The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  Na. Today you touch no one and no one touches you.

  At the mountain’s crest a wind blows in all directions with sharpness enough to cut men into shards and strew them about, nameless and fragmentary, across the ginger desert below. Here men lean alone against the firmament and the boy watches as uncles, cousins and father extend their arms, in the manner of birds, to keep balance along the craggy chine that leads to an even and welcoming plateau, the highest point along the crest. There they stand, hands pocketed or knotted behind their backs, to gaze at the Kurdish flats to the south or the vaulting Zagros to the east. From up high his father calls. The boy runs to the summons and is caught and kept as a feather is sought and fastened to his forehead by means of a narrow leather strap. Crowned thus, he is applauded and the men push him ahead to lead them into a deep valley from which no life sounds or flies. They descend single file, the boy ahead, jolly in this new year and new game of manhood (and possible birdhood) and they walk silently until the land flattens and the wind ceases and they come to a narrow dell of aspen saplings whose leaves flutter green and gold in the afternoon sun.

  The uncles remove shoes and socks to sleep or recline against boulders while cousins walk solemnly through the grove to gently touch the thin trunks of trees only a few years older than themselves. The boy follows in curiosity and zeal, hopeful for a game, a shout, a dash through the cool copse, but is instead pushed around and out by a cousin who gestures him away.

  Na na na. Not yet, later. Go. Your baba calls.

  Together, father and boy walk past the coppice to a deep crevice between rocks, through a swale of seeping water, and soft moss grows atop the sharp stones. They move carefully into an escarpment where the mountain walls nearly touch and the ground juts at them from beneath and beside. In the indentures the boy sees night birds rock in a sheathed sleep as above them the sky, all day a great expanse, thins to a narrow gray blade. Aligned with his father the boy has no fear and they walk slowly to emerge from the tiny fissure into a meadow of new grass and thin streams. The boy runs to the nearest pool to drink and splash and watch his father crouch and disassemble a crude box made of rocks, from which he unearths an ax and a black-handled knife, both of which he tests on the tips of his fingers, one of which draws blood. The father pockets the knife and shoulders the ax and calls to the wet, wondering boy.

  Come. We must go back. It is time.

  Even before they arrive the boy can see the men gathered in a circle again beneath the trees. They are without fire or opium pipes or instruments, and because they do not sit or stand, but pace in small steps back and forth among the trees, the boy is ill at ease. His heart pulses quickly as he shouts.

  Why do you stand there? Where is the sitar and the daf? Who is going to light the fire?

  His closest cousin raises neither voice nor eyes and kicks the ground and the fallen leaves. The boy sees loose smiles slip out from his uncles’ lips and his baba offers no explanation and gives no comfort; he grows an ax from his shoulder and a knife from his fist and the boy is no longer aligned with him and no longer cares for the game of the feather tied to his head or the ceremony of the caves and wants nothing but the crisscross of his maman’s knees and shins and the sad songs that sing him to sleep.

  At the sound of a sudden clap the men, uncles and cousins, take the boy by his shoulders and head and lay him down at the base of the selected tree. He is held down, by whom and how many he does not know, to stare up at the canopy of leaves that blot out the sky as hands clear him of pants and shirt and shoes (leaving the feather fastened to his forehead). When he is naked and cold the men gather around him to sing and clap as if the boy were last night’s flame. They are tight and close around him and he can feel the hot air of their breath, the drips of spit that fall out from their singing mouths, and smell the musk on their skin. He opens his mouth to protest, but as in a nightmare, nothing comes. The sky above him fills with faces, a ceiling of flesh: lips, cheeks and jaws hang loose and ragged and pulled down by the force of an earth that draws all things to its center. And here the boy lies: bare and caught, lodged at the bottom of a well at whose edge men tremble before they fall.

  The song stops. From all around a warmth of hands presses and the boy is touched and caressed until blood rushes to just below his middle, to the smallest part of him that only he knows and his mother knows and they know together, that fills now with a cold, flush fire that opens and closes in him again and again. His smallness stiffens and he is aroused, and the boy begins to drown in a pleasure unrecognizable but for its proximity to wild agony. Deaf and blind from the opulent touch of the men on and over his body and his smallness, the boy is oblivious to the spectacle of his father’s ax aloft as he cuts apart the spine of the young tree that grows just above the boy’s head. His smallness swells with pleasure and the ax falls, down again and again. Trapped as he is in the moment’s wealth the boy feels no fear. He hears nothing of the fresh wood spliced above him and in his closed-eye ecstasy does not notice the black-handled blade as it is kissed by the closest cousin (who lay against another tree just last year, when the boy was left at home) then passed from cousin to cousin to uncle to uncle to father to the oldest uncle, who murmurs a single prayer, Ya Ali, before navigating the knife around and along the rigid organ in a cut, even and circular, that relinquishes the boy of skin and sanctuary for all the days of his next years.

  With wide wet eyes the boy looks up at the faces he has always known, for he knows these men and no one else, to see their smiles and hear their song and feel their touch all over his bloodied self, and he lets fly a keen, high and sharp, full with the vitriol and sorrow of one suddenly betrayed. A burn blossoms from the very center of him and spreads through blood and organ and ear and eye until finally day and light dissipate into a clouded haze and the boy is held aloft by a clutch of hands, young and old, and his limp body is passed thrice through the new split in his tree. The men sing, certain in their ceremony, as they clean and bandage him where he bleeds. They remove the feather from his head and fold it carefully around the slack cut foreskin and tuck the offering into the split of the tree before they sew it together like maids at a loom stitching the broadcloth close. And the men sing.

  Blessed is the bark by Madig to grow deep into the land.

  And:

  Blessed be the boy by Saladin to grow high atop it.

  So they sing and so they rejoice to carry the body of the boy, this year’s man, back out of the grove up the valley and mountain and into the cave, unaware in their celebration that, like the tree, the boy too has been cleaved. Here opens the first crack to let in the fear and sorrow that will fissure through the whole of his life. As a soldier he will be deftly divided through the head, as a murderer cut open through the heart and as an old man split so thoroughly that one side of him dies first, unbeknownst and long before the other, damned to serve in hell as half a man.

  The Sapling

  I am the boy and the boy is in me.

  Split and sutured as such I am unfit for the earth to suckle, to weave, to keep.

  One day I am deemed lumber; another day I am chopped; another day burned.

  As a tree: I am a boy and the boy is me.

  As ash: our fates will blow together in the end.

  Mother’s Fool

  On the third day the men wake at dawn and prepare for the return home. Blind and heavy from the nights of smoke and dark, the boy and his cousins work together to roll the rugs and pack the backs of animals and set out, into the blue morning, with hooves and heels seeking to match the marks they left only days ago. In silence they move away from the mountains and their carved caves and make their way across the desert floor. Ahead the horizon spreads level and sparse and above the sun rises along the same inches of sky day after day, plotted and, like the men, in correct course.

  Overcome by pain, the boy rides behind in a blank refusal to keep pace with the silent, stiff men. Though he is no longer freight in this new year, he rides his own h
orse and holds to his own blade, the boy considers these weary bribes against what he has undergone. He keeps a cautious association with the men who saunter ahead and holds his bitterness before him like a shield. The father, who disallows such malaise, rides around his son to taunt his sour expression and jockey the boy’s horse into a forceful trot that bruises his already burning loins. The boy grimaces in agony and is eventually left alone to curse his father and ache desperately for his mother’s teat.

  What he would give.

  For a simple suckle of the warm cream he would part with his new blade. For a suckle and the soft sleep afterward he would easily give his too-heavy saddle. For a suckle, the sleep, a bit of humming and hands through his hair the boy would offer up his whole horse. Like this, morning turns into afternoon and they step closer toward home, the boy so preoccupied with the variations of barter and beg that he doesn’t notice as they pass through the familiar stone wall that separates the inside of his village—hearth, women and flock—from the outside world of nomad, shah soldier and thief.

  At the sight of home the men slow in their march and the boy quickens his horse to ride first and front, his eyes and heart greedy for the recognizable, the regular, the world he knew before this new year of ruse and betrayal. But upon first glance the boy sees nothing familiar of the land that bore him. They move through outskirts he has walked a thousand times, past fields separated in steeps and pastures thin with stock, and today, from atop his horse, all of it shines new. The boy blinks, rubs his eyes hard and slaps his face to clear his gaze of the luminescence to see it for what he knew before: dirt, rock and stream fit only for work and the occasional game, good to stomp and spit and shit on but otherwise dull. The self-aggression fails him and the land glows, resplendent with green garden beds, strong rock fences and leafless mulberry trees all irradiated with the orange sheen of late afternoon. Even the open eyes of sheep and goat and rooster wink at the boy in an offering: This is your land, we are on it and your own dead are below it, all of us offer our lives and deaths to the man that grows within you, to nourish, yield, prosper and keep. And the boy recognizes the direct relation to him—boy once, now man, now Kurd, now Kurdish man to reign over Kurdish land; the young suzerain, kingly after a simple cut.

  The pain he has held close is gone now and he rides erect and proud and ahead of the line to lead the men into the village, where women and children run from doorways to greet them. Young and unwed girls rush alongside the boy’s horse and reach their hands into his lap, grab at the bloodied bandages and laugh and click tongues in happy song.

  Aufareen!

  Mashallah!

  A new Kurdish man among us!

  Their faces, too, are new with a stark beauty. They are not the aunts and cousins he left behind, but creatures of light with white teeth that sparkle through smiles, hair that is tossed about and run down with bright ribbons and eyes that when cast up to meet his reflect the entirety of the sky’s blue through them, blue with abandonment, adoration and joy. The women clap and laugh and the boy shakes hands and kisses hands and straightens himself to try to catch sight of his maman, to see her in this new year and take of her and so center himself as a man. Instead, he is suffocated by the instant celebration and cannot take his eyes off the land and the women and the village that passes him all around.

  The procession comes to stop at his father’s house, where a cousin runs in quickly to light the brazier and the boy’s dog stands at the door to bark at the parade of stumbling men and women in song. Uncles carry the boy in on their shoulders and place him gently on a cushion in the center of the divan, where he sits to accept the gifts placed at his feet: gold rings and embroidered shirts and tins of honey candy from Kermanshah. The room fills and fills more and tiny coals are warmed and placed in small bowls attached to long hollow ceramic stems. The women push in bits of soft brown brick that dirty their fingernails and light the paste until it glows and pass the pipe from aunt to uncle, cousin to father, brother to sister and husband to wife, and the infinite night shrinks to fit in the small room, tight and entire, to close the space between man and woman, bones and blood. The men tell the women of the journey and the tree, of the boy they left behind and the new man who is returned. The boy sits and smiles, proud and lost. In his delirium he stands on the cushion and announces to the room:

  I forgive you all for the cut and the blood.

  I am a man in the new year and this is my village and the village of my dead and it is worth the price of a small piece of skin.

  The divan grows noisy with laughter and applause and the men sing and smoke and bring with them the heavy beauty of the cave. The women sit beside them and let their heads hang and sway to the music and they ignore the boy, who grows sleepy in the thick air and moves about to seek out his maman’s lap. She is not in the circle, or in the periphery where the wives lean up against their husband’s backs, but just outside her thin figure is tucked in the doorway, her face tired and pale.

  Maman!

  The boy does not resist, cannot resist, and runs to clutch at her waist and tear at her shirt to pull for the milk without caution or shame.

  The men laugh in an uproar and pull the boy off his mother and toss him, from clenched fist to fist, until he is on the cushion again and she has disappeared from the dark doorway. His baba chortles.

  Na, na, na.

  You are no longer your mother’s fool, that milk belongs to me now.

  He pinches the boy tightly on the ear and with an exaggerated stomp and smile makes a great show of walking into the doorway where she disappeared. And the family sings to this. The aunts throw their voices high and the uncles open their throats to song and night and merrily take to their houses and beds to open their throats again to the nectars of their women and leave the boy alone, curled on the cushion in the divan in a cold association of heart and liver and lungs, child and king, abandoned to a sleep filled with dreams of barter and beg.

  In the morning the village sleeps through the first and second and third crows of the cockerel. Only the boy and his dog wake, and they leave the cold and empty divan in search of his maman. He walks through the streets with unblinking determination, eager to hold her face in his hands, announce his new manhood and reassure her that the babe in him will continue to devour and take.

  They move toward the northern edge of town, where the women zealously compete to keep up elaborate garden plots. Here are enormous eggplants, feathery dill, pendulous squash and vines spread with cucumbers and delicate saffron flowers. The boy walks past all the prized growth to his mother’s own plot, where nothing blossoms or grows. She is mad. The women of the village say it and the boy has heard. What type of woman walks over hot coals? Can’t be right in the mind . . . yes, yes, she was orphaned as a girl but we have all suffered . . . who is she to stay in bed all day with that one child of hers? And the boy, left to suffer her endless sad songs, it’s no wonder he runs about flapping like a bird, the craziness must be contagious . . . yes, yes, she has had a hard life, haven’t we all? At least I have children from my womb and vegetables in my garden. She has only that boy and her silence and dirt . . . beechareh, still, I feel bad, she must be dried up and dead inside, just like that messy plot of hers. They say she has no shame and it is true; the boy has found her in the wasteland before, feet covered in mud, hands long unwashed and eyes on fire with a fever that freezes through to the center of her.

  Today is no different. To reach her the boy must snap through tangles of roots with his hands and kick away rotted gourds with his unshod feet and she is there, sitting as she has sat before, legs crossed, combing through her wild hair with the desiccated stalks. The boy knows to keep a distance, wait for permission, the warm open eyes, the allowance. Only then can he approach to take of the teat, just as every animal must, and hold it with one hand, or both, or just teeth, and suck until the satisfaction comes and the skeleton of his body melts into the fallow earth, heavy and soft.

  Her song stops. She gazes
fixedly at the boy.

  So you’ve come again for your mother’s milk, yes, jounam?

  The boy nods and his maman laughs from somewhere deep inside her chest.

  Well now, they haven’t made you that much of a man, now have they? Running silly and shoeless in search of my teat?

  She laughs again and lifts the wool shift over her shoulder and head and what is suspended before the boy is fleshy and alive in this garden of dead.

  Come now, son of mine, show Maman what a man you are.

  Inside the boy the new man smarts at this challenge and in an instant he is upon her with avarice, son and man, baby and boy, taking what he wants with the callous lips and ravishing tongue of a hungry whelp.

  Maman

  A girl with a basket of onions on my hip.

  That is how they find me.

  I walk alone beside the field, under the skies of late summer, my shawl slipping to my shoulders. They come, two men on two horses, at full gallop. When they see my skin tanned from the sun and my eyes greener than the onion stalks in my arms, they slow and stop, one to stare and the other to ask:

  Are you Agha Barzani’s girl?

  I nod. Just as much as these onions are his onions I am the agha’s girl, I want to say.

  What is your age?