The Ink Bridge (14 page)

OMED DREAMED OF A LIFE that wasn't patterned by wire. A life that was not sealed behind two rows of steel fences. Every day he watched the wall and hoped. When he was out for exercise, he watched the sky. It was the home of eagles. Omed knew these birds, had seen them on the battlefields and killing grounds of home. They sent a shiver down his spine.

Out there was an endless desert, a sea of sand and rough rock where no man could live. Strange animals roamed the desert, snakes and giant lizards, the
kangaroo
that stood on two legs like a man and had the face of a sheep. They stared at Omed from outside the wire. This was no country for humans. Not here. They were trapped in a desert, an island within an island.

His father once said,
Words are a bridge that can save you.

So Omed read. There were only a few books in the centre. But he found one on the stars and learned the tricky constellations that made up the roof of Australia.

At night there were many stars – a spray of them, thick like a shawl across the belly of the sky. But it was not like the sky of Bamiyan where as a child his father would point out animals and strange beings. Here the moon rocked on its back, stars flew across like tracer bullets.

He searched for the Southern Cross. This was the key to the way south. In the south lay cities and people, places where someone could hide; he had heard the guards talking. As he read he practised his writing, scribing words onto lengths of toilet paper with a fine-tipped pen. He needed to write quickly or the ink would grow fat on the soft paper. He needed to write in English because he needed to answer their questions. And how else would a mute speak?

At first they had thought he was deliberately silent and told him that things would go badly if he did not answer. When he had showed the mangled stump of his tongue, he saw disgust in the pucker of their lips.

There were always two and they spoke quickly. They had an interpreter, a Tajik who hated the Hazara and did not know his special language of silence.

The more Omed wrote his story, the less he remembered what he had written. Once the words had left his hand they were gone. They kept the paper and said it was their property. This was the way they stole his story.

It was important to remember everything exactly as it had happened. This was what they wanted. If something, even a small detail, was forgotten the two suited figures would give each other a solemn look, like sour mullahs, and the rat scratch of their pens would rise in his ears.

He knew enough to realise that these men held his life in their hands. At their wish, he could live beyond the wire. But again, it all came down to words and sometimes they were his friend and other times they betrayed him.

Words would haunt Omed at night. They would rain into his sleep like bullets. They would puncture his dreams with their tiny spikes, the punctuation marks worrying his wounds and infecting him with their madness. He would swallow words like
illegal
and
refugee
and
backdoor
and
process
. He would shout
poor
and
life
and
hope
as an antidote and the words he did not know in English he would whisper in Dari, in Hazaragi, in shame.

The detention centre was built for four hundred people, but fifteen hundred souls crouched under the tin roofs. There was no air conditioning even though the sun made the sides of the huts too hot to touch. Five toilets meant long queues in the mornings and evenings. The conditions turned people into animals, fighting and clawing their grief out on each other and themselves.

Omed watched as desperate people drank shampoo and carefully sewed their lips together to show the world how little their words meant. Such was their sadness, their sense of helplessness. He saw parents pull their children to their bodies in the hope they could protect them, but the poison was in the air, inside their minds.

The man who ran the camp wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun. His shirt was pressed, the seams of his trousers sheared like blade edges to his polished shoes. His name was Jim Parasole and he was the whitest man Omed had ever seen. Even the albino, Omar, whom the village children would shout names at from behind the walls of Bamiyan was not as white as this strange man. When he had first seen him, Omed had wanted to touch his thin, pale eyebrows to see if they were real. But he would not be touched.

He was king here. In the old manner of kings. A ruler in a desert kingdom surrounded by his army of hard-booted men and the annoying presence of his subjects.

Omed had been brought before him only once, when he had scuffled over the book he was reading. The man who had wanted to take it, an Iranian, had not counted on the sharpness of Omed's nails. Omed had spent three days in the Management Unit for his crime.

One afternoon Mr Parasole stepped onto the red dirt and made his way to the front gate. Omed leant his face against the burning wall of the toilet block and watched. A truck drove to the gate and was let inside. Mr Parasole greeted the driver and walked with him as he opened the rear door. A figure stepped into the glare. A man. He was small and hunched, impossibly dark and dirty beside Mr Parasole. Mr Parasole talked to the smudge-person briefly and called a guard. As the guard walked the man inside, Omed recognised him.

The Snake looked back and smiled, his forked tongue reaching out and running over his bottom lip. Omed fought sickness. The Snake had condemned him to death on that wormy boat. Omed had tied the children to the anchor that had dragged them to the bottom of the sea.

Omed sat alone as he always did at mealtimes: the boy who couldn't talk, whose silence set him apart. He ate slowly, turning the pages of a book with his free hand. Around him, the clamour of language fell like a mortar barrage. He put his hands over his ears and continued to read.

Suddenly, a plate came down beside his book and Omed's gaze ran slowly to it. From there to a rough brown hand, nails bitten back hard, a tangle of hair on the forearm, scars, a cheap jumper with sleeves pushed to the elbows, the bristled neck, the jawline puffy and pocked, and then the eyes, one of them too big for the face, as if it had been plucked from the corpse of a giant.

‘
Salam
. If I am not mistaken it is my young travel companion.' He leaned close to Omed, whose nose tightened on the smell of his sweat. ‘Is it not wonderful that we meet again?'

Omed's heart thumped. It became so loud that the lights in the room dimmed. There was not enough air. He fought for breath. His book slid sideways and hit the floor. Then he was on top of the man. He had a fork. And suddenly there was little space between it and the Snake's good eye. The Snake pushed him back, but the fork drew four deep lines across his cheek before rattling across the room. There were faces all around. People shouted. Blood. The Snake's hands came around his throat. He could feel his windpipe crushing.

Omed gave up.

Time began a slow shuffle. Sounds echoed and faded. And so, he would cease to be. In this terrible nothing place so far from home. He felt relief that it would be over. Should a life be lived in this way? So much fear and running. So much death and waiting. He closed his eyes and the world vanished. Like the giant Buddhas, like his people, he would finally be scoured from history.

The guards dragged the larger man off. Despite himself, Omed pulled breath into his worthless body.

‘You right there, buddy? You right?'

Omed went into Management. Where they put the suicides, the violent, the crazies. It was punishment and protection. A bright hell.

The lights were on all day and all night. There was no one to listen to, nothing to see, nothing to touch but the bare walls. With nothing to cling to, Omed's mind floated like an abandoned boat. At first he marked the passing of time with meals. He pressed his ears to the wall, eager for sound, any sound at all. Eventually, they became so finely tuned they could pick up the slightest noise through the steel. He could hear ants working the soil under his bed, clouds preparing rain, the sound of birds and singing and bells and the rush of wind through feathered wings and water trickling underground and his blood churning, churning inside. His mother came, telling him to be strong; saying his father had never given up, even when they finally came to kill him; he had not surrendered his beliefs. The guards came with questions and even Mr Parasole with his white, white skin, and his big hat. They said Omed had started the fight. There were witnesses. He should speak up.
He had no words!
They were well-fed and sweaty, beefy men, with thick necks. But he was alone on another ocean. Cool salt. Sun. Adrift with wraiths and water
djinns
and bird spirits and gods with trunks sewn with golden thread.

The Poet sang to Omed, his face long and wise.

A week can be a month and a month can be a year.

It is that simple.

But time is never caught like a fly in amber.

It moves. It is a living thing.

And time dresses as it pleases.

For one it is a quick dancer,

its skirts spinning around.

For another it is an orphan

dressed for a funeral,

a slow march.

When there is too much time,

then there is more.

Finally Omed was torn from the lighted cave. But he had cleverly turned himself into a curtain. They tried to open him, but he had gone; slipped into a world of his own making. He spoke with his parents as fluently as when he had a tongue. He knew everyone else to be ghosts: the guards with their pink fists, the swirl of inmates in dull prison clothes. Walls were everything to Omed. A thing only had value if you could hide behind it. Beyond the fences, he knew angry gods were marching, he could hear them stamping up a haze of dull desert dust, dragging the heavy souls of trapped men behind them. Omed slipped enough food between his lips to hold life. He spread oil through his hair and smelled of printing ink and the tintack odour of electricity.

The Water Mother came to him one day as he plunged his hand into the toilet to paste the walls. Her voice bubbled up.