‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You just didn’t see him.’
‘How could I miss my own son? I’ve come all this way…’
‘He keep out of sight. He ask us not to tell you.’
‘So he’s been watching me?’
‘Of course. But you lost in your dreams and you don’t see him.’
‘I was thinking of Massoud.’
‘Of course. We all do.’
‘What’s Eli doing here?’
‘You just have to wait to find out. But first we are all going to Massoud’s hideout.’
Then I realise that there is not only an SUV in front of us, there’s also one behind us. I can see in the side mirrors that it has a policeman and three armed guards in it.
‘Have they been with us all the way?’ I ask Meetra.
‘You didn’t see them at the tomb?’
‘I took a photo of one of them looking in the window of the mausoleum when I was inside and another one at the amphitheatre. I didn’t realise they were with us.’
She shrugs and says, ‘Doesn’t matter,’ as Abdullah parks the car.
As I step from the car, Eli is coming over at a trot. Right away, he hugs me to him, saying, ‘Come on Mother, we’re going to see where the great Massoud hid out. Come and I’ll show you.’ And he takes my hand.
Over a stretch of gravel, nestling in under a steep mountainside, there are two nondescript rock and mudbrick cabins. They are run-down and the windows are broken but they have sheets of plastic over them. Behind us comes a personage, the dignitary whose excursion we are part of: long, crisp black suit coat over white shalwar kameez, stepping out smartly ahead of his entourage. He heads for the humble mud building where Massoud was quartered in hiding, but he is soon out again with one hand behind his back, as if he’d been disappointed in the middle of a bow. No, Massoud wasn’t there to meet him, nothing to see…
Eli and I take our turn. Inside is a decrepit memorial to a great struggle. The room is small, render cracked and fallen from the walls, two small windows stuck open in their frames, a ceiling of tin and beams, rubble piled high in the corners. To me, it is a monument more fitting even than the stone mausoleum; it speaks of work and hope and time passing, whereas the mausoleum pits itself against time, the expression of a high and mighty grief.
The soldiers precede us into a dark little covered porch linking the two cabins and seem to dissolve into blackness in front of us. They are the bodyguards following the personage. ‘Who is he Eli?’
And Eli does the same thing to me as Meetra has done and says, ‘Doesn’t matter, Mumma. Not for now. I’ll tell you when the time’s right.’
‘But you were travelling with him.’
‘Yes. I was even driving some of the way. I could see you all the time with your little camera on its tripod at the window and I was thinking, “That’s my mum!” You never miss a moment, do you?’
‘Can’t see the wood for the trees, you mean!’
It isn’t a door into which the soldiers and the personage disappeared ahead of us. It’s a hole in the mountain. A cave. A soldier gives us a smile and a nod as if we are in on some wonderful conspiracy.
‘Gosh, it’s pretty dark…’ I mutter as Eli’s grip on my arm tightens.
We edge our way in with the feeble light of a torch being shone behind us. Eli starts crooning softly and his voice comes echoing back, wrapping me in its warmth and joy. Then he says something in Dari to Meetra, so I have to ask, ‘What are you two saying?’
‘Massoud was coming and staying in here,’ Meetra says, ‘when the Russians were bombing.’ Every now and again the walls light up in the beams of the torch and I can see that this is a big place. Meetra translates what the guide is saying: ‘It was only for Ahmad Shah Massoud. For the rest it was bigger and longer.’ She means there is another one of these somewhere close.
Eli hugs me close. ‘What about that, Sibella?’
‘It’s wonderful, wonderful. Did they dig it out by hand?’
‘Some of it is natural, but I think they increased the size a bit.’
It feels very big in the dark and we feel for the walls, little embryos trying to attach in a mysterious womb.
As we passed to the outside, sunlight gleamed on Meetra’s crown ahead of us and we came out into a great shaft of brightness. We stood on a small arena of flat ground above the tumbling Panjshir, surrounded by stupendous clarity. Rocky peaks encircled us, clear air entered us and the light picked out the details down to pebbles.
Pushing its way up through my joy is the horrible weed of what happened in Melbourne. Eli has joined me in the middle SUV and we are on our way to lunch. Meetra says we are going to eat at the house of one of Massoud’s relatives, which is not far from here. The relative isn’t there but connections of the VIP in the leading SUV have made the arrangements.
‘Eli.’ I am holding his hand. I lay my cheek on his upper arm and look into his bearded, very tanned, blue-eyed face. ‘Can you tell me what happened to your unit in Melbourne? It looked as though a violent crime had been committed there. You hadn’t paid your last bill and there was money outstanding and the landlord came after me for reparation and an explanation. Please tell me what happened.’
He sighs and squirms on the threshold of a mental space he doesn’t want to enter. ‘Well, to start with, Mum, you have to believe me. I didn’t commit a crime, but I do know what happened.’
His tone has changed abruptly and I try not to snap in reply, but I’m so fed up with the devious tangle that our relationship has become over the years! ‘There was a pool of blood that someone had tried to remove with bleach…’
‘I know. I wish you didn’t have to be involved in this but let me tell it from the beginning so you will understand.’ So he takes a deep breath and adjusts his face, his eyes losing the immediate view as he arranges what he has to say.
‘I didn’t live there a lot of the time I was in Melbourne. There are Afghans in Melbourne who are in a lot of trouble. It’s a very small minority of them, mind you, but there are a few. I’m known to the Federal Police as a person who speaks Dari and who has been back and forth to Afghanistan lots of times. And I’m in contact with ASIO and people in DFAT, so quite often, when I come home to see you guys, I’ll be asked to do a little favour for one agency or another. This time it was the feds who approached me.
They asked me to look after an Afghan woman who wanted to go into drug rehab. She’d been in Australia since the nineties with her husband and children and her husband’s parents and she had citizenship, but it hadn’t protected her much. For all that we tout Australia as the land of mateship, she had no mates, didn’t speak the language and lived like a prisoner in her own home. The family’s very conservative and wouldn’t let her work and she was so depressed, she was on the verge of topping herself. She’d turned up out of the blue one day at St Vincent’s casualty with a baby on her lap and she was very agitated and acting as though the baby was sick. Well, a doctor looks at the baby and the baby’s showing all the signs of narcotic poisoning. It was about a year old.
‘So, baby on narcotics…Doctors at St V’s see it every so often because there are a lot of heroin addicts in and out of their rehab. Turns out, as it generally does, that the mother’s addicted too and she’s been breastfeeding it. But there’s a special problem in this case because no one speaks her language and she won’t tell anyone who she is. It’s a case for social workers. Well, they’re pretty savvy and they have her picked as a Dari speaker with a drug problem and they know it’s a matter for the Federal Police not the locals.
‘The feds know about me, knew I was staying nearby at the time, and they got hold of me to come in and interpret for this woman. My work with the feds is the reason it was hard for you to get hold of me and why I had to lie low. I’m only useful to them as long as I remain anonymous.
‘Anyway, turns out this woman has heard somehow, possibly the SBS programs in Dari, or from the telly, of the methadone program at St V’s,
and is desperate to go on it. The family won’t let her out of their sight and they hold her drug supply over her head to keep her from doing what she’s just gone and done – come to the notice of Australian social workers via the medicos. Social workers means police, police means getting busted, getting busted means jail. She was too scared to stay in the rehab because the family would almost certainly trace her there, so it’s Eli to the rescue.
Well, it’s one thing to harbour an Afghan woman in your home but another thing entirely to face an infuriated Afghan husband. He’s likely to kill you and his wife, so I agreed to set her up in my flat so long as I wasn’t going to be caught living with her. Meanwhile the feds could investigate the family and see where they were getting their drugs from…It turns out that the husband’s become a supplier of alternative medicines and they’ve built themselves a castle in Coburg. Obviously, something’s going on.
‘While they were investigating, I shaved off my beard and became the clean-cut Charlie you saw at your opening…’
‘Oh God! You turned up in your gym gear.’
‘Well, that was part of it, Mum,’ he exclaims, suddenly irritated with me. What he thinks of as my pettiness is a bone of contention between us, but he will do things – like turning up to my grand opening in his gym clothes – that I’m certain are meant to slight me. Sometimes I think he does it to draw attention to himself – what as, though? My protector? My absence in his presence? His humility versus my pretentiousness? He isn’t humble!
But it isn’t the time to go down this path so I pull my horns in and listen.
‘I was being a gym instructor for an outfit in Fitzroy and living in a room in someone’s house while I was keeping an eye on Samia – that was the woman’s name – taking her to her methadone program and making sure the social workers went to visit her and the baby. The family were out looking for her, of course, but they weren’t about to report her disappearance to the police for obvious reasons.
‘She was around thirty and that family’s doings had been the story of her life since she was sixteen in Afghanistan. They’re Shinwaris. She told me that her father sold her to her husband’s family to pay off a debt. He owed the family for sixteen sheep. Sixteen sheep, one woman; you get it. She’d been a nice-looking girl at some stage, too, you could tell that. Since being sold, she’d had six kids. Anyway, that hardly counted. She was good value as far as the family was concerned; they treated her like a slave. She did all the housework and looked after the kids and her husband’s parents as well. They were quite wealthy as far as wealth in Afghanistan goes. Well, of course they were: they were in the heroin trade.’
‘But the blood…’
‘I’m coming to that, Mum. That family has extended connections with other communities, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Europeans too, who are into sports medicine. They know people everywhere, all over Melbourne, and they found out where Samia was within four days. After all, it’s only a long tram ride from Coburg, Samia couldn’t drive, she had no money to take a cab and no access to money. She was toting a kid around. You can’t hide in this world if those are your credentials. We knew they’d find her and were hoping for a drug bust before they did. So I’ve stocked Samia up with things she needs for herself and the baby, including stacks of disposable nappies and bleach. Why bleach? Well, I remembered you always had a supply of bleach around when Nin was a baby and it didn’t occur to me until later that the point of disposable nappies is you don’t need to wash them. Anyway, no harm done, just four redundant litres of bleach stored up in her en suite. I’m living in a room about three doors away from Samia’s. She’s using the phone I had on there and I’ve got a mobile – any trouble, she rings me right away. About a week before your opening, I’m pounding away at the gym when there’s a call on the mobile. She’s seen one of her husband’s brothers skulking in the driveway of the units – you had to go down a driveway to get to my unit as you obviously know by now. So, not quite knowing what I’m going to do, I’m on my way in my tracky daks and singlet, sweaty, tough-looking, I hope. It takes me about ten minutes to get there, about twelve minutes from the time of the call. In that time, the brother has got into the garage and opened the piss-weak door into Samia’s kitchen – the doors were done on the cheap; you could lock them but they were hollow inside and bendable. Only the very front door has a bolt so anyone with a picklock is home and hosed and doesn’t even have to do damage to get in. By the time I get there, he’s upstairs with Samia screaming and kicking and being held against the bathroom wall. I came through the front door, using my set of keys.
‘“Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on here?” In a deep voice. He lets her go, the poor little kid’s squalling and suddenly Samia starts to haemorrhage. And I mean haemorrhage; she’s having the mother of all miscarriages. It’s pretty bad, blood everywhere, she goes unconscious, I ring the ambulance, the ambulance comes. I just didn’t think it out. There wasn’t any time. I got Samia into the ambulance, I phone the feds from the ambulance. They tell me they’ve got it under control and I’m not to go back to the unit under any circumstances because the bastard of a brother is probably armed. Then suddenly I remember the kid, phone them again, but I get put through to voice mail, in the back of my mind I’m reading, “Siege in Collingwood, Kid held hostage” and I’m trying to morph into fifteen versions of myself to be in all the places where I’m needed, not to mention the one place where I want to be – with my mother and my gran and my cousin and her kid.
‘Poor Samia’s very, very sick. I call them up in the rehab and ask if a social worker from there can come and hold her hand while I go back and see if I can get the kid, because I’m buggered if I’m going to take the advice of the feds and leave well alone when there’s a little kid involved. Besides, the bloke from the feds is an immature young cock and I don’t know why they’ve hired him. He thinks he’s Rambo. He’s really, really up himself, half my age and what would I know about anything, I’m only a journo. I haven’t got top-secret clearance. He’s got top-secret clearance. Some people are so infatuated with their job descriptions they can’t do the job for playing the part.
‘Nobody’s free right away at the rehab, but they’re ringing around the hospital and as soon as there’s a social worker available, they’ll send him or her up to where we’re desperately waiting for an operating suite to become available – I don’t know why they bother mentioning a “him”, because I’ve yet to come across a social worker who isn’t a “her”. Well, another hour goes by, Samia’s still bleeding, there’s no operating theatre available, and, bugger it, they have to move her to the Women’s where there is a theatre. She’s getting mighty desanguinated by now and it’s a matter of the Women’s or death. So, off we go to the Women’s and she’s rushed into theatre. New hospital, new staff, who am I, what am I doing here? Where’s the husband? I don’t know who the husband is, she knocked on my door and was in trouble, I called the ambulance and there’s no way anyone can ask her who her husband is. “Lovey? Lovey?” Bent over an unconscious woman as the theatre doors swing shut. And then she’s on the operating table fighting for her life. I can’t go in to be with her and I can’t go and get the kid, because she might not make it. I ring St V’s again. Can they send someone over? I’ve got to go check out the little kid. What about a policewoman? they ask. Well, no. There’s a drug bust on and I need a social worker who knows the history to come. Please. It’s urgent, she might die and I should go and get the kid if I can. Luckily, at St V’s they know the routine. So, half an hour later, the social worker from St V’s comes over – more bloody hospitalese, what’s one of their social workers doing on our patch? While all that’s going on, I skedaddle. Back I go to the unit. No yellow tape, no crime scene, so I let myself in. Nobody home. Upstairs the basin in the bathroom’s been broken and some idiot has poured the bleach I bought for the putative baby nappies all over the stain of Samia’s haemorrhaged blood at the entrance to the bathroom.
‘My hear
t sinks. I’m in a fury. I ring the fed guy whose name’s Jason. “What the fuck, Jason?” “Don’t worry about a thing, mate, you’re in the clear.” “What’ve you done?” “We’re getting you out. We’re sending you to Bali, all expenses paid because your life’s not worth a pinch of shit in Melbourne right now.” “What about Samia?” “We’ll get her and the kid into a refuge.” “Have you got the kid, then?” “No?” “So the fucking brother’s got the kid.” “We thought you had him.” “Don’t you ever listen, Jason…” “Now, don’t speak to me like that, my friend.” “Are you threatening me?” “We know all about you, Elias Jan of Tolo TV.” “What?” “Yeahhh!” he chuckles. He’s heard that I’ve reported things on Tolo.
‘I was just so angry and frustrated, Sibella, that I flung the phone across the room and broke it. The ignorant little puffed-up bastard. And anyway, I don’t work for the Federal Police, I’m a journalist and I didn’t set out to be roped in. I’ve done this type of thing before and beyond having my expenses paid, I got bugger all out of it. I was furious.’
Eli sits there in the car beside me, blinking and fuming as we jolt along. ‘I tried to think it out, Mum. But it was just some concocted situation. As it happened, I did go up to Indonesia. They gave me five hundred dollars spending money. Big of them.’
‘What happened to Samia?’
‘She came out of the operating theatre in a bad way. The St V’s social worker decided to drop the pretence and they contacted the fucking family so she could see her children. They all came in and sat around her bed, weeping the true tears of crocodiles while the poor, poor lady died. Her fallopian tube had burst well and truly, her womb was ruptured. She was just too weak from loss of blood to take the hysterectomy and, in any event, there was muck in her body cavity.
‘They put the husband and his father on surveillance and two weeks after I left Australia, the feds busted them on drugs charges. They were part of a pretty big smuggling ring but it wasn’t just heroin they were bringing in. It was ecstasy and ice and the makings of growth hormones for gym freaks and sporting heroes. They’ve been in jail for some months now waiting for their case to come up…or so bloody Jason tells me. I’m so, so sorry Mum. What a thing to put you through! They’ve informed the state police about what happened to Samia now, I believe. At least, that’s what the latest email says. I’m so sorry, Mum. Down the track I’ll try to get reimbursement for the damage to the unit.’
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