PART 1
1. Salinah Mahrami : Desert
I must think like a box, thinks Salinah Mahrami. She lies crushed flat into the back of a truck, hot and a frenzied with thirst, but knowing their lives depend on her being a box. In the jostling dark, she steels herself still for the sake of her son. He burrows into her. The air in the truck is diesel and urine and shit, and sweat congeals over her skin. So on this third day of their new life as freight, she must finally ask herself if it is so wise to flee her homeland. To abandon everything that defines them, and fly like specks of dust west across the desert? Wise, to be scattered by the winds of politics forever around the planet? For something as weightless as an idea? Air, she thinks, kicking off boxes, gasping, ‘Aghh!!’
The truck clunks to a halt. A bolt scrapes back, and releases a blast of sunlight: ‘Shut up!’ hisses the driver, pulling clear a box of dates. His silhouette blazes at them. ‘The border is close. The soldiers might search the truck. Understand?’
She pulls Afif against her. Surely he knew this already. ‘Perhaps we should turn back.’ She searches his outline for a nod. ‘Come when it’s safer.’
The driver groans deep in the ache of his belly. ‘There is no safe time. Especially for you.’
No woman, she knows, can travel without husband or male relative. A son will not do. She prays they recall the Prophet’s words: Revere your mother. But she is not their mother.
‘Shut up and pray!’ he says, slamming them back into blackness. The truck shudders forward, tossing them in and out of potholes, as if the country wants to shake them off its rump. Yet the country will not let them go. It would love them to death. She smacks a box down around Afif, and soon they hear shouts and banging of doors.
‘What have you got?!’ shouts a voice just outside.
‘A few dates only.’
‘Dates?!’
She imagines the driver shrugging.
‘Hardly worth the petrol.’
She sees the driver pout, tilt his head, a poor man who knows only about dates.
In silence money is paid, and they are through.
The truck creeps on, like a beetle crossing an infinitude of sand. In her swelter and darkness, Salinah feels a cool of tears on her arm, and asks, ‘Afif?’ But they are her tears. Perhaps it is too much to lose: one husband, one motherland. Maybe we should have simply renounced our belief. To embrace the country’s Faith is to be enfolded in the order and certainty of ancient ways, in the clarity of surrender to God’s will. Then we might all still be living at home, if we had just disowned the dangerous extremism of our belief. In bed, she had leant her cheek to his face: What good is freedom if we are dead, Jamaloddin? He smiled and seemed to look at her. Without freedom, Salinah, we are hardly alive. She ached to slap him. Cloaked in the shawl of The Faith, she could have walked safely about, teaching pious art, and he could be writing nice news reports. It was possible.
She strokes Afif’s cheek, surprised by his absence of scars. ‘Soon,’ she tells him, to soothe herself, knowing nothing of how far, if indeed anything awaits them. Around her waist she feels his small arms clinging like tendrils.
‘Will they have water?’
She smooths his hair. ‘Of course.’
‘And shade?’
‘Everything.’
Afif clenches in on himself, imagining how his father would be – like stone, with the heart of a warrior.
In prison, of course, the decision was already made. Then she could only watch the slow collapse of the political prisoners, their deaths always expected, always a shock. Detention is only to extract a confession, said one guard. No more.
And if they have nothing to confess?
Always her weakness for questions. He narrowed his eyes and sniffed her stink, sizing her up for later. They would not be detained, you fool!
She held to Afif.
But we take measures to find the truth, a sly grin about his eyes, and we know when we have found it.
Her face began to shiver.
*
On fluky legs they stand beside their truck, squinting under an ochre sky, a sun the colour of dry blood. ‘Where is the camp?’ she asks the driver.
He opens his hands and smiles.
‘And the embassies?’
He slides back into his cabin. ‘You’re free now. They’ll find you.’
They watch the dust of their truck recede like the smoky ruins of a bombed town, inhaling the air of the desert, how it tastes of rust and clay, bitterly sweet but free of diesel and urine. They squint down into a ferment of what could be a settlement, and Afif squeezes her hand in both his hands. ‘Look Afif. Children.’
‘They look strange.’
‘But children. That’s good.’
‘Then there must be a school.’
‘Yes, and books. And teachers!’
They look for buildings, or a road, for any bloom of civilisation in this squall of dust.
‘Will the truck return?’ Afif asks.
She searches his eyes, for her answer, for a blade of hope to offer in return.
So they walk down into the camp as if learning to walk again, surprised by the suddenness of people here, the scratch of wind. They shuffle through sepia lanes of hessian and sticks and barefoot children. Refuge, Salinah thinks, though a weight of mud has begun to cling to her shoes. It is too quiet. There is no refuge from the sun. ‘There will be other Baha’is here, Afif.’ Under some trees, a group of figures lie as if scattered by a dusty wind. She waves, and they turn their heads to watch her without curiosity. She asks a woman sitting on the ground before her tent, ‘Where is the office here?’ The flies at her mouth are not troubled. ‘Sister. The office?’ A look of faint interest visits her eyes, then goes. Salinah touches her hand, shocked by its coldness. She whispers a Baha’i blessing, and hurries on.
‘Down there,’ says Afif.
‘Where? How do you know?’
‘Down there.’ He points along another row of crowds and dust. And because where else can they go, they trudge deeper through the orange mist of bodies and voices and curious fingers brushing against them, feeling their skin hardening with dust.
‘It’s good,’ she tells Afif. ‘The Australian embassy will take us in.’
He stops, ‘Australia?’ the force of his glare on her.
‘Your Uncle Behyouz is there.’ She strokes his hand. ‘We will be safe, Afif.’
He pulls back. Our truck, he thinks, must still be close. He could run after it, get home in three days and rescue his father. She reaches, but he steps away. No, he will be a man, make his father proud. ‘No! We can’t run away!’
‘Afif, we must…’
‘It’s cowardice. My father needs us!’
She steadies him by both his shoulders. ‘Dear Afif, even the Beloved One fled our country. It’s better to live for God than to die for men.’
Fire and tears swell his face. ‘No!’ he says. ‘Better to die!’ He blunders away, his open shirt flapping like a flag behind him.
‘Afif!’ Standing alone, she is suddenly tired.
*
‘So, where are your papers?’ asks the official. He shuffles behind his barricade of files.
‘You know I have none. Be serious.’
The man glances up, recognising the dry woman in rags and the boy at her side. ‘Mahrami, you say?’
She grips her chair, would love to slap him. ‘And you know this also. Must we pretend?’
He looks from the boy’s unblinking stare to the Baha’i woman he saw last month. And the month before. She is part of the endless queue of muddy beggars who come with nothing but empty palms and the gaze of cattle in their eyes. But not yet this one, strangely. After six months, she still looks at him, and dares to be angry. Some take longer to dry into replicas of the people they once were. Perhaps if the bigwigs came and saw. It’s out of his hands. ‘We have made enquiries,’ he says. ‘But your government is slow.’
‘My government!’ She stands. Just one smack would wake this fool. He lets her glare for a while. In another time and place she would have turned heads.
‘Last week, they sent confirmation. They say you are…’ he glances down at a paper, ‘…Dider Rezaio.’
‘What?!’ How she aches to shake him by his chicken neck.
‘Dider Razaio. And they write you are wanted by the police for theft.’
‘Are you insane?’
He smiles. Perhaps.
She steps back. One kick would collapse his brittle table; send his little pile of papers to dust.
‘They say you are a petty criminal whom they’re not very interested in.’ He stares and nods.
‘This is…’
‘But if you were the Baha’i, Mahrami, they would be very interested.’
She can see in his eyes some flecks of green. She finds her chair.
‘Mr Mahrami was well known.’
She stares. She is wearing, he notices, a blouse from her city, but old and beginning to shred. To wash it might be fatal.
‘You must think, and then tell me who you are: Mahrami or Rezaio.’
She glances at the boy. Her hands flutter.
The boy stands: ‘We would like to return.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No!’ says the woman.
Yet something very certain reaches from Afif into the official, strikes him like a punch to the forehead.
In the large tent she shares with 200 others, Salinah cries for all the world to see, her face streaked in tears. There is no shelter from their stares… She can see good reason to wear full burqua, as many now do, for its tiny privacy. It would be her own dark tent. Her proper place as a woman, where she must, with all her heart, hide Afif inside from the reach of this camp and the hurt it does the children. They swarm among the adults, bartering their small bodies for food, or running heroin under the blind eyes of the few policemen. A little rice might entice them into school for a day. But Afif needs no such lure: he feeds on the words they teach him at the special school for the Faithful. ‘Afif, you are Baha’i. Keep away from them.’
‘They are strong, mother. And wise.’
‘”Wise”?!’ She shakes her son, ‘I forbid it!’ wanting to tell him that these are the people who killed his father. ‘No! Hear me, Afif?!’
But he slips away, runs like water to the lowest point, to the crowd. She once found him, cross-legged among the boys all neatly in rows, wearing red bandanas and chanting in a chorus like monks or soldiers. They chanted and rocked on their haunches, back and forth, and back and forth, willing truth into their words, mothered by their lullaby; and Afif rocking among them. Her heart shouted. But to speak out there, especially a woman, would be asking for death.
‘You must stay by me, Afif. On your father’s life!’
‘What good is waiting?! Nothing comes to those who wait here!’
‘Listen, they will send us to Australia. And Soon. Uncle Behyouz will help.’
‘No! If we go home now, the Faithful will help me find my father!’
She gazes into the depth of her boy’s eyes, into his fear and thirst for his father, his wild lost eyes. ‘Afif, maybe your father…’ He stares: she must tell him about the mob that took his father away. For his education, one told her. Your husband will realise that scripture is the foundation of the State. And perhaps he did see. ‘Afif, maybe your father… is no longer…’
‘No!’ He kicks their pallet away, ‘You’re lying!’ and runs.
She scrambles upright, ‘Wait!’ but too slow. They had announced, Art must glorify only God, and closed down her art school. They burnt her paintings. Our bodies are not for lust, and slapped her face. She hurries, but Afif has plunged into a sea of mud huts. She tries to run. ‘Afif!’ she shouts. He is probably already at the school. A drowning person clutches at a snake.
People stare at the mad woman, running and sending up small puffs of dust. She remembers the policeman. Last month, he came to that school: he tried to stop the orphans from going there. They bound his body to a pole. Still he shouted to the children. So they cut off his head, and tied it between his legs. Anyone touching this body, said their sign, will share its fate.
‘Afif!’ she calls to the cloudless sky.
At the Reception Centre, the man is startled by her loud arrival. She glares down at him, gasping. Normally these people slide in like shadows, he thinks. ‘Your identity?’
Her fingers lift the pale scarf that is always at her neck, and drape it about her face. Against her cheek it is a shroud, so cool and raw. ‘I am…’ she wills herself not to tear off the scarf, not to run to the school and their blades, and her death, ‘…Didar Rezaio.’
He squints into her eyes, but she does not look away. This name on her lips tastes of blood. She must scream.
‘I know someone, Mrs Rezaio,’ he smiles. ‘He can take you and your son where you want to go. If you want.’
She gazes past him out into the blaze of sky, vast and open and empty. ‘Yes.’