Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  Chia and I were even, if only temporarily, both equally neglected by our father.

  I visited Shiler after she was released from the hospital and I recovered from what turned out to be pneumonia. Joanna opened the door and pulled me into an embrace. She looked as though she’d been crying.

  “Shiler’s asleep. Sit awhile.” Their neat one-bedroom basement apartment looked spacious with its cream-colored walls and small white sofa, so in contrast with our yellowish paint and ugly burgundy couches.

  “No I’m not,” Shiler called out from the bedroom.

  Joanna sent me in and went to wash her face. Shiler was propped up on the bed in the corner, pressing her knee up to her belly and squeezing it close. She looked up, and our eyes locked. A large scar extended from her left temple to the center of her forehead, cutting through her eyebrow. A tiny blood spot in her left eye. Face bruised and pained.

  I knelt and held her hands. “Delala min, what have they done to you?”

  “I’m okay,” she winced. “Only lost one kidney.”

  “A kidney?” I screamed. “You lost a kidney?”

  Joanna came in with a tray of tea, eyes now completely dry. “She has another perfectly functioning kidney.”

  “How? Why?” I tried to release my hands from Shiler’s grip, but she did not let go. For the first time I saw fear in her eyes. The firm ground shifted beneath my feet. I’d never seen Shiler so beaten down—not in school, not ever.

  “Failed the virginity test. And they found out about my parents’ history. Two men and one woman beat the shit out of me. The prison hospital removed the fucked-up kidney. You know what’s funny? The woman’s finger broke from all the beating.” She laughed a bit before squeezing her knee to her chest again.

  Joanna pressed her forehead to Shiler’s and kissed her hand.

  I drew a sharp breath, refused to let my tears fall. “I safeguarded some of your movies. Seven of them. Sorry, that’s all I could do.”

  “I didn’t think I would get even one.” Shiler’s smile was real.

  I unzipped my large coat and brought out a bag of discs.

  “Oh, girl, I thought you were pregnant,” Shiler taunted me lightly. Her smile reached her eyes.

  “As if.”

  We laughed. I got up to place my coat on a chair. The Second Sex was on the bookshelf. I never had read it, so Chia must have passed it along. He’d inscribed a note on the first page: To my militant sweetheart.

  “I didn’t know you and Chia were so close.” I frowned.

  “Please sit with me awhile, Leila. Keep the lights on. Keep the door open,” Shiler asked. Five minutes later she was asleep.

  I left the bedroom, no longer feeling obliged to hold back my tears. Joanna followed and held my shoulders. “Where the hell is God now?” I said. “Why did this happen to Shiler?”

  “Oh, darling. God had no say in this.” Her words, already gentle in her soft Kurmanji dialect—much more sonorous than the Sorani dialect Kurds spoke in Iran and Iraq—were especially tender. “It’s all human mess, and agency is part of the law. So it’s all in our hands. It can be changed, gulakam.” She called me “my flower.”

  “I wish I had your faith.”

  I thought about Joanna’s struggles, how, unable to speak Persian, she’d understood only a few words that were spoken in the court during her trial. When she tried to defend herself in Kurdish, the outraged judge changed her sentence from “life” to “execution.” He assumed Joanna was a separatist because she spoke in her mother tongue. She wasn’t a separatist until that day.

  Joanna had wailed and explained that she had been raised in Kobani, Syria, not Iran, and didn’t speak Persian. Nobody understood her. Nor did anybody care what a convicted murderer had to say. Joanna swore to God’s Kurdish, Persian, and Arabic names that what she had done was self-defense, that the man had tried to rape her while she was going home from work. But the law knew one thing: A man’s life was worth twice as much as a woman’s. People said he hadn’t actually raped her before he was killed. What had she worn that day anyway? Why was she walking alone in the dark? Regardless, she had to either pay the man’s blood money or be hanged in retaliation.

  The only thing that saved Joanna from the noose was Shiler, growing in her belly. And now the same government that had sentenced her to die had come for Shiler too.

  We hugged quietly and cried in each other’s arms.

  “All it takes is some listening. Remember, crying, even praying, is not listening, chawakam.” You’re my eyes. Her warm look instigated a certainty that I knew I’d lose as soon as I was out of her sight. My friend’s body was mutilated and so was my soul.

  On the way home, I realized whom Shiler had been dating.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Baba came out of the bathroom, the same old towel loosely thrown over his shoulders, the same welts, the familiar lavender soap. The pit in my stomach as I looked at the scars was the same too, but that was the extent of it. I was too broken open to dance, feeling trapped once more. Fatima, the rich girl, had killed herself after her fiancé didn’t show up on her wedding day, I’d learned. I didn’t blame her.

  Baba went straight to the pot on the stove, lifted the lid, and inhaled the aroma. I had made Chia’s favorite stew of herbs and beef, sewzi ghawlma. During the meal I had Baba’s attention and Chia’s compliments, but as soon as they were full, I was once again as significant as the greasy dishes left in the sink.

  Baba lay down on his mother’s rug and turned on his radio. “—and Mohammad Sedigh Kaboudvand, editor of the weekly newspaper Payam-e Mardom-e Kurdistan, is sentenced to eleven years in prison, convicted of ‘inciting the population to rebel against the central state.’”

  Baba said the journalist had written about the Kulbar and asked if I knew who they were. I did not. Poverty-stricken villagers, so helpless that they risked their lives and their only valuables, their mules, to smuggle goods, walking long hours and days in the mountains carrying heavy burdens on their backs, sneaking by numerous checkpoints, getting randomly shot by the heartless Iranian guards.

  “Baba, I found all the shirts I’ve gifted you over the years. Did you even try them on? Even once?” They’d been hidden under a large pile of newspaper in the attic, tags still on them.

  “Even if the guards don’t kill them, the hardship of the job will,” he went on, but I detected a hint of embarrassment on his face.

  I waited for him to give an explanation, perhaps to say the colors were too happy or the sizes weren’t ideal. He stared at me, and I could read his thoughts. How could Leila care about shirts more than the human lives lost weekly to poverty and the savagery of the border guards?

  I sighed and headed to Chia’s basement studio. His radio was on too, tuned to the same station: “—Kurdish protestors were killed and a hundred and forty-two arrested in Saqez. Government buildings and banks were destroyed.”

  He paced in the tiny studio, sweating, taking notes, pacing some more. “Iranian troops arrested as many as twelve hundred protesters and killed eleven people . . .” the radio went on.

  The birds and worms had already eaten all the cherries in the backyard. Our bikes were rusty and broken. The trees were dying.

  Chia started packing for his teaching post.

  I went inside his room. “Will you visit every week?”

  “Every week?” He looked up from his suitcase.

  “You’ll be only three hours away.”

  “The books and heavy stuff should go underneath, right? And then I can squeeze my underwear and socks in the little spaces between books, don’t you think?” he asked, as if I knew anything about traveling. Indeed, why would a man immersed in community service waste money on visiting a perpetual straggler, and an aging one at that.

  “Don’t forget your favorite blue shirt.” I handed it over, cleaned, ironed, and neatly folded.

  “Ah, thank you!” he said but did not put it in his luggage.

  “Explain to me, Profess
or: What is wrong with having clean shirts?” The anguish of my trivial existence was insignificant to him.

  Chia shook his head. “I’m going to a poor village, not to a fashion runway.”

  “Oh, so you’re a saint now, are you?” I said, hands on hips. “You think I don’t know you’re responsible for Shiler losing her kidney?”

  Chia yelped and drew a quick breath, which made me realize my wild guess had indeed been correct. He hunched over his suitcase to avoid my gaze and folded his underwear smaller and smaller, trying to make it take up as little space as possible.

  It was all too obvious now. So the progressive souls had been dating and had kept it from me. “You claim you know all about this society, and yet you couldn’t protect your own girlfriend? How long has this been going on behind my back, anyway?”

  “Shiler had planned to tell you the day she was arrested. We wanted to tell you, honestly, Leila, but the timing needed to be right. You can be such a prude.” He echoed the sentiment Shiler had said a hundred times: I was too uptight about sex. “Now will you please go away?”

  “Why do you treat me like I’m only a nuisance?” My voice was shrill, a mouse-like squeak.

  “We’re in love. Do you understand what that means? It’s not like I forced her.” He wiped his forehead with a trembling sleeve.

  “Well, she is the one who was tortured for it, and yet you act as if you are better than everyone else.”

  He threw a book at the wall and shouted louder than I’d ever heard, “Get a fucking life!”

  I had none.

  Chia zipped up his half-packed suitcase, left without another word, and slammed the door behind him.

  Deflated, I sat at his desk and read his notes. He’d been documenting Kurdish sufferings in our banished mother tongue: Kurdish men made up a disproportionate number of the political prisoners and executions, often more than 40 percent. Women setting their bodies on fire. Smart students expelled from top universities because of their or their families’ political activities. On every page he had written the national anthem in large spiky handwriting: Kas nalle Kurd merduwa; Kurd zinduwa—Let no one say the Kurds are dead; the Kurds are alive.

  I ran my fingers over the words. Alive. Dead. Alive. We were dying but still alive. How was that possible? But it was something I felt acutely. I held a finger under my nose. I was breathing. But I was not alive. Only no one could see that.

  Something powerful seized me and would not let go. I was restless, haunted. I wrote: And here I am, a Kurd who wishes for nonexistence before your eyes, a woman worn down by hurt and isolation, stuck for a thousand tedious years in solitude and invisibility. You see the suffering of everyone but me.

  A red Toyota decelerated at our door and honked. Baba got in the car, dressed up and clean shaven. The driver was the neighborhood dealer everyone called Gravedigger.

  I had to get out more too. I filled a small vitamin container with hot water and pink tissue paper. With a piece of cotton, I colored my cheeks and lips. The phony vibrancy gave me the confidence to go out to the town’s only park.

  The lawns smelled fresh and clean after a light rain. The daisies and poppies were picked over despite the signs forbidding it. I remembered pulling them up by the stems with Shiler and Joanna when Chia was born. I kicked the rotten fruit that had dropped from the trees, half-eaten by worms and birds. The unwanted apples.

  Passing men whistled, catcalled, then scoffed at my old-fashioned clothes as they drew closer. They could treat me however they liked. Women came in only two types: whores or dutiful slaves to their families. Good girls would not go to a park alone. Good girls would be content with having men breathe the fresh air on their behalf, take in all the oxygen one required to keep women at bay.

  Glancing up at the blue sky as I strolled through the park, I saw two adolescent boys up in a tree, kissing, trying to hide within its branches. They must have trusted that the morality police were not in the habit of looking skyward. The boys could be executed for that.

  I bade farewell to the flowers and took to the sidewalk. Cars honked, drivers trying to pick me up. Within a matter of seconds, I made a decision. I was ready to get in one of the honking cars and give destiny a chance. It was common for men with new cars to pick up women, offering rides to see what would come of it—a phone number, a kiss, a date, a fling, maybe something more if there were chemistry.

  I stood by the curb. Men braked, looked through their passenger windows, and asked, “Where’s this pretty lady going?” I blushed beneath my homemade rogue.

  One rubbed thumb and index finger together to suggest he’d pay me.

  I sat down on the curb. My heart slowed until there was a long pause between each leaping beat. When the beats did come, my heart heaved desperately, like a fish on a rocky shore, trembling and gasping.

  Another car beeped. I raised my eyes to look through the passenger window when a red Chevy braked inches in front of me. My hands were too frozen to open the door.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Oh, hi, Baba.” The contempt in his eyes wasn’t just terrifying: it transported the magnitude of his hatred to me like an electric current; I was a disgrace to his honor, wearing makeup, sitting on a curb like a beggar, trying to get into a stranger’s car. “I was going to see a doctor,” I offered.

  He rolled up the window without a word, and the car accelerated, dust flying behind. I was being punished for what I hadn’t done yet, sentenced in a court from which I’d been excluded.

  Utterly drained, I walked aimlessly for a while and then hailed a cab to go to Grandma’s.

  When I reached the rusty gate of the apartment building, my vision tunneled. I had to support myself with a hand against the wall, and then I lay my head on it and imagined Chia’s small head lying on my shoulder. I recalled the days when he enjoyed my stories, the stories that had slowly decomposed in me since he first left for university.

  An invisible umbilical cord had connected Chia and me, the kind that formed between siblings neglected by their parents. He was too immersed in the gratification of teaching to remember this now. I should have gone with him to the village, not that he’d offered.

  Climbing the stairs to Grandma’s third-floor apartment was dizzying. I placed my cheek against her metal door to cool down.

  Through the door, I heard Mama speaking in that odd, singsong voice of hers that I had heard late at night while she was on the phone. I couldn’t make out the words, but the affection in them was recognizable. I turned my spare key in the lock, pushed the door gently, and saw something I could never unsee.

  I would rather have believed I was schizophrenic than register what my eyes saw. Mama was indeed talking lovingly. To a naked woman’s tiny penis. She was holding it before her mouth. Mama was dressed in red lingerie the likes of which I’d never before seen—not in her drawers, and certainly not on her. Mama then lifted the woman’s penis and licked her vagina. I blinked. Blinked again. Rubbed both eyes.

  “Bring me a glass of water, you whore,” Grandma yelled. She was in the bedroom, the door shut. Mama was too immersed in carnal joy to notice her daughter or her mother. I shut the door before she saw me, but loudly enough for her to realize somebody had certainly seen her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I turned on my heel. Ran down the stairs. Nauseated and gasping for air, I sprinted down the street. Something chased after me. I retched several times beside a tree, finally coughing up bile. I kicked some dirt over my vomit, then sank to my knees.

  After a while, when I felt as though I could stand, I dried my face and hailed the first open cab.

  The lecherous look the driver gave me jangled my nerves. In my peripheral vision I could see him leering at me in the mirror. I pushed my headscarf forward, tucked in the few strands of hair that had escaped, and fisted my hands to stop their shaking.

  “Where to?”

  I told him the farthest place I could think of. I needed to put as much distan
ce as possible between me and what I’d witnessed. My breath grew shallower. I needed air.

  “You’re hot,” the cab driver said when I rolled down the window.

  I glared at him. We’d likely crash at some curve soon because he believed women were created to be stared at in his rearview. But the thought of a quick death was tempting.

  “I meant ‘hot-blooded,’” he went on. “It’s chilly today, yet you open the window.”

  The speed limit was fifty kilometers per hour, but he was driving at least a hundred. I wished he would slow down so I could lose myself in the scenery. He slowed down, and I had the sudden unsettling conviction that my forehead was glass and he could see through it to read my thoughts, or worse, see the scene of my mother that kept replaying in my head, a trailer of what was likely years-long infidelity.

  “You’re not from Mariwan, are you?” he asked.

  I didn’t look like my people. Who did I look like? I could put on an accent and try flirting, but a hand reaching up from deep in my chest had grabbed my voice.

  He gave up, either offended or bored. “Sallahai salla, awin dari tom . . .” He was singing along to the song by Razazi playing on his car stereo. With his eyes finally off me, I prayed the winding road would never end.

  I rubbed my eyes, hoping to wipe away what I’d seen. It couldn’t be real. I had lost my mind. That’s what it was.

  We were approaching the mountains now. I was determined to distract myself. I had to, or I’d completely lose it. Lake Zrebar was too beautiful, too tempting—a three-thousand-acre freshwater escape. In my mind I gave myself to her cool waters like Ophelia, my body floating in the lake while an invisible part of me watched from above.

  Checkpoint. I wouldn’t know what to tell the patrolmen if they asked why I was going to Zrebar. When stopped, the grinning driver said a warm hello and shook hands with the soldier, whose Kalashnikov dangled on his back and whose nose probed inside the car to ferret out anything illegal: playing cards, alcohol, music, or drugs. The driver put something in the guard’s proffered palm. We were permitted to pass.