Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  “You think he’s adequately drunk?”

  “Saddam has been overthrown.”

  Baba appeared at my door and asked me to iron his shirt. The same soothing and subtle smell of lavender soap, the same welts on his back and shoulders beneath his undershirt, silently testifying to his infinite suffering. He did not look as irritated as usual though.

  Chia winked and left, trailing our father. I followed him as far as the shadow of my doorway to watch, to listen. Chia sat in the living room beside Baba, who was fiddling with his radio knob.

  “So, the murderer of so many Kurds is finally toppled,” Chia began.

  The butcher of your family, your hometown, I added to Baba in my head.

  “Was Khomeini or Saddam more bloodthirsty, do you think?” my brother asked.

  Baba turned to Chia but didn’t answer the question—how could he? Iran had executed his best friend and two of his brothers. Iraq had killed his uncles and grandparents in the 1963 massacre and his remaining brother in the 1991 uprising.

  My old man squinted. “Now Iran, Turkey, and Syria are panicking. They’re putting much more pressure on their Kurds. Listen!” Baba pointed to the talking box that transmitted nothing but the same static buzzing. He shook his head. “The poor stateless Kurds!”

  “Aren’t all Kurds stateless, Baba?” Chia asked.

  “You don’t know about the Syrian Kurds who are denied citizenship?” Baba measured his son’s worth based on his knowledge of Kurdish plight. But how were we supposed to learn our history when Kurds were omitted from textbooks and the media didn’t teach us either? Mama’s snores from the bedroom and the static from the radio made it hard to pick out his words. “The news says there are three hundred thousand of them, but I am sure there are more.” He no longer seemed to see Chia or even his mother’s handmade rug at his feet. “The children of these stateless people are stateless too. They are the poorest of the poor. You have a legal birth certificate, at least.”

  Baba abandoned the radio and turned on the television, changing the channel immediately when he saw a clergyman delivering a sermon on the West’s “cultural invasion” of the innocent youth by “glorifying promiscuity and drugs.” Other channels either showed mullahs or played recitations of the Qur’an. As usual, Baba spat at the screen, cursed the mullahs, and then turned off the TV. And as usual, his simmering rage agitated me, even though I was merely spying on this conversation.

  Chia fingered the glossy leaves of the peace lily Baba had been growing. “Why do they torture people who have not committed a crime and who only believe in something other than what they are told to?” My brother straightened his spine and sat cross-legged on the rug in front of my father as if expecting him to be able to explain.

  Baba glanced at his son forlornly, then back at the dark screen of the television. It reflected his bald head, his baggy trousers and short-sleeved undershirt. He picked up a newspaper and shuffled the pages. “Rotten propaganda!” He threw it away, scratched his mustache with his index finger.

  “How would it happen when you were in prison?” Chia pressed his luck.

  “At midnight,” he said, “they would call names. We were eighty inmates in one wing—sometimes more, sometimes less. Anyone whose name was called after the sun went down never came back.”

  I pricked up my ears from my invisible post. Baba’s gaze remained on the flowers woven into the rug, his expression neutral, reminiscent. “We would listen for and count the gunshots right before sunrise, and with a fork, we’d engrave the date and the estimated number of people executed on the walls of our cells.”

  I steadied myself on the doorframe. My brother sat rigidly.

  Baba continued stoically. “Every time that loudspeaker crackled, every time a guard turned it on and blew into it, every time someone whose name started with A was called . . .” He stopped and glanced at Chia, through Chia, as if Chia weren’t there. “The ones who were called had only a moment to give their friends and cellmates any useful belongings they had. A shirt, a pair of shoes, a comb. And they might ask for something to be sent to their parents, wives, or children: their diaries, drawings, handicrafts they had made in prison with inedible dough. Then their friends . . .”

  Baba squeezed his eyes shut, bit at the corner of his cracked, bloodless lips. “After the men were taken away, their friends would light a candle if they had one, would pass around some dates if they had any, and would shed tears if they still had some left in them. That kind of stuff. They would gather the few possessions they had to give the executed something like a funeral, an acknowledgement of their existence in a place that wished to annihilate us all.”

  Chia cleared this throat and asked in a gravelly voice, “Was that the worst part? When a friend was taken?”

  My father looked away, rubbed his face, and pressed his fingers to his temples as if he were focusing on something. I wanted to run and grab a glass of water for Baba, whose lips had dried up, but I stayed put. “Once a plainclothed man walked in with a flashlight in his hand.” He wheezed. Looked the other way. Memories were crowding in.

  I held my breath so I wouldn’t miss a single word.

  “Three guards followed the man, who was clearly an Ettela’at agent.”

  “The intelligence service,” Chia breathed.

  Baba continued. “It was past midnight, and the central lights of the prison had all been turned off. We were about twelve cellmates then, Joanna’s husband among us. Their daughter was due to be born the day after. We were ordered to stand in a line and face this figure who walked before us, directing his flashlight at us. He pointed his index finger and ordered an unlucky prisoner to step forward from the line. His blinding light then flashed into my face. I shut my eyes and frowned. On a reflex . . .” Baba’s lip stayed low, slurring his speech.

  My heart was beating too loudly, and I worried its pounding would drown out Baba’s next words.

  “And?” Chia prompted softly.

  Baba sighed, the deepest sigh. “Somehow the monster decided to move on to the next person and beckoned him out of the lineup. He didn’t bother to call names, check the prisoners’ files. He was so damn sure he would get away with it all. He could have ordered the light to be turned on in a snap—nothing would have happened to him even then. But he didn’t bother. He took eight men.”

  Baba’s features were tight, his breathing so labored I felt he was reliving the terror.

  “Did you ever hear what happened to those eight men? Was Shiler’s father one of the eight?”

  “He was. They are buried in a La’nat Awa.” Baba didn’t wait for Chia to ask what La’nat Awa was. “The cursed place. Mass graves where prisoners are taken after execution, or if they die under torture, or if the subjects are just kidnapped or ‘disappeared,’ or if their families can’t afford to pay the bullet fee . . . Can you imagine? When they executed someone, they made the families pay for the very bullets that killed them just to get the body back. Kurdistan is full of mass graves, all called La’nat Awa.”

  There was a long pause. “They did all of that. They even raped the young women they sentenced to death because they believed virgins would go to heaven and that those opposing the state should only go to hell. They didn’t call it rape. They called it a marriage, to make it somewhat religiously acceptable. They believed all of that. Or maybe they didn’t. They knew it was a game of power and lust, didn’t they? They must have!”

  “Baba,” Chia said gravely, “I promise to become a lawyer one day and bring them all to justice.”

  Baba looked into the distance with a blank expression on his face. Then he suddenly turned back to his son. “But my name was always called during daylight. You think I was one of the lucky ones?”

  Chia was unable to answer.

  Baba’s lips twitched into a bitter sneer. “You do, I see it. All they ever did to me was whip me and then turn me loose so I could live like this, like a dog begging for scraps to feed my children. You can’t understand it
. I was once young too, had hope, thought that I could change things if only I tried hard enough. My dream was to read stories into a loudspeaker for hundreds of elders relaxing in a large meadow. You won’t believe it, but I was a dreamer at one point. You know, son, there is more dignity in death than in a life like this.”

  He took a pull from the bottle of arak he’d stashed beneath the couch cushion, stood, and made for the attic stairs. As he passed my room, he locked eyes with me, still hunched in the shadow. So he knew I was eavesdropping the entire time. Chia remained seated.

  I quietly closed my bedroom door and plugged in the iron. My hands shook as I moved the old heavy thing across another of my father’s dark shirts. La’nat Awa.

  The whip had indiscriminately left its crisscrosses on our backs. I put aside the iron, hugged Baba’s hot shirt, and inhaled the smell of him. My tears left widening dark spots on his clothes.

  Our region was one huge mass grave: Some lay silent; some cried out from under the earth.

  My father needed nursing just as much as the helpless Kurds in Iran, the homeless ones in Iraq, the hopeless ones in Turkey, and the stateless ones in Syria.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I woke before sunrise and groped for the lamp switch. Today was the day. The university admission results would be printed in an otherwise insignificant newspaper, Chia’s and my fates printed in the tiniest of fonts. Each year I’d studied geometry and geography to prepare for the national university admission test, the Konkour, but to no avail. Only private universities had admitted me thus far, and they were expensive. This was my last time taking the Konkour, and Chia’s first and last. If I did not get in this year, I would stop making a fool of myself. If he didn’t get in, he would be conscripted.

  Unable to get back to sleep, I started wrapping a present I had bought for Father’s Day. Three years had passed since Baba had shared stories of his time in prison—the reason I’d saved up to get him a gift—and tears still welled in my eyes whenever I remembered them. Since no one knew Baba’s real birthdate, I had to wait for a different occasion to show how much I cared for him. His mother, the woman who’d given birth every year for the greater part of her life by then, had said he was born in the spring of the year of the flood. That was all she remembered. A birth certificate issued for a dead sibling had become Baba’s hand-me-down identification after he survived infancy. The other boy was also called Alan, the flagbearer.

  Without a college degree, I wouldn’t be able to bear myself, let alone a flag.

  Rebellious tears slipped down my cheeks despite my efforts to contain them, spilling onto the gift wrap, which turned my fingertips green—my favorite color, a tonic in my otherwise dreary existence. Holding my stained fingers under the running water of the bathroom sink, I caught a glimpse of Baba’s eyes in the mirror. Neighbors and relatives had commented that I took after my father, but this was the first time I was stunned by the resemblance. If he only understood how his daughter was his prisoner, kept under house arrest.

  With my hair cropped short in preparation for the sweltering months of summer beneath my headscarf, I looked androgynous, unlike Shiler—her baby fat, for which she was once teased, had developed into womanly curves. She had a supple bosom and looked prettier than ever with those wild eyes. I sometimes ran into her in the town’s bazaar now that she’d returned from volunteering in refugee camps. She had resumed her “degree-seeking mandate” in an adult school.

  The green stain on my index finger was persistent. I imagined dipping my entire body into a tub of this color, becoming “the forest-green woman.” I could stand in the town square, and people would tip coins into my jar to ogle me, smiles on their faces. I wouldn’t need a husband. My hand turned numb under the cold running water, but the stain wouldn’t rinse off until I used soap. That sparked an idea.

  From under my bed, I fetched some leftover pink wrapping paper, put it in a bowl, and poured water over it. Then, with a small piece of cotton, I colored my cheeks pink. My homemade blush looked natural, my face lively and somewhat pretty despite the boyish haircut and the dark circles under my eyes.

  I ran down the stairs and peeked into Chia’s room in the basement, excited to show off my improvised “makeup.” He was praying. Palms held up to the sky, head tilted backward, eyes on the whitewashed ceiling, lips murmuring words of gratitude or complaint, I couldn’t tell. He looked snatched away from this dreadful earth.

  I crept into the room, sat in the only available corner of the bright but messy space, and wrote in his open journal: “We are each a thousand people inside, brother, masquerading as one. We are each an intricate plant with petals and thorns, full of hope, full of hurt.”

  With hands that had received the light, Chia wiped his face in the ritual of ending prayers, a gesture that to my mind was the reason his forehead had a spark that no one but I could see. I hid my cheeks with my palms. A good girl wouldn’t rouge her face. Only whores did that. I could not remember the last time my God, the loving moon of my childhood, had smiled upon me.

  “Ready?” Chia looked right past my pink cheeks.

  “Have been for a while.”

  We sprinted to the biggest newsstand in the city, where a crowd had already gathered. The rising sun flung a streak of purple into the ebbing indigo of the predawn sky.

  “I keep saying the paper won’t get here until noon,” the vendor said. “If you know people who live in big cities, have them check for you. Stop blocking the traffic now.” The frustrated man’s logic did not work on the noisy, impatient crowd.

  Chia clasped his hands behind his back and leaned against a wall. As the hours ticked by, I stared at the patches of cloud that stubbornly refused to form an apparition of our future, at the sun that shone, indifferent to the mixture of anticipation and dread on the street.

  When the papers finally arrived, people snatched for the pages on which their surnames were printed. Some tore apart the pages in their anguish over disappointing results. At least ten people were bent over every page, each drawing a corner toward them as if expecting the paper to stretch. Tears fell. Hysterical laughter followed. There was a jubilant hoot or two.

  Chia snatched a copy and pulled away from the crowd. My mouth tasted like coins as the bile rose in my throat.

  “I’m dizzy,” he said. His finger ran down the list of last names that started with S.

  He gave me a frightened look and shook his head. A deluge of panic broke my calm façade. A final defeat had been a recurrent theme of my nightmares, a thought I wholeheartedly avoided in the daytime, but which lurked in the shadows of every moment.

  Chia wiped a fugitive tear with his sleeve. I grabbed the paper from him, pressed the sheet to the wall, and tried to keep my finger steady as I ran it through the names; there were several hundred Samans. I blinked several times. My vision blurred.

  The name next to one of the Samans was Chia’s. “I am not imagining,” I whispered.

  His destiny was spelled out in the code written beside his government ID number. Each student’s exam scores alone would decide their academic fate; even those accepted to public universities had little say in the subjects they would pursue. Chia stared down for a moment, shoulders drooping, and reclined against the wall for balance.

  “Chia?”

  He dropped to the ground and buried his face in his arms.

  Despite all his efforts, all the late-night cramming and candle-burning, ranking first in his school, the town, and the province, he could not compete with students from the bigger, wealthy cities, people who had the right books and the right tutors. On a national level, he was merely a mediocre student.

  Me? Not even mediocre. In this competition, my rank was nonexistent.

  The young men and women who had shared the morning wait with us were now sneaking away in silence to find quiet corners and cope with their defeat after having reached for a dream far beyond the grasp of the working-class families of our deprived region.

  Chia wandered
away from the broken hearts. I followed him. We took the bus home and sat in our designated areas on the gender-segregated bus.

  He’d been selected to study political science, which he didn’t care for, instead of law, as he’d hoped. But, like Baba, he had been admitted to Tehran University. This could be his making or his undoing; I would exchange my fate with his in a second. This time I hadn’t been accepted anywhere, not even by the expensive private colleges. On the list, “Saman, Leila” was nowhere to be found.

  When we got home I offered Chia a distraction. “A family is coming over tomorrow. Will you help me clean up the living room?” My mother had accepted new suitors for me as a contingency plan, the latest in her scheme to marry me off, but I’d held on to the smallest shred of hope that I could cancel the meeting if I were bound for Kurdistan or Lorestan University, if not Tehran. The thought of being touched by a man I didn’t like gave me the creeps, but I saw no other way out.

  “They come to ask for your hand, not mine,” Chia mumbled and lay down in his bed.

  I glared at him, already annoyed with his moroseness. Didn’t he realize how much I’d give to be in his position? Slowly but discernibly, time had turned us into strangers, even physically. Chia’s fair skin had turned brown as he swam in Lake Zrebar and played football with his friends under Kurdistan’s abundant sun. My skin had turned jaundiced in my loneliness, my cheeks hollow; I slept poorly, waking with aches in my muscles, stabbing pain behind my eyes. His eyes were still charming, my mouth still big. He was tall and attractive while I was short and frumpy, my head swallowed by a fuzzy Afro of unruly hair.

  Perhaps tired of the heaviness of my look, Chia got up, handed me a wrapped book, and said lightly, “Hope you read this one.” It was the translated version of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, sold on the black market for three times the price of permitted books.

  I had no interest in it, in anything highbrow that he and Baba were immersed in, a club of two.