by Gina nahai
I fought with the other children who thought me odd because of my mother’s condition, fought with their parents who treated my mother as if she were less than human. I fought with my father when he returned heartbroken from his lost wars and acted as if my mother were the enemy—grabbing her when she went mad and tying her to the poles that kept our tent erect, letting her struggle and scream and beg to be freed, until she exhausted herself or chewed through the ropes that bound her and escaped.
We lived in a state of constant change, dependent for our safety on the will of God, the kindness of the elements, the benevolence of faraway kings and conquerors who distrusted the Kurds ’ independence and who tried to tame and settle us on their own terms. When the Second World War started, my father joined another rebel army and was gone for months. He came back with his lung punctured by a bullet from the Syrian police, and after that he could not breathe well or ride long distances.
My mother would go through months of calm, then suddenly become possessed. She was the most stable of hands, the surest refuge, only to leave home without warning one day and run into the mountains where she would stay for days, without concern for me or my safety, hiding from the snakes until my father found her and brought her home. She sat me on her lap and talked to me before I could understand language, lay me in her bed and held me until 1 fell asleep, and then suddenly she would pick me up and throw me across the tent to protect me from a snake.
“Her soul has been taken over by a Jinn,” the tribe's elders declared, and set out to cure her with age-old remedies. Prayers were said and written into talismans that she was forced to wear around her neck. Animals were slaughtered, and their blood was smeared on her hands and feet. Fires were built, and the names of all my mother’s enemies were fed to the flames. The Jinns left for a while, then came back.
In between her bouts of madness, my mother drew on her hands.
Every few weeks she woke in the dark and took her brush. I felt her rise, because I slept next to her, and so I watched as she mixed the dry brown henna powder with a bit of water, then went outside to sit on the bare ground. Oblivious to the bitter cold of winter or the morning fog, she drew patiently, with great precision, never moving from her place or looking up from her hands or reacting to anything that went on around her. Ifollowed her out of the tent and climbed into her lap, but she did not see me. My father called her, but she would not respond. The tribe’s women rose to do the day’s chores, asked her to help, chastised her for her indifference to the needs of the group, but she did not hear them. The sun would rise and set, night would fall and she would still he sitting, her hands glowing in the moonlight, still drawing.
The next day, the henna had dried, and my mother would open her palms and hold them before me to see: she had beautiful hands—white and fine and uncalloused. I said this to my husband once and he corrected me, told me it was impossible for a woman who led my mother's life to have soft hands, that weaving rugs and herding sheep and erecting tents were bound to scar the palms and toughen the shin.
My husband is welcome to his logic. I know what I remember. What I choose to remember.
The lines she had drawn were so fine and pale, so intricately woven, I had to look awhile before I recognised the images she had created. She started at the tips of her fingers and worked her way into the center of her palm, then drew from the wrist up toward the fingers, so that the entire painting on each hand revolved around a central figure. She drew a different image every time—a village with goats and horses, a chain of mountains with snow melting off their caps and pouring into ravines, a house with many chambers and a courtyard full of people. Every shape was small but precise, complete with minute details. At the center of each world, surrounded by walls and barriers she could not climb, was a lone woman with bewildered eyes and a crown of gold coins.
As I got older I realised that the entire painting was a maje, that the woman at the center was searching for a path that led away from the center and off my mother's palms. Wanting to help her, I would take my finger and trace the lines, edge my way backward and forward, around and then back again across the rivers and the pathways of my mother's imagination, but every road led back to the center and every outlet was a dead end, and even the surest of escapes proved to be only a false hope.
It became essential for me to find a way out. I felt as if my mother wanted this from me; as if, by painting her hands and showing them to me, she was asking me to help her find a way out of the labyrinth. Breathless, I searched until tears of frustration poured from my eyes and my mother, knowing my disappointment, closed her fists and told me to stop looking.
I loved her hands and loved those drawings in spite of their hopelessness, loved them in spite of the fact that the tribe’s women said they were the works of the Jinns who inhabited her soul, in spite of the fact that my father, believing this perhaps, or desperate to save her from her madness at any cost, broke her brushes one day and threw her henna in the river. None of the tribe’s women knew my mother the way I did. Even my father, who may have loved her, I think, but who at any rate had thought that her love would save him from his own despair— even he did not know my mother well.
It wasn ’t the paintings that drove her mad. It was the fact that she could not find her way out of the life she had ridden into one night on the back of a horse.
Like the woman at the center of her palm, surrounded by roads that led nowhere, dwarfed by the enormity of obstacles so small, they fit onto the tip of a miniature brush—like the woman she drew over and over, my mother was looking for a way out.
It’s strange how hope dies: we hold on all our lives, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, until one day, a single incident, a single loss, marks the end of our faith. One morning when I was eight years old, I woke up and found her staring at me with hollow eyes. She had cut off all her hair.
It was true, I thought, what the tribe’s elders said: that the snakes were a result of my mother’s Jewish blood, that it was I, the infant she had borne, who had brought the evil spirits into my mother’s body. The madness was in both of us, and it would be in my children, too.
My husband, of course, would in time provide a different explanation for what ailed my mother: “Schizophrenia,” he would read out of his thousand-page book of medicine. “A severe mental disorder characterized by unpredictable disturbances in thinking. The onset of the illness usually occurs around the age of twenty. Patient characteristically withdraws from reality and thinks in illogical, confused patterns. ”
The Professor is always looking into books to explain life, always seeking comfort in the distance, the impersonality of scientific theories. “Science is what separates man from beast,” he used to say when we were first married. He spoke in that haughty way that made me feel small, the tip of his tongue resting for a split second between his teeth, producing a tiny lisp, his upper eyelids descending slowly over his pupils, as if to feign modesty. For years I resented him for his aloofness, the way he dismissed the human heart as “animal instinct, an obstacle to be overcome in the interest of civilization,” the way he labeled emotions as “unscientific, and, therefore, unjustified.” Now I know he did this to save himself from his own torment.
He had seen my mother at her worst, you see—chained to the poles where the tribe's people kept the horses, unrecognisable to anyone who had known her only a few years earlier, allowing no one but me to approach or touch her. The Professor knows this: that I was the only person my mother trusted in that state of alienation, the only human contact she could bear, and so he knows how hard it was for me to leave her and come here with him, how I have blamed myself for abandoning her. That's why he wants me to buy into his medical explanation: “The woman was ill,” he says. “She needed a doctor, not a nurse.” Have I made her, my mother who once chased me with a butcher knife, trying to cut off the arm she thought was a two-headed snake—have I made her into someone she never was?
She would sit behind me on the b
ack of our horse, my father riding ahead of us with his rifle drawn against bandit attacks. The sun would be warm on our faces and her hands would cradle me against her chest and I would close my eyes, my ear to her heart, the sound of her breath pulling at me like strings, bringing me down an inch at a time, surrounding me until I was afloat and weightless and I could sleep without fear.
She loved me, I know. She loved me and wanted to protect me if she could, and in return, she trusted me to save her from the snakes.
I WAS TH1RTE EN years old the summer my husband first appeared at our campsite with his fountain pen and his notebooks, speaking a dialect of southern Kurmanji that few people in our tribe understood, and using elevated words and phrases that instantly set him apart from us. He was bone-pale and thin, and he wore a black suit—the kind morticians wear here in America, that they keep pressed under a mattress or hang on the back of a chair at night, the fabric so worn it shines even in the dark, the creases so accustomed to a human form, they give at the knees and elbows even without a body pushing at them from within. But the Professor also wore a vest, and a watch chain, and leather shoes with laces. He was well-shaven and well-combed, and he carried white handkerchiefs with his initials embroidered on them, a gold cigarette holder, and a walking stick. He was an aberration, I thought—a creature so unlike any I had ever known and so unsuited to the world I lived in, I wanted to strike out with my fists and shatter him like the frail image of the man I thought he was. He had come to study the language of the Kurds, he said through an interpreter who walked with him everywhere and acted as his guide and food taster and personal valet. He was an important man who taught at a famous university in America, the interpreter claimed, and before that he had lived in France, and what he liked most in the world was to study dead or dying languages and trace their origins and their roots and the culture of the people who spoke them.
To me he was a girl dressed in mens clothes, so afraid of the mountains, he could not travel through them alone, so revolted by the earth, he stood with his toes always raised slightly
off the ground. He even brought his own chair everywhere he went—a hand-carved wooden stool that the interpreter carried and set down for him. Before the Professor sat down, the interpreter wiped the stool with a rag, and even after that the Professor ran the tip of his finger over the surface to make sure all the dust was gone. Chairs, he told me later, were invented to separate men from beasts.
I looked at him once and realised I never wanted to see him again. But he had already noticed me and was not about to be ignored.
For a while he studied me. He showed up in our tent pretending to interview my father’s relatives, to transcribe the words and phrases they used and to determine the roots of our dialect. The language of Kurdistan is called Kurmanji, but it has two major and two minor dialects, and each one of those is spoken in half a doqen subdialects. Kurdish Jews, what’s more, speak Aramaic—an ancient language that was already dying when I was a child. The Professor asked questions and recorded the responses on a log he kept, which he handled with as much care as if it were holy.
I was old enough to understand the source of his interest in me, old enough also to realise that my prospects for marriage within the tribe were at best grim: I was a half-Jew and a madwoman ’s daughter, a wild child even my father could not control. Ever since I was very young, the elders in the tribe had warned my father that I might be kidnapped by a Kurdish Khan and taken away, because the Khans sent riders to look through the country for pretty girls who would grow into pretty women.
The elders had told my father that this might be a good thing, that if it should happen my father would be wise not to fight or try to stop it. Later, as I grew up, 1 could see boys looking at me, could hear their mothers admiring my looks, but I also knew that the blood that runs under the skin counts for so much more than any outward attribute, and so part of me was aware that I should have been thankful for the attention the Professor extended me—but I wasn’t.
I was repelled by his smallness, by the way he never touched his own clothes or any part of his body except with the tip of a finger, the way he acted as if we Kurds were nothing more than the drops of ink he painted onto the pages of his log: touch them with your hands and they become a big smear on the page. After I married him I realised that he was shy and that he covered it up with arrogance, that he was uneasy and compensated for it by making others feel inept. He was afraid of his own emotions, of the torment of rage and lust and sorrow that brewed beneath the surface of his affected manners, and so he approached everything with a scientific mind, putting out the fire before it burned him. But even after I had learned to understand him, I could not overcome the sensation that underneath it all—underneath the black suit and the gold watch and the years of education—underneath all that was a man who had already missed his luck.
Two MONTHS INTO his first visit to our campsite, the Professor went to see my father.
Speaking now in our tribe’s dialect, he said he had a few words to say about himself, that he wanted me to hear them as well, that, even though I was young, he believed I should not be excluded from any discussion involving my fate. By then my mother was chained to a pole outside the tent all the time, and my father and I hardly spoke. When he commanded me to come in and listen to the Professor, I refused, but I lingered close enough to hear what was said.
The Professor said he had come to Kurdistan for two reasons: to study the language of the Kurds, to be sure, but also to find a wife he could take with him when he left. He said he had considered his options carefully before deciding on a Kurdish girl, and he had narrowed his wishes down to what was practicable as well as desirable. He said he had a big house in America and the best job a man could hold, that although he was born in Iraq, he considered himself a Western man because he had spent his adult life in Europe and then America. For a wife, he had decided on a Kurd because we were of the Aryan race, because we were a physically and mentally strong and adaptable people, because he felt that our light features would fit in easily with Americans. He wanted a young girl so he could train her himself, was willing to marry an illiterate because he would educate her himself. He said a great deal about civilisation, speaking in his slow and methodical way, without making eye contact with my father or any one of the others in the tent, punctuating his sentences with long silences as if to impress upon them that they were in the presence of greatness. He said man s purpose in this world was to achieve civilisation, that the history of mankind was that of a battle between the rule of law and chaos. Then he offered to take me out of the wilderness and to America.
Before my father had had a chance to wet his lips or even consider a response, I stormed at the Professor. I told him to go away, that I would sooner cut his throat than leave with him, that I wanted nothing better than to see him vanish from our campsite and go back to the land of civilisation he was so proud of. Enraged that I had answered for him, my father charged and grabbed me, and we began to fight—I kicking and biting and he trying to subdue me, until the others stepped in and separated us. I looked at the Professor then and saw he was paler than ever, so I charged at him one last time and shoved him with the flats of my hands:
“Go to hell,” I said, but of course, he didn’t.
He KNEW THE ART of waiting, you see. He had learned it from his years of study, from also the years of waiting to metamorphose into the person he wanted to be. Growing up in Iraq, he had known he wasn ’t meant to live the life of his ancestors, that he had a destiny unlike any of his peers ’. But to get there he had had to wait, to keep his desires in check, to maintain a calm surface as he slowly reinvented himself, first in his own mind, and then in the eyes of others. So he knew how to wait and knew how to use logic to overcome simple desire and in the end, I think, he knew how to buy a heart that he could not win with love.
He stayed away from me a few weeks, went back to the town of Mosul and sat in a rented room recording his findings and conclusions. In
his absence the tribe’s elders had a chance to admonish my father for not having controlled me, to remind him of my age and my predicament and how the Professor, in spite of his looks and his affected manners, was probably the best chance I had at marriage. Those were the years of Kurdish despair— the years after the Second World War when every independence movement had failed and hundreds of thousands of Kurds from Turkey alone had abandoned home and country and headed for the West. In West Germany their numbers would become staggering, but they also went to other parts of Europe, some even to America. My father, who had lost his youth and his health in defense of his homeland, had less hope for the future than anyone else, and so he wasn’t altogether averse to the idea of sending me to America except that he disliked the Professor as much as I did, and so he was relieved to see him go.
Just when we were about to break camp for the summer, the Professor appeared again with his notebooks and his interpreter in tow.
He had brought me gifts from the city—a set of gold bangles, a Western-style dress, a box of marfpan candy in pastel colors that he had bought from an Armenian bakery in Mosul. He came to our tent one early morning and offered the gifts to my father as if the two of them were old friends, as if he were performing the traditional duty of bringing souvenirs for friends and family after an extended journey. He took the gifts out one at a time and laid them on the rug my father was sitting on, explaining their value and their use, taking care to avoid even a glimpse in my direction. He did not, as is the custom in the East, proclaim modesty, did not insist that the offerings were of little value, that nothing he could bring my father would do justice to his rank or character. This was a Western trait, I would learn in time, but to my father and myself that day, and to all the tribespeople who saw the Professor interacting with us, he appeared arrogant. Then he took out his grandmother’s ring.