Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  At the lake, the cab driver asked whether he should wait for me. I gave up all my change and left. “It’s not safe, sister,” he called after me. “I can come with you or wait for you. I won’t charge you.”

  A wave of sardonic cynicism washed over me. All of a sudden I was his “sister.” “You mean it’s not safe because of lewd men like you?”

  “Ghahba!” He pressed hard on the accelerator, spraying dirt behind his tires.

  Inhaling deeply in relief, as if I’d finally surfaced after a deep dive, I watched his cab disappear around the curve of the road. I began to pick my way up the hill, its lush green forest an oasis. I craved something bitter and icy, anything to make me forget the look on Mama’s face as she had fondled that woman’s tiny penis. Or perhaps that hadn’t been a penis but rather a very large clitoris?

  I shook the thought from my mind and instead trained my eyes on the lake’s glassy surface. When we were children, Joanna had told Shiler and me some of the legends surrounding Lake Zrebar, including the one of its mystical origins: since no one could identify its source—the lake was not connected to any other body of water and rainfall alone could not have formed it—some believed it had appeared by magic. If only the lake could lend me some of its magic now, give me the strength to overcome my shock.

  Joanna had said all I needed was to listen. So I did. The snow on the high mountaintops had not yet given up to the spring sun, but the hill was dotted with patches of flowers. Among them, I came across a shiler, the crown imperial lily, a rare beauty. The petals faced downward, and a crown of small leaves sat proudly on top of each stem. Red poppies burned bright under the sun and danced with the breeze. They urged me to hold on a little longer. But a thought nagged in the back of my mind.

  Could my father have known what was going on? I wanted to find out—I couldn’t stand the thought of bearing this silently, alone—yet I was afraid of his apathy upon hearing the news. I feared his indifference would destroy me more than her betrayal, the unforgivable sin conducted by a pious woman who had taught us such strict boundaries between men and women.

  How long could I continue like this, crushed as I was beneath the daily cruelties faced by my people? Denied our language and history, policed and imprisoned, tortured and executed—when combined with my personal failures it was too much to bear. Constantly failing to meet my parents’ expectations. Taking the Konkour again and again. Shiler’s arrest and beating. And now this. Each injustice barbed me more than the last. I knew that at least this time I hadn’t done something wrong, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I myself was an existential mistake. I was an error. Entranced by my own misery, I sank to the ground, seeking release.

  I let my headscarf slide down, closed my eyes, and lay down on the grass, palms to the sky, the sun gentle on my face. With my eyes closed, I saw the wind carrying my body above the fields while the poppies sang my requiem.

  When I opened my eyes, I watched as butterflies flew overhead, spreading their dotted wings of orange, brown, and black as they moved from red poppies to the yellow bushes of wildflowers, to hawthorns and jasmines, whose fragrance overpowered all the other fresh scents. Almond and wild pear trees were still and serene. The wheateaters, serins, and other birds were singing in a majestic orchestra.

  Time passed. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there among the flowers, behind a huge stone on the hill, fantasizing about a serene nonexistence. I’d spent hours doing nothing, absolutely nothing: not thinking, not cleaning or cooking, not humming a song, not watching a movie for the millionth time.

  The sun started to set, snapping me out of my dreamy state.

  Here I was, a woman alone on a mountain at dusk.

  An invisible boot pressed against my throat, making my breath labored and helpless, and yet I couldn’t go back and face my parents. Or my stifled future. Hidden behind a boulder, I hugged my knees and imagined my rage and pain whirling into a wildfire, burning down all the injustices.

  My shoulders were heavy beneath the daily cruelties of living as a woman in La’nat Awa, the damned place. This fatigue was incurable. Despite all the clothes I wore, my skin felt naked in its constant exposure to the thorns of my existence.

  The sun had sauntered down, disappeared behind Lake Zrebar. A dozen shades of red burst open along the horizon as the day gallantly made way for night.

  Below, the narrow winding asphalt road was the hem around the hill’s green skirt, embroidered with clusters of red and yellow wildflowers. Among them, the shiler flowers stood elegant and tall, flourishing across the rough Kurdistan plateau, defying the senseless borders drawn by the Allies after the First World War.

  I bent down and cupped the bud of the shiler, slightly trampled by some oblivious hiker yet still intact. As I thumbed the smooth petals, I yearned for the shiler’s perseverence. But I was a garden of anguish, of loathing, of torment; my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death.

  I stood up, my breath now coming in pants. I wasn’t hiding anymore. “Basa bas,” I shouted. “It’s enough. Enough.”

  I started down the hill in a tumbling run and found myself unable to stop. Despite the chill of the evening, I started sweating. The wind whipped my headscarf, and I gained speed. I flapped as if I had wings.

  As I ran, a wail escaped my chest. I was headed toward the main road, toward the world of men. The streets belonged to them. Judgmental men. Hypocritical men. Their-honor-depended-on-women men. Cars hurtled around the curve, full of drunk drivers who honked as they spotted me sprinting down the hillside. They were going too fast for this road, too fast for their sluggish reflexes, and too fast for their old vehicles. A white late-model car careened down the winding road, kicking up dust. The wind roared in my ears.

  The white car and whoever was driving it seemed to seek me out as a fellow traveler. I stumbled on a stone, crushing the shiny red poppies in the grass. And as I lurched, my untold stories tumbled inside me like pages ripped from a book and tossed, crumpled, into the wastepaper bin. An overpowering urge to scream my story, to expel it from beginning to end, seized me. Suddenly I could see the heads of all those Kurds crushed beneath tanks.

  Descending the slope at a breakneck pace, my shouts crescendoing, I was unable to stop myself, this crazed woman.

  A final lunge and I was airborne.

  A squeal of brakes. Tranquil at last.

  PART II

  ALAN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When his grandpa drew a yogurt mustache above Alan’s lips, the boy dissolved into giggles. Picturing himself with real whiskers thrilled Alan, who thought that facial hair might make up for being shorter than the other boys in his class.

  “Your laughter woke me up, you cheeky monkey!” Uncle Soran, youngest of the six uncles and the only one awake, tousled Alan’s hair as he came onto the patio that opened to the yard. They sat around a nylon cloth spread atop a crimson handmade rug to eat breakfast.

  Alan laughed again. “Bapir, I want handlebars, please.”

  With a chapped finger, Bapir curled the ends of the yogurt mustache on either side of Alan’s puckered-up lips and planted a dab of the stuff on his nose too. Alan collapsed into laughter.

  That June morning in 1963, Alan decided that Bapir was the most amusing person on earth. Perhaps he was the reason Alan adored older people and loved to listen to their stories of maama rewi, the trickster coyotes. It hurt Alan that most people with gray hair weren’t able to read or write, that their backs hurt and their papery hands trembled; his dream was to read stories into a loudspeaker for hundreds of elders while they relaxed in a large meadow filled with purple and red flowers.

  Grandma brought out more nan, the thin, round bread she had baked in the cylindrical clay oven dug into the basement. Alan made his own “bulletproof” sandwich: fresh honeycomb mixed with ghee. “After I eat this, I can run faster than the bullets,” he said.

  “Our monkey is growing up, and yet we all treat him as if he is a young child!” Uncle Soran said
, making his own bulletproof morsel.

  “One’s grandchild is always young. That’s just how it is.” Bapir brushed crumbs from his lap. He winked. “If I were you, Alan, I would make it so I never grew up.”

  “Growing up is a trap,” Grandma agreed, nodding.

  “But I like the future,” Alan said.

  They laughed. Bapir splashed a kiss on Alan’s face. “Something a six-year-old would say.”

  Still wearing his yogurt mustache, Alan frowned. “I am seven.”

  They cackled.

  Father had come to Sulaimani to publish an article he’d written with Uncle Soran illustrating the suffering of the working class in Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. Kurds had settled in the Zagros Mountains three hundred years before Christ was born, but now Alan’s people had no country to call their own. When the Western Allies had drawn the map of the Middle East, they had cut Kurdistan into four pieces, dividing it among Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.

  To visit Bapir with his father, Alan had to ace Kurdish spelling. But Kurdish was not a subject taught at school; Arabic was the only language used there. Father had been trying to teach him and his three brothers to write in their mother tongue, something Alan saw no use for. That morning, Father had skipped breakfast to search the city for a contraband typewriter.

  Across the yard, Grandma was watering the pink roses and white lilies. A pounding on the wooden gate in the cement wall that surrounded their plot of land shattered her concentration. She dropped the hose.

  “I’ll get it.” Alan ran across the yard to save her the trouble, but before he reached the gate, six men in Iraqi army uniforms, their faces hidden by striped gray scarves, broke the lock and directed their Kalashnikovs at Grandma’s face.

  “Where are they?” the shortest one demanded.

  Bapir froze, a morsel still in his open mouth. Alan turned to see Uncle Soran leaping over the wall and clambering onto the neighbor’s roof. Somebody—Grandma—grabbed Alan and backed him toward the house.

  Nestled against her bosom, Alan watched the soldiers invade the house without waiting for an answer. All six uncles were pulled from their beds or hauled from the bathroom, the basement, a closet, and off the roof next door. Alan wiped off his white handlebars with his sleeve and tried to make sense of the chaos, the jerky movements, the incomprehensible noises escaping people’s throats. If only his eyes would give him weapons instead of tears!

  His uncles were dragged by the neck, screaming and struggling, like animals to slaughter. Bapir’s questions and prayers, Grandma’s cries and pleas, the neighbors’ screams and curses—nothing had the slightest effect on the soldiers, who conducted the raid without a reply.

  Alan’s uncles, some still in undershirts, were marched out at gunpoint to army trucks carrying hundreds of Kurdish boys and men between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. Alan peeled himself from Grandma’s arms and ran to the street. The men were told to squat in the beds of the trucks, to place their hands on their heads, and to shut their mouths. Alan looked back at Bapir, who remained next to his smashed gate, head bowed.

  Along with other children, women, and elderly, Alan chased after the lumbering trucks, their huge rubber tires kicking up clouds of dust as they carted away the men amid the anxious cries of the followers. The older men, unarmed and horrified, searched for weapons and ran up the mountains, asking the Peshmerga to come down to the city to face the armed-to-the-teeth soldiers. Alan trailed after the truck carrying his uncles as it traveled up the hillside at the city center. His heart had never beaten so fast. The truck finally stopped at the top of the hill, and prisoners were shoved out.

  On the hard soil, the captives were each given a shovel and ordered to dig. “Ebn-al-ghahba,” spat the soldiers—Son of a whore. The angry bystanders were ordered to stand back. People obeyed the AK-47s.

  Dirt sprayed over the prisoners’ bodies, hair, and eyelashes as their shovels cracked the earth open. Sweat dripped down their faces, and tears ran down over hands that muffled sobs. Alan looked at the pee running down the pants of a boy next to him, at a woman behind him clawing her face and calling out, “God, God, God,” at an older man shaking uncontrollably, his hand barely holding onto his crutch. Alan did not seem to be in possession of his own frozen body.

  Once the trenches were dug, half of the prisoners were ordered to climb down into the ditches, and the rest were forced to shovel dirt up to their friends’ and relatives’ chins. Bapir had finally made his way to the top of the hill; he had found Alan in the first row of spectators, gnawing his thumbnail as he watched. Alan begged his grandpa to stop the cruelty.

  Bapir hugged him. “They will be released in a few days, these young men.” He pressed Alan’s head to his chest. “They will be sent back home, bawanem, maybe with blisters and bruises, but they will be all right. Pray for them.” His hands trembled as he squeezed Alan’s. “May it rain before these men die of thirst.”

  Alan searched through the crowd to find Uncle Soran lifting a pile of dirt with his shovel. Soran’s grip loosened when he looked into the eyes of his brother Hewa, whose name meant “hope.” Hewa stood in the hole, waiting to be buried by his closest relative, a man whom he’d play-wrestled as a boy and confided in throughout his life. “Do it, Soran,” he said, his eyes shining up from the hole. A bearded soldier dressed in camouflage saw Soran’s hesitation. “Kalb, ebn-al-kalb!”—Dog, son of a dog—he barked, and swung his Kalashnikov at Soran, the barrel slicing the skin under his left ear.

  Soran growled, almost choking, as he turned. With his shovel, he batted the Kalashnikov away so that the gun hit its owner in the head, cutting his scalp. Alan flinched. Bullets rained from every direction. Soran crumbled. His blood sprayed over Hewa, who was screaming and reaching for the perforated body, pulling him forward, pressing his face to the bleeding cheek of his brother.

  Crying out, Bapir tried to run toward his sons, but dozens of guns pointed at his chest, dozens of hands held him back. The shower of gunfire wouldn’t cease; it struck the hugging siblings, painting them and the soil around them red.

  His uncles, still in each other’s arms, were buried in one hole. Half of the prisoners were still covered up to their chins with dirt. The remaining ninety-five men were sent down into the other trenches, and the soldiers buried them up to their heads. Alan stared at the rows upon rows of human heads, a garden of agony.

  Intoxicated with power, the soldiers kicked the exposed heads of the prisoners, knocked some with the butts of their guns, and jeered at them.

  At the top of the hill, Bapir sobbed with such force that his wails shook the earth, Alan felt. He clutched Bapir’s hunched shoulders and felt impossibly small.

  A sunburnt man and a neighbor with shrunken features hugged Bapir, then placed the old man’s trembling arms around their shoulders and walked him down the hill.

  “Where are my other sons?” Bapir gasped for air.

  “Let’s get you home,” the neighbors told him.

  Alan wanted to go with his grandpa, but he was afraid to move. If he took a step, the nightmare would become real. He scanned the hill for his other uncles, who were perhaps buried in some distant trench and unable to move. He couldn’t see them. Even Bapir was no longer in sight.

  The hubbub was dying down. The strangers who’d witnessed the scene were bound by their dread, their exchanged looks the only solace they could offer each other. Their heads seemed to move in slow motion, as if everyone were suspended underwater. Alan breathed in the atmosphere of quiet horror, of paused hysteria.

  Suddenly people cried out in terror. From the road below them, several armored tanks were approaching. Gaping in disbelief, Alan staggered back, holding a hand to his mouth. He could neither run away nor slow his hammering heart, which was now threatening to explode. When the panicking crowd pushed forward, guns fired into the air to hold them back.

  The tanks advanced.

  Alan’s mind couldn’t process the scene before him. Screams. Curses. Pleas.
The devilish laughter of the soldiers. He felt an invisible piece of himself drop away and melt into the ground. He was not Alan anymore.

  It took an excruciatingly long time for the tanks to pulverize the heads of the prisoners.

  The metallic stench of blood, of crushed human flesh and skulls, the foul odor of death made its way into the spectators’ nostrils and throats. The lucky ones threw up. Alan did not.

  While the giant metal treads ground his family and the other Kurds into nothingness, Alan sucked in shallow and unhelpful breaths.

  Bapir lay in bed at home, tossing in anguish, a hand still on his aching chest. By his bedside his wife shed silent tears. Although they had not witnessed the crushing of their sons, they collapsed that day of broken hearts, one after the other. Someone went to find a doctor.

  Father arrived at his parents’ home oblivious to the tragedy, having taken an unusual road to safeguard his treasure. His typed article was tucked under his shirt. The joy of achievement and hope for his people glowed in his eyes. Then he found his parents on their deathbed. In bits and pieces, the neighbors told him of the massacre, how Ba’ath soldiers—ordered by President Aref and Prime Minister Al-Baker—had punished the Kurds for daring to demand autonomy.

  Father ran to the hill, where bewildered children gathered and clung to each other. Beside them, a group of adults wailed and cried, threw dirt into their hair, and beat their faces in terror.

  “The British bastards armed Baghdad to kill us. Their tanks, their planes, their goddamn firebombs and mustard gas that killed Iraqis forty years ago are now killing us,” Father said to no one in particular.

  Then he just stared with unseeing eyes at the gory mound of his pulverized people, his brothers.

  Seeing his father’s dazed reaction, Alan finally allowed the sobs he’d held in since he first saw the soldiers to burst forth. Other children followed suit. Tears and snot rolled down the dusty faces of the boys and girls who’d been abandoned by the living and dead alike.