Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  The religion teacher, whose endless lectures on sin and the afterlife terrified me, walked around the fifteen rows of seats where three girls in navy coveralls and white headscarves sat on each bench. I pushed my notebook closer to the edge of the desk so she could see that I’d done my homework.

  “Tell your mother to wash and iron your headscarf for you every now and then, okay?” she said in a softer tone than her teaching voice. She smelled of rose water, and I thought about all the flowers that had to die to make that perfume for her. “Tell her to sew the hem too.” Students swiveled in their seats to look at me. I swallowed, feeling the heat creeping up my neck.

  As she moved toward the blackboard, the teacher’s massive buttocks jiggled under her dark brown manteau. Everyone continued to steal glances at me through the lesson until Shiler left her seat in the back row and approached the teacher to whisper something.

  “Can’t you wait?” The teacher was back to her sharp lecturing voice. Shiler looked around nervously and then whispered again. Her forehead was slick, her face drained of blood. The class did not breathe, trying to figure out what was going on. The teacher turned to survey the class and finally said, “All right, go.”

  Shiler left, and murmurs about blood rose until she reappeared at the door a few minutes later, head bent. An uproar started in the class; not since the end of the eight-year war, when air-raid sirens sounded from the city’s loudspeakers and we rushed to the underground shelters, sometimes trampling each other in the chaos, had there been such a commotion. We almost fell out of our seats as we leaned forward to hear the hushed exchange at the front of the room.

  “They can help you in the office,” the teacher told a flushed Shiler, who then burst into tears and ran out of the classroom. I grabbed her schoolbag and followed.

  “I didn’t believe Joanna when she tried to tell me,” Shiler stuttered, crossing her arms and bending at the waist.

  “What did you do?” I asked, and immediately regretted my stupid question.

  She looked up at my face with fury. “I didn’t do anything. I hate the teachers. I hate this place. I’m never coming back to this dump. I am sick of hearing about the afterlife. Who needs it when this is hell in full flesh?” Shiler snatched her bag from me and threw her textbooks at the hallway wall, one after another. Her religion book hit the large painting of Ayatollah Khomeini. I was flabbergasted.

  Shiler spat at the books scattered on the floor, wiped her mouth, and ran down the stairs. I looked out the window of the hallway and saw the shriveled janitor trying to stop her from going out the gate. It was part of his job to prevent girls from leaving and men from entering, unless they were parents or from the government. Shiler argued with him, waving her hands in the air. He grabbed at her wrist, but she pushed him away, sprinted through the gate, and disappeared around the curve of the street. Her black gum boots left traces on the slushy road.

  “Saman, get back inside.” The teacher was peeking out of the door of the classroom. I made my way back to my seat, trying to recover from the shock of seeing sacred textbooks hit Khomeini’s face. Insulting the supreme leader was a crime punishable by imprisonment, at the very least.

  A girl sitting next to me elbowed me. “Did you see the bloodstains on Shiler’s manteau?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  I was trembling the rest of the school day and all the way home, sitting in the last row of the bus and looking outside. All afternoon the school had been full of hushed conversations about bleeding. Trying to solve the mystery of girls and blood, I figured some girls threw up blood sometimes. That couldn’t happen to all girls, though, could it?

  People in hats and jackets were making snowmen and playing dodgeball. Some mingled under the weak winter sun on their flat rooftops, cracking sunflower seeds and bantering.

  “God, I promise to be a good girl.” I held my pinkie up toward the sky as I made my pledge, much to the amusement of the bored commuters.

  At home, I shared the leftover bread from my backpack with Chia. After eating it all, he confessed that Baba, proud of his son for standing up for what was right in class, had bought him a sandwich before taking him to school.

  I pinched his arm. “You spoiled brat. You thief. You ate everything I had. You deserve to vomit blood, not me.” He was big enough now to get away from me easily, and he only laughed. It was so unfair that he took advantage of the good looks he’d inherited from Mama. That he fooled me and charmed everyone, even Baba.

  But then I remembered my pact with God not to allow the Satan of anger and laziness deceive me in return for keeping me safe from the bleeding that had started in school. “I pardon you for eating my food and forgive Baba for liking you more than he likes me,” I announced, and sat down to do homework.

  Chia sat by my side with his notebook and started filling the pages. He hadn’t had Joanna to teach him his alphabet like I had, but he was still an able speller. We were snoozing on our books when Mama got home. I jumped up, eager to prove I was a helpful, obedient daughter, and gathered the laundry, including my school coverall and headscarf, and figured out how to turn on the washing machine. Proud and victorious, I announced to Chia that we would have clean clothes soon. If only I’d known that I would be beaten later for having poured bleach instead of detergent on the dirty laundry, leaving some with orange streaks that looked like flames.

  The stench of rotting fruit made me go to the kitchen to haul out the trash bags. A watery discharge of garbage sludge dripped out of one bag, leaving a filthy trail on the tiled floor that ants would love. Disgusted, I left the bag in the middle of the kitchen, snatched an apple and a cucumber out of the grocery bags on the counter, and hid them under my shirt. But before I could stash the produce in my schoolbag, Mama caught me. “Only one per day,” she directed as she came out of her room, now in her ankle-length loose navy dress, and scolded me for having left the garbage in the middle of the kitchen.

  The three of us were eating feta cheese on thin slices of lavash bread when Baba came downstairs from the attic. “Sign a check for the shelves you ordered,” he commanded.

  “No money.” Mama spoke with food in her mouth, opening wider for the next bite.

  I held Chia’s hand and thought of taking him upstairs to the attic, where we would be somewhat removed from the fight I sensed was brewing. Chia munched his snack quietly, oblivious to the hurricane that was about to make landfall.

  “You owe the guy.”

  “I have no money,” Mama shouted. “Zero money. Nothing.”

  I led Chia to our bedroom and shut the door. He did not protest that I’d interrupted his meal.

  “Why did you order them, then? They’ll grab my neck for payment, not a woman’s.”

  “Why don’t you pay for once, faggot?” Mama fired back. She’d been throwing that insult around ever since Baba had taken to sleeping alone in the attic.

  I felt panic rising in my gut and held my palms over Chia’s ears.

  “Where the hell do you go every evening, leaving these kids alone? You think I don’t know? You think I’m stupid?” Baba raised his voice.

  Chia looked up at me. I knew my hands hadn’t blocked the sounds, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Where do I go? You really don’t know where I go, do you? Eight years. Eight damn years of war.” Mama’s voice came up through the door. “I had to stand in long lines for hours to get a few kilos of rice or sugar for you and your children. Stood there and fought with fuckers who cut in the line. See these blue veins in my leg? See?” I imagined her pulling up the hem of her housedress. “That’s the result. If I don’t go to physiotherapy every evening, I can’t walk. What the hell do you do out all day, sucking dicks and making no money?”

  Baba roared. “Shut that fat mouth of yours, you filthy bitch. I’ll set those shelves on fire and burn this entire house to the ground.”

  The image of our house engulfed in flames shook me with terror. I found some headphones and with trembling hand
s put them over Chia’s ears, plugged them into the old black radio, and turned it on. I turned up the volume, held my hands over my own ears, and pressed tightly. Chia laughed. I wasn’t sure what he found so hilarious—my face or something on the radio.

  I giggled with Chia to distract myself. Something hit the wall. A glass or some china shattered. Odd cramps panged in my belly. Chia looked cuter than ever in his blue-and-white-striped shirt and pants. My laughs were loud and ugly, but my mouth did not look too big to him, so I grinned freely when we were alone together. I loved him even more because of those giggles, but when I pinched his cheeks, chubby and red, I realized his temperature was too high. I knew he hadn’t sat with his head near the heater that evening. Rising alarm made me pinch harder, thinking that maybe I could just squeeze the fever away. But tears formed in his eyes. I bit my lip. I was a terrible sister, leaving red marks on his cheeks.

  Oh, God, please don’t make me vomit blood in punishment.

  I put my index fingers in the corners of my mouth and drew my lips wide, squinting and sticking out my tongue, making a dreadful face. Chia laughed, and the tears rolled down. I kissed his wet cheeks, then got down on all fours and told him to hold the radio in his hands and jump on my back. “I’m too big for you,” he said.

  “Don’t worry. Come on.”

  Baba roared in fury. Mama screamed words of hatred and contempt. I neighed and barked and crawled around for Chia, who felt heavy. The headphones were still over his ears. He fell off my back and rolled onto the floor, laughing uncontrollably.

  Between my legs was unusually wet. I touched my pants and gaped at the rust-colored blood that had seeped through my panties, at my shaking fingers and sweaty palm.

  I colored the flowers in my drawing with my red fingertip.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Flowers were blooming; green shoots that had appeared in April and May sprang up, straightening, opening. Walking toward Mama’s office on my last day of high school, I daydreamed about attending university, having my own job, buying my first camera, making films. I gulped lungfuls of aromatic black locust and stuffed my mouth with fresh white mulberries picked by boys who freely climbed the trees and shared with passersby. The trees grew indiscriminately in front of most houses, grand and dilapidated alike.

  Mama was still busy with her last client, and I had to wait in the counseling office. The walls were painted gray, and the window faced the main downtown intersection where the sidewalks were too narrow for the rush of pedestrians. I perched on the swivel chair by the brown desk where a stack of papers sat beneath a dove-shaped paperweight. Sketching whirling dervishes, I thought about what Shiler had shown me the week before. I rarely saw Shiler since she had dropped out of school—Joanna, now the most sought-after tailor in town, frequently took her on road trips across Kurdistan, visiting ancient sites, listening to folk myths from the various parts of the region, watching all different kinds of rituals, and on nice days, climbing hills to see red-legged partridges—so I’d jumped at the chance to go with her to the khaneqa, the Sufi’s lodge. I could still feel the rhythm of the daf, see the dervishes in a circle, arms locked, until one of them broke the human chain and began to spin in ecstasy.

  Mama tucked a bunch of files under her arm after she led her unusually big client out of the office. She wanted to walk despite her arthritis, using my body as a crutch.

  “We should get you a cane.” I took the files from her as we pushed through streets buzzing with people.

  “I’m not that old.” She winced and panted.

  “Your client looked like a man in hijab,” I said.

  “She’s a hermaphrodite, the most amazing person. Completely unique.”

  I was about to ask what a hermaphrodite was when a familiar voice rose above the noise of the crowded street. I recognized his husky timbre before turning to see his face. Baba was leaning against a pole, the sole of one foot flat against it, wearing a black cap two sizes too big for him, rows of prayer beads hanging from his arm, calling out, “Only twenty tomans.”

  Instinctively I called out to him, but when he quickly turned his back to me, I shut up. Mama kept walking as if she were oblivious to his presence.

  “These files are heavy. My schoolbag is heavy. You are heavy. I can’t walk anymore,” I barked. We got on a bus and sat next to each other on torn synthetic leather in uncomfortable silence.

  “How’s your leg?” I finally asked.

  She looked at me sideways. “Since when are you interested in me?”

  It was a fair question, but it didn’t soften the blow of her accusation.

  “Mama, I’d like to know. There’s so much I want to understand about you.”

  “Really?” She turned to me. “What do you want to know?”

  I knew she and Baba had met at Tehran University when they were both students and that being among the few Kurds there meant they shared a common historical pain. But it was hard to imagine what had drawn them together. “What did you like about Baba when you first met him?”

  Mama said she had found Baba charismatic and intelligent, a knowledgable man of few words, passionate about justice, charming in his down-to-earth manner. She had liked his warm hands, deep dark eyes, his cherubic face that betrayed little emotion.

  Baba’s mother had come to live with the newlyweds in Tehran, and Mama had thought it was his mother’s fault that he soon lost interest in his new bride. Mama had come to understand that his mother was an anchor in his life only after the woman passed away and he became unmoored. It had gotten worse still after Baba was released from prison; Mama had felt neglected, merely another piece of furniture in their home. “He would worship my eyes one moment, and in the next moment, he’d act as if I were invisible.”

  Perhaps that’s why she picked fights, I thought; she needed to be seen. The bus had grown crowded and noisy, the evening commute at its height, so I stopped asking questions.

  When we got home, Mama propped up her swollen legs against the wall, which was stained with footprints from years of this ritual.

  “But you two loved each other at one point. What happened? Or do you think it wasn’t love from the start?”

  “You’re too young to understand.” Her mouth twisted out of shape.

  “Mama, I’m eighteen.”

  She closed her eyes. Her chest heaved up. “He liked to kiss my eyes. Only my eyes. I couldn’t understand why.” A tear rolled down. “Turns out the love of his life had hazel eyes like mine. She had died before we met, but he could never get over her. But I was in love. Do you know what that means?”

  “I have an idea.” I was actually clueless—none of my crushes ever lasted more than a few months—but I didn’t want to dissuade her from finishing her story.

  “It was the one time in my life I was foolish, and I’ve paid for it ever since.” She shook her head. “Love means being extremely stupid. And I mean extremely. Then one day the hormones subside, and you learn who you’ve really committed your life to. You’re stuck. You can hit your head against the wall all you want. You can’t do anything.” She stared blankly at the water-stained ceiling. “But no one tells you that. If they did, no one would get married.” She turned my way. “Don’t look at me like that. Like you said, you’re eighteen now; time to get a grip on reality.”

  She started massaging her temples and then sat up and tied a headscarf tight across the back of her head. She believed the pressure would help with the migraines until the painkillers she swallowed kicked in. I brought her some sunflower seeds and sat across from her. The breeze swept in through the open window.

  “Listen . . .” she sighed. “I know I can act crazy sometimes. Don’t think I don’t know. But it’s out of my control.”

  Now she really had my attention.

  Mama cracked a seed. “This isn’t the life I imagined. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, pulled down by weights.” She waved her index finger in a circle. “You know the black hole they talk about in the galaxy? There’s o
ne right inside my chest. I never know when it will suck me in again. I kick and scream to be released, and in the process I hurt others—and I hurt myself.” She met my eyes, her own verging on glassy. “Your father has no idea how difficult things are for me. He doesn’t acknowledge my suffering; he thinks he’s the only one who’s been locked in a cell. But I’m fighting for my life. I want to live.”

  I struggled to digest this.

  “You don’t understand.” She cleared her throat and spat out a shell with such force that it bounced off the bowl.

  I wanted to ask why, instead of constantly lashing out, she’d never tried being vulnerable with someone, perhaps someone as empathic as Joanna, whom she still wrongly perceived a threat. But I couldn’t find the words to articulate how I felt. So I just held her hand in mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  “Anyway.” Mama steered the conversation back to neutral ground. “I had you when your father was imprisoned, and you were so cute and spunky, sometimes you’d act like you were the mom.” Mama smiled. “I raised you on my own in the middle of the war, and do you know what the first word you spoke was? ‘Baba.’” She laughed mirthlessly. “My fucking life.”

  “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sure what part I was apologizing for.

  “We were lucky your father was released,” she went on. “Several thousand prisoners were executed around that time. I had hoped having Chia would help him get over the torture and whatnot, since he had missed your early years. And Chia did help, at least for a while. Your father loves toddlers, but as soon as they grow into people, he loses interest.”

  “You think he likes dead women and young children because they cannot disappoint him? He can picture them whatever way he wants.”

  Her face twitched. “Stop romanticizing shit. He’s just not right in the head.”

  Ha. She expected sympathy but refused to offer any in return.

  “And quit acting like you’re smarter than all of us!” she snapped.