Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  Baba saw before him his martyred brothers, uncles, and friends, swaying slowly in the breeze together. Their heads tilted to one side. Ropes snug around their broken necks. Hands and feet bound tightly together as if they were hanging from the sky itself.

  The guard pulled Baba along, and before he really knew what was happening, he had shoved the soldier against the wall, kneeing him in the groin with all his strength. The guard collapsed, but others swarmed Baba, raining down blows. When they were done, he was thrown into a solitary cell.

  That was when Baba, who until then had been the quietest and most introverted of the inmates, started beating his bloody head against the wall. As punishment he was kept longer still in isolation. His tiny cell had no ventilation. For months he sat alone and picked up the scraps of plaster that fell from the ceiling.

  I bit the insides of my cheeks to swallow down my tears. Sitting across the dinner table was a man who had paid a massive price for hoping and trying for a just world, who had fathered and then neglected me, who wasn’t aware that the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him, chewing at the core of his compassion before spitting it back out. And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path.

  Later I busied myself with washing the dishes and Baba fetched a videotape from the attic. When I was finished I sat beside him on the sofa and kept peering at him out of the corner of my eye, hoping for more stories, but he was glued to the screen. Soon I became engrossed in the story of Titanic too, half of which I had to make up to compensate for the language I didn’t understand. He fast-forwarded through all the kissing scenes while I looked down and played with the hem of my skirt.

  The next day Titanic was nowhere to be found. Baba had removed it to save me from the “perversion and decadence of Hollywood.” When I finally summoned up the courage to ask him to bring home some more films, he played Iranian ones in which no couple ever kissed or even held hands and women slept with headscarves on. Nonetheless, I was grateful. Baba’s interest in film reignited mine.

  One of the recurring images I have of my old man is how he tried to hide a tear while watching Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, which depicted a girl trying to get rid of her infant, conceived when a group of American soldiers raped her. In watching these films, I gained a reason to wake up each morning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Stop watching that crap,” someone whispered as I was yawning and going through the library’s limited movie collection. The voice interrupted the library’s reverent silence, which was otherwise punctuated only by the sound of quiet pages turning.

  The speaker wore black lipstick and dark brown eye shadow. Her pointed nose and stern eyes were unmistakable.

  “Still looking for trouble?” I said. We hugged.

  Shiler’s unusual makeup would make her an easy target for the police of “Enjoining Good and Forbidding Vice,” who strolled around female schools and libraries to “protect” us from perverts. But as usual, Shiler wasn’t afraid.

  “You’re a bookworm now?” She pointed to the pile of film magazines and books I was carrying.

  “Look what I found. I bet the staff doesn’t know they have this here.” I handed her the thin copy of Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, cracked and dry with age, smelling faintly of pipe tobacco and dust.

  “Neat. Want some Hitchcock?” Shiler winked.

  I beamed. She looked over her shoulder and told me to pick up the DVD in an hour from the far end of the library basement, where spiderwebs wove loosely around books on dirty shelves. “Bring it back next week, same time, same place.” With that she disappeared. That girl, looking as if she had emerged from one of the stories I directed in my head, had earned my undying devotion.

  Though I was careful not to get caught watching banned movies at home, I replayed Vertigo six times before I returned it, and Shiler brought me new movies most weeks at our library rendezvous. Since Baba was barely home, I had enough time to watch anything I wanted as long as I switched to state-run television when I saw him coming through the gate. To return the favor, I wrote Shiler’s adult school essays for her. She wanted to read only what she liked.

  “Have you ever had khoresh khalal?” I wanted to feed her in return for her kindness, especially because she’d let me borrow the DVD of Scent of a Woman, our favorite movie, for three whole weeks. I’d kept it hidden between the pages of an English-Persian dictionary that had become my holy book, helping me understand the dialogue I devoured.

  Shiler shook her head, blew a bubble with her chewing gum, and sat on the light brown desk instead of the chair.

  “I’m talking about the Kurdish food.” I poked her gum. “The beef stew with slivered almonds and barberries . . . no?”

  The librarian who relentlessly rebuked Shiler for her “unladylike” behavior walked between the tables to check for illicit activities, like writing a love letter. Her wire-rimmed glasses hung on a silver chain midway down her chest, and she raised them to her beaky nose as she prowled the aisles.

  “Didn’t know you cooked. No more yogurt and sugar for you?” Shiler refused to acknowledge the librarian, who shook her head and let out a loud sigh as she walked past.

  “Haha . . . with such fantastic nutrition, it’s no wonder I never grew. How is your mom?”

  “She’s well. This morning she was telling me how your mother smuggled a photo of you inside the prison for your Dad.”

  “You have to tell me all about it.”

  “That would be a fifth-hand story. Your father told my father, who told my mother, who told me. Ask your father to tell you.”

  A girl with thick glasses hushed us and flipped through the pages of her textbook. Shiler made a face at her.

  “So do you want to go to my place?”

  “Let’s do it.” Shiler jumped down from the desk and grabbed her coat and her blue knapsack.

  In the courtyard, a handful of high school girls were chatting and chuckling. The pond was covered with a thick layer of ice. “You should tell me about the aid work you’re doing.”

  “No.” Shiler stopped short, and her stare was intense. “No. It was traumatizing for me; you couldn’t handle it. You can’t ask me anything about that. Promise?” The trees on the way to the bus station, victims of last night’s violent storm, were upended, their root balls exposed. We walked the next few blocks in ruminating silence until Shiler switched to a lighter topic.

  “Have you met any cute boys? Last night I kissed Chris O’Donnell,” she joked. “In my dream, of course.” Her unrestrained mirth, so in contrast with most girls’ self-conscious behavior, earned us looks of obvious disdain from the public transit passengers. The men riding the bus who interpreted Shiler’s free spirit as an indication of “availability” got off at my station and followed us, then sneaked by and mouthed their phone numbers. I was agitated, conscious of prying eyes behind windows, of neighbors’ headshaking. Oblivious, Shiler kept up her monologue about Chris O’Donnell’s wet lips.

  We played our favorite film again as soon as we got home. Shiler started tangoing with an imaginary partner, doing an impressive job. I gazed at her shaved head, hair long only in front so you couldn’t tell she was bald when she wore a headscarf. She playfully grabbed and twirled me, but I was too clumsy to keep up with her, so I sheltered in the kitchen, busying myself with preparing lunch.

  Shiler licked her fingers during the meal, making all kinds of flattering murmurs as she ate. Our old chair rocked when she leaned forward to pour herself a second helping. She gulped down one spoonful after another, hardly pausing for air.

  “I have a theory!” I said. “I believe foods change taste and texture based on the energy that flows between the people eating it.”

  She wiped the grease off her lips. “I sure as hell love my mom’s cooking, but I’ve never tasted anything like this. I’m so full.”

  We lay down on the sofa. “I miss Joanna,” I said.

  “You should visit. She misses you too.�
��

  We resumed watching our movie. “And I’m here to tell ya . . .” Shiler and I recited as Al Pacino yelled out those words, lines we both knew by heart, sentences that had me imagining the power of being articulate.

  Months of this daily parroting had taught me many words and expressions and helped me fake an American accent.

  The phone rang, interrupting our joyful recital. On the other end, Chia needed little prompting. “The Constitution ostensibly grants equal rights to all minorities in Iran, article three, section fourteen,” he said, sounding all smart and sophisticated but forgetting to ask what I was up to. “But we are denied mid- and high-level government posts and education in our mother tongue. The intentional underdevelopment in our region creates economic marginalization that severely inhibits us from participating in Iranian public life.” I didn’t know what some of those words meant.

  “Who’s that?” Shiler asked.

  I palmed the mouthpiece. “My brother.”

  Shiler snatched the receiver. “Well, hello, hello, Mr. Political Scientist. How’s the big city?”

  Whatever he said on the other side made Shiler laugh her head off. I forced the receiver back toward me, but all I heard was his guffaw. “What’s so funny?” Why couldn’t he joke with me?

  “Leila isn’t letting me talk to you.” Shiler crinkled her nose between chortles.

  I finally had full control of the phone, but I hung up.

  “I thought you wanted to talk.” Shiler scratched her bald head.

  “Shiler, why did you shave your head?”

  She fetched a cucumber from the fridge. “I don’t know.”

  I offered a plate, knife, and saltshaker, but she ignored me and bit into the fruit. “The first time I did it was the day I got my first period. You remember. The day I thought I’d die from embarrassment. Anyway, that day I went straight to the barber, pocketed a shaver, and got rid of my hair.”

  “You wanted to get rid of your womanhood?” I pulled a pillow onto my lap and leaned forward.

  “Maybe.” She fingered her lower lip, leaned back in her chair, and looked up at the light bulb in the center of the room, hanging down on its white wire. “I’m in love.”

  “With Chris O’Donnell?”

  “No, silly. With a real man. I mean a man who lives here.”

  “You have a boyfriend?” I was flabbergasted. “Who’s the lucky bastard?”

  She glanced at me sideways. “I can’t tell you, though I am pretty sure I am the lucky bastard.”

  “You must.” I threw a cushion at her. “Tell me. Do I know him?”

  “You’ll find out later.” She giggled.

  I teasingly punched her arms. “Who?”

  She wrestled with me and was pinned down. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll tell you. I have to ask his permission first. I promise.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  At the entrance of the central library, a woman wrapped in a black chador checked everyone’s ID and outfit. The new two-story building was no place for “idle” people. A large painting on the wall quoted Prophet Muhammad: “Seek knowledge from the cradle to the coffin.” The building reeked only of paint, devoid of the dust and musty smells of older libraries I loved. But this one offered the newest collection of books and films.

  Shiler showed up at the small booth in the far corner as planned. The bang of her large knapsack on my desk startled me. Sweat glistened on her forehead. “Will you take care of this?” she asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. She was gone as suddenly as she’d arrived. I placed the bag on my knees and kept reading about Yilmaz Güney’s Yol, recorded when the Kurdish filmmaker was imprisoned in Turkey. The banned movie had won several international prizes.

  The loudspeakers announced the library would be closing in fifteen minutes. I looked around for Shiler among the rows of books but didn’t find her. The place was almost empty except for “nerds” like me, a word I had picked up from a movie. I checked the bathroom. Still no luck. I thought she might be in the courtyard, gabbing as usual.

  As I went down the stairs, the lights of a morality police van flashed through the windows. I stopped. Shiler was handcuffed, but she still had a mischievous smile on her face. I couldn’t hear what she was telling the woman covered head to toe in a black chador, one of the female police officers who came in handy because men were not supposed to touch women. She was shoving Shiler forward and shouting at her, calling her a whore, an animal.

  At the police station, Shiler could be subject to a virginity test, which she’d hopefully pass, though the sting of humiliation would persist. I wished there were something I could do for her. I retreated to the safety of a bathroom stall and opened her knapsack. So many DVDs and videos. Fifty or so. I couldn’t have asked for a better treasure. I had a strong urge to run home and start watching them, stay up all night, not eat, not even breathe. Just watch. Swallow them all. But the banned films were probably the reason Shiler had been arrested.

  Dump the bag and run, my wise side said. But its contents were all I wanted from life; it could sustain my happiness for days and weeks to come.

  The librarians were locking up, and I had to be quick. I listened for the police, who could come in any second and search the few remaining patrons. Baba would renounce me if I were arrested with even one of these films. I couldn’t breathe properly.

  “Anyone here?”

  This must be it. “Me,” I responded, but my throat was too dry to make a clear sound.

  “Anyone here?” Louder this time.

  I recognized the honeyed voice of the old librarian who had checked out my books and magazines. I cleared my throat. “Just a minute.” My shrieking voice could give me away.

  “Hurry. We’re locking up.” Her footsteps started to fade down the corridor.

  The bag of riches had to be left somewhere retrievable. Perhaps somewhere between the books in the religion section in a country where everyone had already overdosed on the topic. But the main hall was most certainly locked already. The ceiling was plaster. The trash can was the only option.

  With shaking hands, I placed seven films in my handbag and dumped the remaining treasure into the garbage can, hiding the blue knapsack with papers I ripped from my notebook. I might as well have been burying my heart.

  Then I stepped out of the stall and soaped my hands. “Wash off that blusher! They’re out there,” whispered the bespectacled Fatima, who had just come in. I knew her from school. Splashing water on my pink cheeks didn’t work. I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

  There was no choice but to walk right by the police and hope for the best. Trying for nonchalance, I tucked my hair under my headscarf and walked slowly. But then I thought I was going too slow and picked up my pace. What if my bag was searched? The words “Enjoining Good and Forbidding Vice” printed righteously on the police van might as well have said, “Entitled to Harass Anyone We Please.” I’d have to go back to the restroom and dump the remaining DVDs. But that could look suspicious. A bonfire was consuming me.

  I turned back and impulsively went toward Fatima, who was coming down the stairs, wrapping her black chador around her. “I was going to ask you something.”

  She rolled her eyes, as she often did.

  “I wanted to ask you. How . . .? Um . . . how do you think you will do on the national exam this year?” I had instinctively found a common point. Failure. Fatima was deemed unappealing in a society that valued a woman according to the smallness of her nose and fullness of her lips. But her filthy-rich and religious family entitled her to a sense of superiority. Her underqualified father, the one who’d once brought his camera to school, was the president of the Department of Natural Resources in Kurdistan. His only merits were being a non-Kurd and sucking up to the government.

  Fatima said she wasn’t too worried about failing the college entry test for the fifth year, explaining that she had several suitors who all wanted her for her “virtues, not for superficial reasons.” I listened with faked interest, a
nxious now that even if the police didn’t harass me, Baba would disown me for talking to Fatima. Her family, in Baba’s words, were “zombies who stole natural resources from Kurdish land and got fat on our blood.”

  A bearded man from the police van walked toward us. My breath caught in my chest. Too immersed in narrating her stories—or vocalizing her dreams—Fatima didn’t notice how I white-knuckled the shoulder straps of my handbag, barely restraining my legs from running away. “One of my suitors is a handsome member of parliament. I’m not going to tell you which one, but you can probably guess. You know, he wants me for life; a chaste woman is more desirable than one of those women who always turn men’s heads,” Fatima declared to my pale face.

  “Hello, miss.” The middle-aged man removed his dark green army hat in respect.

  I kept staring at Fatima, still as a statue.

  “I have been told to drive you home. Your father’s driver called us to say he won’t be able to pick you up,” he added.

  The police were there to give Fatima a ride! Not to arrest Shiler for her films. Oh, somebody’s fucking God. Shiler had probably been arrested for her makeup. I had to run to the toilet and get the bag.

  “Again?” Fatima stared down at the asphalt as she answered him. A pure woman like her would never look directly into a man’s eyes. A “chaste” woman like her would only get people like Shiler in trouble.

  “His son is in the hospital.”

  Fatima turned to me. “Leila, we can drive you too.”

  I was about to throw up. Luckily I had a good excuse for declining her offer. “Thank you, but no—I live at the opposite end of the city.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll tell you about another suitor on the way.” Fatima confidently walked to the van, expecting me to follow. If I weren’t such an incompetent liar, I would’ve gone with her for safety, but I worried the police might guess from my body language that I was hiding something. I had never sweated so much before.