Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  And again, before she can answer, Meetra pipes up. ‘Okay, we are a very interesting group of people. My mother is Pashtun, my father was Tajik.’

  ‘Then presumably, Mahni’s mother is a Pashtun and her father was a Tajik?’ I taunt, but it goes nowhere.

  ‘The warlord Massoud was a Tajik, was he not?’ asks Ursula.

  ‘Panjshir Tajik,’ Meetra says.

  ‘Is there a difference?’ I ask.

  ‘Tajiks identify themselves by the region they are from. They are not nomadic or tribal people. They are left over from a widespread settled community of former times.’

  ‘That’s not generally the case in Afghanistan, is it?’ asks Ursula.

  ‘Not among the Pashtuns. They are tribal people. The herders – the Kuchi – belong to the Pashtun; they are different again; they are nomadic. They supply most of Afghanistan’s meat.’

  ‘Lamb and goats?’ Ursula asks.

  ‘And chickens. Some of them are settled and breed chickens, but mostly they follow the pastures. No paddocks, like here. It’s too high up.’

  ‘Do the Sunnis and the Shias get along?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Before the wars, everyone in Afghanistan gets along. Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just curious and I heard they have their differences. In Australia all we used to have was Catholics and Protestants. There was a very obvious social divide. It was a bit like Northern Ireland, wasn’t it, Ursula?’

  Ursula opens her mouth to answer but Meetra pre-empts her, too. ‘You?’ she asks me.

  ‘I’m not religious. But I’ve always lived in a Christian atmosphere.’ What I don’t say is that it was a muddled Christian atmosphere. I spent my formative years with intolerance on one hand and hypocrisy on the other. What I’ve really lived is a Western democratic life, Australian style.

  In what could be a tone of compensatory forgiveness for my having no God, she says, ‘I think Australian people are very friendly.’

  ‘What about you, Mahni?’ I ask. ‘How have you found it, living at home and looking after your mother?’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘But it’s lonely,’ I say.

  ‘It’s lonely.’

  ‘It’s a British culture,’ I say. ‘Inward looking. Over the fence is okay. Sharing recipes, but we keep to our own houses unless invited. And invitations are generally for special occasions. It’s easier to be born into that culture than to come into it from elsewhere, especially if you’re used to a more communal way of life.’

  Meetra says, ‘But new arrivals, ethnic groups, we come with problems.’

  ‘Well, of course; if they had no problems, they wouldn’t have to move. But don’t think there aren’t problems here, too,’ I say.

  ‘Everywhere humans are living there’s a problem,’ says Meetra.

  ‘We have a big one,’ I say. And I mention the lack of rapprochement between Europeans and Aboriginals and how Aboriginals were denied the vote and excluded from the census and written out of Australian history until the 1970s when the Land Rights movement began.

  But Meetra isn’t inclined to comment on that, she says, ‘Sometimes you meet, say, a Sri Lankan: in their own country they have problems with Tamil Tigers and now, being in Australia, they did not forget that. And now they are trying to deflect it on others.’

  Ursula comes in with a story she has brought back from Adelaide: Somali Muslims are complaining that the Lebanese who own their mosque are discriminating against them because they’re black. ‘They don’t let the Somalis park their cars in the car park,’ she says. ‘When a Somali widow rang up after her husband’s funeral at the mosque, to ask for his death certificate, the imam wouldn’t hand it over until she’d coughed up for all the funeral expenses. Her husband had only been dead three days. In Australia, the place that holds the funeral is supposed to lodge the death certificate automatically.’

  Meetra hoots with laughter. ‘This is imam! No humanity!’

  ‘I was brought up Catholic,’ says Ursula, ‘I lapsed years ago, but do you know, it wasn’t until Vatican II that I was allowed to talk to my Protestant neighbours when I was wearing my school uniform. We were okay at the weekends, but at school…nuh. Different schools, different cultures. That was the first experience I had of this sort of division and the stupidity of clergy. When John XXIII became pope, my mother rushed in next door and hugged the neighbours, saying, “I always knew Protestants had souls!” And just look at the Catholic clergy now! Ducking for cover after it’s revealed that paedophilia wasn’t just an isolated occurrence but an entrenched observance! Even the Pope wears Dorothy’s red shoes like some perverted Wizard of Oz.’

  And so the conversation went for another hour. Trying not to spill the beans of my situation with Eli, I attempted to introduce the sort of things that he might have been involved in that would have accounted for the condition in which Mr Liu and I found his unit, but apart from Meetra vouching for the decency of ninety-nine point five per cent of Afghans living in Australia, I didn’t get far. She’d forgotten her boast that she’d find out where Eli was right away while I was there. All I learned was that Mahnaz means ‘Moon’ and Meetra means ‘Sun’ despite their having been born at polar opposite times of the year. Inevitably the sun is mightier than the moon, if a lot less subtle. The moon must slide in and out as the clouds permit.

  I shall ring Meetra tomorrow and take her up on her promise to find out about Eli. After visiting my mother, I am lying low in the darkness of my house. The message bank on my landline is full, but the phone keeps ringing, so I leave it off the hook for hours at a time and try to sleep with the doona pulled up over my head.

  I took the luxury of a Yarra-side walk on my way home from the hospital tonight. I sat on a jetty by the river in the twilight at about seven o’clock, fearing that if I went home any earlier, I might be accosted by David. It’s better to park the car some blocks away and sneak up the back alleys to avoid contingencies. As I sat there watching the reflection of a white tree trunk break up into a massive, energetic pattern that seemed to crackle over the surface, a piece of graffiti caught my eye. Someone had written in small letters on the edge of a step ‘Ikarus + Ovid’. Ikarus, plus Ovid, I thought, who would write something like that today when no one studies Latin any longer? And, in any event, it isn’t Ikarus about whom Ovid wrote, it’s Icarus, with a c. It was one of the first poems I learned in Latin. It really moved me. When Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax in his wings melted and he fell from the sky, his father, Daedalus, cried, ‘Icare, Icare! Ubi es?’ ‘Icarus, Icarus, where are you?’ and he saw the feathers in the water and had to bury his beautiful boy, cursed by his own invention. Now the tree trunk seemed to be shattering into the feathers of Icarus and my heart was breaking.

  During the Taliban occupation of Kabul, Eli was back in Washington. We were in contact for a couple of years and I would hear of his efforts to write something comprehensive about what he knew. Then he went silent and I heard nothing from Phoebe either. I had no idea why and I was worried sick. They were out of contact for many months and then, out of the blue, Eli turned up on my doorstep. He was looking dishevelled and sick. I put him to bed. He started shaking all over. I called in my understanding GP. Eli was wrapped up on himself, shuddering and weeping. What had happened to cause such a breakdown?

  Charles Green was the only relative of Phoebe’s who treated me with any decency: he was on a post in Geneva and I’d rung him for a not very reassuring chat about Eli and Phoebe during their long silence. He’d told me not to worry, that there were some difficulties they were working through and that they would contact me sooner or later. He couldn’t tell me what the problems were and when I asked if they were marital or related to work, he said he couldn’t say, but he was sure they’d let me know eventually.

  Eli was almost unable to communicate when Charles rang me. He was aware that Eli had come home and wasn’t surprised to hear that he was in a bad way. He told me that Phoebe had recentl
y turned up in Geneva. She’d been back and forth to Pakistan many times during the long silence. This time, she’d been on a short visit, having told everyone it was for work. She was supposed to be doing groundwork for a US-sponsored pipeline across Afghanistan. The Clinton administration had already rejected the proposal because of Afghanistan’s instability and reluctance to recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, nevertheless, things might change once Bush took over the presidency. Phoebe was in Pakistan, supposedly talking to her contacts about possible strategies in the lead-up to Bush taking over from Clinton. Eli was in Washington. Actually, Phoebe’s department hadn’t wanted her to go to Pakistan; they’d wanted to send someone else and it was nothing about pipelines, but rather to probe intelligence people about a rumour that Al Qaeda was planning major sabotage on US soil. The person they’d wanted to send was junior to Phoebe, was of Middle Eastern extraction, spoke Dari fluently and was male, but instead of her organising for him to go on the commission, Phoebe sent herself.

  She did indeed end up speaking to the intelligence people who were supposed to be seeing the young man and did indeed get valuable information out of them but her superiors were furious that she’d broken ranks. They also found out that Phoebe and the young man were having an affair.

  ‘In my day,’ said Charles, ‘it was the women who slept with the men to get promotions, but this guy was an ambitious, canny young piece of work and in my opinion, it was he who duped Phoebe. Anyway she turned up here in Geneva to see me on her way home in a mood that was both triumphant and surly. She knew she’d be in serious trouble for not sending the guy, but at the same time, she had the information the department wanted and she was going to upstage him. But that wasn’t all. She’d been to see her friend Bollywood while she was in Pakistan and hadn’t been able to resist a “little present” given to her by Bollywood’s brother. It was a statuette of a rooster made of processed heroin in an opium and clay slurry, covered in plaster of Paris and then painted as only Afghans and Pakis can paint a rooster. She showed it to me – she’s always got to one-up everyone, has Phoebe. She was going to go back to Washington, triumphant with her information and then party her brains out on “dud chook”, as she called it.

  ‘I asked her, “What about Eli?” and she just said, “What about Eli?” I said, “What, you’ve thrown him over for this new guy’s charms, have you?” and she just invited me to have a bit of chook before she got on the plane.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t in a quandary about what to do. I’d been forewarned. Phoebe often used to come back to the States via me; the CIA knew that. They’d tailed her. She reckoned she’d set up these meetings herself, or at least played some big part in setting them up and she was angry that they weren’t going to send her. She was angry that they’d chosen junior lover-boy to go. She’d been outmanoeuvred and didn’t want to admit it.

  ‘I knew what was going to happen. I was going to put her on the plane, there’d be a CIA guy on board and she’d be arrested and charged with espionage or some such once they reached American air space.

  ‘As things turned out, she was busted for drugs. Maybe Bollywood’s brother was pulling strings with the CIA behind the scenes. She never got to tell her story. I rather think the drugs charges were a foil. If she’d been charged with espionage or some other crime related to what she’d done, it would have caused an unwanted sensation.

  ‘Eli rang me and said he’d stand by her, but then I had to tell him about the circumstances. He was gallant. He’d still stand by her – but in the event, she rejected him. She said, “No! I’m going to do this all myself,” and she didn’t once look Eli in the face when he turned up at her trial.’

  All the time they’d been off the radar, Phoebe had been behaving strangely. She was sniffing coke. She tried to hide her indulgences from Eli and when she wasn’t really succeeding to do that, she diverted her own attention by succumbing to the flirting behaviour of her young colleague, upon whose brilliance everyone was commenting.

  ‘I suppose she felt under pressure to bowl this young guy over,’ said Charles. ‘She’s at that age where if you don’t climb in your profession, you’re going to get knocked off. Phoebe’s tactics have always been to sprint out in front and dare everybody else to catch her. Well, she’s been caught. Won over by the competition and then thrown over. That young guy is a major negotiator for the Americans now.’

  Eli was crushed. He’d realised Phoebe was addicted to party drugs. He confessed to having had to go cold turkey himself to break a developing habit a couple of years after they were married. ‘It was heroin then,’ he told me, but he hadn’t been so bad that he needed methadone. ‘She did, but she wouldn’t admit it.’

  During her trial he kept his mouth shut about being betrayed. He only spoke about her addiction. He had to see her sentenced to eight years with parole in five.

  So much for beautiful Phoebe of the yellow dress, silken hair and swirling allure. She was released in 2005, by which time the crashing of the Twin Towers was old news and she and Eli were divorced. These days I’m told she lives in upstate New York, teaching languages at a college.

  Eli was a long time recovering. He adored Phoebe and I don’t think he did recover fully, but he did continue with his work and he did continue to go back and forth to Washington. He’d just become a US citizen when Phoebe was arrested.

  He said he was clean. I certainly hope he was clean. I pray that the trouble at his unit isn’t about heroin.

  Deep in the night there is hammering on my front door.

  ‘Come out, Isobel. I know you’re in there.’

  It’s so tiring!

  And tiresome!

  And what would he do if I opened the door? Other times he has come strutting into my life – everything’s going to start all over again. He’s planned it all out – he’s going to do this and I’m told I’m going to do that. He won’t go. Hours and hours and hours will be wasted, coffee drunk, mounting tension, explosive argument, violence on the brink – and, if it spilled over, I know this from Allegra, he would hit me with an open hand to the back of the head. And hit me and hit me and hit me. Back of the head because it doesn’t show the bruises.

  On and on goes the hammering.

  No use trying to sneak out the back and down the alleyway to my car, because he has a car – at this time of night, he’d hear it starting up, know he’d flushed me out and give chase in his car. No, I tell myself. You have to stay put, Isobel.

  A window down the street goes up and a voice yells, ‘Shut up! Fucking shut up, will you? If you don’t shut up, I’ll call the police.’

  Why should my days be so tainted and embarrassed?

  I hear the front gate click and a minute later, an engine starts. The car turns and its lights shine full beam in my bedroom window. All he’ll get is the glare from the blind, I tell myself. He sits there for a while until an ambulance comes along and he has to shift.

  I am going to have to get out of here.

  There are very few places you can turn when threatened with violence. My closest friends live out of Melbourne these days and even if they were here, David knows who they are and would target them. I could go and stay in a motel – but for that, you need money and I don’t really have money to spare on motel rooms. And if he followed me…

  I’ll have to go to the police and seek an intervention order. I did it once before a long time ago, before Nin was eighteen. It took all day. Interviews, explanations. And then it was twentyeight days before the magistrate would hear the case. The case was heard. David wasn’t present. He didn’t agree with the order; all he would agree to was counselling. I had no physical evidence of damage. Well, I wasn’t going to waste any more of my time.

  Why? Why sit in a room with the same obstinacy over and over and over again? The same kink in the same nature. The same blindness. So much so that in the end you think it’s you who’s the one with the screwed-up mind. I don’t want to do it.

  So I find my
self out on the road driving: cross one minute, resigned the next. Fearful. Bored. So bloody bored with recalcitrance! I don’t know where I’m going, except that I seem to be following the route I took yesterday. Maybe I am going to Mahnaz’s house. I seem to be. Well…I still have to ask if Meetra can find Eli for me…

  The suburbs pass and they pass and they pass until I am making the mistakes I made yesterday, turning back on myself, turning into Mahnaz’s street and…here I am, crunching over the gravel in the big driveway once again, reaching the mat, ringing at the door. I wait. I can’t hear anything. I look at my car. Should I go back there rather than ring again? Should I find a magistrate and start to file an order? I ring again. This time, a voice. ‘Salaam!’ it says. It sounds like Mahni, but she doesn’t open the door. ‘Is that you, Mahni?’ No answer. ‘It’s Isobel. Could I talk to you, please?’

  And the great door opens a little bit and Mahni’s face peeps out. She sees me and says, ‘Come in, come in.’

  And I follow her in. And she opens the door from the foyer into the great room, which swims before my eyes as if asleep in filtered light. Yes, it swims because I am crying. ‘Mahni,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been attacked, I…well, not attacked, but intruded upon and I need to hide and pull myself together.’

  We perch, side by side on one of the sofas. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, and I start to shake and weep in spite of myself. She sits there, her fist on her mouth, staring.

  ‘Oh, I hope I haven’t frightened you,’ I say, now managing a laugh. ‘It’s my brother-in-law; he’s harassing me over some possessions. You see, I brought up his daughter when my sister died…It’s complicated. But he won’t leave me alone.’

  She takes her fist away from her mouth. ‘He has hurt you?’

  ‘No. No. Not physically. Just mentally. But he frightens me and I want him to go away…’

  ‘Mah-ni!’ calls an old voice from the depths of the house and it’s followed by a stream of what is clearly invective in Dari.