Burnt sage to stave off the evil eye.
Burnt sage passed over the slick body of the new foal for a long life.
Burnt sage to make the bird-boy sneeze.
He is fifteen, perhaps. His name is Reza Pejman Khourdi, perhaps. The soldier’s spine is sealed and assured. Perhaps, perhaps not. At the smell of sage Reza can feel a pained pulse make its way up his back to the base of the brain. What was tight is now a tunnel through which the long-clogged past eagerly travels as if scent was a laxative, a calling. He spews from his mouth and eyes, asshole and nose, and in that one evening throws up his name and age and fake family and breathes in the forgotten language and familiar pattern of stars. The fontanel is fluid now. Tomorrow in Saqqez he will recognize faces and eyes that say to him, as clear as speech that screams: We know that you know that you are what we are. In his tent that first night Reza dreams of a horse with the head, neck and naked chest of his mother, a shadow to prance through his sleep. The she-Pegasus trots around their garrison to raise dust and call to him, Jounam, jounam, jounam. My boy (though he is sworn: nevermore). She stomps and laughs, her loose breasts jostle up and down and swing side to side with each of her prancing steps, delighted that a little perfume can bring her boy back.
First Face
For seventeen days now the shah’s soldiers have camped outside our village.
At first sight of them the men of our village quickly disappeared into the mountains. They kissed us on the heads and told our mamans not to worry. Khoda is with us and we will watch over you.
On the second day the shah soldiers came to town. We hid in the grain cellar of my uncle’s house and I stayed on the top step to keep watch. They rode on horses and some sat in big moving machines and some walked. They stood in the meiydan and shouted for the men to come out. No men came. Then they shouted that any Kurd who was not a follower of the shahenshah of Iran, the king of kings, would be shot and killed. I nearly raised my voice to say I am not!We are Kurds of these Zagros and that is all! But my maman gave me a slap just as I was opening my mouth and my sister Halva laughed and was slapped too. The soldiers shouted again for the men and the silence that followed was soon filled with fire shots from the cracks in the mountains where the men of the village had gone to hide. First the horses, scared by the sounds, ran, and then shah soldiers, boys no older than me, scattered out of the meiydan and tried to hide behind the fountain and the mosque but were pushed out by the older soldiers with knife edges and curses until the square was filled with scared boys ducking the hail of fire shots coming from up high. Some tried to shoot back. They cocked their rifles and held them up to their shoulders, and I laughed to see them aim at the nothing all around. Our fathers were deep in the mountains, covered by stones, invisible. Then the soldiers began to fall, one by one, clutching their shoulders and legs and bellies, screaming. A few feet from me a shah soldier fell and spilled blood on the ground in front of our house. The still-standing boys ran about to drag the fallen, like I have seen ants drag their prey. We watched them collect their brothers, gather their guns and what was left of their horses and disappear. When the fire shots stopped my maman ordered us out of the grain cellar and told me to shovel the dirt in front of our door, where the soldier’s blood was already drying and brown. Take it to the stream, throw it in, wash the shovel and your hands.
Every day now the soldiers ride or walk from their camp to our town.
And every day he comes and walks slowly through our small streets. They walk with purpose; some say they walk slowly for us to hear the clink of their sharp spurs and know them as military men, modern men, men of metal. Others say: Hide your daughters, they are hungry, ravenous like mountain wolves. He walks harder and looks more carefully upon everything and we think maybe he looks at us and knows us. Once he bent to Halva, my smallest sister, and touched her hair with his hands and I am sure she smiled. But we keep far from him, cautious and irresolute, for though he seems familiar the uniform is his only skin.
Nonetheless, they tell me I have his face. The women say it because the men, hidden in the mountains all around, are gone for saying. Still, the women talk. When they lift my chin up to see the resemblance all I can see are their hairy lips and chin bottoms.
Bale, bale, bale.
Yes, yes, yes, here and here, for certain . . .
And:
For sure.
Their puckered fingers carve lines in my jaw, around the sockets beneath my brow.
Yes, yes, yes.
They mutter in hushed assessment and agreement.
It is all I can do to gaze down and pretend not to know. I have seen my reflection in the still puddles of water after the rain and I have seen where the nose and eyelids and lips hang heavy with gravity’s drag. I look too in the wavering water of the fountain and I am just a boy’s head and a boy’s neck and I look like I look, like the other boys and as myself.
Such similarities.
The women chant.
Such a resemblance. Ay Khoda.
For the first few days they came again and again; we hid, but this time they destroyed everything. They fired a big ball into the building where our bazaar is. They tore all the photographs of our hero Simko and gathered all of our Kurdish pamphlets and flags in the square and declared us traitors to Iran. When Halva asked me what Iran was I did not know, so I said it was a monster that hated Kurds. They tried for some violence on the old blind woman, who refused to hide, but she folded to the ground easily and so they left her alone. Then they left.
Now it is nineteen days and the garrison at the bottom of the hill is dirty; we can see it from here. Their machines have not moved and their tents are growing tattered. We can smell their shit in the breezes that blow up the mountains. But the soldiers still come and go among and between us as they like, kind or coarse, as they like. They are bored and use us mostly for games; they scream:
Where are your men? Where is your baba?!
Where is Simko?!
And when we don’t answer they tear down our lines of laundry and wear our socks over their hands and our sisters’ skirts like scarves around their necks; they smell our mothers’ stained monthly cloths and let their eyelids flutter in pretend delight. They kick over the pans of crushed tomatoes we have peeled and seeded and cooked for the winter to come, hours of work that leave our hands gummy and raw, and they make a contest of kicks—who kicks the farthest—and the pans fly through the air and splash our winter’s tomato sauce all over the street like blood. The one with my face is the best kicker among them and the loudest laugher and the heaviest hand, and once, when he kicked a pan farther than the rest, I had to stop myself from cheering, it was such a good kick. His face is strong, with a chin like a solid brick and smooth skin and two eyes like half moons, even and equal on his head. There is an expression too, just below the skin, a flesh mask, veined and muscled, of some great capacity.
A few days after, when my similarity is so popular I cannot walk without an old woman touching my face, my own maman takes me aside and holds my head in her two hands.
Jounam, Arash, let the familiar one catch you and go along.
My maman is not a crazy woman, at least not all the time.
Go to their camp, the tents below, and ask him in our tongue why they are here. Why have they come to harass us? What do they want? Arash, jounam, go ask him for Maman, please, light of my heart, ask him.
She begs with the brown in her eyes and I am a good boy with his face and I know that the worry is not just hers but the worry of all the women in Saqqez who gave their men to the mountains and sleep alone and lightly because of the garrison’s night noise and gunfire.
Go for a quick moment and then run right back and I will have the zulbia waiting.
For two days I follow him around like one of the village’s desperate dogs. First, nothing. Then he yells at me in their language and I do my best not to blink or fall back in fear. I persist and when he shouts I take a rock from my pocket and throw it at his fe
et. I give very little chase and without any effort on his part he drags me by the neck to the edge of the fountain, where the whole village comes to watch as he takes my shoulders in his hands and screams at me in the foreign tongue that makes the soldiers around us laugh and he thrusts my neck and head into the water such that all I can see is his jovial face, my jovial face, and the bubbles of my escaped breath as they explode on the surface. The soldiers gather closer and pound their rifle butts into the marble base of the fountain. I am lifted to hear their happy chant and immersed again, this time his face, my face, is all joy and I am deaf from the rifle pounds that reverberate through the stone and water; heavy drums that rip apart my ears, one and one. I am raised again to the silence. When my eyes clear of water and I can breathe I look into him and say in my language, without coughs or chokes, which is a miracle because I am blue already:
They say you have my face.
The mask in front of me warms and melts like a child near sleep and, in just as many seconds, hardens into stiff steel. Maman was right! I struggle out of his arms to run to her. He speaks our language! He is one of us! My face, my brother . . . And from where we are wet, our hands, arms and shoulders, I quickly slip through. Another soldier catches me and throws me down while our brother and son strikes blows on my head with his boot, once and then again, and then again, head and face, until I am covered in blood and the dirt of the ground, until my face is a mask of the earth and nothing more. When satisfied and tired, when the sky is gone and the courtyard is gone and the fountain is the fountain of paradise, the soldier leans down and whispers in our language. Thank God I don’t have your face.
A swift, arced kick to the middle of me and the blood breaks its walls and tunnels and flows free and I am the first face of our dead, his dead; a molten face, cracked and filled through with dust and dirt that looks up at the women and children from the puddles and pools of Saqqez on their walks to and from our beautiful fountain.
The Penumbra
A month after the rout the battalion still camps, shamed and idle, on the low plains beneath the indomitable city of Saqqez. The commanders are without command. Obstinate in a humiliation bred of mulishness, fastened to a mulishness bred of humiliation, they keep the garrison posted and useless as there are no instructions from Tehran or otherwise. In the weeks that pass captains and lieutenants absolve themselves of post and hierarchy and keep to their square tents and triangular fires and take to hobbies afforded by years of battle boredom—stone carving, backgammon, hour after hour of silent smoking—careful to ignore the cadets that rove about them, restive and keen for action of any sort.
It is an unanticipated tedium, an empty wait, and the cadets fill it how they like. The tribal conscripts spend the days hunting, to return each evening with the limp bodies of grouse or hare strung to the ends of their rifles. City boys, Reza the only conscript among them, quietly spurn their commander’s silence to lurch into Saqqez each day, in search of food, entertainment and harassments general and satisfying to burden the people of Saqqez. At night the cadets come together again to sit around fires of kerosene and scrub and eat what ever canned or caught food is available, to smoke from pipes of opium and drink the watered-down vodka they trade bullets for from passing gypsy caravans. In each other’s lit eyes the boys find a safety to protect them against the anonymous wild dark.
In this time two moons have passed: the first, an orange harbinger of harvest, the second of veiled alabaster, dim and irregular. In their ragged euphoria of smoke and drink the cadets regard the dark moon as an unpropitious omen. To ease their suspicions the captain comes to the fire with an astrolabe. Reza stares at the bronze item, meticulous and precisely punctured, and listens to the captain explain the sequences of the stars: the horse, the ladles big and small, the giant and his square belt and all manner of resemblances the cadets can neither make out nor imagine. The moon above them grows darker, as if to collapse into night, and the cadets press the captain for cause. He holds the astrolabe in his lap and looks into the universe of the fire and tells softly and sadly of the rotations of the planets and the spherical shapes of celestial beings and the relationship of the sun to the earth and the moon to the universe, explaining that tonight they all sit witness to the sun’s gentle slip behind the earth to cast its shadow on the surface of the moon’s fair face.
It is but our own silhouette.
Unbelieving, the cadets return to their pipes and dice. Reza keeps focus on the apparition above him as a thing once white and sure, now darkened and covered, also comes to pass within him. A shadow grows, expands each day gaseous and swollen, to eclipse over all that was positive and bright. He re-minds himself: He is Reza Pejman Khourdi and he has x or y years and he is a dutiful soldier/son of the king of kings, the king of kings is correct in everything he does and that Reza does for him, and he has kicked and killed his first Kurd and that is right as it was the Kurd boy in himself that he kicked and killed to die and be dead and now that is clean and in order and erased. All of it, like the moon, becomes a shifting certainty under the wink of tonight’s singular darkened eye.
In the morning he walks with a burlap sack, his rifle and three other cadets up the steep green slope in search of food to feed their many hungers. They stop in the orchards at the edge of Saqqez. It is the center of fall and the trees are laden with cherries and mulberries and the soldiers stand on the warm earth and eat their fill. Reza hoards and gobbles the red fruits until the juice stains his teeth and spills from his mouth in lines of crimson and violet. The cadets tease him.
A fan of the cherries, eh, Khourdi?
Mulberries are a child’s fruit, didn’t you know?
Reza cannot hear them through the churn of his rapacious appetite, as he must now feed his soldier self and the insoluble shadow self and all he hears is: I am a child, a hungry bird boy a shadow that feasts on these favorites, favorites for the famished bird boy, and I am today a bird and a boy, ravenous for fruit and seed. They walk on, into the diagonals of orange light that cut in from the tops of the mountains and slant down in black bars across the hills.
Every morning in the town is like every other. The fountain continues its endless trickle; the women and children walk about muted, their motions part of some eternal pantomime with only sound effects: the slap! sizzle of dough as thrown by old hands onto fires of hot rocks and the splash! of boys who wash their faces in the fountain, the squawk! of errant, determined hens. All of it the same as it was. The soldiers enter into a smooth current of time that does not stop or slow or scream for them or at them and they drag their burlap sacks from street to street, unable to penetrate with fear or threat or back-strapped gun the life rhythm of a morning repeated dawn after dawn for as long as the mountains have held themselves high in the sky.
In his foul humor Reza comes to stand above an old woman tending a smoky, struggling fire. At his feet she is bent into a small ball that is everything: his old stone village, his maman’s dead garden, the tenacity of the Kurds. With her iron prod she stirs the ashes of his baba’s body and the bodies of all the useless and defeated Kurds who left him orphaned all those years ago. The woman wears a black robe and her head is covered in a fabric of many colors. She raises her face to look at him and it is clenched, like the stone, every moment of time that she has spent sitting at this meager fire like her mother before her and all the Kurd mothers before them stuck in the doomed visage. With her dirty hair and dirty feet and dirty hands, she is seen by Reza as the shah must see her: a being just above the line of animal. A people wholly without the grace afforded by shined buttons and boots and a nation to call their own; a population low to the ground, of the ground, stuck to lose, again and again, the very stones that spawned them, useless and forgotten by history itself.
He reaches into the crotch of his pants and grips for himself, pulls out and pisses on her flameless pit. The cadets laugh and clap at this gesture, take it as the first volley, a point of permission, and lark about senselessly from alley t
o alley cutting into skins full of cool water, turning over the bowls of goat milk left to curdle into yogurt and trampling from one house to the next to raid the pantries of women who watch without concern, having long ago buried their food elsewhere.
So the morning goes.
The cadets: three frenzied city boys and a Kurd who harbors a dancing shadow run about the silent city, gauche and insatiable, in search of food, of grains and cheese and tea to fill their bellies, and terror and alarm to fill their hearts. Steady in its century-old self, the city gently hides its children and grows calm in the haphazard chaos. At a house at the edge of town Reza pushes down a door to find a young mother, cross-legged on a motaq, feeding a child from breasts sodden and ripe and red at the tips. The babe opens his eyes wide at the intruders but does not move his mouth from the stream, and the soldiers are quick to empty her cupboards of rice and tea leaves and fresh butter; she has taken no precautions and hidden nothing. Since her husband left the mother has thought not forward in time, but in a circle without a yesterday or tomorrow, where she is the food and her baby is her husband and the shah soldiers are angry apparitions to taunt her, waking nightmares. Reza stands in the doorway, immobile, caught hosting not one but two selves: the shadow self that craves to suckle at this all-mother’s teat and the soldier self that determines this to be dirty loot, for the taking but not at all valuable. Nevertheless, the two demons are this morning bosom buddies who take each other by the hand to dance in joy at the sight of a mother and her milk. He approaches the woman.
The Age of Orphans Page 10
