The Age of Orphans

by Laleh Khadivi

  The men leave the village in a line that snakes behind the slumped courier. The cries of women follow them until they reach the road, where the sound folds in with the wind and fades. At the crossroad the courier pauses and the boy watches dusk empty itself into the bottomlands and cover the earth in a blue mist. His mare shifts foot to foot but the boy sits in a daze, occupied by the chore of driving the fear back inside, the scare that beats through him in a fluid pulse, potent enough to keep loose the bowels, tenuous the fingers and waterless the mouth. He reaches into the front of his pants to feel the wound of the circumcision that is now almost healed and tries to remember the man he has been made into: a Kurd to sit straight backed and stern and listen carefully to the call of the land. The courier steps quickly to the east. The men heel their horses and orient themselves toward night. The boy’s mare jumps out and down in rhythm with the rest, his rider nervously fondling his broken piece with one hand and clutching at slack reins with the other, quietly muttering, Maman.

  For one night and the following day the line moves east. In the silent windy dark through to the arid day the boy keeps close to his father, who shouts constantly.

  Raise the reins! Keep pace!

  Sharpen your back! Look, son, there, look!

  He points to a jagged outcropping of stones in the shape of a broken wall.

  There is the fortress of the Bistoun, where we were victorious against the Umayyads and the Sassanids. That is where the Kurds held to their land, and look how it still holds to itself.

  See? Over there—

  He points again, this time to a rock-strewn road that juts off the trail.

  That is the path to Nurabad and the river Cameh and the bone fields of Luman, where the Ottomans left us dead in the sun, for the birds to eat out our eyes and the heat to melt away our flesh. Only now has the earth begun to take in our bones. Look—He points at the faint seam of mountains that sew together the land and sky.

  That is where the Kerand live. Watch out, boy, all their daughters have olive-colored eyes . . .

  And look here, and look there . . .

  The boy does not care to focus on his baba’s demands to stare at the ruins, empty of glory, and to spite him turns eye and ear in the opposite direction, where he spots a figure—a quavering hallucination of perspective and temperature—a specter soldier of the unclaimed lands. The boy narrows his eyes to make out a man tied together with windswept tatters, his legs split atop a solid horse, the two bodies as shaped and still as clay. The boy is certain they have come upon some fettered symbol unearthed and planted on the surface of the desert to anchor down the nests of ever ascending dead. The boy makes no mention of the vision and the men continue their sleepy march and his father keeps up with decries of: Here! and There! Eventually the horses themselves come to a halt, undirected and on their own, before the figure and his beast. The animals shake their skins and neigh and the specter soldier raises a bandaged hand. One by one the men fall asleep where they sit and slump on their horses, closed eyed and limp, as if under a spell, and for the first time the boy is calm and unafraid. The specter soldier turns and leads the men off their path east toward the unknown south and the beasts follow one by one, carked by sleeping cargo, with no reservations in their natural minds.

  The wrapped man leads without staff or gesture and after a time they move up over barren mounds of sand and the horses must high-step, a foot a foot a foot, to keep their muscled masses in motion, to stay above the sink. All until the animals sense water, which they come to in time, a depression filled with viscous mud, where the horses pause to drink while the men fall off them to wash their faces in the muck and mount again sporting masks of dripping sand. The specter soldier keeps pace at the front and the boy, who is not at all asleep, rides to meet him, to stare at the scarves of dark fabric wrapped tight around head, neck and arms. There are slits for eyes that look only out and everywhere else the man is encased. The boy seeks out some hole, some space beneath the scarves, to reveal a slice of skin, to know the man as a man, but there are no disclosures. A sweet smell of rot seeps from beneath the rags and the boy’s mare steps back and away. The caravan moves on.

  In the afternoon the sand is whipped by the wind and the horses tilt their heads and close their eyes to the sharpened air, follow head to tail to head to tail in a simple blind pull while their sandmasked men sleep. The boy wakes in the cool of dusk to see the sand has turned again to hard earth sprouting with sagebrush, cactus, lizard and creek, while above one star suckles the night sky. The march of horses, men, father, courier and specter soldier move forward into the dark until they reach the ledge of a great crevice, a deep and even cut into the earth’s crust. The boy peers over the edge to find a city aglow, of domed gypsum and carved onyx porticoes, and he shakes his head once and then twice, certain the city is his head’s manifestation of the day’s heat.

  The specter soldier dismounts and walks ahead and then down into the canyon that yawns before them and the men shake their heads of sand and sleep and descend with the same easy and unsuspecting step that carries them every morning from warm bed to cold out house. The boy follows and his mare goes to join the other steeds that sit on their haunches at the precipice like a pack of obedient, oversized dogs. They descend switchbacks in silence and the boy, distracted and stunned, forgets the morning fear and the afternoon heat and takes in the city steeped all around him. There are fountains and courtyards, streets of smooth alabaster and azure mosques. Everywhere span banners, from rooftop to rooftop, window grate to window grate, orange and red cloth spread about like the leftovers of some sumptuous celebration. Otherwise, there is silence and the streets of the sunken stone town unravel one after the next, empty and lifeless, with the exhausted hush of a storm survived, a calamity come and passed. The boy rushes to keep up with the men, slipping once or twice on the worn steps.

  At the first crossroads a body hangs, bloated and strung by the neck. In the easy evening breeze the exploded eyes and distended tongue sway from side to side. The men pass beneath it without notice, but the boy stops to look. The lack of life does not interest him. He sees it in the fields around his father’s house and in the fields after an animal lies down to approach death, moaning in invisible pain. He has even seen it in his own room, in his own bed, the morning he woke next to the blue body of his year-old brother. In the boy’s life death is a regular thing; it is the boots that fascinate. They dangle before him at eye level, structures he has never seen, and he stands beneath tomorrow’s carrion to hold a hand out to the leather and laces in curiosity and want. They are severe encasements: hard and impenetrable and leaden as shields, as if to press ground away from body, skin from surface, earth from sole. The boy feels his own feet, clumsily shod in canvas and hide and separated so barely from the ground beneath he can feel every pebble and divot in the stone streets of the ancient city. Bravery is in these boots, the boy is sure; if he wore them, all battles could be won. Hungrily the boy reaches out to touch the boots and feels a quick wind snap from the mouth of a dog that circles the swinging body in a devoted pack. Blood drips from the tip of his finger and he lets go his fascination and runs to find the line of men, leaving the boots behind, eager to imagine the possibilities of their strength.

  Before a plain iron gate the specter soldier stops and shouts, Bohzkohn! The rusted iron hinges squeal and one by one the men—uncles, cousin, father—disappear dutifully under the watch of an old man who mutters, Yallah! Yallah! They are taken to an interior courtyard where rugs are spread and a copper samovar steams at the hands of a girl in a flower-patterned kerchief. Overhead, the moon is a half thing and they sit in the laced night-shade of a rangy ficus, the boy among them and the specter soldier between, and they are silent, unsmiling, sipping their tea until the last drop when the old man calls:

  Rostam!

  An adolescent appears shouldering a canvas sack.

  There.

  He gestures with his hand to the center of the circle.

&n
bsp; Put them there.

  The bag is released and the contents land with a curious clatter. The men are quick to draw the rifles out, to examine their long narrow caverns and delicate crescent-shaped triggers and smile. Rostam, gone, now returns with boxes of small shiny bullets linked together like decorations of gold, bridal dowries, beads for prayer, and the men don them as sashes around their shoulders or cummerbunds about the waist. They take again of the tea and rise to leave, the boy with his own sash and too-long rifle that he uses as a walking stick. The specter soldier stops them with one raised hand.

  They are from the dead soldiers of the shah, those responsible for the silence of our town.

  Take them, make a noise so the shah will know the Kurds are not defeated.

  He sits again, exhausted, and signals to the girl, who abandons the samovar and kneels before the old man to unwrap the rag straps from his face. Round and round she walks, soft footed and in song, disentangling him from his bandages. The men stay to watch the revealing of welters and burns that shine out wet with blood and pus. Naked but for this skin of scars, the old man raises his arms for the girl to apply a white salve that she pushes from the sharp spine of a plant and rubs onto the gore of what was once a muscled torso, a sinewy shoulder, a broken-featured face. The specter soldier rocks from side to side, his arms lifted, in what devotion or surrender or pain the boy does not know, and hums along to the kerchiefed girl’s tune. Whatever bravery the boy claimed dissolves and churns heavily at the sight of the gore until he is nauseous. The men take their leave and walk through the iron gates, each stopping to clap the boy on the back. Eh, if I hit a little harder maybe I could slap some of the green off your face. The men joke, happy with their sudden bounty.

  They emerge from the crack of the earth, mount horses and ride away from the sunken city. In the iron wash of sky a few stars, disparate and unstrung, blink down at the caravan with their dusty sheen. The boy lags at the end of the procession and thinks of the boots and the skin of the specter soldier and the empty sunken town. His father leads the line, strapped across the chest and back with half a dozen rifles that fan out from his figure and cut his silhouette against the horizon, jagged as a spur. Ah, and there! Look! The rubble in the distance. Our castles of Hoshap and Bistare, where we fought off the Mongols and the Arabs with the valor of a million men, just as now we go to fight the shah.

  The boy does not listen or look and instead raises his head to gaze at the sky, where a cast of falcons, six or seven by quick count, spins slowly around the itinerants below. Peregrine, like the men who wander the age-old land, they move with an infinite glissade, carving rounded shapes into the surface of the sky. The birds take all of the boy’s attention.

  And look . . .

  But the boy cannot, for his neck is craned taut and straight to see wings that jut out and then disappear in a pulse, a stroke, a soar that takes weight from the boy’s body; and he is light through the chest, through his head, and nearly aloft. Made of wings and wind, the birds aviate in arcs and dips above the distressed land, above the fissures of stone, its explosions of magma, the tension of its wood and wire fences and the evanescent demarcations of time, fury and blood to which his baba points.

  And look, here . . .

  And look, there . . .

  But the boy does not, for he is trying to fly. With his chest opened upward he pushes his face deeper into the beam of sun and wishes for his thin bones and narrow shoulders to aspire among the chaotic open-aired thresh of wings, to fly high and above the hemmed land and sweep aloft the delineations marked out for him, on him, into him.

  Birds

  Of earth, we see all.

  Though our ears are empty and our feet frail farces, our lungs breathe the best thin air and our wings rise and fall to draw circles in the sky. We fly interminable; omniscient; above rotations of earth and time.

  Of earth, we see all.

  Below, the many spines of Mesopotamia: her plates long buckled into mountain ridges, hoary and high; rivers and streams, silken kraits that line the land in silver and blue; the undulations of skulls buried beneath the desert floor, one after one after one, like the nodes in history’s back: benighted, elapsed, in dissolve.

  Of earth, we see all.

  Below: the scales of a scorpion, the whiskers of a grouse, the freckles of sheep that move across the green hillsides. Below: the sandy substructure of ancient wells that rest in the shadows of treetops whose roots and trunks they water slowly over the ages. Below: a desert pocked by brush and crater; the unmanaged dunes; the swales lush and green; a defiant nature.

  Of earth, we see all.

  Below, the human effort: to sow, to order, to reap, to flame, to farm, to slaughter, to sex, to sit and to stay, to move and to horde, mortal and unresolved. Below: the harnessed wood; the tamed stream; the crumbled ruins strewn and screaming about the surface like a million mouths of broken teeth. Below: a madness for marking.

  Of earth, we see all; we are the eyes of God.

  Below, the caravansary: a march of men in a string, like ants, thirsty and maddened to possess the mound. We have seen the march of men before: Chaldean, Greek, Parse and Aryan. All with the same two limb legs and two limb arms, eyes to witness and water, ears to hear and hands to clutch and caress. To us they are but one man, the same man, a man the same as the ant in a constant march and march and march.

  Of earth, we see all; we are the eyes of their given God.

  Below, the boy in the caravan gazes up to the swirl of us with a sterling desire, cursed, as he is, to the gloried ground.

  The Mirror Without Silver

  By afternoon of the third day the men camp in a cool ravine where a thick river cuts into the earth with such ferocity of sound and rush the men are mute at its bank. The boy climbs in to wade ankle- and sometimes knee-deep in a torrent as swift and unforgiving as any he has ever known. He watches the men invigorate themselves in the cold waters, slip on the mossy stones, swim against the strong current to emerge cursing, dripping, smiling and anew to laugh at one another and lasso wet turbans through the air. With puckered hands, swollen ankles and numb feet the boy reaches into the churning flow to catch and uncatch the slippery carp that slick themselves on his feet and legs as the men take to the sandy shore to lie in the warm sun. Even the courier sits serene in the shadow of a stone ledge to suck at a long pipe and watch the men become boys and listen to the din of air and water drawn from high above. The boy watches him and wonders if the courier’s call to fight and tales of terror were but a secret to deliver the men, without shame, to this halcyon riverside.

  At dusk they see a figure of an old man, a stunted mule and a rickety cart on the ledge above the ravine. A voice shouts down to their gathering.

  Have you space for an old wanderer?

  With claps and cheers the men respond.

  Come down, this is God’s earth, come, come down, old man.

  The humble caravan descends down into the canyon with such a clatter of copper and glass and bray and creak that the river herself seems hushed. With a nod they make their way upstream, where the mule takes water in the shallows and the old man undresses and bathes. All the while he is hungrily eyed by the men, uncles, cousins, father and courier, who watch with faces that plea.

  Tell us.

  Tell us.

  You know, so tell.

  The old man sings to himself and cups handfuls of water to throw onto his neck, into the pit of each arm, through the holes of mouth, nose and ears. He shapes both hands into a bowl and fills them with water that he dribbles across the spine of the mule. He is a happy old bahkti, the boy thinks, to travel the desert with fantastic wares, lungs full of song and jokes and a mind privy to the fates of men. Uncles, cousins and father stare impatiently at the old wet man and his wet mule. Silently they plead.

  You have come to us on the eve of battle. So tell us.

  And:

  You know, so say.

  Clean and cool, the bahkti chides them jovially w
ith tawdry jokes from his collection: an unfortunately placed scorpion bite; the travails of a certain woman born with the parts of a man; the story of the Lur herder who, in the act of affection, lost his prized part when the donkey jumped at the sight of a mouse; and on and on. Only the boy and the bahkti laugh. The men leave the riverside and walk up to the camp. Happy with his new company, the boy reaches again into the deep pools for fish.

  To catch the carp you must fill your hands with anger and force, finger to finger to finger, five and five across. At the first touch of the scale or what ever passes—an eye, a gut, the last tail fin—you must grab and press with extraordinary force and no thought at all.

  The bahkti sits on the smooth river rocks, preoccupied with the activity of cleaning his ears. He sticks a gnarled finger into his ear hole and explains:

  You must pierce.

  The bahkti pulls out an orange waxen lump and shakes it at the boy.