The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  * * *

  I am a funny man and fate has a funny way of going about my life. I was born, just like all the other Kurds, in this green valley. My father is a farmer and I am a farmer to follow him. I married a girl whose brows meet in the middle of her forehead, brows more lush and verdant than the best season of my fields, and together we had seven children to follow and farm. All of this was set out for me under the sky and stars, until the sky shrank and the stars became dimmer and the shah determined everything about my life, including my name, my occupation and the language my own children speak. Now I, the most illustrious farmer in Kermanshah, harvester of life from dirt, must sell poison (a new fashion among the Kurds in the valley—Did you see how it kept the locusts off his melons? Ya Ali, let’s sprinkle the tomatoes with it too, a whole season of food untouched by bugs!) to all the planters north and south of here in order to make enough money to pay the tithes that keep the soldiers off my land, away from my ignored plots. It’s a funny fate, I must admit, but I make what I can of it and spend days in my shed, painting the little sacks of powder not with the fearsome skull but with flowers and oranges, red hibiscus and cherries. When the farmers come to buy the bags I make sure to joke, a little murder for the pesky gadfly is a lot of life for your eggplant crop. I get a few laughs here and there but everyone can tell I have my baba’s hands—better for making life than for taking it.

  That was the year the captain—who everyone knows is a Kurd though he himself tries to hide it—started to walk across my land. Those days I rarely left my shed. Once a week an army truck would make its delivery of chemicals and powders. They would say, So you are saving crops, eh, Kurd? Where are all those excess harvests? It’s about time the shah saw the fruits of his generosity. If I wanted I could tell them the extra, the prize vegetables and fruits, were going straight to the mountains to feed the resistance, those fled from Mahabad, but I smiled and said nothing; the money I’ve made so far is enough to buy my wife an iron stove and my boys a radio.

  So I stay in my shed mixing and causing a stink and watching the captain, who is not old but looks it from a distance, walk from south to north across my land, in the direction of the mountains. Sometimes he is with his two oldest sons but mostly he is alone, with a rifle and a bag for hunting. On the few occasions we caught eyes he raised a hand and I raised mine, like friendly men do in passing. It was then, once, many years ago, sometime before his wife died, that he approached the shed and I invited him in to have some tea.

  We stood sipping and silent in the heat of late morning. At this distance I could clearly see the Kurd in him. He reminded me a little of my uncle Abbas when he was young and I was still a boy who would run behind him and beg to use his knife, ride his horse, take a smoke of the pipe he kept in his pocket. We drank and the captain kept his face down, as if he was afraid I would recognize him. You make the pesticides for the crops, yes? he asked, pointing to the shed behind us. Yes. Though I used to be a farmer of the spiciest radishes you’ve ever tasted, I bragged. The captain nodded. And the business of making poison, is it simple? A sudden feeling of pride came over me, pride for my shed, my occupation, that here I stood, a simple Kurd, sharing tea with the captain, who was curious about my expertise. Oh, it’s a little more complicated than you think. And I took him in and showed him my new tools. The carbon tetrachloride and benzene, the arsenic for rodents, the measuring spoons and little glass wand I use to stir. Do you have pests on your crops? Because I could mix up a good little potion for them . . . The captain stared at me, his teacup halfway to his mouth, his eyes empty and clear. Yes, mix up a packet for me. I have worms in my apricots and plums, they are thick worms that burrow straight through the heart of my fruit . . . make something strong so my children will have good-tasting fruit this fall. I am a farmer and a father and I knew just what the captain asked. So I mixed for him a delicate and potent poison, all the while telling him jokes and keeping lively, so proud I was to host such an esteemed guest in my shed. Every now and again he would take his cigarette from his mouth to laugh, but mostly he sat and stared at the mountains with his cold eyes.

  The Holy Day

  In the time after the failed republic the town quiets. The Kurds who marched on the square have folded back into the mountains and the only ruckus comes from the occasional parade for the shah or the random rifle practices of bored cadets.

  Like a shop keeper with little to sell, Reza closes the barracks every third Friday of the month. He locks the munitions shed and tells the officers and cadets to find recreation in prayer or gambling or letters to their dear mamans. He leaves behind his jacket and cap and walks alone out from the town, in the direction of the mountains just west. He sports his hunting rifle and a game sack for the quail and pheasants he has no intention of catching and waves at the village residents, who wish him luck in his hunt. They mutter beneath their grins: There goes the happy captain, smiling through all that sin. There are fewer huts and houses at the edge of town; here no one calls to him. The eyes on Reza are narrow with suspicion and he keeps a fast step up the steep and sparsely populated roads until the roads themselves end and he is walking up the mountain itself. On nice days, the only glare he suffers is that of the sun.

  He makes all the appropriate turns by memory and walks through the hot noon and into the afternoon, when he makes it to the top of the first peak. Here he stops, takes rest and water if he has it, turns his back on the town, the flats, even the small plot in the distance where Meena primps herself for the invisible shah and his children run about oblivious to the war in their blood. Reza turns his back and walks down into the mountains, where he is certain nothing will seek him out.

  What he has made habit: the walk, the turned back, the descent into the valley, the long smoke and the swim in the always cold stream, the smoke again and then the dreamless nap from which he wakes, forgiven and composed. The mountains ask him no questions and give no guidance and he takes to them for the relief. He walks away from the derision of his crimson-lipped wife, the angry eyes of the Kurds, who accuse But you are us . . . how could you be the captain against us? and the aching faces of his children, who wonder why their baba, who has his own gun! grows each day weaker. There is little glory in these reminders and Reza takes to the walk, to the silence and the wind for an intermission. He is old and hopes one day to stumble and fall and die on these trails, undiscovered until dry and decomposed.

  At the river he watches the water carve the frozen edges of ice that form along the banks. He does not understand how ice keeps solid well into the spring, or why some of the water freezes and some moves on. He forgoes his usual frigid swim and walks through the valley, up the next incline, to the second tier of mountaintops. The climb is hard and after a while he adjusts so that his steps grow light and his breath is in pace. At the peak Reza looks not back toward town but ahead into the crevasse that spreads out in an infinite series of stone folds. He takes in the possibility of walking on, one range to the next, without care for daylight or supplies, and does not hesitate moving forward and down, craving a point of no return.

  In the End

  The children are busy with their breakfast. Naasi whines and Hooshang rocks her with one hand and writes out the last of his dictee with the other. Hamid shovels the lavash and paneer into his face, following it with spoonfuls of honey. He keeps the food close to him so his younger brother can’t have it. Afsaneh and Heideh sit in front of Meena as she combs their hair with rough pulls that make their eyes water. Reza keeps to himself at the end of the sofre. He takes no food and only a half glass of tea and fills his pipe with enough opium to make the scene distant and lovely like a dream. In his pocket he keeps the tiny tin container with the brown paste, a lighter and the packet of poison the farmer mixed for him just last week. Each time he reaches to refill his pipe or light his cigarette his hand brushes past the packet. Reza smokes and smokes and thinks of what is possible.

  One of the girls starts to cry. Meena yanks her head back with fie
rce pulls, working at an obstinate tangle in the girl’s hair. There is no sympathy in her stroke. Eh, Afsaneh, do you think for one moment that I am going to let you go to school with the knotty hair of a goat? No, maman. The girl sniffles. And why not? Reza watches his daughter, cheeks wet with tears, her green eyes glistening, answer without thinking. Because then we will be mistaken for Kurds. Meena’s tone grows soft and her strokes are slower as the knot is cleared and the brush runs evenly through the girl’s hair. Aufareen, jounam. Very good.

  They eat and drink and the table is quiet again, each child lost in himself, as nothing unusual has happened. At the summons of the driver they pack for school and Reza takes their cheek kisses and good-byes with a mouth full of smoke, his head thick in a haze. The room is empty and the table before him is full; the kholfat knows not to remove any of the honey or preserves or cheese until Meena returns to take her breakfast. At the other end of the sofre her pot of tea sits, steeping with the special herbs she has sent to her from Tehran, good for the circulation and weight loss. Reza stands to stretch and inhales once or twice on his pipe and pushes his right hand into his pocket.

  In the end he will follow the farmer’s instructions—You must dilute with water, depending on your desired potency—and leave the room as Meena returns to drink her tea and read a magazine. Reza will think randomly of borders and how, in the end, he is glad not to belong to a people locked in by the invisible boundaries of nation or state or law. In the end all borders will fall off him that morning until he is just lightness and then emptiness and then there is nothing to the man; no lie, no boy, no Kurd, no proud captain, just dusty air through the lungs and mouth. In the very end, when the smoke clears and his children return to an empty house, Reza will leave them and their confusion and walk to the mountain’s edge where he will scramble and search for the sharpest, heaviest rocks to pound and slice out the cold air that gusts through him in a never-ending gale that freezes his head and numbs his heart.

  Daughter

  Our maman died when she was still young. She came to a close abruptly, in a way that made a lot of people think that death didn’t come from within her, but from outside. When the doctors opened her skin and took out some of the cold congealed blood in her veins, weighed it, prodded it, tasted and tested it, they showed open surprise at the density of toxins therein. They called it an impressive testimony to the resilience of life that a woman as poisoned and as pregnant (eight months in with the seventh child) managed to last into the following morning. But our maman was a strong woman and pushed life through her well into her next and last morning, calling for us to sit, here and here, on her lap and legs and hold her shoulders and neck and hair as she felt the final concession approach. By noon we were so exhausted from the spectacle and the uncertainty, from the day and night of silence, that when the house filled with cries and Baba walked outside and calmly lit another cigarette we thought maybe it was a celebration, maybe the baby was born, maybe all the nervousness about death stemmed needlessly from our childish imaginings.

  I was seven and Afsaneh maybe four or five. We were young. That our mother should disappear was one thing, impossible and shocking, but that she should go somewhere else, somewhere without us, was cause for great alarm. In the days after her passing we wondered not why or how she had left us (she would never leave us, our maman) but where did she go? What place existed besides our four-room house, our rocky courtyard and the high mountain walls all around it? This Kermanshah was a world and we had never left it, nor had our maman, so then where did this death take her?

  Ringed in by the Zagros, we could not think of a world beyond and so we confined the relocation of our evaporated maman to the dirty white walls of our bedroom, to the wired pens that held the animals, to the life in the forest behind our house, and so we locked her neatly into our world with us. With the confidence of children we concluded that our mother did not die like so many of our useless over-loved pets (whose slow decay we watched with curious certitude), she was not killed (like her angry brothers would come from Tehran to claim, pointing a finger first at the piece of paper with the doctor’s findings and then at our father’s head), but that she simply, of her own volition, vanished. Vanishing, like a flash of lightning or steam from a kettle, was a forgivable, almost graceful act. In death she vanished, the air taking her and she evaporating in it, and in those first few days she became a small part of everything we saw and breathed. Believing so, we kept a wishful watch for our mother’s equally instant return.

  We all waited in our own ways. Hooshang, fourteen, the oldest and almost a man, was found at the river wearing Maman’s clothes: a silk sweater and one of her wool skirts unbuttoned around his hips. He had the cream-colored stockings pulled over his hands and forearms like long gloves and had fallen asleep with his arms wrapped around himself. We all saw him and none of us told Baba or laughed. There was a grace period between us after she died; without a mother to police our vicious love for one another both the love and the viciousness dissipated, and we lived, for a time, un-knit, in a small common space and distanced from each other, learning that mourning required a sort of privacy we had never needed or known.

  I’d like to think that parts of that open benevolence still last in these adult versions of those suddenly motherless siblings. But what I feel, most regularly and honestly, is that, with time, our love for each other has faltered, as if Maman’s presence was a constant reminder of how the seven of us, in belonging to her, were connected to one another. Now that we have left Kermanshah, climbed over those mountains in our own secret escapes, there is no evidence of a shared starting place, as our mother’s body was the first and only home.

  As we lived inside and around each other’s grief during those first few days, the news of our mother’s death traveled locally, and the village women, wives of low-level cadets and low-rank local conscripts, descended upon our house in determined droves, dropped their luggage of clothing, bedding, pots, pans, live and dead poultry, herbs, sewing kits, sleeping pads and children at the door and sought out Baba. They wanted to pay their respects, to kiss his hand and cry convincingly in his face to remind him of their loyalty and secure for their husbands a good standing in his fickle favor. They searched the house for us, like hens pecking in dark corners for seed, and poured forth anew, crying out our names, our mother’s name, God’s name, and smearing their tearstained faces against our own dry, bewildered skin. They were foolish women, these Kurdish wives, always hunched and cloaked, and their hatred of our mother was so public and so proud that this sudden grief played out for us as comedy and we left the crying (which they had turned into a language of its own) to them and kept a steady, waiting silence for ourselves.

  It was not until the arrival of our mother’s body, wrapped in a thick sheet of canvas and unloaded from the trunk of Baba’s car, did their crying stop and ours start. I remember the six of us stood on the porch and watched the men carry the sack of her to the shed behind the garden. We watched the sharp-chinned village wives follow, whispering and giggling to each other like schoolgirls, their hands full with buckets of water, lengths of white cloth, small brushes and soap.

  All of us, even the boys, pried at the closed shed door to be let in. From inside we could hear rustling, shapes shifting positions, laughter, gasps, the sound of water splashed and cloths being wrung and snapped. My seven-year-old imagination writhed as I thought of our mother coming alive inside the dank dusty room, clean of the sickness and all that pain. Long after the others had gone Afsaneh and I sat in the tall grasses that grew up alongside the shed and picked the knots out of each other’s hair, cleaned our cheeks with spit and made ourselves presentable for Maman’s return. You can’t say we should have known better, two young girls, but we sat for a long time, long enough for the sharp silhouettes of day to soften, long enough for the air around us to darken with evening. We waited until our hands were numb and our spines spasmed with chill and nothing could be seen or separated from anything else.
We stayed there a long time, our backs up against that shed wall in the thick inky night, in a darkness that was everything, and listened as the sounds of village women’s laughter and crickets’ quick strums closed the space around our hope.

  They started with a map of the world. It hung on the wall of the room where we slept shoulder to shoulder and head to toe. The “world” was flat, expansive, covered in a deep blue that separated small quilts of pastel patchwork that were supposed to be countries on a landmass. Aside from Parvin’s defacement with crayon (Baba, once after smoking, had taken a piece of coal and circled the area where Iran, Turkey and Iraq met and scrawled Kurdistan) the map was without blemish, the only wall décor in the house. Every night before we fell asleep, Maman stood in front of the map, with some baby or other on her hip, swaying back and forth as she pronounced the names of oceans, seas, mountains, countries. It was our trick to avoid sleep, to sing back her pronunciations of Amree-kah! Rusee-ia! EE-ta-lee-ah! and her trick to have us dream outside of what we knew. Of course it made no sense to us at the time, that these words were places, but there is a lot to be said for those songs, as we have fled that home to live, scattershot, all over the world. The village women took down the maps and the area around them had tanned a slightly darker shade of blue over the years, leaving the imprint of a dark rectangle on our bedroom wall. I spent many nights staring at that stained shape and pretended it was a square of sun flooding through a high window.