The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  Running short of money, Faris offered to pay in jewellery. When the deal was sealed, Zahra said, ‘Uncle, thank you very much. Tomorrow I will see Ali.’

  ‘Be like lions,’ Quassey said. ‘Don’t fear anything. Leave the worry about Indonesian police to me. I will take care of everything.’

  On 18 October 2001, Faris, his wife, Layla, and Zahra were bussed from a school building in Sumatra late at night. It was still dark when the 421 men, women and children were offloaded on a beach at the southern tip of the island. Waves lapped at their feet. The sea stretched out before them, an ominous presence. Smaller boats ferried them to a boat moored offshore. The women and children were taken out first; it was calculated they would offer less resistance.

  As they neared the boat they were sickened by what they saw. Nineteen metres in length, four metres wide, the ageing fishing vessel bore no resemblance to the boat they had been promised. They could not imagine how it could brave the ocean. The women and children were transferred on board, and the men followed. The anchor was winched in. The boat moved out at dawn into unknown seas.

  On the living-room bookshelf stands a model of a schooner, carved in wood. Faris bought it in 2008 after a journey to Indonesia seven years after the boat that became known as the SIEV-X—Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel number 10—sank. ‘I did not want to return,’ he says. ‘I did not want to meet the ocean again. But my heart told me to go, and my mind wanted answers.’

  He visited his old haunts. He returned to the hostel and the markets of Cisarua. He searched the ports for the fishermen who had saved him. ‘I wanted to take them presents. I wanted to give them flowers. I wanted to give them cake. I wanted to say, you saved my life. I wanted to say thank you, you looked after me, but I could not find them. I ran here, I ran there. I asked many people. No one would help me. No one said anything. It was like a big secret.’

  Faris returned home with nothing to show bar the model schooner. He lifts it from the shelf and shakes his head in wonder. He pauses, his eyes fixed on the intricate carving.

  ‘The women and children were crowded on the lower and upper decks,’ he says. He points at various places on the model. ‘The men sat in the front, and on the cabin roof. They were here, over there, and on the roof of the engine house.’

  Bodies leaned on bodies, heads rested on stomachs. People lay feet to feet, head to head, curved in foetal postures. Mothers held babies in their arms. Infants rolled into the bodies of sleeping strangers. People pushed for that extra centimetre of breathing space.

  Faris sits back down on the sofa. He holds the schooner in one hand and places the other on his chest. ‘I sat in the boat like this,’ he says. He straightens his back, folds his hands in his lap, holds his body steady and stares at an unknown point. Then he sags back. With great effort, he lifts himself from the sofa and eases the boat back on the shelf. He returns to the sofa, folds his arms and straightens his back.

  ‘Yes, I sat like this. I did not move. What did I care?’ he says, maintaining a blank face. ‘What did I have? What could I lose? I am suffering for what? I was hard. Nothing can shift me. To die was much better.’

  Faris continued to sit in the same place on the boat even as, later that morning, twenty-four Mandaean Christians, fearing for their safety, disembarked near a group of islands south of the Sunda Strait. Many other passengers were tempted to join them. Faris had no desire to leave. He had rolled the dice, and that was that.

  At night, the vessel rose and fell into deepening troughs. A collective prayer rose from the boat, a chant in a babel of languages: ‘God, please save us. Please save us. God, help us.’ Zahra clung to her father. Faris held her tight, and tried to shield her from the fury of the storm.

  After many hours, the wind subsided. In the morning, the sea was calm. The children saw dolphins and leapt for joy. The captain announced they had passed the yellow buoy and were now in international waters, six hours from Christmas Island. Soon you will reach your destination, he said.

  ‘Zahra, we are almost there,’ said Faris.

  Zahra clapped her hands. ‘Are we going to see Ali soon?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, God willing,’ Faris replied.

  In the early afternoon, the boat foundered. The engine was damaged. The captain called for any mechanics among the passengers to help fix it. The back-up machinery was old and corroded.

  The sound of a plane lifted their spirits. The men dragged out T-shirts, jeans, blouses and shirts and set them alight. The smoke signals rose. The plane vanished.

  The boat’s engine stopped. The men laboured frantically to revive it. Men and women bailed the water with buckets and other containers. They could not keep up. The waters rose; the boat groaned and the planks cracked. To lighten the load, supplies and luggage were thrown overboard. Zahra wept as she saw the toys and batteries she had planned to give Ali disappear.

  Still the waters rose. The boat listed. The panic spread. Then the men began to jump. Some leapt in silence, some with wild cries. Others stood by the edge, petrified. Faris held Zahra’s hand on one side and Layla’s on the other.

  ‘Zahra, do not worry,’ he said. ‘We are together.’ He braced his knees, hesitated. Wondered whether to chance it. The sea raged below them. Zahra pleaded for him to stay on board. ‘We must be brave,’ Faris said. ‘I want to be with you,’ Zahra replied.

  A mountainous wave settled it. It happened quickly. The SIEV-X went down at 3.10 pm. People were screaming: ‘God, help us. God, help us.’ Some were trapped below deck. Others were flung into the ocean. Layla and Zahra clung to Faris.

  Layla lost her grip. Zahra lost her grip. Faris saw Zahra slide into the ocean. He moved towards Layla. Layla screamed: ‘Don’t come to me. Go to Zahra.’ Faris swam after Zahra. She was wearing a life jacket. He kept his eyes on her. She was elusive, bobbing in the water.

  ‘I was like a fish,’ Faris says. ‘I swam quickly. I followed her, but she was faster. She was like melting butter.’ She was beyond his outstretched hands, glimpsed in the troughs between waves. Appearing, disappearing. He searched and searched. He dived and resurfaced, drew on reserves he did not know existed. He swam until his body could no longer bear it.

  Faris returned to Layla and found her floating, dead. There was no time to think. He was supported by a worn life jacket. He stands up to demonstrate. There were three pieces of foam: ‘One here,’ he says, pointing to his lower right back, ‘and one there,’ pointing to the left. ‘And one under my head.’ He tilts his head back to show me.

  He is immersed in the telling. Debris floated by: suitcases, water bottles, oranges, apples, shoulder bags. Stuffed animals. Shoes. Thongs. Cooking pots. Pillows. Plastic toys. Pieces of timber. Slicks of petrol from the sunken boat. It was raining. Water beat down on water, clouds blurred the horizon.

  At nightfall, the world sank into darkness. The rain ceased. An eerie silence settled on the ocean. The survivors had drifted apart. Faris floated alone. His throat burnt with saltwater. The waves swelled in a hypnotic rhythm. Then, approaching midnight, the boats appeared—two larger boats, and a smaller one.

  ‘Three boats,’ says Faris. ‘I swear it.’

  Their lights flickered out of the gloom. He paddled frantically towards them. He discovered there were many other survivors in the ocean. They clutched at debris in singles, pairs, in groups of six. They held on with one hand, and with the other they paddled. They screamed. They whistled. They shouted: ‘Help. Please save us.’ Searchlights probed the waters, illuminating the paddlers.

  They were close, reaching out, almost touching. The hulls loomed like walls above them, then the boats backed away and withdrew into the darkness. ‘They vanished. Just like that,’ says Faris. He sits back on the sofa, returns his hands to his lap and resumes his motionless posture.

  The desire to see Ali again kept him going. He held the image of his son before him. It was an antidote to his exhaustion. But when the boats abandoned him, he was finally broken. Faris leans back on the
sofa. Again, he is elsewhere. Beyond the kitchen window the leaves are rustling.

  Faris’s gaze returns to the living room. He lifts himself from the sofa. He stands on the polished boards and continues his story: ‘I did not care anymore. I lost all my feeling. I lay on my back. Like this.’ He stretches full length on the floor. ‘I rested my head on the life jacket.’ He folds his arms over his chest, wriggles, and makes himself comfortable. ‘The water was thick and salty. The jacket was my pillow, and my bed was the ocean. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.’

  Faris awoke in the dark to rain and lightning. ‘Where are the people? Where are the people? No one is answering. Everyone is gone. I am alone. I am with the ocean. I am with the wind. I am with the sky. I am with the water. I am with three bodies—a young boy, four or five years old, and a boy and girl, maybe eleven.

  ‘Where did they come from? How did they find me? The bodies stuck to me. They did not leave my side. They were like children resting against their father.’ Faris takes a deep breath. He unfolds his arms and places them behind his head. He lies back and gazes at the ceiling. ‘This is how it was. I lay on the water. I did not care. I closed my eyes, and I returned to sleep. Just like that.’

  I sit with Aunty Joy at her living-room table. I am overwhelmed by what she has told me. She knows the ebbs and flows. When Coranderrk was closed in 1924, five older people refused to be moved on, she tells me. They remained there until they died. In 1933, Joy’s brother, James Wandin, was the last Aboriginal person born at the station, in the home of his grandmother, Jemima Wandin. Granny Jemima passed away in 1944. She was one of the last of the Wurundjeri to die at Coranderrk.

  When Joy’s father, James Henry Wandin, died in 1957, fourteen-year-old Joy tried to fulfil his final wish to be buried in the Coranderrk Cemetery, the last half-acre of Wurundjeri land. Her efforts were thwarted. Even in death, he was refused his birthright.

  Yet the people endured. Family bonds were sustained, kinship remembered. In this we were determined, says Aunty Joy. The Wandin family and other Wurundjeri descendants continued living in Healesville and the Upper Yarra region. They retained their ties to the land, regardless of who now claimed title.

  The resistance of the Wurundjeri never ended. Aunty Joy notes key dates. 1985 marked the creation of the Wurundjeri Tribe Land and Compensation Cultural Heritage Council. In September 1991, the Coranderrk Aboriginal Cemetery was handed back, the first half-acre regained. The following year the Wurundjeri acquired the ninety-four acres of the former army school of health. In 1999, another two hundred acres were returned.

  The Wurundjeri are passing on lore, reclaiming language, marking the special places, the gathering sites on the banks of the creeks and rivers, and Mount William, the location of a stone axe quarry, once the epicentre of a vast trading system that extended seven hundred kilometres to the north. They are planting, rejuvenating areas of Coranderrk. They have never left, yet they are returning.

  I drive northwest to Mount William and am guided over the greenstone quarries by Wurundjeri elders. I now know the maps. I drive around the bay, Boonwurrung territory, where the city hugs the coastline. I drive to Mordialloc and walk the banks of the creek to the sea entrance. I drive back northeast and break free of the suburbs into the Yarra Valley. Barak’s country, now farmland and vineyards.

  I cross the Great Divide via the Black Spur Drive and return hours later to Coranderrk Station. I have traversed this route many times now. In 2009, towns in the Acheron Valley were ravaged by bushfires. Many lives were lost, homes destroyed, properties wasted, swathes of forest reduced to charred trunks and bare black branches.

  I crisscrossed the spur in the months after the fires to record the stories of survivors. I heard tales of fences melting like candle wax, of a woman trapped in a car between two walls of flame—the burning house visible in the rear-view mirror and the woodlands ablaze before her—thinking, it’s so hot the windscreen is going to explode. She closed her eyes, put her foot on the accelerator, and drove through the flames to the other side.

  I heard tales of the 1939 fires from one of the last living survivors, an ageing farmer. He was thirteen years old back then, working on his father’s farm. ‘Was so hot, all you had to do was spit to start a fire,’ he says. He relives the sight of exploding eucalyptus, and of horses, their manes on fire, screaming as they tumbled down the hillside. His father lost his mates at the timber mills. ‘Never saw him weep before. Never saw him weep since. Tell whoever is willing to listen that the fire will always come back. To live here, you must live with the knowledge of fire. No matter what you do, the fire will always come back.’

  I have descended the Black Spur towards Acheron on many mornings and seen clouds lifting from the valley like plumes of white flames from obscured crevices. And I now drive homewards over the spur as darkness descends, after a day of bushfire stories. It rains. The road is treacherous. The forest leans in, branches swirl in the winds, the rain slants across the windscreen. I turn the wipers to high speed and grip the wheel as I take the sharp bends.

  I am nervous, unsettled by the lights of oncoming traffic. If I slow down slightly, cars bank up behind me. I sense the drivers’ damn impatience. They are crowding in on me, beeping their horns, raising their high beams, as if to say, ‘Get out of the way, you idiot.’ I seek out wider shoulders, pull over, allow them to pass, then return to the road.

  My thoughts are under siege, possessed by what I am coming to know about this stretch of mountain. I think of a young man I had met that day: ‘It went still, so still,’ he told me, his voice falling to a whisper. ‘And out of the stillness, arose a deathly roar, like a stampede of cattle coming over the mountain.’

  He lost everything, his home, all he owned. He moved to a caravan park, and lived alongside others displaced by the fires. ‘I now live for the moment,’ he says. ‘I am strangely free. I am light on my feet. Weightless.’

  These stories too are now a part of me, interwoven with the tales of Wonga and Barak crossing the Great Divide, leading their people. They had no need to hasten, no need to career around hairpin corners. They knew the terrain. Knew that it could not be taken by force. Knew that they must walk it at a steady pace, guided by the contours, attuned to the land.

  They knew how to work it, and how to conserve it; knew the texture of small things, what was edible, what was useful. They knew of plant communities now extinct and lost to memory, and they knew the power of fire and scorched earth, and the certainty of new growth. Knew the dangers and the beauty; the scent of it—their beloved Country, the solid ground beneath their feet.

  Faris awakes to the rising sun. The three bodies are still by his side, as if reassured by his presence. In the distance, he makes out a fishing boat. He cannot believe what he sees. He no longer trusts his own vision. His limbs ache. He is hungry and thirsty. Salt clings to his tongue. It sours his mouth and sears his lips.

  He sees a black plastic bag floating by. He paddles over and grabs it. Inside there are three red apples, two packets of biscuits, and a bottle of water. He starts with the water, and drinks all of it. He eats the three apples; the biscuits he keeps for later. He now has energy for another twenty-four hours. The water and the apples have given him hope.

  A seagull settles on his head. It is very light. In the distance, Faris sees two fishing boats; and he sees a whale, swimming towards him. He is scared. He says to himself: ‘Faris, you are gone now.’ He says: ‘I did not drown, but this will finish me.’ He prays. The whale dives and disappears below him.

  Faris paddles towards the fishing boat. As he draws close, the three bodies leave him. ‘I never mentioned this before,’ he tells me years later. ‘What happened was amazing. As soon as I came near the boat the three bodies went one way, and I went the other. I watched them float away. I said to them, “Thank you. I will never forget you. You did not leave me. You kept watch over me. You stayed with me through the night.”

  ‘The fishermen threw down a rope. I reached
up and grabbed it, and they pulled me out of the water. I was the first one saved. They lifted me onto the deck. They helped me up. They hugged me. They were very kind. They led me to a shower. They gave me tea, and they gave me food and water. They were sitting beside me. They put their arms around me. I showed them a photo of my wife and daughter. I told them, I want to go to Christmas Island.

  ‘I said, “Please take me.”

  ‘They said, “We can’t.”

  ‘The captain said, “We are going back to Jakarta.”

  ‘I said, “No, you must look for other people.”

  ‘The fishermen told me they saw only dead bodies and luggage. I told them, “There are fifty people out there.” The fishermen had good boats. Strong, timber boats and a satellite. The captain was a good man. He said, “Okay, we will look.”’

  Faris saw each survivor rescued. He was lowered on a tyre to haul in some of them. They were lifted on board in shock, exhausted, weeping. They collapsed on deck. For a moment, they were frantic with relief, but relief soon gave way to panic.

  Their cries rang out: ‘Where is my son? Where is my daughter? Where is my wife? Where is my mother? My father? My aunt, my uncle? Where are my brothers and sisters? Please you must look. You must save them!’ They sank to their knees, tore at their hair and their damp clothes, and beat their fists against their foreheads and shoulders. They fell at the captain’s feet, and wrapped their arms around his legs. Faris is still haunted by their pleas.

  ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Why?’ His voice falls to an urgent whisper. ‘Why did the boats leave us? Why?’ It is years since the sinking and the question still plagues him, as it plagues the forty-five survivors dispersed over many lands—Sweden, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Finland—including the seven who settled in Australia.

  In the early years Faris would ring survivors living in other countries. They talked for hours. They talked through the night united by a common fate, churning over the details of the event. Why this, and what if that? They clung to each other’s voices, staving off the return to the desolation they felt when the calls ended.