Mahtab's Story

by Mahtab's Story (retail) (epub)

  It was bare, just beds and a rail to hang clothes on, a tiny cupboard, a shelf and a chair. There was a window too, open, but it had bars. Mahtab gripped them and pressed her nose between them. Beyond, she saw more treeless yard, another high fence, and then long rows of other buildings. People were sitting around in small groups, children were playing in the dust and all around were more wire fences, holding them in. She laughed. Why bar the window when they were held in by that wire fence? And a world of flat, brown land beyond that.

  Mum closed the door.

  ‘Where is my father?’ Soraya tugged at Mum’s robe. ‘Mahtab said he would meet us. Why are we here?’

  Mahtab looked away.

  Mum sat on the bed and kicked off her dusty sandals.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know where he is and I don’t know how long we will be here. What I do know is what your father told me. This is a free country and they will treat us with justice, according to the law. You must stay strong and ready to meet your father as soon as he comes for us or we can go to him.’ She bent down and opened her bag. She took out the small jar of earth that Mahtab had not seen since the day they sat on the mountain, looking down over the valley. ‘This is going to be our home for a while. I don’t know how long. But while we are here, this will remind us of where we have come from, who we are.’ She placed the small jar against her lips and put it on the shelf. Mahtab tried to remember the moment when that jar was filled. They had been high in the mountains, on the side of the road. It had been cold. There had been snow. She could not, in this heat, bring to her body the sensation of snow.

  Mahtab was hollow. Empty, as if her flesh and blood, her energy that kept her breathing and running, thinking and talking, was gone. Nothing was in its place. She was hungry for food but she knew that she would bring it back up. Not because she was on a small boat, rocking on the rough sea of a broad ocean, but because the will to hold it inside her was gone. She was hungry. Hungry for water, for her father, for her grandmother, her aunts and uncles, for the trees in the back yard, the cabinet against the wall, the silver and glass objects so lovingly collected, for her mountains, the jagged peaks that cut the sky.

  Her father was dead. She felt sure of it. She was just a speck of dirt on the floor, drifting through the gap between the boards, falling to the ground.

  That night, Farhad and Mahtab each took the narrow beds and Soraya crept in beside their mother on the larger one. Mahtab lay in the darkness, listening. It felt strange to be lying still, no rocking boat, no crowded bodies pressing up against her, no smells of other people. No coach rolling along a highway. She stretched out under the cool sheet. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe things would be all right. Maybe Dad wasn’t dead. He would find them here. He would come and sign some papers or pay some money and they would go with him and stay with him, somewhere. She would have a room again with her things, a bed with a cover she had chosen herself and a soft, soft pillow to bury her hair in. Voices murmured from outside or the next room. Then silence. She slept.

  Heavy boots sounded outside their door. Mahtab grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled it tightly around her, up to her eyes. She couldn’t breathe. The door opened and torchlight shone on her face. It flicked around the room, resting for a moment on Farhad, on Soraya and on her mother. Something was said in English. She shivered but she wasn’t cold. The door closed.

  Mum said nothing but Mahtab knew from her breathing that she wasn’t asleep. Soraya made some little noise and Mum started to sing then, softly, that old song from the truck, the one that Hamida had sung on the boat.

  La la la la sleep,

  Because the night is long,

  It’s too early for you to count the stars yet,

  Some people are smiling even in their dreams,

  Some people have wet eyes even in their sleep,

  La la la la sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  A BELL WOKE them. A shrill, raucous sound, drilling its way into their heads.

  ‘What do we do?’ Farhad stood in the middle of the room, his clothes rumpled, his hair sticking up like grass after a windstorm.

  ‘We get dressed neatly and then we go to wash and we find out what we are to do.’ Their mother’s voice was firm but there were dark bags under her eyes.

  They came out of their room and saw those who had arrived on the coaches with them walking towards a separate green building. They fell in behind Hamida, carrying her baby, Ahmad grabbing at her legs.

  Beyond the fences they could see more buildings and people.

  ‘Why are we here and they there?’ said Mahtab.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her mother led them to the queue, waiting to enter the green building. They were served a plate of chicken and rice and sat down at a long table. Mum and Hamida talked in soft voices. Mahtab stirred her food and looked around to see if there were any other girls her age. How long since she had thought of Leila. Where was she now? Was she in prison too?

  Table after table was filled by men with occasionally one or two women and their children. Some men were like her dad with dark hair and beard. Some men were black. One or two had their young children with them but most were alone.

  After breakfast, they went back to the room to wash, and their mother told them that she had some news of what would happen.

  ‘We will be interviewed,’ she said. ‘Hamida spoke with a nurse who came to check the baby. She says they will ask us about why we came here to Australia and why we have no papers. I will ask them to help us to find your father. I will tell them of the things that were happening to our family, what happened to your grandfather, and then I know they will tell us that we can stay.’

  ‘Here? In this prison?’

  ‘No. No, this is just while they check us to find out who we are exactly and to make sure that we are not some dangerous person who wishes to bring harm to this country. Then we move next door, to the bigger camp, where we saw those people this morning and then, when they find your father, we can join him.’

  ‘Then what happens? Where will we go?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Your father told me about big cities where he would be able to work and you children would go to school and you would grow up free.’

  Free? Free was how she felt when the boat came into the harbour and she touched land again. Would that feeling ever return? Mahtab dropped her veil and began to brush her hair. It was long now, way past her shoulders, and it was hard to pull the brush through the thickness of it. The scratches and sunburn on her fingers ached. Mahtab looked out through the doorway, across the bare brown earth, through the wire fence and then over more flat, brown land. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what they had seen in the city, Darwin, such a short time ago. Green gardens and green beside the road, trees along the edge of the streets and buildings that looked so new, so shiny, some as tall as any in Herat. The shops, the cars, the naked arms. Would they live in a place like that? Would they too have a garden again, fruit trees, a swing, a paddling pool for Soraya, a room of her own?

  On that first day Mahtab’s mother washed and washed her hands and face. The dust of the road and the salt from the sea had worked their way into every scratch and tear in her skin. Her burqa was sun-bleached but clean, her feet brown from sun and dust. She didn’t know when she would be called.

  Mahtab sat with Soraya, on the step closest to their door.

  Men squatted in groups, talking quietly. Guards lounged on white plastic chairs, soaking up the sun. A young woman, her head covered in a short black veil, walked the length of the perimeter fence and when she reached one end she turned and walked back again. Sometimes she stopped and held her arms high and wide, making a strange shape against the sunlight. She carried a stick that clicked softly as she ran it against the wire. Up and back. And again. And again.

  Farhad and Ahmad found a friend, Hussein, from Iraq. They couldn’t speak the same language but they too found sticks and started drawing in the dust. First they drew a big ship and all three
stood on it and rocked and swayed but they tired of that and with their sticks behind them they rushed in wide circles, creating swirling, crazy patterns that sometimes overlapped and sometimes went off in wild designs.

  And they laughed. Mahtab hadn’t heard such a sound for a long time, and she found herself smiling. She knew her mother felt better for it too because she came and stood on the step and she smiled and clapped her hands at their antics. Mahtab looked again to see if there might be a friend for her, but she saw no one her age.

  The interview didn’t happen that day. They waited and waited and when Mahtab asked why no one came to talk to her or to send for her, her mother shrugged. ‘Many people arrived yesterday, Mahtab. Why should we be the first? It may take days.’

  It did.

  Each morning they had their breakfast, washed and readied themselves to be called and to answer why they had left their country. For a whole week, they waited. They listened to the stories of others who had come the way they had. Some would not speak when Mahtab’s mother asked them about the meeting. Others said there were too many questions and there was no way they could answer them all. One woman said that the man who translated her answers did so wrongly, she knew it from the look on his face but she didn’t know the words to say it so the man in uniform would know the truth. The Iraqi woman, the one who had wanted to save the water for her children, cried.

  Mahtab sat, shielding her eyes from the sun, watching the girl at the wire.

  One morning, a young woman approached Mahtab’s mother. She was the nurse who had spoken with Hamida and she did not wear the same uniform as the guards. She smiled and held out some brightly coloured books, saying words that none of them could understand.

  Then she turned and said slowly, ‘Cath-er-ine.’

  Mahtab didn’t know what to say. She looked down at her dusty feet.

  The woman reached forward and took her hand. She pointed to herself. ‘Cath-er-ine,’ she said again. She pointed to Mahtab and raised her eyebrows.

  Mahtab didn’t answer.

  ‘Cath-er-ine,’ the woman said again.

  ‘Mah-tab,’ Mahtab whispered.

  ‘Mah-tab. My name is Mahtab,’ said Catherine, each word coming from her as a slow, distinct and rounded sound.

  ‘My – name – is – Mah-tab.’ Slowly the sounds came, louder now.

  Catherine smiled and said something that Mahtab didn’t understand. She pushed the books into Mahtab’s mother’s hand.

  ‘My – name – is – Mah-tab,’ said Mahtab to her mother. ‘My – name – is – Mah-tab,’ as she stood beneath the shower, as she brushed her hair at night, as she lay in her bed, waiting for sleep to come.

  Catherine came a second time. She sat, repeating the phrases, smiling at Mahtab.

  My name is Mahtab.

  I am from Afghanistan.

  I am twelve years old.

  How are you?

  I am well, thank you.

  Gradually the writing in the book began to make sense. Sometimes Catherine came to where Mahtab and her mother sat on the steps of their building and she would point to the words beneath the pictures on the page. ‘Bus. Tram. Train. Ship.’ They repeated the words slowly. ’Bread. Rice. Carrot. Potato.’ Sometimes it seemed to Mahtab that the words came out like the strangled sounds of a fighting cat. Catherine laughed and they laughed with her.

  During that time, the interview happened. Mahtab wanted to go with her mother, to ask why they were in prison like this, like common criminals, when they had done nothing wrong. But when she went with her mother to the main building, the pink-and-ginger man told her to go back to their section.

  She sat in the doorway watching Farhad, Ahmad and Hussein. They had some words now, or at least they spoke to each other in their own languages, but whether they understood, she couldn’t tell. Soraya climbed on her lap. ‘Tell me the kangaroo story.’ She pushed her head into Mahtab’s shoulder.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘Please, please.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Mahtab told her again the story of the father who buys the pet kangaroo for his little girl. She wondered, as she spoke, if their own father was alive or dead, if such a creature did exist, or if it was all a fantasy from the storybook he had read. Maybe nothing he had told her then was true. Or had he arrived like they had? Was he too locked up behind some barbed and cruel wire?

  Their mother came back. Mahtab couldn’t tell from her face what the meeting had been like. She went straight into the room and she sat on the bed and Mahtab followed to sit at her feet.

  ‘What did they say?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Tell me, Mum. What did they say? Why are we here? Can we leave now?’

  She reached down and stroked Mahtab’s hair. ‘Sshh, little one. They say we are illegal. Queue-jumpers.’ She laughed, bitterly. ‘As if there was a queue for us. We have broken the law by coming the way we did. We must wait while all our documents are checked and our situation is examined, and they said that can take a long time, maybe years.’ Mahtab heard the tremble in her voice.

  ‘It could take years, and sometimes…’ She stopped whatever it was she was going to say.

  ‘Sometimes what?’

  ‘You don’t want to know, darling. You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do. I am old enough to be told. I am old enough to hide silent in a truck as it goes through the mountains, as it was crawled over by Taliban, to stand with you in airports and on the deck of a ship. I haven’t cried out or betrayed us. I am old enough to know.’

  ‘Sometimes people are sent back to the country they came from.’

  Her words were a kick in Mahtab’s stomach. A heavy boot that sent the air gasping from her throat. Go back! Back to the black turbans and the whips and the cries of the women and fear, the cold, cold fear that one day there would be that knock on the door.

  No, Mahtab wanted to scream, No No No, but the trapdoor had dropped, shutting her throat, and she flung herself on the bed in silence.

  The two young children were already asleep when Mahtab and her mother prepared for bed. ‘You sleep with Soraya,’ said Mum and she took Mahtab’s mattress and pushed it on the floor across the doorway.

  ‘To protect you all,’ she said simply. ‘To make sure no one comes in here at night, to get at any of you.’

  ‘But who would want to come in here?’ Mahtab said.

  ‘It has happened. One of the women told me. You’re too young to worry about things like this. Let me do that.’

  But Mahtab did worry. She lay still in the dark listening to her little sister’s breathing. She tried to understand what her mother meant. Was it the guards with their torches? She had grown used to that. It happened at the same time every night, the boots, the turning of the door handle, the light flicking from Mum’s face to hers, Soraya’s and Farhad’s. Sometimes she didn’t even wake. Or was it someone else, someone who might mean harm to them? And in what way?

  The nightmares began that night. She was on a mountain in a village that she didn’t know and she was alone but she could see a small child, a girl on the other side of the road calling for her. Whenever Mahtab tried to cross the road, the child moved beyond her reach, still calling and calling her, begging Mahtab to reach her. The child had a face that Mahtab didn’t recognise but she knew it was Soraya. Then the child had gone and Mahtab was running as if she was escaping from someone, but when she turned to see who was following her, there was no one. Still she ran. She knew she had to, even when her feet were cut and bloody. She ran so fast that she could not breathe. She called out for her mother or her father but no one came, and she was falling, falling.

  She woke then.

  The dream came every night. Sometimes it was Soraya who called her. Sometimes it was a boy with the face of a stranger, but she knew it was Farhad. Sometimes they were in the streets of Herat, sometimes in villages she didn’t recognise. Always she
ended up running and falling and always she woke before she landed.

  Sometimes when she opened her eyes she found her mother kneeling on the floor, her face close, whispering soft words of consolation. ‘It’s all right, my little one, it’s all right. You are safe now. Mumma’s here. It’s just a bad dream.’

  Then Mahtab would say that it was nothing, she was fine, her mother should go back to bed, and she would roll over and push her face into the hard pillow and sleep again. One night, by chance, she felt in her pocket and her fingers closed over the tiny shell from the sand the night they took the boat. She rubbed the rough edges as she had that night, and remembered salt air filling her lungs, and the shimmering, beckoning water.

  She slept later and later.

  In the first few weeks, they had all got up and joined the breakfast queue soon after the meal began. As time went on, they were moved into the open camp and there they became part of the later meal group, the stragglers, and there were times when Mahtab told her mother that she wasn’t hungry, that she didn’t want to eat and she wasn’t coming to the dining room. At first, her mother thought she was ill and let her stay in bed. She brought back bread from the kitchen, thin slices of soft white bread that Mahtab couldn’t eat. After a few days of this, when Mahtab refused to see Catherine, her mother insisted that she get up when the others did, that she come to the dining room with them to eat.

  ‘You must set an example to the others,’ said her mother. ‘If you give up, then how can I keep Farhad and Soraya well and happy?’

  ‘How can anyone be well and happy here?’

  ‘We must try, Mahtab. We must try.’

  ‘Why? Why should we try? They do not want us here. Our father is gone. He should never have left us because now he’s dead. You keep pretending, keep hoping. We have no hope, no life here.’