Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  KIDS: Meat!

  TEACHER: Yes! And what does the fat cow give you?

  KIDS: Homework!

  Rounds of belly laughs, and we continued on our way.

  No matter the weather, under his white shirt Saïd was always clad in a red jersey for the English soccer team Arsenal, and when he wasn’t proffering punch lines, he was talking soccer and making up teams for afternoon matches.

  “Who’s in?” he’d say and point his cleft chin at us. “After school.”

  “I have to go back to the farm. My father is unwell,” was my routine answer, though it pained me to miss a game. My father frowned at my playing: Bury yourself in knowledge while you have the chance, Shaker, not in the dirt. The dirt will always give itself to you.

  “Who listened to the game last night?” Saïd would inevitably want to know, his brown eyes going big. “I don’t even know which teams were up—couldn’t get a signal, made me crazy.”

  “Electricity’s been out for two days from here to Mosul. We’ve got the generator going nonstop,” Barzan told us.

  We all believed that some natural event was the cause: the Tigris flooding its banks or a lighting strike. The elements in Iraq could be as capricious as the politics.

  “Nothing to do with the weather. And a lot more to do with bombs,” Samir called back. It was the first we’d heard of it.

  “What do you know about bombs, philosopher Samir?” laughed my cousin Khairi. No one believed it.

  But Samir had turned away with a look on his face that told me he’d stopped listening. Standing still now, he tilted his head, and a flat hand went up over his brow. Saying nothing, he searched the bright distance. His lips cleaved and let out a breath.

  Out there, a bird of prey sailed the high winds over the plain and we heard a single screech reverberate down over Shingal. As the dark form swept lower on the zephyr, the curvature of his eyes sharpened—and now that bare gaze seemed to stalk me. For a moment, there was nothing else.

  “I would do anything for my slingshot,” someone whispered. “Look at his wingspan.”

  I told them the bird was too far out. “And it’s a sin to kill such a creature for sport.”

  As we all stood there watching the wavering falcon, the atmosphere around us began to quiver. And somehow I could feel what was coming like an omen. At once, the ancient air surrendered to a shock of sound and a pair of fighter jets ripped through the heavens, cutting away right over us. All the boys jumped up in their filthy shoes and screamed. The first sight and sound of those mighty planes tore open our psyches and awakened something slumbering deep within us—the primal instinct we all had for war and its colossal machinery.

  “See!” Samir yelled and pointed. “See!”

  And the riptide of sound dissipated to a low thunder.

  Then a breathless voice called out, and we looked over to see Tarfan running wild. People were streaming out of their houses. Panting before us, Tarfan stopped, beat-up satchel in hand, the contents of paperwork and pens spilling out.

  “Who were they?” we all asked the sky that seemed so empty now.

  Eyes bulging, Tarfan looked at us like a boy who’d swallowed his own heart. He dropped his tattered bag in the mud. “I’ll bet it’s the Americans—who else?”

  WHEN I CAME home, there wasn’t any talk of war whatsoever. There were no sounds in the house, except of my mother’s sighs and my father’s breathing, which you could hear rattle and heave no matter which room you went to. All through the season, I held vigil with my dad, all of us taking our turn like supplicants to the ticking hours, which had become his alone in their waning.

  “Sing,” he’d whisper to the candle flame.

  And I would for a while, taking up my tambour.

  Sometimes, his knuckles would gently lift and fall as though his fingertips had joined mine on the strings, or he’d reach out to be sure I was there.

  “I’ve spent my packet, boy,” he muttered just once, and we let it go.

  Other times, he’d jerk an elbow toward the stacks of volumes lined up on the sill.

  “Read some.”

  “Yes, Babo.” And I’d open a book. It never mattered which one.

  Every hour or two, and only while he slept, we’d move Babo from one side to the other, using a long drawing sheet—me at one end, a grim-faced sibling at the other.

  “Death comes up through the feet,” my oldest brother, Naïf, told me when the skin on Babo’s legs started to mottle. And I wanted to shame him for his careless talk. The day I saw Babo’s nails going blue, I felt something fragile in me slip and shatter. I coated my father’s dry lips in ointment, kissed his brow where he was still warm with blood, though the rest of him was as cool as night. Somehow, I took what I could get and made it what it wasn’t—time.

  The early summer morning came like every other, but that time I found my Babo sitting up against the pillows. The window open, a glass of water held in his hand.

  “Hello,” he said and looked right at me.

  I collapsed into his gaze and watched dumbstruck, as he got up unaided from his bed. He moved slowly forward and touched me on the shoulder; his eyes were like glass.

  “I’ll have an egg,” he said. “Some naan. Milk. How I’ve missed it.” Then, for the first time in half a year, he went to the bathroom alone and turned on the taps. Loud and clear, I could hear him singing.

  In a jubilant state of my own second-coming as a boy, I went right to the kitchen, fired up the hot plate, and cracked the eggs into butter, thinking of all the smug things I would say to my know-it-all-brothers.

  When my father came out smelling of soap and smiling, I passed him his full plate of food. We talked while he ate—a mile a minute. He asked about each of my friends, my grades, and said I might as well play a game of football now and again to keep my body healthy.

  “Not too much, mind you, Shaker. Not too much of anything, but love,” he said. It was a thing he’d told me many times. We didn’t go near what had been happening to him—it seemed the strange spell of atrophy had broken at last. Finally, he instructed me to run down to my uncle’s house and bring everyone back to see him.

  “Hurry now, Shaker, and tell them I’m here waiting.”

  OUR ACRES OF farmland were hushed, the dirt road empty. I felt the sun heat my back when I ran and kept going until I was dripping. In the distance, the edge of town took shape and I heard an infant bawling like a calf. There would be a wedding that week and my mother was busy helping prepare the food well ahead of time. Yazidis celebrate all feasts together as one, because as dwindling members of humankind, that’s all we are. The bride and groom were so often cousins, and if not, would at least be Yazidis of the same tribal line—which is almost the same thing.

  When my father married my mother, it was his second marriage. His first wife had died giving birth to Naïf, as often happened. One year later almost to the day, my mother’s mother offered up her seventeen-year-old daughter’s matrimonial hand to my Babo—a man with a good plot of land, a healthy boy she would make her own, and a solid house to tend to. So Naïf got a new daki, a year later a brother; and the rest of us came, year after year. Our mother used to say that marrying a man old enough to be her father was not such a bad thing: he’d made all his foolish mistakes long before she was born, and at least he was handsome.

  When I got to my uncle’s house, they were all inside talking. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and a few other men were crowded around a brass hookah, which sat between them on the floor like a bejeweled octopus. Each man took small sucks from a long tentacle and held in the sweet-smelling fog.

  When Daki saw my shadow flood the open doorway, she put her knife down on the board and clapped fresh thyme from her hands. Then she took in the patches of sweat on my shirt.

  “What is it?” she said. “Babo?”

  “Of course it is, girl.” Dapîra’s old soft face poked out from behind my mother. I will never forget the certainty in her gaze.

  Lookin
g back on it now, I can remember everything that happened in that room with a crystalline clarity: sets of eyes on me blinking, and the hot rush of blood roaring though my chest. I told them all, so proud of my news, that my dad was wide-awake, what he’d eaten, that he was wearing a clean shirt, and that he needed them to come right away.

  Without a word, they all raced for the door. In a moment, I heard my uncle’s pickup revving to life and watched my mother rush into the passenger side, holding the embroidered edge of her shawl up over her face. My grandma glanced at me for a moment before getting in. Then uncles and aunts crammed into the flatbed and the truck lurched forward, rows of hands holding on as the vehicle barreled hard up the street. There was no room for me in the back of the pickup, and it was understood that I’d be making my own way home. Young legs had to earn their rest—my father had always told me that.

  And they didn’t believe me, anyway. That’s what I thought, and I kicked a stone down the road a few paces.

  NAÏF WAS IN the doorway when I got back, smoking one of my father’s stale Baghdads, contemplating the glowing tip. He looked at me as I passed by, and I saw his torment, which was hard to figure: why he’d be so upset at mistakenly thinking the end had come for Babo. He should have been rejoicing instead.

  All along the walls of our house my kin stood silent, lowering their heads as I passed by. Even now, I can feel each step down the narrow hall to Babo’s room. The smell of soap was strong in the heavy air, and I was sure he was waiting for me to bring him a cup of chai, sing a little. I was going to tell him how not one of them had believed me.

  Inside, several neighbors stood by as my mother, grandmother, and two of my sisters sat weeping around the bed. A sheet was already pulled up over the form of my Babo, leaving just his caved-in face exposed. Someone had already placed two silver coins that flashed over his lids.

  When my Daki looked me over as I got close, I could see the girl in her shining through her grief, and she reached to pry open my clenched fist. She spoke to me softly and for a long time. I’d been mistaken all along, and it would take time for me to forgive myself, and the angels who’d played a trick on me.

  “You were the one standing with him in the space between worlds, Shaker,” she told me. “It was his gift to you. In time, you’ll know what it means.”

  It didn’t help me much, not right then, with him lying there. I placed both palms on his rigid form—all the marrow had seeped from his bones, the last living breath long gone. My old king was dead; I could live to be a thousand, and there would never be another.

  Chapter Three

  The Cruelest Month

  WHEN THE MAN CAME TO OUR DOOR, HE HAD A CLEAN AK-47 strapped to his back and a stained paper bag full of fruit in his hands. Figs. Bruised apricots, flies hovering. Two other men lingered outside, smoking cigarettes and wandering the courtyard like old dogs kicking up dirt. Mopping her wet brow with the edge of her shawl, Daki quietly took the fruit, uttered a quick thank-you—yaho—and looked down.

  Then the man, who lived on the land next to ours, crossed the threshold, bringing his long shadow with him like a cool sentry. He wore the scent of gun oil like cologne. Slowly, he slid off his weapon and cradled the barrel, appraising the small house Babo had built with his bare hands, where thirteen newborns had drawn their first breaths, and two their last. Not much to see in there: threadbare rugs, a couple of tambours in an open cabinet, the faded picture of my father as a young man, staring out from under his army cap with those blue eyes full of hope.

  Since we buried my father a few months before, I’d seen that particular neighbor several times, watching from a distance as I planted and plowed under the desert sun. But he didn’t even glance at me now as I stood panting next to my mother, hair dripping.

  “Shaker,” Daki said, without raising her eyes. Hard to tell from her flat voice what she was thinking. “Go and get your brother.”

  I didn’t bother to ask her which one.

  NAÏF STOOD ALONE on the crest of the hill, shirt hanging like a rag from his hand. His glazed back was a bare cliff of bone and muscle. Stronger than the rest of us, he had wide hands that could uproot trees and hoist boulders. He was back from working the construction sites in Tal Afar, to fix the well that had suddenly gone dry. Haji had tinkered and sweet-talked his contraption to no avail. The trouble wasn’t the pump, but the desiccated earth that had given us all that it had left. A builder by trade, Naïf knew there was nothing to be done. When I got to him at last, he motioned to the dry basin.

  “Miracles were not meant to last, little brother.” It’s what Babo had always told us—and with those words, somehow I knew our time on that land was coming to an end.

  In a blubbering rush, I reported about the neighbor with the fruit and assault rifle, the two others outside, and my mother left all alone. Wide-eyed, I pointed down at the house. Just then, a small convoy of old sedans was snaking along the road toward the farm. The trucks stopped just past the gates to our farmyard, engines idling. A few men got out; one stopped in the cucumber field to take a piss.

  Naïf told me not to worry, that no one would lay a hand on Daki. Then he gestured with his chin in the direction of Khanasor. How that vista had evolved since Saddam was caught in a spider hole, blinking and covered in lice, and mere yards from one of his favorite palaces. Right across our village and on every other rooftop, satellite dishes had popped up like mushrooms. In the blurry distance, military helicopters hovered over the foothills. Rumor had it the Coalition Forces were building a base from the ruins of a high Ottoman citadel that had a good vantage all the way to Syria. Not far beyond the village and out along the open plain, a long white tent sat over the flat dirt like a forgotten game piece. Fires were already blazing, and shoals of smoke spread out over the barren valley. When you saw the jevat tent, you knew there was either a wedding, a funeral, or trouble to settle in the tribe. They would come for us in time.

  Our family had always been in a deadlock over who had the right to farm our fields. Yazidis didn’t actually own anything, even if they’d paid for it. Under a homicidal dictatorship, no one did. If a person had connections in the ruling Baathist party, they could have more than others; just a whisper in the right ear would grant whatever was coveted. Even another’s land. My father had no meaningful connections—he’d held his fertile ground by virtue of reputation alone. Now that Saddam and Babo were both long gone, things were getting heated—without Babo, our family had no muscle.

  Naïf and Haji explained that nothing would happen quickly. Both tribes had to agree on a course of action, and that could take months. They were right. The tent went up and down again and again, men came to the door with guns and offerings, and like everyone else we implored the angels for rain. And every night, my mother sent up wishes for steady work and fine brides for her sons.

  WHEN I WAS still very little, I remember asking my father how a man set about finding a wife.

  “I didn’t find mine,” he said. “They found me. And then I went and got them—it was the same both times. Love is like a river, Shaker, flowing two ways at once. You just have to jump in and let it take you.”

  His answer made no sense to me, and I told him so. And then he told us the story.

  ONCE THE TWO families from the Jeffria tribe agreed that widowed Babo would marry young Daki, my father bought a white horse and a saddle. Then he put on his officer’s uniform and rode into her village with a ring tucked in his pocket. Not quite a full woman, Daki waited on the dirt track, her family clustered about her, singing. A small sack of clothes in her hands, she wore a red sash, tied according to our tradition, three times about her waist.

  When my mother glimpsed her betrothed riding that elegant beast down the steep hill through a wash of spring mist, a gurgling baby boy she’d love at first sight strapped to his lap, she knew she was seeing far ahead into time. And it was good. Daki gave a shy nod and her father smiled up at his new son-in-law. Had my mother shaken her head just once, or mou
thed a “na,” the family would have led her back into the house—no questions asked. That was our way.

  THE DAY I came in from shepherding and found Haji talking a mile a minute to my mother and saying a girl’s name over and over again like the refrain from a love song, I knew he’d jumped into the river at last. Her name was Kamila and her family was waiting.

  On the way to Kamila’s family home to settle the wedding, my mother sat ramrod straight in the front seat, her mouth forming a silent, jubilant prayer. Our mother had bought so many gifts, we’d had to reload the car twice. It was the custom, she kept telling us as we packed box after box of sweet cakes, candies, bolts of fabric, and dresses. Daki had taken the obligatory extravagance to a new level.

  When we pulled up to the bride’s simple concrete house, her entire family emerged in a long parade of smiles; tambours played as we greeted one another, arms entwined as kin. I watched as Haji gently led my mother to Kamila’s father and she passed him the sack of dinars, worth the equivalent of seventy-five grams of solid gold. Our spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh, had long ago set the dowry price. Every bill and coin was hard to come by, and we’d had to sell more than a thing or two: several sheep, chickens, and one of Babo’s hunting rifles, just for a start. Still, not one of us begrudged the expense. Love was a precious gift and you never worried about its material cost.

  After the traditional exchange of offerings, we ate and drank for hours, everyone talking at once. Then, in the steady kerosene light, Haji stood with his bride and placed a polished gold band on her finger. The hint of a tremble, Kamila did the same, sewing the first thread between them, fast and forever.

  WITHIN A MONTH and according to Yazidi tradition, our family held an elaborate village feast spanning three days. Up until then the bride had still lived in her family home. Right from the start, Daki planned every detail—and so our real trouble began.