Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  Copyright © 2020 Ava Homa

  Cover © 2020 Abrams

  The poem by Sherko Bekas on this page was translated by the author.

  This page, map of Kurdistan © Peter Hermes Furian / Alamy Stock Photo

  Published in 2020 by The Overlook Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938692

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-4309-2

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-894-7

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or change the entirely fictional nature of the work. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The author and publisher make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this material.

  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

  abramsbooks.com

  To Kurdish women,

  for flourishing in barren fields;

  to Farzad Kamangar,

  for imagining otherwise;

  and

  to Ehsan,

  for braving the storms with and for me.

  What else can you do when your stage is an ember and your audience a gun?

  That’s what you had to do.

  You had to write poetry with the tip of the flame

  And set fire to your fear and silence.

  —Sherko Bekas (1940–2013)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part I: Leila

  Part II: Alan

  Part III: Leila

  Part IV: Chia

  Part V: Leila

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  A woman alone on the mountain at dusk.

  An invisible boot pressed against my throat, making my breath labored and helpless, and yet I couldn’t go back and face my parents. Or my stifled future. Hidden behind a boulder, I hugged my knees and imagined my rage and pain whirling into a wildfire, burning down all the injustices.

  Could my father have known what was going on? I wanted to tell him, to share this burden with him. My shoulders were already heavy beneath the daily cruelties of living as a woman in La’nat Awa, the damned place. This fatigue was incurable.

  The sun had sauntered down, disappeared behind Lake Zrebar. A dozen shades of red burst open along the horizon.

  Below, the narrow winding asphalt road was the hem around the hill’s green skirt, embroidered with clusters of red and yellow wildflowers. The shiler flowers stood elegant and tall, flourishing across the rough Kurdistan plateau, defying borders. I yearned to be a shiler, but I was a garden of anguish, of loathing, of torment; my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death.

  I stood up, my breath now coming in pants. I wasn’t hiding anymore. “Basa bas,” I shouted. “It’s enough. Enough.”

  I started down the hill in a tumbling run and found myself unable to stop. Despite the chill of the evening, I started sweating. The wind whipped my headscarf, and I gained speed. I flapped as if I had wings.

  As I ran, a wail escaped my chest. I was headed toward the main road, toward the world of men. The streets belonged to them. Judgmental men. Hypocritical men. Their-honor-depended-on-women men. Cars hurtled around the curve, full of drunk drivers who honked as they spotted me sprinting down the hillside. They were going too fast for this road, too fast for their sluggish reflexes, and too fast for their old vehicles. A white late-model car careened down the winding road, kicking up dust. The wind roared in my ears.

  The white car and whoever was driving seemed to seek me out as a fellow traveler. I stumbled on a stone, crushing the shiny red poppies in the grass. And as I lurched, my untold stories tumbled inside me like pages ripped from a book and tossed, crumpled, into the wastepaper bin. An overpowering urge to scream my story, to expel it from beginning to end, seized me. Suddenly I could see the heads of all those Kurds crushed beneath tanks.

  Descending the slope at a breakneck pace, my shouts crescendoing, I was unable to stop myself, this crazed woman.

  A final lunge and I was airborne.

  PART I

  LEILA

  CHAPTER ONE

  My five-year-old mind could not identify the map drawn on my father’s back and neck from the lashed scars of his time in prison. Wrapped in a beige towel at the waist and indifferent to the water droplets sliding down across the hacked frontiers on his bare back, my father packed some of the new baby’s clothes and diapers and explained in a hoarse voice that he had to run back to the hospital.

  Mama and my new baby brother, Chia, meaning “mountain,” had not come home yet, and I was impatient to meet him. The events of that day were etched in some persistent cell in my memory. Baba got dressed, absently shoved my pants and doll inside a plastic bag, and gathered me into his arms. Wrapping my arms around Baba’s neck, I saw tears in the corners of his eyes and the fresh drops of sweat on his receding hairline. It was stuffy in the house, the heater still blasting although it was well into March.

  “Your head is crying,” I giggled and ran my palms over his sharp stubble. “Angry skin. Porcupine.” He carried me down the carpeted stairs that twisted in a perfect spiral from our hallway to the basement studio and knocked on Joanna’s door.

  Joanna opened the door, wearing her face-wide smile. “Congratulations, brakam!” She wasn’t really my aunt, but she and my father called each other brother and sister. Joanna was dressed in a loose, green, ankle-length dress and a black vest, her hair tied up in a ponytail, her red lips the color of my father’s bloodshot eyes. Her golden belt jingled as she walked, its many dangling coins clinking mellifluously together. I loved that she was always nicely dressed, how it set her apart from most women in Mariwan.

  “Healthy baby boy. We’ll be home tonight.” Baba handed me to Joanna. “Could you please take care of Leila?”

  Squeezed between them, I inhaled my father’s signature smell of lavender soap, which mingled with Joanna’s jasmine perfume.

  “Of course. Hello, big sister!” she said as she tickled me under my arms. Baba thanked her and set down my bag next to the edge of the wooden door.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  “Hana . . . ?” Joanna asked.

  “No . . . have you turned on the radio today?”

  His own radio was always on, its staticky broadcasts a familiar soundtrack. Joanna’s radio was usually on too, but hers played only mellow music, often Sayed Ali Asghar Kurdistani’s soothing voice. She waved a hand in the air, swatting away the unheard news. “Believe me, I can live a day without tragedy, Alan! You can too. Newroz is coming. Your son is born. And we deserve a break, brakam, don’t we?”

  Baba’s face twitched in a futile attempt to dispel the tears that pooled in the corners of his eyes. He turned his face away and crossed the tidy room to the dim main entrance of the walkout basement without another word.

  “Let me get you a jacket, Alan,” Joanna called out to Baba’s hunched shoulders. The chill crept in even after he shut the door behind him, deaf to
her words.

  “I’m mostly made from water,” I announced, repeating the little fact I had learned from Joanna the day before. She was the reason that, at age five, I could read. Her daughter, Shiler, could already spell too, and she was only twenty days older than me.

  Joanna sat me in a chair next to Shiler, who was busy practicing the Kurdish alphabet her mother had taught her: a as in azadi (freedom), h as in hemni (peace), n as in nishtman (homeland)—everything the Kurds were deprived of.

  Born and raised in her mother’s crowded prison ward, Shiler had learned to focus so intently on the task at hand that she completely disregarded the world around her, so she had only just now noticed my arrival.

  When Joanna had been released from prison several months earlier, she and her daughter had moved into our basement while she looked for an inexpensive place to rent. My father had said they could stay in our house for free because he’d had a lot of respect for Joanna’s deceased husband—his former cellmate, a leftist activist who had been executed. Since she had moved in, Joanna had painted the basement studio a light shade of green, and the grass no longer grew long and unkempt in the yard outside the large, spotless window.

  I was thrilled to have a new playmate, but Mama didn’t like having Joanna and Shiler downstairs; she was suspicious of how Joanna had secured her release from prison despite being sentenced to death for stabbing a man. Baba had explained to me that in Iranian law, a man’s life was worth twice as much as a woman’s, so Joanna was to be killed in retaliation for taking her rapist’s life. But the decision was eventually reversed.

  “And God knows how!” Mama added.

  Baba had stuttered when I asked what a rapist was.

  “Go play with your dolls,” he’d responded. I longed to know why the government punished everyone I liked.

  Joanna now held a candy before me. “Mostly from water, ha? But what is the rest of your body made of? Chocolate?”

  The orange-flavored candy was inside my cheek before I could answer. “No,” I mumbled, mouth full.

  “Honey?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why are you so sweet then?”

  I laughed, holding onto the hem of my skirt. She kissed my cheeks. I wished Joanna had always been there, when Baba was too busy feeling bad for himself, Mama was too busy telling the world how wonderful she was, and Grandma was too busy praying for a grandson.

  “Leila, have you had anything to eat?” Joanna asked with a hand on her hip.

  “I found some yogurt. Ate it with sugar.”

  On her single burner, Joanna warmed up her leftover shorabaw, a traditional soup of beef and beans, though I found no meat in it.

  “When will Mama and the baby come home? Do you think they miss me?”

  “The baby doesn’t even know you,” said Shiler, looking up from her finished letters.

  “Yes, he does! My brother would recognize me among a hundred girls,” I declared. Joanna stirred some bread crumbs into the shorabaw. I slurped the delicious soup and went on: “He’ll recognize my voice, because I sang to him when he was in Mama’s belly.” Joanna confirmed that he certainly would.

  “Joanna is sewing new dresses for you and me for Newroz.” Shiler was the only child I knew who called her mother by her first name.

  “You ruined the surprise, avina min,” Joanna said.

  Shiler took me to the sewing machine in the far corner of the studio, sitting by the cooler that acted as their fridge. On and around the hand-cranked machine, the fabric lay shapelessly, red printed with white flowers.

  “Why don’t you explain to Shiler how you celebrate Newroz here?” Joanna said as she washed the empty bowls in her tiny sink.

  It was Shiler’s first New Year’s celebration outside of a prison cell, and I excitedly told her all about the gifts we’d receive—usually a crisp note and perhaps a toy—and how thousands would gather in the city center, where there would be lots of pastries, dancing, and bonfires. The celebrations would stop only when the Revolutionary Guards showed up.

  “Why was my Baba crying?” I went to Joanna. “He likes Newroz.”

  She pressed my head against her chest. Her breasts were small, unlike Mama’s. “You’ll find out someday,” Joanna said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “When you’re an adult.” She gently stroked the back of my neck and kissed my cheeks.

  I pulled away and used the hem of my blouse to rub her saliva off my face. “I am an adult!”

  Joanna laughed, a laughter that bubbled up from her core and erupted like a geyser. The wrinkles around her kind black eyes and her narrow mouth made her look older than Mama, though Baba had said she was younger. Mama had smooth skin, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. No wonder people often assumed Shiler, with her straight black hair and beautiful eyes, was Mama’s daughter and I was Joanna’s.

  “Tell me now,” I insisted.

  “Something terrible happened when your father was a child . . . I suppose it still makes him sad, especially now that he has children of his own.” She straightened up, having said enough for one day. “I know—how about we pick some flowers to make a bouquet to welcome home Hana and baby Chia?”

  Shiler and I whooped in eager agreement, and Joanna covered her hair with a white headscarf, grabbed her handbag, and led us outside. We combed the neighborhood for our bouquet, walking to the park to pick the first spring daffodils and poppies. When we picked the flowers, I felt their pain somewhere inside me; the hurt was very real. But I didn’t say anything to Joanna and Shiler. When we had an armful of flowers, we stopped at a fruit stand, where a toothless man sold us strawberries so fat I could hardly hold them in my fist.

  “Strawberries are my favorite fruit,” Shiler said before stuffing her mouth.

  “Well, you’re very lucky, darling. Kurdistan has the best strawberries.”

  “Mine is pomegranate,” I said.

  “It must be in your blood, Leila. Your father is from the pomegranate capital. Halabja.”

  “I want to go there! I’d eat a hundred pomegranates.”

  “He is planning on taking you when the war is over. Hopefully soon.”

  I bit into a strawberry, its juices dripping down my chin, and asked Joanna, “What does your hometown have?”

  “Olives. Kobani has delicious olives.” Joanna wiped the corner of my mouth with a handkerchief.

  The three of us watched as several butterflies, the first of spring, fluttered haphazardly against a sudden gust of wind, their wings glistening like dew.

  “Oh, where were you all these years?” Joanna pressed a hand to her chest, shaking her head in amazement, water glittering in her joyful eyes. “What did eight years of bombing do to you? And to the bees and the dragonflies?”

  “I’m a butterfly.” Shiler sprouted imagined wings, her arms moving up and down in the air. “No, actually . . . I don’t want to be a butterfly. I want to be an eagle.”

  “Though crows live a thousand years, I want to be an eagle.” Shiler and I both recited the poem Joanna had taught us, in which a crow reveals to an eagle the secret to longevity: Settle for flying low and feeding on debris, and you’ll live a hundred years. “Chon beji sharta nakou chanda beji,” the eagle refuses. How long you lived was irrelevant; what mattered was how you lived.

  Joanna led us up the trail near the park, where we saw more and more butterflies. “Remember, girls, you can be anything you want to be. Don’t allow anyone to make you believe otherwise. See, these beauties were simple worms once.”

  I thought I’d misheard that. “Worms? Worms can become butterflies?” I asked.

  “Only caterpillars,” Shiler corrected her mother. “Not every worm.”

  Among the things I did not understand that day was how right Shiler was. Neither of us knew if we were caterpillars or earthworms. Nor did we know if the tight, dark days of hanging upside down was the onset of death or a necessary part of an incredible transformation.

  Chia and my parents did no
t come home that night, so I stayed in the basement. Joanna tucked me in and crawled under the bedsheets, covering her eyes with a headscarf. Shiler snuggled against her. I lay down too, but my mind whirred with thoughts—of Baba’s tears and pomegranates, of whether my baby brother had a song in his heart.

  “Can I play with the toys, Auntie?” I asked. Joanna was already softly snoring, so I slid from beneath the covers and played with the horses and elephants Joanna had arranged on a corner shelf. She’d made them in prison out of bread crumbs, beans, and newspaper strips to educate and entertain Shiler. Soon I grew bored and looked around, and my eyes landed on the fat TV set sitting on a chair across from the bed.

  When he wasn’t watching the news, Baba sometimes let me sit and watch old films with him. Since I couldn’t understand the words, I invented dialogue in my mind. I pressed the power button on Joanna’s TV.

  A nightmarish scene played in an endless loop: people with blistered faces lying on the ground, huddled bodies sheltering against walls. Birds, cows, sheep, cats, dogs—every animal had dropped dead, like they were flowers that had been plucked from the earth.

  “—Saddam Hussein gassed Halabja this morning. Within a few minutes, five thousand Kurdish civilians died in an aerial bombardment of mustard gas and nerve agents.”

  People had fallen on the spot while trying in vain to run away from the chemical attack, trying to protect a loved one, now also dead: a baby, a child, a spouse. They had died with open eyes, open mouths. Flies had nested on their lips and burned cheeks. Their flesh had turned black. There had been no protection from the murky yellow clouds of nerve gas and deadly toxins, not for the civilians.

  A tremor of fear sprang up inside my belly, making me shiver uncontrollably, but I was rooted to the spot, staring at the screen. A woman had choked to death while fixing a helicopter toy for a small boy. A girl had died grinning, as if cut off in the middle of a mischievous joke. Some seemed to have perished slowly. A woman was twisted like a rope, vomit and blood on her clothes, her face crumpled with anguish. Thousands and thousands of bodies. Others had collapsed on the outskirts of town, trying to cross the mountains, running to imagined safety.