The Book of Ordinary People

by Claire Varley

  Then one day the problem was suddenly resolved – the Patriarch recalled his Athenian priest, who was now desperately needed in a church deep in the mountains near Albania, and who better to take over than the young priest from Parramatta? The congregation was overjoyed – finally a solution that left no one without face. What a clever Patriarch their church had, benevolent and infinite in his wisdom! Little did anyone know that this solution came to the Patriarch not through the word of God, but via airmail from a determined woman called Xanthoula Georgiou, who told him she would not stand by while her church fell into disrepair. But Xanthoula never told anyone this, because that wasn’t how it was done.

  Let’s skip back now to the RMS Strathmore as it cruises through the Indian Ocean in 1957. Up on the railings a young woman is perched, her body leaning towards the grey sea below. Tears fall down her sixteen-year-old cheeks as she draws her foot up another rung and closer to her fate. It is quiet because everyone is down below enjoying the celebrations, for they have finally crossed the Equator, and only a young Xanthoula Anastasiades is about, singing to herself as she breathes in the sea air. She spots the sobbing young woman and rushes over to her. Eventually, the young woman confides to Xanthoula that she has left behind a secret sweetheart, only no one in the village knew. Now, however, her belly is growing day by day, and when the uncle who sponsored her in Australia finds out, she will be ruined and who knows what will become of her. Xanthoula calms the young woman, pressing her hands against her wet cheeks, and convinces her to climb down from the railings. ‘There is always a way,’ she says, and while neither of them know what it will be, Xanthoula comforts the young woman because they are going to a new country and maybe it will be different from the old world.

  Eventually they disembark in Melbourne, and Xanthoula demands her family make room for the poor young woman. Her husband is dead, she tells anyone who will listen, and any Christian would make room for her in their heart and their home. So the young woman gains a dead husband as well as a new life, and eventually she marries and lives a wonderful life, and it is not until many years later that she tells Xanthoula’s daughter her secret in the dying afternoon light of a nursing home in Melbourne’s north.

  These are but a small handful of the many stories about Xanthoula Georgiou that circle and swirl in the atmosphere. There are too many to be told, because she lived a giant life in the smallest possible way. History tells us to seek out the extraordinary people; to find exceptional people who altered the world in monumental ways. But in doing this alone we forget the ordinary ones who were extraordinary in their tiny circles and created miniscule ripples that made the world better in uncountable little ways. If you had asked my mother what she wanted from life, she would simply have told you that she wanted her children to live a better life than she had. My sister is the first in our family to go to university. I am the first of us to own a small business in Australia. Our children are happy and healthy and surrounded by opportunities. She found pride in all these things, all these things she said she wanted. But her real legacy is in all the tiny acts she performed without acknowledgement or reward, and without ever expecting this. So this is part of the story of Xanthoula Georgiou, and there are many other parts out there that none of us know. She was good young and good old, and she will live on in each of these stories forever.

  37

  Nell

  Nell poured herself a glass of water and sipped it in quick mouthfuls. Her eyes hovered to the far corner of the window where a moment ago she had seen Madeline pass by. Nell had risen to rush out and call to her, to grab her attention, but then realised there was no reason for this. What would she say? There wasn’t anything. Besides, Madeline had seemed busy, her two boys pulling at her sleeves and getting under her feet, the younger one skipping about and the older one watching in brotherly exasperation. She had left them to themselves, sliding back into her seat. Nell checked the door, then her phone, her tummy grumbling at the enticing fried potato fug. Soon, Rani rushed in, her arms spilling with folders. She let them cascade out across the table as she fell into the chair.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I’m starving. Let’s order something.’

  They looked about the crowded café, trying to catch the wait staff’s attention.

  ‘God, it’s ridiculously busy these days,’ Rani said. ‘They had some write-up in one of those popular e-newsletters and now you can barely move in here. They’re asylum seekers, did you know that? The family who run this place. Former clients of ours. Officially refugees now.’

  A woman with bottle-blonde, sky-high hair arrived at their table. Her eyes brightened when she saw Rani, then she swooped in to kiss her cheeks, left, right, left.

  ‘Look at this place!’ the woman crowed. ‘You wouldn’t believe how far people come to eat over-fried potato. But who am I to complain? And to think we all came on those boats. Anyway, no need to order, Rani-joon, I’ll get Mansoor to make you something special. Proper Irani food, not this potato chip nonsense.’

  Rani beamed. ‘Thanks, Massoumeh.’

  The woman left, elbowing her way through the crowd. Rani turned back to Nell.

  ‘How’s everything? How’s your mum? How’s Seymour?’

  Seymour had been parading about like a rooster since the gallery was featured on television with the word ‘seminal’ mentioned at one or more points, and important people suddenly wanted to know who he was. And their mother had thrown herself into teaching another women’s biography class in some sort of new-lease-on-life-Stella-getting-her-groove-back type of whirlwind. Both texted Nell constantly, emoji-laden spiels full of self-affirming phrases and adjectives dripping with zeal, and she was adjusting gradually to their happiness. It was a new state for the Swanseas, akin to watching a newborn giraffe learn to walk. And, without fanfare, the antique sideboard had reappeared in the house one day, back in its position as if it had never gone away.

  ‘They’re good.’

  ‘And work? Have you heard from Madeline at all?’

  Nell thought of the Madeline she had seen moments earlier, her children tugging at her sleeves. Her mother had turned up at Seymour’s for lunch one day with a basket full of paperwork and Nell had noticed Madeline’s name on the enrolment list for her mother’s next course. A tiny flicker of self-forgiveness had fluttered about her chest, then she went back to slicing the sourdough as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Mediation failed so they’re heading to Family Court now. She’s hopeful. I mean, what else can she be?’

  ‘There’s always hope,’ Rani sighed, pawing at the folders before them.

  She found the one she was looking for, then slid it to the top.

  ‘Right, Swansea. Are you ready to finally enter the world of legitimate legal volunteerism? Because this backlog of asylum claims waits for no woman.’

  She pushed the folder towards Nell.

  ‘Elham Tasviri and her daughter Niki. Back in MITA after failing the merit review, so our only hope is a successful judicial review in the next few months. That and an appeal to the Minister to get another bridging visa granted so we can at least get them out of detention in the interim. There’s a strong chance we can convince them, but I’m thinking we’re going to have to apply some additional public pressure.’

  Nell glanced down at the thick file before her.

  ‘Her housemate works here, actually,’ Rani continued. ‘I should introduce you. I have a feeling you’ll get on well and she could be very helpful to us for the public campaign.’

  Nell nodded as Rani continued talking about hearts and minds, and special circumstances and compassion. She reached down, pressing her hands against the file’s weight and urgency, then carefully, purposefully, laid it open.

  38

  The last chapter before the next chapter

  A Well-Founded Fear of Persecution

  December 2016

  By Aida Abedi with Patr
ick Lee

  Most of us never think about the power of waiting. We’re told it is a virtue, a strength, an admirable quality we should all strive to master. We don’t think about all the ways it can destroy you: swiftly, without warning, because you’ve left it a moment too long, become too complacent or hoped against hope that perhaps they wouldn’t come for you. Or slowly and deliberately, chipping away at you molecule by molecule, at your bones, your mind, your soul, because a wait with no end is truly unbearable.

  How do you pick the time for action? Must you wait until the moment inaction becomes a death wish, or do you call fate’s bluff early? How do you time the unthinkable? Make the choices we make when there are no others possible? When ‘I do not want to leave’ becomes ‘We must in order to exist’. And how do we bundle the unfathomable into one coherent sixty-page document for review by an unknown person sitting at a desk who wasn’t there and didn’t experience it and will never know the tears and sweat and adrenalin of clutching onto that choice?

  In the life I lived long before this waiting game, I was a journalist. I sought out these kinds of stories and presented them with what I thought was an abstract eye. As if I could be removed from the words that flowed from my fingers. As if I wasn’t a part of it all. And then, unexpectedly, I was, much more than I could ever have imagined, and suddenly my life veered drastically from where I always planned for it to go. Forced onto a pathway I never contemplated having to take.

  Perhaps for me it was easy. When the gun is to your head, flight is a logical option. I had a loophole – pure luck – because the police cells were too full to hold me in the days before my court date and my passport was not yet cancelled. A tiny window of urgent opportunity. For others it is like alchemy, weighing up the ingredients of probability and chance. Every day calculating their own risk matrix and trying to determine the mythical point when fleeing becomes acceptable. Because this is what we are judged by – a clinical external assessment of each of our fight or flight mechanisms.

  Take my friend Elham. She could have waited for her husband to kill her. Could have weighed up his words with the potential for action and hoped for the best. But picture the columns shifting in her head – in Iran she had no right to divorce, could no longer work because her husband forbade it, and the child growing inside her would be his property in the eyes of the law. She could have waited for the beatings to get worse, for the prison around her to shrink its walls ever closer, and for her husband to draw the energy to tell the authorities that she was banned from leaving the country. Perhaps she could have waited.

  Or my colleague Massoumeh. Her husband praises the ground she walks on, abhorring our country’s unequal laws, and perhaps this is what brought him to the attention of the local paramilitary forces. Too vocal in his political discussions with other bazaaris, his stall soon became the target of repeated vandalism by Basiji. Massoumeh and he waited, though, sweeping up the shattered glass each time. Soon it was their apartment too, yet they continued waiting, scrubbing the graffitied threats from their walls. Then it was their bodies, bruises blossoming like flowers by the light of the morning. And when it became their children, who cried at night from fear after being followed home from school by terrifying men, then they could no longer wait.

  And so many others, who had the wrong politics, the wrong religion, loved the wrong person or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so their life was sent shuddering rudderless when for others it was not. Each of them forced into the unfathomable decision to prolong or end the waiting. Though who among us realised that all we would be doing was exchanging one waiting game for another?

  Before I left Indonesia I collected the stories of others waiting for their boats, pooling them together into a recipe of pain, sorrow and defiance. I collected these stories in case anything happened to them, so that there would always be a record of who we’d all once been, not who we were in that moment. Who we were before the waiting started and our lives progressed in this strange holding pattern like a forgotten bag on an airport carousel. I asked them to tell me the memories that made up their life, to choose the version of themselves they wanted to be remembered as. Not as statistics or tragedy, not as case studies or cautionary tales. About everything they were and everything they would be – the first and third acts – not the horror and harrow of the here and now. And each time I asked them to share with me the warmest memory they possessed so that this would become their legacy.

  And soon I will be writing them, one by one, week by week. This project, Stories of Ordinary People, will appear each week on the pages and website of this newspaper, written by myself and my colleague Patrick Lee. You will have the chance to meet us all, transcending the bars and barriers constructed by governments to keep us from each other. And perhaps this may make the waiting less unfathomable.

  But before we introduce you to the others, it is only fair I share my own story first – my warmest memory – which pulls me along through each hour of the long dark night. The history I want to reclaim:

  For me, it is a moment, simple and pure. It is me, hurrying down the street, dodging the harried pedestrians and erratic motorcycles, anxious not to be the last to arrive. Slipping through the front door of my parents’ home, pulling off my scarf and shaking out my hair as I shower my family with kisses and hugs. It is Nowruz, our new year, and I assure my mother, like I always do, that this year her Nowruz table has truly outdone itself: apples, hyacinth from the garden, coins, sumac and vinegar. My father’s prized Hafez instead of a Qur’an, already open and waiting for us to read aloud to each other as the evening stretches on. The sabzeh I planted the previous week is green and perfect, its shoots alert and ready for the year ahead. My family is already gathered, my mother and her sisters busy in the kitchen, my brothers and cousins joking with each other while my father pretends not to laugh from his perch on the couch. Even my uncle Asadollah is here; though blighted by a cough he sits on the daybed shouting commands in his pyjamas like Mossadegh. The house aches with the smell of sweets and pastries, fish and rice with dill wafting from the kitchen, and my father sharpening his claws in anticipation of wresting the tahdig from us all.

  We eat, our bellies full of the tastes of our past, the walls dense with our stories and laughter, and above it all, hope for the year to come. From behind his teacup my father’s hand emerges, halting us mid-conversation, and he commences his philosophical treatise, my mother mouthing along like prosaic karaoke. It’s not what history makes of you that matters, but what you make of your history.

  We hold our breaths – watching the countdown on television – and at the exact moment of equinox the room is a sea of bodies, hugging and shouting and laughing. My mobile buzzes with messages of love and goodwill. And we are weeping, all of us, because we are together and we have lived another year, and before us lies a whole new year that we will struggle and laugh and love through together. And from deep in his memory my father finds a well-loved story and clears his throat for silence.

  I know what you are thinking. What is the use of this story? What is there for you to do with it? It’s nice, sure, but there’s hardly a headline in it, hardly anything to shift the hearts and minds of the great story-hungry masses. And perhaps you’re right about that. Perhaps it is the wrong story for me to leave you with because it doesn’t serve the purpose you want it to. But it is the story I choose – the one that I want to be remembered by. And next week it will be someone else’s. Week by week, story by story, until we seep into the everyday from our current home in the shadows. Ghese ma be sar resid, kalaghe be khoonash naresid: Our story has finished but the crow has not yet arrived at his house. This is how all Persian stories finish, and I am finished writing my stories – for today.

  Acknowledgements

  This book would not be possible without the kindnesses of a great many people. First and foremost Mojdeh, my hamdel and my darling friend.

  Thank you to Math
ilda, Cate and Haylee for taking turns helping steer this story away from the rocks of my own making, and to Jemal for helping me salvage the wreck of the first draft. To Bec and Brianne for your supportive and loving editing.

  Thank you for answering my many, many questions: Petie, Des, Rani, Tanya, Sarah, Carmela, Dalal, Haseeb, Rodgers, Jana, Charley, Beth, Lil’ Daniel, Dave, Lisa, the Reza’s, Elham, the Abedis and the Tasviris.

  To the Farsi-speaking women’s and men’s groups at WCC for teaching me so much, and to Omid and Nida for inspiring me with your passion and compassion.

  To Renee, Nouna and Spiro for your Hellenic insight and spellchecking.

  To Pip for being my first reader and to Grace for your kindnesses every time I rang to say that writing a second book is like parading naked in front of strangers whilst one’s soul is crushed in a vice and one’s dignity cast upon the unyielding spikes of judgement and despair.

  To Philomena for your supportive and caring sensitivity read.

  Immense gratitude to those who gave me the space to work on this at various points in its life, particularly Jo, Aunty Chrissie, and Laura, Dave and Kenzie.

  Thank you to WCC and WHV for all your support – you are the best kinds of folk. To John, because you have to put up with me every single day and, like a fire that burns near flammables, I demand constant attention and care. To Brian, Matt, Lauren, Max and Imo for being my cheer squad. And to my Ma, for everything always.