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A voice-over tells that since nineteen seventy-nine,
when the Russians invaded Afghanistan,
fifty-three thousand Afghan refugees
have come to live – where the film begins –
in Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar,
close to the Afghan border, in northwest Pakistan.

Peter Henry Lepus hasn’t been to Afghanistan, or
to Pakistan.
Scratching one ear reflectively,
he considers. The movie shows a lot of those countries’
brown deserts,
as well as some of the roads in Iran,
which Clifta may want to use her many eyes on –
if she is to look €¦ for the ground €¦ of Omar Khayyam,

whose Khayyam name, his father’s, seems to mean
he came from a family of tent-makers.

A friend from those pre-Gutenberg times,
Nizam al Mulk, Omar’s co-student,
wrote a ‘memoire’ of Omar
that Peter has read about
(the friends were sent to a Muslim scholar, an Imam,
to study the Koran).

Peter’s also read that the Persian calendar
was re-designed by Omar,
who was ‘learned in science, as well as astronomy,
wrote a ‘table’ of the stars, & an algebra book
that travelled to Europe.

The other of Khayyam’s two school friends, Peter’s found out,
later became
the notorious
austere & frightening
‘Old Man of the Mountain’,
who, from a castle south of the Caspian,
developed the ‘Cult of the Assassin’,
about whom, & about which,
rumours abound,
partly due
to the tales told
to an early travel-writer,
who visited the terrain
about one hundred & fifty years later, recording what he heard
with pen & ink
as he did not have a camcorder, within a volume
titled: The Travels of Marco Polo.

Peter, who’s been searching more recent books
on behalf of Clifta, finds that Khayyam’s bones
are said to lie in something called a ‘Tomb’
& that he died
in the first quarter of the twelfth century

in an ancient Iranian city with at least
three spellings, the most recent of which

Peter’s found, after many fumblings through old books,
seems to be Neishabur.

He has not found Neishabur yet,
on this movie’s maps
which flash by fast
showing its journey’s routes in red.

He remembers the little spider’s telling him
of her mother, reading, in a Sydney park, aloud
to her & all the little siblings, ‘Arachnid Fitzgerald’s translations
from the Persian’ – a poem which was recited to him
solemnly in the Iraqi desert many, many times;
the poem ran:
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
the Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep
And Bahram, that great Huntsman, the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

There may be places in this movie that Clifta may feel

she needs to go €¦ if she’s to ‘find’
Bahram, the great
Huntsman of the Rubaiyat,
whom she believes.may be her ancestor€¦
even, he thinks despairingly, inside her imagination €¦
There may be digital videoed roads she wants to travel
in her search; he’s seen an Iranian bus’s red
Sydney-Huntsman-Spider-concealing curtains
that Clifta may want to travel on. There are cities too.
Esfahan & Qom he has found, on his own
map of Iran, & they are ‘represented’; here on this movie’s map
on a route to Tehran.
His long dark rabbit eyes
focus on Max’s screen,
where play
of the DVD
that’s been fast-forwarded,
has stuck. (Or is it merely stopped?) Braid says there are some scratches on it.
They’ve watched the same scene several times, & jumped,
to Peter’s surprise that a movie has them,
into CHAPTERS, (sequenced forward)
with long stretches of the movie’s story
left behind.

The name T E H R A N-
printed in large scarlet capital letters across the screen
points him to an idea. Planes fly to Tehran. If Clifta can get to Baghdad Airport, she
could perhaps stow away under a round white cap like the one
that Jamal wears, when he leaves Peshawar from the refugee camp
in northwest Pakistan, where the movie’s journey starts.
She will probably need to fly to Tehran, to begin her search, Peter thinks,
turning round to see if she is watching
any
of the movie’s many roads or its fewer maps. He thinks she should be. She is the one
who said, I want to go to Persia, NOW
And perhaps there may be people at the University there, who can help her.
Peering under the table he sees she has crawled into a large crack.
There seem to be two of her. Then, he realises. One ‘Clifta’ is the old skin,
thin, papery, that Clifta’s left behind.
The new Clifta crouches wet & strange (estranged from herself?) inside a larger skin
that Huntsman Spiders have to make, to grow. Her old skin was not big enough
to hold her.
Humans, as well as rabbits, Peter’s learnt,
live & die as one – they do not need
to change their skins, to grow up,
though all need for, ‘safe’ air to breathe,
& water€¦

The two young Afghanis on the screen have to change
their clothes – ‘to look Irani’ –
the caps they wore from Pakistan must also disappear.
They try to learn to make new sounds, speak Farsi, not Pashtu.
Enayat learns the word ‘snow’ in English.

Is it cinema verite? Braid asks, What is that? Peter wonders.
He has seen the word ‘cinema’ written in gold,
high up in some cities, above crowded streets, on buildings
he has not been inside. He does not know what cinema is,
nor that verite means ‘truth’ in French.
He has not seen it written
on any buildings, whole
or hollowed out by what Max called ‘Tomahawk cruise missles’,
in Baghdad, where he is now, nor has the word verite appeared.
It is over five months since Saddam’s huge stature
was pulled down – & that act – & scene
turned into photographs,
& recycled, for money,
sometimes with enigmatic US soldiers’ faces
& a few close-ups of excited teenage Iraqi boys, & men,
with stories about the ‘fall’ of Saddam’s regime
on newspaper front pages round the world.

In a hotel outside the Green Zone,
with a basement power supply
that Max has paid to use, Peter Henry Lepus,
Max, Braid, & occasionally Clifta
are trying to watch a DVD
which a journo friend of Max’s brought in from London
that recently won the Golden Bear Award in Berlin
Isn’t it rather soon for it to be released as a DVD? Braid asks.

Max,
for once, in not listening to her. One arm
round her shoulder he says,
They used two Sony digital cameras, one left on all the time, & a camcorder./
It has the feel of a doco, but it’s facto-ficto. The route was travelled first by the writer &/
director who followed people smugglers’ routes, collected stories, & came back later/
to shoot, sometimes using guerrilla doco tactics, to catch transactions in backrooms
between people who didn’t know they were being filmed.
No script. Few pros, mostly those in it
played the story’s versions of themselves.
It’s a distallation. People-smuggler experience
isn’t pleasant.

The last scene is shot in a mosque,
which Max says was filmed in London.
The younger one, Jamal, is grieving at last for his friend,
his cousin Enayatullah
who got sick in a black space inside a box, where
Max says the oxygen ran out;
there was not enough ‘good air’ to last forty hours for the ship’s journey,
which is marked, on the film, by a red line across blue, to Trieste,
from Turkey. The box is called a ‘container’.
The blue, Peter’s learnt, is what map-makers use
as a sign of sea or ocean:
if you know what it means, you do not need
to be able to read words; though, he has also found,
map-makers like to write words
across map’s blue
that tell which ocean or sea is pointed to.

Other people were travelling in that boat’s black space €¦
Afghanis, from the northwest €¦
Max says they’d be defined as ‘Economic refugees’,
in politician or migration official English,
an old man with a beard, a woman & her husband with their baby €¦
They got sick like Jamal’s friend
who was his cousin & arrived dead except Jamal & the baby Mehti,
who is shown, when the container’s at last opened,
trying ti put his mouth to his lifeless young mother’s breasts.
Braid is weeping quietly by the ending.
Peter, Max & Clifta who’s crawling,
still damp in her new skin,
under a bench by the old iMac’s table,
do not speak.

Max was in Doha recently
to watch some Al-Jazeera footage
of the Assault on Baghdad,
spent days, perched on a desk
watching interviews with grieving people
who’d lost mothers, husbands, daughters, wives,
sometimes all
of their families, after that, he watched
the later news stories
of the carnage that followed the
suicide bombers. An Iraqi driver he’d talked with
on his way back from Doha
‘d been blown up,
just after he & Max had parted.

It’s time-out for me from watching replays of the’ real war’, he says,
leaning back on the green plastic chair
to re-watch a movie that’s not showing either missiles,
a city sky line with buildings burning
or debris blown upward
by landed bombs. You’re hard, Braid accuses him quietly,
removing his arm, getting up, with the free encyclopaedic extract
from Wikipedia in one hand. She’s headed for the bedroom, to read about
the facts behind the movie’s making on her own.
Peter does not relax from his stiff squat.
Both ears erect as he watches what is re-screened,
he is thinking back to past images.
The film does not show him any libraries
that he might send Clifta to,
to begin to search for records by & for herself.
He is beginning to suspect
that ‘Bahram’.
Clifta’s ‘great Huntsman’, from the poem
‘Arachnid Fitzgerald translated’,
perhaps from Edward
FitzGerald’s very free, renderings
of the Persian of Omar Khayyam,
may not have been a Sydney Huntsman Spider
or even one from Australia,
&, in fact, may never have lived, hunted,
or gone to sleep,
anywhere within this world.