The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  Peacock Feathers and Strong Soap

  In 1946 behad Chezani, a schoolteacher, went crazy during class and threatened his students with the needled end of a compass for a whole afternoon before finally—pop!—piercing his own throat. That same year Kaavan Izadi, a local man with a farm, experimented with pesticides distributed by the modernizing committee and, mixing them with lye—boom!—exploded himself and the shed he worked in, and injured a donkey who stood nearby, unprepared. The village farmers swore off pesticides, and the hinny healed but gave birth to a lame foal the next spring. That was the fall when General Il’al Dizayee, who the Kurds sang about in their songs, was killed and we stared at newspaper pictures of his body laid out in front of a line of soldiers suited up just like our baba. Our maman took the picture to our baba and laughed in his face: Ha ha ha. Now this is progress. You pretend to take care of state business, Mr. Captain, but these soldiers really do. Who have you killed? Too much of a Kurd to take care of your own? Ha. Ha. Ha. Our baba had only two types of response to our maman’s hahahas. One was silence and stillness and the other one was the opposite of silence and stillness.

  Before he stuck the compass in his throat, Behad Chezani came to our house to ask our baba, slowly, because his voice was shaking, W-hhy can’t I speak Kku-rrd in the school? And our baba didn’t take his sunglasses off to talk to him and said it just like this: It is the orders of the most imperial shah. And from somewhere in the house we heard our maman make a snorting sound, and it was one of our baba’s still times because Behad was there, watching him.

  Without their clothes on, Kurd faces and hands didn’t look that much different from those of our maman or the men in the modernizing committee who lived in the house in Kermanshah and drove a car. They had lighter eyes sometimes, and sometimes light hair, but everything else—neck, wrists, lips and ears—was pretty much the same. Only when you looked at their Kurd clothes could you tell a difference: they were dirtier, like they had all rolled around here and there, and full of color, sometimes little mirrors where you could see your blurry self.

  In school it was even harder to tell because we all wore the same white shirts and black pants and sweaters with a sharp dip in the middle. Our maman said, Now this is how the little boys and girls in England dress, you should be proud, they are very smart. I had friends named Darius Safanejad, Afsaneh Khorshand, Mehrnaz Miraftabi, and on and on, but I also had friends named Erdelan Dermikorol, Gazin Ocalean, Kilda Teimourvian and Nivad Qourdeh. Gazin Ocalean had a peacock in his yard and we pulled its feathers from the tail to see it run and then take them home to our maman, because Gazin Ocalean’s mother said, These are always good luck. Our maman would always burn them and make us wash our hands in detergent.

  Nivad Qourdeh was the son of another Kurd soldier who worked for our baba and when I asked him who his best friend was, he said, My gun! And that his father let him sleep with it at night, just in case. When our baba heard that he just shook his head and asked, What do children need guns for? I never wanted a gun as a child. And Nivad Qourdeh’s baba nodded his head in serious agreement. Nivad Qourdeh’s baba had only one eye; the other one must have fallen out, because they put a big white marble in its place and it rolled around covered in tears. He always brought nuts for the house, and when he found out our maman didn’t like nuts he brought boxes of nabots instead. Our baba stayed friends with him to the end, even after he was hung for treason against the shah and his head puffed up so much that his marble eye popped out and a street dog sniffed at it and walked away. After that our baba smoked so much of the flower that he wore sunglasses all the time and didn’t take off his uniform for days.

  When I was six, baba ordered that a cinema be built in our town. When they showed the film The Great Ziegfield a man from the modernizing committee walked up and down the aisle shouting, Imagine those buildings, imagine those cars! Kermanshah of the future could look just like that. As he walked he stepped on all the shells of sunflower seeds that people had spit out and the audience shouted back at him, Choke up! Be quiet! We are watching cinema! The frustrated state employee yelled back, Choke up yourself! What do you need quiet for? You can’t even understand English! And he was right, and we were all looking at the pictures of gold-haired women in long dresses with shoes like nails and tall buildings that reached up to the sky and streets covered in smooth stone, and not understanding a word. This didn’t stop us from throwing the sunflower seeds at him or laughing when someone on the screen slipped.

  Of all the movies I liked the ones with the newsreels most. They were full of pictures of important men and women and important airplanes and ships. When they showed a picture of the shah of Iran, our king, Maman clapped and Erdelan Dermikorol’s father threw sunflower seeds at her, but she ignored him and whispered to us, Look how straight and clean he stands. Look at his Soraya. That dress! And then she would sigh. Every time we saw a picture or a film of the shah we sighed.

  For the fall our maman was asked to teach Farsi at our school in Kermanshah, since she was born and raised in the Farsi capital, Tehran. After one day of all of us repeating in song the names of great cities and foreign countries—Dam-a-vand, Shee-raz, Amrika—Ferydoon Moididi and Taba Kazeen and Nisar Montandahr didn’t come to school the next day. But all the time Ja-han Khaligizad kept on bringing peacock feathers to our house as gifts from his family and our maman kept burning them and sending Jahan home with hands rubbed raw from detergent.

  And all these times there were parades on the one smooth street in Kermanshah. On the mornings of the parades, our baba would shout, Clean the kids! Wash their hair and their faces! while our maman was scrubbing the seven of us so hard that our skin stung and everybody cried a little bit, even Hooshang, who was almost a man. Our maman yelled back: I can’t wash the Kurd out of them! They’ll never be clean! And baba usually did not stay silent and still at this and someone always wore a little bit of blood to the parade.

  Ferydoon Faroukheyzade told me he came to the parades to see army men in their suits. He called them Iran suits and I didn’t tell him what our baba told us, that their suits were old Russian Cossack suits and itched all over in the winter and in the summer, but I don’t think he cared. He liked the medals and the colors and the guns the soldiers carried with them. Kilda Teimourvian came to the parades to see the horses in a line because at her house, she said, the horses were wild and ran around and you couldn’t get close enough to touch them. Once, at a parade, she was bitten by a horse ridden by an Iranian-suited general. The bite sounded like this, snapglumph, because the horse bit first with its teeth and then its lips. Kilda didn’t blame the horse and still came to see them with her wide blue eyes. Our maman came to the parades with red color on her lips and cheeks in a very tight jacket and skirt, like a man’s suit for a woman, but so tight that she couldn’t breathe very much. She would sit under a parasol with the men from the modernizing committee, who wore dark suits and oil in their hair, and while our baba walked around and shook hands and clapped backs and waved and rode in the cars, she would fan herself and smile and say things like: Yes, beautiful day, this fresh mountain air is so good for the lungs, and then she would try to take a deep breath to show how good it was, except that she couldn’t because of her tight man-woman suit. Of course they speak Farsi, I’ll send them to Tehran for proper schooling, oh, of course, even the girls. I was educated in Tehran, the shah encourages it, you know. We must knit this new country together somehow. The modernizing committee men would nod their shiny oily heads.

  Our maman did not talk to Nivad’s mother or Kilda’s mother or Taba’s mother, who let their kids run in the street and watched the parade from inside buildings or on rooftops. Our maman talked only to the men on the modernizing committee, who held her parasol and lit her cigarettes.

  There were no contests at the parades, but sometimes there were prizes. We thought the Iranian modernizing committee was very generous to give out so many exciting and free things. Kilda’s baba once won a free phone
call from the phone house and he stood in the street thanking God for his good fortune, and our baba said, Allah has nothing to do with it. Thank the shah! And Kilda’s baba smiled in a secret way and said, The shah, Allah, it’s all the same thing, isn’t it? You could see our baba was confused by that question; for a moment his body was in between being still and unstill. Kilda told me that when her baba went to the phone house he stood there and called our baba a pedarsag because he had no one to call and he felt tricked. I realized that was a big difference between being a whole Kurd and a half Kurd like us; the whole Kurds didn’t know about anyone or anything outside of the mountains.

  But everyone came to see the cars: Darius Safanejad, Afsaneh Khorshand, Mehrnaz Miraftabi, Erdelan Dermikorol, Gazin Ocalean and Nivad Qourdeh. People got tired of the Iran suits, and the horses and the guns, but no one ever got tired of the cars, and they would move so slowly and smoothly down the street that Erdelan thought there were a thousand snails inside the hood, pulling and sliding slowly across the ground. When our maman heard that she laughed: Ha! Our baba was sometimes in the car waving, sometimes alone and sometimes next to a big-framed painting of the shah. The shah had a bald head and a serious smile and he wore an Iran suit with more medals and badges and crosses than any other soldier I had ever seen. Sometimes our maman would make a wreath of flowers to hang around the frame and the cars floated down the street like that, with all of the boys and girls from school in constant contact with the feel of their slick metal sides, fascinated by our curved reflections looking back upon us. Erdelan was disappointed when they opened the hood and there were no snails, just the engine. He told me he didn’t understand the engine, and that was less exciting. He died of gassing that winter, when the kerosene heater his family had won at a parade leaked and killed them all while they slept. It was winter and for the first time they were able to keep the windows closed, glad for their new smokeless heat.

  Apostate Breed

  Mahabad!

  Reza sits at his barracks desk. The front room is full of soldiers gathered around newspapers and radios, each announcing in a loud whisper:

  They say Kermanshah is the next to go.

  They speak as if Reza is not there, but he is there, perfectly there; within earshot he smokes and listens, smokes and hears the din outside. They have come from all the villages around to parade in the streets of Kermanshah with their wives and daughters and flocks. Through the thin barracks wall and the one window the cries seep in, triumphant and merry.

  Mahabad!

  Mahabad!

  Long live the Kurd republic of Mahabad!

  Reza taps his finger to the beat of their simple shouts.

  Mahabad! The children will speak Kurdish at school!

  Mahabad! Off with the yoke of Iran and shah! Mahabad! A home for Kurds everywhere!

  Three taps for the word. Ma. Ha. Bad. Tap. Tap. Tap. Today their dream is true. A Kurdish republic in Mahabad. A dictionary and a printing press. Leaders in suits. A constitution for Kurds and a declaration of Kurdish autonomy. A country of their own. Reza closes his eyes to imagine the scene: the square full of people, barely room enough to move, so they have to shuffle and shout while good feeling spreads and gels them together until they are an impervious mass of Kurd and flock animal and possibility. Even the old wart-faced mule smiles. Vendors toss out fruits and burnt ears of corn (. . . no one goes hungry in the motherland . . .). There are kites and candies and the joy is general as birds of all varieties fly above in a sky blue and inestimable. He hears the voices of young boys rise above the commotion, more sonorous and zealous than the yells of their fathers and uncles.

  Mahabad!

  Mahabad!

  Mahabad!

  Reza cannot help but smile. The captain sits at his desk, eyes closed, taps his finger, smiles. Was he not that boy just yesterday, just last year, just last lifetime? Maybe here, behind closed eyes, he can be that boy again. All around him the cadets pace, impatient for command. Their spurs clink and chink about the room, some part of them forever ticking.

  Excuse me, Agha Captain?

  The lieutenant approaches to interrupt Reza’s imaginings (a street vendor hawks ears of burnt corn—How tasty and salty! —but gets no business as there is no hunger anywhere; all the stomachs are sated with pride).

  Yes, Sarhang?

  Agha Captain, perhaps we should dispel the gathering. They have amassed like this for three days now and the news from Mahabad is becoming more worrisome. Do you not think the situation is getting a bit dangerous? Perhaps we should just scare them a bit, fire a few shots in the air, a few at their feet, just a little something to let them know that Kermanshah is not the next city to go.

  The lieutenant is a Tehrani boy, the same staunch young face that brought Meena back on their first night. He is well read and versed but a clumsy soldier, heavy and brusque. Reza finds him an annoyance on many levels: his tireless reciting of the Shahnameh; his odious habit of speaking French at any opportunity; the way his teeth crush on top of each other like badly laid tile.

  Sarhang, I believe the latrines are due for another mopping?

  The lieutenant looks down and turns on his heel, his spurs clicking and chinking with an even, angry beat.

  Reza closes his eyes to return to the happy fantasy.

  Ma. Ha. Bad. Ma. Ha. Bad. A kite of yellow in a cobalt sky.

  She nurses and reads and does not look up.

  Are your barbarian brothers rioting again? How were the streets today?

  He doesn’t respond and looks instead into the empty paper pack with tobacco flakes at the bottom.

  Busy, like yesterday.

  Naasi suckles gently on her mother’s teat, one hand clenched in a fist and another open. Meena sits turning the pages of the newspaper with her free hand. Without looking up she speaks to the black-and-white print.

  They say Mahabad is the first, and all the other Kurdish cities will fall right behind in this hysterical claim for a country. What do Kurds know about a country? They can barely tend their flea-ridden sheep. They say the ideas are already spreading through the Azerbaijan and Turkoman provinces.

  Reza stares into his empty pack and aches for just one cigarette, one inhale to silence her pinprick voice and one exhale to make him deaf. Inhale. Exhale. All day he has listened carefully to the happiness and the joy and his ears are tired and hot and not interested in this worry and complaint. Did he leave the cigarettes in the jeep? His jacket pocket? Are there any in the house?

  They say Kermanshah is the next to go.

  The baby sucks gleefully. Meena looks up at him.

  What are you going to do, Captain Khourdi? How are you going to keep us safe? They say you are letting things go . . .

  The whorehouse is overflowing with cigarettes; the madam keeps a stash in each room. It is the other common passion among the patrons; some take opium, some vodka, but all of the men who frequent Madam Husili’s many-roomed house at the north end of town smoke cigarettes.

  Are you as weak as they say you are? Useless as the rumors claim? You are definitely useless to me and these children of yours. It would be a benefit to us all if I simply announced to them all, the soldiers, the Kurds, everyone: Your captain is a Kurd! No different from the rotten peshmergas that shit in the mountains and take goats as their wives. A coward, pitiful in this Iran.

  Reza gathers his wallet and gun and Meena switches the baby from one breast to the other, leaving the first exposed and drooping. Slowly she turns the pages of the paper spread out in front of her and the babe and mutters.

  Ah, Reza joon, I have always thought you to be an apostate breed, one way or another.

  The Assyrian and Armenian, Christian and Coptic girls meet him at the door with squeals and hisses. The tile floor echoes loudly with the sound of their heeled shoes as they circle around to remove his coat, hand him a cigarette, free him of his hat and holster; Reza is a regular customer. With a gesture of his lit cigarette he chooses Heidieah, his medium favorite,
because his favorite is pregnant again, and smokes half a pack before he lays his tobacco-stained lips on her in a fury meant for his wife. As he is fucking his sweaty arduous fuck, Reza re-minds himself that he is the shah’s captain and an accomplished soldier who has taken the census, collected the tithes and harnessed all the wandering flocks and tribes (and he wants desperately for someone, the shah, this whore perhaps, the Kurd boy who brings them water, the town mongrels, anyone really, to lick and pet and smooth his shellacked head and compliment him: good job, good job, aufareen, my boy, aufareen). Reza thrusts into the young girl and re-minds himself that he has done his duty and started the Farsi school, hoisted the red, green and white flag, learned the proper tone of the new anthem and generally represented this invisible thing called Iran to the Kurds, who only believe what they see. The whore laughs in delight and he turns her over to see her happy face and fuck her and in the fucking remembers his own wife, that she is a soft, negligible thing and the slice of her sharp tongue is useless against his bullets and boots. Heidieah giggles in ecstasy and her flush round cheeks press up against eyes that shine like diamonds in a bed of rock. The sight of their blaze fuels the machine in Reza and he floods the girl with all his re-minding and remembering. She screams in theatrical delight, for he is a good customer and the captain, after all.

  When it is over Reza smokes one cigarette after the next and lies beside the sleeping whore and thinks happily of happiness as it has manifested today in the twinkling eyes of a loose woman and in the shouts of proud Kurdish boys, and he smiles at himself for the beneficence of his command as captain of Kermanshah, a kindly captain who allows all manners of joy.