The Watermill

by Arnold Zable

  He no longer calls. ‘I am tired. They are tired. I have no answers; they have no answers. What can I say to them? It is the first question they ask: “Why, Faris, why? Why did Abu Quassey put us on that boat? He knew it wasn’t safe. He knew the weather was no good. He knew the engine was old. He knew the boat was dangerous.”

  ‘Why did the boats leave us? Why?’ I saw the boats. They saw the boats—two bigger boats, and one smaller boat. But they left us, and still we don’t know why. This question makes us sick.’

  I am back on the Black Spur Drive, mid-winter 2019. There is something about driving on treacherous roads flanked by dark forests that leads me to speculate. What does it mean to have one’s story ignored or denied? What does it mean to be hounded and left homeless? What does it mean to belong? To feel at home, grounded?

  Meier and Hadassah never travelled over the Black Spur. They had no need or the desire. They were done with journeys. As they entered their seventies, they finally acquired the house they had rented for decades. The landlord had died. He lived in New Zealand. Never once did he visit or get in touch. He left all supervision to the real-estate agent. The house was put up for auction in 1970. The prices in our gentrifying suburb were about to soar, putting houses out of reach of families who had lived in them for generations.

  On the day of the auction we gathered outside our home: my two brothers, long-time neighbours, friends and supporters. And Hadassah and Meier, fearful of what lay ahead. They could not imagine living anywhere else. They could not contemplate another move, beginning anew in another location. One more uprooting would have been unbearable, perhaps fatal.

  There remained a sole bidder against them. He had appeared at the last minute and positioned himself in front of the crowd. He was a calm, calculating rival, dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie, casually lifting his finger as the bids mounted. He looked straight ahead, impassive. We reached our limit. Our rival countered. We made one last desperate bid. He shrugged his shoulders, returned to his car and departed.

  A cheer went up. The onlookers had been drawn into the drama. They recognised the stakes. We drank a toast on the median strip, under the palms and poplars—that stretch of paradise my father loved to look at from the front window when he lifted his head from the works of the Yiddish poets.

  The change in my parents’ sense of wellbeing was instant. They had secured their tiny space on earth. They walked with firmer steps to the corner stores, the milk bars, and to and from the nearby shopping centre. They rejoiced in the familiar. They knew every shopkeeper—the newsagent, the barber, the shoe repairer, the baker and chemist, the butcher, the greengrocer, the delicatessen, the fruiterer and the hardware manager. They engaged with them in conversation. Big talk. Small talk. It did not matter.

  They lived out their lives in that house and the neighbourhood, grounded by its solid presence and nourished by its certainty. It was all they wanted, and all they needed. Meier made his way daily to Curtain Square and his bench beneath the Moreton Bays. He inhaled the scent of figs fermenting on the path, and breathed easy. Then he returned on that one-block walk from Curtain Square to Fenwick Street, and a hundred metres further, to his single-fronted terrace house, the proud owner.

  In her final years, Hadassah retreated into the depths of the house. She slept in the back room. It was her fortress, shielding her from the ghosts that continued to besiege her. On warm days, she sat on a chair in the backyard, enclosed by tin and paling fences, the secure borders of her private domain. Hands folded on her lap, eyes closed, allowing the sun to bathe her.

  She moved about her tiny kingdom, shoulders rounded, from the yard to the washhouse, and along the brick path to the kitchen door. She sat for hours at the table, as the sunlight withdrew from the window, along with the stove, the refrigerator, the fireplace, the enamel sink, the shelved alcove, and the plywood cupboards—her anchors. She sat as darkness descended. Her voice rose from and returned to silence, and with it the song: How still it has become, the night has come to stay. The white beryosé remains; standing in the forest alone.

  By the time they died, Hadassah in 1990, Meier in 1992, they had lived in the house far longer than they had in any other place. Upwards of forty-five years. More than half their lives.

  Faris and Majida too have no desire to be elsewhere. This is where they wish to live out their days. They too take comfort in the familiar: the stairs to the wire-mesh door, which opens directly into the kitchen. The tree outside the window. Their bedroom; their living room.

  ‘He cannot be away for long,’ says Majida. ‘Only here, he feels safe. When he visits his mother, Fadilha, and his son, Ali, he cannot stay still. Within half an hour of arrival, he is nervous. “Majida, we must go back,” he says. “Why?” his mother asks. “You have just come.” “No, I must go,” he says. He is panicking. He must return home to our flat.’

  ‘Would you risk the sea journey again?’ I ask. ‘Of course!’ Faris replies. ‘For years I was no one. My brain became hard. My heart was tougher than rock. Nothing could frighten me. Nothing could hurt me. Too much they pushed me in Iran and Iraq. Too much they said I was dirt. We have a saying: “If someone is wet, he is not afraid of the rain.”

  ‘This is my home now,’ Faris tells me with a wave of his hand. ‘This is my palace. Everything.’ He gestures to the window: ‘This is my country now. I love it. I want to look after it. I do not like to see rubbish on the streets. I cannot understand why people throw rubbish in such a beautiful place. I pick it up and put it in the bin.

  ‘Thank God. Iran and Iraq are finished for me now. Finished.’ He flicks his hand in a dismissive gesture. He glances downwards, and taps the floor with his foot. ‘This is my earth now.’

  And there is the lullaby Faris sings in his sleep. Majida recites the lyrics in Arabic and translates: Don’t cry, your mum is coming back soon. She’s bringing you toys, a bag full of toys. One of the toys is a duck, and it goes quack, quack, quack.

  Faris lights up at the memory. ‘Zahra learnt this song from an Egyptian man who lived with us when we waited for the boat in the hostel. His name was Ibrahim. He had a daughter, Sara. She was four. She played with my daughter.

  ‘The Egyptian man told Zahra, “I will teach you a song.” Zahra sang the lullaby to me. She tickled my stomach whenever she said “quack, quack, quack”.’ Faris laughs. Then the light drains from his face. ‘Ibrahim and Sara were on the boat with us. When the boat sank, they vanished.’

  He leans forward and buries his face in his hands. Hidden somewhere in the flat are the shirt and trousers he wore in the ocean, stiff with salt. He cannot throw them out. All that remains of Zahra is a doll and a handbag. Zahra had left them behind in Indonesia. They too are hidden in the flat. Faris retrieved them in Jakarta after the fishing boats returned from the rescue. He has kept them close by ever since. I am haunted by the doll and the handbag, though I have never seen them. I dare not ask.

  Yet, there are saving graces, forces that keep Faris going. There is his son, Ali. He still lives with his grandmother, Fadilha. Faris sees him often. And there is Majida. Her journey mirrors his. She tells it only when I ask.

  Majida’s Kurdish forebears too made the journey from Iran to Iraq in search of work. Majida was fourteen when, in 1982, Saddam’s police came for her family in Baghdad. They were ordered out of their home at night and detained in a hall with more than one hundred people. In the morning, they were taken on buses to the Iranian border and abandoned. They slept where they were dumped, and set out at first light.

  They walked through the day and the night. They rested the next day and continued in the evening. Late at night, they came across a patrol of Iranian soldiers. They had left two of Majida’s brothers imprisoned in Baghdad. Her father did not care about the loss of his home and possessions, and his truck-hire business: everything he had worked for. He was worried only for the two sons.

  It was after the fall of Saddam Hussein, in 2005, that he learnt of their fate. They had
been killed in jail in 1990, two among the thousands of Kurdish men tortured and murdered, or used as human minesweepers in the warring borderlands. When he heard the news, Majida’s father had a heart attack. He died a year later, a broken man.

  Accompanied by a brother and two sisters, Majida had left for Indonesia in 2000. They boarded a boat in Sumatra for the final leg of the journey. On the third day at sea they sighted a plane with a kangaroo insignia and were elated. The boat made it to Darwin and the sisters spent four months in the Port Hedland Detention Centre. After their release, they settled in Sydney.

  ‘Sometimes I love October, and sometimes I hate October,’ says Majida. ‘I arrived in Australia in October, but my mother died on a day in October. My family was deported from Iraq in October, and the boat that took Zahra and Layla’s lives sank in October. I knew about the people who drowned on SIEV-X, and I knew about Faris before I met him.

  ‘When he came to see me in Sydney he told me everything. He told me he was always sick and worried. He showed me his medication. He told me he could not sleep at night, and he told me that sometimes he did not want to talk to anyone. I told him, no worries. I want to be with you. I could see he was a kind and honest man. I told him, “Faris, I will move with you to Melbourne.” I told him, “Faris, I will marry you.”’

  Now, after many visits to Faris and Majida’s flat, I can see it. Now that we have sat together, side by side by the living-room coffee table, in talk and in silence, I am beginning to understand it: this story of immense loss. It will always be that. The stain will never be washed off.

  But there is something else. It is in Majida’s stoic demeanour, in the tone of her voice, and in her ease, the measured way in which she moves from the kitchen to the living room, bringing food and drink to the table.

  It is in the way she moves about the flat, mindful of Faris’s presence; and in her complete absence of judgment, the way she allows Faris’s stories to rise from and return to silence; it is in her attentiveness no matter how many times he tells them. And it can be heard as she sings Zahra’s lullaby. This, too, is a tale of love.

  I am a child of people of air. Hadassah and Meier’s journeys saved their lives but, for years to come, imprisoned them with the ghosts of their loved ones. I am the beneficiary, free to travel of my own will and free to choose my destinations. I can take flight.

  The plane lifts me above and beyond the city. It arcs over the bay and veers back inland. It carries me across the Great Divide, a vast stretch of plateaus and mountain ranges. For 3700 kilometres, the Great Divide follows the eastern coastline. It is a watershed, host to rivers flowing east to the coast, and west, inland. It can be seen from the plane window where the land breaks free of the gridlines of city streets and highways, fenced farmlands and homesteads into the vastness of untamed terrain.

  I am flying to the interior, the red centre, and north into the Territory, and then out west to the Kimberley—from the forested ridges of the Great Divide to white inland saltpans, from secluded bays to red dirt and jagged escarpments. I have a birds-eye view of the continent—river tributaries and estuaries fanning out like leaf veins. Creeks twisting between ridges, carving gullies. Looking down on swirls of pale blues and violet, ochres and purples, broken by arrow-straight roads shooting towards receding skylines.

  I have begun to walk land that has been walked, and worked, for millennia. Begun to know a tiny fragment of the living quilt of Indigenous Country. I have walked in the wake of rains beside once-dry riverbeds now raging waterways. I have circumnavigated rock monoliths glowing at dusk like red phantoms; have walked where long-dormant seeds have burst briefly into flower. And I have begun to walk with some of those who possess stories for each rock, each stream, each constellation and waterhole.

  A big story this. And an old story: where there is dispossession, there will be resistance. This is how it is. ‘It’s going to rain,’ the old man says. ‘Give it six hours, but believe me it’s going to rain. Best place to be is here, sitting in the shade beneath the house.’

  Several times a year, I take the now-familiar route by way of the Yarra Valley, left at the Woori Yallock turn-off and, several hundred metres on, right into Barak Lane. I pull up at the Coranderrk Cemetery, unchain the gate and fasten it behind me. The cemetery stands on a rise, enclosed by wire fences. I have been coming here for a quarter of a century now, since the day that Aunty Joy first guided me.

  It is autumn. The ground is strewn with decaying leaves and toadstools. Mounds of discarded bark wreathe the bases of eucalypts. Alpacas wander down to drink from the dam. A black bull moves by, lowing. Crows forage in the paddocks. The winds are rising, all is movement: branches and saplings, clumps of grasses and wild daisies.

  Among the graves there is a headstone for Winnie Narrandjeri Quagliotti, Wurundjeri elder, a leader in the fight for recognition. When Winnie died, in August 1988, she became the first Wurundjeri buried in the cemetery in more than four decades. Nearby is a granite memorial stone dedicated to William Barak.

  Further on, there is a moss-encrusted cairn with steel plaques, recording the story of the trek across the Black Spur and the history of Coranderrk Station. And the names of the people who found their final resting place here: beginning in 1863, the year the people returned.

  There are many Wurundjeri names, Kulin names, and names belonging to other tribes from throughout the state now known as Victoria. Babies and infants, teenagers, adults, long-lived elders, marked alone or grouped in families, their dates of birth and death recorded. Below them are engraved the words of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal: ‘We belong here, we are of the old ways.’

  It is well over a century since William Barak’s passing. There is a photo of him seated on the veranda of his wooden cottage beside his dog in his final years on Coranderrk. I imagine him from this half-acre, my gaze fastened on vast expanses of sky and the surrounding ranges.

  Like his great-grandniece, Aunty Joy, Barak was open, willing to receive visitors who came in good faith, proud to demonstrate the ways of his people and to pass on stories and language, vocabularies of Woiwurrung that would become one of the sources for the reclamation of language by his descendants. His dignity cut through, and his presence drew people to him. His being transcended his enclosure, and undermined the prejudices of those who saw him as a curiosity.

  The sun, a globe in the west, is hitting the peaks, sending shafts of light over the valley. I imagine Barak speaking of his homelands. He speaks, as people who knew him have described it, in a slow, gentle voice. He sweeps his hand over the ranges.

  He resisted all attempts to move him. He belonged to the creeks and the rivers, to the Birrarung, and to the volcanic plain that defines the river’s course and beyond, to pathways and trading routes that are woven into the fabric of an entire continent. And always, at the heart of it, to the mountains of the Great Divide, and his place overlooking the valley. Aunty Joy quotes his words years later: ‘Yarra, my father’s country.’ He would not be moved. He would never leave it.

  And in years to come, my mother and father would find their tiny space within it: Hadassah and Meier, the song and the poem, in their single-fronted terrace; and Faris and Majida, in their one-bedroom apartment, the resting place for a lullaby. Hadassah and Meier, Faris and Majida: they came from the old world to the new and found refuge in a world far more ancient than the old.

  Meier and Hadassah are a part of this earth, buried now in Kulin country. And Majida and Faris are a living part of it. They walk each afternoon in Princes Park. On clear days, to the east, in the far distance, can be seen the ranges of the Great Divide; and to the south, the city’s core, a huddle of office towers and highrise apartments; and, closer, the sandstone facades of university colleges.

  Majida and Faris sit on a park bench as evening falls. There is space, acres of grass, oaks and elms, palms and eucalypts. Children play in the small playground fifty metres away; their mothers keep a watchful eye. Faris hears the chirping of birds and the v
oices of children. For a blessed moment, he is fully present.

  And yet...Faris sags back in his seat. He feels hot. His haunted expression returns. His gaze turns inward. He names them. Zahra. Layla. Ibrahim. Sara. Four among 353 men, women and children—all gone, their resting places unmarked, forever en route, in the ocean. And the boats abandoned them: ‘Why? I will never understand it. Why? Why?’

  A station wagon pulls up to the bitumen space in front of the cemetery. A young man steps out, unlatches the gate, and makes his way to the cairn. He pauses in front of the plaque and searches. His eyes linger on one name. He runs a finger over it. He steps back and stands for a long while head bowed, then makes his way to the fence. He sits, legs folded, and looks out over the valley.

  And I know. I know without having to ask. He has located the name of an ancestor; and I know he is feeling something of what I felt in 1986, in cemeteries on the outskirts of the towns whose names I first heard sung in that distant kitchen. Bransk, Bialystok, Grodek, Orly, Bielsk. Seeking family names among untended gravestones dispersed over fields, hidden in woodlands, sinking into abandoned plots obscured by wild grasses. And of what I felt in Treblinka, where I lit a candle at the stone marked Bialystok and retreated to a forest of conifers to sit on a floor of raw dirt and pine needles.

  We sit within the same half-acre. We sit as the evening closes in. We sit as the mists begin descending, and as the mountains fade to black skylines enfolding rolling farmlands. A flock of migrating birds wings overhead in V-formation. A chorus of frogs rises from the dam. The shrill cry of cicadas rings out in the valley. We sit as the land gives way to nightfall. Here is where we meet.