Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  “I just remembered,” I yelled out. “I must go to my grandma’s tonight. She lives right there.” I pointed behind me with my thumb. “She’s ill, and my mother needs help taking care of her.”

  “Someone will walk you there,” the police said, putting his hat back on.

  I couldn’t say anything more without giving myself away.

  “Bye, Leila.” Fatima came back and kissed my cheeks, which were turning hot again. Apparently we had become best friends in the past few minutes.

  “You go ahead, miss. One of our men will follow you. You’ll be safe,” he said, and led Fatima to the car.

  I nodded helplessly. “Thank you.” The police thought they frightened women less than men did. Cops. That’s what they were called in the movies.

  I picked up my pace to match my heartbeat and did not look back as I turned from one street to another. I was at Grandma’s door when it hit me. The library was open only to men tomorrow; women would not be allowed in.

  “Hello to you, young lady.” The toothless neighbor appeared, emerging from the front door of the apartment block. I was too out of breath to do more than nod. I glimpsed another green-uniformed cop patrolling at a discreet distance, and I climbed the stairs two at a time to reach the third floor.

  Sweat puddled in the hollows of my clavicles and ran down between my breasts. I felt ill. What would happen to poor Shiler? I was so useless, unable to do anything for her.

  Mama looked surprised to see me, but she didn’t nag, fight, or bang about. She tightened the tie of her headscarf, prayed in the living room, and recited God’s hundred different names, pressing the chant-counter’s button each time, keeping track of the blessings and graces she was buying herself. Not even my obvious anxiety over Shiler could pull her from her ministrations.

  In the bedroom, Grandma, diapered and demented, looked good for someone whose days were supposedly numbered. My frantic pacing back and forth bewildered her though.

  “Grandma, my friend was just arrested. Over nothing!” I fretted. “I don’t know what to do.”

  She looked at me suspiciously and asked if I was her sister-in-law. “Wait a minute! I know you,” she said a few minutes later. “You’re my neighbor.”

  I sighed. “Don’t worry, Grandma. I don’t really know who I am either.”

  It was useless to stay there any longer. I couldn’t help Shiler, but maybe I could salvage the rest of her cache of films. After leaving Grandma’s I stopped by the library, claiming to the custodian that I’d dropped a gold earring in the bathroom earlier that day and asking to be allowed to retrieve it.

  “Go away, kid.” The young janitor smirked.

  Dejected, I took the bus home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Shiler, can you hear me?” I placed my fist over my heart and knelt before the open window of my bedroom, praying that my friend would feel my words. “You and I are victims of the insanity of a nation that punishes femininity and the arts and reveres thieves and murderers. But you are not alone. I am with you. I know you will be strong. Please be strong.”

  Snow swirled onto my hair. My breath turned into steam.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Baba rushed into my room and shut the window. I was burning up.

  “Will you bail Shiler out, Baba?” I jumped up.

  “Joanna called. Was Shiler talking to a boy or something?” Baba’s clothes gave off a new sickly sweet scent, the bags under his eyes deeper and darker.

  “No. Poor thing was just at the library. Baba, what will they do to Shiler?”

  “Don’t worry. They won’t hurt her. Just the usual humiliation, you know. I’ve found a bail bondsman.” He turned to leave. I desperately needed him to sit with me, distract me from my crippling anxieties.

  “The drought in Syria’s Kurdistan . . . so heartbreaking,” I tried, sitting down on my bed.

  His icy gaze bore into me. Oppression. Discrimination. Poverty. His old fervor aroused. Those stateless people in Rojava who were starving, whose villages were deserted, who had no money and no documents to seek asylum. The Kurds in Bakur, whose villages were burned and whose women were raped by the Turkish army, who were jailed and tortured for speaking their mother tongue . . .

  I watched my father as he sat down and leaned forward on the chair beside my bed, shook his head, and frowned in sympathy with his subjugated nation. The wrinkles creased around his eyes and mouth, the corners of his chapped lips dry and flaky, his receding hairline graying. He was only present enough not to bump into objects, but otherwise he was too consumed by the injustices outside of our home to see his own decline, let alone mine. He went quiet, looking unusually confused, or maybe just tired.

  “Baba, you never saw me until I was three, right? Mama says my first word was ‘Baba.’” I had a cold sore on the corner of my lip.

  “I saw a photo Hana smuggled into prison for me.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  “You know, I am starting to think that knowing comes at a price. I think you should curb your curiosity.” He got up to leave.

  I held his arm. “Ignorance is more expensive. You’ve always said that.”

  “You’re awfully hot.”

  “Tell me. It’ll make me feel better.” I longed for a happy story but figured he wouldn’t have many of those. Baba sat back down in the chair and told me about my mother’s visit to Evin prison in Tehran, far from home in Mariwan where she’d moved after Baba was arrested.

  In the 1980s, prisons around the country were packed with real and perceived dissidents, some merely unlucky passersby captured during protests, some detained for being related to an activist or for having talked to one on the phone. Baba’s crimes included being reported by his landlord as “anti-revolutionary,” being Kurdish and, even worse, Sunni, and keeping two banned books. One was written by Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a charismatic Kurdish leader who fought for national rights, the other a collection of essays published by a leftist group that prioritized class struggle over national identity. The two Kurdish political parties didn’t agree much, but the idealist Baba wanted to read both theories and find their commonalities. When he was arrested, he was accused of belonging to both groups, a bitter irony.

  The wings in Evin were so overcrowded, Baba and the other inmates had to take turns sleeping on the floor. But the cells gradually became less populated as more and more “enemies of the state” were executed. Khomeini, the self-appointed representative of God on earth, issued the orders: kill the Kurds, the corruptors on earth; kill the Communists, the prima facie infidels; kill the Mojahedin, fellow Muslims who opposed him.

  Baba was well into his second year behind bars before Mama visited. She sat uncomfortably in a chair on the other side of a thick glass pane and picked up the phone. An armed soldier searched through the gifts she had wrapped for Baba. She moved her lips, but Baba couldn’t hear her over the mingled voices of other prisoners. She pointed to his phone. He picked it up.

  “Sorry, I had to leave Leila with my mother. Bringing her along for the ten-hour bus ride was just too much. All she does is poop and eat anyway.”

  Baba gazed at Mama’s hazel eyes and high cheekbones and realized he had nothing to tell her. He reached deep down in his heart and came up emptyhanded.

  The guard removed a tiny picture from the pocket of a blue shirt Mama had brought, shook his head angrily, ready to yell at her for trying to smuggle a photo into the prison, but she was too immersed in her monologue to notice. “Ma’am!” he called out.

  Mama put down the receiver and looked at the furious guard. Baba tried to make out what she was saying, but he wasn’t much of a lip reader. There was only one thing he wanted to ask her before the time was up.

  After a long flirtatious exchange, the guard looked around, put the photo back in the pocket of the shirt, and did up the button.

  Mama picked up the receiver again. “What was I saying? Oh, I met your friend’s father. What’s his name? Dana. He was, you
know . . .” She stroked her finger across her throat. “Dana’s father was forced to search for his son’s body in a pile of corpses. And they were lucky. Most families have not retrieved their children’s bodies yet.”

  “That’s how she broke the news of my best friend’s execution,” Baba said, interrupting his story.

  I only nodded in sympathy, knowing that at the smallest sign of judgment he would stop talking. That’s why he had kept his stories to himself: his crippling fear of not being understood.

  Baba got up, went to the fridge, and came back with a cold beer. He leaned back in his chair and looked past me, into the living room, as he shared the rest of his story.

  May 1979. Three years before Baba went to prison eight Iranian tanks shelled Kurdish houses. The Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran, killed fathers before the wide eyes of their children. Then they looted shops and sold the products on the black market. The blue skies were smoke stained, the smell of blooming mulberries and poppies mixed with gunpowder, the shoots tinged red by the blood that ran in rivers through Kurdish cities.

  I knew better than to interrupt him.

  Ayatollah Khomeini was moving to assert control over the restive Kurdish cities and countryside; when resistance was encountered, he did not hesitate to issue a fatwa, a religious order, condemning the Kurds as “enemies of Islam” even though the vast majority of Kurds were Sunni Muslims.

  Baba sipped at his beer.

  Armed with tanks and airplanes, the Revolutionary Guards slaughtered the Kurds. Even hospitals weren’t spared. The Kurds were alone, neglected nationally and internationally. Kurdistan was, however, full of youths; similar to those in Tiananmen Square ten years later, they tried to block the troops and the tanks.

  It felt as if I were sitting right inside a furnace, sweat dripping down my temples, between my legs, and down my spine. “What did you want to ask Mama when she visited you?” It hurt to swallow.

  “I asked Hana where she had buried my mother.” He looked down at the discolored carpet with its exposed threads.

  She had responded, “In Tehran, of course, where she died. What, you wanted me to carry her corpse on my back all the way to Halabja? Across the border during this war? With what money? I couldn’t sell my few pieces of jewelry for that.”

  “Where in Tehran?” Baba managed to say between gritted teeth.

  “I mean, prison is no heaven, but at least you’re safe here. Nobody bombs a prison. You have no idea what’s it like to run to shelters at all hours with a heavy baby in your arms . . .”

  “Which graveyard?”

  She looked at him sternly. “I don’t know its name. The big one. The one at—”

  A loud buzzer signaled the end of the fifteen-minute visiting period.

  “Did you at least get her a gravestone? Is her name marked?”

  They were talking at the same time, at the tops of their voices, into dead air.

  Mama banged on the window. They were not allowed to speak another word.

  Later that day, Baba received the package his wife had brought and found a small black-and-white photo of a child with a naked gaze. His daughter. When I was born, he’d named me Nishtmaan in a letter written to my mother from prison. But because that name was banned, Mama had named me Leila instead.

  “So you were never offered a furlough?” I asked.

  “Once only. Twenty-four hours. Too short to visit you in Kurdistan.” Baba had searched for his mother’s gravesite at the cold and windy cemetery until he found her photo and the stone where her name was carved in calligraphy. He stared at the cold slice of marble, all that was left of his only source of compassion and stability in life.

  I imagined Baba running his fingers over the photo of Grandmother’s silver braids and her unsmiling lips set under eyes that seemed to be joyful.

  A new question nagged at me now. “Baba.” I had a hard time speaking, feeling crippled by fear and fever. “Why did you stay with a woman you—?” I stopped short; “dislike” was an understatement, but it was hard for me to suggest a stronger sentiment.

  He squinted at me. “Why what? Are you asking me why I stayed with your mother? Is it not obvious?”

  I shook my head, looking into his eyes, where the pain of five decades was engraved.

  “Because of you.” He said it with such surprise, it was as if I’d asked what his name was.

  “Me?” I pointed at my chest, brows rising.

  “Of course. You and Chia. Why else did you think? I’ve wanted to leave this marriage many times. I could’ve gone too—a couple of times I was close—but I just couldn’t. Not with everything that I have witnessed firsthand in my life.”

  My mouth hung wide open.

  “Your mother, she’d remarry in a heartbeat. She wouldn’t have much choice—a single mother isn’t safe on her own—but with her good looks, she’d have her pick. But what if her new husband hurt you two? This damn country has no laws to protect children, you know. I just couldn’t.”

  I kept staring at him.

  “Plus a war could happen any day, with America, with Saudi Arabia. Nothing’s certain. And I have seen with my own eyes the things that happen during a war: the lootings, rapes, and kidnappings, the trafficking of women and children.” He sipped his imported beer. Wiped his mouth. Sighed. “I have seen parents in refugee camps prostituting their daughters to get some clean water. Get a tent. Feed the rest of their children. War brings out the worst in people, even the people who are honorable in times of peace. Anyway, at least this way I know that you and Chia are safe.”

  Was my father my prison guard, or was I his?

  A key turned in the lock.

  “Looks like your grandma finally kicked the bucket.” Baba stood up. “Don’t be fooled by what your mother claims. That woman was cruel long before dementia broke what little filter she had. She used to beat Hana, just like her husband beat her.”

  But those footsteps, firm and steady feet walking up the stairs, were not Mama’s.

  I cut Baba off and ran to the living room.

  “What happened to you?” I was startled by Chia’s bald head. He loved his hair too much to shave it.

  “What are you making a fuss about?” Baba frowned. “He’s home to visit his family.”

  Chia smiled. “Can I get a hug, please?”

  I threw myself into his arms.

  He touched my forehead. “Leila gian, have you been near the heater?” he teased.

  “She left her window open. I think she’s coming down with something.” Baba grabbed two beers from the fridge, another for himself and one for his son.

  “We should see a doctor.” Chia grabbed my hand and sat me down on the sofa.

  “They arrested Shiler.” My eyes welled. “Over nothing.”

  Chia opened and closed all the dish cabinets. “I can’t find one clean towel!”

  “Can you come with me to the police station tomorrow?” Baba asked Chia.

  “Sure.” Chia poured some water in a large plastic bowl and placed my feet in it. He removed his shirt, soaked it, and placed it on my forehead. “Baba, do we have any codeine?”

  Baba grumbled and disappeared into the bathroom.

  “What’s that scar?” I pointed to his shoulder, visible through a hole in his undershirt.

  “That’s nothing.” Chia kissed my forehead, and all the ache disappeared.

  “Why didn’t you come home for the winter break? And why are you home in the middle of the school term?” His militarized hair was disorienting.

  “See, my shirt has already dried. If your fever doesn’t come down, I’ll have to take you to the emergency room.” He fed me some tablets and tipped a glass of water to my lips.

  Next thing I remembered, he and Baba were putting me to bed. “Chia . . . help Shiler,” I pleaded weakly, but the words came out unintelligibly.

  Every time I opened my eyes that night, Chia was at my bedside, his soaked shirt on my forehead.

  Around noon I woke to a d
elicious smell. “Since when do you cook?” I was less drowsy today, but still weak.

  “A boy has to survive on his own.” He handed me a steaming bowl of chicken soup with fresh herbs floating on its surface.

  “Has Shiler been released?”

  He looked at me gravely. “Yes. She’s in the hospital.” I felt a fresh wave of concern for my friend.

  “Let me guess—she got a beating for being defiant?”

  “Typical Shiler.” He turned his eyes away from me, but I saw something hitch inside him.

  Relieved that at least Shiler wasn’t in prison, I demanded that Chia tell me the truth.

  “What truth?” He put the kettle on.

  I confronted him. “You stopped calling. I expected you over winter break. Now the hair. What’s going on?”

  He waved the match in the air to put it out. Chia explained that he’d dropped out of university, unwilling to complete his political science degree when his heart was set on studying law.

  “In this country, we don’t even have the right to ask for our rights.” His goal, he said, was to eventually bring the perpetrators of genocide and mass executions to justice in an international criminal court. He was certain that was the purpose of his life, and he didn’t want to spend four years studying something he saw no use for. But having dropped out, he could no longer use the military exception granted to students, so he had been in a garrison for the past three months, completing his military training. I was furious with him for not having told me earlier, but I felt too woozy from the fever to pick a fight.

  “What happens now that the three months of training is over?”

  “I’ll be sent to teach in an isolated village.”

  “I hope you’ll be sent somewhere nearby.” I sipped the honey lemon drink he presented.

  “Me too. I’d rather serve my own people.”

  “Your pretentiousness gives me a rash.” I scratched my neck.

  He laughed.

  Baba came home early that evening, boiling with fury and frustration. Turkey had killed some two hundred Kurds. Our father had noticeably declined; his face twisted with pain.