One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  Anders took notice. A father’s threats were something he had respect for. He never went near the girl again.

  * * *

  He was by now seeing his own father in the school holidays. The first time, he was four and a half and his father took him for a week’s summer holiday at a cabin by the sea. Jens would occasionally ring Wenche and say he wanted to see his son. The boy sometimes ran and hid, and the other children were sent out to look for him.

  Jens usually spent his summers at a country cottage in Normandy. Then Wenche would deliver Anders to the Scandinavian Airlines staff at Oslo airport, and after a two-hour flight he would be picked up by his father in Paris. Sometimes his older half-siblings would be there. They went on family outings or to the beach. At the summer cottage it was mainly Jens’s third wife who took care of the little boy. She had no children of her own and grew fond of Anders, who also became attached to her. He was overjoyed whenever she offered to read him a story. ‘Do you really want to?’ he would ask her. ‘Are you sure you’ve got time?’ He would sit curled up on her lap for hours while he was being read to. He calmed down there. And seemed to forget everything around him.

  * * *

  When Eva started school, Anders was in Year 3. He would not acknowledge her any longer. Not at school, that is.

  The blue garden, the park and the forest were separate from school – like different continents. Their friendship only belonged in one of them.

  This gave the little girl the space she needed to find her own friends. One of them was the girl who lived on the ground floor of their block of flats. She was scared of Anders too. Every time she went out of the door, she was afraid he was going to spit on her from the second floor. It had only happened once, but that was enough to make a horror of gobs of spit dog her entire childhood.

  Eva finally got her own group of friends. She was now tough enough to say no to Anders when he wanted her to come out and play.

  * * *

  Anders was on his own again.

  But one day he latched onto some classmates. It proved not to be so hard, after all. He just said hello, and they said hello back.

  In his primary-school years, there was nothing very remarkable about Anders. He was there, but did not draw attention to himself. He joined the Scouts, he played football and rode round on his bike with his friends.

  What marked him out from the others was that his parents were never there for him. The football team relied on parents to take turns driving the players to matches and tournaments. He always had to get a lift with others, mostly with Kristian, who lived close by. Team sports were never really Anders’s thing. He had poor ball control and often misjudged passes, but he was there.

  Anders was average at most things: average height, average at school, an average sort of bully. He was far from the worst, and also capable of showing a kind of concern, like helping a bullied child who’d been hit in the face with a snowball look for his glasses. If the glasses were covered in snow he would brush them clean before handing them back.

  One boy in the class was a particular target. Ahmed was nicely dressed, tall and dark – the only Pakistani in the school. He would generally sit and read in the library at break time so he would not have to face the school playground alone.

  They called him Brownie.

  Then one day Ahmed retaliated for the first time, and knocked Anders over. When Anders struggled to his feet, battered and bruised, everything had changed.

  It was the start of a friendship.

  They ran around the forest together, played basketball, went to each other’s flats to watch films. Even at primary school, the two of them were keen to earn money. Every day they waited for the newspapers to arrive. Once the copies of Aftenposten had been delivered they transferred them to their trolleys and lugged them round to the front doormats in the neighbourhood.

  Anders had found a friend.

  Al-Anfal

  Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their every finger!’ For they defied God and His Messenger, and who so defies God and His Messenger, God is severe in retribution. Here it is: so taste it! For the unbelievers the torment of the Fire!

  The Qur’an, 8:12–14

  It was no coincidence that Saddam Hussein chose a chapter from the Qur’an to name the assault he was planning on the Kurds. Al-Anfal means spoils of war and is a reference to God’s order to Muhammad to do battle against the infidels with all his might.

  And the unbelievers shall be herded into hell, said God to Muhammad after the first great battle for Islam in Badr in 624, in order that God may distinguish the depraved from the pure. He shall heap the depraved one upon the other, piling them all up, and deliver that pile to hell. These are truly the losers.

  The officers of the Iraqi army in 1988 similarly ordered their soldiers to tie the Kurds together head to toe, blindfold them and dump them from trucks into ready-dug mass graves in the desert. The victims landed on top of the still-warm bodies of dead neighbours, brothers and other relatives, and lay there waiting to be shot.

  Al-Anfal is the Kurds’ holocaust – a genocide committed with the ultimate aim of Arabising Kurdistan. Arabisation had already been going on for decades. The Kurds and other minorities had been forcibly moved from border areas, while Arab tribespeople were brought in from the south under the supervision of the Iraqi army. It was important for the government to take control of the oil-rich areas around Kirkuk and Khanaqin.

  The Iraqi army command calculated how to kill the maximum number of people quickly and efficiently. The villages to be cleansed were first surrounded by soldiers, then the people were forced from their houses and driven away. On reaching the place of execution they were handed over to firing squads from the elite security forces. Bulldozers covered the bodies with sand and earth, and the Kurdish problem was on the way to a solution.

  By naming the campaign of extermination after a sura of the Qur’an, the Iraqi government sought to legitimise its executions as a war against unbelievers. The Kurdish mosques in areas selected by the Prohibited Villages Committee of Central Security were razed to the ground by the army’s corps of engineers. First with dynamite, then with bulldozers. A decree from the highest level ordained that no settlement was to be spared. After the raids, the destruction was inspected by helicopter, and if as much as a single building remained standing the area commander was held to account.

  One lovely spring morning, the scent of flowers and sweet apples came wafting across the rooftops in a village high up in the Kurdish mountains. Then people’s eyes began to water and their skin to burn. The babies died first, then the toddlers, then the old people, and finally even the strong. Those who survived were left blind or with other serious after-effects.

  In the next phase, village after village was bombed with mustard gas, sarin and other nerve agents. This culminated in the attack on Halabja in March 1988, which killed five thousand people, and left thousands more scarred for life.

  * * *

  In the midst of all this there lived a young Kurdish man by the name of Mustafa. He was a trained engineer and had served in the Iraqi army, repairing tanks and military equipment in the south of the country. Mustafa felt himself to be a slave of the system, trapped and under surveillance. The Iraqi intelligence services, trained by the East German Stasi, had ears and eyes everywhere.

  After his military service, Mustafa found work as an engineer at the water and sewage works in the Kurdish city of Erbil, and was there when al-Anfal started. Frightened voices whispered stories about the mass graves, the blue-black faces, the desiccated eyes. Stories that were dangerous to repeat.

  Working in the accounts office of the waterworks was a beautiful, elegant woman with black curls, six years younger than Mustafa. She had a laugh that came floating out of the door and along the corridor as he passed. Her family had fled from Kirkuk, and she wa
s obliged to abandon her university course when al-Anfal began.

  Mustafa’s first ploy was to make sure the girl got to know his sister. Then, when the entire workforce was sent by a state committee to make an inventory of a warehouse, he saw to it that he and she were standing beside each other, sorting goods.

  She was called Bayan. And she was everything he wanted.

  A few days after that, he got his sister to ask her: ‘Do you want to marry my brother?’

  Bayan did.

  * * *

  It was snowing when they got married in February 1992. That meant good fortune!

  But after the Iraqi army moved out of the town, conflicts erupted between the various Kurdish factions. There was shooting on the streets, prices went through the roof and the Iraqi dinar plummeted. Buying a simple meal took plastic bags full of banknotes.

  It also snowed on one of the last days of December that year, as Mustafa drove his pregnant wife through the potholed streets of Erbil at top speed. Bayan groaned with pain every time they hit a bump, her contractions coming thick and fast. An icy wind blew in with them as Mustafa opened the main door of the hospital. Even inside, the temperature was only just above freezing; there was no electricity and all the paraffin was gone. Once Bayan was safely in bed, Mustafa sent word to their friends and relations, who collected enough fuel to get the hospital generator going.

  The steady drone of the motor was soon providing an accompaniment to the cries of the women in labour.

  Snow for their wedding in February and on the day of the birth. Doubly good fortune, thought Mustafa as he waited in a corridor reeking of paraffin. This must be a child born under a lucky star.

  Three women each gave birth to a daughter in the labour ward at Erbil that night.

  Two of them were given the name Befrin, which means Snow White, after the beautiful snow flurries that were filling the air.

  Bayan put her daughter to her breast. No, not Snow White, she thought. You’re not a Snow White.

  ‘Let’s call her Maria,’ suggested Mustafa.

  ‘No, I know a sick old lady called that. She can’t be named after a dying woman,’ said Bayan.

  ‘You choose then,’ smiled Mustafa.

  The brand-new mother looked down at her firstborn child. The baby had big, brown eyes and her head was wreathed in thick, dark hair. You look like a princess, thought Bayan.

  A name that meant princess came into her mind.

  ‘Bano,’ she said. ‘We’ll call her Bano.’

  Our Children

  I am a father of two

  You are a mother of two

  Let hurrahs ring round the Earth

  For they are our masterpiece!

  Einar Skjæraasen, ‘Onga våre’

  The month the Soviet Union collapsed, there were blue stripes in the pregnancy test.

  At last!

  It had been quite a wait. Tone and Gunnar had both qualified as teachers. They had moved north, as far north as they could get, to Kirkenes, right up by the Norwegian–Soviet border. When they went camping and fishing round the Pasvik valley, they could see over to the formerly mighty neighbour, which was now on the verge of collapse. The same forest on both sides, but a steady and advanced welfare state on one side, and social and industrial decline in a ticking environmental nightmare on the other.

  They had moved up north because special rates on paying down student loans were available if you took a job in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. Tone got a job at the upper secondary school in the former mining town and Gunnar taught at the secondary school, where he soon became the teachers’ union representative.

  As the pregnancy test showed its blue stripes in December 1991, Gorbachev’s empire was being broken up into fifteen republics. Tone and Gunnar decided to celebrate the pregnancy with a trip to the other side, to the nearby city of Murmansk, where people were still living in some sort of equality of poverty.

  The people of northern Norway had a lot to thank the Soviets for. Hitler’s army torched every building in Kirkenes and other towns and villages in Finnmark before it was sent south by Stalin’s troops in 1944. People up here had not forgotten it was the Red Army that liberated them. But since the war there had been precious little contact between the two peoples.

  Now, the parents-to-be stood on deck in the cold on their way into the huge city and saw the vast collection of nuclear submarines in the ships’ graveyard stretching halfway along the fjord.

  Tone shivered. What if the radiation damaged the baby? A new life, vulnerable and longed for. She would have to be more careful now.

  * * *

  The snow melted, spring came, and spring turned into summer. A summer of sorts, at any rate, with average temperatures at midsummer of six to seven degrees centigrade, which suited a mother-to-be who was growing larger and feeling hotter all the time.

  It was the end of July when the contractions started.

  The birth at Kirkenes hospital was long and hard. It took all the long, light night. Towards morning the baby finally arrived, big and bonny. They would call him Simon, Tone decided.

  When a little brother put in an appearance eighteen months later, Simon treated him like a teddy bear. He would lie beside the baby tickling him, especially his earlobes. If Simon was going out, he would throw his toys into the playpen so his brother wouldn’t feel lonely.

  It was little Håvard who turned out to be the showman of the family. He was especially keen on singing. He often put on concerts at home, with the rest of the family as his audience.

  * * *

  Two teachers with two children, an average Norwegian family.

  Every weekend they were out and about around Pasvik with the boys in child carriers, fishing for wild salmon in the rivers, lighting bonfires under the midnight sun, before they all slept in the tent they carried with them. In July they picked bilberries, in August it was cloudberries, and in winter they wrapped the children up in sheepskin and pulled them out into open country on a little sledge.

  If Simon and Håvard’s feet got cold, their parents would have them run barefoot on the crusted surface of the snow. An old American Indian trick, their father told them. The first time, he had to dance in the snow with bare feet himself before the two chilly boys were convinced. It worked: the blood was soon coursing round their veins.

  Gunnar taught his boys to distinguish between the tracks of wild creatures and tame ones. Wild animals walked in a straight line, tame ones tended to wander more aimlessly. The lynx, with its big, round pawprints, always chose its course and stuck to it. So did the wolverine with its long, narrow prints.

  He impressed on the boys that they had to be alert to the dangers of nature. Wolves could attack something as big as an elk, and scarcely an anthill was left undisturbed if bears were on the prowl.

  One summer’s day, when the family was taking a break, on the hill behind them a wolf stood staring. Thin and grey, it almost blended into the rocky mountainside. Gunnar froze.

  ‘Keep still. Don’t move,’ he said to the two boys. Tone picked up Håvard and Gunnar led Simon away, walking backwards. Very calmly, without any sudden movements, they withdrew up the slope to the road. The wolf slipped between the trees and was gone.

  * * *

  ‘It is time for the kids to get to know their kin,’ Tone said one day. Distances in northern Norway are vast, and trips are expensive. It was time to go home. In Kirkenes they had a council flat, it was a nice one, but it wasn’t theirs.

  ‘We need to find something of our own,’ Gunnar agreed.

  They were lucky: the house next door to Gunnar’s grandparents fell vacant. So they moved one county south, to the place where Tone saw Gunnar for the first time: Salangen, in Troms.

  ‘What a romantic place,’ exclaimed Gunnar when he returned to Upper Salangen, a short distance up from the fjord on the way to the high fells, an untamed bit of the natural world.

  * * *

  ‘We’ve got to make sure we meet people,
’ Tone soon concluded. So she and the woman next door started a revue group. Then they needed writers and performers. Gunnar had once penned love poems, hadn’t he, so perhaps he could write some scripts? As for Tone, she was eager to try her hand as a stage diva.

  The car was a great place for practising revue numbers. The whole family bellowing out. Håvard always the loudest.

  A girl lives in Havana, makes her living how she can, sitting by her window, beckons to a man!

  Every year, after the New Year’s Eve fireworks, the children of Upper Salangen put on a show. Astrid, the eldest of the neighbours’ children, was the director. The children devised comedy routines and practised their gymnastic displays. As the new year started, Reserved signs on cushions and chairs around the house showed the grown-ups where to sit.

  Håvard usually opened proceedings with a show tune. Simon was too shy to stand on stage, so he was the lighting technician. Throughout the show he carefully kept the family flashlight trained on the performers on the stage. He was never prouder of his younger sibling than on New Year’s Eve, when Håvard stood up there alone on stage, expertly illuminated by his big brother.

  Gunnar’s scripts and lyrics soon earned quite a reputation in the district, and schools and children’s clubs started to ring up and ask him to write something for them. The PE and IT teacher spent whole evenings writing and composing. He learnt to read and write music, and once the children were in bed he would sit, polishing up dialogues and scales.

  The two boys learnt to trust in themselves early on. From Year 1 at school they went off on their own across the garden, up the lane to the main road, then along to the crossroads where the school bus stopped. In winter, when the polar night descended on northern Norway, it was mostly pitch dark, as neither the lane nor the main road had street lights. One morning Tone was standing at the window with her coffee when she saw a shadow in the early-morning gloom. A huge bull elk was bearing down at top speed on Simon, who was ploughing along, head down, through the squally wind and snow. The elk and the seven-year-old were on course to blunder straight into each other. Tone cried out as she lost them both from sight in the snowy storm. She rushed out in her slippers and yelled.