by Osamah Sami
‘Do you mean the young cleric?’ she asks. She recognises Dad from his trips back to Iran over the years. He had come and gone to complete his PhDs, publish his books and for pilgrimage over the years—although this trip had come after many years away. I confirm it’s him, and tell her I can be there in an hour.
At the gates, I’m met by a guard with a machine gun.
I show him Dad’s passport. ‘This isn’t an Australian passport,’ he says. ‘And where is yours?’
‘Dude, this is an Australian passport. I’ve called them already—’
‘They don’t give appointments here.’
‘So check with them.’
‘Show me your passport.’
‘My passport is in Mashhad.’
‘Why is it in Mashhad? You don’t have a Mashhadi accent at all. Are you lying?’
A black car with tinted windows pulls up. An Iranian man opens the door; two Westerners exit. They look 100 per cent Australian: pale white men in suits. Best of all, they’re speaking with my accent.
‘Mate!’ I yell. They look over, but just nod and walk in.
The guard taunts me. ‘You are nothing to them.’
I must admit, I don’t look my best. My clothes haven’t been changed in days. My facial hair’s out of control. Maybe I’m insane in thinking people might see me as anything other than a street rat.
I beg the guard to just call in and check if I am lying. I offer him 100,000 in Iranian money—about a week’s wage. I place a large banknote in his hands. He checks to see if the note is fake. When he realises it’s real, he almost drools. He buzzes in: ‘There is an Arab to see the ambassador.’ I want to strangle him. I call over his shoulder, in English, that I’m an Australian citizen, seeking help for an emergency. The gate buzzes open.
It’s a quick affair inside. Dad’s passport is taken. The first page is cut with scissors and handed back to me. I’m given instruction on what form the cargo needs to take, instruction on the embalmment process. I’m told to translate important papers using the official services and given a number to call if I need help, even after hours.
I take a taxi to a translator’s office, where I’m greeted by a short lady with a slight hunch.
‘How fast do you want them done?’ she asks, in Farsi.
‘I need to be back in Mashhad tonight.’
‘What makes you think I’ll have time to finish them today?’
‘I’ll pay extra.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? What kind of an answer is that?’
‘I’m from here. I grew up in Iran.’
‘But your name is Arab.’ She examines me from behind her specs.
‘I’m an Australian citizen.’
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why don’t you translate them yourself?’
‘They need to be official.’ But I switch to English, to demonstrate. ‘What’s with you people? Your culture is rich with poets and painters. Full of history and all that’s left is a sad, unhelpful bunch in a stinking polluted city, more worried about where my great-grandfather’s from than about how you can help me.’
‘Wow. Your English is good,’ she says. I pause. She smiles.
‘Can you do this for me? Please?’ I beg. ‘If you can read the papers, you can see I lost my dad two days ago.’
‘Okay, go. Come back in two hours. Exactly two hours.’
She’s as good as her word.
◆ ◆ ◆
I catch a car to Qom, the city of blood and uprising. I still have my belongings in the apartment where we had been staying, and I have to pack up and pay for the stay.
The car arrives at 6 pm—to Qom central, the shrine. I kiss the door and walk into the grand yard. I ablute in the icy water by the fountain and head inside to rest and reflect.
I can’t think too much about Dad’s death, but I do think about Dad. What he was doing. How he was doing. How he is lying among the dead right now, waiting to rest. I ask Imam Reza’s sister, Ma’sooma, for help. I tell her I’m not terribly religious, but if she has the power to pull thousands of pilgrims by the hour, then I beg her to send some my way, and push me forward.
My stomach sends me to the toilet to remind me I’m still a human being. I squat inside the cubicle, deep in thought. Will I ever be able to smile again? I wonder. Will I ever go back to telling my jokes? Almost seraphically, the gent in the cubicle next door lets rip the most feral fart, long and loud and infinite. When he’s done, he discharges another short five-second blitz just for good measure. His sounds of joy and anguish as he tries to release are the perfect cover for my schoolboy giggles.
I leave the toilet, thanking God for showing me that life comes down to this. If Yasser Arafat had told a good fart joke when negotiating with the Israelis, he might even have ended up achieving peace.
◆ ◆ ◆
I’ve packed up, paid the rent and I now wait in the bus terminal, leaving Qom for Mashhad again.
It was due at nine-thirty but it’s already 10 pm. I ask him what time he thinks we’ll get there. The driver tells me our ETA is eight tomorrow morning, but we’ve got at least a thousand kilometres to cover.
I call up my memory of The Castle. I tell him he’s dreaming.
‘Can’t rush,’ he tells me. ‘We’ll get there when we get there. Maybe we’ll have an accident. Maybe we’ll never get there. Where’s all your anxiety going to go then?’
At 11.20 pm, we finally have departure. Everyone chants a good-luck verse and the tension drops. But not for me.
THE GREAT ESCAPE
Tehran, Iran, 1995
Dreaming of polar bears
‘My son has had a dream,’ my mother said, with an air of great solemnity.
The war was long over—but here I was again. Dragged into a small, dark tent by my mother, who was once again electing to deal with me via a woman who’d crawled straight out of a classic children’s treasury and into modern-day Tehran.
She looked exactly like the fortune teller I’d seen during the war, the one who’d told me I’d grow up to be a therapist. I did not know where all these fortune tellers did their training, but I was certain they must’ve used the same plastic surgeon: nobody on earth was born looking quite this strange.
‘Hmm,’ the old witch hummed into my ear. Her weird lips pressed inwards. I was sufficiently creeped out.
‘Go on. Tell her,’ urged my mum.
‘I had a dream we were living in a green place,’ I said, ‘with lots of polar bears all around us.’
‘Hmm,’ she continued. ‘Tell me, are you planning to travel soon?’
‘Aren’t you supposed to know that?’
My rejoinder was met by a solid smack on the back of my neck. ‘Ow.’ But this was a touchy topic for my mother; she had a lot riding on it. We’d been waiting on refugee status for almost two years, ready to join my father down in Australia. Dad had applied for us to get humanit
arian visas after his first visit to Australia in 1993, but he didn’t tell the family (particularly knowing my big mouth may spread the word and cause trouble). He waited on the news until 1995, when he finally got a preliminary conditional ‘yes’ and we had to undergo a medical exam. We had been persecuted in Iran as Iraqis for far too long and, knowing our lives were bleak, he had presented our case to give us a better future.
‘Your dream is clear,’ said the fortune teller. ‘You will get your visas. You will live in Australia. And you will become a great doctor.’
Mum was overjoyed. She hugged me and kissed my shaved head a thousand times, thanking the Lord her offspring was finally going to be of some use.
‘And since your son will be a great doctor in a faraway land,’ the crone went on, ‘I will have to charge you an extra success fee.’
Mum was so happy she didn’t care. She showered her in money. For my part, I was horrified, thinking this was all well and good, but where would our next meal come from? We were going to need those coins.
As it turned out, she was right and I was wrong on this one. Three weeks later, our application was approved.
I met the news with some sadness. Australia was so far from Iran that it must have been governed by a separate god.
America cannot dare do a damn thing to us
Soon, I was at the airport with my family: Mum, Dad, Moe Greene, Ali, Mona and baby Roah. We were surrounded by customs officials, not to mention their Kalashnikovs.
It was critically important that we did not speak Persian here. We had to speak Arabic, and only Arabic. We were not to be seen as Iranian residents departing for good, but Iraqis who happened to be passing through. (We’d already destroyed our Iranian Green Cards and after lots of hush-hush transactions, Dad had obtained forged Iraqi passports to fly out with.)
Like the rest of the country, the airport was pulsing with undercover agents who were ready to stop us at the slightest provocation. Dad understood the urgency better than anyone; he’d already fled one country—fled from Iraq, to here. We’d heard the story many times. It never got less awful.
I could picture it quite clearly. The thin mattress on the dirty floor of the tiny room in the house that smelled of mud and of cement that never dried. My father reclining, feverishly scanning his sheets of newsprint, reading and flipping, flipping and reading, with all the concentration of a kid cramming for his finals.
It was 1979. Saddam Hussein had just taken power, and only pro-government Iraqi papers were allowed. Dad, with cash he’d earned at his own dad’s tailor shop, would exchange dinar for US dollars and then, through a mule, buy the illegal Iranian newspapers every week.
The punishment for anyone caught was, of course, a brief, unfussy death. Nonetheless—his bedroom was already the room of a scholar, with newspapers like this one crammed under his bed. Books were stacked all around him, on the floor, against the walls, shelved against each other; on the wall beside his mattress was a poster, ripped and repaired, of a black-and-white Audrey Hepburn, with her trademark cigarette, a classic photo unlike any taken by an Iraqi’s lens.
Dad was lounging around with two best friends, Arif and Haitham, who also happened to be his newspaper and US dollar suppliers. When they gathered, they talked big about what they’d do to Saddam if they got the chance. But mostly, they just talked about movies. Dad’s nickname was ‘Hollywood Encyclopedia’, an honour bestowed on anyone in Iraq who could name three films starring Stallone and De Niro. He also harboured a theory that De Niro and Pacino were the same person; it was only years later that I finally convinced him to watch Heat, at which point he was happy to pass the title down to me.
Everyone had learned to recognise the knocks of the Baathist militia. They were notorious for shooting those suspected of anti-government leanings at point-blank range, feeding their bodies to ravenous dogs, and then invoicing the families for the cost of the ammunition. But that morning, no knock came. They just pushed the door in.
My father ordered his friends to scale the gas pipes and get out; he knew he had to stay with his mother. What could they do but flee? In seconds they were outside, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, the soldiers chasing them with a scatter of bullets.
His mother collapsed at the commander’s heel. ‘Please, my son is a good boy. Take me instead.’
By way of reply, the commander smashed the butt of his rifle into her face, and ordered my father to kiss his boots. They bundled him into a military jeep and left his mother on the floor, wailing and bleeding.
Later, they stripped him and hung him by his feet from a ceiling fan. They left a steel table spread thick with surgical tools strategically in view.
The interrogator was his uncle. Wartime does strange things.
‘Fuck, Sami,’ he said. ‘You’ve made my day so difficult. How am I meant to have dinner with your aunt tonight? There won’t be peace for days. Just give me your friends’ names, and I promise to end this quick.’
He plugged in an iron, like the type his wife used for saner reasons every week, and let it heat.
After fifty-eight days of torture, two soldiers came for him. My father was to be transferred to Abu Ghraib. The warden there, his uncle warned, was not a ‘family man’ like him. But he was glad to be rid of my father, so that his home life could know peace.
Little did he know these ‘soldiers’ were Arif and Haitham in costume. Again, war does strange things. They had used the fifty-eight days to grow their moustaches thick enough to fit in, and had crafted replica uniforms with the help of my father’s tailor shop.
They drove straight for the border, and crossed into Iran by swimming the shallow marshland. There were no other options.
In 2003, my dad was finally able to call home again. He was told his father had passed away, but his mother still lived. All this time, she’d believed he had been executed.
When my father got off the plane in Basra, to see her for the first time in twenty-four years, he was informed that she’d suffered a heart attack after speaking on the phone with him, and passed away in her sleep.
So Dad understood what it was like to lose your family, and had no interest in doing that again. In the airport, a barely controlled tension buzzed around him.
I, on the other hand, was a twelve-year-old, and I had never once been on an aeroplane. After hiding from aircrafts half my life, stashed into underground bunkers, I could not believe that this was happening.
An announcement crackled through the loudspeaker: ‘Mr Rezaei, please make your way to gate four.’
I couldn’t help but smile at this. Good old Mr Rezaei had come in so handy for me, so often; whoever he was, I wished him well on his journey. Then my smile dropped, and my stomach flipped. I was leaving everything. I wondered whether, in Australia, I’d be able to go around door-knocking, and what it would mean if the door was answered by a girl in a red shirt.
‘Can I speak a bit of Persian?’ I asked Dad. ‘Like to say “hi” and “how are you” and things like that?’
‘No!’ Dad snapped.
‘But Dad, even stupid people know how to say hello in the language of the country they’re in.’
‘Well, you’re more stupid than a stupid person. We all hav
e to be.’ Our accents were too fluent. As soon as we opened our mouths, the customs officers would know that we had been born here, and our whole cover would be kaput. But I was itching to talk. I loved to talk. And what if an officer greeted me, should I ignore him? Dad had spent years teaching me manners and it would be rude not to reply.
‘But Dad—’
‘Osamah! You know how you like acting? Just pretend you are a character! Your character doesn’t speak Farsi. End of story.’
‘Cool!’ I replied, as we approached the customs desk. ‘So. What is my backstory?’
Dad’s eyes widened sharply behind his glasses. ‘What backstory?’ he exhaled in a single breath.
‘When I did theatre in school, I always had to develop a backstory, even for a small character, like the wind. When I’d played the wind, I’d come from a tornado.’
‘Your backstory is that twelve years ago, I made a huge mistake by having you,’ my father said. ‘Now shut up and let’s go.’
I stopped right where I stood. He was rarely snappy like this. But, despite the urgency, he stopped too and squatted by my side. ‘Son. Don’t act. Just be,’ he said.
This, I could work with. I loved the idea of just being. Doing some of Shakespeare’s plays, I’d heard ‘to be or not to be’, but never had it felt so meaningful.
So we advanced towards the customs desk, my brothers and sisters mute, no backstories necessary. My mother was praying in whispers; deep lines of anxiety spidered her face.
Dad, though, was cool as art. He spread our seven Iraqi passports on the desk like a rainbow’s arch.
‘Where are you travelling to?’ the bearded customs officer barked.
‘Sorry, no Persian,’ replied my Dad.
‘Yeah, Arabic only,’ I loudly concurred. Dad barely glanced at me over his shoulder.