The Marsh Birds (3 page)

‘What, more serious than your mum becoming an egg seller? More serious than the poor people
dying
?' Nura lowered her voice so their mother wouldn't hear, ‘More serious than going to hospital to visit Uncle Mahmoud?'

Dhurgham shuddered but he wanted to make a point. This was the first time the embargo had really affected his everyday life.

It wasn't the embargo at all. Three days later, they left in the middle of the night.

Sometime on the ninth day, he went numb. The sun was slanting down across the cobbled stones. The street was deserted, the mosque full for prayers. He stayed outside, unable this time to tear himself from his vigil, not for hope, but for the weight of his despair. The sunlight had a cruel silence. The sunlight was as empty as darkness. The world was empty. Nura and his father and mother were not in it. The expectancy leaked out and the pain constricting his throat and rib cage stiffened, setting in his brittle body; a pain hooped and frozen.

He sat without hope, then, day after long day, aching, barely able to get the energy to buy maarouk, barely chewing to eat it. Ammar the maarouk seller was nice. He wheeled the cart over to Dhurgham whenever he saw him. He smiled and said hello in his funny Syrian way. Dhurgham liked the sort with dates and sesame but mostly forced himself to buy the plain.

Just ten lira each. Ammar laughed a lot and one day gave Dhurgham a cigarette to smoke. Dhurgham kept it in his top pocket.

Maarouk, to keep soldiers on their feet, he thought. Eating maarouk he wasn't spending very much. He hadn't touched the money in his coat. The Syrian money Ali had given him would last at least another three weeks. They would think he had done well, looking after it all so carefully! But there was no glimmer in his heart. They were gone.

It was a terrible six days.

Dhurgham knew that he was the darling. Nura knew it too and teased him for being spoilt.

‘You'll never get anywhere without me and Mum right there beside you to do everything for you.'

‘You'll see, Nooni. I'm going to be a scholar and a pilot. I'm going to be a diplomat. A general. A very diplomatic general. The first man to bring peace to Palestine. I'm like Sayf bin dhi Yazan—it is meant to be. If you want to help me do such things, you can,' he said with expansive generosity.

‘The first man to get a sesame cookie, more like.' Nura sneered.‘“You'll grow strong if you eat, eat, eat, apple of my eye.”'

He was undaunted. ‘Don't worry, Nooni, it won't be one-way traffic. I'll even smack your husband one if he needs it.'

Nura slapped him in the chest and raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Shhhh, silly. I'm not getting married.'Then she smiled and squeezed him tight.

He grinned. He was her favourite too. Nura hated everybody else these days. The angrier she got, the more pleased Dhurgham became: he increasingly got his witty, feisty sister all to himself.

Sometime around the fifteenth day, his hope returned. His father was so strong! His mother so strict and stern. Nura so funny! They were captured, he thought. Tortured. But now, resourceful and beloved even of his captors, his father was in the process of escaping. His father would come and get him; then they would together rescue the others: Nura first, then his mother, then his uncle, aunt and cousins. The explanations began to parade through his mind and he smiled to himself. His mother would be cross to feel these ribs poking out! He had better feed himself a bit to please her. He giggled. How delicious it would be to be scolded! He was strong, too, like his father. No more of these tears! He had so often said,‘I am strong, aren't I, Mummy, for a twelve year old!' His mother would sometimes say
yes
, exasperated; but on rare occasions she would smile, stop what she was doing, and look closely, her face lit up with wonder at his extraordinary physical, moral and spiritual strength.

He imagined anything to keep himself from touching the emptiness of those six days. He began to imagine that every person who eyed him with more than a cursory glance was a messenger.

He became, in no time at all, a hollow-cheeked blank-eyed child, smiling now and then to himself, muttering sometimes. A small dot at the heart of an old city that is itself built over countless layers of past lives, countless buried cities. There are and have been thousands of such children in this city, any city; odd fruit, there to be picked or to wither away. Curled up in filthy clothes, familiar but unknown around the mosque. He could have stayed for the rest of his life, inscribed into the ordinary day by the repetition of the tiny marks of his presence, provided he did nothing that could really distinguish him from the inanimate steps and broken stone.

He lived in a kind of darkness, feeling his way around the mosque, touching the same spot on the same stones in an endlessly repeated ritual, counting the steps from one point to the next, regulating in muttered seconds and minutes the time he rested between stepping out the same circuit, pacing himself until he could allow himself his rationed time inside.

The call to prayer structured his day. His active duty outside and his stillness within. He knew the mosque so well, inside and out, that he made his way around as a blind boy might have. But his time inside the mosque was illuminated by a form of dark ecstasy that depended on his eyes. In that vast expanse of peace and coolness he found his own pain mattered little. His waiting had adopted its strict pattern. He would wash his hands and face and neck and pray in the great prayer hall, numbed and charmed. Then, in the huge open courtyard, he would sit and lean back against the wall of the arcade between two pillars, regulating his place by moving one pillar along each day, furious and disoriented if someone was already in his chosen spot, unsettled and uncertain as his slow orbit was disrupted by the pillars of the entrance and the carpeted prayer hall. He was framed, held up as he slumped, in massive glory. He studied the mosaics, letting every leaf, every faceted building, every perfect fruit, every motionless wave be imprinted in its leaping stillness onto his mind.

His field of vision each day allowed him one piece of an evolving whole. It took him sixty-three days to make his way all the way around the mosque. When he began a new circuit he laughed quietly as he found wholly new things to see in the familiar images. He began to imagine that, behind the unchanging windows of one exquisite heavenly tower in the mosaics, an eternal boy looked out at him, missing him when something obscured the line of vision. His best days were when the eternal boy could see him. His winter was the long sequence under the southern arcade, which passed under the wall on which the boy's tower was depicted. He passed these twenty three days slowly, waiting for his spring when he would turn the corner into the easterly arcade and see from that oblique angle a gold line that was the tower.

He found that he could live, day after day, waiting for them, but his memory stopped working. He could not remember the marshes. The van was a fact that made him want to go to the toilet, but he couldn't remember anything in it and he avoided looking at vans or thinking of the word. He could not remember why exactly he waited on those stone blocks, what was delaying them. He knew their faces and held them close. He knew words only: Baghdad. Marshes. Van. His mind was a fuzzy blank, as if tuned out.

‘As-salaam aleykum.'

‘Waleykum as-salaam.'

‘What are you doing, son?'

‘Waiting.'

Three times Mr Hosni asked and three times got the same answer.

The fourth time, Dhurgham greeted him first.

The fifth time, Mr Hosni was inspired.

‘Hey,' he said in a low voice.‘Come with me now, quickly, quickly. I know where they are.'

Dhurgham's eyes shone, suddenly, richly, and Mr Hosni jumped with the pleasant shock of it.

‘My parents?' the boy breathed.

‘Maybe,' Mr Hosni said, glancing to the left and the right in arch secretiveness. ‘Come, now!'

Dhurgham leapt up and grasped the extended hand.

‘What about my sister?' he whispered, beaming, breathless with the terror that it was a dream.

‘There there,' Mr Hosni said awkwardly, stroking the boy's head. He put his arm around the thin shoulders, seeking through his register for something motherly. Dhurgham began to sob, softly at first, then in deep, sawing grief, bitten deeper with each breath. Mr Hosni cuddled him close, bent over him, crooning in a gentle falsetto. The two rocked stiffly side by side, Dhurgham threshing with his grief until he fell asleep in Mr Hosni's lap. Mr Hosni stopped crooning and looked down speculatively at the boy. Would clean up OK, maybe. Too thin, for now. He lifted Dhurgham slowly and carried him upstairs.

The child was so heavy!

But when he undressed Dhurgham he found it was the filthy clothes that were heavy.

‘Sleep, little bird,' he said in wonder, smiling.‘Baba Hosni is here now,' and, surprised by feeling genuinely solicitous, he tucked the blanket tight around the thin body. He was such a pretty boy, too. And alone with all that money for so long! It must have been meant to be.

When Dhurgham awoke, he was naked under a soft clean blanket, in a bed for the first time in months. His body shuddered and then settled into the giant relief that rose up through him from his toes to his ears. He kept his eyes shut, blissful, half asleep.‘Nura?' he said, but there was no answer. He could smell something that made it all wrong and he stiffened. He didn't call out again. He buried his head under the blanket and realised that the smell was himself. He stank terribly. He opened his eyes and clutched his own chest, his fingers splayed in the dim purple light under the bedclothes, and the shock of his boniness, the grid of his ribs, shot through him. He leapt up. His clothes were nowhere to be seen. He was in a strange airy room with an open door. He raced down the stairs stark naked, furious, roaring the way his father would have but feeling like crying. He knew he was small and thin and couldn't use his own name.

Mr Hosni was a smart man. He told himself that he would get to the bottom of the money business, then, if it really was the boy's, he would invest it, taking just board and keep, just board and keep. He had been up since the break of day, not for prayers, oh no. He had first thought of just disappearing, leaving the boy to make his own way, destitute, into the darkness that swallows such children, but he was too curious. Too many stories had delivered such misleadingly dressed boys only to follow with much more, much more. And not just fantasy stories either, especially these days. The boy was almost certainly Iraqi. Who was he? What if he, Hani Hosni, Mr Soft and Sweet, became the saviour of a genuinely valuable kid?