Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  “Chia,” I called. “It’s not exactly what you wanted, but you have done magnificently.”

  “You don’t understand. I hate political science. Politics is no science. I wanted to become a human rights lawyer.”

  “I know. Still, you’ve done better than almost everyone else in this city—really.” I swallowed. “I am proud of you.”

  “Your nail is bleeding.” He sounded like he was reporting the weather forecast.

  “Ah.” I wiped my cuticles on my black slacks. “Didn’t realize I was chewing them.” I hugged Chia to reassure him that I meant what I’d said; I savored the touch of his skinny and hairy arms, his familiar and comforting scent.

  I shuddered as he jerked back. Our emotional distance was finding a new geographical dimension.

  “You’re crying.”

  I wiped my face with my sleeve. “Tears of joy, I guess.” I grinned.

  “Don’t pretend . . .”

  “What?”

  “I told you to put ironing aside and study, didn’t I? Didn’t I? But you don’t listen. It’s not my fault you . . .”

  I stared at him in disbelief.

  “I would have loved to see you go to college, but you ruin your life and act as if I’ve betrayed you for wanting an education myself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You make me feel . . . Please just leave me alone.” Chia waved his hand in the air as if shooing away a bee.

  “You haven’t even started college yet and you are already acting like a snob. Just because I can’t . . . You have no right to humiliate me.”

  “You give me this look.” He raised his hands and curled his fingers inside as if clawing at something invisible in the air. “That miserable look. You make me feel like I’m a shitty brother, betraying you for leaving you alone here.”

  “You would be miserable too, Mr. Che Guevara, if you were a woman!” I slammed his door. “I hope you die from loneliness in Tehran,” I shouted as I ran up the stairs.

  I shrieked at the top of my lungs once I was on the rooftop. It felt good, like when Shiler and I had screamed nonsense during morning assembly, so I did it again.

  Then I spat from the roof over and over, timing how long it took for the drops of foamy saliva to hit the street below: only two and a half seconds to reach the gravel. I spat as far as I could and watched the drool evaporate in four seconds. The game went on for several minutes as I expelled these tiny pieces of my being, hoping I was spitting out the bad bits, the parts of me deemed so unworthy.

  Dry-mouthed, I went into the attic to drink from Baba’s pitcher, the remains of which turned out not to be water. I chugged the bitter liquid, several glasses worth. Within minutes my head was swimming. Reclining on a cushion, I impersonated Baba, happy and proud that my son was following in my footsteps, getting into the same university where I’d studied. I clasped my fingers, stretched my legs, and preened my pretend mustache. My farce would be incomplete without the radio, so I turned it on. Of course it was tuned to the Kurdish station. I wasn’t listening at first, but then my ears pricked up.

  “. . . The fight at a football match in Qamishli broke out between the Kurdish fans of the local team and the visiting Arab team. Security forces arrived at Qamishli and opened fire on the Kurds, killing seven of them. The funeral for these men turned into a violent demonstration.”

  A Kurdish affairs analyst was speaking about the anniversary of a major conflict in Syria that had happened two years ago, explaining how the Syrian police had killed and injured hundreds and arrested more than two thousand, spreading the Kurdish protest to other cities.

  Right away I regretted wanting to be Baba, so I pressed the off button, grabbed the old radio, the source of such horror, and ran back to the roof. With a cry of triumph, I threw the old box over the edge and watched it shatter to smithereens on the ground below. Now we might have some peace.

  It didn’t hurt when Baba slapped me across the face that night. It did hurt, though, when the devil I thought I’d killed was replaced a few days later by a new one, one with a bigger voice to broadcast our unending tragedies.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Leila, Grandma needs me. I’m going to stay with her for a while. I can’t afford a caretaker any longer. I think her days are numbered.” Mama stood by my bed, her new perfume sharply sweet, an orange duffle bag—the color of her lipstick—hanging from her shoulder. The spark in her eyes belied the news she was breaking. Or perhaps she was relieved that this smothering cycle of caring for her demented mother was coming to an end. Mama had seemed uncharacteristically content for some time now, not picking fights with Baba or me and even taking more care with her appearance.

  “How long?” I looked up at her from my Jila Hosseini poetry collection, which I’d hid within a chemistry textbook. In truth, I’d given up trying for college, but I had maintained the pretense of anticipation, mainly for myself, my only armor against the despair that was silently and certainly devouring me.

  Mama shrugged her shoulders and left the door ajar. But the fat brown suitcase she carried out the front door let me know she’d be gone for weeks at least. She’d been wearing mascara, and Mama’s darkened lashes had brightened her hazel eyes, eyes that Chia had inherited. I had last seen him five months and fourteen days ago, when he left for university. My little brother was now in the capital, becoming an educated grown man. As more doors opened for him, just as many slammed in my face.

  I checked Mama’s bedroom, adjacent to mine, and sure enough, I found her closet nearly empty. Gazing in her bureau’s mirror, I frowned at how the genetic lottery had showered my mother’s beauty on my brother but left me dry. I’d had only a few suitors over the years, and as much as I’d hated those potential husbands, I longed to be desired, to be given the empowering chance to say no. I sat on my mother’s mattress; it was worn on only one side, molded into the shape of a lonely woman. Perhaps beauty wasn’t such a blessing after all?

  Mama’s scratched reading glasses were lying on a book whose dust jacket was covered by a newspaper. It turned out to be a psychology book, and the pages of a chapter titled “Borderline Personality Disorder” were dog-eared. Hostility, intense and highly changeable moods, lack of empathy, strong feelings of isolation, distorted sense of self, impulsive self-destructive behavior. It was my mother to a T.

  I made my way back to my room where I had been barricading myself since Chia left, not interacting with anyone, even Shiler. In the meantime, a massive and frightening bleakness inside me kept expanding and rattling. Sometimes I wrote about it in my diary, sensing that if I didn’t somehow fill the hollowness, it would swallow my heart and spit out my core. Other times I wished for the emptiness to scrape me off, a permanent erasure.

  I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.

  The posters in my room that Chia had given me over the years had suffered from dust and neglect, and my blinds were always shut even though my window opened onto only our unkempt backyard and the marble-covered wall of the back of the neighbor’s tall building.

  I catch a glimpse of a stranger trudging inside me, in rare moments when the persistent fog evaporates, I wrote. In lightning flashes, I notice a tormentor at work when external persecutors are asleep. The wound is said to be the place where the Light enters you, but the Dark can sneak in from the same place.

  The phone rang. It had been nearly two months since Chia had last called. Long-distance calls were expensive. “How are you?” I basked in his fruity voice and sophisticated words as he talked about the extensive market of banned books he could now access through contacts he had made at university; about the students’ idealism meeting professsors’ wisdom, creating an “educated imagination” ready to reshape society; about the stigmatization of the Kurds in Iran, Turkey, and Syria—our criminalized identity, the “assimilate or annihilate” policy. He didn’t ask how I was, but even if he had, what did I have to say?
That I found no reason to get out of bed anymore, that I was endlessly tired and sad?

  “When are you coming home?” I interrupted his speech about the autonomous and prosperous Kurdish region in Iraq and opened the window. I stretched my palm out to catch a few snowflakes that were racing down, unaware of their fate once they reached the ground. I wondered if there had ever been a rebellious snowflake, one that asked what all the rush was for, sat still on an evergreen and looked on in horror as her friends turned into mud and slush under the heartless shoes of self-immersed humans. Did the witnessing flake die in excruciating pain, more so than the others who faced their destiny without prior knowledge or resistance? Or did she make the best of the remaining part of her freefall? “Sorry, what?”

  “Any new drawings lately?” he repeated.

  “When did you say you’re coming home for winter break?”

  “I can’t, sis. Sorry. I’m working on a newsletter with some friends after the final exams. We want to wake society up to—”

  “Oh, give me a break.” I hung up, surprising him but also myself.

  In the snow-blanketed alleyway, kids were playing with mitten-covered hands; a beautiful girl was perched on the hood of a parked car, flirting with a man whose tongue dangled out of his open mouth like a thirsty dog. A middle-aged neighbor was shoveling his driveway joyfully, bobbing his head and singing along with the upbeat music blasting from his radio. If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.

  A man who looked to be in his thirties pushed a wheelchair-bound woman up the curve of the street. All wrinkles, she eagerly watched children sledding, running, and building snowmen. Standing by the window, I folded my cold arms and continued to watch the old woman, who was covered in a green, blue, and white blanket. Her eyes shone as the children shrieked with joy, pelting snowballs. “She loves colors, eh?” I shouted to the man as they passed my window.

  He looked up and smiled jubilantly. “Oh, yeah, she loves life.” The old woman tilted her head toward me. I waved. She blinked twice, then smiled, showing off her perfect veneers. I saw in her the rapture of being alive. When was the last time I had looked for little excuses to enjoy life? Shuddering, I closed the window and turned on the coal heater. On the roof, the chimney coughed smoke into the sky.

  “Dance when you’re broken open. Dance if you’ve torn the bandage off.” I recited Rumi’s rhythmic lines, buoyant enough to temporarily lift me from my depression. “Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood.” I had the entire house to myself, and I relished my solitude. I twirled like a dervish, challenging the walls to dare enclose me, feeling like I could transcend. I took a deep breath. And then another.

  With newfound vitality, I set about cleaning the house. I tended the potted plants, the dying spoon-shaped flowers of the peace lilies, the withering heart-shaped leaves of the silvery-grey peperomia. They wanted to stay alive, it seemed to me, not because of anything, but in spite of everything. I scrubbed the kitchen and tidied the living room, though there was little I could do about things like the spring that broke through the stuffing of our secondhand sofa. Nonetheless, the neat house felt less alienating. In the afternoon, I showered and made nisk: pureed red lentils, sundried mint, and mixed herbs.

  As the nisk simmered, I read Ms. Choman Hardi’s poem about homeland, sitting by the window. Outside Baba appeared around the curve with a wheelbarrow full of potatoes. His breath made little clouds before his face; he wasn’t wearing gloves or a shawl. A woman carrying an infant stopped to buy some from him.

  An old man came chasing after Baba. “That’s mine, you filthy thief.” He lunged after his quarry, and his boot landed on my father’s hip, knocking him over. I gaped.

  The woman’s bag split open in her hand, and the potatoes rolled onto the asphalt. “Sorry, ma’am. Are you okay?” Baba got up, ignoring the old ogre.

  “Thugs!” the woman cursed as Baba ran after the potatoes and put them in a new bag. She left without her potatoes, without paying.

  “What is wrong with you?” Baba cursed.

  “That’s mine.” The old man pointed emphatically to the now-overturned wheelbarrow.

  “Get out of my way.” Baba continued picking up fallen potatoes, sniffing.

  “You think I’m bullshitting you? See, I’ll show you.”

  “Go to hell, you lunatic.”

  “I’ll prove it.” The man winced but confidently went to the wheelbarrow, pointed at its right corner, and started to shout. “See, my name. See? Right here.”

  Under the streetlamp, I saw a sweat break out on Baba’s forehead. Shaking my head, I shrank behind the curtains a bit.

  “Do you see, or are you blind?” the man cried at the top of his voice, his frail body shaking in fury.

  Baba wiped the sweat away with his sleeve and looked down, busted.

  “You’re still young enough to find proper work. Or this will be your future.” The man pointed a finger at himself. Another crushed Kurd. A bitter smile appeared on Baba’s face. He did not mention that he’d been about to defend his PhD dissertation when the Cultural Revolution had closed down the universities.

  “Fine, fine,” Baba relented. “My mistake.” Before the man could object, Baba scooped a few more potatoes into his gunnysack, threw it over his shoulder, and hurried through our gate, locking it behind him. I considered helping him lug it inside, but I feared injuring what little pride my father had left. Instead I turned to my journal: “Kurdistan is the land of bravery and betrayal; it asks to be embraced but bites you when in your arms.”

  Baba looked a little wobbly as he came into the kitchen. Our eyes locked. He wheezed. The lines on Baba’s forehead deepened, his voice cracked, and his cheeks and nose were crimson.

  I handed him a glass of water and asked if he would like some tea. He nodded and washed his face in the sink.

  “Smells like my mother’s food.” He inspected the pot.

  That was the biggest compliment. I served us two big bowls of the soup and sat across from my father. He took a tentative spoonful, then groaned his approval.

  “Mama will stay at Grandma’s for a while,” I told him.

  He nodded and took another bite. I hated how he looked so relieved. But I too felt there was now air in the house, as if Mama used to suck up all the oxygen.

  “Add more lemon juice next time.”

  That night Baba did not turn on the television or radio. Instead, perhaps inspired by my soup, he went out and shortly after came back with bags of groceries. He taught me how to make a mouthwatering dish of ground lamb, celery, carrots, eggplant, potato, and tomato sauce. We substituted lentils for the ground lamb. Despite the embarrassing scene earlier, his temporary bachelorhood had put him in a celebratory mood.

  “Did you know why they call this food mala dez?” He blew on a steamy spoonful.

  “Meaning a clergyman would steal it? Why is that?”

  “They say if something is good, it will be immediately stolen by either gendarmes or mullahs.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s sad.” He looked at me with surprise and tasted the food.

  “I know, but I love these little acts of rebellion. Naming a food that way.”

  His taste test burned his tongue. I chortled louder. He threw his head back with glee, showing the empty space where his molars should be.

  The food was ready. We relished every spoonful.

  “Another teenager was tortured to death today. Only fifteen. Lashed for cursing at the Supreme Fucker.” It was a test, but I didn’t take the bait. I redirected.

  “How did you learn this recipe? From Dayah gian?”

  “Everything she made was unmatchable,” he lamented. “She was a saint. Every time I had a nightmare she was there, ready to soothe me back to sleep.”

  “You had a lot of nightmares as a child too?” I had no idea.

  Baba told me he had witnessed a massacre when he was seven and how the murderous frenzy of the so
ldiers still haunted him with rejuvenated potency, in scenes that shifted from a mute, black-and-white motion picture to colorful, three-dimensional, real-life experience.

  Chia and I had grown up hearing whispers about that day, the day that had defined my father forever. It was his inheritance, this agony, and I longed to share in his burden, if only to understand what had led him down his path of activism to the imprisonment that was still a chain on our family.

  He’d been only seven years old. Baba swallowed, saying he couldn’t give details of the day. Instead he shared how he still relived it some nights.

  In the nightmares, he was there again, a horrified witness to the parents’ shrieks and pleas, the soldiers’ mirth, the growl of the deadly tanks, the prisoners’ silent tears.

  Raising his eyes to the sky, Baba would beg for divine intervention, for an end to the cruelty. Instead he’d find himself in a hole, buried up to his chin, at once a terrified spectator and a panicked captive. He would wait for God to pay attention. He would wait until there was no more waiting to be done and the tread of the tank was upon him. As the tanks rolled in, his inability to scream would awaken him. Grandmother would emerge with a calming hand, in a sky-blue dress, looking like a fairy who had entered through the window.

  Outside, a truck’s tires crunched the snow. Stunned, I studied Baba’s stoic face. I swallowed, wanting to say something, but I didn’t know what. That he was a gifted storyteller? That I understood him well because I also suffered, even though my exposure to genocide and incarceration was secondhand? In fact, that was the problem. My imprisonment and motherlessness was figurative, his literal.

  “Did you have that nightmare in prison too?” I finally asked.

  I summoned patience until he spoke. Ordinarily a morning interrogation would be followed by a flogging in the basement, he told me. But one day his guard was called upstairs, and Baba had to follow.

  Baba raised his bruised face as they climbed the stairs. He then saw a row of hanged prisoners framed by the window that opened onto the prison courtyard. “Hearing of executions was one thing, but seeing those limp, hooded bodies . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence.