Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

I was hysterical. “If we get arrested, I’m the one who will be killed, not your half-Persian ass.”

  Karo drew me inside a medical center to our right, which I hadn’t noticed until that very moment. Another couple followed close behind us. “Act ill if they come in.”

  “What? I can’t act.” I freed my arm from his grasp.

  “They won’t feel bad for a man. Just cry and wail like you’re in pain. Don’t argue, for God’s sake! Can you do that?” If only he knew.

  A few more people rushed inside the clinic after us, and an older man closed the door. “Better to save a few than none,” he said as he turned to survey the terrified crowd. We exchanged guilty glances, but no one objected. Our shame was overpowered by the will to survive.

  Karo and I ran down a staircase and crept inside a busy laboratory. “Act pregnant.”

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean?” I winced against the antiseptic chemical smell.

  “We have to act like we’re married, or we’ll draw attention.” Karo then pointed to another couple whom we had seen among the protestors. The woman was resting a hand on her hip and pressing her belly with the other. Sweat dripped down my spine and neck. A lab technician winked at us and gave us some of her medical folders. They were prepared to camouflage us. I burst into nervous laughter.

  “I didn’t say act high,” Karo whispered and grasped my shoulder.

  “Congratulations!” The other supposedly pregnant woman wiggled her eyebrows at me. I bent at the waist with a hand on my stomach.

  “Thank you! It’s our first,” Karo responded. I looked at his serious face as he rubbed my shoulder affectionately. He looked down at me reassuringly, and my anger and fear evaporated. Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes. Indeed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A tiny camcorder in hand, I filmed a homeless man across the street, zooming in on his every gesture. His salt-and-pepper hair, unwashed and uncombed, lay limply against his shoulders. His jeans were torn at the knees and stopped an inch above his ankles. Though it was early still, dark clouds were building in the distance, threatening an afternoon storm.

  He walked between two old trees, touching their trunks with each pass, talking loudly and animatedly, throwing up his hands and sometimes slapping his chest. Pedestrians rushed past, with or without a glance. Nobody stopped to listen; the man’s restless rant was lost in a crowd absorbed in their cell phones.

  Chia entered the kitchen in his gray pajamas and undershirt, the side of his face bearing pillow creases, strands of his brown hair pointing in five different directions. A long yawn claimed his face before he could say hello. He then inspected the fridge, reminding me of his days as a boy in mismatched socks.

  “Stalving?” I carefully placed the camera on the table without turning it off and poured myself a cup of tea.

  “Still haven’t put that camera down, eh?” He rubbed his eye and gulped some milk straight from the bottle.

  The black camcorder with MicroDVD storage, though preowned and a few models old, was my most valuable possession. I didn’t exactly own it yet; I’d only made a down payment and was paying in monthly installments. Still I was thrilled to experiment with pan and tilt.

  I had a strong urge to document my little joys, partly because I had an irksome fear that they would be short-lived and partly because I wanted to be able to replay beautiful moments over and over again. I was particularly excited to record Shiler when she visited next week so I could replay her antics on tape when I missed her.

  “What were you working on so late last night?” I sat on one of the wooden kitchen chairs we’d picked up at a secondhand shop, desperately in need of a fresh coat of paint.

  “I was studying first, and then I read the Bekas collection you brought me, Miss Book Connoisseur. Hold on.” Chia left the tight kitchen, passed through the adjoining living room, and entered his tiny bedroom. Gone were the days of his spacious basement; in our Tehran apartment, I had the larger bedroom. I realized the stark walls of the rental building no longer bothered me. It was my home.

  Chia came back with the book, sat across from me, opened it to a page he’d dog-eared, and read:

  In 1988

  all the gods watched

  the villagers’ bodies burning and spitting.

  But they inclined their heads

  toward those fires

  only to light the cigarettes on their lips.

  I inhaled the scent of my freshly brewed cup of black tea with cinnamon and let the steam bathe my cheeks, nodding in agreement with the poem, remembering the day Chia was born, when I had watched a violence on television that my brain couldn’t comprehend but every cell in my body did.

  Chia put the book on the counter and spread butter and sour cherry jam on a piece of bread. He swallowed a mouthful.

  “I heard Mama’s client committed suicide a few days ago. The intersex one. Actually, not her client anymore after . . . you know.”

  “She must have suffered so. Poor thing!”

  “You don’t sound as outraged anymore.”

  “Not as much.” I sipped my tea calmly. Baba had renounced me, and I had renounced Mama in my heart, so I had no contact with them. Any updates about my life were relayed through Chia. Despite the massive hurt this caused, I also felt relieved, and then felt guilty for feeling relieved. When we had moved to Tehran, I had begun sessions with a therapist, who had explained that Mama’s narcissism and Baba’s chronic depression meant they hadn’t deliberately—or perhaps even consciously—damaged me. Perhaps trauma was a Kurdish heritage, passed down through generations.

  “How come you’re so cool with everything?” I asked. We still trod lightly around the topic of Mama’s affair, the final unjust hypocrisy that had pushed my frazzled self over the edge.

  “I’m not. I just think infidelity isn’t the only way to betray your spouse. They both betrayed each other. And their children. I feel bad for them now though, aging and lonely.”

  My hands trembled slightly, sloshing my tea. There was a pain deep in my chest that pierced my lungs with each breath. Revisiting these events I was so desperate to put behind me gave me flashbacks that felt more like experiencing the terrors anew. Chia took my hand in his own.

  “Leila, I could use your help to complete this research project I’ve started. I’ve called it ‘From Self-Reign to Self-Immolation: The Paradoxes in Kurdish Women’s Lives,’ and it’s to be published in a human rights magazine in Canada. I can see how you turn pale and start chewing your nails every time I try to talk about the accident, and I think working on this together will help you, me, and other women who are in danger.”

  “What exactly are you looking into?”

  “Why it is that Kurds had female rulers and governors in the eighteenth century, at a time when that was unheard of among Persians and Turks, but now we have such high rates of suicide by fire. What happened to Kurdish women?”

  “What happened to Kurdish men?” I asked. The sound of sirens outside startled me. “I don’t think I’m ready yet. Sorry.” I wanted to curl up and hide somewhere.

  “Okay.” Chia grabbed the camera and turned the lens on the man I had filmed earlier.

  “How did this magazine find you?” I asked.

  “Through my blog.”

  “Chia, don’t you think you risk too much?”

  He stared at one of my photos of the snow-covered Zagros Mountains that I’d pinned onto the creamy flowered wallpaper. “Somebody has to do something. And we’ll be careful. We’ll publish under an alias.”

  “Last night I dreamed I had a bunch of fish and I couldn’t feed them. They were swimming around in a small vase that was placed inside a big pond. I knew they were hungry, but I couldn’t find their food. The tiny dears were starving, and no one knew but me, and they kept looking at me, begging for food. It was my job to feed them, but I kept searching and found no food. I still feel bad for them.”

  “Sti
ll having nightmares?

  He knew one of my recurring nightmares featured a man in scrubs, holding an electric drill before my exposed genitalia, jeering at me. I shuddered.

  He looked up. “Any chance the guy outside may appear in one of your films?”

  I opened the cabinet and retrieved the cutting board. “As soon as God sends down a bundle of cash for my filmmaking purposes.”

  “You should look into ways of getting your work in front of a director.” Chia swiveled to look at my direction.

  With a large knife, I chopped quickly through a handful of lettuce leaves. “And show them what? Random footage of streets and people, of trees and birds, recorded by a camcorder that’s a joke to a professional? Give me a break, Chia.” I dropped the knife on the cutting board and turned to him. “You have to know people who know people.”

  He stared down at the white kitchen tiles with the same kind of blank stare he had when he compared dreams with reality. “You know what you should do?” He combed through his hair with his fingers. “Start talking to the customers at the bookstore. The ones who show up for movies, film magazines, and such. Hmmm . . .” He zoned out again, pinching his lower lip. “If we could find a way to contact one of the Kurdish directors, Hiner Saleem or one of the others, and to show them what you’ve got, I’m pretty sure they’d be supportive.”

  I shook my head and resumed chopping. “Show them what? That I have no education, no background, no experience . . .”

  “Dreams matter, Leila gian.” He nodded, stood behind me, and whispered, “Desires matter. Take them seriously.”

  I lifted the lid of the pot I had put on the stove early in the morning. “Only if I were Martin Luther King.”

  “Mmm . . . sewzi ghawlma?” Chia sniffed theatrically when I stirred his favorite dish, the stew of beef, herbs, dried lemon, and beans. I made it every time I wanted him to stay at home longer, stay and tell me that every change in life started with a desire, that the courage to believe in the wildest dreams was what had allowed a black man to run for president of the United States, that women got to be leaders only after they believed in their capabilities. I wanted Chia to speak to me about all these things and let me pretend that I didn’t believe him, that he was only being silly.

  “Karo would die for this food! Do we have enough for three people?” Chia picked up his cell phone from the table and texted his friend when I shrugged.

  “Let me make the salad.” Chia fetched tomatoes and carrots from the fridge and started washing them.

  I watched his clumsy ways and laughed when he nicked his finger chopping a cucumber.

  “What’s so funny?” He wrapped his bleeding finger in a napkin. Now I had to do the salad.

  “Do you realize why you know so much about history and politics and the world?” I said as I pushed him away and started dicing.

  “Because I read.”

  “Also because you always had me to cook and clean up after you so you could spare the time.”

  He left the kitchen and flopped down on the squat blue couch with Kevin McKiernan’s The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland in his hands. I retreated to my room and thought about what to wear for our handsome guest. My striped shirt was a nicer fit than the one I had on and a better match with my tight green skirt. I was so short and petite that I could pick up great clothes in kids’ sizes at clearance sales. I tied a forest-green ribbon in my curly hair, applied black mascara and peachy lipstick, and returned to the living room.

  Placing headphones over my ears, I sat across from Chia and watched Crash on Chia’s laptop again to better understand Paul Haggis’s complicated intertwined screenplay, stealing glances every now and then at my brother, who was absorbed in his book. But I couldn’t focus. Karo stubbornly claimed a space in my head, refusing to leave. The shape of his strong arms and broad shoulders flickered behind my eyelids each time I blinked, and I imagined myself sitting on his lap or my head hiding in his chest, his arms protecting me. Was I confusing my desire for safety with love? Or was that simply what love was, believing you’d found the one person who held the answers to all your needs?

  “Every time he is around, I smell trouble,” I muttered, pen in the corner of my lip.

  “Who? Karo? You blow so hot and cold about him.”

  I got the tingle one gets when someone guesses their secret. “I’m not sure why you spend so much time with him.”

  “It’s his story . . . it fascinates me.”

  “That he is a con man’s son?” I stuck my chin out. “Funny how his father was humiliated at home. Assimilation didn’t work, it seems.”

  “I don’t think it would make anyone happy for too long. Apparently his father disappears for months on ‘business trips’ to Gulf countries. He sends a lot of money to his wife in Toronto though. So I guess he is financially successful.” Chia tapped the side of his nose.

  “I bet his identity is not the only thing Karo’s father lied about,” I said.

  Chia yawned. “He married someone who would most likely have rejected him had she known earlier who he really was. Or divorced him, if it weren’t such a taboo.”

  “I would love it if he had a secret Kurdish wife.” I giggled.

  He looked up at me. “That would make a good story.”

  “In a far-flung village where nobody speaks a word of any other language, and he probably has nine very Kurdish children who will grow up to become Peshmerga.”

  “Don’t forget to save that in your idea folder.” Chia insisted that I take notes for future screenplays, but I never did.

  “I’ll come to the terminal with you to pick up Shiler.”

  He nodded. Chia and I continued sitting across from each other, occupying different worlds. By the time Crash ended, the sun’s rays bathed our kitchen floor and the aroma of a delicious meal wafted across the living room.

  “I’m famished,” Chia said.

  Belsima. I mimicked his childhood speech impediment, but only in my head, because he didn’t enjoy the memory as much as I did. By the time we set the table, Karo was at the door: ponytailed, biceps flexing under his T-shirt.

  “Mmm . . . so good . . .” he moaned as he ate. His enthusiasm for the meal made the well-mannered Karo speak with food in his mouth, and a grain of crispy saffron rice dropped onto his black jeans. I tucked my hair behind my ear and felt the blood rising to my face. My lonely heart interpreted every friendly gesture as evidence of his attraction to me, but I told myself it was pathetic, wishful thinking. Never before had I so desperately wanted to be ignored by someone, if only so my heart wouldn’t go skittering with each smile he cast in my direction.

  When we couldn’t possibly eat more, we lunged for the sofa.

  “I don’t know how to thank you two for the feast.”

  “The usual way is fine.” Chia winked.

  Karo pulled a USB stick out of his pocket.

  On Chia’s laptop, Karo showed us some footage he had secretly downloaded from Tehran University’s high-speed wireless connection. The clips, mostly filmed surreptitiously on cell phones, documented the government’s violent crackdown on peaceful protestors who gathered to object to the disputed presidential election.

  The third video made my temples throb. It was hard to believe that what we were seeing was real, not the creation of some fifth-rate movie director. We played it again, pausing several times, our heads pressed together before the screen.

  From the window of a city bus, someone had filmed a man dressed in black, wearing a mask and a cloak, who brandished two batons at cowering protestors. Vaulting between two cars, he leaped up and viciously beat anyone within reach. He twirled the batons like some sort of Persian ninja, chased his victims, and didn’t stop until he’d rained blows onto their skulls. The video ended when he approached a group of soldiers, who warmly welcomed him, clapping him on the back. I would’ve thought it was a prank if it hadn’t been for his bloodied victims, their howls of pain audible even through the bus window.
r />   “Isn’t chaos the best opportunity for the psychopath?” Chia asked.

  Karo and I looked at each other; we didn’t have an answer, and Chia wasn’t looking for one either.

  I wandered into the kitchen to make tea and looked outside again as I waited for the water to boil. The homeless man between the tree trunks was hooting with laughter, slapping his knees in excitement, bent forward in a deep amusement. How easy it was to lose sanity, I thought, when you were exposed to such madness, so frequently.

  When I returned, Chia was staring at the ceiling, Karo at the floor. We were all tired of discussing the situation in Iran, all discouraged by the political, economic, and cultural deterioration. I placed the tea tray on the table before us.

  “There’s no getting used to life here because it keeps getting worse and worse!” Karo shook his head.

  “So, how does it feel to be beaten up? To be killed because you demanded your basic human rights?” Chia was flushed.

  “What do you mean?” Karo asked.

  “Don’t you think that the mainstream’s silence these past three decades is at least partly responsible for this onslaught?” Chia looked back at the screen. I’d never seen him confront Karo like this. “When ethnic and religious minorities were crushed, did you not think one day they’d come for you too?” Chia turned to his friend again and looked him right in the eyes.

  I was flabbergasted.

  “We . . . people had hope.” Karo cracked his knuckles. “They believed in political reform.”

  “Reform? Don’t you think people on the margins have every right to be wary of this new ‘quest for justice,’ Green Movement or whatever?” Chia’s tone was calm, in contrast with his accusatory words. “Our three decades of resistance against the Islamic Republic was dismissed as separatism or violence because it was a poor man’s fight.”

  Karo rubbed his sock-covered toes against the light brown carpet. Where did he stand? He then looked up and noticed my expectant eyes but only glanced at his watch. “We’ve got to get going, Chia, if you want to make it to your class on time.”