But since he has allowed—and because there is talk of the captain’s excessive and incapacitating sentimentality; because the republic of Mahabad has come to a swift and sudden end; because the town’s joy has flipped to its other side: upset—Reza must now disallow. The decree is drafted by the lieutenant and sung happily throughout Kermanshah by the garrison of shah soldiers until even the smallest daughter knows that to gather in the square is forbidden and all mentions of Mahabad are now illegal and that any remnants of last month’s joy and good feeling concerning nation or state will be dealt with as transgressions against his majesty the shah. They announce that the republic of Mahabad is, as of yesterday, terminated, the printing presses burned and the town patrolled by tanks. Reza listens to the pronouncements through the walls of his barracks office and can hear nothing else but the occasional bray of some anonymous hoofed animal tied unwillingly to a post.
* * *
They bring them into the office strung together in a human chain made of rope and sharp twine. Reza sees that each one’s fists are tied fast around the neck of the man in front of him and the line of men, ten or twelve, moves slowly and cautiously behind the cadets. The lieutenant looks to Reza proudly.
We caught them conspiring to organize. Some are men of Kermanshah. Some from Hormoz. They were found in a cave in the mountains with guns, ammunition, and literature of the Kurdish National Front, though none of them can read. Interesting, isn’t it, Agha Captain?
Reza does not look at the men, not in the eye, not at their bound arms and necks, not even at their silly sandals, and stays seated behind his desk. He picks up the newspaper, opens it wide like a blanket in front of his face and pretends to read.
Very well, Sarhang. Carry on.
The barracks fill with the stench of the Kurds; they smell like a flock after the rain. The lieutenant lines them up and paces, uncertain what to do next. He tells them to stand. Then he tells them to sit. He unties their hands and then thinks twice and ties them again as a cadet holds a gun in the direction of their faces and chests. Finally he places them in hard-backed wooden chairs with their hands bound tightly behind them. Reza lowers the paper a bit and sees a middle-aged Kurd so devoid of fear that he is shaking his head and chuckling. The lieutenant looks about for a crop and, finding none, grabs at a long thin shish that the cadets use for grilling their Friday kebabs in the barracks and begins to pace and preach, his speech punctuated by the cymbals of his spurs. The lieutenant clearly enjoys the sound of his own voice.
What is this feeling of wanting a state all your own?
The Kurds keep silent.
Our Iran isn’t good enough for you?
Reza hears the spurs stop and lowers the paper a bit more. The lieutenant stands in front of a man with a grizzly chin and a scowl, a man clearly unimpressed by the immaculate soldier. Reza smiles to himself and raises the paper again. The lieutenant continues.
Maybe you can tell me?
The shish lands again and again, this time leaving marks, but the man makes no sound. The lieutenant is awash in his own eroticism, a flash hot mix of high idea, poetry and violence.
You have only seen the mountains and never the sea.
The shish snaps.
How can you possibly understand our new nation when you don’t understand the borders of the whole earth?
The shish snaps.
That we live on a planet with lines of water, lines of ice, lines through the middle of the hemi spheres?
The shish lands and the man shouts out. Reza raises the paper higher to avoid the sight of the blood and the piercing, and the photographs are right before his eyes: pictures from the last days at Mahabad, where Gazi Mohammad, Abul Gassem Adr Gazi and Mohammad Houssein Khan Safe Gazi, leaders of the Kurdish National Front, hung from the gallows pole erected in Chwar Chera Square. Their faces are smudged but the shoes and nooses and tongues are clear and the effect is one of suspension: a graceful, almost willing, pendant of body and might, heart and hope. Reza thinks: when was he ever a man like that? Not yesterday, not last year, not a lifetime ago.
For weeks after Reza is slow with sadness. In the face of Meena’s derision, in the company of his men and even before the women he cannot drink or smoke or sex and walks about, trapped in the husk of his mortal self, feeling himself sink nearer and nearer to the ground; a biped; a quadruped; a slithering snake; a man milled down like stone into dust; re-minded and remembered into the earth and what ever worlds below.
The Returned Birds
Now the body drags. What elastic tendencies snapped readily before, this manner to the next, this loyalty to that, to toss him from one side of himself to another (shadow dance, craven city liar, baba-son, shah-son, mountain-son; etc.) are now stretched and slack. He is a heavy man lumbering behind his two oldest sons, Hameed and Hooshang, who are jaunty over grass and boulders and through the mazes of sage and rabbit brush at the mountains’ base. They are off to the hunt, the three together, as prophesied in mountain caves, and though he is breathless with a body that drags—nothing about him like the warrior with the cuirass and the shield and nowhere are the horses in armor and no one sounds the victory bell—he is still their father and they are still the sons and morning passes into midday and the mountains loom. Hopefully they will hunt and hopefully they will kill. The boys amble ahead easily, occupied in their own talk.
. . . and if I return the marbles to Ali and then score a twenty on my next dictee she said cinema . . .
. . . I wouldn’t beg for the cinema like you, I am not a begging baby . . .
. . . Maman doesn’t think so, she told the agha at school she would be happy to help him make a trip, a school trip, to the cinema and to the train . . . and he said thank you, Khanoum Khourdi, we are so honored to have your assistance . . . and she was very smiley at that . . . and I will go if you won’t.You can stay at home with the girls. Ha ha.
Time turns and the body drags. Of what was flighty and fit, there remains only a heavy mass with lungs more faulty by the day, a liver of weak proportions and a mind bloated with soft desires and misgivings. The decrepitude grows like a mold in Reza’s small parts and spreads into a florid revulsion of all beauty and whimsy, belonging and love.
All things Meena cultivates with an easy hand.
She is his mirror, in opposition to him, an inverse reflection: each year he sulks closer to the ground, she cuts a sharper frame, keen to herself and her abilities. Never the sweet girl, she has not turned sour but into a shrew, unstoppable in ridicule that he has never provided her chandeliers in the divan or gala festivities befitting a captain’s wife. He has fallen lazy, fallen fat and slow, and can no longer thrust out his chest and lust for blood and respect, while, all-power she has birthed child after child and taught them specifically: how to disregard their father, how to hate the Kurds all around, how to hunger for some invisible refinement of mind and body. In these fourteen years she blossomed into the vindictive seductress, an able sway about her hips and a glint through her eyes, and he has thickened to drag, to sweat, to cough and watch her draw over her face with black kohl around the eyes and burgundy whale wax on the lips. To make a gift of herself, masked and wrapped and given to any of the few eligible who come to Kermanshah to serve their two-year post. He has overheard their murmurs in the barracks.
Yes, with the schoolteacher.
Oh, I heard it was the lieutenant.
Either way, she’s always after the Tehrani types.
If only we were stationed closer to those city hives and farther from tribal girls! I’ll wait my turn for the captain’s wife, if that’s all right with you . . .
The body drags, and the motivation along with it. Reza cannot bring himself to shock or shame, or even the heat of humiliation. Where there was excitement in the boy and determination in the cadet and vainglory in the soldier there is sadness in the captain, a languid sorrow from which he cannot even lift one finger or two. She takes from him the energy required for pride and arrogance, gobbles
it up and spits it back as seeds for the children to eat. They are a marriage separated by six children, nation and king, and he watches her grow against the land while he dissolves into it and does not care what hands have touched her, what wetness seeps through her, what unholy transgressions delight her. Now the body drags and Reza sinks within it, caring little for the reputation he leaves in its sluggish wake. Captain Reza Khourdi, the cuckold of Kermanshah.
He follows his sons up the hill to a labyrinth of stones in the mountains where they have many times spotted and shot wild turkeys, horned goats and even foxes. The day is warm and a mass of cirrus churns above them to hold the air thick and close to the earth. They come to a dale between two rising stone slopes and the sun emerges brilliant to clean the sky and sparkle in the water, and the two boys make their way down a ravine in search of rabbits or snakes. They call to their father.
Baba, here. Baba, over here.
He goes to sit against a trunk as his boys kick about the stones with their leather boots, startling a flock of starlings out of the shrubs. The small birds fly off in a thrum to re-seek their solitude. Reza takes a cigarette from his breast pocket and lights it, the fire tip the only red around. The boys sit beside him and the three listen to the air, the trickle of a distant stream, the tucking and jumping of wings, beaks, the flit and flash eyes. The man and boys are still. They are father and sons, together and vanished, for moments on end. In the silence the rest of the birds return, first a falcon and then two sparrows and then a handful of vireos and finally the starlings, an entire murmuration, reconvene in the brush again, alighting on the tiny branches with their tiny feet.
From behind an esker slides a fox, languorous and thin, and Reza motions to his boys (he is their father and so must teach them how to kill) to keep still. He hoists the rifle to his shoulder, makes a one-eyed gesture with his face and fires to break skin, flesh, bone and earthly calm. Hooshang and Hameed run to the fallen animal and Reza walks behind, drags his heavy body filled with age and fragments, until they come upon the carcass. Blood runs from a wound through the neck to mat the fur and stain the stone all around, incarnadine and hot. The boys stick their fingers in the hole, wipe the blood along the body of fur, along their stones and their own arms and legs. Hameed closes the eyes of the animal and asks:
Baba, now what?
Reza does not answer. He waits for the echo of the rifle shot to dissipate, for silence to return. The boys make a game with the body of the fox and then play with each other and finally come to sit beside their baba and fall asleep. In the time of afternoon and then dusk, insects, birds and animals surround them and Reza thinks: Who will miss this fox? and What is the weight of a bag of bones?
The boys sleep beside him and Reza wonders if they sit long enough, the three of them, to wither here and die, will their bones be left whole, intact, a testimony to their human form? Or will they be caught and dragged about, strewn in dens and nests, here and there, disappear into the life of a wild they cannot control?
It is an ending neither happy nor sad, the only ending he can offer his sons, for he has little else. Nothing of nights in caves gathered around fires where the sound and clap and song bound you to the man next to you to the man next to him through time and space. Nothing of histories in stone, the victories and massacres that connect today to yesterday to the beginning of time; nothing of the lovepride his own baba cloaked him in when he was a boy, his Kurd boy.
To his boys Reza can only give flags and state songs and portraits of a medallioned shah. He can give them streets and citizenship but never the freedom to travel the borderless land or the stable sensation of home. But none of it satisfies, not the boots or the cinema or the afternoon drives in the state car where they scream, Baba, faster! Faster! He would like to take them deep into these Zagros, hold them by their shoulders and give them the mountains, the flurry of birds, the age-old blue dusk, all the love buried deep in his Kurdish heart. He cannot give them the proud lesson and say: This is your home. Let it keep you well.
In the soft early evening air, with the shallow sleep breaths of his boys in his right and left ears and the fox bleeding before him, Reza considers his wife. He thinks of her in vivid detail: the wrapping and masking, the constant churn and query, the unsettled mind and modern, unsatisfied heart. He sees himself trapped beneath her: a run-down specimen, impotent and without history, unable to give her the love of a strong shah soldier she so craves and not brave enough to be the Kurdish baba his children deserve. A life of determinations and lies; forced to march about as a falsity; a captain in command of nothing. Would any of them love him after the truth? Once he is naked and announcing: I am a Kurd of these mountains, an old Kurd at that, heavy and worn and heartless. You, my children, are half bloods, half Kurd, and this land will take you in as its child and so let it. And you, my wife, have married a man torn in everything but the love in his blood.
Reza considers what he must do. He looks to the faces of his boys and gains strength at the thought that they too will live on the land and hunt it, know its shape and designs, for it is theirs, and it was once his. He thinks of their faces and how they are no different from the faces of cousins he has long forgotten, the faces of the boys in Kermanshah and in Saqqez. He thinks of how easily his six children could slip into the fold of the land if only their mother would allow it. She will not. And so they are damned to remain as homeless as he.
Reza cannot offer his children much; in fact, he knows he has one gift to give. A simple truth he has been living a lie he’s Kurdish and hasn’t bothered to tell the truth living the lie in front of his boys that will serve his children now and the boy he was once and all the Kurds that came to make him a man of these mountains. In his sunken self Reza recognizes that just as the stars align each night in the sky, century after century, it is now his duty to align the Kurds long dead with the Kurd in him and the Kurds in his sleeping sons. He looks at the dispersed life of the slim fox laid out before them as a guide, true and passed into the next dominion, and thinks of the simplicity of death. Death, Reza thinks happily, the quieting of life’s insatiable storm.
The boys wake and stand beside him rubbing the sleep from their eyes as Reza skins the beast. Off comes hair, bits of head flesh, globs of animal brain. Hameed carries the sturdy tangle of muscle and meat as it drips a trail of drops, red drops, now black drops, now dried drops, behind them and Reza mutters, Who will miss her bag of slutty bones? Not I, swimming about in my bag of shamed bones? Who will miss the bloodless fox . . . The boys run ahead, singing an old child’s rhyme.
Yeki bood, yeki nabood . . . Once there was one and once there was not one . . .
The Farmer
The first year they asked us and we told them nothing. The soldiers said: how many are in your family? I answered: enough. He asked again, this time standing a bit closer to his captain, and I answered: in my family there are enough, enough for me and for you. All those behind me in the line laughed and laughed. The line, which stretched out the barracks door and down the streets of Kermanshah, was longer than any line our town had ever known. I was told that my little joke spread the entire length of it and it was a line of laughing Kurds.
The second year they ordered us back to ask us the same question again. Inches from my face the soldier demanded: How many are in your family? I must have an accurate count of mothers, sons, daughters, uncles and cousins and aunts, even grandmothers and grandfathers. Well, I replied, let me see. Before me there were maybe twenty or thirty, our small tribe goes back a long way, you know, maybe forty grandfathers on my side and forty on Leela’s side, then there are the dead to count and the un-born. Do you have the counting beads? Because I can’t add. Maybe you can make the number for me? Some tidy sum of the living and the dead? The soldier looked to the captain, who dismissed me with his hand. As I walked out all the faces I passed had smiles spread across them.
The third year they called us again and we stood in that ridiculous line all morning long. When i
t was my turn to enter the barracks I saw that the desk in front of the captain and the soldier was covered with tools, shovels, axes and hammers. There were also seeds in small packets and bags of fertilizer and pesticide. The soldier (he was every year the same) asked me again: how many Iranians are there in your family? I tried to take my eyes off the bounty before me, a farmer’s dream—the ax, the saw and the hammer, the strong new seeds from the city—and I answered in a daze. There are no Iranians in our family. We are Kurd. The soldier kept his eyes on his paper and asked again. How many Iranians in your family? Tell us and you can take home one of the shah’s tools. It seemed a fair deal: a little lie in exchange for an ax that lasts for years? Why not? I cleared my throat. I am one myself, two my wife, seven my children—four girls and three boys—and one my brother, but he is missing an arm and a leg, does he count as half or whole?
Behind me I heard the line start its happy jitter. The soldier made a note of what I said and handed me a bag with a human skull on the front. New pesticides, to kill the insects that eat your crops. Careful—this time it was his turn to smile—it is very strong and very dangerous.
I left with the poison powder in my hand, though I would have rather taken the hammer. If you can’t joke in such serious times then it’s nice to leave a heavy mark.
The Age of Orphans Page 19