The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  “In heaven there are no children of marriage,” he said.

  In the cyclical nature of Yazidi tradition, it made sense that heaven—for those who transcended the cycle of rebirth—would echo creation: Shahid ibn Jerr was no child of marriage either. Like this, its tombs and shrines remembering men whose “mysteries” were those of angels, Lalish mirrors a kind of Platonic form, perfect in the heavens and printed on the earth.

  The venerated leaders are considered divine, but the angels themselves are superior. “All of these are degrees,” said Baba Chawish. “There is nothing bigger than God. After the protectors and the prophets . . . the last thing is us!” He laughed a hearty laugh. As a sheikh recited in a Yazidi sermon at the turn of the millennium: “We are deficient. God and Sheikh Adi are perfect.”

  Slowly, the conversation came back to earth. Would Jews accept converts? Were there good doctors in Israel? Sue was from China, how many religions do they have? How many millions of people? He clapped his hands when he heard the answer. “Mashallah!”

  And why did we come to Iraq? “Someone told you Kurdistan was good?” A friend did, I said, and I had to see for myself.

  “The baab is open any time,” he said.

  The Baba Chawish walked us back through his dominion; a delegation was gathering in the inner courtyard of the sanctuary. The German consul was visiting, escorted by the prince himself. Embassy vehicles and attaché cars clogged the area at the foot of the hill, where the most divine of all men on earth had just found a parking spot.

  As we exited the temple, I noticed something—I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever missed it. On the right side of the entrance, there is something prominent and peculiar: a black snake zigzags upward in low relief, the tip of its tail in an orange-sized hole in the mortar. For Christians, Satan is manifested more directly than anywhere else in scripture as the trickster serpent in the Garden of Eden. For travelers, this image was a mystery. Layard writes in 1849: “The snake is particularly conspicuous. Although it might be suspected that these figures were emblematical, I obtain no other explanation from Sheikh Nasr, than that they had been cut by the Christian mason who repaired the tomb some years ago, as ornaments suggested by his mere fancy.”

  In some religious traditions the snake is cursed, substantiated by its slithering and undeniable scariness. But in the Qewle Afirina Dinyaye, the Hymn of the Creation of the World, a snake plugs up a leak in the ark that was carrying the very first creatures, man among them, across the ocean. Not a trickster, but a savior.

  Yazidis have woven threads through a world of stories, deliberate or not, acknowledged or not. As long as you aren’t hell-bent on converting in or out of Yazidism, you are fine by them. As long as you seek truth and follow your path, you do right. Beliefs of the believers are all close enough. But alas, the devil is in the details.

  AT EVERY CHECKPOINT we had passed through as passengers, I watched the driver and the guard drown out each other’s pleasantries with more pleasantries, never leaving time for an answer to a question. “Salaam aleykum choni bashee?” (“Peace be upon you, how are you, good?”) the driver would say, partially rolling down the window and waving his hand. Now in the driver’s seat myself and detesting the car searches that followed most disclosures of our citizenry, I began to try the same thing.

  Salaamaleykumchonibashee, I mumbled, partially rolling down the window and waving my hand. The occasional squint from the soldiers . . . and like a charm they motioned us through.

  The murmuring smoothed the borders between languages as we left the dominion of Sorani (the Central Kurdish spoken in Erbil and to the east and written in a variety of Persian Script) for Kurmanji territory. I could suss most Sorani letters out from Arabic, but I got vowels wrong all the time, and often spoke past the limits of my reading skills. Kurmanji, Northern Kurdish, is written in the Latin alphabet and is far more widely spoken outside of Iraq.

  In a place where political borders are perfectly satisfying to almost no one, I saw the linguistic lines as extra meaningful. We drove westward toward Norah’s brother Fady, and his home in Kurmanji-speaking Dohuk.

  FOR LESS THAN A DOLLAR, any juicy chicken shawarma stuffed into a crescent-shaped pocket of fresh, chewy bread can be yours. On the side, the vendor offers “Family Sauce,” an inauspicious brown condiment bottled with an ambiguous label of fruits and vegetables that is, without fail, sticky and stained. It is magical. From the U.S. military to Robert from Baghdad waiting in line behind us, nobody didn’t love Family Sauce.

  The ingredients are hardly secret: seasonal fruits, coconut, vinegar, onion, garlic, seasoning, dates, water, mustard, thickening agent, caramel, salt, starch, tomato paste, black pepper. Seasonal fruits, we joked: there’s the secret.

  Across the street a colorful shop squeezes fresh fruits, Kurdish custards, ice cream, and that three-millennia-old treasure of Mesopotamian desserts, likely born in the swelling Neo-Assyrian empire around the time they were conquering the Kingdom of Israel: baklava. A string of plastic bananas hangs from the awning.

  Sue raced to the airport, and back to work. We lost our president. And still, with Charlotte, I was far less alone on the road than usual, sharing thoughts with native tongue to native speaker in a way that left less unsaid. I was better able then to live the moments as they came; less scribbling and recording and documenting as if the experience would be nothing without carving it in stone.

  I reminisced out loud, I think, so Charlotte would remember with me. So that her brain would pair with mine like a backup hard drive. Fady blasting Rihanna . . . the hours of café backgammon in a smoke cloud . . . remember that lamb quzi, comically oversized and served over rice and raisins?

  My memory of Dohuk is sparse and disjointed—above the city there was a dam that abuts a big, blue man-made lake. On one postcard-esque hillside of long golden grass, a small cluster of whitewashed tombstones decorated in Kurdish and flowers underneath a single tree. Across the road, we drank tea with a beekeeper in plastic chairs high above the water. He stirred the pot for us and his friend over a solid campfire, and white pigeons flapped through the smoke.

  Properly stuffed, we rebounded toward the far east of Kurdistan, from Dohuk back to Erbil, and then on to Sulaymaiyah. We passed two of Dohuk’s several amusement parks on the way to the highway, waving good-bye to Mazi Mall, ila al-liqaa’ to Dream City.

  As we drove, I remembered the ubiquitous NO GUN signs—in hotels, at the carnivals. No Glocks. No Kalashnikovs.

  THE NORTHERN ROUTE to the capital runs parallel to the Turkish border from scenic overlook to scenic overlook, past picnickers and illustrious cities. I hunted out the window with my camera. The eyes and movements were something to study, and I aimed out the window as if to ask how I looked to them. As we snaked through the tight streets of Amadiya—an ancient city-cum-summer-getaway sitting high on a pedestal of sheer cliffs—a boy craned his neck to follow us, away from a foosball table that had been dragged onto the street, and framed from behind by the posters of soccer stars. I didn’t take a picture, but that image stuck with me as a freeze frame—his look, the game and the reality, the dream. If I didn’t write him down, I’d lose him soon.

  Somewhere in the greasy control room where I file these images away, a connection was offered: the girl from Dragon Valley—black mascara and shaved head, red dress and blue eyes-like-sapphires—remember her?

  Near Amadiya, a side road leads to a small monastic village; a blue highway sign declared this in Arabic, Kurdish, and Syriac on top. We followed until the road went no farther. There: a church remade recently of large sandy stones hid from view in a thick grove of walnut trees, and a spot to park our car and venture inside.

  A diminutive woman lived in the monastery complex—the two-room church about the size of a school bus and its one adjoining building—and she shuffled to push open the metal door, guiding us silently from room to stone room and waiting while we looked. She wore black socks rolled up above black slippers, a long black sweater
draped over a brown dress that stopped at her shins, and a faded cloth tied tightly around her head. Light leaked around heavy window curtains.

  The woman pointed to an object propping a door open. It was a solid metal cone, maybe forty pounds, with grooves on the base to screw into something else.

  A rocket.

  Through hand gestures, she explained that the church had twice been destroyed by rocket attacks. “Saddam,” she said.

  His anti-Kurdish, anti-Christian campaign destroyed four thousand villages in Kurdistan in the late 1980s. Underneath the stairs to the church, they had stored other souvenirs of war—another rocket cone, some warped missile casings, shreds of metal, a faded church bell. She pointed again, smiling weakly.

  All my chasing the scent of violence; this was its wake, in one form.

  From the early 1970s onward, America had a habit of encouraging the Kurds to fight Saddam, and then flaking on promises for support. James Akins, former attaché at the American Embassy in Baghdad, has called this relationship “one of the more shameful stories in our diplomatic history.” It had always been like this: “they came to us, and the position that I took was, ‘You’re great people. You’re really awfully good, and you really should have your rights inside Iraq, and probably other countries. But you’ll never get any support from the United States, because we have great interests in Iran, and in Turkey.’ ” It’s amazing Americans are still such welcome tourists.

  The churchkeeper walked us through the church kitchen to the porch where her husband sat in a blue plastic chair, cracking walnuts with his eyes nearly closed as the late afternoon sun hooked into the crannies of his cheeks. We drank tea. The man was jolly, wearing two sweaters and a mustache, placing walnut after walnut on plates for us to eat.

  Soon, it was dark, and we got lost easily. We knew we would have to cross back over the Great Zab, a river that comes from Turkey and joins the Tigris south of Mosul. For hours, we attempted to match the headlights tracing nearby hills with the shape of the roads on our maps. After a few bouts of desperation and only walnuts as sustenance, we belched from the dark underbrush onto the highway north of Erbil, reseeking the refuge of the faded pink room.

  THE NEXT MORNING we preloaded phone maps and stapled crumpled paper ones together for the simple journey east. Our only creative choice was to take the faster southern route that skims the outskirts of Kirkuk, a city that has remained at the very core of Arab-Kurdish conflict since before Saddam’s time. With a population estimated at around a million, the city may sit on 7 percent of all the world’s oil reserves.

  For a half hour, we had been outside official Kurdish territory as recognized by the 2005 Iraqi Constitution—as soon as we’d entered the Kirkuk governorate, we were in a disputed territory under central Iraqi government control. Whatever had changed was invisible from the highway, like crossing a state line.

  Especially since the Baathist government returned to power in a military coup in 1968, policies of Arabization had been enacted to reduce the number of Kurds in the area. Kurdish civil servants were transferred and dispersed in the southern Arab governorates of Iraq, neighborhoods were renamed in Arabic, major roads were constructed that destroyed Kurdish homes for very little compensation. After 2003, though, Kurdish numbers may have doubled. No one knows. From the New York Times in 2010: “The number of Arabs who have left since the American invasion in 2003 might be 250,000, or not; the number of Kurds who have since arrived is said to be far higher, or not. Turkmens once made up 60 percent of the city of Kirkuk, compared with 30 percent now. Maybe.”

  The 2005 Iraqi Constitution outlined solutions for the “disputed territories,” all to be accomplished before the end of 2007. First: “normalization,” the reversal of ethnic redistribution policies. Next, a “fair and transparent” census. (While Kirkuk was last tallied in 1997, Iraqi census numbers have been disputed since 1957.) Finally, a referendum; disputed territories would be allowed to choose their own destiny, Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan. After countless delays, the census has yet to happen.

  As we rounded a bend in the highway, I saw the city sprawl, flat without a single tall building. There is very little security in Kirkuk; violence, kidnappings, car bombings are still all too common. Fire glinted at the refineries, and black plumes puffed from the smokestacks of oil wells like tall candles on a cake.

  But no sooner is the city revealed than the ring road jerks away over an overpass. We were too curious to take it. Just a little farther, I thought.

  There was Turkish on the signs now, the written language of Iraqi Turkmen. There were signs for the Baba Gurgur oilfield a few miles away, once the largest in the world, where Iraq’s first oil gusher was struck in 1927 and the contest for Iraqi oil took root. Natural gas had been flaming in the fields for thousands of years at Baba Gurgur, where expecting mothers came to pray to have baby boys, and where, as a kind of party trick to light Alexander the Great’s walk home for the night, Plutarch wrote, the Babylonians had set a street on fire. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar throws three Jews into a “burning fiery furnace.” Legend has it that was in Kirkuk, too.

  The knowledge that this was too far for foreigners was scary and indulgent—I had goosebumps on my arms and vinegar in my belly, pushing us forward. If I wasn’t held back, then I would follow infinite directions for infinite lengths. Without a barrier . . . why stop when there is road ahead? It’s the nemesis of honor and all good things, isn’t it—giving up?

  CROSSING THE BORDER into a wholly separate country invites a change in interpretation: whereas Kurds in Kurdistan enjoy certain parliamentary rights and freedoms, Kurds in Kirkuk, though they may have the same history, exist in a vastly different political climate. Though they all have survived Saddam’s genocidal campaigns, Kirkuk’s uncounted have yet to see peace.

  Kurdish flags flew here, as they did everywhere in Kurdistan. Red, white, green, the yellow sun. Our visas, guarantees of our security and freedoms as Americans, were valid only for Iraqi Kurdistan. We passed through the first checkpoint. The guard asked no questions.

  Suddenly, on the houses overlooking the highway, I saw that the flag’s green had turned black—and the yellow sun was replaced with three green stars and the words Allahu Akbar. I had only seen the Iraqi flag on government buildings in Kurdistan, and then always side by side with the Kurdish ensign.

  Soon, a second checkpoint. This guard wore a different blue, camouflaged uniform that read “US ARMY” on the lapel. His face and voice were Iraqi, and as we feigned confusion, he showed that he had no English to offer. We didn’t want to go farther, but we didn’t want to get arrested either. Pretending that we thought we were still on the road to Sulaymaniyah (despite the WELCOME TO KIRKUK highway sign) seemed like our best bet.

  The soldier was bemused. He waved his hands at the territory in front of us, making identifiably “dangerous” motions and struggling to convey to idiots what a wrong turn was. We mimed idiocy (perhaps it wasn’t miming) until we knew we weren’t in trouble. If we revealed that we had knowingly trespassed into Iraqi territory, we faced unknowable consequences. Had I really been that stupid?

  A blue, camouflaged arm waved in a U-turn. Giving us our leave, the guard tried once more to explain.

  “Ghalat,” he said.

  It was a word I didn’t know. Charlotte translated, one ripple of a laugh of relief caught in her throat: “Big mistake,” she said.

  Black smoke seemed to be coming from everywhere. Yellow containers of gasoline lined the roads, available for purchase by the jug. Retracing our steps, I pulled over at a small grocery to treat a hunger that had come to fill the space where my nervousness had been, and, after long deliberation, we left with a package of bone-dry wafers, a sheath of chocolate sandwich cookies, and a banana.

  A crowd of children and an older man looked in through the car window as I put the car in drive. We waved, and took the first exit out of town.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, the Iraqi army fled the
ir posts in Kirkuk as ISIS mobilized nearby. The more cohesive, arguably more committed Kurdish forces seized the opportunity to assume full control of the city; the Disputed Territory Under Iraqi Control is now a Disputed Territory Under Iraqi Kurdish Control.

  Yet all over Kurdistan, whatever transformation may be under way, at shawarma stands and cafés and salad bars, we and the local populations exercise our freedom to put the magical cocktail of Family Sauce on anything and everything as we damn well please.

  Although the condiment is made in Erbil, its label is written only in Arabic. Its ingredients, those seasonal fruits, are mysterious and immeasurable. At the very bottom of the squeeze bottle, there is a rare stamp: “Made in Iraq.” Just above this, a disclaimer: “We are not responsible for poor storage.”

  WE MET REBAZ at night outside Azadi Park, the biggest and brightest of Sulaymaniyah’s obligatory amusement parks. I’d reached out to him on Couchsurfing, like a free version of Airbnb with a mission of international hangouts, and he’d invited us to stay with him in his parents’ house. Before we met, Rebaz listed Suly’s—the five-syllable city goes by its nickname—major attractions. Azadi Park (“Freedom Park”) was “the place of torturing kurdish ppl but now its a good park to rest and breathe.” Suly is bleeding with this kind of history; the deepest scars of war and Saddam’s genocide are in the city and province of Sulaymaniyah.

  Ali, a friend of Rebaz’s, was waiting for us at a chic, spacious café in the center of town. He was tall and thin with a lean face and closely cropped hair. Rebaz was much shorter, in his late twenties and a pink cable-knit sweater. It looked like you could order alcohol, but we followed our hosts and ordered exotic-sounding teas.

  For some reason, maybe because Suly is thirty miles from Iran, I had expected this eastern edge of Kurdistan to be more strict. It was the opposite. “In Suly it’s more open than the other cities. It’s like that from a long time ago,” Rebaz told us. If it hadn’t been Eid, the city’s massive outdoor bazaar would’ve been buzzing. As it was, Suly was taking the week off.