The fish know you are not keen with that clumsy clapping.
The boy submerges his arms wrist-deep and feels only the stones and water and then the flesh of a fish that he fiercely grabs and punctures as it passes through his hands. From the swirl he withdraws a carp, mangled, bloody, spirited. He continues to press and feels his own fingertips drain the life from the cold wet body until it falls limp in his hands. The bahkti gives out a demoniac laugh and licks his waxy fingertips.
Aufareen. Aufareen, boy. Come and choose a prize.
The boy follows him back to his covered cart, where the floor planks are loosely hewn and all manner of dirt and dust covers the contents within: a bell, a string-limbed doll that moves at a tug, a gourd filled with seeds to sound like rain, eye masks of clear dark glass and twine. The bahkti fingers them all, leaving behind the clean streak of his touch. From a canvas wrapping he removes a jagged piece of blackened mirror and hands it to the boy, who examines it to find fragments of his own face: the lip and the nose, the blinking eye and the brow above, the red mouth full with tongue and tiny teeth.
It is sharp, but it is yours. To break it is a certain curse.
He is careful to carry it first in his palm and then in the folds of his waistband and tells no one of the lesson or the gift.
In the evening the men feed the bahkti and offer him the best of their smoke and arak and gather to wait for their fortunes. The old man sings them songs of the famous Kurd warriors, tales of the brave Simko who hides in the mountains with bands a thousand strong and ballads of the pretty blue-eyed maidens who live in the cracks of the Zagros, sequestered and pure. The uncles and father recognize these as stock tunes and ask directly:
What of us, uncle? Where are we to fight and when?
The bahkti clears his throat, pounds on his duduk with one hand, plucks the sitar with the other and sings:
It matters not, the fates revolve.
Like the earth and the moon and the sun.
The fates revolve.
What was your father’s victory is your loss and your son’s triumph, his scion’s tragedy.
Ask me, and this is all I can foretell. Lay didi la la. La didi la la la.
The boy hears none of this and lies stomach down on his sleeping sack to gaze and gaze again into his own eyes, green ovals unfamiliar and flinching, open and endless with infinity to rival the black cosmos above.
For days they bivouac alongside the river and wait for a sign. The bahkti has long since gone and the courier no longer leads and the boy grows bored and impatient. He follows his baba about and begs.
Now, Baba, now? Can we go now?
His father is taciturn and says nothing to the first few inquiries and then finally replies.
It is not for us to choose. We must be told.
Days pass and the itch of excitement dulls, and the father grows irritated at the boy’s sullen face and sends him, with a cousin and a bronze coin, up and out of the ravine to find a goat for sacrifice. The father orders the two boys:
Go find a nanny and we will offer her up, blood and spirit, and wait for the telling, for the command.
The boy and his cousin walk toward the great green slopes with little idea as to where such an animal exists. The boy takes time to explain victory to his cousin, as he has come to understand it, as he has invented it.
There will be ribbons and fireworks and all of the girls will kiss our hands and heads because we have made the land safe for them and my maman will be happy enough that her garden will grow all around her and then I can get a little drink . . .
In the early afternoon they stand before a house of white mud from which a man emerges, without summon or call, and takes the boys to a pasture of soft clover and daisy clusters, where a flaxen-haired nanny chews coolly on the earth’s sweet cud. A length of rope tethers her neck to a post beaten deep into the ground and at the sight of the man and the smell of the two new boys the nanny nags just once, loud and guttural, and runs to dash away but is caught by the solid rope tied to her neck. In an instant she is raked backward. The boys approach and again she lurches forward with an ornery and defiant pull and again is restrained. Between each yank the nanny pauses to smell the malfeasance on the two new boys and dodge their death message again and again until finally a rock makes its way to her head and she can no longer pull herself from the stake or pull the stake from the ground. With neither bleat nor tug she follows the two boys back to camp, her eyes dazed with admonition and omen.
At the camp the boy’s father inspects the nanny with disdain. He looks once at the goat, and with her honest and impertinent face, she looks once at him. The father shakes his head.
There is too much life in her yet.
Neither the boy nor the cousin understands for what misdeed they receive such fast slaps about the head and in their surprise they forget to cry out. The father walks away from them angrily to tie the nanny to the ravine’s sole tree, where she can reach neither water nor herb, and the boy trails behind to hear his father’s mumbles.
She is a bad omen among us.
Ya Ali, pardon us for such a hasty, untame offering.
Ya Ali, pardon us, please.
When the sun sets the boys tie the she-goat by the ankles, front and back, and carry her to the fire where the men wait, sing, smoke and hold out a bowl crafted just that day of hardened river silt. Even upside down, after a day of bray and bleat without water or cud, the nanny flicks her tail and head with strong snaps and twists her torso in flagrant jerks, her buoyant body one gesture of loud declaration. The knife at her throat is a thin thing, a quick thing, and the blood flows first in spasms and then streams, and the final sounds of her life are drowned by the men’s song. It is an unfamiliar song, one the boy has never heard, a series of names intoned again and again, and the boy takes to his bed away from the feast of red drink and red meat and the drone of that same song. He blinks in the night and waits for the men to sleep and for silence to cover the camp like a heavy blanket. To night he is tired; the day has been long and unwieldy and the boy has no energy left to discern between celebration and lament.
Baba
Ay khoda, I am a listening man.
We hear them first in the wind; long songs that whistle youuu youuu youuu and tease us out from under our women and away from our warm fires and off the spines of wearied jacks. Easily we are pulled from these lives and strung about this enormous earth as servants to your sound.
And we follow, ay Khoda.
We follow the choruses sung to us by the wings of birds, the tick of rain, the puzzle pieces of cloud left in the sky at day’s end, and we come, Khoda, we come to your commands. As you called my father before me and call the father in me now and my son who is now at my side, we have all listened and yoked our unknown fortunes to your desires.
In my life I have joined the men to walk the hot desert flats, climb sharp mountains’ edges, and live in caves so to better hear your summons. To better rid our land of outsiders: Russian, Armenian, Turk, Qajar, and now this new mock king. Battle after battle the Kurds have rushed to defend this land, all at the beckon of your call. To hear your call is to obey. We listen for the sake of our lives, the lives of brothers, sons and unborn alike. It is fear that sacrifices the land and love that holds it close, so you have called, ay Khoda, and so we obey, obey, obey.
Twice now I have come to this ravine. Once when I was a boy like my own son—who is still malleable of heart and head, though he masquerades with a firm age—and now once again when I heard your call in the courier’s voice. Each time we gather ourselves in obedience, neither conscious nor considered but made of movement and memory, and each time we find ourselves swallowed in this depth, this chasm of shrub and cut red stone, to wait for your command and brace for the battleblood to beat within.
That first time I waited like my boy waits, unknowing, and I listened to the uncles tell me I must steel my boy heart and boy breath, for when the battleblood comes there is only black fury for sight
and death drone for sound. I waited patiently for you then, ay Khoda, and for days, nothing came. My father and uncles smoked and threw dice and waded in the river like children. We sang to you every night and every dawn I pressed my head to the earth to hear a sound and the men laughed at me, Foolish boy—what if it comes from the sky, what if it’s in the wind?
I was taught to receive without expectation; and so you came from the sky in a murmuration of the smallest birds that landed on our shoulders and heads, and we emptied the ravine to follow them up and out to the desert floor. Flying before us we could see Mohammad Al-Din’s men and their cloth tents spread across our land, easy and unaware. And we rode in to take of their horses and their camels, their gold and feathered hats. We rode in beneath the flurried, chirping starlings as bayonets broke in our horses’ ribs and we fought with empty hands; to pull the tongues from their mouths and push their eyes into their heads and press in the soft skin of their necks until, face by face, they fell. And you were with me all that time, ay Khoda, and I was just a boy with blood on my hands and the sense of you in me much more than a sound in my head, more than a song in my ears; an enchantment entire.
And here again we have come to wait for your call and the boy I was then lives in my boy now, with his own impatience born of a mix of fear and courage. He wanders our riverside camp in constant query: When do we go? Where do we go? How will we know? How am I to answer, ay Khoda? How do I teach patience to my beloved? He is but a boy, full of fanciful ideas and too long at the breast of his mad mother’s milk, but he is my only and I have loved him with all of my living self and all the dead I carry in me. All that is left for me is to teach him.
Teach him to be a listening man.
A man patient to you.
In blind duty like the rest of us.
The boy lies awake each night to look up at the stars and seek out a sign, and I cannot explain that here we’ve been cast, with no course or recourse, to wait, growing bored, hungry and vainglorious in imagination alone. Many days have passed since we left our women and wives, ay Khoda, and though we sing to you each night and clap our small hands to the ceiling of stars and wait for the thunder of your two palms, or the flight of owls, or the whistle in the wind—nothing comes. My boy listens to the men, who have grown disquiet, and asks me:
Do the gods have us wait here while somewhere our blood burns? Baba, why do we wait?
Amu said that while we sit cross-legged in this ravine day and night Kurd blood, mamans’ blood, burns and burns and we do nothing. So I send him and his eager cousin to seek an animal for the slaughter, the blood sacrifice that always brings you near, and in his return, ay Khoda, your call has come.
And: I am a listening man.
And: I am an obeying man.
To hear and obey you are one and the same. When you sent sign in the body of the goat, I cursed the boy and tethered the beast far from the men, who would know with one look at the overalive eyes of the nanny that the enemy is near and strong. I kept the beast away until moments before the kill, to spare the men this truth, but they recognized it nonetheless and we have taken your omen in stride, without complaint or plea, as this will be our land long after we are gone.
We are listening men, ay Khoda, and if this is your command, so be it. Our minds are not made of matter but of the echoes of your desires, and we are obedient men, ay Khoda, and I a willing father among them, prepared to lead my one son into an unfortunate battle, the two of us ready to attend death’s call.
The Night Essay
With bellies full of goat meat, the men rise at dawn, empty camp and travel up the steep ravine walls and across the same grassy planes wandered yesterday by the boy and cousin. The smooth flats give way to slopes jutted with boulders and the men dismount and ascend into a soft mist that hides the sharp rocks all around. They maneuver through cracks and along switchbacks that elevate them to a vantage point beneath a sheltered and craggy peak, where they remain, secreted and all-knowing, like the gods they call to in their everynight prayers. Here they perch to afford a view of tents, men and black machines that rove about the green plain below, small and shifting, measured and disoriented, like citizens awoken to an unfamiliar country.
At night the group bivouacs in the talus slides between stone peaks and their shadows. The men arrange samovar and pots and feedbags in the loose pebbles as if arranging accommodations in a luxurious divan. They set up no tents and light no fires and sing no songs and play only silent games free of raillery and maintain an invisibility so pristine the boy wonders if they exist at all. He questions nothing though, for since the sacrifice and the slaughter the men have moved with somber and absolute rectitude, as if taking orders the boy cannot hear. For two days they camp, eating only salted meats and drinking cold tea and regularly climbing up to the peaks to catch sight of the shah’s men and crawl down again, expressions unchanged. At night the men sleep bunched together in tight knots below the warm bellies of the horses, which shift from side to side in the steady saunter of their equine dreams.
One afternoon six caravans of men arrive in succession, turbaned and armed, to join the congregation already gathered. They embrace and speak and smoke and make camp amidst what is already established. At night the boy steps carefully about them, for he is unable to tell his own cousin from another cousin, his uncle from another’s father; his men are now so mixed with strange men that in the dark, all the faces meld into one. To fall asleep amidst them on that first night, the boy gazes into the mirror given to him by the bahkti and takes the reflected image as a brother, his homologue among the arrived, to whom he whispers the secrets of the bravery and fear he juggles within.
We march forward, for we are Kurds and this is our land. The men of the shah may look strong, but Baba says it is not the right sort of strength and they will be defeated with one blow from my new gun.
The boy nods and his reflection nods back. The boy goes on.
We must push the soldiers back off our land so that there can be smiling mamans and sweet tea and days of uninterrupted play.
The reflection smiles at the boy.
Yes, our land. My land and yours. I’ve no fear in me at all.
The reflection is still, serious through the eyes and about the mouth. The boy nods to make sure it is in fact his replication and not some other world of boys like him, scared and silent. The reflection nods back.
That is correct, no fright at all.
Well before dawn on the fourth day the men rise in unison and relieve into cupped hands their night’s liquid, which they splash onto their faces. In the early blue light they do not eat breakfast or bread or even dried meats and mulberries, and the boy grows hungry and cannot find a face familiar enough to complain to and so scrounges about the empty burlap sacks and finds nothing. As if to tease the hungry boy the men take turns with a knife and cut a line across the palms of their hands and squeeze blood out from their bodies into a tin cup that follows just behind the knife as it is passed from man to man; they drink and are nourished. So it goes for the morning and the afternoon. The forty or sixty or eighty men obey the silence and pour of their life juice into a cup and imbibe it easily, as if it were a glass of tea. The boy makes the incision himself and the gash sears less than he expects. He clutches his fist to watch with glee as the ruby drops join the rest and hungrily drinks the warm viscous fluid like a noonday soup.
At dusk, when the sun stretches into a thin line and the red line of blood has passed into and through all the bodies of the men, they descend. They leave the encampment, each on his own horse with his own gun, and footstep carefully down the shale and whetstone of the mountain. There are more horses and men than the boy can count and they follow, one after the next, in a long line that looks from the bottom like the mountain’s own vein. Once down on the plain they take cover under the navy coat of a moonless night and walk toward the steady flicker of the shah soldiers’ camp, keeping their long-barreled shotguns and rifles laid perpendicular across the necks of
their horses. Drunk on the night and the warm wind, the boy marches along gaily, his eyes trained to the fires that burn on the far distant sphere, open and inviting, as now he is in a line of warriors to war, in love with the land that spreads out around them, for tonight it is his to claim.
The boy can feel his baba’s eyes seek him out in the crowd. The father searches for the son and catches sight of him at the end of the line, where he stares into the night with a focus resonant and clear. His posture is sturdy and there is little left of the nervous or uncertain child. The boy watches his baba turn to lead in the front with a satisfied expression and knows he is a glad baba, happy to offer history a hero.
They approach.
From the periphery of the encampment no sentry stirs or yells Kurd! and the men enter with speed and raise guns and bloodied fists in the air but make no war cry and wait instead for the sounds over which they have no control. The garrison’s young soldiers barely move from their fires or out from underneath the blankets and they are easily overtaken by Kurd riders vested in sashes of bullets that shine brilliantly from days of diligent spit and polish. Not until the first shot, a misfire from the hands of an old uncle, do the soldiers scatter into tents and supply piles to regain holsters and bayonets and rifles and redirect their confusion forward, into the chaos.
* * *
In a minute, an hour, the night entire, the boy, long fallen and aimless on the surface of the nightmare, wanders to witness soldiers and men entangle in rigid links of human flesh, and he bawls in the spaces between burning tents and motionless machines. From triangle openings in canvas huts, soldiers aim and fire and hit horses that stumble and collapse in heaps. The men who rode atop them scramble from underneath the crushing slab and the boy watches one after another fumble at the triggers of rifles and pistols not even once cocked. Shots are fired, aimless and ill-guided, only to disappear into the night or pierce the muscle of a dead horse. Eventually the men, uncles, cousins and father, abandon the combustion of the weapons and take them as steel staffs to open the faces of soldiers, with brutality enough to bring forth blood. They exploit what ever surprise remains of the attack and raid tents to drag out the unbelieving and the fearful, to force heads into fires and pummel the raucous globes of flame until extinguished. But the soldiers are intact, unfazed, already part man and part machine, and raise their rifles like arms and fingers and fists and take to the easy rhythm of fire and shoot, fire and shoot. And what the men perform with cries and shouts the soldiers perform with automatic efficiency: to aim and pull life out again and again with a mechanized dexterity and repetition so thoughtless that in the disorder and bloodletting the Kurds, adorned in useless ammunition, now accept bullets from the guns of soldiers trained in nothing but the aim and fire. All around the boy there are sounds of falling, the fallen and cries of:
The Age of Orphans Page 5