Which was more important? He didn’t know.
‘I miss Jadda,’ he said instead. Stupid words. Inadequate. But suddenly he heard a sob from the man beside him.
‘I wish I had been there. I wish I could have said …’ His father’s voice broke off. And then he said, ‘She was so strong. It was embarrassing, when I was growing up, having a mother who spoke out as Jadda did. I worried that someone at her school would report her. “Do what is right,” she said, “and bear on your shoulders what comes next. Don’t let them make you less than you are.”’
Faris looked at his father, wondering. It had never occurred to him that Jadda had helped create his father, the man who risked his family to help a stranger. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, Jadda’s outspokenness made the police believe her son might be a rebel.
‘What would you have said to her?’
The man beside him shrugged. ‘That I loved her, I suppose.’
Faris thought back to those years of phone calls, the expression on Jadda’s face as she listened to her son, his distant voice across the world. ‘She knew,’ he said.
‘I thank you.’ His father’s words were formal. But he smiled at his son.
The rain gusted again, then stopped. They caught a bus — Faris realised his father avoided taxis now — to the city, walked past the Opera House to the Botanic Gardens, where Sister Margaret-Mary had suggested that they meet, and sat in the café while the trees dripped outside. Faris glanced out the windows, trying to judge if any of the women outside looked like a nun.
‘Be careful what you tell her,’ said his father.
Faris nodded. They had permanent residency, but the safety of Australian citizenship was still to come. Australia treated them well, now, but both knew how quickly that could change. Perhaps he would never speak with the freedom that the other kids at school took for granted, kids who had never known how a few words, a small action, might destroy a life.
Two women entered. One was middle-aged, a bit like Mrs Purdon. The other was so old she had shrunk, but her eyes as they looked around the café were clear green. She saw him. She said something to her companion. The companion nodded and left the café as the old woman made her way alone through the chairs.
Faris and his father stood politely.
‘Well, boyo,’ said the old woman, a small cross sitting on her pale green cardigan, smiling through her wrinkles with those familiar green eyes.
All at once he understood.
CHAPTER 31
He stood in shock, cold and hot all at the same time.
Susannah held out her hand: freckled, shaking slightly, but the small hand he remembered nonetheless.
‘You must be Faris’s father.’ Her voice was forthright and direct, the voice of a woman who was used to students obeying. ‘I’m Sister Margaret-Mary. Faris and I met three years ago. Would you mind if we talked alone?’
‘Is it about the application for citizenship?’
‘No. I’m nothing official. We met, that’s all. I would like to talk to him now.’
Faris tried to find his breath. ‘I’ll be fine, Dad. We’re … friends. I just didn’t recognise the name.’
‘Friends?’ Faris could see his father’s puzzlement as he looked from the ancient woman to his son, could see the moment he accepted that his son was in so many ways still a stranger; he could see the flash of pain this caused too.
For the first time Faris realised how much his dad wanted to be his true father. He understood the barriers that had held back the words of love, could even glimpse a future where the trust between them might grow. He gave his father a quick hug, startling them both. ‘Go and look at the Opera House,’ he suggested.
His father looked from Faris to Susannah. ‘I’ll come back … in an hour then?’
‘An hour would be fine.’ Susannah’s accent was still there, faint: the song of Ireland. ‘Tea,’ she said to Faris. ‘Hot and sweet. That’s what we need.’
He nodded.
He had drunk half the cup before he felt he could speak. Susannah was always good at giving you time for silence, he thought. Days or weeks, to let your mind catch up. He had longed for his friends. He had never realised how much time would have ripped them away from him.
Sitting with Susannah now he almost felt more lonely than he had been before he met her again.
‘You became a nun.’ And old, he thought. So old.
She smiled. ‘What else should I be, after eighty years of caring for you all?’
Faris had looked up the Sisters of St Joseph on Google before he and his father had come to Sydney. He had wondered why any woman would join a religious order and give up a family and love.
The ten-year-old girl had given up her own life for the children on the beach. But that girl had been rich in both love and family. He looked at Susannah’s face. He suspected this old woman was as rich as the girl had been.
‘Why aren’t you called Susannah? I thought nuns could use their own names now.’
‘Susannah is my middle name. I thought Margaret-Mary boring. I thought, in Australia I’ll be Susannah. A new land and a new name. But when I got here,’ she sipped her tea, ‘I found that I was still Margaret-Mary.’
Yes, she was still his friend. Impossible, that a woman so old — more than grandmother old — might be a friend. ‘You’re Susannah too.’
‘Well, I suppose I am at that. I’m so very sorry it took so long to find you. I hoped I could be there when you first arrived.’
She looked at Faris steadily. ‘It’s always hard when you get here. Even for those who come here knowing they will be allowed to stay. At least I knew Australia wanted me, that Australians spoke my language. It was bad for Jamila and the others who left Refuge just before you came. But you never told me your last name. Just that your father was a doctor. I wish you could have had someone who could say, “Those days on the beach happened.”’
‘Yes.’ He wasn’t sure what he felt now. Relief — his mind wasn’t so damaged that he had imagined it all. A sense of wonder. Happiness too, because he had survived. He had even begun to grasp life again and make it good.
‘Did you think you might have imagined it all too?’ he asked.
Susannah sipped her tea. ‘Of course. Nikko wasn’t with me when I woke up, you see. I’d been delirious. The beach was just a fever dream, I told myself. But I had changed. Even Mam knew that I had changed. You can’t do what we did back there and return just the same. I met David and knew it had been real. It was twenty-six years later. You know how time hiccupped back on Refuge.’
Refuge. A good name for it, he thought. His heart had suddenly worked out how to beat again.
Susannah shook her head at the memory. ‘There was David, in my schoolyard. A bit more meat on his bones and his poor scarred hands. A Jewish boy in a Catholic school in a little country town, but his aunt knew our children got the best that we could give them. That’s what mattered. Oh, those were hard years. Half the children didn’t speak English and had ghosts in their eyes.’
He stared at her in wonder. So the friends from his bright golden beach were here — or two of them at least. But he still felt the ache of loss. They would be too old to want to play with a ball on the beach. ‘Did David recognise you?’
‘We wore habits back then, long robes and veils, all black and white. I doubt he even looked at my face at first. I called him up to the office. “Where is your violin, David?” I asked him. “Gone,” he said. And then he said, “Susannah,” and we were both crying, and I had to explain why to Sister Augustine. Nothing fazed Sister Augustine, not even the tiger snake under the blackboard.’
‘Did Sister Augustine believe you?’
‘She found David a violin. She found him a music teacher, when his aunt married and they went to live in Melbourne. His teacher had played with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra before they put him in the concentration camp, and now his hands were as bad as David’s. Oh, they were good for each other, those two. They helpe
d each other build new lives.’
She hadn’t answered his question about Sister Augustine. Somehow he knew that she never would answer him, not about the women she called sisters.
‘Where is David now?’ He glanced around the café, in case one of the men might suddenly turn out to be the boy he’d known.
‘He died,’ said Susannah — Sister Margaret-Mary — gently. ‘A few years ago. He had a good long life, Faris. A rich one.’
He knew she didn’t mean in money.
‘He became a psychiatrist, helping those with mental illnesses. He knew enough about grief and loss, didn’t he now. He knew how to help. He played with a string quartet. Not to big audiences, but he was happy with it. Played at one of my schools a few times. I taught in every little town in Victoria at some stage, I think. Little school after little school.
‘I started looking for you all, after David. Not by myself, of course, but I’d ask the brother-in-law of a pupil’s mother, or a girl I’d once taught, anyone who might know about new immigrants. Sister Augustine and I were on the wharf when Nikko’s boat arrived from Greece. No, I don’t know why he wasn’t with me. Perhaps in his heart he wanted his true family.’ She grinned. It was a clear echo of the ten-year-old’s grin. ‘No one thinks to ask a nun why she’s there when she might be needed, and we were needed indeed. It got me into the detention centre to meet Jamila too.’
‘She’s safe? Happy?’ How many of them might be still alive? He tried to work out their ages. His mind had always baulked at trying it before, in case it had been an illusion and he was adding to it. ‘What about Nikko?’
‘A crewman leaped down into the sea to rescue him. Oh, Nikko grew so tall, taller even than you are now.’ She chuckled. ‘Though not quite as tall as those uncles he imagined at that Feast of St Kangarou. Nikko became a teacher. He married another teacher — the crewman’s niece — years later. They’re retired, but he and his wife stay with isolated children around Australia to help them with correspondence school. Ah, it came good. With a bit of faith and a lot of tears and work.
‘Jamila has one of those computer jobs.’ She spoke in the tones of one who regarded computers as items from a strange world, far more foreign than the lands they all had come from. ‘She has a PhD, the girl who couldn’t go to school. It hasn’t been easy for her. But she’s going to stand for parliament in the next election. She says she’ll be prime minister one day.’
‘Is she married?’
‘Not yet. But I think she will be, one day.’
Faris wondered how Jamila’s dreams for Australia had changed from the city of women she had imagined as a terrified child on a drifting boat. Susannah nodded, as if she knew what he was thinking. ‘She has a vision for Australia’s future too.’
‘How did she survive?’
‘She and her parents fought the man who tried to kill them. Jamila tied him up with her scarf. Her father paid the crew and other passengers not to untie him. Jamila says she and her parents explained what the man had done to the officials here, but she doesn’t know what happened to him.’
In a funny way it hurt, thinking his friends had led their lives without him. All of them so much older than him now.
‘Are they OK?’ He was really asking if they had been injured, even mutilated, by whatever horror they had gone back to.
Again Susannah understood without the words. ‘We each have scars, of some sort or other. The fever left me deaf in one ear. Who needs two, when one will do?’ She put her hand on his; it was small, cold and old, but comforting. ‘I think that each one of us is happy. Maybe we learned how to be happy, back on that beach. We meet every year, just after Christmas. You can see for yourself.’
‘What about Billy? Did you ever find out what happened to him? I tried to Google him, but there are so many Higgses.’
Susannah laughed, delighted. ‘You’ll never guess. I taught his great-grandchildren! Billy had the biggest farm in the district and fourteen children. He married his cook. And oh, Faris, you will like this. One great-great-grandson became an astronaut! A scientist, up in space.’
Faris thought of Billy’s journey in the stinking hold of the small sailing ship. Billy would have understood his great-great-grandson’s journey and been proud.
‘We’ve tracked down nearly all of us, even the ones I knew before you joined us. Even Ah Goon. He got back to China. He wrote a poem that is still taught today, about a far bright beach. There’s a bay named after Henri — he got here too, and then back to France. Pedro’s many-times-great-grandson has written a story about his seafaring ancestor, who went to Australia and back. Mei Ling died in a car crash, the day before her fiftieth birthday. But she left two daughters — oh, such fine girls. She became a pianist, a composer of music for movies. All those concerts of David’s perhaps. Bridget was a nurse in World War One, Julio became mayor of Bellagong. Did I ever tell you about Julio? I’ll tell you about them all one day. Too much to tell you now.’
Yes. It was all too much.
‘What about Mudurra and Juhi?’
‘They are too far back for history. But I think they are with us nonetheless. Have you ever wondered who was the first person to step onto Australia? Maybe it was Mudurra.’
‘With Juhi beside him?’
She laughed again. It was the girl’s laugh, from the old woman. ‘Why not? Maybe he dreamed Australia just like he dreamed the beach. Maybe without him none of us would be here.’
‘But Juhi hasn’t changed the world. There’s still hatred. People still kill each other because of their religion or the colour of their skin. She hasn’t changed a thing.’
Susannah met his gaze. ‘Who knows? Give us time, boyo. The world keeps changing. Maybe in time there’ll be no hatred. But I think that she and Mudurra were happy. Don’t you?’
Faris thought of Juhi’s face as she followed Mudurra through the doorway — the modern girl who had been the best student in her school. ‘I don’t know. If only she could have taken some things with her. Like antibiotics, in case she got sick. But we couldn’t take anything, could we? Not even your book.’
Her face was serene. ‘We took our memories. We took something else as well.’
‘What?’
‘The gift of friendship. Every one of us, bruised and battered by other people. We learned understanding there. We learned that together we were strong.’
Faris thought of Alex, Walter and Joel. Was his friendship with them a gift from Refuge too? He remembered one of Alex’s stupid facts, that Indigenous people had plants that were sometimes more effective medicines than modern drugs. Had Juhi also known that?
There was a name he had avoided. He spoke it now. ‘Nafeesa?’
As soon as he said it, he knew this was who mattered most. It wasn’t just that Nafeesa might be closest to his own time and close to him in age. He had felt a string bind them together from the first moment he had seen the love and determination in her eyes, so like Jadda’s.
Once more he felt the warmth of Nafeesa’s fingers touching his.
‘Ah, yes. Nafeesa.’ Susannah looked at Faris steadily. ‘I worked out all the times in my book, you know. When each of us had come from, the date we’d go back to. But I didn’t get a chance to ask Nafeesa when she’d come from, not before the doorway was washing away.’
‘Nafeesa arrived after me. That means she’ll arrive in Australia after me too.’ But would that be years, or months later? he wondered. He simply didn’t know.
Did Susannah?
‘You want to meet her when she gets here?’
‘Of course! I want to meet everyone,’ he added quickly.
‘But her especially?’
Faris was silent. This was an old woman, after all. How could she understand?
‘We were all equal on that beach,’ said Susannah, her voice clear even among the mutter and chatter of the café. ‘The colour of our skin didn’t matter, nor how we prayed to God, or where we came from. But it matters here in Australia. Are you
sure you’ll want Nafeesa for a friend now? A girl from a culture so different from yours?’
‘I would still be her friend.’ He thought of Nafeesa’s determination, holding the doorway on the beach. ‘She wouldn’t let differences stop her from being my friend either. Not Nafeesa.’
‘Even if her uncle didn’t approve? Your father?’
Faris thought of the man in tears on the bench by the sea. ‘My father is a good man. I think he is a man who accepts others as they are.’
‘And his son is too?’
Faris put up his chin. ‘Yes.’
Susannah drained her teacup. ‘I thought so, boyo. I knew you well, back there. But people change.’
Faris looked at her, a challenge in his eyes. ‘I’m going to look for Nafeesa too. If we all made it to Australia, then she will as well. I’ll be there to help her. I … I’ve got some money saved. I can buy her a phone, so we can text, even if she’s in another city. If she doesn’t arrive till I’m older and I’ve got a job, then I can help her even more. And if she doesn’t come for ten years, twenty years, when you are gone, I’ll still be there for her —’
Susannah held up an age-spotted hand. ‘Enough. I believe you.’ She looked out the window.
Faris wondered if she was looking for the companion who had brought her here. Was she tired? Did she need to rest?
He said quickly, in case the companion arrived, ‘Why did it happen? How could it happen? The more I think about it, the less I understand.’
‘I’ve had over eighty years to think about it,’ said Sister Margaret-Mary, looking back at him. ‘And I don’t understand it either. But I no longer think we need to understand everything in life. It happened. It was good.’
‘Because it taught us friendship?’
She smiled. ‘It gave us time. Time to want to live. But we learned more than that. It taught us how to live together, despite our differences, how to work together too.’
‘You think that’s why we all survived when we came back?’
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