The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  I shrug.

  Are those his fields?

  Again, I nod. Just as much as I am his girl.

  And this is the path you take home every day?

  It is not my home, I want to tell them, only a tent with a coal fire that blows smoke into our faces when we sleep head to foot to head to foot, three brothers and a sister and Baba Barzani, who keeps his knobby knees and chapped feet in my face, and the maman, who calls me girl and nothing else. Though they are not my family and this is not my home, I must take what they give: a tear of their lavash, a piece of meat, the every-night spill of their son’s seed, for I am an orphan and their generosity is a gift, so I am told.

  But I am not a speaking girl, so I nod nicely and say nothing. For a moment they look at me with sharp, narrow eyes. They stir their horses with shouts of Yallah! and I watch the beasts, a brown and a black, who care nothing for me or my age or my onions, run away in response to some whistle in the faraway wind.

  At the well that night Zayideh whispers to me that two men and two horses came today and told her baba they found me and her baba said, Boshee, and that tomorrow I will be prepared. I am not a speaking girl, lest I accidentally say something ungrateful, and so I ask no questions of Zayideh at the well and ask no questions the next morning when she and the maman take me to the river, where I am undressed, wet and scrubbed raw with a wool cloth. Zayideh’s hand is smooth and even and she tickles me from time to time, but I can’t laugh because every minute her maman is rough and presses my flesh as if to husk off my shell entirely, to leave me more naked than I already am.

  Then I am submerged, and when the waters rise to my chest and neck and chin and finally over my head, the heart inside me stops and still the maman holds me under. All I hear is the sound of water crashing on stone and water on water. A fish looks at me sidelong and swims on. I think she might kill me so I try for a scream and my mouth fills with the river and I am pulled up and dried and my skin is slathered with sickly sweet rose oil and I am dressed in thick skirts of bright colors and one woolen shift after another to cover my flat chest. Zayideh combs my hair and the knots come out in clumps, and she tosses them into the river and onto the ground until I am light of dirt and skin and hair, so light as to be nearly empty, a girl taken from herself and given into the river.

  In the afternoon the horses return with the sun in their eyes. Their men ride to where I sit toasting seeds at the fire and look down at me, one with a smile and one without. Baba Barzani takes them into the tent and yells at me to prepare the tea. Zayideh pinches my waist and whispers in my ear.

  Make it strong. You might be wed yet.

  I am alone with Baba Barzani and the two men in the tent. I heat the coals beneath the samovar, fill the basin with water and drop in the leaves. I watch them spread across the surface of the water like lace and listen to Baba Barzani tell them the story of how my family died. He explains, though he never saw, that my parents had been shot first, the shah’s work, of course, then sliced and put into the fire that ate up our house. I was found in the pen, clinging to sheep.

  I was forced to take all of their animals in the pen, you know, save all of their livestock, bring them home with me, and the girl came along too. And how she screamed those first nights! Ay Khoda! She hasn’t spoken much since, thank God.

  Here the two men nod and sip their tea and crunch on the sugar rocks. Baba makes no mention of the work his sons have done with me, or even of the work he has done, in the tent at night loud enough for the maman and Zayideh to hear. Instead he tells them again and again:

  She is a pure girl. Clean like the river.

  Cleaned by the river, I want to say, but it is true, I am not a speaking girl. If I was I would tell the two men I hid behind a pile of blankets when the soldiers came and demanded tithes, taxes for the herds, payment on the land; my baba refused them and said, Your shah is not my king, this land belongs to the Kurds. I would tell them how the soldiers laughed and one took him by the hair and held his face to the floor and the other three threw down my maman and said, I am sure the shah will be happy with some of the jewels from her purse. From my spot I saw the black feathers on top of their shakos quiver from side to side and watched the toes of their boots carve holes into the smooth dirt floor I swept each day. I listened to my baba scream horrible words at the men and then scream no words at all and in the end mumble his prayers and pleas with a mouth full of spit, tears and dirt. After they each took a turn on my maman she was a limp thing and the soldier carried them both into the yard and shouted, What good is a Kurd who can’t pay? What good is that to the shah? No good, no good at all. I ran into the pen to hide between the smelly wool of the sheep and ewes and watch all the quick moments of the kill and the long moments of the death and wait for God to turn me into a lamb so that I could disappear from my own flesh.

  The two men in the tent drink their tea in silence. Outside I hear horse hooves stomp on the grass and the blustered breath of impatient beasts.

  Chai? I ask of the men and the men shake their heads. One of them grabs my wrist and inspects the palm of my hand. The other runs the tips of his fingers across my forehead and jaw.

  Koshkel-eh, they say to one another.

  She will do, they tell the baba Barzani.

  The baba coughs.

  She comes with nothing, no dowry; she is an orphan girl, pure, but an orphan . . .

  I am told to bundle a few things and sent out of the tent and Zayideh helps me and teases and pinches me all the while.

  Tomorrow you will have a baby and your flat chest will swell with milk just like the ninny teats do.

  The maman sits crouched at the fire, flipping the bread from side to side, and says nothing as I get on the horse and wrap my arms around the strange waist. Baba Barzani says nothing and stands outside the tent with his hands clasped behind his back and we move slowly out and away from this home to the next. Zayideh shouts and claps behind me.

  Good-bye, goat girl! Khodafez!

  I ride with the man who touched my cheeks and jaw and the spine of the horse shifts beneath us with each step of its heavy haunches. The afternoon lasts long, and we move toward a sun that empties itself into the sky and onto the mountains and rocks and covers the land in a thick honey gold and then a dusty bronze and then disappears. I am asleep when we stop and the man lifts me from the horse and takes me to a sturdy house, not of cloth or canvas, but stone and mud, and lays me down on the motaq. I feign a deep sleep as my shawl is unwrapped and my shifts undone and all my skirts taken off until I am cold and shivering. He is on top of me with a body of muscle and hair and it is not a quick or quiet thing like in the tent with the brothers, but a prolonged deed; one movement that lasts through the long night. I feel a heat spread and pulse inside as if I was nothing but heart, no stomach or lungs or head, just a hot fast heart. The man takes me and turns me, now on my stomach, now on my back, and I am rotated in slow revolutions like planets and so I rise out from myself to float above the man and the house, amidst the pockmarks of stars in the night sky, to watch and wish for the red slit of dawn to cut open on the horizon so I may again sink into myself, to sleep and dream.

  That is when I knew you first, jounam, boy of mine.

  That is when I felt, in my bones and blood, that I, orphan girl with no belongings, girl with the basket of onions (not hers) who stood on the ground (not hers) with hard bare feet, was to possess a soul of her own; a son (mine) born to me, the mountains and the day.

  Now you stand before me to beg for milk and I want to say yes and yes and yes again, and hold your soft-haired head to my breast and sing my song to you, but you are no longer my boy, but a man, their man. I am bitter and furious that my one possession has absconded so easily and my garden dies around me and in me and in vengeance I will whisper in your ear: I knew you when you were a nothing. Not a Kurd. Not a boy or a girl. Not even your father’s seed and not the beast in my belly. I knew you when I planted fields that grew greener than God’s eye and the b
irds flew in ovals above to admire my work. When my mother screamed and my father spit and cried as the Kurds were cursed I knew my simple body would birth a doomed man, just as the green-eyed girl alive as the summer fields would become this woman before you, barren and rotted; we are part of the cycle of land and love, have and have not. Here, I have you, jounam, to hold and rock, to suckle and scold, to slip through my fingers in this next year to leave and join the rest. Go. Follow your men from one silly battle to another; claim this pebble-strewn plot or that and know this land grows and dies with little care for the men who try to hold it. Drink, my thirsty boy, drink. Take of my teat and your cut skin and your smoking pipe and your silly steel knife and pretend a man marches in you as the earth herself slips out from beneath you. Drink, jounam, drink as your motherland sours and dries.

  Kites, Trinkets, Boots and Birds

  The season of his initiation passes from winter into a cool barren spring. The boy takes to his new life with vigor, as it is a good life, full with allowances and nearly endless permission.

  Of chores there are few: clean out the samovar in the divan with fresh water; keep the men’s pipes oiled and ready; take his mare to pasture every morning and afternoon. None is more important than his Friday morning obligation to choose the animal slaughtered for the Friday afternoon feast, to pick which watery eyes, which bleat, which open breath of life must pass now into an instant death; to stand unwaveringly before his butcher uncle and decide on death itself without sentiment or visible deliberation.

  Of duties there is only one: to keep watch. He has been taken aside and told, by uncle, cousin and father alike, The shah comes with tanks and armies of horses and men. Keep a careful lookout for them. They will be of a frightening size, but do not scare, run to give us warning and all will be well. This is our land and the gods of it are on our side.

  No longer allowed his morning jumps from the roof, the boy perches, bird-like and still, on the highest hill in a constant survey of the continuous sky and the Mesopotamian flats and the horizon where they meet. He knows nothing of battle and passes the morning hours imagining the oncoming cavalcade of horses that breathe fire and smoke, his strong scream of warning, the shoulders that will hoist him up to celebrate his bravery and sharp eyes. By afternoon he is hot and distracted; his thoughts are full of air and wind and view, the count of passing birds, the shapes of flocks and their elegant escapes across the sky. Evening comes and the boy descends into the village, where he reports duteously that the horizon is empty and without threat in any direction. For this service he receives a warm hand to his back from his baba.

  You must have lucky eyes, boy of mine, to keep such strong soldiers so far away. You will make your ancestors proud.

  Of permissions, there are many. Now he can slap the younger cousins, the ones who have not yet had their year in the cave, slap and laugh and pull on their foreskin with taunts of the pain to come. He can ride away on a horse, any of them, as far as he wants, to traverse the distant edges of the mountains and return home with trinkets of traveling salesmen, the doves of magicians, kites made by the old bahktis.

  He can travel aimless and free but must return to take all of his baba’s commands: Clean the pipe of grit, wash my turban clean, dig for the wax in my left ear! In turn, the boy has the permission to command his aunts and girl cousins alike: Food! Drink! Now! Though he demands of his maman like he sees the other men demand of their women, the boy is careful to keep himself close to her, so to take from her the milk he feels his new man needs. Without chiding him she allows it, always and only in her dead garden, where they are found by his baba, who doles out a hard smack for the transgression. And so it is. For the sake of these permissions, duties and chores, the boy must haughtily abjure the warm milk and heartbeat and sever the liquid thread that ties the boy to mother and mother to land and land to the bodies of all the boys before, and so close, the heart of the child, ventricle by ventricle, until the organ’s sunken shape is inhospitable to any innocence, folly or blind love.

  Now the boy wears the thick scarves around the loose pants, heavy shirts and a turban tight about the head. He moves around the village with an untested strut and puff of his chest and the men applaud him while the girl cousins laugh. Every afternoon he walks alone to the ice water stream just above the village to swim, as instructed, in the near-frozen rush that pierces through him like needles until he has to sit, knees pulled up to his chin, and sob the hot tears that cover him in a lukewarm sadness. Once he has cultivated the cold heart of the Kurd the boy walks back to the village to be one man with the rest; to sit in the divan and smoke the sweet brown paste and listen and nod at the stories of battles won and land gained or lost, to grow sleepy but feign joy; to smoke and cough and drink and vomit and sing and cry into the night until the distinction between everything and everything else dissolves and the boy, laughing, is father and dead grandfather, past and present, table and turtle all at once.

  * * *

  Long before dawn the boy is shaken awake and told to dress.

  Hurry. To the divan. The courier has come.

  The boy follows his cousin, his head still murky with dreams. The room is full of men who smell of sleep, wives and warm beds. They gather in a circle of serious faces to listen to the whispered story from the courier’s mouth. The boy sits with the rest and stares at the stranger among them, a thin man with dusty skin and a turban wrapped tight and high around a face washed over with death. Too tired to understand, the boy leans on the cousin next to him, who listens rapt and wide-eyed to the tales: charred fields, tanks propelled by captured thunder, aghas’ angry faces hanging from gallows made of sturdy teak. The courier speaks of villages smothered: Bana, Hawraman, Orumiyeh, Sanandaj; house holds robbed of gold and goods, ransacked and then wet with gasoline and burned while the families were bound and forced to watch the pyre of their home. He continues on, eyes downcast, to tell how the hero Simko was captured, tortured and tossed to the street to scare the Kurds and deem their call for country foolhardy and counterfeit. The courier pauses for effect, for breath, and the cousin incessantly elbows the boy.

  Vay, vay vay. Now we must fight! Are you hearing this? We must go! The room is alive with panic and joy and the boy wakes completely from the courier’s nightmares to find the faces of the men turned and contorted in a manner unfamiliar to him. They begin to move and jostle about the room like different limbs of one angry organism and the boy is kicked and pulled and nearly stepped on. He grabs about his insides for the man that supposedly grows therein and finds that a sensation of bravery sizzles in his gut, born of the fervor in the room, and grabs his cousin by the shoulder, to shake him and cry.

  Yes! We must go! To defend the land for the Kurds! Yes!

  The courier continues with the names of passes, the numbers of horses, the hidden armories and on and on. The boy stands to listen to the messenger, who paces in front of the window, slowly revealing details and plans. Behind him day breaks over the eastern mountains and thin yellow light floods the divan, filling the cracks of the men’s worried faces with gold, like a promise or a prize.

  The village comes alive. Everywhere arms reach to empty supplies of food from storerooms and cellars and pile them in a center courtyard where a spit turns two dried and bloodless calves. The knives are unburied and cousins take to the blades with hot oil until they glisten and wink, while uncles push bits of bridles into horse mouths as penned-in mules and hinnies watch with indifferent eyes. Women, wives, sisters and girl cousins, run about and cry, Khoda! Khoda! Khoda! with drawn faces and moist eyes. They bustle in kitchens, courtyards and gardens to grab and pack for their men. They clutch cummerbunds and stirrups and wail.

  Khoda! A quick return!

  And:

  Khoda! A victory against the shah, that treacherous djinn, ay Khoda!

  Older aunts chant their suras feverishly and young girls drop peacock feathers into the saddlebags of their unwed cousins. The maidens laugh and throw bright-eyed smiles in
the faces of tomorrow’s husband, lover, father, and promise them:

  Jounam, I will wait for you, I will wait.

  Come back with a gold coin, a soldier’s tin hat, a victory trinket for us to build a home around.

  Victory is the spice of love, don’t you know . . .

  The women wail and move through the morning filling sacks with supplies of lavash, fallen fruits, sweetmeats and tea; filling ears with cries and plaudits, hands with locks of hair; all the while careful to fill the veins of their men with braveblood enough to last for the journey and the clash.

  The boy works alongside them, packing and gathering, and fear tickles all over him like a painful itch. Now and again he pauses to stand and feel through the soft soles of his sandals for a tremble and then flattens himself to feel for the vibrations, and still, nothing. No tragedy reaches him through the crust of earth; he hears no shouts calling the warriors in the direction of the dying. He wants to run to the divan and break the courier’s sleep and make sure the hero in him will be born, that there will be battle and victory and his baba’s pride, but he is caught by arm and neck and commanded by cousin and uncle and father.

  Sharpen the blades! Yes, even the scythes!

  Pack the bags with rice! Chai! Toorshi! Morabah!

  Fill the casks with water! All the water in the well!

  At the well the boy drinks and drinks from the cool wooden bucket, gulp after gulp, but cannot swallow enough to wet over the dry desert fear makes of his mouth. Thirsty for something else, the boy forgets his duties and runs about to find his maman. She is nowhere to be seen. Not buried underneath the blankets on the motaq, at the river’s edge or in her dead garden, and the boy cannot see or think through the gaseous dread that covers him inside and out like a cloud. When it is time he is found and easily snatched up by the hard hands of his baba, which hoist him onto a waiting mare. The old man admonishes, Eh, I thought I brought home a man from the caves, a brave Kurd . . .