Khoda.
Khoda.
Ay Khoda.
The column of Kurds has dissipated and the boy wanders, unattached, through the battle to see only what the fire allows: the copper buttons of jackets, the shined black soldier boots, the sheen over the eyes of the men—uncles, cousins, father, soldiers alike. From the corners enormous beasts, made of heat and exhaust and throttle, move slowly across the camp, dropping soldiers who shout commands and organize themselves in rows to kneel and shoot. Older men in uniform stand back from the action, crops at their sides, and watch from under stiff-brimmed caps, their expressions blank and unconcerned. The boy walks on, unfazed and deaf.
In these short instances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.
For shelter, for sleep, the boy lays his body in the desert dirt alongside the carcass of a stallion. He lies face-to-face with the collapsed beast at the very moment of the horse’s death and the boy is the last vision caught by the black equine eye before it sweeps back, glutinous and glib, into the carved head.
What the stallion sees in that intimate infinity will be foretold over the time of the boy’s life and the life of those he spawns and the lives to exist over and after this one: a boy lies to sleep in the desert dirt; lies to faint; lies to die. Around him fires burn in triangles and pits and over the round curves of flesh. Everywhere in the lit oasis hungry djinn burrow down to Azrael and ghosts rise high among the dead strewn at the periphery.
The father searches for the son.
The father searches for the son.
The father searches for the son.
The son lies in the desert dirt to sleep, lies to faint, lies down to die; to remember and forever forget what the equine eye sees in its last sight: a boy seeded with a shame enough to burgeon and grow and take lives of its own. The father searches for the son. The father searches for the son (the son rises to the call and shouts in soundless dream talk, Baba! I am here! Behind the black horse! Where are the uncles and the cousins? Why do you lie and lead us to this death?) The father searches for his son and finds him dust covered and upright behind the corpse of a horse and reaches a hand to reach out for the boy and takes instead a bullet through the center of his palm. A soldier laughs and mutters, Kurd, and drops his weapon and takes to the father in a meticulous rage to kick his fallen body, unravel the turban from his head and plant boot after boot into the shattering skull. The father cries out nothing at first and then:
Please. Please. Please. And with his one good hand tears at his hair like a woman.
Please, I beg you. And his moans are high-pitched and sniveling. The boy silent-shouts at his father, Baba! Baba! Why do you beg? Baba, rise! Rise! Rise! Rise so that we too can be carved in the mountains’ stone, father and son, Kurd after Kurd . . . But the soldier is an automaton made not of night or earth, but of a machinery bleak and unstoppable that takes boot to head, boot to head, boot to head, until the face on the floor is covered with a bloody veneer; unrecognizable as father or son, uncle or cousin. It is in that moment the dying stallion sees the shame fester and feed in the boy, as the boy too would like to kick at the father, to thunder-shout, Rise! Rise! If this is ours, then rise! But instead the boy chooses to never remember, and thus never forget, and keeps the crushed face of his father secreted in a damp purgatory of forget and never-remember, to rove destitute as a ghost through the living days of a son who can never forgive.
A boy lies in the desert to sleep, to dream of boots, thick and strong and without the holes of history, that he can wear upon his own small feet to keep the feel and pull of the earth pushed back and away.
The Baker’s Son
Listen, I tell the Kurd orphan. Do you see that cadet over there? The one with the sandbag cheeks and big behind? He farts so massively in his sleep that you will want to pinch your nose tightly and breathe only through your mouth. Like this. I hold my nose with two fingers and let my jaw hang open like a mule’s. See? Some of the boys think you can still taste his stench, but don’t believe them. They complain about everything. What’s to complain about? I say. We are all here in this sweltering nowhere, our food is deliciously rotted, the morning tea smells like my baba’s armpits and we have to go around slaughtering the likes of you all day and all night in the name of some imaginary king. A soldier’s dream, wouldn’t you say? The Kurd orphan stares, unsmiling.
The sergeant brought him to my tent at dawn, explaining the obvious: he was a Kurd boy, he had survived the night, the massacre of his barbaric father and uncles, and by the shah’s orders, captured orphan boys are instantly conscripted. As he talks, the sergeant holds the Kurd boy by the neck with one hand and picks his nose with the other and orders me to tell him the story of my own glorious conscription. Even though the sergeant is a fat man with thin wits who regularly sickens me with his oily face and rancid burps, and even though my head still burns from last night’s battle, I oblige. I tell the Kurd boy only the choicest bits of my story: the day the shah’s soldiers came to my little mountain town of Ramsar and all the village boys ran to join, eager to align themselves with the majesty and force of such a regal army. And the soldiers still burned down our madrassa and my own baba’s bakery with its stores of wheat and flour. But we were determined to join, at least from what I can recall, because with one hand I clung to my own maman’s teat and with the other hand I reached for the gun they held before me. Yes, I think that is how it went. All the young boys were willing and ready and though I still have scars from the bayonet blades on my arms here and here, they are proud scars, Kurd boy! The soldiers told me they were marks of my forthcoming manhood. And just like that we were gone and I have not seen my family or that rocky village since, thanks be to our great shah.
Uhh-huh. Our great shah.
The sergeant nods in his stupid agreement. The Kurd boy makes no sound or gesture. I continue, detailing the joys of the barracks, the never-ending elation at our all-day and all-night marches through deserts and mountains abandoned by Khoda himself. There are mornings you will wake to the beautiful songs of birds. I make mention of the comfortable beds, kind commanders and the honey we were given every morning with our bread and cheese.
Don’t forget to tell him about the walnuts.
The sergeant pipes in, switching from one nostril to another to dig deep and listlessly while listening to my tale with rapt attention, each bloated eye watery with hunger and imagination. Yes, walnuts! I tell the Kurd boy. Enough to fill both hands. Crunchy and sweet and laced with tiny ants that make them even crunchier and sweeter! Then there are wrestling matches just like the ones you and your brothers had, I am sure, if not better, where the commanders watch and smoke and bet on the strongest boys and watch happily as the weakest boys cry. And the uniforms! Comfortable and cut to fit, itchy and still smelling of the Russian Cossack who last wore it. You will find yourself booted and tall, strutting about just to hear the rhythm of the spurs at your heels. A gun of your own, a knife of your own, a hat that might match your head, all gifts from the magnanimous shah, our father and true commander. Yes, magnanimous. Yes, our true commander. The picking sergeant murmurs as if in a trance.
Animated beyond belief, I go on. Have you heard of Tehran, boy? We are greeted like heroes in Tehran. The city where the lamplights burn all night? Where the women rush to you, Armenian, Turk, Azerbaijani, to touch the buttons on your uniform and the brim of your hat and offer themselves to you, though they smell like rotten fish. Where you can walk from street to street receiving greetings and gifts like a king and every commander and cadet you pass salutes you like family. Pure popularity, I assure him. The
lies exhaust me and I close with a flourish. Service to the shah is an honor full of rewards you cannot even imagine! Today is the first day of your blessed existence. Befaymin! With all my heart the army of the shah of Persia, soon to be Iran, welcomes you!
Aufareen! Aufareen. A thousand years for this shah and his Iran!
The sergeant removes his finger from his nose and hand from the boy’s neck and claps deliriously, like a deaf child, with his eyes closed and a wide smile across his face. The Kurd boy stares at me with his clear eyes and unscarred face. He understands none of what I say but keeps his gaze fixed on the shapes of my lips and face as if to determine what I intend.
When the sergeant has left us I find a long rope and tie a loose knot around the orphan’s ankle and another around the center pole of the tent. We lay down together on my cot and I whisper to his frozen face: it is not as bad and some days it is worse. He stares at me. He is a handsome boy, no more than ten or so, green eyes, with a curved mouth, supple and red. I fall asleep with his warm breath in my face. I wake in the unbearable heat of the afternoon to the sound of laughter filling the tent. Loose of his knotted leash the Kurd boy stands before me wearing my discarded boots, the laces wrapped clumsily around his shins, his face split in the smirk of a maniac. The other soldiers egg him on.
Show him. Show him. Show Karaj your new trick.
The Kurd boy grins and runs out of the tent and into the searing afternoon, runs among our tanks and tents, trips and rises, falls again and rises again and comes to kick the body of some nameless remnant from last night’s massacre. He kicks it again and again and stumbles back to me with the same delirious smile. The soldiers laugh and taunt.
The sergeant will be pleased, Karaj, you are raising the perfect cadet.
I drag him back into the tent, lightly smack his grinning head and wonder if such instant orphaning and instant adoption will beset the Kurd boy as a blessing or a curse. Either way, he is my brother now and his jovial face fans my hot mood. Listen, I tell him. See that soldier over there? The one with his rifle across his shoulders, the serious-looking one? Every night he wets himself in his sleep! Can you believe it? A grown soldier of the great shah! Pissing like a baby! The Kurd boy smiles and I smile too, like two brothers sharing the same joke.
Disbanded
The tent hangs in a series of soft drapes drawn up to a round apex. From the opening a solid yellow trunk of sunlight shines down. The boy sits cross-legged in the dark and watches suited men walk into and out of the slash of light in steps just long enough for the brilliance to flare their bronze buttons and lapel metals. The boy has been in a dusty dark like this before; in his disorientation he cannot help but confuse the memories of the cave with the memories of the massacre. It is early afternoon and hot and the boy’s allegiances mix randomly as he sits restless, with the zeal of a novitiate lost, in the center of the shadowy tent, eager for the flavor of this new world’s song and clap.
A hand appears in the shaft of light, disembodied by the dark, and holds a severed head by the hair. The smear of life liquids: mucus, blood and dry salted tears glisten in the dusty sun and the head twirls neatly in one direction and then another and comes to stop and face the boy with a long-dead stare. The jaw drops with a small jointed snap and a plum-colored tongue falls out, swollen and thick. A voice from the dimness asks the boy in his language:
Is this your baba?
The boy nods and shouts, ecstatic.
Baba!
The boy looks directly into the open eyes and announces:
I wear the boots now too! Look!
The purple tongue shines in the light and the boy, embarrassed for his baba’s ridiculous face, tries to stuff the muscle back into the mouth to give some order to the disgraced animal. All around him the darkness laughs.
And now what of us, Baba? What of the father and the son and my son and the kings of this Kurdish land? Now what?
—
Baba?
The desert wind blows hard and the walls of the tent arc inward to shrink the cavern and gather the men and the boy in an even smaller darkness. Over the top of the opening the gales drive with such a force as to create sound like the breath of lips over the rim of a bottle, like a whistle from the dead in one note: high, lucid and pure. In a jolt the disembodied hand yanks at the congealed mane and the head is gone. The boy waits, perhaps for the rest of the body, perhaps for an annealing where everything comes together again, alive and attached. A man in uniform crouches beneath the light and calls to the boy in his own language.
Come near.
The boy walks close and craves to touch the man and his shaven face and his sharp hat, but instead the man touches him: his cheek and jaw, the line of hair along his head, the roundness of his shoulders and flanks. The booted man stands to search through his pockets and draws forth a trinket: a figure of wood and string painted to look like the boy himself, legs and arms and a helmet of brown hair. With deft and nimble fingers the man manipulates the strings and the wooden boy walks and raises his legs, lifts his arms and kicks at the air with his wooden feet. The toy dances in front of and atop the boy, prancing from shoulder to head and down to shoulder again. The others in the tent look on, uneasy and suspicious of their captain’s sudden delight. The boy snatches the wooden figure that crawls on his head like an annoying insect. The captain laughs and says in his harsh accent, Go on, keep it. I have pocketsful. They dance at your will. Good puppets always do.
What water he receives comes from canisters and tastes not of mossy river rock or wooden well bucket or dried animal skin but of metal, sharp and acrid in the mouth. What food they give him—salted meats and bowls of rice—cures the hunger for only a few minutes before he retches the lot of it in a viscous spread at the soldiers’ feet. For the first days he is tied by a long rope loosely affixed to the center pole that holds up a musty, damp tent, and for those days the boy keeps to himself, shits in a corner and wets his pants. When awake, uncertainty overtakes him and the soldiers, booted men all of them, move about like specters to smile, poke his cheeks, pull down his soiled pants to look and laugh and smack his parts.
The boy makes eye contact with all of them and one of the soldiers, who closely resembles his oldest cousin, Nivad, gazes blankly back. The cousin and soldier are of the same age and have the same deep cleft in the middle of their chins and curled hair. The boy is quick and thrilled to shout, Nivad! Immediately he is slapped. But now he is desperate and convinced (and loves his cousin, who always kept a smile tucked away at the corners of his mouth and once sewed a kite for him) and remains adamant enough to shout again: Nivad! And he is slapped again by soldiers who mimic his desperate one-tone plea, Niiiivaaad . . . The boy cannot help himself. If this is Nivad then they are not dead, not the uncles, cousin or father, and he follows the familiar soldier from tent to tent, meal to march, until all the soldiers, identical in height and dress and voice, form an army of Nivads.
In these first days the mind of the boy turns to madness.
He runs from one to the next to tell them that their uniforms are merely costumes they can now abandon to become Kurds again, his Kurds who have been victorious against the shah and now must find his baba’s body, quickly, and sew on the head, collect a few pairs of boots and start the trip home. Again he is slapped.
Days pass and the boy is calm and hysterical in turns. After a time the army takes him for its own as he is quite obviously a Kurd and an orphan and a fool, their loot from the land. He is untied from his leash to serve as the errand boy and quickly becomes the captain’s favorite. Every evening he is allowed to sit on the old man’s lap and play dutifully with the puppet as the men play dutifully with him. On the day of dispersal the regiment collects itself, machine and man alike, to move north toward the mountains of Sanandaj in a line of tanks and horses much like the lines the boy has known.
The day is hot. The sun rises straight above them and lizards and snakes scuttle to shade as the army walks slowly out from the valley of
the massacre and the boy rides on the captain’s horse, nestled between the old man’s legs. The party passes the pile where Nivad himself lies atop the men: uncles, cousins and father’s headless corpse in a mound of the boy’s own flesh left to rot and disband at the prick of desert heat and vulture beak. The boy keeps fixed on his puppet, his dirty fingers and new boots, and does not raise hand or eyes in the direction of his fallen family. They move slowly into the first pass heading east and the mountains take them in, the desert behind them left to the shadows of sun and moon.
The Age of Orphans Page 6