by Ava Homa
“We will. As soon as Chia gets out.”
“Remember, my arms are always open to you. I love you like I love Shiler.”
Shiler, I remembered. “Please tell her to ignore the lie.”
Upon hearing the bogus report, which had now spread like wildfire across Kurdish and state-run media alike, Mama and Baba were a team for once in their lives, united by tragedy. They forgot about how disgraceful I was and invited themselves into my apartment before dawn. They left their luggage inside and headed for the Evin morgue. I turned off my phone, which was now flooded with sympathetic emails and interview requests by the local and foreign media that had believed the farce. My parents came back empty-handed. I sheltered in Chia’s room and locked the door. Mama pounded on the door and screamed, but I could not let her or anyone else touch Chia’s things.
“You godless woman!” she yowled. “You didn’t tell us. We had to hear it from strangers.” She was just another sound to block out while I floated in an unidentifiable time and space.
Mama’s tenacity and unmatched skills at getting on people’s nerves made the authorities promise to return the body under the condition that the deceased’s family signed documents under oath, guaranteeing that they would neither hold a funeral nor bury him during daylight. Even after all this, it took them days to deliver the body they claimed was Chia’s.
My brother and I winked at each other, secretly mocking others for believing the deceit. He was four again. His chubby arms and legs jiggled as he ran to me, bit into unwashed cherries and giggled.
A truck carried us and the imposter’s body to Mariwan. “I need to pray,” Mama said when we entered the city. “Drop me at home first.” She thanked God as she climbed down from the truck, straightened her shoulders, and walked away without looking back.
In the wee hours, Baba, the truck driver, and I arrived at the graveyard. The gates were locked, but Baba talked to the night guard, placed hands on his shoulders, slid some cash into his palm, and, using a flashlight, walked into the darkness, silent, head bent, shoulders hunched.
With shivering knees, I followed the men. The driver, quite strong and well built, helped Baba retrieve the body from the truck. They placed the stretcher on their shoulders, shepherded me past the older section of the cemetery—the little gardens where used needles were scattered—to a section with holes dug for graves that hadn’t yet been assigned. Baba stopped, and I watched in silence.
Baba laid the body down inside the hole, meticulously tucking the shroud around the limbs, and climbed out of it. The weak beam of his flashlight scanned the wrapped corpse. Only its size resembled Chia’s. The government paid attention to these details. Baba froze. The truck driver shoveled dirt into the hole. Baba was only a silhouette.
There were only the sounds of our breathing, the sinister whooshing of the wind, and the lethal silence of the graveyard.
“Cannibals!” Baba’s sudden outburst rattled the cemetery. “Cannibaaaals!”
His shoulders shook, wracked by feral sobs. Huge tears ran down his cheeks and lost their way in his week-old graying beard.
I blinked at him in disbelief. Where was my proud father? Or was this his clone? Had this all been staged, right down to the foreign mourner before me?
“It’s a lie,” I whispered.
Our eyes locked. The pain in Baba’s eyes was real. Shocking in its vulnerability. The saddest person I knew, who subsisted on sorrow like air or water, was now testifying to a catastrophe bigger than anything he had experienced. In that one look, I knew the truth.
“Chia, tell him it’s a lie!” I clambered down into the grave and pushed the dirt away. Placed my hand under the dead man’s head. Removed the shroud from his face.
“No, Chia gian. Brother, wake up!” I shook his shoulders. His pale lips did not move, and his head dangled limply. “Say you won’t leave me!” I wailed.
Baba turned off the flashlight. “Hush, Leila.” Baba’s soothing voice was not his. It was a voice he had borrowed from another.
I pressed my brother’s lifeless face to mine.
What escaped my throat wasn’t a sob, a lump, or a breath. Rapid, noisy air burst from my heaving chest. I was sinking and straining for air.
I woke up in my childhood room. The sameness shocked me, the old shabbiness and the layers of dust. In this room I had studied to get into a university, had kicked out Chia when he’d peeked in to spy on me, had spoken to the suitors I’d resented. The clock had stopped ticking. I sat up, drew my aching body upright, took in the silence and the darkness. The full moon glowed with a smile in spite of Chia’s absence.
I swiftly separated from the girl who was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her shoulders heaving up and down in noiseless sobs. Defying gravity, I flew up, feeling numb and free.
When the sunrays finally beamed through the dusty air of the room, I became one again with the anguished body. “God! Hello? Mr. God!” I jerked up and opened the window. “Wake up!” The sun’s face grinned, suspended in the dawn sky.
“Are you even alive, Mr. God?” I roared in a voice that was louder than I thought possible. My scream echoed down the narrow street where we’d once sold apricots. “Are you? Or did they place a noose around your neck and strangle the life out of you too?” My plaintive cries merged into a long keening noise. I bayed like a wounded animal, a coyote whose pup had been slaughtered before her. An early-morning shopper stopped before our home and looked up at me incredulously.
Loud thumps on my door didn’t stop my tirade. “You’re the one who should be buried in the earth, not Chia.”
Baba broke the lock and rushed in. “Astaghforella,” Mama said. “Alan, get her to stop this blasphemy, will you?”
“Enough, Hana,” he hushed my mother. She slammed the door to her bedroom.
Baba pressed my wrists, shook me like a rag doll. I looked at him. There it was, in his face: an age-old pain that was still young in mine.
Hundreds of people showed up at our door uninvited, at the same ramshackle house in which Chia and I had grown up. I hugged my knees in a corner and watched the comings and goings, the whispering mourners who could be caring strangers or daring spies. Old and new neighbors, the baker, the butcher, convenience store owners’ wives, classmates, Chia’s students and their families, anyone who thought they knew my brother in some capacity showed up.
Chia had the best-attended secret funeral.
The old cassette player repeated the rhythmically recited verses of the holy book all day, promising that friends of God had no fear or sorrow. No sorrow. People stole dreadful looks. They exchanged knowing, condescending glances when talking about “the martyr’s family.” Mama was thankful to her God for making her feel special again and providing her with all the attention she craved but didn’t know how to handle. She left the guests to pray ten times a day, then walked back and forth through the crowd, repeating that she was the blessed mother of a martyr.
Baba was a ticking bomb, a silhouette in the flickering candlelight. Like Shiler, he’d hike to grieve. I pictured him climbing up the Zagros Mountain, hands clasped behind his back, head bent, counting the number of steps, searching to find the best rock with which to entrust his weight, assuring himself that nobody had ever been condemned to experience such a horrific sequence of misfortunes as he. He rarely showed up at the mosque, where a man’s job was to appear sad but reserved, unshaven and messy. A heart attack was more acceptable than shedding tears.
Then she showed up. Joanna.
“How could this have happened? How?” I asked, collapsing toward her. My vision blurred with tears, but I noticed that time had left its mark on Joanna’s face. Or was it worry?
We cried in each other’s arms. “Leila gian, dalala men, kechakam. Nazarakam,” she said soothingly.
Dressed in white from head to toe and showering me with terms of endearment, Joanna didn’t offer answers, only listened and calmed me. She managed to feed the guests during the three days of the funeral and n
urse me too. The custom was for the female next-of-kin to utter the most heartbreaking sentences loudly, pull at her hair, and claw at her face so everyone would weep along. I failed. Some guests helped Joanna provide dates and halva, others made and served tea, and the woman next door, a self-appointed expert mourner looking to turn funerals into howling contests, took matters into her own hands. When the crescendo of her wailing peaked, she orated, “Chia, son, how’s your new home, darling? Is it too dark there? We were looking forward to celebrating your wedding, young man. It wasn’t your turn to leave; why did you have to get ahead of everyone else, darling?” Her questions were soon lost in loud sobs.
I got up to leave this theatre of mourning. My limbs were numb and heavy, as if the amount of noise I had been exposed to had stemmed the blood flow to my extremities. At the door two women in their early twenties hugged me and sobbed, telling me they had been following Chia’s letters from prison and were shocked by his execution.
There was much they could have done prior to May 9. And yet, all these people who claimed Chia had changed them had done nothing. “Thank you. But there are still many more political prisoners you can save.” I walked down the alley.
“Excuse me,” a short man with salt-and-pepper hair asked. “Do you know which mosque men should go to for the young man’s funeral?”
It took me a few seconds to recognize him, but the now-gray, still-large mustache was distinct. “Two blocks south of the main street,” I responded. “By the way, I think you were right. We would’ve been better off in an orphanage.” He gazed at me for a second and left.
There was one thing I needed to do: preserve what little sanity I had left. After some pacing up and down the street, I snuck back inside my room, packed a bag of Chia’s childhood toys and notebooks, and threw it into the yard from the window of the bedroom. When the mourners were busy sipping tea, I slowly walked downstairs, and after hugging Joanna goodbye, crept across the weedy garden and grabbed my belongings.
The dried-up sticks standing erect by the cement walls used to be apple and cherry trees. The rusty bicycles—their front wheels stolen—had given up on life.
My body no longer felt like my own, only a rental, as if I could be subject to eviction any day. Perhaps that day I’d reunite with Chia, who had dropped his body.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The orange globe of the sun was visible in the sky when I got off the bus at Tehran’s West Terminal and transferred to the local bus. The smell of hot beets and baked potatoes wafting from the sidewalk carts had me drooling, but an anxiousness tugged at my heart, urging me to head home immediately.
Stuck in the morning gridlock, I remembered that I had failed to pay the rent yet again. With the news of Chia’s execution spreading, the landlord must be outraged and afraid for his safety. Chia’s notes and diaries could be soaked and muddy on the street, the lock changed. Since the city transit was at a standstill, I got off and ran the rest of the way home.
Blankets and kitchenware had been thrown in front of my building, but they weren’t ours.
“Miss Saman, Miss Saman,” Kajal the building cleaner called as I took the stairs two at a time. She only spoke Persian in public, even to her daughter, although she had told me she craved Kurdish.
“Sorry I missed Mariam’s twelfth birthday. I’ve picked out a new book for her, but I haven’t been by the store,” I responded in kind.
“Mariam was sure you wouldn’t forget.” Kajal grinned from ear to ear and leaned on her broom as if it were a crutch. “I told her you were traveling.”
“You were right,” I lied. “See you soon.”
“Miss Saman, I must show you something.”
“I have to go now. I’ll talk to you later.”
“It’s urgent.” Her voice was lost in the sirens of an ambulance and my footsteps. But I was already taking the stairs two at a time.
Mercifully, the key to my apartment worked and everything seemed to be in its place.
Ignoring the notice scrawled on a slip of paper and squeezed under the door, I dashed into Chia’s room and dove into his closet. His scent still lingered faintly among his folded and hanging shirts.
My throat seized, and a searing pain radiated from my shoulders down my arm. My fingers ran over the calligraphic characters of Shamlou’s poem posted inside the door: “In me/there was a rough prisoner/not used to the clanking of his chains.”
In the drawer of his bedside table, I found Chia’s notes and an eighteen-page draft of an article titled, “From Self-Reign to Self-Immolation: The Paradoxes in Kurdish Women’s Lives.” What had happened to the Kurds in the casino of life? Snake eyes? Double zero? Or chips taken away one by one?
It was easy, indeed joyful, to look at his published articles. But the half-finished one that I had promised to help complete . . . I hugged my knees, sitting in his closet. I should have stopped him from leaving home that day.
Chia, in his blue-and-white-striped shirt and pants, munching on a hard crust of bread, materialized before my eyes. Mama and Baba screamed at each other, and the floor shook. Small and slim, deeply anxious, with messy hair and a muddled head, I carried Chia on my back, crawled on all fours for him, tried to protect him from the panic that had descended on me. “Ly-ly-ly . . .” Chia’s lullaby soothed me into a nap.
Next Chia was hanging from a rope. Unable to breathe. No matter how badly he wanted to inhale, he couldn’t. He felt life leaving his emaciated body. He knew he was dying, but there was nothing he could do.
I was unbearably powerless as I watched him gasp for air. I gasped with him. Someone knocked. I called Chia’s name. More knocks.
My eyelids snapped open. I was suffocating in a tearless nightmare. I got up to open the door but felt dizzy and lost my balance.
“Leila. Miss Leila.”
“What’s going on?”
Kajal was at the door, head tilted. She looked around. “I found this,” she said, a navy headscarf with tiny printed flowers hanging from her hands. “I thought it might be yours.”
It was the same scarf she had been wearing for the past two years. “I don’t have time for this right now.” I resisted the urge to shut the door and went to the kitchen to splash cool water on my face.
She briskly stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “I have to tell you something,” she whispered.
I palmed my face to stop the light-headedness. She had invited herself in for tea before and had shared how she’d fled her village to save her daughter from a drug-addicted father. She worked three shifts to make ends meet and pay for her daughter’s schooling so the girl wouldn’t suffer the same fate as hers. Today I was in no state of mind to listen.
Kajal drew the curtains closed, turned off the light. “Miss, a couple of men have been asking for you,” she whispered in Kurdish. “They claimed they were your relatives. I didn’t give them any information.” Her voice had dropped so low I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.
“Men! What men?”
“They asked if you usually have a lot of guests or if the same people come here often, what time you leave, what time you come back, if you carry big suitcases. Miss, I pretended to cooperate. They thought that because I am a simple cleaner with an accent, I am stupid. They told me to call the next-door notary office when you came home. They said if I didn’t, they’d have me fired. Please, miss, you have to move out immediately.”
I had to sit down.
“They might come back any day.” She kneeled before me, her voice barely audible. “They got here this morning right after you went upstairs. Miss, I am so glad you didn’t hear me when I asked you to stay. I could have . . . you know . . .” Tears welled up in her eyes. “They gave me this number and some cash and asked me to call them when I saw you. I accepted so they wouldn’t be suspicious, but I swear upon my daughter’s life, I would never . . .” She threw herself into my arms.
“I’m grateful, Kajal gian.” I was too weak to hold her.
“Yo
u shouldn’t stay here. Leave right now. I’ll help you pack.”
I looked around. Chia had passionately discussed his ideas sitting on this chair, had voraciously read on that sofa, had eagerly eaten at this very kitchen table.
“I can’t.” Come what may. If they ever showed up at my door, I would jump from one of the windows before I let them take me.
“If you have nowhere else to go, at least make sure you don’t turn on the lights at all or go near the windows, even with the curtains drawn.” Kajal got up and unplugged the phone too. “No internet. Do not open the door for anyone, even your own father. I will bring food for you. We should agree on a way to knock, or you can give me a key. Oh, wait, I have a better idea.” She rummaged through a large set of keys. “Remember Karo? The handsome man on the twelfth floor?”
I nodded.
“His apartment is empty, and he gave me the key.”
I shook my head.
“Yes. Yes. You must.”
It was either that, or my place would be my solitary confinement before they detained me.
“Hide in his apartment until you can make arrangements to travel. Go to some far-flung village, or wait—go to Iraqi Kurdistan. You’d be safe there. I might be able to find you help from my village to smuggle you across the border if your name is on the list.”
“What list?”
“Of those who cannot leave the country.”
“Oh, yeah.” Iran didn’t send dissidents into exile but instead made them rot in living hell.
“I know these things, miss. My cousins are Peshmerga.”
Maybe I could join Shiler. “I really need to connect to the internet.”
“That’s another reason you should stay at Karo’s. At least at night. I will get you an internet card and some bread and milk.”
“What if he comes back? Or another tenant moves in?”
“He owns the apartment, miss, and he is not renting it for another year. He told me so. I think he went abroad. He gave me his key so my daughter and I wouldn’t need to commute every single day. We have stayed at his place a few times. Most of his personal stuff is packed, but there’s a bed, utensils, a sofa, and a television. Don’t let any of the neighbors see you. Be extra careful.” Proud of her plan, Kajal left to copy me a key and buy groceries.