‘What?’
‘Why don’t you go back to your world? You say the war is over in your time. You survived! You are a brilliant violinist, even I can tell that.’
‘Yes,’ said David. ‘I was brilliant.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘I was in a place called Auschwitz. The soldiers rescued us, but I was sick. Or maybe starving. Maybe both.’
‘But you’ve been rescued. You’ll get better.’
‘It doesn’t matter if I get better or not.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We had to work in the camp. Even us children. We worked in the snow, we slept on bare boards. Do you know what chilblains are? My hands swelled, grew red and wept. I might get better,’ said David, and his voice held a world of loss. ‘But my hands never will. Not enough to play the violin. Not as it should be played.’ He added simply, ‘I don’t want to live without my music. Are you coming?’
Faris nodded. He wanted to weep, but what use were tears for David?
The two boys walked side by side through the crowded streets. Once again no one stared at Faris’s jeans. David slipped into a lane at the side of the theatre and went in by the stage door. Faris continued round the front, through the auditorium and into the back seat where he had sat before. He waited for the light to shine on the stage, for David to enter, seeming to shine brighter than the light.
David lifted the violin and began to play. It was the melody he had called ‘Jamila’s Song’ again. Had Jamila composed it? wondered Faris. But David was the musician, not her. What was Jamila’s story?
The music sang across the theatre, David’s fingers firm and sure. It sang of loss, but of strength too. For the first time since he had seen the beach, Faris suddenly knew that this was worth keeping, that this beauty, the knowledge of creating beauty, should not be lost.
Faris felt the tears cold on his cheeks.
David, at least, should stay here.
CHAPTER 11
Time vanished. There were no more holy days or feast days. No one ever fasted here on the beach. The days changed little, other than that one feast for St Kangarou.
Billy brought down a thick pastry filled with meat and vegetables that he said was called a pasty. Jamila brought apricots for Billy, small and with red freckles, as sweet as sunlight. Juhi brought down a big basket of fat red fruit, juicy and strange-scented, but shrugged when they asked her what they were. She rolled a giant watermelon down the sand hill. Nikko ran to catch it, laughing as he rolled it over to Susannah and the others. Mudurra slashed it open with his stone knife. They ate the sweet flesh and Billy and Nikko tried to see how far they could spit the seeds.
Juhi made bracelets of pink shells too. They slid up and down her wrists and ankles as she walked. Faris sat with Nikko, and together they made a whole row of sandcastles, a city of sand that would vanish overnight.
‘Jadda?’ he asked that night.
‘Mmmm?’ Jadda sat curled on the cushions, reading her Jane Austen book set in Australia. The house koala sat beside her, chewing on a carrot.
‘May I take one of your coconut cakes down to the beach tomorrow? My friends like your cake,’ he added.
Jadda looked up from her book. ‘Of course. It’s good to have friends,’ she said quietly. ‘Good to do things together. It is good to learn how to be a friend too.’ She put her book down. ‘I’ll make the cake now, so it will be ready for you to take in the morning.’
‘Thank you.’
He watched her walk into the kitchen, in the rich red dress that she loved, the gold clips in her dark hair. This was not the grey Jadda, the frightened Jadda of the ship. ‘How can I leave you?’ whispered Faris. ‘How can I bear to leave all this?’
He hadn’t gone to listen to David again. The music’s beauty was too hard to bear, knowing that it was lost, even if he could still hear it here in this dreamy place. Nor had he asked Jamila, Billy or even Susannah whether he could visit their worlds for a time. Instinctively he knew that the things most treasured would be the things that were most likely to be lost, even if they were to survive the trips back to their own realities.
It was hard enough to bear his own losses; it would be unbearable to wonder which of his new friends’ loved memories were lost forever too. Dreams could crack too easily.
Billy was right.
And yet the next afternoon, at last, he climbed the sand hill to sit next to Susannah after lunch, instead of playing the game with the others. She smiled at him without speaking, almost as if she had known that he would sit with her that day. It was a smile of comfort as well as friendship.
For a while they simply looked at the figures playing the game below, set against the white-laced waves. At last she said, ‘I liked your cake.’
‘Jadda made it. My grandmother.’
‘I’d like to meet her again.’
‘One day,’ he said evasively.
Susannah nodded. ‘You’re going to leave. You are going to go through the door.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Not yet. But you will soon.’
‘How do you know?’ he asked hotly.
‘Because you are sitting here with me. The game isn’t enough for you any more, nor your memories neither.’
‘I can’t go back.’
‘You can,’ she said softly. ‘Is this what you did to all the others?’ he cried. ‘Taunted them?! Persuaded them till they walked through that door?’
‘It is.’
‘Can’t you just leave all of us alone?’
‘Should I?’ she asked.
He could feel her watching him as he walked down the sand hill to go home.
Days passed. He didn’t want to go back! He didn’t want to talk about going back with Susannah either. But for some reason he joined her on the sand hill nearly every afternoon now, sitting without speaking, most days, as one by one the others trudged past them when the game was over. None of them met Susannah’s eyes as she said her quiet ‘good nights’.
She sits here to make us remember, Faris thought.
‘Did you do this every day before I came?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Sit here like a … a vulture … to remind them of what they have left?’
‘Not every day.’ If she felt the insult, she didn’t show it. ‘Sometimes it’s good to live the happiness. Other times are for remembering the hard things and the good. There are seasons for everything.’
‘Seasons don’t change here.’
‘We are the seasons. We come. We go.’
‘You know all our stories, don’t you?’
She nodded. ‘I remember them, so you can all forget. For a while.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘Of course it hurts!’ she cried. ‘Do you think I stay here for the pleasure of it? Don’t you think I want a life — my real life, or a chance of one, after all these years?’
‘But you stay.’
She nodded, the anger under control again.
‘Do you know the story of everyone who has been here?’
Susannah nodded. ‘Every one. Jane, Vlad, Mei Ling. I miss Mei Ling,’ she added softly.
‘Where was she from?’
‘There was a war,’ said Susannah. ‘In a place called Vietnam. Have you heard of it in your time?’
Faris nodded. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Mei Ling and her family escaped, but pirates captured their ship. Took their food, even their water, ripped the jewellery from her mother’s ears. Her mother had painted her gold bangles pink with nail polish, so they didn’t look like gold, but the pirates took them anyway, even if later they might just throw them in the sea. The pirates took the engine and the fuel. Their boat just floated in the sea. They had no fresh water. Mei Ling’s tongue swelled up. She said the sun sucked their life away, till they lay on the deck like dried fish.’
‘She went back to that?’ Faris wondered at the courage that could take you through a door to a hell of salt and thirst.
Susannah nodded.
> ‘But she was going to die!’
‘Mei Ling learned to hope here. She said she had lost the power to hope during the war. She went through the door hoping that it might rain, that a ship might rescue them, or the tide take them to an island.’
A chance — just a chance — of life, thought Faris.
‘You must have faith,’ said Susannah softly.
‘What about Vlad?’
‘His country was called Bosnia. Have you heard about it too?’
‘A little.’ Two religions — or was it two races — who tried to wipe each other out. But that was all he knew.
‘Vlad said it was bad when he was small. His father took weapons when they ploughed the fields. His mother was too scared to collect mushrooms in the forest. At last soldiers came from a land called the United Nations. Big men named Maoris. Vlad said the soldiers made so much peace the enemy villages helped each other bring in the harvest. They sang and played music and laughed together after the harvest was brought in. And then the soldiers left.’
‘What then?’
‘His father woke him in the night. There were screams outside. Scream after scream. Vlad’s family hid in the cellar under the apples: his parents, his sister, his grandmother too. The enemy came and kicked the apples above them. They joked that the cowards had fled.
‘His family waited three days, hiding under the apples. The fourth night they left, to try to get to a refugee camp in Austria, and then perhaps be selected to come to Australia, where his great-uncle had come after a big war. His family climbed the mountains, using ropes to get down cliffs. Halfway down a cliff his grandmother went limp, like a sausage. They lowered her to the ground. They tried to wake her, but she didn’t move even though her eyes were open. Vlad cried, his sister cried, but their grandmother was dead.’
‘Vlad told you all of this?’
Susannah nodded. ‘He made himself forget. I was afraid he would stay here forever, like Billy, like David and Mudurra. I remembered for him. I remembered how cold he was, like he breathed in ice. The snow began to fall and there was only white. The next step might be safety or a cliff. He couldn’t feel his fingers, or his feet. He felt his face vanish …’
‘And then he was here and safe?’
‘But he went back.’ Susannah’s voice was fierce now. ‘There was a life waiting for him. I have to hold to that. They made it to a camp in Austria. They have to have had! By now they’ll all be together in the real Australia.’
Faris tried to make himself believe it too. ‘Where does Jamila come from?’ He still knew almost nothing about the tall girl in her scarf.
‘Ask her yourself.’ Susannah nodded to where Jamila walked up towards the sand hill. She was singing the melody David had played again, but once more the words vanished in the sound of waves and wind.
‘I don’t want to … to upset her,’ he said reluctantly. In a strange way he almost felt he knew Jamila from David’s music. But he had never spoken to her except for words like ‘catch’ and ‘thank you’.
Susannah clenched her hands into small fists. ‘But don’t you see?! We need to remember, so we can have the courage to survive. We need to remember the people who loved us, the future we might have. Jamila!’
The girl glanced across at them. She stopped singing. For a moment Faris thought she was going to keep walking. Instead she sat next to them.
‘You want me to tell Faris my story.’
‘How did you know?’ he asked.
Jamila smiled, but there was pain in the smile. ‘Because that is what Susannah does. She makes me tell my story to everyone. But it hurts to remember.’
The image of a dark wave filled Faris’s mind. He blinked. The sand was golden, the sea bright blue again. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Jamila looked down at the players on the beach, as though looking at them would make the memories less real. ‘It would take a hundred years to tell my story properly.’ She looked back at Faris. ‘I am from a country that you would call Afghanistan. My people are Hazara. The Pashtuns hate Hazara. It has been that way for hundreds of years.’ She shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t even know enough of my story to tell it properly. What makes hate bloom instead of friendship? We are different, but people who are different can be friends. What makes someone say: “Your difference is evil. We will wipe you out, forever”?
‘Maybe if I had gone to school I would know the answer. But there was no school for me. My mother went to school. My grandmother was a teacher …’
‘So was mine! But she lost her job.’
‘My grandmother lost her school,’ said Jamila. ‘It was a school for girls. So many girls wanted to go to school that the teachers started classes at dawn, and then the same classes again at lunchtime for another group of students. The teachers worked from first light until the dark. But it was worth it, my grandmother said, because they were bringing light into the lives of their students. Then the Taliban took our town. The Taliban said, “No schools for girls. A girl must stay in her home. The only men she sees must be her family; her only education should be in the proper way to show respect.”
‘My grandmother covered her whole body, as the Taliban told her to do, in case a man might see her in the courtyard. She stayed inside her house and courtyard. But she sent messages to her students, to come if they wanted to keep learning, to be people, not black-garbed ghosts inside a man’s life.
‘She taught in her front room. They had no books, only my grandmother’s memory. They had no pen and paper — to buy those would make the Taliban suspect.
‘But they found out. They cut off her lips.’ Jamila was strangely calm. ‘Her lips had taught girls improper ways. They cut off her ears, for they had heard improper things. They took out her eyes. They threw her back into her house for my mother to find.
‘My grandmother died that night. Her school died with her. My father was angry. He said my grandmother had endangered us all. What did it matter if a girl could not go to school?
‘My parents hoped that life would get better. Soldiers came from beyond Afghanistan. I could go outside our house then, but when I heard a shot I had to lie down. You wait for the battle to finish around you, then you get up again.
‘Outsiders started a school for girls in our town. I wanted to go, but my father said, “No. Too many people will be angry. She should not go.”’ Her face twisted. ‘He was right. The Taliban poisoned the school’s water. Every girl there died. If I had gone there, I would be dead.’
She shrugged. ‘That was when my father said that we must leave. My father had heard about Australia, that there is no war, even that people can speak their minds. He did not believe that, but he did believe that in Australia we might be safe. My father does not understand what it is to be a woman, but he cares for his family. Yet there was no way to apply to go to Australia in Afghanistan.
‘My father sold our house. We hid among bags of wheat on a truck to Pakistan. We flew to Indonesia. We got on a boat …’
Faris stared at her in horror. ‘Then there was a storm. A wave …’
She looked at him oddly. ‘There was no storm. There was a man. On the first day he was like all the other men, quiet, waiting for the journey to be over. Then he saw my mother look at him, saw her say something to my father.
‘The man was Taliban. I don’t know why he was on the boat, pretending to be escaping, as we were. But he saw my mother’s face. He knew she knew. I saw him give money to the crew. The three crewmen looked at us and nodded. Then the man sat back and smiled. Just a little smile. He was waiting for the night. He would kill us in the darkness, to silence us, as my grandmother had been silenced.
‘I prayed that an Australian ship would find us before night came. I prayed that the others on the boat would help us. That night the three of us sat close together. I saw a knife gleam. Then the crew put out the light.’
Her voice still held the same eerie calm. ‘I heard the man come towards us, the rustle of his clothing. I thought, please let our b
oat land on Australia now!
‘And then I woke up,’ said Jamila. ‘I woke up and there were my clothes, ready for school.’
She looked at Faris. ‘It was a long time before I remembered. Life is good here. My mother is happy. Late every afternoon I go to school, with the second lot of students. I study. But I never learn more than I knew before. When I realised that, I cried. I cannot even tell my mother the school is not really there. I never had much to lose before,’ she added. ‘Just my family and my life. A little life. Then I dreamed what life might be, a free life in Australia. I have that life here. So now I don’t remember. If I can.’
Faris stared at her in wonder. He had felt that his grey boat was the only one going to Australia. Oh, he had known there had been others, that their rusty craft had even made other voyages before theirs. But for the first time he felt the thousands of years, the countless shadowy faces of those who had sought refuge, who had dreamed of a place over the sea’s horizon that they called Australia or Botany Bay or even, like Mudurra, just the land beyond the smoke on the horizon.
‘So will you stay here forever?’
Jamila gave Susannah a wry smile. ‘No. One day I will be my grandmother’s child. One day I’ll have the courage to go back through the door.’
She stood up. ‘But not today. Not for a long, long time, I think. Maybe my family will survive. Or maybe this is the only Australia I will ever see. This afternoon I will go to school again. I will learn nothing, but I will feel that I have. Tonight my mother and I will read together, with no fear of shots in the darkness or strangers at the door.’ She smiled at them, then strode off down the sand hill, the ends of her scarf flying in the wind.
Faris lay that night in his clean sheets in his bright bedroom. Am I a coward? Is Jamila a coward too?
No, he thought. We aren’t cowards as long as we do go back one day. Back to the Taliban man with the knife, back to the wave. Back to those we love.
‘One day I’ll have the courage,’ Jamila had said. Would he find the courage one day too?
‘How many have come here?’ he asked Susannah the next afternoon. He had climbed up the sand hill to join her. It was almost a ritual now. He still wasn’t sure why he did it — sit with a girl, and a young one at that.
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