nizar didn't bend to pick them up.

‘Are we animals, that you treat us like this?' Abu Nizar seemed to be choking. He never spoke so loudly.

Dhurgham had never heard Abu Nizar raise his voice. He stared, worried, at the older man's drawn face.

‘You are lower than animals,' Miss Cora said and turned her back to them.

Dhurgham said nothing and left quietly with Abu Nizar.

Abu Nizar climbed onto the roof that afternoon. He shouted over and over, ‘I want my watch! Where is my father's gold watch!' and tapped his wrist repeatedly. Then he slashed himself open across the belly with some glass he had been hiding before the guards swarmed up and beat him down with batons. Abu Nizar disappeared, transported in the night to a hospital in Adelaide. When he returned two weeks later, he was put in isolation and for some reason never released in all the remaining time Dhurgham was there. Dhurgham asked about him now and then and was told he was still there, fine, but could not be visited. He took it calmly, without question, without frowning.

Dhurgham was put on the high-alert surveillance list, and he found that with the tablets came constant intrusions to check that he had not harmed himself, and more frequent room searches. He started to imagine shocking them by harming himself. It gave him a lot of pleasure. AID didn't care for him! No, not at all. It would just look bad if someone died and they couldn't cover it up. He wished he could die just to show them up and then come back and gloat.

He had come to like his number. He felt powerful every time he signed a cartoon RRN 230. He referred to himself ironically, playing the fool, the mad prisoner who has forgotten his real name. But this also made him feel armoured and that was a good thing, here in this room.

He drew the wriggly butterfly line on the white page that made his Australia. Its skin. Its spread. The first time he'd traced it out from an atlas in the recreation room it had been as seemingly random as a water stain dried into the page. Now it was absolute. Fixed. More firm than the shocking, cold stars in the sky above Mawirrigun. He could do it now with his eyes shut. His face was dreamy. This line was mantric, a chant filled with the need to repeat and repeat.

He drew a stylised flame off-centre, the heart. It might be a campfire, warming him. But this was Mawirrigun. This was the X marking the spot where he, RRN 230, sat. This flame was both his prison and himself. Flame, rose, dagger, heart (cleft)—this symbol, in this spot, whatever he drew, also required no thought. Mawirrigun was forever.

Then he divided Australia from top to bottom with a careful but wavering line. The Highway. The one road in the red desert to the north of Mawirrigun, to the south of Mawirrigun. The one road to and from forever. He felt utterly calm as his blood stilled into the drawing.

Today he drew the Highway as a zipper, opening down—opening that blank unknown country, to what? In the start of that V was nothingness. He drew slanting rainfall and under it a multifoliate rose, rising out of the zipper. Himself.

In that V, in the opening up of the red highway, in the splitting of the desert by rain and in the desert flowers, there he would find himself. One day. Outside forever and back into the rush of a sunset and the wind roaring past an open window and the sound of a diesel engine, steady and dependable, rushing away and unzipping the world. Behind him flowers. The sempiternal foliage of the mosque mosaic formed unasked from his pen.

Another day he began the same cartoon, trying to perfect it, but when he drew the open zipper and tried on inspiration to draw the AID Minister Cowell peeping out, Mr Hosni's grinning face flooded from his pen onto the page.

Dhurgham went on hunger strike. The heat shimmered around him and inside him. The weaker he got, the more he felt that he was glowing with the heat. Here, here was the power and the glory he had lost all this while! Here in his empty belly and his legs and arms that could no longer carry him! He thought of the curling leaves and glinting mosaics. He found he could remember with clarity every curl, every frond, every ancient façade and stair, and he lost himself in ageless grandeur. He thought of the ocean rising and falling under the holy light of the sun and he dived singing into its coolness and drowned. He was a saint and a devil, a dagger in the sides of the guards. He reached into his memory for the stillness and not the anxiety, for the beauty and not the stink. Without moving his head from his bed he could feel their discomfort and his resolve strengthened. He had been thus on the boat, yes. He was strong. Stronger than these guards and these soft voices, and stronger than these flimsy walls, these metal barricades! He soared in a waking dream, ecstatic in his burning bed, joyous, vicious, exultant.

What Peter saw when he went to visit Dhurgham with Don Riordan's message was different from what he had expected. He saw a bone-thin teenage boy lying flat on a bed, huge black eyes burning but otherwise motionless. Dhurgham pulled dry lips back over sticky yellow teeth in a grimace and whispered,‘I am stronger than all of you.' Peter didn't see the joy. He only saw a boy with fetid breath who should have been using his muscles and mind, wasting away in a feverish madness.

‘Tom,' he said quietly,‘I have been told to tell you that you are to be forcibly fed and given water unless you stop this nonsense now.'

Dhurgham's laugh was like a wind in sedge. ‘I am stronger,' he whispered again.

Dhurgham was cuffed to the bed by one hand and both feet. Miss Cora held his head to stop him threshing. A new guard he hadn't seen before straddled his stomach. Mr Theo held his arm and the nurse inserted a cannula and attached it to a drip. Dhurgham fell asleep almost instantly and didn't wake for three days.

Without warning, Dhurgham was moved out of Mawirrigun to Kanugo Kagil 3000 kilometres to the east. Mr Donald called him into his office, told him that this was in preparation for him to be deported, forcibly if he refused to go, and then the guards put him on the darkened bus without letting him return to his room and get his shoes. It all happened in a split second, then there was the numbing bus journey—a sequence of strange, bleak service stations and an armed guard at his toilet door, and then for days he felt himself sitting like a ghost in his new room, taking his time to catch up with his body.

Two hours after he left, Jean-Luc Isakowski arrived for the appointment he had confirmed with AID staff a week before. He was met with blank looks and then assurances that his client had been transferred, that his client had expressly stated that he didn't want to see Mr Isakowski because he was a Jew, and that his client was now in Kanugo Kagil. Mr Isakowski rang Kanugo Kagil. RRN 230 was not there either but was expected. He sighed and asked resignedly to see his other clients. He packed up his doubts at the end of the day and got in his outdated car and drove the fifteen hours back to Adelaide to try to find out what had really happened.

Once Dhurgham caught up with himself and had time to think it over and feel Mawirrigun sink into the past and dreams, the move to Sydney set a small clock ticking. It broke his Australia open and gave it form, colour, dimension. The momentum of the move from desert to city could not be stilled. In Kanugo Kagil he was wound up, waiting, he wasn't sure what for, but he knew that he couldn't stay, not long. The energy charging him day and night had to carry him out and away. Kanugo Kagil looked like a prison but it wasn't, not entirely. It was too sloppy, much sloppier than Mawirrigun. The worst guards and security officers could indulge in behaviour far less controlled than in a prison; the best could be far gentler and more indulgent. The place had so much regulation that was invented to annoy that its regulations for smooth management and policies of basic procedure were eroded, highly variable. Dhurgham noted all this with pleasure.

Kanugo Kagil had no electrified outer perimeter fence. It had the jagged wire scroll over the top, but the single fence itself seemed to him amazingly permeable. At one point he could stand, fingers locked through that single scaly skin, and look straight out into a cracked asphalt lane leading past miscellaneous brick walls and an overhang of jasmine, past an old, upturned green rubbish bin to a street lamp. He could see the exotic peaks of red and orange tiled roofs. In the distance he could hear a clock chime, on the half-hour, on the hour. He could feel himself to be a crooked finger's breadth from a return to life. He could hear its hum and bustle, its measured paces, its rituals. The scurry in the morning, horns blaring, to work and to school. The scurry home, the settled quiet. Its monitors: the clock and the intermittent sirens. His fingers could push through into air in which the police tracked down the bad people and the ambulances rescued the hurt people; and fires were put out without anyone being beaten up. And the clock.

Curiously, he knew none of the people in his compound. Some he mistook at first for visitors, as less than half were Arab, Iranian or Afghan. He had expected to find Rafik and others who had been transported, but they were long gone. Some knew of them and could tell him that they were released or deported, or hospitalised, but none of this seemed real. Dhurgham had no hope of release. But he had growing hope of freedom. His fear kept him awake and alert, and his spirits remained high.

He didn't plan his escape. He kept himself to himself, quiet, uncommunicative. He was still on high surveillance but he paid no attention to the intrusions. He prayed. No one knew him here, so he rebuilt himself as a quiet, devout, good man: a horologist. Within two weeks he was rewarded and taken off the list. He began to avoid taking his drugs when he could. He needed to be alert, to miss nothing. He waited and watched for his escape to be made manifest to him. He put all his trust in God.

When the single fence parted in front of him, he was unsurprised. He barely heard the grunts and gasps of the two men. He didn't feel their fear or urgency. He heard the clang of the miraculous two-handled cutters as they fell slowly to ground, and he flowed like water through the breach, singing.

Eleven men struggled through after him, only six part of any plan, before the hole was plugged in a shriek of sirens and hoarse shouting. But Dhurgham was with God. He was long gone, running far and fast in the windswept streets, moving, inspired, into a maze of alleys; leaping to hide, inspired, in an enclosed private garden. He sang quietly as he sat on a wooden garden bench under a sweet-smelling tree with a smooth white trunk.

A song then welled up in him. It seemed to come from somewhere beneath his belly, deep from the well of his childhood. It was the radio play theme song of the great knight and warrior Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, who arose from the East, blessed with a green spot on his cheek, fated to revenge his father's murder, to unite the warring clans in an empire and to love his beloved. He set the land aflame in victory, glory and ultimately tragedy. It was silly. He smiled to himself. He
did
feel sort of heroic. He
had
stood up, seized back his self and walked away, as he had once thought they all had to.

He was encircled by flowers. It wasn't Joyce Collyer's garden, he could tell. He was probably nowhere near Bondi. He wasn't even sure Bondi existed. He stroked the Australians' white, golden-eyed cat, his hands quivering in delight, his heart filled with love. It had been so long since he had touched a creature! He trusted the rhythm of the city that he would be safe until about six-thirty, and then, when he heard the chime, nearer now, he stopped humming and hid in a dusty woodshed filled with aromatic resinous logs until God brought down the curtain of night and flooded the place with slanting rain. His heart beat like a furnace bellows; God's blessed cat purred against his chest and he stayed warm.