Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

I ground my back molars. Every time Karo showed up at our house, he was going somewhere and taking my brother with him. “I’d really like to know what you think about Chia’s comment.”

  “Well . . .” Karo sipped his tea. “What can I say?” I stared at him unblinkingly. Chia went to his room to get dressed. He had vented and was now content; unlike me, he did not expect an answer from Karo. At least not right now.

  “It’s true, what Chia says. It makes sense.” Karo scratched his day-old stubble. “I hadn’t really thought about it before.”

  “Well, it’s something you’ll have to think about if you decide to reclaim your Kurdish roots. People who are protesting in the streets today sat back and did nothing when minorities were killed in droves. So what does this mean to someone like you, who claims a half-Kurdish identity but has had all the privileges of a Shia Persian man?”

  “I’m ready,” Chia said from the apartment door.

  “I haven’t figured that out yet. Sorry.” Karo joined him, bending down to tie his shoelaces.

  “See you soon.” Chia shut the door.

  The silence that overtook the space was broken by the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm. I ran to the door and called out, “Do you have to go?” Chia was descending the stairs two at a time.

  He stopped and turned to me. “You don’t work today?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll return in three, four hours, as soon as my class is over,” he said.

  “Chia!” I called after he had climbed down more stairs. He didn’t hear me. I called louder and ran down a few more stairs. “Chia, Chia!” The space was airless and had a moldy, sour smell.

  “Gian?” He looked lovely in his new T-shirt, black jeans, and red-and-white sneakers.

  “Please stay home. I’ll make dokhawa! Any food you want.” A pause. “I’m sorry I said I wasn’t ready to help with your project. I’ll do it.” I grunted, gripping the cold railings. I hated that I couldn’t suppress my fears, that I frustrated Chia with my attachment to him. I hated how pathetic I sounded, and yet he was all I had in this world. “You know it’s not safe out there. Please, Chia.”

  Chia glanced down at Karo waiting on the lower level and looked up at me again. “I can’t keep skipping classes.” It was true; going back to school had saved him from conscription, but it wouldn’t if he failed his courses.

  Karo opened his mouth to say something, but he only tongued his upper lip, swallowing his unspoken words. Chia climbed the stairs, cupped my cheeks, then took our old headphones out of his backpack and put them over my ears. They were attached to an MP3 player. He placed a kiss on my forehead. “Don’t worry, gian, I’ll be home soon.” When he hit play, Shahram Nazeri’s lullaby washed over me.

  Chia left, and I went back inside to the kitchen window to witness a perfect expression of exasperation. The shabby-looking man in the tree-lined street was pulling at his hair, looking left and right, shaking his head. Then he kneeled, tipped his head back, and started talking to the sky, to the drizzle. Curious to hear his words, I cocked an ear, but the sound of the many roaring car engines drowned out his voice.

  “It’s okay,” I leaned forward and called out from the window of our fourth-floor apartment. “You’ll be fine.” I put down the camera, cupped my hands, and shouted, “We’ll be fine.”

  He resumed pacing and rambling despite the downpour.

  I closed the window. Fine, I wrote on the window in the cloud my breath had formed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A silhouette was running toward me. When he drew close enough for me to take in his bullet-ridden body, I recognized him as Baba. I stepped back in terror. “Carry me, my daughter,” he pleaded. I was too timid to face a perforated body, too slight to support his weight. “Chia, Chia gian,” I called. My brother was carrying a blood-drenched cadaver on his shoulder and reciting a plaintive postmortem letter out loud, too loud. My heart was blasting with long pauses between each beat. I pressed my hands against my ears, pressed them so hard that I smashed my head.

  Children in Kurdish clothing danced and played in the dirt, whirled around my bleeding head, their eyes brimming with joy, their laughter inaudible. The children didn’t see it, but I did: their crumbled future.

  Soaked in sweat, I awoke with a terrible burning in my throat and groped my way to the bathroom, splashing water on my face. Chia wasn’t in the kitchen or in his room. My calls went straight to his voicemail. Gripping my hair by the roots, I stood motionless until the thumping in my head slowed down. The hands of the clock lay on top of each other, pointing upward. He should have been home hours ago.

  The longer I paced the floor, checked the sluggish clock, and looked out the window, the more real the nightmare became. I turned on the TV, played a DVD, opened a book. Nothing helped. I looked through Chia’s room. There it was: the diary he’d given me at the hospital. I rubbed my face and sat on the bed. I flipped to a random page and reread a passage he’d also posted on his blog, Imagine Otherwise.

  Girls were secretly reading the history of the Kurds. Sitting in a circle on the hill, among the wildflowers, the students were whispering, giggling, and reading the pamphlet I had prepared for them. The frowning principal was looking through the window of his office, thinking that these shy-looking, pretty village girls were reading science.

  I was playing football with the boys.

  “Ro-nal-do! Ro-nal-do!” the students cheered for Ali, who had scored a goal, but then he suddenly ran up the hill, away from us.

  “Wait, Ali. Wait!” I chased after him. “What’s wrong?”

  The clock kept ticking. It was one in the morning.

  “If I were really Ronaldo, Farhad would be playing as my team’s forward now.” Ali held his sleeve in front of his mouth and looked down at the poppy fields.

  “What do you mean?” I asked the little boy.

  I would have liked to think it was the sun, wind, or exhaustion that caused the tears that rolled onto his sleeve. When I reached him and kneeled in front of him, his cheeks were burning and his eyes were volcanic.

  Footsteps. I ran and looked through the peephole. Chia wasn’t there.

  “You will be a great footballer one day, Ali gian,” I said softly. “And you can do lots of things for your village when you’re rich and famous. How about buying new shoes or clothes for every child in the Newroz? Cool?”

  “I could.” Ali stared into my eyes. “I’d give Farhad’s father money.”

  I swear I saw a spot on Ali’s forehead that gleamed, right between his brows. I still hadn’t put my thoughts together to form an answer when Ali ran up the hill again, holding onto his hand-me-down pants. I had almost lost sight of his tiny, fragile body in the distance and among the grasses of Awyar Mountain when I understood what he meant.

  I called, emailed, and texted Chia and Karo for the fifteenth time. The streets were deserted. My only shield against my mounting panic was the diary.

  You know what he was thinking? That if he could have financially supported his classmate Farhad’s disabled father, the boy would not have had to quit school to work as a construction worker, and he would not have fallen to his death from twenty stories up in the city sky. These village kids never cease to amaze me.

  I felt the usual sharp pain in my stomach. I wonder if Leila, like me, sometimes feels pains that medicine can’t cure.

  “Yes. I do. I do, brother,” I said. One was allowed to talk out loud to oneself when alone, right? One was insane if they did so in public, but I was all alone in the dark, reading by flashlight instead of turning on the lamp.

  I did not know what to say to a ten-year-old boy who had lost his friend to poverty. Quoting the phrases I had written in a countercultural human rights publication could not bring consolation to this young man—“the necessity for instituting a disability pension”; “the desirability of a smaller gap between the rich and the poor.”

  Was it helplessness that was breaking his little heart? His inability to sa
ve his friend and one day himself and other poor families? Was it powerlessness he was tasting for the first time?

  “It’s not . . .” I stood up and shouted after Ali as loudly as I could. “It’s not your fault.”

  His shaved head was a moving, shining spot under the sun, between the bright red poppies.

  I resumed pacing, rubbing my left arm, muttering to myself, looking awfully similar to the man I had watched with pity that very morning.

  It took three attempts before Shiler picked up. “What’s wrong?” Her voice, traveling all the way from Kurdistan, was garbled with sleep, tinged with slight annoyance.

  I could see nothing but darkness inside or outside of my apartment, as if the stars had lost their way home.

  “What’s going on?” she asked when I didn’t reply, not sounding as sleepy this time.

  “Chia hasn’t called or returned.” If my brother were stuck somewhere, he would have called. I shook my head to erase the image of the ninja I had seen on the screen that afternoon.

  “You think . . . ?” Shiler did not finish her sentence.

  Even if Chia had been injured and taken to a hospital, he would’ve made an effort to contact me. He had promised never to leave me again.

  But if he had been detained . . .

  “I don’t know what I think,” I sniffled. It was the buts that made life overly complicated. Buts within buts, creating layers of anguish.

  The long-distance call was expensive. Talking was dangerous. Shiler and I listened to the sound of each other’s breath. We both knew the injured or gunshot protestors who arrived at the hospitals were taken away by security forces before receiving treatment. We both knew that even the lawyers representing those arrested during demonstrations were sometimes jailed.

  “Maybe his cell phone has died,” Shiler offered, but the shiver in her voice betrayed her.

  My fingernails were bleeding. “His friend from upstairs is not home either. I knocked on his door.”

  “That could be a good thing. Chia’s not alone. They could be hiding, waiting for the curfew to end.”

  The threat of tears terrified me. It would confirm the terror I was trying hard to contain. “You’re right. Chia will be back with a good reason for his delay. I’m just being paranoid. I am.”

  “It’s okay to be afraid, Leila. I’ll get on the first bus to Tehran. Call when you hear from him, please.”

  “I will.”

  I told myself I was only taking a shower. Tears rolled down my body along with the shampoo, the sweat, and the terror. But they were lost in the stream of water from the showerhead, so they didn’t count.

  By the time I had towel-dried my body and lain down on my bed, it was half past three in the morning. I placed the old headphones over my ears and pressed the play button. “Ly-ly-ly-ly,” I sang along. My hair soaked the pillow.

  With closed eyes, I saw Chia and me playing cops and robbers in the yard, saw the days he’d chase after me but never catch me. Or other times when, picking up on some story I’d made up, he would beg me to save him from the wolves. The little head he’d hold near the heater to fake a fever and solicit affection. The story of the parrot and the oil jar that he had me repeat a hundred times. Or the story of the king and his daughter. She was not a bad girl. I had been trying to make myself trust that despite what Mama and Baba had made me believe, I was not a bad person. Not at all. But tonight they were both yelling at me for not being able to take care of my younger brother.

  Chia was my child. I had raised him. But he wasn’t just a child. He was also a protective brother and my best friend, a father, even. And he was a souvenir from my childhood, from the days when we did not know what headaches were, or terror, the days we had no schedules, no debts, no grudges. “Ly . . . ly . . . ly” played from my headphones. The clock chimed four times. “Chia will be home. After the sun rises, he will be home,” I said loud enough for every item in the house to hear.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The ticking of the clocks would not stop. I checked off the days on the calendar, from the first to the thirty-first, and then tore off the pages of each passing month.

  Shiler ran along with me from person to person, building to building: hospitals, safe houses, schools, police stations, prisons, anywhere and anyone who might tell us where Chia and Karo were. The graffiti that marked the walls of the city was as frantic and disorganized as our search, an odd mixture of leftism and Islamism, spray-painted portraits of Hollywood stars mixed with anti-imperialist slogans and sketches of political prisoners.

  My new routine started each day at dawn. I was sent from one rancid government office to another, and I drew innumerable sketches as I waited in the stale air to meet with authorities who each promised me the next person he referred me to would help locate Chia. I shredded my doodles and tossed them into the wastepaper basket on my way out the door.

  When Chia had first disappeared, I’d written to my parents that he’d left for a study-abroad program in Malaysia so they wouldn’t try to come to Tehran and hinder my search. I was afraid of being pushed, now that I was trembling at the edge of a cliff. Keeping up the artifice was easy, since we were still not on speaking terms.

  One weekend, after navigating the confusing city for months, still no closer to finding answers about Chia’s whereabouts, Shiler convinced me that, to preserve our fragile sanity, we must take a day off to hike Alborz Mountain. We climbed up the trails, through bushes and by the prehistoric rocks, and rested on top of one of the hills. I took in the sublime view of the steep green valley, inhaled the fresh mountain air, the subtle fragrance of trees and wildflowers, and allowed the breeze to take away some of my exhaustion as it caressed my face. The hills hummed with frivolity as men clapped and sang upbeat songs, children danced to the beat, and women watched with envious joy. The morality police didn’t come up the mountain, their vehicles ill-equipped for the terrain and they themselves averse to the climb.

  “We should do this all the time,” Shiler said, her face pink from the fresh air and exercise, her headscarf tied behind her neck, showing her large earrings. “I feel alive!”

  I did too. We walked down at a leisurely pace. A little river was rushing somewhere out of our sightline, finding meaning in moving more than arriving. At the bottom of the hills, a quaint village called Darband welcomed hikers with its numerous lovely cafés and fountains. At a traditional-style lounge decorated with Iranian handicrafts, I sat cross-legged across from my friend on a large bench covered with a Persian rug. Shiler appeared stoic, but I’d hear her cry herself to sleep most nights as she slept alone in her boyfriend’s bed.

  We ordered kebab, barbequed tomato, rice, and sangak bread. It was a day I’d have liked to have documented, but, no longer able to afford the monthly payments, I’d returned the camcorder and lost my deposit too. These days my paychecks went to bribing secretaries so they’d arrange for me to meet with authorities. But my bribes must have been too little, since most officials weren’t available to meet with me very often. I’d borrowed rent money from Joanna, whose soothing hand on my forehead I craved like a plant deprived of water. My energy, however, was unmatched in those weeks; I was up at dawn, running around town all day and working at the bookstore all evening, always getting home after midnight. It was easy. I would’ve done anything to save my brother.

  Shiler winked. “Don’t look now, but the cute guys that have been checking us out from across the restaurant are coming this way.”

  I shrugged, and Shiler agreed that she was in no mood for flirting either, but the gentlemen, educated men with gelled hair and expensive clothes, proved too charming as they offered to share a hookah with us. They joined us on our bench, and the four of us smoked the watermelon-flavored shisha we passed from hand to hand, discussing music, literature, how Iranians were migrating in droves only to be deeply nostalgic about this very village we were sitting in.

  When the men learned we were Kurdish, they eagerly asked us questions about Kurdistan
’s nature and said how much Iranian music owed its power to Kurdish artists and melodies. Then we spoke about the Kurdish doctors Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who were arrested for developing educational AIDS programs for healthcare professionals and were accused of being spies for the CIA. The younger of the two charming men, in his early twenties, voiced the need for greater sex education, which was vital in a society where parents acted as if sex outside of marriage was only for the neighbors and schools offered no response to pubescent desire other than to ban it. The other man, in his early thirties, believed that Iranian youth was “lost in lust and hungry for love.” I no longer knew if abstaining was a sign of virtue or backwardness in a religious society in a speedy modernization frenzy.

  The café owner, who turned out to be a close friend of the men, brought us red wine in gold-rimmed teacups with sugar cubes on the saucers. It was the first time I drank alcohol in public in a country that would lash you for it. When the Police of Enjoining Good and Forbidding Vice came around as the orange sun spread color through the sky, they received their “gifts” and left without harassing anyone.

  We drank more “tea,” listened to live music, and sang along with the band. The conversations became increasingly flirtatious. Shiler and I laughed a lot that night. The men paid for the food, as was the custom, were offended when we offered them money, drove us home in their Peugeot 206, and invited us to an underground party the following weekend. When asked, Shiler and I both gave them made-up phone numbers and had them drop us off a couple of blocks north of our apartment. It went without saying that neither of us girls would risk attending a mixed-gender party that could be raided.

  “Chia would be cool with us having one night of innocent banter after weeks of misery, don’t you think?” Shiler asked, holding on to my arm as we walked down the street lined by residential high-rises in the middle-class neighborhood.

  “I’m sure he would. Let me tell you though—Karo’s far more handsome and a lot more interesting.” I didn’t confess to the guilt gnawing at me over flirting and drinking.