My project was given fast-tracked ethics approval by the university, but I’m uneasy that if it becomes known that trauma is inherited there is a danger that children of survivors might approach their futures fatalistically. Sean reminds me I am overlooking the potential positives. That the changes might be reversible, given a better environment. This is what I cling to.
We stop at the first house, a simple white weatherboard on a small lot of ground, postage stamped with lawn and concrete. Across the road is a petrol station and immediately beside the house, a bottleshop. I watch a beer-bellied father and his flat-capped son go inside. On the back of the father’s singlet are the words: Fuck it, I’m going fishing.
Farzhana opens the door to us. Her mother is behind her, and her brother is making tea in the adjoining kitchen. Farzhana offers us seats on the couch and moves her textbooks and reams of underlined notepaper off the lounge-room table to make room for our small cooler and paperwork.
‘You know we are here to take some samples for research?’ I ask the family. ‘From the inside of your cheek. Like this.’ I demonstrate on myself, taking a swab from the packet and running it across the inside of my cheek. ‘It is okay with you?’
Farzhana nods and signs the form. Asks her mother and brother to do the same. Farzhana opens her mouth for me and I take a swab.
I ask about her studies and she tells me they are going well.
‘Farzhana is studying hard to be a doctor,’ I tell Sean, and I wonder what genes are being expressed that explain her resilience. I remember that she told me she arrived by plane and was able to secure a visa with minimal waiting.
I take a sample from Farzhana’s mother next, and Sean appears as surprised as I was when I record beside her name that she is forty-five years old. She has a baby on her lap. Farzhana’s brother opens his mouth next and I take a sample.
‘Can we take a small amount from the baby, too?’ Sean asks and Farzhana translates. The mother looks nervous and I fear this is a step too far, although an essential one for the experiment. I look at Sean, whose expression remains compassionate and caring.
‘If it helps others like us,’ the mother says in Hazaragi, which Farzhana translates. The mother pulls down the baby’s chin, and I swiftly run the swab inside the crying child’s mouth.
When we are done, we hug our goodbyes and drive to the next house, not far away, another small weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof. A hot-rod with a cut-off muffler speeds up the road and a lit cigarette hits the road nearby, smoking briefly until the next car runs over it. Two young women with high ponytails, bare midriffs and shorts that reveal a good portion of their buttocks, strut past.
Abdhul is warmly welcomed by another Hazara friend of his, and I begin to grasp just what a central person Abdhul is in his community. This is what it must have been like in Nina’s cottage back when Helena was young. A steady stream of immigrant families coming and going. Warm embraces, and not just the Hydro camp workers and their families, but the tens of Russians Nina told me had been employed constructing the Bruny Island road network.
If only this was all Nina and my mother had experienced. If only the Forsters had not existed. If only Nina had welcomed Uli into the family. How much suffering would have been avoided. It cannot happen again with the new wave of refugees. It cannot.
We are introduced to Abdhul’s friend and the man’s wife and their three children who, when asked, open their mouths, one by one, in apparent resignation. They, like Abdhul, arrived by boat, so are still waiting for visas. I learn that this couple left Pakistan with four children, but one died on the boat journey. The mother hands me a photograph of the sweet-looking boy, now deceased, and my heart feels heavy and stretched thin, as if it might break.
As I work, and Sean fills out the relevant forms, I try to explain to Abdhul’s friends the goals of the research, and the way the results might somehow assist them, or people who arrive like them, in future.
‘I hope the results might provide evidence that processing should be done more quickly,’ I say and Abdhul translates.
The husband and wife nod.
But I see a problem emerging in the study design. Most of the Hazara children in Hobart arrived with widows who came by plane and they have all been processed much more quickly than the men or, more rarely, the families, who arrived by boat. I had hoped to see a difference between children who were given security promptly and those made to wait for years, but with so few ‘boat’ children here, it might not be possible. Still, I’m hopeful I can answer the question of whether trauma is inherited, although we also have the issue of finding a control group, a group of untraumatised Hazara people, if such a group exists. I have heard there are some Hazara medical workers who fled before the worst of the war and who are now living in Sydney, and I make a note in my phone to email various hospitals when I get back to work to see if I can be put in contact with these people. I turn my attention again to the family in front of me.
‘Are you coming to the picnic afterwards at the Boat Park at Sandy Bay?’ I ask them as we prepare to leave. ‘We have organised some food to say thanks for being involved in the study.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ the woman says. ‘We are coming.’
I pick Ellie up from school on the way to the picnic, and she meets Sean for the first time. They shake hands playfully, at Sean’s instigation, between the front and back car seats. At the park, she stands pressed to my side as Sean and I talk quietly at the boot of the car, heads together over our esky of salads, buttered bread rolls and sausages.
About thirty people come for the picnic, many more than enlisted. ‘It won’t be enough food,’ I say.
‘They’ve set up over there, sister,’ Abdhul calls out to me, and we turn to where he is pointing. A series of picnic rugs have been arranged under the large oak trees. There is an impressive spread of food and I look back to Abdhul, who has jogged across to help more of his friends unload foil-covered pots from their cars. He holds the pot handles with folded tea towels. I laugh out loud at the abundance.
‘Shall I even bother cooking these?’ Sean asks, eyeing the sausages.
‘The kids will like them, won’t they, Ellie?’ I ask her, pointing at the group of Hazara children playing with a ball on the grass.
She regards the other children cautiously. ‘I want four.’
‘Four?’ I make a mental note to look in her lunchbox. She hasn’t been eating much at school lately and it’s becoming an issue.
‘They’re beef, right? And chicken?’ I ask Sean.
‘Yes. No pork.’
We find a place on the rugs near a covered pergola where three separate children’s birthday parties are in full swing. I see Ellie’s eyes go to the lollies and chips and cake, the girls in their pretty dresses holding pink helium balloons. She would rather be there.
‘That smells delicious,’ I tell Farzhana, who is uncovering a steaming pot of fragrant rice, mixed with some sort of spice. She gives the rice a stir with a silver spoon.
Some of the Afghani boys are peeling off their shirts and running down to the beach and into the water. Ellie covers her face with her hands in amazement that they are allowed to do this: go swimming in their shorts.
‘Can they swim, Farzhana?’ I ask.
‘They won’t go deep.’
There is a large scar on a friend of Mohammad’s, a jagged, raised mark where the skin appears knotted. Ellie notices it, too, along with several of the children at the birthday parties, who openly stare.
‘He was shot,’ Abdhul tells me straight, and Ellie leans against my leg. I want to cover her ears so she doesn’t hear anything else, but I can’t in this company. I suppose this is the sort of thing Claire wants to protect Sally from, and I feel a hypocrite for having judged her for it. When Sean goes to take photographs of the group, the boy with the gun wound stands behind his friends so the scar is hidden.
The woman beside me lifts the lid of a metal pot on a battery-operated outdoor cooker. St
eam rises from the curry-like chicken-and-potato dish.
‘Birjani,’ I say, and Abdhul laughs.
‘Yes, sister. You are learning!’
I smell the spicy sweetness coming off the meal the woman is stirring, her heavily ringed other hand holding her scarf so it doesn’t fly from her head in the sea breeze. She speaks rapidly with the women opposite her and chuckles at me. I have no idea what is being said and try to hide the bitter feeling of being excluded.
‘What are they saying?’ I ask Abdhul quietly.
‘Don’t worry about them.’ He laughs, then whispers, ‘They need to be better educated. I tell them this, that women here have jobs and they need to go back to school.’
I’m taken aback. I swing from being irritated by the women’s gossiping to wanting to defend them, as I am sure Helena would. What options did they have to be educated at home?
‘My wife, too. She will need to go to school,’ Abdhul says.
‘She is probably very busy with the children. Twins. And your parents live with her, too, don’t they? She looks after them?’
‘Yes, that is our way, but when she comes here, she will need an education, too. She will do that. But some of these women …’ He shakes his head, making a joke out of it.
Sayed leans in, saying what Abdhul doesn’t. ‘Some are just interested in dressing nicely, making their homes look good. Some …’ He nods at the group who laughed at me, and says, ‘they are just interested in gold. Jewellery.’
I turn away, wanting the subject to change. I am about to add, ‘That’s not the case with Farzhana,’ but feel Sean poking me in the side. He has heard Abdhul and Sayed’s comments and has an eyebrow raised at me as if to say, See? Not so perfect now, are they? He’s talking about the men.
‘Please start.’ Abdhul points to the central pot, and takes a handful of rice from it. He gathers a piece of chicken from the birjani, pinches it together with the rice in the palm of his hand, and eats a mouthful.
I join him, remembering Claire’s concerns about polio and tuberculosis. I’m ashamed of my fears, which I know are irrational, but I take my food from a part of the dish that is relatively untouched.
An English-looking man in a pork-pie straw hat at one of the children’s birthday parties is staring at us. From the way he has been handing out pink bags of sweets I suspect he is the father of the birthday girl. Ellie asks if she can join some of the Hazara women and their daughters, many of whom are now swimming, fully clothed, at the beach, and I answer, ‘No.’ I wrap her under my arm, hoping to show the birthday girl’s father that I am not only a friend of these people, but also a ‘responsible’ parent.
I smile at him, but he turns away and looks at the Hazara women, with their covered heads, and their children. The girls’ loose shirts and scarves blow in the breeze and catch in the waves, reminding me of butterflies. Didn’t Nina say something about butterflies once? Yes. I remember it. She used to say that was what was expected of her here: a complete metamorphosis.
I try to join in the conversation of those around me, to show the man that these people are friendly, that there is nothing to be afraid of, because that is what I see in his eyes: fear, as if a terrorist incident might break out in the park. Ellie pulls away from under my arm and chases an escaping helium party balloon, which she catches just before it reaches the sea.
The Hazara girls come out of the surf dripping wet and run to Ellie, who looks over her shoulder to the man in the pork-pie hat. He nods at her, and she hands the girls the pink balloon, which they bat between them, until it escapes and disappears over the water. The girls run with Ellie back up the bank to the picnic, where their mothers fuss over their clothes, dabbing at their jeans and long shirts with the ends of their headscarfs.
‘Have you got spare clothes?’ I ask the women, worrying that as the sea breeze picks up the girls will freeze.
The girls shake their heads.
‘It’ll be a wet ride home,’ Sean says, raising both his eyebrows now. ‘Is it what they always do? Bathe dressed like that?’ he asks me.
‘I don’t know.’ I look across at the boys, dressing themselves in dry shirts. ‘I don’t imagine they swim much at all where they’ve come from. They’ve had fun.’
‘Sorry I’m late!’ It’s Sue, calling out to me as she walks from her car, carrying a bucket of ice cream and cones. She smiles at the scene around her and asks Abdhul if it is okay to distribute ice creams to the children.
‘Yes, please,’ he says.
‘Although they look a bit cold,’ Sue says.
My phone rings. I don’t feel much when I see it’s Ian.
‘It’s Ellie’s dad. I’ll talk to him later,’ I tell Sean and Sue, rejecting the call.
‘Call him back now. I’ll watch Ellie. It’s all good,’ Sean says. He kisses me on the cheek, and I see Ellie notice.
‘Told you he’s a good sort,’ Sue says, elbowing me gently. ‘I’ll see if I can find a towel or two for the girls.’ She hands the ice-cream bucket and cones to Abdhul and asks if he has a spoon, then goes back to her car while I phone Ian.
‘Ellie says she’s sleeping over at Sally’s again tonight because you’re working late?’ Ian asks. ‘She says she’d rather stay home. Do you have to work back so late?’
I almost laugh out loud. ‘Ian, listen to yourself.’
‘It’s important she has stability.’
I take a breath. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’ I shake my head. ‘Look, I’m under the pump with a particular project. I think it’s quite important. It won’t be a common thing. Not at all. Okay?’ Ellie comes to me.
‘Is that Daddy?’
‘Yes, sweetheart. Here, talk to him. He’s missing you.’
She takes the phone and turns away, walking towards the sea as she talks to her father.
29
I email several Sydney hospitals, asking after Hazara doctors or others who fled Afghanistan before the conflict. It’s already 8 pm but Sean and I begin the DNA extractions, processing all the samples in one go. Yet without a control group, a group of untraumatised Hazara people, the results will be meaningless. We go to bed exhausted at Sean’s house and I feel guilty that I am relying on Claire to mind Ellie, although the couple of times I have offered to have Sally, Claire has declined.
Despite our fatigue, Sean and I make love.
‘It’s not like we get too many chances,’ he says, holding my hair back from my face and looking into my eyes. He tosses and turns for some time afterwards, before I ask him what is on his mind.
‘Nothing,’ he says, but I can tell it isn’t true. He switches on his bedside light and opens one of the dozen or so scientific journals he keeps beside his bed. There are more journal articles in his car, sliding around out of their manila folders on the back seat. ‘Do you mind if I read for a bit?’
‘No.’ I wait a few moments, stroking his bare chest. ‘Tell me. Are you happy? Are you okay with everything?’ I feel nervous asking.
‘I’m happy.’ He leans down and kisses me on the lips.
‘Then what?’
He shuts the magazine. ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d always thought, I’d hoped, I might have a kid one day.’
‘I see.’
‘And you’re … I’m falling in love with you, Sara, there are no two ways about it, but I’m thinking we’ve missed the boat for having kids together.’
‘Yep. I think that boat’s sailed.’ The irony, I think. After battling it out with Ian on this subject for so much of our time together.
‘It’s okay, but I’m trying to get my head around the idea that I could well be a geneticist who won’t pass on his genes to another generation.’
‘I don’t know what to say. There are more ways of influencing another generation than by being a biological father.’
‘I know. Forget it.’
But of course, I can’t.
The next morning, over breakfast, I check the emails on my phone and am surpris
ed and heartened to have already received a reply from a Hazara surgeon living in Sydney.
Dear Dr Rose
Thank you for your email and for your research. It is essential that the full cost of delayed processing of refugees is acknowledged. I am one of the fortunate ones. I left Afghanistan as a young man and received a visa to come to Australia where I completed my medical training. I can arrange that you receive samples of my buccal cells and those of my wife and children. Also, I can arrange to send samples from others I know here. I will arrange for blood samples, too, given that the epigenetic changes you are looking for might be in blood cells but absent from cheek cells. I suggest you also test the blood of your Tasmanian subjects. I will provide details of the histories of those from here.
I understand your need for a control group and all I can say is that while most Hazara have been persecuted, people like myself who managed to secure visas for themselves and their families before the worst of the conflict took hold are significantly less traumatised than those who fled our part of the world by boat. Those people remain separated from their families and have no idea, still, if they will be allowed to remain in Australia or be sent home. For them it is a living hell.
I wish you the very best of luck with your research.
In peace.
Dr Shah
I feel a deep sense of contentment, not just to know we now have a control group, but that this man thinks the research is valid and will be helpful. I read the email out to Sean.
‘What did I tell you?’ he says, holding out his coffee mug for me to ‘chink’. Sean and I have the control samples and run the analysis, as excited as two children on Christmas Eve. With the aid of a community nurse and expanded ethics approval, we have also acquired blood samples from our subjects, on Dr Shah’s advice. Sean and I work again late into the night, targeting genes known to express stress hormones and studying them for signs of epigenetic changes compared with the control group.
Already we have shown differences in the levels of stress hormones in the saliva and blood of more traumatised individuals, a significant finding in itself. Interestingly, those people and their children had less stress hormones, giving them less capacity to deal with current or future stress.
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