“We can’t spare any expense, or Kamila’s family will not think that we respect them. Pay no mind. Pay no mind. This is about family blood.” I must have heard her say that a thousand times.
Yazidi wedding feasts were massive operations. Pouring in from villages all around sacred Shingal, most anyone who shared our way and our clan’s blood had received an elaborate invitation. Over 1,600 hungry guests expected to be well fed, and we had to pay for all of it: invitations, musicians, photographer, wedding clothes, flowers, food. To forget a single soul was to forget ourselves. For us, there was an illusion of safety in numbers—I found that out before I could even read.
IN 1995, MY parents brought us all to work a co-op farm in Rabia, a small town on the border crossing into Yaarabiya, Syria. Out there under a seamless desert sky, my people worked sunup to sundown. In that drought year before the salvation of Haji’s water pump, my family was lucky to have such work. At nightfall, the laborers filed back to the communal compound to eat, and then wandered back out exhausted to their sleeping huts. Dozens of poor Yazidis crammed into close quarters with our tambours, songs, and homemade wine; people got to know each other well. One giant family, that was how my Babo put it.
Halfway through that season, a pair of young men, all of sixteen and from the other side of Shingal, stayed in our hut. Daki made a good space for them in a corner. Right from the start, those boys gave us easy smiles, calling me brako, brother, and patting me on the back. My father had taught me the word orphan, and I understood it meant that they had no one else but us. Every so often, they drew pieces of candy shaped like miniature lemons from sacks in their pockets, handing them to me like secret messages. Those tiny sweets were the first I’d ever tasted, and I sucked on them so slowly, savoring the thrilling sourness that coated my tongue.
The day I walked into the hut barefoot and alone was my last in Rabia. My mother had sent me back for a rest, and the walk from the fields under the desolate sun was long and lonely. No one around in the compound.
From the first step into the dim room, I knew something was different. The smell was sweet and warm and I stopped to check for the candy in my pocket. Not sure why, but that’s when I saw him. Body slumped a few feet away from me like a grain sack on the floor. Face down. Eyes closed. Two raw craters blown out from his back. Bits of bone. Blood all over. And I stood there staring, mouth hanging open for a long time. Not sure what to do. I might have been holding my breath, but he did not move.
Everywhere in the small room, you could see evidence of a wild fight for survival. Dark footprints stamped over the floor. Still wet. A scattering of candies like bright beads. Upended furniture. Shattered oil lamp. Gaping holes in the walls. Looking around, I took it all in. Maybe there was a sound, I don’t remember now, but some other thing drew me further inside.
Heaped in a darkened corner, I found the other boy sitting up against the wall, eyes wide open. Dark holes the size of coins pierced his bare chest like fang marks. By now, my limbs had started shaking and I fell fast to my knees, too afraid to cry out loud. Across that stained floor, a pale half-departed gaze reached mine. I knew that person well. Heard him snore while he slept. Sometimes, he gave me his naan. But he wasn’t doing anything now. Then he blinked, eyelids fluttering, and a hand twitched in his lap.
Alive. Barely.
And I could not move.
Trying hard to speak now, he heaved wet hisses of air from deep inside that ruptured chest. Gushes of blood poured out over his mouth and down his chin. All he could manage was a slurred “Brako, brako,” before his eyes rolled way back in their sockets.
That’s when I ran.
By the time Babo came back with me, both of us panting, the second one was also dead.
Later, someone explained that the brothers had fomented some mortal dispute between themselves and the powerful Arab al-Sharram tribe that held dominion in the region. The word rabia means “four”—the boys had been killed with four bullets total, two each right to the heart—and as it happened, I was four years old at the time. My mother had told me so just the day before and held up her hand, slowly counting fingers.
No matter what anyone said to me afterward, I’d learned a new fact the moment I’d walked into that room, and that knowledge would never leave me: the human body is material. Destructible. It doesn’t take much to tear right through it—a bullet will do just fine. It was the first of many lessons I would be taught about conflict: always take the road to peace whatever the cost—there’s no price too high to pay for staying alive.
BY THE TIME of the next jevat, Naïf and my other brothers had few choices left. Khudida had announced his own engagement to a girl named Markaz, and the whole matrimonial parade of parties and expenses started up again. Daki had already spent almost every spare dinar we had, and there wasn’t much else coming in.
All this on his shoulders, Naïf climbed up to the high pasture, where I was shepherding the few sheep we had left. The land of our father spread out as far as the eye could see, we stood there together, talking.
“They offered a small payment,” Naïf told me. It was enough to get us a place in the village, but not much more than that.
“And you all agreed?”
“Truth is, Shaker, one day, they’d just decide to get in those trucks and come take what they want. It can come to that. And when it’s all said and done, we aren’t this property. It’s just dirt. No one thing makes us who we are. Not even our skin. It’s what our parents taught us and we have to live it now.”
“It’s because of the man with the AK, isn’t it?” I said at last.
Naïf shrugged and stared way out. “This might be God’s land, but it’s still bloody.”
Chapter Four
Sergeant White
OUR NEW HOUSE WAS MADE UP OF EIGHT CONCRETE ROOMS LIKE cells all stuck together. No doors between them, courtyard in the middle. A single patch of dead dirt. Right away, I went to work at the scrap of yard: poured out mounds of soil, planted vegetables. A row of flowers for my mother. Haji suspended chains of tiny lights from the downspouts, giving us stars, and set up a cooking grill. I shared a room off the yard with my mother and three sisters. At first, we slept on mats positioned over the floor like thin rafts and hung old sheets for screens. My married brothers took rooms with their wives where they covered the sad walls in wedding photos. Leftover siblings divvied up the rest and made what they could of it. Most every evening we gathered in the front room next to the kitchen to prepare meals, sing, and mull over the long day.
Now that there was no more land to labor, I was free to wander the village that winter of 2003, looking for my cast of schoolmates and a pick-up game. Sometimes, we just sat around shooting the hot breeze and tossing rocks, or played tag around the scatterings of boulders and scrub. Other times we simply roamed the untouched, ancient-looking earth like the sons of Adam that we were.
We’d gathered on a massive shelf of bedrock the size of a football field, great caverns hatcheted into the blunt cliffs looming on one side. Way up there, the gritty summer wind blowing sideways into our parched faces felt like being on the deck of a huge ship. It never even occurred to us we needed better props—poor boys who want for everything can imagine just about anything.
Standing the ground like our captain in his red Arsenal jersey, Saïd was always the first to offer up whatever he had, and the last to ask for anything. Without a word, he proffered one of his socks, and on cue we peeled off our T-shirts, tossing them into a dingy pile. It was always the same routine. We grabbed a couple shirts, bunched them together, and stuffed it all into a long sock. Knotting the end, Saïd squished the mass around, shaping it as best he could. Meanwhile, my cousin Khairi and I took the other tops and jogged along the shelf, dropping them to mark out goal posts. Somehow, we always fell into neat teams without argument and took our places. The thing was to play and forget that we hadn’t eaten lunch, or maybe even breakfast; or that my mother had just sold our last lamb. Or that we didn’t even have a re
al ball.
And that’s just what we were doing when we heard it: a steady foreign thrum plucking at our stillness. Wap-wap. Wap-wap. Wap-wap. Wap-wap. At once, we all sat up, peered across the brown void below, and then squinted into the hot eye of the just descending sun. Veering away from the horizon, two dark specks moved like prehistoric insects over the ground, their rising hum amplifying as we watched, low and coming straight for us. Then the air began to beat, quickening the atmosphere and my blood. Our reactions were all the same. Every boy leapt up, catapulted off the rock, and tore out across the hot desert sand, hollering.
TWO FAT CHOPPERS; twin horizontal rotors front and back. Chinooks. American. I’d seen them on the TV at Barzan’s house. So, I raced the ground in Babo’s shredded sandals as though every breath depended on it; eyes locked dead ahead, arms pumping. Fast and steady. By now, the whole sky was pulsing like a drum and people were climbing rooftops and pointing. All around me the loose ground rose to a dry boil, and I kept on going right through the first wild torrents of dust.
Parting the desert floor as they pounded down, the Chinooks soon disappeared into churning explosions of sand. Suddenly, I was stone blind in the grit. Then I heard high whining sounds overtake the rotors, felt the earth quiver under me, and I waited, eyes closed against the convulsing sands. When it all stopped, I hunched down and made for the rear ramp, mouth parted and full of mud—first on the scene, by far.
A soldier stepped off the back of the giant chopper, hauling a rucksack over his back. Right away and as though he knew I’d be waiting there, he handed me a plastic bottle full of cool red liquid.
In a stupor of awe, I moved back a few yards, tongue lolling in my mouth.
When the boys caught up and glimpsed the bright new thing in my hands, their savagery was instant. Before I knew it, we were all on the ground in a wild free-for-all. Kicking. Punching. Clawing. Anything to get at what the flying man had given me.
Not one of us even knew what was in that bottle, but it had unleashed some dormant predatory gene into our collective blood. I held the thing fast like my own soul. Then Nawaf, who sat next to me in school and whom I’d known all my life as a loyal friend, grabbed a rock from the ground and smacked it into my forehead. With the shock of pain, I felt the bottle slide out from my surrendering grip. A mess of blood and hot tears smeared my face.
A moment later, a pair of hands hoisted my pathetic form up by the armpits, dragging me, feet leaving tracks in the ground, right out of the dirty melee. Set down by a Chinook, other soldiers were suddenly all around me, talking. Someone poured cold water over my head.
The soldier who’d given me the bottle apologized, wiped down my cheeks, and told me not to worry, that there was plenty of Gatorade to go around.
Standing there, chest heaving, I got my bearings back: before me was a flesh-and-blood all-American soldier. Over six feet tall for sure—star-spangled grin, so big and bleach-paper white. Skin like I’d never seen before in my life: dark as the smooth tar we used to fix the roof. Never seen a black man, or even a white one. Never seen any kind of man but our own. Never even held a plastic bottle of Gatorade. Never—so many things at once.
“Hello,” I stammered, trying out my English, grateful for my language teacher, a diabetic Sunni named Jassim. He was famous all over Shingal for producing the best English speakers in the province. And I was first in my class. “My name is Shaker. I am a boy.”
“Dang,” he said. “You Yazidi kids are smart. Good to meet you, Shaker, I’m White.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No white. It is black.”
When he laughed, that man roared, head flying way back, and I thought I saw a gold tooth flash in his mouth. Right from the start, I believed those men who came down to earth in a raging sky were gods.
“No, no,” he said, and pointed at the name printed over the breast of his fatigues. There was an American flag patch on his shoulder. “My name is White. And I am a man.”
Our shared laughter that afternoon sealed a kind of covenant. Without a doubt, I knew we were going to be friends.
THE NEXT MORNING, I shot up, ran across the yard, and begged my brother Naïf, who’d just opened a barber shop a few blocks away, for a few dinars. He scolded me for turning into a Yankee-Doodle so quickly, dropping a few coins in my hand before I raced off again.
I bought two cold bottles of Coke from a small local shop that had a cooler, and stuffed them into my school satchel before making my way to the water complex. The US Army Civil Affairs office was building a makeshift base around the tower to protect it. Holding over eighty thousand liters of clean drinking water, the tower was critical to village life—and a twenty-story-high target. Thirsty desert populations were the most vulnerable to al-Qaeda blackmail: whoever had the water wielded the power. By the time I got to the front gates, walls of sandbags were up, and soldiers sat at their posts looking out over barrels, trigger-ready.
Didn’t take long for someone to see me: scrawny kid shuffling around the dirt lot at the front gate. Within minutes, White showed up and someone stepped out to check me over. Pulling the Cokes out of my satchel, still cold, he said, “Look what he brought you, Sergeant. Glass bottles, too.”
“Nothing like a Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle,” White said when I walked inside. He patted me on the back.
Nothing much to that outpost, just three ugly government buildings circa 1975 that had been used to man the tower, and a few army tents. Still, I felt like I’d just stepped into the kingdom of heaven. Soldiers in fatigues milling around all smiled when they saw me. A few walked over, tousled my hair, and we slapped out high fives. It was 110 degrees, and when the other soldiers saw my drinks, they all asked if I could get more.
Knowing the Americans were coming in any day, the shopkeeper had stocked his shelves. Sergeant White negotiated my pick-up and delivery fee and helped me take orders: Pepsi, Fanta, Diet Cokes. The list got so long that White had to find me a wheelbarrow. Before I knew it, there was real money going into my frayed pockets. I’d already made enough to buy my mother all we needed for a good dinner. Then White and I sat in two metal chairs by the perimeter fence. He opened our bottles and showed me how to toast saying “cheers.” From then on, I’d say it every time I had anything to drink, even milk.
“Wow, that’s good, Shaker,” White said, putting a leg over his knee, and he took a long loud gulp. He had an Adam’s apple the size of a walnut. “What’s the word for ‘thank you’ in Kurdish?”
“Na!” Maybe I said it a little too loud. White looked a bit startled. “No Kurdish,” I told him. For centuries, Arabs of every creed and tribe had told Yazidis they were Kurds. “Yazidis talk Kurmanji. We are not a Kurd.”
“Kurmanji, I got it. Back where I’m from, people call my kind of people the wrong kinds of names all the time. So, you teach me your words. And I’ll teach you mine. Deal?”
“Yaho,” I said, sipping my cola. “Means, thank you.”
“Yaho, Shaker. Now, you go get those drinks, and then come back here with your friends. Get as many of ’em as you can. Looks to me like a good day for a game.”
As I left the compound, change jangling in my pocket, I turned and gave White a salute; and all the way to the gate, his thundering laugh was right behind me. I have relived that moment ten thousand times since.
LONG BEFORE SHOCK and Awe, and especially after it, we were taught at school to despise all Westerners and America as the ground zero of infidels, or nonbelievers. Soon after the war started, our teachers, still under directives from the ministry in Baghdad, had scrawled out “Death to America” in Arabic on the board, and we all had to chant it. Later, we copied out “We want America to fail” on pieces of notepaper, and were sent outside to toss them into the air. A wasteful exercise that baffled us, but we did as we were told. After a lifetime of propaganda, our young brains should have been washed clean of any chance at kinship with those friendly invaders. The trouble was, as Yazidis, our own country had labeled us
as the worst infidels in Iraq. So, when those Chinooks delivered Sergeant White and his battalion to Khanasor in a fanfare of dust, they’d brought us both our saviors and our brothers.
“What in the heck is this?” White asked, turning over Saïd’s stuffed sock in his hands as more than a dozen bony bare-chested boys were lingering mute behind the gate.
“Ball?” I said, with a shrug.
“Nah, first things first: this thing goes bye-bye.” Every time White spoke to me, I held on to each word like treasure.
Shaking his head, White told us all to put our shirts back on and wait for him to return from Mosul.
A few days later, the Chinooks were back, beating up the air over Khanasor. More soldiers exited the hatch and started unloading supplies. White was right there in his body armor and shades. Soon as I got to him, he told me to get a team together and meet in the big lot on the other side of town. Right away, I tore through the streets, eyes peeled, grabbing boys from their doorsteps, beds, a barber’s chair, down from trees, and out of their mothers’ aromatic kitchens.
THE COPPERED GROUND out there was as hard as granite and in full view of blocks of houses and a large public courtyard. Someone had dug up fresh mounds of dirt and positioned markers like seat cushions to form a large diamond shape over the ground. Beyond a stretch of rolling dunes, the craggy heights of Mount Shingal shimmered soft pink in the summer heat. People were on their rooftops drinking beer, smoking hookahs, and hanging laundry on the lines. Others unfurled blankets over the cooling pools of mulberry shade, children hanging in the branches, old men leaning half-asleep against the trunks. Someone had started up a cooking fire, and the warm, meat-roasted air swelled. I was wearing Haji’s gargantuan sneakers and stuffed the toes with wads of cloth. White had already split us into mixed teams, using a simple number system: even on one side, odd on the other.
It seemed like the whole contingent was there milling around: army shorts and baseball caps, dog tags hanging down. Some threaded their way into the groups of chattering kids lingering on the periphery to hand out Life Savers and lollipops. The children cupped their tiny hands into bowls and squealed.
Shadow on the Mountain Page 4