Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  The issues raised that morning ranged widely. The girls’ questions were mainly about friendship and fathers. One thought her friends all wanted something from her. One realised her father could never change, but she loved him and didn’t want to defy him. The boys were more open than the girls. One wept when he described the death of his grandmother, and how she had cared for him in Jabal Al-Nathif after his parents had died in the first Gulf War. Loss and rage drove this small community, who knew each other’s stories and the calamities that had brought them there. Many had relatives trapped in Gaza.

  Wounds ran deep as wave after wave of displaced and struggling people arrived in this impoverished community. But something else was happening that ran counter to the despair and poisonous ideologies that were fuelling extremism all over the region. The young participants in the Ruwwad programs knew they had been given a chance they would not get elsewhere—and that there is hope.

  At that point, plans were taking shape for similar communities in other parts of the region: in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. I returned to Cortona and started to think about how Ruwwad’s methods might work in Australia.

  In Cortona, the weather had changed and the pool was closed, so Lyndall and I sometimes went to soak in the ancient Bagno Vignoni in the Val d’Orcia, breathing in the warm mists from hot mineral springs. We planned journeys together and made some of them happen—to Damascas and Aleppo; and later to Dubai, where some of her family were based. I hoped to persuade her to visit me in Australia but she never would. The distance, the politics, the treatment of refugees. We imagined meeting in India, which we both loved and had visited often.

  Then it was the seventh anniversary of 9/11, and I was sitting looking out over the Valdichiana, which still had loops of pale mist on the fields. The hills were blue against a pink heat haze and the air was cool. I loved it there, where I knew I had grown stronger. I fell in a heap sometimes but not so often.

  I had been fantasising about staying there, toying with the idea of finding a small, crumbling house to rent, and hoping my family would find ways to visit me. I even looked at a couple of houses below Cortona, and one rather derelict one up the hill, opposite Nella’s. What I’d live on was even more uncertain than where I would live. The occasional requests to do reviews and columns would soon dry up. I had written about the earthquake, and about what was happening in Dubai, but that was about it. I could teach English and help a few people with money write their books, but not much else.

  My way of life was an anachronism in these times, which were a hideous hinge between one era and another. Hard-heartedness was on the rise. I was a privileged woman bobbing around the edges of things, while millions were moving across borders, trying to feed their children and find a safe place to sleep.

  8

  Life lines

  I DREADED RETURNING TO Australia. I’d run away. Blown up my life. Lost face. I wasn’t even sure I would live here again. Somewhere along the way, I’d decided that I would be more use to my family, and everyone else, if I made an independent life for myself in another place. I’d come back not because I was needed—I assuredly was not—but because my daughter was having an exhibition of her lovely, meditative artwork at a city gallery late in 2008.

  I intended to return to Jordan in the New Year, to help where I could with children in the refugee camps, and otherwise make myself useful there, returning to Australia for short visits. I’d heard stories in Jordan of Australian women who stayed for years, becoming indispensable. One was a doctor, working with village babies born with heart defects. Another was a nun who vanished into Syria near the Lebanese border helping the poor. I thought of tracking them down and persuading them to let me tell their stories. There was not much more a former publisher could do.

  The tenants were still in the house; happily, I heard. So I avoided that part of town and camped in other people’s spare rooms once again—staying with generous women friends who were living alone with considerable style and flair. I had returned to a world peopled almost entirely by women, or so it seemed to me. Few couples among my friends had survived, and those who had steered clear. Or maybe it was I who avoided them—envious that their marriages had survived, shocked by how needy I still felt.

  The GFC had knocked a large hole in incautiously invested superannuation like mine, and so had all my independent travel. Taking a leaf out of Carmen’s formidable budgeting, I made myself a spreadsheet, trying to recall 5-year-old details of household expenditure, to estimate how long I could last if I went on renting the house and living outside Australia. I’d lost track of how much the basics cost; everything seemed to have gone up, gouging was on the rise.

  Lodgers and reverse mortgaging were the obvious solutions, said London friends, who often had a lodger or two, people who worked in the city but lived in the country, inhabiting a converted attic or a back bedroom, going home on the train at weekends. Unlikely to be the pattern in Melbourne. In any case I could find no sign of reverse mortgaging being offered by Australian banks, and the one financial adviser someone sent me to produced a graph to show how rapidly a reverse mortgage on the house would be devoured by me. He thought I was nuts.

  I intended to keep moving, hoping next to join a small group that was setting up a children’s library in Gaza, such as Raghda Butros and Rabeea Al Nasser had done in Ruwwad, in places where there were no books, just photocopies of old textbooks. I had some Australian children’s stories donated by my friend Julia Taylor at Five Mile Press—a fine little series called Feelings: When I’m feeling Angry/Happy/Jealous/Sad/Kind?, which I planned to give to Rabeea to translate for children when we visited Gaza. After that, I would stay on for a while to help with her children’s reading program at Ruwwad, approaching Australian publishers to donate children’s books, subsidise their translation and have them printed. I would try to find an Australian donor to ship them free of charge and ask agents to waive charges. Having them translated was no problem—the Arabic writers I spoke to in Melbourne were happy to help, and money to pay them properly could be found. But any mention of a Middle East destination, and publishers and distributors backed off, suggesting I try over there.

  Then, on 27 December, Israel launched its largest, bloodiest punitive attack since the Six Day War, targeting Hamas bases and the police headquarters on the Gaza Strip with twenty-two days of constant bombardment. The international media was forbidden to witness the carnage. Foreign aid was heavily restricted, the Red Cross and the UN forced to leave. The librarians’ visit could not go ahead, and I was back to following the news on Al Jazeera, which was all bad.

  So was meeting my husband in the Botanic Gardens and, soon afterwards, having a solicitor inform me that he wanted to divide up ‘the assets’—one of his despised weasel words now being applied to thousands of books and CDs; old-fashioned, shabby furniture; a few good pictures painted by friends; and boxes of old files in a storage bin. A friend found me a solicitor. I didn’t want a divorce; just a proper arrangement between two people, with much shared history and grown-up children, who still cared for each other. Presumably everything would have to be sold. The books and the stuff in storage would have to be sorted.

  He was up and away, in huge demand. His American Journeys had been out for months to great reviews, and now the media of course wanted his take on US politics—and there he was, holding forth on morning radio or The Minefield or Late Night Live or Q&A. I kept catching myself falling for his mind all over again, relishing his political analysis, laughing at his drollery; yes, missing him. I had not, it seemed, moved on enough. I’d run away, but now had a failed book and a failed marriage to deal with. Like finding black ooze beneath your feet when you thought you were floating free.

  I spent a lot of time that summer grimly walking the streets of Melbourne, avoiding people, going to films, sitting in parks, feeling trapped and sad. It was ferociously hot, the air dangerously dry, dead birds and possums in the lanes, and spare beds at a premium. E
mergency warnings cut across the news, outer suburban and country people being advised to take their pets and hand luggage and stay with friends.

  I felt in the way staying where I was, so I borrowed some camping gear from one of my sons and drove up the Princes Highway to southern New South Wales to a tent in a beautiful garden on a friend’s hillside near the sea. I woke on 7 February to the news of fires raging throughout Victoria, after the highest number of days with temperatures of more than 43 degrees since records began. There was an immense death toll and terrible destruction. But I shocked myself by responding as if through the wrong end of a telescope: at the money coming in from poor countries, the royal visitors and weeping politicians—railing in my heart for the Palestinians in Gaza whose faces we were not allowed to see.

  I rebooked my tickets to Jordan for mid-March, and offered my services to the City Library for a refugee reading program. Then I put the word out for a student who could teach me some Arabic, so I could speak with the children in the Ruwwad library when I returned. So I could learn how to say: Where I come from, there have been very bad fires. Many people have lost their houses and many are dead. But they would know that. The kangaroos and koalas with bandaged feet would have been on television. Many of these children would have family in Gaza.

  A friend suggested Sahar, a clever student who came to Australia in 2001, with her parents and a younger sister, leaving behind her two older brothers in Saddam’s Iraq. Only gradually did she tell me her familiar, shameful story. Sahar and her family, and everyone else on board, had jumped into the sea when the boat they were on began breaking up, the navy vessel Tampa standing by. The family were taken first to Nauru; then eventually to the Maribyrnong Detention Centre, where Sahar was allowed to attend school, but always in a locked van with an armed guard accompanying her.

  ‘I made no friends at school,’ she said. ‘I was full of shame. But it made me stronger.’ And she told me of the kindness of many people she met while in detention. Her fortitude and generosity of spirit were inspiring, and it was I who was ashamed.

  Now she helped me choose some children’s books for village libraries in the West Bank and Gaza. Choosing books for children in other cultures is fraught with sensitivities. Sahar told me that books about dogs and pigs are never given to children. Indeed, it is rude to mention either animal at mealtimes. But parents teach young children how to be kind and how to forgive, as the Qur’an insists on. Her father encouraged Sahar to read widely. The phrases and sentences she taught me I would use when I returned with some Australian books for Rabeea. I told Sahar about leaving behind, for Rabeea’s House of Tales and Music, the ukulele I never learned to play. And how, perhaps, I would be able to start a little conversation about bushfires and koalas with burned paws, and kangaroos swimming in the sea.

  I returned to Cortona in April, just days before the earthquake struck L’Aquila in the Abruzzo, and again was watching coverage of a huge catastrophe, the 28,000 made homeless, the more than 300 killed, the crews digging out bodies. The Italians didn’t weep on camera like Australians now did. Except for one young man in his underpants, dug out from the rubble after twelve hours, and whose dry sobs went around the world, Italians in L’Aquila turned away from the camera to weep—or the camera turned aside to leave them their dignity. Even Berlusconi could not politicise their catastrophe, or so it seemed to me. Maybe it had something to do with Catholicism, fatalism; generation after generation in small towns and villages stoically rebuilding in this beautiful, dangerous part of the Apennines, where the terremoto is always expected.

  I was starting to face packing up the apartment, shipping a box of books and papers to Australia, where I would have to start again. I thought about sponsoring a refugee once I was back home and living alone in a house that would be too large.

  Lyndall’s English friends had befriended Akram Ali, a young Hazara Afghani man, while he did his A levels, then studied at Oxford Brookes, where he excelled. He was obliged to return to Afghanistan to help a family member, which would be dangerous for him and also mean he couldn’t return to England. He sometimes stayed in Lyndall’s tower; sometimes in Bologna, where the clergy let them sleep. He showed me footage on Facebook of the poetry group he had started with the refugees in the Duomo. The next time he came to Cortona to help me with my computer, archiving files I needed to keep, he asked if I would please help him come to Australia to study. I told him I would make enquiries at universities later in the year, when I was home again.

  The children’s library Rabeea wanted to show me was in Beidha, near Little Petra, where Bedouin families like those I encountered with Ruda on that long climb had all been rehoused from the caves of Petra.

  I took my books for the children, and saw that the Swedish Anna Lindh Foundation had stocked the schoolhouse library with classic children’s stories in Arabic translation. There was Ali Baba, which I saw from the book’s prelims had gone from a classic Arabic tale into Swedish, and back into Arabic again. I wished I knew enough to follow the differences.

  The Bedouin mothers came with their children and stayed on for reading lessons for themselves. Rabeea had everyone sitting in front of her on the mats as she read, her lovely, expressive voice making them all laugh and groan along with the drama of the stories: Aladdin, and a Finnish story about Moomintrolls, magic and snow. It sometimes snows heavily in Beidha, the mothers told me. They helped me write the Arabic alphabet on the whiteboard and laughed at my efforts.

  I showed my large coloured photographs of the bushfires in Victoria, and remembered that Sahar told me there is no word for hillsides covered in bush. The smoke and the burned-out cars, and helicopters dousing the fires, got the most response from the children and their mothers: The war, the same.

  In May 2009, I was staying with Teresa again. I was trying to find the right people to talk to about freighting Australian children’s books in translation into the refugee camps. I wished I could ask Sidi Hassan, who would know immediately who to speak to and would help me make it happen. Then I planned to take myself to Jerusalem and the West Bank.

  Carmen had arranged for me to join PalFest, the second Palestinian Festival of Literature, with a group of mainly British writers and performers. PalFest was led by Ahdaf Soueif, whose novel, In the Eye of the Sun, about a woman growing up between Cairo and England in the 1960s and 1970s, I much admired.

  Before I left Amman, I visited the researcher Adiba Mango, whose baby son, Ghassan, was then eight months old. Adiba had not heard of the stalling of the book, nor of my banishment, and was aghast at what had happened. She offered to send a letter from me to Prince Hassan, via her father, to find out if he’d see me before I flew home to Australia. She suggested also sending him several of the pieces I had written about Ruwwad and a recent visit to Dubai. This I did, hoping when I was back from the West Bank, I would be able to call on him and Princess Sarvath, and clear up whatever damage had been done. It was her father, Dr Mango, who wanted the Prince to sound like a prince, so I had only a very small surge of hope that he might listen to Adiba. But when I returned, there was no invitation, nothing.

  Teresa’s driver, Walem Sallah, collected me at eight-thirty the next morning, and we drove through the Jordan Valley to the Allenby Crossing. Friendly chaos on Jordan’s side: no apparent systems; piles of passports; officials at windows, taking all the time in the world. No one lost it, even though it was Friday and the last tourist bus had to fill before midday. Then we headed off, through several checkpoints, to the large Israeli Crossing, where there were hundreds waiting. The Palestinians were processed elsewhere, and foreigners were quizzed: Why here, who do you know, where are you staying? Why Ramallah, why Bethlehem, why Hebron, why are you going back to Jordan? I said I was joining a tour of writers from London, who would arrive tomorrow night. I showed the name of Ahdaf Soueif, the group leader. The woman took my passport and did not come back.

  Finally, there was just me, and three others going to Ramallah from Jerusalem. All the boo
ths started to be closed for Shabbat, which starts at sundown. The army officer interrogated me again, a blank paper in front of him. He went away. What is wrong? I asked. Why are you here? he asked. Four hours later, I was the second-last to leave, before a poor Palestinian family trying to visit their invalid mother in Ramallah. I was not permitted to wait for them and share a taxi.

  My night and a day alone in the Old City of Jerusalem before the group arrived were spent first in the courtyard of the Christ Church Guest House, where the boy on reception was too devout to smile. I was reading Karen Armstrong’s Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, and a lovely Farrar Straus edition of the work of Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish. That evening, I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the Crucifixion and the holy tomb of Jesus, where there was truly an odour of sanctity. Praying devotees were kissing stones, weeping, praying aloud, and moved briskly along. A young Moroccan volunteer took my hand, and led me through passageways to the Armenian church and the Syrian church, which were, he said, more beautiful. Simply lit, unadorned Romanesque arches loomed out of the dark. The air was thick with other people’s prayers, and I watched couples filming each other kissing the stone of Abnegation, or was it Mortification? I remembered Prince Hassan’s story about the Palestinian Muslim family, the Nusseibehs, who have been custodians of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre since 634.

  The next morning, the rampart walk had been closed, so the golden dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque could only be seen from the Mount of Olives outside the gates. Saturday security, said the guard, who let me stand on the step near the gate and take photographs through the bars. The Davidson archaeological site was huge and meticulous, and so was the scaffolding and the hoarding advertising a vast hospice being built overlooking the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. The streets were thronged with Orthodox men in big hats and sateen coats, and families of scarfed women and girls in long skirts, small boys in white shirts holding their fathers’ hands.