Four shots at silence - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rodney Hall
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WHATEVER ELSE I may have expected on arrival at that detention camp in the far north of South Australia I did not expect Babak. Babak was thirteen years old. He was from Afghanistan, an asylum seeker with his lips sewn together. Crude thread zigzagged from needle hole to bloodied needle hole. He sat, listening to what I had to say, slumped in the dust among sixteen others, enduring a temperature upwards of forty degrees. All of them had inflamed lips bruised around the stitches. Politely they listened. Once I had finished I was told none spoke English.
An Afghan doctor, also incarcerated there, volunteered to be my interpreter.
Babak wrote down his first question for the doctor to translate: ‘Do you have towns and cities in your desert?' ‘Yes,' I told him, ‘but not exactly in the desert.' ‘Do you live in one of these cities?' ‘Yes.' And then, of course, I came up against the impossibility of explaining Sydney – the heart-stopping beauty of the harbour on a sparkling day. So I invited the next question instead. And it was: ‘Who put us here?'
By association I thought of the Prime Minister's harbourside mansion. Men and women edged closer to hear, despite the guards in the employ of the private company administering the camp. In place of an answer I invited these others to tell me stories on behalf of the hunger-strikers who could not speak. The doctor did his best, listening, nodding, translating, finding the right words in hesitant English, bringing life to fragments of what had happened during the desperate journey to reach safety: stories of humble gatherers of wild pistachio nuts who had found the courage to defy the insurgents and set out on the journey, stories of horror and repression, torture and murder, a gruelling struggle across the mountains and a long, long journey by train, stories of the first terrifying sight of the ocean, stories of hunger and heroism and sinking vessels and men in uniform coming to the rescue – angels, for sure.
My interpreter produced a tattered newspaper clipping from his pocket and unfolded it with a surgeon's fingers. He gave it to me to read. John Howard was quoted as saying: ‘Children in the proper, positive care of their parents don't sew their lips together, do they?' He asked me what was meant by this and pointed to the words: ‘They are trying to morally intimidate Australians.'
I had no way of explaining. Shame overcame any attempt. My own country, out there beyond the razor wire, unendingly flat, struck me as a strange barren place I didn't recognise. Because Howard was not alone. An inescapable disgrace was embedded in the complicit tone of the article.
Meanwhile Babak's father, with one arm across his son's shoulders, constantly dabbed some antiseptic on the boy's lips and hummed a chant. His own lips sewn and sore. Not hard to see the grief in his exhausted eyes. The doctor explained that Babak volunteered to take part in the hunger strike because he knew he would need courage when he grew to be a man with his own children to protect and feed.
From there I moved around the compound under a blazing weight of sunshine. My guard informed me that each detainee had been allocated a number and must be addressed by that number. He supported this requirement by explaining that it assured them of equality. Failure to comply? He illustrated the consequences by telling me about a nursing sister there who had refused to use the numbers and set about learning her patients' names. Of course the manager had carpeted her and dismissed her. He sniffed, ‘And anyway, she could never say them right.'
I insisted on keeping the doctor with me till we completed the circuit. Then I said goodbye to Babak. In the interim he had written a message for me: ‘My mother says,' the doctor translated, ‘we must be proud of our beautiful Pashto language.' I assured Babak that I had no doubt of it and that Pashto would be beautiful again on his own lips when next he was free to speak.
‘Makes you wonder,' said the guard supervising my departure, ‘who they think gives a damn.'
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ROUND BY THE pharmacy. A boy. Boy grins. Boy walks past bus stop where young tripper is begging coins. Tripper's shoes don't match. Boy walks on right past the Japanese restaurant. Sushi sign. Past antique shop with convict manacles trapped under glass display dome. Walks up to fat Aboriginal transvestite. Transvestite opens mouth. Cigarette hanging from lip. Boy, not noticing a thing, walks on air. Can't spare a scrap of attention for anything. Just his empty goldfish bowl. Boy clutches bowl against chest. A glass bowl filled with light and silence. ♦