Queeny holds up Ba’s book and kisses its cover and puts it back in my hands. “He would have wanted you to have this,” she says. “There’s even a poem about you in there. It’s the very last one.”
She turns to the middle of the book and looks at those words for a long time without saying a single thing. She waits, her eyes pulling at those letters, until the world stops its spinning and the sun stops its shining. When everything ever imagined has paused with expecting, Queeny reads the words, first in Rohingya, then again in English, so I know for sure what they’re saying.
When the shadows of fallen stars whisper their truths,
When the wind’s kiss echoes in empty fields,
When the spirits of the earth lift to the skies,
You’ll be there.
The song of the sea, the soul of the world,
Caressed by the wind,
Scattered in the shadows.
You will see.
And forever our wings will carry us home, together.
I let the words trickle into my brain, slowly, slowly. And when the poem stops, the rest of the book is blank.
Queeny hugs me then, and it’s strong and tight and true.
“I almost forgot to tell you,” she whispers, “while you were asleep. It was the weirdest thing. All over the camp, there were these hundreds of dead fish. They were just there in the morning after the storm. Harvey says sometimes that can happen during a storm. That a cloud can suck them up from the sea and dump them somewhere else. But for a minute…” Queeny stops and her eyes go a bit watery, then she looks at me and whispers, “For a minute, it made me think of your Night Sea.”
Jimmie’s back. She’s all right. She’s here. In the tent. Even though those fences were put back up, even though those Jackets are walking and jingling their keys through the night, even then she still came.
I wake up looking right into her eyes. My lips move, but my throat is too tired and worn to make the words come.
She smiles at me. “I’ve got another joke for you. Why did the chicken cross the road?”
I shake my head.
“To get to the idiot’s house. Knock, knock.”
And even though my voice isn’t working right, my lips mouth the words. “Who’s there?”
“The chicken.”
It’s not even funny, but I’m laughing, soft and quiet. I say, “What do you get if you cross a wolf with a chicken?”
“What?”
“Just a wolf. The chicken didn’t stand a chance.”
Now Jimmie has her hands on her mouth, quietening her laughing and shaking her head. “That’s terrible.”
“I know.”
“Okay, then, what side of a chicken has the most feathers?”
I know this one. We end up the two of us saying it at the same time.
“The outside.”
Jimmie smiles at me, and I smile back with everything in me.
Jimmie’s fingers wrap around behind her neck, and then she has the Bone Sparrow in her hands. She pushes it into my hands and scrunches my fingers around it.
“It’s your turn. To wear the sparrow. For now anyway.” Her face glows with happy. Her arm is covered in a bandage that must have been white before but is rusty from the dirt now.
“Dad’s back. For good. So I guess I don’t need its luck and protection anymore. Jonah said that I almost died so what kind of protection could it be, but I told him that he was wrong. I told him that the Bone Sparrow brought you to me, to save me. Jonah couldn’t argue with that. And my dad, he told me that it was just like Mum’s stories. Just like Oto and Anka. I didn’t even know he knew those stories, but he does. He said he knows other stories too. He said he’s going to tell me them all.”
There is so much I want to tell her. But I don’t even know if the words make it all the way out of my mouth. There is so much I will tell her. Someday.
“Thanks for saving me and all,” she says. “Like a superhero. Super Subhi.” Her laugh tinkles in the dark.
I grab her hand and shake my head and whisper, so soft that the sound doesn’t even make it to my own ears, “The sparrow in the house. Queeny was right after all. It did mean death. Eli…” But Jimmie hears me. She hears and her eyes go soft and she shakes her head and brings my hand up to her cheek.
“No, Subhi, you’re wrong. A sparrow in the house doesn’t mean death. It means change. Waking up new and starting again. Subhi, a sparrow in the house is a sign of hope.”
And when my eyes close, it’s to the song of Jimmie’s smile playing in my head, and the warm sure that something inside me has been made whole.
In the morning, Jimmie is just a dream, floating in my head. But I have the Bone Sparrow in my hand and her whispered words in my ears. Maybe she is a kind of guardian angel after all.
That’s when I see the thermos. Next to the bed, full of hot chocolate, sweet and hot and thawing me out from the inside.
I find my notebook and pencil and I start to write. The letters flow from deep inside me without even a pause to worry about which way is which and where to put what. And my head fills with memories and stories from so long ago that fences weren’t even invented yet. Stories that haven’t even happened yet. Stories that the world won’t see for years and years. All those stories swirl through my head, but I suck them in and tell them to wait. Because first I have to write the most important story of them all. The story that isn’t even a story. The story that has to be told, no matter how hard it is to tell.
There are people here. Outside people. They are asking their questions. They have their uniforms and they are taking people one by one into a room. They are asking people about what happened. About all the craziness.
When a woman comes up to me and tells me her name is Sarah and asks if I want to come with her for a chat, I just look at her. My mind is blank and the screaming in my brain is louder than even before.
I see Harvey. He’s looking at me.
And already I miss Harvey so much that it hurts.
I look at Sarah. “Once there lived a Limbo kid named Eli,” I whisper. Sarah bends down close to hear me better. “And he had something important to do.”
When I look back, there is only sad in Harvey’s eyes. A single tear rolls down his cheek. My heart bleeds out even more pain than I thought it could, knowing what I’m doing to Harvey.
But Harvey loves me. He nods, to let me know that it’s all right. That he understands.
Then he is gone. And I never see Harvey again.
Not ever.
Oto never did discover what happened to Iliya. The rest of Iliya’s story was lost to history, as most existences are.
Iliya hadn’t, as Oto assumed, been killed by either the mine or the fall. Rather, he was rescued by villagers and taken to an English doctor volunteering at an aid station. The doctor had traveled to many countries and conversed with many different healers. But never had the doctor seen a concoction as powerful and promising as the one Iliya carried. He realized that this could be what the world was waiting for. Iliya, likewise, realized just how much about healing he still had to learn. So it was without any hesitation that Iliya accepted the doctor’s offer to join him on his travels.
Together, they saved many people. And it was in this way that Iliya arrived many years later on the shores of Burma, where he would fall in love with a local Rohingya woman who reminded him somehow of his grandmother Mirka. Perhaps it was her sunburnt nose, or the way she stuck out her chin when she was determined not to lose an argument, or the amazing dark blue of her eyes that looked like the night sky just before a storm.
Despite their meager existence, Iliya continued to heal those he could and refused offers of payment of any kind. He became something of a local legend. A famed healer with only one foot. A hero.
His children would go on to become farmers and healers themselves, and their descendants would continue to face greater and greater hardships in a country they had always lived in and whose leaders refused to a
cknowledge them as people, free to live their lives in happiness and safety.
Burma would become known as Myanmar, and the Rohingya would be told that such a people didn’t exist. Many would be killed and tortured and forced to leave. Many would try to escape, searching only for safety. Trying to walk their journey to peace. Many would fear that they had been forgotten by a world that seemed deaf to the cries of those in need, a world in which hope is in short supply.
But Iliya was unaware of all that would come. He would forever believe that the luck of the Bone Sparrow remained with him, carried perhaps in the greened coin that had once lain in the bird’s center, and that had somehow ended up in his shirt pocket during the blast that had changed his destiny. He had led, he believed, a truly charmed life.
Subhi. Wake up.” Queeny kicks my head with her toes. Maá is up already, at the flap to the tent. Waiting.
“Come on. Hurry.” My heart thumps, but there’s no arguing with Queeny.
We tiptoe out, not a word. Queeny and me and Maá, walking our way out into the dark.
“Come on,” Queeny whispers again, her hand reaching out to lead me.
Queeny and Maá have set up a broken post to use as a ladder and wedged it up next to the container we used as the emergency hospital after the craziness. There’s no one in there now, but they’ve left the container there, just in case it’s needed again.
Queeny helps Maá up, then climbs up herself. Then she reaches down her hand and helps pull me up. I can get up myself, but I don’t tell her that. I let her pull me, and she smiles.
From up on top of the container, that north wind butts up against us and sends goose bumps up my arms, even in the hot. We can see all the land stretching away from us, on and on forever and ever.
“Look, Subhi,” Queeny says. She points way out, to where the land ends and the sky begins. “It’s the sea.”
Even though Eli said we can’t see them from here, not ever, there’s a flickering starting in the sky. Soft green and blue and purple and orange lights are coming in waves, pushing through the darkness, reaching out to us, rippling across the night. Dancing. My chest aches with the bigness of it all, and my body calls out, screaming for something. Those lights are so perfect that I almost can’t stand watching them in case that ache gets so big that my whole body will tear apart with wanting.
“Eli, he said not ever…”
Maá, she looks at me, those lights dancing across her eyes. “Not ever can always change.” She holds a letter tight in her hand, the same letter she was given five days ago by Sarah, smiling her biggest smile as she passed it over. Even though I asked Maá what it says, she still won’t tell me. Sarah won’t either. “Someday, Subhi” is all Maá says. She smiles every time she reads it though.
Queeny shines her face up at those lights. “Solar flares,” she whispers.
A story runs through me, a whispered memory, every little detail, and I can feel a warm spreading from deep down in my stomach all the way to the very tips of my fingers. “It’s a love song,” I say.
Maá and Queeny don’t answer. I wonder if maybe I didn’t whisper out loud at all. Maá and Queeny, they’re watching the lights, their hands holding each other tight.
Eli was right. Those lights are the most beautiful thing in the world. And Jimmie, she’ll be watching too. Watching from her house by the gum tree with the old bathtub and the LEGO mailbox. All of us watching those very same lights, like we’re all still together, even though we weren’t all of us together at the same time ever. But inside my head we are. Inside my head, Eli is watching those lights too.
I wonder if Harvey is watching. I hope he is.
The Bone Sparrow burns hot around my neck, and I rub at it with my thumb, rubbing my story deep into its bone.
Tomorrow, everything will change. But I’m ready. The Shakespeare duck says it’s tough luck if I’m not. He’s still sulking after I threw him away. It doesn’t matter that I went back for him, and that I spent hours searching for the little bugger. One of the Jackets’ dogs had used him as a chew toy for a bit. He’s a little worse for wear, and his tail is mostly gnawed off now, but he’s still just as chatty. At least now he doesn’t squeak.
Sarah talked me through what we’re going to do. She says it’s as easy as pie—I’ve just got to tell exactly what I saw and not leave anything out. I asked her how many pies she’s ever made, and she said not a single one, but the way she smiled when she said it made me feel okay. Sarah says I just have to be brave, is all. For Eli. For everyone. I told her to tell Harvey I was sorry.
Maá nodded when I told her that I was going with Sarah to tell what I saw. She smiled even though I could see she was scared and sad. She said I was just like my ba. And she said it in Rohingya.
Sarah made sure I didn’t tell anyone what we were going to do, excepting for Maá and Queeny, because all those Jackets are still here and working, even Beaver. Even Harvey, somewhere. I didn’t say a thing, but word must have got around somehow, because when I came into the tent after dinner, there were the rat traps. Every one of them broken, lying on the floor next to my bed. And on my pillow were my shoes. Blue with white laces and the black leaping up the sides. Now they’re the perfect fit. I guess I’ve grown a bit.
From far away I hear a song, beautiful as anything, getting louder and louder and filling my chest with its sound. Queeny, she doesn’t seem to notice, but Maá, she leans over. “You can hear it, né ?” Her voice is a whisper, so soft my ears almost think I’m imagining. As I lean into Maá, that whale song goes deep inside my head and deep inside my chest, right down to the very middle of my bones. Maá points to the horizon. “There, in the seas. Under the lights…”
And there he is. Eli’s whale, as old as the universe and as big as a whole country, singing his song to the moon.
The Bone Sparrow is an imagined story. However, it is based on an all-too-true reality. While the characters, events, and places described in The Bone Sparrow are fictitious, the policies that have put people like Subhi and his family in detention, and the conditions described, are not.
Conditions in detention centers and refugee camps are different all over the world. The conditions I have described in this book have all been taken from reports of life in Australian detention centers. However, the treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum is a global issue.
UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, has called on all nations to stop treating asylum seekers like criminals. Across Australia, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Europe, asylum seekers and refugees are routinely detained, fingerprinted, and, in some places, numbered.
Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees are detained in Europe every year, with European Union laws allowing refugees to be locked up for eighteen months without a criminal conviction. The conditions of some refugee camps in Europe have been described as diabolical, with access to only one meal a day, harmful levels of bacteria, and appalling hygiene practices.
In Australia, asylum seekers and refugees, including children, are locked in detention centers indefinitely, and people arriving in Australia by boat are not allowed to be resettled in Australia, ever.
In the UK, at the Immigration Removal Centres, as in Australian detention centers, there have been protests and hunger strikes over the detention of children, suicides and deaths in custody, and allegations of abuse.
The USA, like Australia, has a policy of mandatory detention. Asylum seekers are detained while their refugee status is reviewed. This can take many months, or even years. Asylum seekers and refugees in the USA are often jailed together with criminals, and if they are thought to have committed even a minor offense, can be kept in indefinite detention, sometimes serving even longer sentences than those found guilty of murder.
Meanwhile, desperate people continue to seek safety in countries lucky enough to boast peace. Many do not make it alive. Italy attempted to save the lives of many asylum seekers coming to Europe on boats by implementing Operation Mare Nos
trum, a search and rescue operation that is thought to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. However, other European Union nations refused to assist with the high costs of the operation, and it was abandoned after only a year.
It is difficult to imagine what living in these conditions must be like. I hope I have done some justice to the stories of those who have suffered, and those who are still suffering. With the passing of a new law in the Australian parliament, it is now a criminal offense to disclose the mistreatment of refugees in detention. This deliberate effort to hide the reality of detention makes it harder for people who care to know what is happening, but there is still information available for those wishing to find it. The Internet is an invaluable resource, and agencies such as Amnesty International, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, and UNHCR are good places to start.
Finally, I would like to mention the Rohingya people. Subhi and his family are Rohingya. The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority living in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. The United Nations and Amnesty International have declared the Rohingya to be one of the most persecuted people on earth, and a recent investigation by Al Jazeera Media Network news suggested that the government of Myanmar is committing genocide in its treatment of the Rohingya. The Rohingya are being hunted into extinction. Governments worldwide are aware of this. They are aware of the plight of these people. Yet when a boatload of Rohingya was left stranded in the middle of the sea, no government in the world agreed to help. It has since been suggested that these people were forced onto that boat and were killed if they did not board. Those who did get on the boat were then towed out to sea and left to die. And the world watched. Eventually, after days with no food or water or gasoline, they were rescued by a group of fishermen who showed more compassion and empathy and understanding than all those in power.
I wish this book had never needed to be written. I wish that the circumstances that led me to write this story had never occurred. I wish that we lived in a world where hope and humanity could triumph over the self-serving policies of governments worldwide that are content to imprison those who are simply struggling to survive. Perhaps we will, someday.
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