Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  I write so my brother and I can understand how much our destiny was shaped before eggs and sperm united to make us. Because if I don’t tell our story, how can I understand why Chia is following in Baba’s footsteps with his increasing activism? How the prison guards who tortured Baba torment me too? What it means to belong to a stateless people so crushed under tyranny that self-sabotage has become routine? How can I ever be free if I don’t fight my faceless prison guards?

  As I wrote, I felt the words mending what was broken within me while the physicians mended what was broken without. When I’d filled the pages of the notebook, I set down the pen. I looked ahead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes.” Forough Farrokhzad’s poem was twirling in my head as I climbed up a ladder to replace her collection in the poetesses section. In the eighteen months since that day at Zrebar, happiness had become attainable, like the tail of a kite drifting ever closer to the ground.

  Chia was now a law student at Tehran University, and his companionship and sense of purpose held my recurrent panic attacks at bay. A small independent bookstore in downtown Tehran had become my source of income—and joy. With this ocean of information and entertainment at my fingertips, I frequently dived into classic and modern books and movies and put my past where it belonged, behind me.

  “Oh good, you’re still here.” Ever-handsome Karo rushed in despite the sign that read “closed.”

  For a moment I thought I would fall off the ladder. This late customer had a strange effect on my body, making me pulsate at my pressure points. Karo lived in the penthouse of the building where Chia and I rented an apartment. He was a PhD student of computer engineering at the same university as Chia and climbed Touchal Mountain with us every Friday morning. He was fun to be around, but what had happened yesterday was too awkward to be easily dismissed.

  For the first time, Karo and I had been alone. Chia had jumped in the gondola lift up the mountain before us, but we were too slow, and the doors shut before we could board. Chia gestured behind the glass, and we hurried to the next one. The group behind us in line did not join our compartment, waiting for their own. Karo’s face became first pale, then pink, and finally crimson as he stole a look at my vanilla-coated tongue licking an ice cream cone.

  Not knowing how else to relieve the tense silence and the weight of his look, I scooped up a dab of ice cream with my finger and stuck it on his nose. Karo smiled, and his eyes traveled to my neck. I became aware of my headscarf, which had slid down. Something trembled within me. Before Karo, men’s eyes on me had always felt predatory, but yesterday it had felt as if his eyes were caressing me like hands, tender and pleasing. In my amplified uneasiness, however, I thrust the entire ice cream cone into his face.

  “What the hell!” Karo sputtered. He glared at me when he had wiped the ice cream from his eyes.

  I laughed, free from the slightest shame or remorse. “You deserved it.”

  “I did not!”

  Luckily the ride ended shortly after. Seeing Karo’s bedaubed face, Chia joined in the banter, and we led Karo to a water fountain. Karo and I stole awkward glances at each other the rest of the day.

  I did not expect to see him so soon, let alone at my workplace, which he’d never before visited. “What are you doing here?” I coughed to clear my voice and looked at the empty place where the clock had been—I had recently convinced my boss to remove it, hoping that customers would lose track of time in this fast-paced city and linger to browse the shelves.

  Karo held on to the bottom of the ladder as I climbed down, stirring the dust motes into a frenzied dance in the air. The face of his watch was large enough to show that it was 5:23 p.m. The store closed at 5:00 p.m., but Chia wanted to go to the gym after his evening class, and I hated being alone in our rental, where the air was always stale.

  “I was hoping to catch you before you left.” Karo looked even taller in his black overcoat. He wiped his forehead. Only someone who had been running could sweat in this cold winter weather.

  I double-checked that I had locked the cash register. We had made only about seven thousand and fifty tomans that day. At that rate, the owner wouldn’t be able to afford the rent, let alone an employee. Thankfully the landlord was a culture-loving rich man who had escaped Iran for Los Angeles after the Islamic Revolution and didn’t worry much about collecting the rent since Iranian currency lost its value in the world market regularly. “What’s it like out there?”

  “Militarized again. I suppose tonight’s protests have been called off.” Karo sneezed into his sleeve.

  The violent clampdown on demonstrators against President Ahmadinejad’s reelection—or selection, as some called it—had caused much unrest in the streets during the summer, but it had been slowing down. Protestors who peacefully held signs that read “Where is my vote?” were later told, “Here is your vote” while being raped in prison.

  “Did you want a book or something?” I slipped the collection of Kurdish poems by Sherko Bekas, the contemporary poet whose poster Chia had stapled to my wall years ago, into my backpack to read on the subway. Earlier today I had reread his elegy “A Complaint to God,” in which the poet writes a letter to God after the Halabja massacre, only to receive a reply from God’s fourth secretary, who annotates the complaint: “Idiot. Translate to Arabic. No one speaks Kurdish in God’s place, and I won’t take it to Him.” I tried to read Karo’s expression, wondering if he would enjoy the poem.

  “Oh, um . . . perhaps. Let me look.” He browsed the new arrivals. The woodsy fragrance of his cologne filled up my nostrils. Most of the heavy perfumes worn by the urbanites in the capital irked my sensitive nose, but Karo’s reminded me of the forest.

  Chia had recently told me Karo was half-Kurdish, and I wondered now if his roots would help him understand a poem about Kurdish plights. Most Persians used our tragedies to say Iranian Kurds had it better than those in Iraq or Turkey in an attempt at whitewashing the crimes of their country and pretending that tragedy could be weighed and measured like so many kilos of potatoes.

  Some of the customers would ask me, “Why are Kurds so hated in Turkey and Iraq?” As if I were responsible for dissecting idiocy and ignorance, as if cruelty and racism had a philosophical theory I was supposed to recite because I belonged to its victimized group. No one ever asked, “How does it feel to be a Kurd in a hateful world?”

  Karo selected three hardback science fiction novels and payed in full. I decided I’d translate the Kurdish poem into Persian for him later, since an impromptu translation may not do it justice. I gestured Karo out of the store before locking the door, appearing busy to disguise my palpitating heart.

  “How come you didn’t go to the gym with Chia tonight?” I wrapped my shawl around my neck twice and put on my gloves as we headed to the subway station.

  “A friend gave me an extra ticket for a play; I thought maybe you’d like to go.”

  I met his gaze for a brief second as we turned onto the busy Valiasr, Tehran’s longest boulevard. The street was lined with ancient plane trees, irrigated by water channels on each side of the road. When Chia and I had first moved to Tehran, I felt we’d crossed over unofficial borders and instantly understood what my brother meant when he said Kurdistan was intentionally kept underdeveloped. Tehran had wide avenues, skyscrapers, intertwined highways, and innumerable new and chic shopping malls and apartment buildings.

  “‘Where am I from, and where is love from?’” he added.

  He could undress me with just his words. I chuckled.

  “That’s the title of the play,” he explained.

  “That’s Rumi’s poem. Oh, and it’s Valentine’s Day today.” The honking of car horns mingled with the call to prayer in an absurd cacophony.

  “The play is about Farrokhzad’s life and poetry. I saw you reading her the other night,” he added.

  “You have a ticket?” I raised an inde
x finger to indicate one, looking at him from the corner of my eye, my face partially covered.

  “Yes, just one. Chia had plans, and I thought you’d enjoy it more than me. It starts at eight tonight.” Theatre tickets were expensive, but Karo’s parents lived abroad and sent him what seemed like a lot of money. Or so Chia and I inferred from the Xantia he drove and the lavish lifestyle he led, at least by our standards.

  “I wish we had more tickets,” I said, “so the three of us could go together.”

  We continued walking. The street had a pulse of its own; women walked by us in tight, colorful manteaux and loose headscarves, others covered in black chadors; some men wore suits, and some wore tight jeans, all headed toward some purpose. The smell of car exhaust, kebab, and freshly baked pastry, the calling of peddlers, the laughter of flirtatious young men and women—the thrum of the city bolstered me high.

  Karo fiddled with the ticket in his palm and said nothing. The air between us felt loaded. As we crossed the square in the direction of the city theatre, Karo’s tall frame and chiseled features turned women’s heads. Many of these fashionable women were also bandaged across the nose; Tehran was the world’s capital of nose jobs.

  “Leila . . . there is something I want to tell you,” Karo said in a low voice, looking down.

  I swallowed.

  “Please, sir!” A girl of about five, dressed in a shabby manteau and white headscarf, dirt caked on her face, made a loud noise that was supposed to mean she was crying. But she had no tears. Karo stopped, knelt, and spoke to her.

  I looked around nervously. Whoever had ordered her to beg on the street would be watching.

  “Wait a second,” Karo told me as he stood, then ducked into a nearby convenience store. The girl waited impatiently, hopping from foot to foot for warmth, all the while eyeing me as if contemplating whether I, too, was worthy of her charms.

  A few minutes later Karo returned with a sandwich and spoke to the child in a low voice, his words lost in the din of the honking traffic clogging the hazy intersection, which more closely resembled a parking lot during rush hour. I leaned against a tree and looked at passersby, mostly in their twenties or thirties, well dressed and made up. Only a few streets south of this beautiful square, the streets were narrow and unclean, the houses dilapidated, the cars old and unreliable. Tehran was divided by an invisible border, but snobbery was wide ranging, either a custom of big cities or part of the ubiquitous, contagious, and unquestioned contempt for whoever was deemed shahrestooni—those who were not from Tehran—who ironically made up the greater part of the city’s population.

  “Let’s go.” Karo came back to me, the sandwich still in his hand.

  “Sir, sir.” The little girl followed, intelligence beaming from her tired eyes.

  “You changed your mind?” Karo asked. She nodded. He handed her the sandwich and knelt once again. “I’ll wait here until you finish it.”

  She looked over her shoulder.

  “It’s okay. They’ll know I forced you to eat it in front of me,” Karo said. She ravenously bit into the sandwich, looking side to side as she chewed the big bite, and smiled at Karo when she finally swallowed. The baby tooth she’d lost made her grin goofy.

  “Well, aren’t you Mother Teresa.” I winked.

  When the girl had finished eating, he trudged on with a smile of self-satisfaction.

  After a few more blocks, we came across armed men in riot gear—full-coverage helmets, black bulletproof vests, and knee pads. The protestors had been gathering here for weeks. We walked in silence and with enough distance between us not to trigger the morality police, who seemed downright friendly in comparison to the riot police. Scattered snowflakes danced down, indifferent to the disquiet lurking in the city.

  We reached a park across from the theatre. A large group of young men and women holding placards, wearing masks and green shawls, walked the opposite direction. Karo led me past a large central fountain to a quiet corner of the park.

  “What did you want to tell me earlier?” I asked.

  “Ahh, well, it’s not easy . . .”

  I got a tingly feeling in my belly. “Say it.”

  He looked surprised by my impatience. “You know I am half-Kurdish, right?”

  “Oh, that.” I deflated momentarily but recovered. “Chia mentioned it. But you can’t speak a word of our language, right?” I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that. Having only one Kurdish parent, or was it more about resisting ethnocide, going the extra mile to learn the language, to understand the history?

  “Shall we sit there?” He moved to where he was pointing without waiting for my answer. I stood in front of him. The smell of roasted peanuts and diesel wafted in the air. The radio of an armed riot policeman crackled across the street, but the relative peace of the park was otherwise undisturbed. “Not sure if it’s wise to be out tonight.” He ran his hands nervously across the bench.

  I folded my arms. “You’re not used to armed men marching in your city? Kurdistan has been militarized for decades.”

  Karo stared at the sky, the fountain, the ground, at anything and anyone but me as he quickly recited his father’s story, as if he wanted to unburden himself of a history he did not know how to handle.

  Like my Baba, his father was one of the genius Kurds who, against all the odds, had gotten into a top university in the capital in the early seventies, but from there their paths couldn’t have been more opposite.

  His father underwent a complete transformation during his undergraduate studies, changed his name and his place of birth on his ID, shaved his mustache and altered his haircut, wore an expensive suit and cologne, and declared his accent was because he had been born in America and never learned Persian properly. Claiming he’d returned to Iran to make investments in real estate, he managed to secure massive private loans and shortly after realized his illusions. Once he’d accumulated enough wealth, he married the sheltered daughter of one of his investors, confessing his origins only after the marriage had been consummated.

  “My mom was devastated when she found out the truth.”

  My face flamed from a rage that bubbled within me as I listened to Karo speak. He looked startled by the wildfire in my gaze. Karo hadn’t known me in those angst-filled days in Mariwan. “I think the play is starting soon,” he said.

  “I don’t want to watch it on my own.” I headed away from the theatre, toward the subway instead. Rickety motorcycles whizzed by me. Karo followed, but instead of offering to see the play with me, he kept on with his story. His mother had decided to keep the secret from everyone, including their children, but loathed her husband from day one. Karo had only recently learned he was half-Kurdish. His sister from New York had informed him in a letter after getting their mother to confess. “It’s clicking for me now why my father was always so tentative at home,” Karo said, and I was once again struck by a thunderstorm of emotions. He wasn’t sure what to do with this unexpected knowledge and wanted my sympathy.

  “Ah, poor you. How can you live with this traumatic information? So you grew up thinking those hillbillies over there were beneath you, but then suddenly—surprise, you’re one of them! My heart breaks for you.”

  “That’s all you got from my story?”

  “Your mother is a racist.”

  “She was deceived!” Karo stopped by the stairway leading down to the subway tunnel.

  “And that’s why you hang out with Chia and me and ask all these questions about history and politics, isn’t it?” He needed a walking Kurdish encyclopedia like Chia to decide who he wanted to be, if he wanted to embrace his origins or hang them on the wall like a decorative piece.

  “Is that wrong? I expected some empathy.”

  “I’m truly sorry your father lied to your mother. It’s awful. I acknowledge that. I’m even embarrassed. I hope you know that deceptions like that are not part of Kurdish culture. In fact, it’s usually the opposite: We’re straightforward to a fault. What
bothers me is that you barely acknowledge the prejudice at the heart of your story and in the dilemma you now face. Would you have hesitated to declare it to the world if you had discovered you were half German or English, despite their histories with Nazism and colonialism? You know that embracing your Kurdishness comes at a price, a huge price.”

  Karo shifted uneasily. A murmur went up in the throng of people milling about the subway, and I was suddenly self-conscious, aware of how loud my voice had become.

  “Did you ever wonder why your father found it necessary to hide his origins to get ahead?” To me, Karo belonged to people for whom poverty, malnutrition, and lack of decent healthcare and education were problems they did not understand for lack of experience. But as I took in his handsome, downtrodden face, I wondered if I had been too harsh. Before I could try to redirect the conversation, however, I was shoved by a frantic crowd running down the stairs. A wave of people charged toward us. I was rooted to the spot in fear.

  Karo looked around, yanked my hand, and we ran as fast as we could. The panicked crowd jostled us in their hurry to flee. Gunshots cracked through the air. People screamed. To the riot police, everyone was a criminal whose innocence was impossible to prove. I ran as fast as I could, but my lungs gave out.

  “To the wall. To the wall.” Karo pointed. I did as he said. He removed my little knapsack and had me wear it in front, which let the hordes of people pass us without pushing and jostling. But the police were getting closer and pepper-spraying their victims. Karo carefully scanned the area. “Come.” He grasped my hand, and we turned onto a side street.

  “Small streets are a trap,” I panted.

  People were frantically knocking on random doors. Every now and then a door would open and someone would pull the first few people inside before shutting the gates again.

  “I know what I’m doing.” Karo pulled at my arm, and we ran down an even narrower alley.