‘Are you serious?’ I ask. ‘After all this time? You are saying it will be another five years on top of this? That he will be separated from his wife and children for that long? Nearly a decade? He has not met his children.’
‘He will have the option of going back to visit if he gets through the immigration appointment successfully. If he is not sent back to Afghanistan.’
‘To visit? He could be killed! He fled from there!’ My eyes are welling with tears and I have no idea what reserves of strength Abdhul has that allow him to sit here so calmly. But, I realise, he is not calm. He is simply losing hope, losing his will, little by little being ground down by the process. This is the process, the deterrent to stop others from coming by boat. Stop the boats. Break those who are here. Have them tell their friends at home that they should not leave.
The lawyer stacks the files Abdhul has given her and stands. ‘I have to make some copies,’ she says. I can see she is also frustrated with the system. She is helping Abdhul. It is not her fault that the process is so protracted. I am shooting the messenger, and I worry that my presence here is anything but helpful. I have a fraction of Abdhul’s patience and calm. The calmer you go, the further along you will travel. Nina also had to be patient.
The lawyer is gone for several minutes and I give Abdhul a wan smile. ‘I am sorry it is all taking so long. At least you are here now. You have a lawyer helping you,’ I say. ‘That is good. Positive.’ I pause. ‘She seems nice.’
He shakes his head and sighs out lengthily.
When the lawyer returns, I smile at her. ‘We appreciate your efforts,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘And, Abdhul, make sure you tell your other friends who arrived by boat that if they haven’t yet been called for an interview, they need to tell Immigration that they still want to stay. Otherwise, they will be sent home. I know it has been a long process, but this is important.’ She waits for a moment. ‘So, would you like a translator to help with the recording of your statement?’
Abdhul looks at me.
‘His English is very good,’ I say.
‘It is your decision,’ she tells him. ‘It is your right. There is no cost. It might help if there is a word you don’t understand. A legal word maybe.’
‘Yes, please. Okay.’
‘All right, but first, can you please answer a couple of questions?’
He nods.
‘You have never been involved in terrorism?’
He clicks his tongue loudly and I see her tick the ‘no’ box.
‘Or been involved with anyone else who is?’
He clicks again.
Again she ticks ‘no’. ‘Sorry, I have to ask.’
The lawyer makes a phone call and addresses the translator as that, ‘translator’. She introduces her to Abdhul, who converses with the woman on the other end of the phone in his own language for a time. He appears serious and on guard. Finally, he looks at the lawyer.
‘I am ready.’
‘And are you ready, translator?’ the lawyer asks.
‘Yes.’
Abdhul begins his story of fleeing Afghanistan with his family when he was a young child because his father’s and brother’s lives were threatened. ‘My mother had to hide them,’ he says. ‘Then, when we thought we were safe, because we had gone to Pakistan, my brother was murdered at the bazaar.’ I watch as grief grips him again. His fingers are shaking, and I have no doubt that if I put my ear to his chest I would hear his heart racing. He goes on, recounting the threat to his own life from a man on a motorcycle at the same market. The dead bodies he saw, people hauled off buses and shot. Twenty, thirty at a time. He gives the name of a Taliban-style militant group he believed responsible. The Lashkar … I don’t catch the whole word. He extends his hand under his chin to suggest long beards.
‘It is all because we are Hazara.’ He points to his face. ‘They know us by our looks.’ He shakes his head and shudders involuntarily. ‘They are terrible. Like animals. What have we done to them?’ He is quiet for a time. ‘But … I got through all of that, I was fine, but this, this is worse. This waiting for a visa.’
The lawyer looks up at him.
‘Just kill me once,’ he says.
Outside, I apologise to Abdhul for the system. ‘Was the translator nice? Understanding?’
He tilts his head in a ‘so, so’ sort of way.
‘Was she Hazara?’
‘No.’
21
Ian pulls up in front of the cottage to collect Ellie. He’s alone in the hire car, another BMW. This time blue. Steely.
‘No Sylvia?’ I call out from the front garden, as I finish planting a fragrant daphne, something of mine in my grandmother’s garden. I pat down the soil.
‘She and Ben are waiting at the hotel.’
I nod, looking around me at the forest of bulbs that have flowered in recent weeks. I’ve drawn a map to mark when and where each plant has emerged, in the hope it will allow me to pave my own way around the garden without destroying Nina’s work.
Ellie hears us talking and runs, weighed down by her overnight bag, to give her father a hug.
‘Hey, Ellie.’ He steps out of the car and his face softens. ‘How’s life? Have you made some new friends down here?’
‘Yep.’ She nods several times. ‘There’s Sally and Kate at school and Mohammad and the others.’
Ian looks at me.
‘Neighbours,’ I tell him. It occurs to me that apart from Abdhul and the men in his house, I have not been welcomed by any of the other neighbours in the street. People have said hello. There have been polite conversations, small talk, but that is all.
‘But Mummy won’t let me talk to that man across the road. She says he’s not nice.’
‘Really?’ Ian eyes me intently now. ‘Hop in the car, Ellie. I just want to have a little chat to Mummy.’
Ellie makes a dive for the BMW, and Ian shuts the door, giving her his new phone to play with before facing me again.
‘What does she mean “not nice”? What have you heard?’
‘Just some old stories.’
‘I’m still her dad. If there’s someone of concern across the road, I’d like to know. I have a right.’
I read the unease in his eyes. There have been enough secrets.
‘The man across the street is not a worry, to my knowledge, but his father was. He raped my mother. She was just sixteen …’
‘Jesus.’ He bites at the inside of his lip; thinks for a moment, looking at me still. ‘And you’ve only just found this out?’
I nod. ‘He’s dead now, but he did it here, just outside the cottage. He got off. Bloody lawyers.’ I glance at him sideways, knowing it’s an unfair jibe, even if made in a semi-joking tone. ‘Actually, the judge dropped the case. I’m not sure there was enough evidence and it sounds like Nina might not have performed very consistently in court.’
Ian nods. ‘Nolle prosequi. That’s what it’s called when a case is abandoned like that.’ He looks across the street at the Forsters’ house, then back at the cottage. I feel hollowed out.
‘It’s a long story, and I think it had everything to do with Nina being Russian. There’s no need to worry about Ellie,’ I say.
‘Good, Sar.’ He kisses my cheek and touches my arm. Lovingly? Are such things still allowed? He looks at the car. ‘She seems happy. Yes?’
Since when does he add ‘yes?’ to the end of his sentences, as if English were his second language. As if he were indeed Italian, not a born and bred Aussie who likes Weet-bix, and a meat pie when no one’s looking. Bloody Vegemite on white toast.
‘She is.’ I want to ask if it’s true about Sylvia’s pregnancy, but don’t. There is plenty of time, and I don’t want every interaction with Ian to be heavy and argumentative. It helps neither of us, and certainly not Ellie.
‘Who’s Mohammad?’
‘A refugee boy who has started at school. He’s a sweet kid.’
‘Rel
ated to those men you waved to the other day?’
‘A friend of theirs. Yes.’
Ian angles his head slightly. ‘Right … I’ve got to go.’ He tosses Ellie’s bag onto the back seat and I blow Ellie a kiss through the tinted glass.
The weekend felt like a week. There was a bushwalk at Mt Field with Sue and Sean on Saturday, followed by dinner at a Japanese restaurant in town that evening, which Sue arranged but bailed on, leaving just Sean and me. Sue told me I could thank her later, which I did. Sean was good company, funny and sensitive in equal measure, although he talked too much about the latest journal articles he’d read. The more sake, the more he talked. At the end of the meal he gave me a small painting he’d done over lunch on the hike, a loose, drifty watercolour with a big, hopeful sky.
When Ian drops Ellie back to the cottage, I’m relieved that Sylvia and Ben are again not with him. I’m also gratified to see that Ian has shaved off the small affected beard he has been wearing since returning from Italy.
‘Sylvia’s feeling a bit off,’ he says as Ellie runs into the cottage.
‘Morning sickness is revolting.’ I look him in the eye. ‘Ellie told me.’
‘Oh.’ He looks away.
I invite him in for a cup of tea, and he accepts, surprising us both.
‘You look well,’ he tells me.
‘I’ve been out hiking with some new friends.’ I look across to the small watercolour that Sean gave me. I have it in pride of place, propped up on the bookshelf, and it reminds me of the present I have for Ellie: an expensive colouring book, one of the mindfulness ones – a welcome-home treat. I take it from the bookshelf and give it to her. She looks at it with frustration, as if I still haven’t realised that she has grown out of colouring in. She turns to her father for help. The book was on the display table at the local independent bookshop in town yesterday; I’d seen teenagers buying it and thought it might appeal to Ellie more than the ones I’d previously bought. She’d always loved colouring in, and used to rise early on weekends, spending at least an hour out in the lounge room occupied with precise designs while Ian and I stayed in bed and quietly made love. Not today. Ellie pushes the loaf of bread, butter and Vegemite – my afternoon snack – aside, and slaps the thick colouring book on the table, using it as a place to rest her mobile phone. She opens an app that Ian must have downloaded for her, and begins a new, loud game.
‘Colour a page in for me,’ Ian tells her. ‘I’d love to take it with me.’
Ellie rolls her eyes and sighs out in a martyrly fashion before moving the phone aside. She opens the book and takes her Christmas pencils from the sliding drawer under the table.
‘Use the desk in your room, Elliekins,’ I tell her. ‘Mummy and Daddy want to have a little chat.’
She rolls her eyes a second time, more so given she’s responding to me, and glances again conspiratorially at her father, as if he ‘gets’ her and I don’t.
‘She’s growing up,’ Ian says when she is out of our hearing.
‘She’s six!’
‘Yes, but six in the twenty-first century. Not in the seventies. There’s a difference. And don’t forget, you were raised by your grandmother, so …’
I choose not to react, noting that I am getting better at preserving my energy. Instead I make a pot of the promised tea, and Ian and I sit at the kitchen table with a packet of shortbread cream biscuits between us. He has one then pulls the loaf of bread towards himself and butters a piece onto the plate I’d already used. He loads it with Vegemite.
‘So, you’re going to be a father again.’
Ian rubs his forehead, as if he doesn’t know how it happened, and I can’t help but laugh. He pulls the band out of his ponytail and lets his hair hang loose.
‘Can’t Sylvia cut hair?’ I pour the tea and hand Ian his cup.
‘She likes it like this.’
‘It suits you, you bastard.’
He smiles, and for a moment I see the man I married.
I look for something to say that doesn’t concern our failed marriage. ‘Helena’s visiting again soon. Next weekend, actually. We’ve had a rapprochement of sorts.’
‘That’s awesome, Sar. Bloody hell. I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘Me neither.’ I look down at my hands, smiling too. ‘It’s nice for Ellie as well.’
Ellie, maybe hearing her name, hurtles down the hallway towards us, waving the hastily coloured-in picture of a fairy-wren. She slaps it on the table in front of her father and I cross to Ian’s side to look. Ellie puts an arm around each of our necks, drawing us together.
‘I hear you’re going to see your grandma again next weekend, Elliekins?’ Ian ruffles her hair.
‘Yep. Her name’s Helena.’ She tears another page from the book and vanishes again. I clear my throat.
‘That business about Helena having been raped,’ I whisper.
He studies me.
‘I saw you wondering … The truth is, she’s not sure if I might be the product of it.’
‘Oh, Sar.’ He puts a hand on mine.
‘She had a boyfriend at the time also,’ I say, ‘so … I’ve taken some DNA from the rapist’s son.’
‘What, without him knowing?’
I nod, slide my hand away from his.
‘And the father’s dead, right?’
‘Yes. Like I said, Nina never got justice.’
‘You can’t really get a conviction now. Am I missing something here?’
‘I still want to know the truth. For me and for Helena.’ I look at him. ‘Is it illegal what I’ve done?’
‘Oh, Sar,’ he repeats. ‘How did you get it? The sample?’
‘I gave him a drink. Swabbed around the rim of the glass and got him to spit in it.’
He laughs, surprised. ‘How the hell did you get him to do that?’
‘I told him there was a wasp in it.’ I cringe, but he looks impressed by my cunning.
‘But you haven’t tested it yet. You don’t know if he is related to you?’
‘No. Not yet. I’m afraid to know, to be honest.’
‘You’re a lovely person regardless of who your father is.’ He rests his hand on mine again, and this time I don’t draw my hand away. ‘Don’t doubt that.’
I look at him and see that he means it. ‘But is it legal?’
‘Look …’ He shrugs.
I feel stupid and, once again, ease my hand out from under Ian’s, wrapping it instead around my teacup.
‘If you just want to know for yourself …’ he continues. ‘Of course, proving you’re related doesn’t prove his father actually raped Helena. You have to take her word about that.’
‘I don’t doubt Helena’s story.’
‘And what about your mum? Does she want to know? Will you tell her?’
I think of the crate that Helena buried in the backyard. If Helena had wanted that history gone, she could have burned it rather than buried it.
‘She wants to know.’
We are quiet for a few moments and I pour more tea into Ian’s cup. ‘What happened to us?’ Where something is thin, that is where it tears.
He breathes out, looks me in the eye. ‘We drifted. We just drifted. I’m sorry I hurt you.’ He pulls his mouth into a downward shape as if to emphasise the point, then shifts his expression, raises his eyebrows and lifts the corners of his mouth in a search for the silver lining. ‘I’m happy we can still talk.’
I feel too drained to smile back. ‘Yep. I guess. If I’m honest, part of the reason for moving down here was to have Ellie to myself. To deny you access. I didn’t feel you deserved her …’
‘I know you’re angry.’
‘Can you blame me?’
‘No, I get it, but there’s a –’
‘A bigger picture, I know. She loves you. I would have given anything to have known my father.’
22
Abdhul and Sue come for dinner at the cottage, and in the half hour after the meal Abdhul and Ellie re
ad a bedtime story together. Sue sits with them on the couch, helping with words that they get stuck on while I clean up in the kitchen, every so often glancing across and thinking what a curious family we make. Afterwards, Sue insists Abdhul teach her some Hazaragi words, and he affords her the same patience that she gave him. I haven’t told either of them about what I’ve learned happened to my mother, or about my paternity concerns, which seem selfish and historical given Abdhul’s family are in real and present danger and he can do nothing to protect them. I make a pot of tea and join my new friends and Ellie in the lounge, where Abdhul is telling Sue of his dream to get work here on a farm. He says he grew up raising goats and misses it very much.
‘My sister has a farm outside Huonville,’ Sue says. ‘They’re pretty strapped for cash so I don’t think they’d have work for you, but I’m sure Carol would be thrilled if you visited. They have sheep.’
Yes, I would like to,’ Abdhul says.
I blow into my steaming mug; I’ve started adding a couple of cardamon pods to my tea, the way Abdhul does. At the end of the cup, I will chew the pods and enjoy their sharp medicinal jolt, then spit out the fibrous skins.
‘Have you told your family about the appointment with the lawyer?’ I ask him.
He nods. ‘They don’t understand why we still live in two countries. They think I am having a good life here. My children think I am a bad father.’
Sue goes to the kitchen for milk to add to her tea, and gives me a heartbroken expression behind Adbhul’s back. I want to reach out to him, to hold his hand, but don’t. It should be his wife here, not me. What would she make of this? Of him dining in a private home with two single women? Abdhul’s housemates, I think, understand our friendship, but his other Afghani friends, particularly several of the women he has introduced me to, launch into veiled conversations in Hazaragi while flashing suspicious glances my way. My immediate neighbour on the right is also intrigued by Abdhul and me. She watches Abdhul coming and going, and I feel I am standing in Nina’s shoes.
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