Sunday's Silence: A Novel

by Gina nahai

  This is the essence of faith, the Professor always says: not asking questions, not daring to disagree. He says that is why the church members brought faith in me even though I am not from among them, even though I have never spoken or acted or lived like them. They see how I can fight a snake, and they close their eyes on the rest of my story and that is why, to this day, most of them do not know that I wasn't born with Jesus.

  I might have told them the truth if they had asked. I might have told them that my mother was a Jew and the Professor is too. I might have told them but they did not want to know, and so the truth remained unseen—untouched and unwanted and gathering weight, until it became a lie I had to hide.

  My daughter, though, would have asked. I know this because that is the way daughters create a bond with their mothers—instinctively, by asking the most trivial questions, by wanting to know the most obscure facts. They ask all through their childhoods without knowing what they will do with this knowledge— without knowing that every word, every memory they take from their mothers will become a link in a bridge they have started to build unconsciously. Through years of separation and hardship, through adulthood and beyond, the bridge stands invisible, stretching longer the farther the child travels, until the day she stops, counts the years and realises she, too, is a woman, and all she has to do to return to her mother is to cross the bridge of words and memories she built in childhood.

  I had a story to tell my child. I prepared it and saved it and then watched it spread itself around me like an interminable wasteland that serves only to remind me of her absence.

  WHEN I WAS a child, my mother would take a thin brush, made from the hair of blue horses, and dip the tip in henna. In the early morning hours when the light was thin she would sit outside, in the foothills of the rocky Zagross Mountains of Asia, and with the brush draw figures onto the palms of her own hands.

  My mother was a good artist when she was sane, an even better one after she went mad. The old people in the village where I grew up used to say that it was her Jewish blood that had caused her madness. They said that all Jews were inhabited by the devil and that he compelled them to do and say strange things. Years later, in America, I would hear that story again.

  My mother’s father, she once told me, was a Jewish Tar player in the court of the Persian prince Zil-el-Sultan, in the city of Esfahan where there was a palace built entirely of glass. He was a handsome man with a hypnotic voice and a fortune that evoked many a legend. His name was Solomon, my mother said, though she had no direct memory of him at all. He was generous with his money, even more generous with his heart. He fell in love and conquered women as if they were ships on a calm sea, anchored and moored and ready to fall into his pirate hands. Even after he was married he continued to set off on wild and adventurous trips to the heart of Egypt and India, looking for fabled beauties whose stories he had heard at home, and that is how he found my grandmother, in a Kurdish village in the year 1893, in the part of the world they now call Iraq, near the city of Mosul, where many Kurds live.

  Most people around here have never heard of the Kurds or the place we called Kurdistan, so it would be difficult to explain that it’s a country within many others, a state with too many leaders, a nation without a name on any map. If I had to describe it to my daughter, I would have said that it’s a ghost country the color of God, a land of silver rocks and lavender plains, of black winds and amber roads and saffron sunsets so glorious, no man has been able to claim them as his own.

  I would have sat my daughter on my knees, in that room where for years the Professor taught me, on that chair where I first learned to read and later came to discover the history of my people. I would have spread before my daughter a map of the East, let her eyes swallow the rust-brown sheet where entire countries lie the sfe of a child’s hand—silent and constant, their mysteries unspoken, their secrets unrevealed.

  “Look, ” I would have said, “here are the Torus Mountains. This is the Black Sea.”

  I would have taken her hand, guided her tiny fingers over the edge of the mountain, into the depths of the sea.

  “These are the Rivers Aras and Euphrates, ” I would have said. “These are the Hamrin Mountains. This is Mesopotamia, the Armenian Anatolia, the legendary Mount Ararat.

  “In between these lines, ” I would have told her, “in an area divided among five countries, live twenty-five million people who call themselves Kurds. ”

  They are a strange breed, these Kurds—the children of fairy-tale Jinns and their real-life lovers: five thousand years ago King Solomon ordered the Jinns in his service to search the four corners of the earth and bring to him the most beautiful virgins alive. The Jinns searched far and wide, but by the time they brought the maidens back, King Solomon had died and the Jinns themselves had fallen in love with the girls. So they

  married the mortals and had children who belonged neither to this world nor to the planet of the fairies, destined to live in the neverland of exile, in perpetual movement, forever restless.

  Kurds lived in caves at first, and later in villages and towns. Many of them were nomads, traveling great distances every year in search of gracing land for their cattle. They spoke different dialects of the same language, observed different customs, prayed to different gods even, but the one trait they all had in common was their ferocity and their strength: they were all good fighters, these Kurds, their women as well as their men. This is why they lasted the ages, why, also, they never knew peace.

  Themselves of Indo-European stock, they were dominated over time by Parthians and Arabs, Mongols and Turks and Persians. After the First World War they were conquered by Western men who took a pen, one day when their souls were filled with the pride of the conqueror, and drew lines upon the map of Asia, creating countries where previously there had been none and, in the process, dividing Kurdistan for all time.

  My grandmother’s village was called Sandor, and it was populated by Kurdish Jews. Into this village rode the man called Solomon and stole my grandmother’s heart. By then he had slept with a thousand virgins and fathered many a bastard child, but my mother’s mother could not believe he would ever leave her.

  Leave her he did.

  To make the pain of his sudden departure easier to bear, or to repay my grandmother for the life she had wasted on him,

  Solomon the Man sent her a hundred gold coins and a bracelet in the shape of a snake.

  He had bought the bracelet in Egypt, where he had once lived with a black woman versed in the arts of the occult: it was a gold contraption that twisted three times and ended in the shape of a snake's head, complete with rubies for eyes. He had intended the bracelet for my grandmother—believing the Egyptian lover's claim that it represented good fortune—but she could not accept the message it bore—that Solomon had left her and did not intend to return—and so she wrapped the snake around her daughter’s ankle instead. Then she braided my mother’s hair into a hundred strands and tied each one with one of the coins Solomon had sent, told her she could open the braids only when her father returned to them to stay.

  My mother was twenty years old, her hair still braided into a hundred strands when she tired of waiting for her father to return. Then her own lover came to call.

  He was a Sunni Muslim Kurd, a nomad with a restless heart and a fast horse who had spent his life fighting in one volunteer army or another, supporting revolts by Kurds wherever they took place, being beaten every time but not accepting defeat, because to do so would mean giving up the only life he had ever known. Between the two World Wars, he had fought in three major Kurdish revolts in Turkey alone, every one of them lost. He had watched 250,000 of his people die in battle or get killed in their sleep at the hands of government soldiers, and he had seen the Turks burn hundreds of Kurdish villages and ban the Kurdish language from being spoken. One morning in the spring of 1937, he rode away from yet another futile war and happened upon a dusty village tucked away in the heart of the Zagross Mountains. He
rode through narrow walkways crowded with children and sheep, past houses built of yellow and red clay and tucked into the side of the mountain in terraced rows—so that the roof of one house was a yard for another. Tiny windows, their frames painted a stark blue, opened inward to reveal white grouted walls decorated with paintedflowers. Inside the houses young girls sat on the floor weaving thread out of cotton or tying knots onto a loom to create a rug.

  At the end of the alley, my father came to a house and stopped. A wooden door, painted dark green, opened into a large room with a beamed ceiling made of tree trunks. One side of the room was reserved for sheep. The other side, where people lived, was crowded with bedding and pottery and an underground oven dug into the clay floor. Rows of fruits and vegetables hung from the roof where they had been left to dry for winter. A smaller door, directly opposite the entryway, led onto an enclosed terrace drenched in sunlight.

  My mother stood on the terrace speaking to a girl in a neighboring house. Her back was turned to the door, so she did not feel my father come in and did not turn around. Standing behind her, my father watched her body covered by layers of brightly colored fabric, her hair dark and smooth, braided in three layers, every strand tied with a single gold coin. When she moved her head, the braids swayed back and forth, catching the light and the reflection of the gold.

  He fell in love with her, he later said, without seeing her face. Then she turned around.

  She was light skinned, with dark eyes and black lashes and the easiest smile he had ever seen. He liked this about her— that she smiled so readily, that she wasn't shy or reticent or afraid of a stranger. Unlike other women in the Middle East, the Kurds did not have to wear veils to hide their faces from men, and they did not have to keep their voices from being heard. He asked her if she could direct him to a tea house, a place where he could rest his horse and get some food. She told him he could stay with her, offered him honey, freshly-made yogurt, hundred-year-old wine that had been buried in the earth.

  My father went back to see the girl many times that year. His intentions were clear, but his hopes were misplaced: Jews and Muslims were not allowed to intermarry. A girl raised in a village would not be able to cope with the harshness of life in the wild. But my mother was fearless and obstinate and driven by her hearts desires. She met my father at night, in the mountains outside the village, and she let him take off her sheer red scarf and kiss her on the mouth. She told my father he had two choices: he could wait for her until they were both old and heartbroken, or he could follow the spurned lovers’ traditional recourse of kidnapping the girls they desired.

  He took her away at midnight, when the moon cast their shadows against the mountain, and by the time the village awoke to see the girl’s bed empty and her honor violated, my mother was far away and already sleeping in the nomads ’ tent.

  The WOMEN IN my father’s tribe wove black goats’ hair into strips of cloth on a horizontal loom, then sewed the strips together to create a giant canopy. Every summer, in the grasslands near the Turkish-Iranian border, they erected the black top on posts three meters high, then closed off the sides by a straw fence that stretched from the ground up to the edges of the canopy. The inside of the fence was painted in vivid, geometric lines of red and blue and yellow. The floor was covered with colorful rugs woven by the tribe’s young girls. Within each tent lived extended families and their sheep-—dozens of people bound together by blood and circumstance, their campground consisting of no more than a few tents dotting the plains.

  Within the tribe women worked and traveled and interacted freely with the men. Girls learned to ride a horse and to shoot a rifle as well as the boys. Parents named their sons after brave, war-like mothers. But their connection to the land lasted only as long as the season, and then they were gone, packing their homes in the space of one morning and tying their tents onto their saddlebags, leaving the mountains of Iran for the valleys of Iraq, where they would spend the long winter months in stone houses erected on harsh, infertile ground.

  You see, I have no memories of my mother’s childhood places, or of the lands of her ancestors. In my mind they are fairy-tale kingdoms populated by men with luminous voices who went riding in search of beautiful women. I only knew that other world—my father’s country, where I was born and where I grew up. I remember a tent, a tribe, a house in the mountains of Iraq. Even now, with my life so different from the past I hardly recognize myself in it, even now I can see the light of those early mornings in the grasslands where I camped as a child. I see the color of the hills in the spring, when a million wild/lowers bloomed as far as the horizon, and a thousand stars fell in a single shower deep in the night. I hear, still after all these years, the silence of those mountains, the sound of our tribe living in the midst of a world unpenetrated by strangers, the freedom of crossing any border at any time and belonging nowhere. Snow would pile knee-deep across mountain passes, and I would bend from my mother’s waist as she sat on the back of her horse, and touch the ice. Heat would rise off naked rocks, and I would find a stream made of melted snow from the winter and run into the water with my clothes on. I remember a world of beauty and peace and freedom, and yet I know that this same world, that same unsoiled country I loved so much, destroyed my mother.

  She knew, almost as soon as she arrived, that she had made a mistake. She was a village girl, bound to her home, born and raised in a place where her ancestors were buried, and for her, the life of constant motion was impossible to bear. She felt unsafe and unprotected in my father’s tent, a stranger to his tribe who would never accept a Jew as one of their own and who had their doubts about her origins and her intentions in marrying my father. She must have contemplated leaving, of course, yet she knew that her own people would not allow her back now that she had been kidnapped by, or had escaped with a Muslim, and she knew she would never survive the journey home on her own—or even find her way through the mountains without my father guiding her. So she stayed in the tribe and wove rugs, sheared sheep and baked bread and roamed the hillsides in

  search of medicinal herbs to soothe her sorrows. When she real-fed she was pregnant, she decided to settle into her life and create a home for herself and her child. She made a new straw fence to surround her part of the tent, painted it from seam to seam with the flowers and birds of her own village, the fairies of her childhood in Sandor, the protective eyes and amulets of her own heritage. She wove a crib of soft cotton, a stretch of brocaded silk in which to wrap me when I arrived, a soft new rug on which to lay me at night.

  Then she began to dream of snakes.

  She dreamed of them every night, and in the beginning they did not scare her: golden snakes lying in her bed, crawling up her thighs, staring at her with their ruby eyes. She recounted the dreams to the tribe’s midwife and was told that she was going to have a girl: in a man’s dream snakes meant great riches; in a womans they meant the arrival of a female child.

  My mother was delighted with the midwife’s interpretation: a girl, she thought, would be her mother’s best friend, her constant companion, the one person in the world who understood her best. But every night the snakes in her dreams grew darker and more threatening. They each had more than one head, lurked in the dark and bit her when she wasn ’t watching. They reminded her of the story she had heard as a child—of the bad king Zahak who had killed his own father in order to inherit his ten thousand horses. Presiding over the seven countries of the earth and the land of giants and fairies, Zahak was visited by the devil who kissed the king on his shoulders. In each place where the devil’s lips had touched, a snake appeared and grew—testaments to the man s evil thoughts and his selfish deeds.

  Night after night the snakes of the devil's kisses came into my mother's dreams and terrified her until she woke up screaming and exhausted and too afraid to go back to sleep. Then they came into her awake hours.

  She saw them in broad daylight and in shadows, ran from them when no one else could see a threat, pleaded for help. O
nce, trying to throw off a snake that had dug its teeth into her, she threw herself into an open fire and burned her right leg. Another time she took a knife and cut her arm down to the bone, extracting, she said, the snake's poison.

  Trying to cure his wife of the dreams, my father took her on a pilgrimage to the tomb of a holy man, near the city of Saqqe{. My mother planted a wooden pole in the earth near the tomb, hung her scarf like a banner from the post, and prayed to the holy man’s spirit. The minute she turned around, the pole turned into a two-headed snake and attacked her.

  They made a second pilgrimage, this time to the home of a holy man in Iraq. A blessed soup was made, ceremonial drums were beaten to scare away the demons that inhabited my mother’s soul. By then my mother was nearly eight months pregnant, and the tribe had moved from their winter dwellings back into the tents on the Turkish-Iranian border. For a while the snakes disappeared.

  I was born in the tent. My mother held me in her arms and sang me to sleep, walked around with me strapped to her back and talked to me as if I could understand. Then one morning she looked up at the sun and saw the sky break into a thousand pieces, sending down on her a shower of black snakes.

  All THROUGH my childhood. I watched my mother for signs of madness setting in. I grew up weaving rugs and herding cattle, washing clothes in the ravine and planting food. I was strong at an early age, stronger than the other girls in our tribe and even stronger than the boys, because with my father gone and my mother sick so much of the time, I was left to do most of their work. I did not learn to read and write, but I knew the uses of medicinal herbs and how to deliver a mare of its foal, and I knew how to fight.