Mahtab's Story

by Mahtab's Story (retail) (epub)

  Libby Gleeson is an acclaimed and much-loved author of over 30 books for children and teenagers. Her books have been shortlisted for Children’s Book Council awards eleven times and she has won three times – most recently the Early Childhood Award for Amy and Louis, illustrated by Freya Blackwood. The Great Bear (with Armin Greder) was the first Australian title to win the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi Award, in 2000.

  Libby has been a teacher and lecturer and a speaker at national conferences, and is actively involved in writers’ organisations. In 1997 she was awarded the Lady Cutler Award for Services to Children’s Literature and in 2007 she was made Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to literature and literacy education.

  You can find Libby’s website at

  www.libbygleeson.com.au

  Other books by Libby Gleeson

  Novels

  Eleanor, Elizabeth

  I Am Susannah

  Dodger

  Love Me, Love Me Not

  Refuge

  The Queen of the Universe

  The Hannah series

  Skating on Sand

  Hannah Plus One

  Hannah and the Tomorrow Room

  Picture books

  Big Dog

  Where’s Mum?

  Mum Goes to Work

  Sleeptime

  Shutting the Chooks In

  Cuddletime

  Amy and Louis

  and with Armin Greder

  Uncle David

  The Princess and the Perfect Dish

  The Great Bear

  (winner, Bologna Ragazzi Award)

  An Ordinary Day

  Mahtab’s

  Story

  Libby Gleeson

  Thanks to the Bundanon Trust

  for periods of unfettered writing time

  First published in 2008

  Copyright © text Libby Gleeson 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Gleeson, Libby, 1950–.

  Mahtab’s story.

  ISBN 9781741753349 (pbk.).

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Text and cover design by Sandra Nobes

  Typeset by Tou-Can Design

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Australia

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Teachers notes available at www.allenandunwin.com

  For Nahid and Dorothy

  Chapter One

  MAHTAB ACHED.

  She rubbed her freezing hands together and pressed them into her mouth, sucking the life back into them. Kilometre after kilometre, the cold continued. Icy air seeped up from the floor of the truck and made its way through the layers of her cotton weave trousers. It slipped through the timber joins near her head and chilled her face, her neck and her shoulders. It brought with it a fine, pale powder that worked its way into her hair, her eyes and her nose. All she could taste was diesel and dust.

  Mahtab wanted to leap up, to drum her heels against the floor, to fling her arms into the air and yell as if her heart and lungs would burst. But her throat was a closed and choking trapdoor. She was compelled and sentenced to silence.

  Farhad crouched beside her, his head not quite to her shoulder, exhausted and dulled into sleep. In the shadows, Mahtab could just make out the shape of her mother beside him. Soraya, thumb in mouth, was pressed against her, each as still as a block of stone.

  Every rock, every pothole and gouge in the road jarred her body against the rough timber that held her in.

  Would they ever get there? Would it ever be over?

  When had the fog of darkness and fear wrapped itself around the house? That fog that closed them in, all except Grandfather, Uncle Wahid and her own father too, until … She pushed that thought away. Think of before. Think of times like the wedding of Aunt Mina and Uncle Wahid when she was six. No fog then. They had all gone out to the hall and there was music and dancing and rows of tables laden with dishes of goat and lamb kebab, sweet fruit and yoghurt. Aunt Mina was queen for the night and even Mahtab had henna on her hands and had stayed up long after Farhad and the baby Soraya fell asleep. But Soraya wasn’t a baby any more. She was almost ready to learn to read.

  The fog must have been there the afternoon with the kites or why would Uncle Wahid have come running? ‘Stop! STOP!’ he yelled and the sleeves of his shirt flew wide and the afternoon sun glinted off the red lights of his beard. Farhad and Reza were racing around the yard with their kites. They challenged each other, laughing and whipping the strings, sharp with their fragments of glass, to slide against each other. It was a weird dance. They risked one cutting the other free, sending the bright blue and red squares flying, high into the open sky, across the city, lost for ever.

  Mahtab and Leila sat under the lemon tree and watched.

  ‘You must never,’ screamed Uncle Wahid, ‘never play this way again.’ He grabbed the strings, hauling them to his chest so swiftly that his hands were torn by the shiny splinters and his blood splashed first on the pale cotton of his trousers and then on the grass at his feet. ‘You are putting the whole family in danger, you will be killed and your fathers and your mothers and your brothers and your sisters and your cousins and what do you think you are doing? You have been told that everything has changed and you are never, never, never to play like this again.’

  Everything had changed. Mahtab held tightly to Leila’s hand. They watched as the boys, snivelling and shrunken, took the shovel and dug a hole under the lemon tree and buried the folded kites in the hard brown earth. They kicked dirt on the brightly coloured fabric, and when they had trodden the clods down Uncle put his arms around their shoulders and patted them, guiding them back into the house. They lay, curled up like babies, crying on their beds.

  Around that time, Leila began to come less often. Before, when their parents sat downstairs, talking and feasting on plates piled high with apricots and almonds, pears and pistachios, Mahtab and she slept above them on the roof. Warm under a single summer blanket, they planned their lives. ‘I will be a teacher like my Aunt Mariam,’ said Leila. ‘And I will have five children and a handsome husband.’

  ‘I will be a doctor like Grandma’s sister,’ said Mahtab. ‘And my husband will be handsome too. I think I’ll have three children, all girls because boys are so much trouble.’ They giggled and pointed at the sky and claimed the stars as their own.

  But then school had stopped. For a time secret lessons continued with a tutor, but then Leila and her family were gone.

  ‘Where is she?’ said Mahtab. ‘Why didn’t she say goodbye? She is my friend, my sister.’

  ‘They are gone to Iran,’ her father said. ‘They left secretly because there was great danger for her family. Her father knew that if he stayed …’ He turned away.

  ‘Will I see her again?’ Mahtab seized his hand and looked up at h
im. He did not meet her gaze but pulled her tightly towards him and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘Who knows, my Mahtab? Who knows?’

  Mahtab lay on her bed, awake long into the night. Why was Leila’s family in danger? Were they now safe from whatever that danger had been? Was she somewhere in Iran and was she thinking of Mahtab? Were she, Mahtab, and her family in danger also? Would they too go to Iran?

  The house was different. She remembered nights when the whole family sat around the low table. They warmed their feet by the coal brazier under the blanket. Her grandmother poured tea and passed around the steaming glasses. The gold chains and coins at her wrist jangled, flicking the soft light from the kerosene lamp into the faces of Mahtab, Farhad, Soraya and their cousins Reza and baby Rasheed.

  Her grandfather told stories: The Thousand and One Nights, Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad, The Ebony Horse. The younger ones fell asleep but Mahtab willed her eyes to stay open as he stroked his beard and his gentle voice spun the tales and more tea was brewed. Finally her eyelids drooped and she rested her head in her grandmother’s lap.

  Now that fog had seeped into the house and into their lives. There would be no education for girls. Mahtab could no longer go to school. Her mother no longer went to work. The women almost never left the house. Instead they sat at home and waited till Mahtab’s father, her uncle and her grandfather came home at the end of the day. They brought with them news of the outside, fearful news, which they shared with the women in hushed voices. Mahtab was sent from the room.

  She listened. She hushed Farhad and Soraya as they chased each other from the kitchen to the storeroom and back again. She stood in the doorway and heard the words ‘men in black turbans…whips…beatings… the knock on the door in the middle of the night… hanging…shooting…public stoning…Taliban.’ On one evening her grandmother found her there, her ear pressed to the door.

  ‘Go to your room this minute,’ she said in a voice that Mahtab had not heard before. Later that night she came and lay on the bed beside Mahtab and stroked her hair. ‘I am so sorry to speak harshly,’ she said, ‘so sorry and you all so young.’

  ‘Will someone come and knock on our door?’ Mahtab’s voice was only a whisper.

  Her grandmother didn’t answer but pulled her close and held her so tightly that Mahtab fell asleep to the rhythm of the old woman’s beating heart.

  Then, one night, her father and grandfather did not come home at the usual time. Mahtab sat quietly in the shadows, listening as her mother, aunt and grandmother paced the floor, speaking in urgent whispers. Uncle Wahid went to search. The whole house waited. Some time in the darkness her father was there, alive, his face black with bruising, one eye closed and swollen, broad stripes of blood seeping through the cotton shirt on his back. Of Grandfather, there was nothing: no body, no word.

  Night after night the whispering and the weeping continued.

  Mahtab sat in the dark outside her parents’ bedroom door, watching over her father. As long as she stayed within sight she knew he would get better. She watched her mother tending the bruises on his face, the cuts on his chest, the slashes across his back from the whips. When he moved, slowly, into the sitting room, Mahtab followed. When he rested in the garden, in the sun, she sat at his feet. She brought him his favourite slices of apple, poured him his tea with sprigs of mint. He said little but stared at her and at Farhad and Soraya as they played on the swing and splashed in the paddling pool.

  One night she woke to hear sounds from her parents’ room. Uncle Wahid’s voice and then Aunt Mina: ‘How can you leave?’ She was weeping. ‘Our family has lived in this city forever. You were born here. Your children were born here. All of the family is buried here. You will be strangers in a strange land. You will be leaving everything you know and love behind.’

  ‘We know that.’ This was her mother’s voice. ‘But I do not want my young children to be buried before their time or to have to bury me while they are young. I want them free from fear, free of all this. We must go, for them.’ Mahtab knew she had been crying too.

  ‘But it is too dangerous to leave.’

  ‘It is too dangerous to stay.’

  ‘It means a long drive over the mountains, and even before then they have their men everywhere. And bandits too, who will take your money. There are even wild animals, wolves. You can trust nobody.’

  ‘We can trust nobody in this place either,’ Mahtab’s father said. ‘Who knows if they will come for me again? Look what they did to our father. Our neighbour’s son has been taken. In every street someone has gone.’

  ‘Please don’t go. Please.’

  ‘We’ve made up our minds. We must go.’

  Gradually her father’s body healed but he no longer went to work in the daytime and at night the books Mahtab so loved to hear him read stayed unopened. He never sat at the low table and taught her the way to move her chess pieces to outwit him, and all stories, all laughter, all joking seemed to have gone from him.

  Then one night he came and sat on her bed. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Your mother and I have made a very big decision.’

  ‘Are we going to Iran?’

  He shook his head. ‘We are leaving, but not for Iran. First I want to tell you a story.’ He folded his arms and took a deep breath. ‘When I was a young man at the University, I met a stranger in a coffee shop. He was about my age and he came from a faraway land called Australia. He was travelling from his country to Europe on a great adventure, and he had stopped here because many, many years ago, his great-great-great-grandfather had left Afghanistan and crossed the seas to Australia to work with camels. So this young man wanted to be in the land of his ancestors. I brought him home and he stayed with us for some time. He wanted to learn as much about our country as he could and so we talked long into the evenings. In return he told us much about his country. I am going to tell you everything I can remember because I want you to know that the way we are living here, now, is not the only way. One day, like that man’s great-great-great-grandfather, we may have to leave.’

  ‘You mean,’ Mahtab hesitated, ‘go to his country, his Australia?’

  Her father nodded.

  ‘But would we come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. God willing. Listen well and remember. If we go to that man’s country, you would not stay at home. You would go to school and you could dream again of being a doctor like your great-aunt or a teacher or whatever you wanted to be. The women work as they did here, before. You and Mum could walk in the sunshine with your faces bare and there are no men in black turbans who can take you and beat you because they do not like the way you dress or what you believe or what you say. There, whips are for horses and camels.’

  ‘Is it a long way?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Can I take all my things?’

  ‘Maybe not everything. It is further than Iran. Tomorrow, I will show you in the atlas.’

  It was still dark when Mahtab woke. She lay still. Australia. She said the word over and over but she had no picture in her mind. What would it look like? How would they get there? She crept towards her parents’ room. She paused in the doorway, listening to the soft murmuring of their voices. Again her mother was crying and she heard her saying, ‘We will die out there. In the mountains. On the sea. It is not too late to choose Iran.’

  Mahtab clutched the front of her nightdress. Her body trembled. Choose Iran. Leila is there. We will be together and then we will return and I do not want to journey through the mountains and over the sea. I am afraid.

  And her father. ‘There is no future for us here or in Iran. We will have the life I have told you about. We will be free to live the way we choose. You must believe. There will be happiness and joy for us when we arrive there. I promise you.’

  Mahtab tiptoed away. Happiness and joy. Farhad and Soraya, in their room, were sleeping. She watched their bodies shifting slightly with each breath. Did they know? Had her father told them? She felt her way
to her room in the darkness and took down from her bookshelf the rag doll her grandmother had made for her. How long since she had fallen asleep with it beside her on the pillow? She burrowed deep into the mattress, wrapping her arms tightly around the doll, rubbing her cheek against the soft fabric. She pulled the blanket up over her head. It made a dark secret space that no one, nothing could enter.

  Chapter Two

  COLD, SO COLD.

  Mahtab sat on the hard wooden floor of the truck. She was wedged in by furniture, boxes and sacks, her knees caught up under her chin. How long had they been travelling like this? Two hours? Four hours? Six?

  It had been night time when they left. Her father shook her awake. ‘Mahtab, Mahtab. Get up. We’re leaving.’

  ‘What? Where?’ She sat up.

  ‘There is a truck outside. We are leaving for Pakistan.’

  ‘Pakistan? All of us?’ She leant against him as she pushed aside her blankets and pressed her feet into the soft wool of the carpet.

  He shook his head. ‘Just us. You, me, Mum, Farhad and Soraya.’

  ‘But Grandma…?’

  ‘Uncle Wahid will look after her. She says she is too old. Get dressed, quickly.’

  At the end of the bed were her clothes – two pairs of trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, two jackets, gloves, her warmest boots.

  ‘Put them all on. It’s cold where we’re going. You’ll need them all. And you can’t bring anything extra.’

  She started to pull on her clothes. Why couldn’t she bring her doll, the special book of poems that Grandpa had made, her favourite photos, an extra scarf? He was already gone.

  The photo of Leila stared at her from its silver frame. She slipped the photo out and pushed it down into her pocket. She stumbled to the front door like an overdressed clown. Soraya was dozing in their mother’s arms and Farhad was beside her, stamping his feet and blowing his warm breath onto his gloved hands. Two suitcases and bags of food leant against the wall.

  ‘Listen carefully.’ Her father shook Soraya awake and knelt her on the floor with Farhad and Mahtab. He looked directly from one to another. ‘You are going to hide in a special part of the truck with Mum. Try to sleep. Sometimes we might stop and you can come out and have a run around to stretch your legs. But, and this is so important, if I bang twice on the wall of the cabin, we are coming to a special checkpoint and you must make no sound. None. Not even a whisper. You understand? If they find you, we are all dead.’