Tehran, Iran, 1995
‘My son has had a dream,’ my mother said, with an air of great solemnity.
The war was long over—but here I was again. Dragged into a small, dark tent by my
mother, who was once again electing to deal with me via a woman who’d crawled straight
out of a classic children’s treasury and into modern-day Tehran.
She looked exactly like the fortune teller I’d seen during the war, the one who’d
told me I’d grow up to be a therapist. I did not know where all these fortune tellers
did their training, but I was certain they must’ve used the same plastic surgeon:
nobody on earth was born looking quite this strange.
‘Hmm,’ the old witch hummed into my ear. Her weird lips pressed inwards. I was sufficiently
creeped out.
‘Go on. Tell her,’ urged my mum.
‘I had a dream we were living in a green place,’ I said, ‘with lots of polar bears
all around us.’
‘Hmm,’ she continued. ‘Tell me, are you planning to travel soon?’
‘Aren’t you supposed to know that?’
My rejoinder was met by a solid smack on the back of my neck. ‘Ow.’ But this was
a touchy topic for my mother; she had a lot riding on it. We’d been waiting on refugee
status for almost two years, ready to join my father down in Australia. Dad had applied
for us to get humanitarian visas after his first visit to Australia in 1993, but
he didn’t tell the family (particularly knowing my big mouth may spread the word
and cause trouble). He waited on the news until 1995, when he finally got a preliminary
conditional ‘yes’ and we had to undergo a medical exam. We had been persecuted in
Iran as Iraqis for far too long and, knowing our lives were bleak, he had presented
our case to give us a better future.
‘Your dream is clear,’ said the fortune teller. ‘You will get your visas. You will
live in Australia. And you will become a great doctor.’
Mum was overjoyed. She hugged me and kissed my shaved head a thousand times, thanking
the Lord her offspring was finally going to be of some use.
‘And since your son will be a great doctor in a faraway land,’ the crone went on,
‘I will have to charge you an extra success fee.’
Mum was so happy she didn’t care. She showered her in money. For my part, I was horrified,
thinking this was all well and good, but where would our next meal come from? We
were going to need those coins.
As it turned out, she was right and I was wrong on this one. Three weeks later, our
application was approved.
I met the news with some sadness. Australia was so far from Iran that it must have
been governed by a separate god.
Soon, I was at the airport with my family: Mum, Dad, Moe Greene, Ali, Mona and baby
Roah. We were surrounded by customs officials, not to mention their Kalashnikovs.
It was critically important that we did not speak Persian here. We had to speak Arabic,
and only Arabic. We were not to be seen as Iranian residents departing for good,
but Iraqis who happened to be passing through. (We’d already destroyed our Iranian
Green Cards and after lots of hush-hush transactions, Dad had obtained forged Iraqi
passports to fly out with.)
Like the rest of the country, the airport was pulsing with undercover agents who
were ready to stop us at the slightest provocation. Dad understood the urgency better
than anyone; he’d already fled one country—fled from Iraq, to here. We’d heard the
story many times. It never got less awful.
I could picture it quite clearly. The thin mattress on the dirty floor of the tiny
room in the house that smelled of mud and of cement that never dried. My father reclining,
feverishly scanning his sheets of newsprint, reading and flipping, flipping and reading,
with all the concentration of a kid cramming for his finals.
It was 1979. Saddam Hussein had just taken power, and only pro-government Iraqi papers
were allowed. Dad, with cash he’d earned at his own dad’s tailor shop, would exchange
dinar for US dollars and then, through a mule, buy the illegal Iranian newspapers
every week.
The punishment for anyone caught was, of course, a brief, unfussy death. Nonetheless—his
bedroom was already the room of a scholar, with newspapers like this one crammed
under his bed. Books were stacked all around him, on the floor, against the walls,
shelved against each other; on the wall beside his mattress was a poster, ripped
and repaired, of a black-and-white Audrey
Hepburn, with her trademark cigarette,
a classic photo unlike any taken by an Iraqi’s lens.
Dad was lounging around with two best friends, Arif and Haitham, who also happened
to be his newspaper and US dollar suppliers. When they gathered, they talked big
about what they’d do to Saddam if they got the chance. But mostly, they just talked
about movies. Dad’s nickname was ‘Hollywood Encyclopedia’, an honour bestowed on
anyone in Iraq who could name three films starring Stallone and De Niro. He also
harboured a theory that De Niro and Pacino were the same person; it was only years
later that I finally convinced him to watch
Heat
, at which point he was happy to
pass the title down to me.
Everyone had learned to recognise the knocks of the Baathist militia. They were notorious
for shooting those suspected of anti-government leanings at point-blank range, feeding
their bodies to ravenous dogs, and then invoicing the families for the cost of the
ammunition. But that morning, no knock came. They just pushed the door in.
My father ordered his friends to scale the gas pipes and get out; he knew he had
to stay with his mother. What could they do but flee? In seconds they were outside,
leaping from rooftop to rooftop, the soldiers chasing them with a scatter of bullets.
His mother collapsed at the commander’s heel. ‘Please, my son is a good boy. Take
me instead.’
By way of reply, the commander smashed the butt of his rifle into her face, and ordered
my father to kiss his boots. They bundled him into a military jeep and left his mother
on the floor, wailing and bleeding.
Later, they stripped him and hung him by his feet from a ceiling fan. They left a
steel table spread thick with surgical tools strategically in view.
The interrogator was his uncle. Wartime does strange things.
‘Fuck, Sami,’ he said. ‘You’ve made my day so difficult. How am I meant to have dinner
with your aunt tonight? There won’t be peace for days. Just give me your friends’
names, and I promise to end this quick.’
He plugged in an iron, like the type his wife used for saner reasons every week,
and let it heat.
After fifty-eight days of torture, two soldiers came for him. My father was to be
transferred to Abu Ghraib. The warden there, his uncle warned, was not a ‘family
man’ like him. But he was glad to be rid of my father, so that his home life could
know peace.
Little did he know these ‘soldiers’ were Arif and Haitham in costume. Again, war
does strange things. They had used the fifty-eight days to grow their moustaches
thick enough to fit in, and had crafted replica uniforms with the help of my father’s
tailor shop.
They drove straight for the border, and crossed into Iran by swimming the shallow
marshland. There were no other options.
In 2003, my dad was finally able to call home again. He was told his father had passed
away, but his mother still lived. All this time, she’d believed he had been executed.
When my father got off the plane in Basra, to see her for the first time in twenty-four
years, he was informed that she’d suffered a heart attack after speaking on the phone
with him, and passed away in her sleep.
So Dad understood what it was like to lose your family, and had no interest in doing
that again. In the airport, a barely controlled tension buzzed around him.
I, on the other hand, was a twelve-year-old, and I had never once been on an aeroplane.
After hiding from aircrafts half my life, stashed into underground bunkers, I could
not believe that this was happening.
An announcement crackled through the loudspeaker: ‘Mr Rezaei, please make your way
to gate four.’
I couldn’t help but smile at this. Good old Mr Rezaei had come in so handy for me,
so often; whoever he was, I wished him well on his journey. Then my smile dropped,
and my stomach flipped. I was leaving
everything
. I wondered whether, in Australia,
I’d be able to go around door-knocking, and what it would mean if the door was answered
by a girl in a red shirt.
‘Can I speak a
bit
of Persian?’ I asked Dad. ‘Like to say “hi” and “how are you”
and things like that?’
‘No!’ Dad snapped.
‘But Dad, even stupid people know how to say hello in the language of the country
they’re in.’
‘Well, you’re more stupid than a stupid person. We all have to be.’ Our accents were
too fluent. As soon as we opened our mouths, the customs officers would know that
we had been born here, and our whole cover would be kaput. But I was itching to talk.
I loved to talk. And what if an officer greeted me, should I ignore him? Dad had
spent years teaching me manners and it would be rude not to reply.
‘But Dad—’
‘Osamah! You know how you like acting? Just pretend you are a character! Your character
doesn’t speak Farsi. End of story.’
‘Cool!’ I replied, as we approached the customs desk. ‘So. What is my backstory?’
Dad’s eyes widened sharply behind his glasses. ‘What backstory?’ he exhaled in a
single breath.
‘When I did theatre in school, I always had to develop a backstory, even for a small
character, like the wind. When I’d played the wind, I’d come from a tornado.’
‘Your backstory is that twelve years ago, I made a huge mistake by having you,’
my father said. ‘Now shut up and let’s go.’
I stopped right where I stood. He was rarely snappy like this. But, despite the urgency,
he stopped too and squatted by my side. ‘Son. Don’t act. Just be,’ he said.
This, I could work with. I loved the idea of just
being
. Doing some of Shakespeare’s
plays, I’d heard ‘to be or not to be’, but never had it felt so meaningful.
So we advanced towards the customs desk, my brothers and sisters mute, no backstories
necessary. My mother was praying in whispers; deep lines of anxiety spidered her
face.
Dad, though, was cool as art. He spread our seven Iraqi passports on the desk like
a rainbow’s arch.
‘Where are you travelling to?’ the bearded customs officer barked.
‘Sorry, no Persian,’ replied my Dad.
‘Yeah, Arabic only,’ I loudly concurred. Dad barely glanced at me over his shoulder.
‘You are going where?’ insisted the beard, still in Persian.
‘I don’t understand your words,’ insisted my dad, smiling and waving his hands about.
All at once, I started to giggle uncontrollably. We were pulling a scam, and it was
working.
The officer clocked me, scowled, and took our passports into a back room. Everything
went still. What was happening? None of us could speak.
I wanted to talk. I wanted to roar. I wanted to whisper.
I wanted to let the world know I was here.
A bunch of soldiers were surrounding us, in the corner. Some of them were pretty
young. I tried to breathe normally but for some reason I couldn’t. My chest was heavy,
like I was in a sealed cube.
Who were we, anyway? Did we really scare the authorities this much? Why did they
need to point their guns at us? Dad was
tough, but not scary. I was strong, but not
that strong. I could probably take one of the guards—if he was tied up. Moe Greene
was another story; he could have taken three.
I was itching to move. Everyone was so still. Even passengers had stopped coming
in and out of the terminal.
I wondered if lightning was just God’s way of breaking tension in the skies. I wondered
if earthquakes were just the earthly equivalent.
I knew that if I moved, the guards would spring to action. I had a sudden, undeniable
urge to untie and retie my shoes. Surely just one shoe—surely that wouldn’t get me
killed?
I wondered if it would, though. Dad had told me to be still.
But before I knew it, I was dropping to the ground. I fiddled with my shoelaces.
No shots were fired. Not even a ‘freeze or we’ll shoot’.
They didn’t. Say. Anything. What a disappointing relief. And how strange that fiddling
with one’s shoes could feel so much like freedom.
Nobody was shooting me. Well, except my family, with their eyes. But they couldn’t
say anything, any more than I could.
So I untied my shoe, then retied it, at first gingerly, then really going to town.
I untied and retied it, over and over again. The guards seemed to be okay with me
doing this, for now.
Suddenly, one moved his gun in a ‘stop it’ gesture. I took the point and stood up
and stared at the dull roof.
But the dull roof stayed dull, and I stayed fidgety. When you’re twelve, it’s hard
not to act like it.
I looked over at a banner sprawled across the wall. It said in Persian:
America cannot
dare do a damn thing to us
.
It was a famous saying of Ayatollah Khomeini’s, which was often found spray-painted
on walls all over the country. I wondered about these Americans, and why they wanted
to do damn
things. I wondered if Australia was anything like them—I wondered if they
were the devil too.
I began mimicking the Ayatollah in my head, daring the Americans to try and get us.
I raised my hand to the sign, like I was greeting a dictator. A great voice boomed
behind me, electrocuting me.
It was the customs officer. He was back, and standing right over me. My heart seized.
Shit. How long had he been standing there? How long had
I
been standing there? Had
I been mouthing the words?
Why, for once, could I not just
be
?