Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

  “You won’t shut up about this Karo guy. Are you attracted to him or something?” She teased. “Ooh, or have you fallen in love?”

  “Neither! Are you crazy? He’s way out of my league. You know the first thing we should do when we find Chia and Karo? Make a ton of homemade wine. Gosh, the wine was lovely.”

  She agreed. That night I slept soundly, free of nightmares.

  Clocks ticked on. Whatever name the dates bore—July, August, September—they were identical purgatories for me.

  The more desperate I grew to knock on every possible door, the more distant Shiler became, asking to be left alone with her “quiet quest,” refusing to explain what that meant, taking to hiking to cope.

  I was borne on a pendulum between faith and terror, between agitation and paralysis. I’d never felt more alone. Despite Shiler still sleeping in Chia’s bedroom, I saw her infrequently, and a chasm grew between us. Although I was sometimes tempted to tell my parents the truth, it was always easier to just keep lying, partly to spare them the panic I’d been living in and partly because there was nothing they could do. I was afraid they’d blame me, each other, themselves, terrified they’d drain what little strength I was able to summon each morning to get through yet another pointless day.

  Joanna’s presence would have lifted me up, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave the city, not when my brother was here somewhere, waiting to be found. My boss was no longer interested in hearing about my hopeless search, couldn’t even bear to look at my sallow face. Dust and cobwebs had overtaken the apartment, the spiders even too sick of me to occupy their webs.

  Day eighty-six. I sank down to the ground by the calendar, stretching my legs. In the silence of the apartment, I rubbed an eye with the back of my hand and stared at the silver alarm clock on Chia’s desk, unsure how to feel about the relentless ticking. Time was both a friend and an enemy. I wanted to fast-forward to a future when I would once again see my brother pressing the snooze button and pulling the pillow over his sleepy head. Yet the passage of each day that ended with no reliable news depleted me.

  The door opened. The familiar shape of Shiler’s curvy figure appeared. The hallway lamp shone behind her back, illuminating the room through the open door, turning her into a silhouette. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I can’t really say I am awake,” I said.

  She sat by my side and threw her headscarf at the wall. “Suffocating piece of shit.”

  I reached for her hand.

  “If he is in a prison, which he most likely is . . .” I began. “How terrible is it? I am sorry to ask, Shiler, but I need to know. Do you remember what it was like? I know you were a baby, but has your mother ever spoken about it? Do you think they . . .” I faltered, my thoughts too terrible to say aloud: Chia being tortured like Baba, being hollowed out, his own map of lashes across his back. Nothing frightened me more than seeing Chia—the man who wanted to bring the perpetrators of massacres to justice—sleepwalk through life like yet another crumbled victim.

  She kissed the top of my hair and placed a calming palm on my cheek. I let my head rest on her shoulder. “I was spoiled rotten, living among women who competed to hold me, to play games with me, sew clothes for me. My every fart thrilled them to pieces. Anyway, Joanna often talks about the aspects of prison that weren’t too horrible, especially for someone like Chia. He’ll meet some kick-ass intellectuals and activists there. There’s a camaraderie among political prisoners of similar ideologies that you can’t find outside. He’ll have a lot of time to read and write. Also, it’s not like the outside world is heaven. Chia knows this country is one big prison.”

  “Thank you, Shiler.” I wiped my tears, slightly comforted. “And he’ll eventually come out, right? They won’t keep him there forever. Even if they found out about his contraband articles and blog and stuff. And when he comes back to us, he doesn’t have to hate life like my father. He can become like Joanna.”

  “I brought him bad luck,” she muttered. Born on the day her father was executed, she could not shake off the superstition.

  “Shiler, he got to experience love because of you. I’m the one who tired him with my excessive attachment. Maybe he would have stayed home had I not been such a bore, such a burden.”

  “You know the last thing Chia told me?” She got up and patted his bed as she told me they were lying down on the prickly dried grass on a hill, making up stories about the clouds sliding by in the sky. “A shepherd passed by with a bunch of animals. Chia said he envied the sheep.”

  “That’s not like him. He is quite the lion.”

  “He said the sheep were lucky they didn’t have to suffer because of the way Britain, France, and Russia had drawn the map of their country. Nor did anyone force them to speak in the pigs’ language because pigs were in charge.”

  “Ah, the famous Chia wit.” Shiler and I sustained ourselves through sharing memories of him. A desperate attempt to make the abstract concrete, to add to our inadequate reservoir of hope. It was our futile denial of being prey to terror.

  Hands clasped under her head, Shiler’s eyes were trained on the ceiling, the light in them fading. She’d wake before dawn and climb the hills across from the apartment. By the time the sun was up, she would already be at the summit. I had once spied her on the hills from the window, a tiny shadow against the watercolor dawn.

  “What’s it like to be on top of the mountain every sunrise?” I asked.

  “It’s not about getting to the top. The trekking gives me the illusion of surmounting the pain.”

  “You being a Kurd and all that.” I smiled. An archaic saying claimed Kurds had no friends but chia—the mountains.

  Shiler swallowed hard, fought to be strong. “I can’t go on like this, Leila. We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “What else can we possibly do? I’ve done everything imaginable.” Shiler didn’t seem to hear me. I bit the insides of my cheeks, got up to open Chia’s closet, to smell him, to find a way to water my spirit in severe drought.

  “Leila, look at these.” Shiler stood behind me and pointed to a series of four photos on the wall, the ones taken in August 1979 in Sanandaj. The shots depicted the row of blindfolded Kurds who had fallen on a dusty field from the blasts of the Revolutionary Guards’ weapons.

  “Look carefully. This is still our reality.” She knocked on the pictures like there was something I couldn’t see. Several AK-47 machine gun rounds were cutting through human flesh. “Here, read what Chia has written.”

  I had already read that blog post a million times. “With every person who fell from a bullet, a part of our pride and dignity died. With every line of published and broadcast propaganda that named us mofsid filarz—corruptors on earth—a part of our heritage shattered in us. We are denied our identity, and when we protest, we are denied life.”

  I chewed at my chapped lip and held my hand to my throat. “What are you getting at?”

  “What do you see in these four photos?” Shiler asked.

  The Kurds crumpling at the knees, stuck somewhere between heaven and earth. “He is standing when others are falling. The first man in the row. Left hand wrapped in a bandage. An icon for dying with a straight spine.”

  “No, Leila. Look at the executioners. These are the people you are asking to help you.”

  My brain went blank.

  “Where do you think the assassins are today?” she went on. “They are the ones running this country. Do you really expect them to have mercy on you and me?”

  Shiler was right. We were deliberately kept in limbo. The goal was to deny families a sense of closure—a proper funeral, a grave to visit, a chance to move on—and to threaten their sanity by making them hope against hope, die in a slow decaying despair. When a mass grave was unearthed, a common occurrence in Kurdistan, some families actually found peace after discovering the remains of their loved ones. But others, who had anticipated reunions, had their reason to hope, to keep going, stripped away.


  “What do you want me to do?”

  “They give empty promises and send you from office to office. They’re getting off on your pain. It probably gives them fucking orgasms to look at the desperate face of an activist’s sister.”

  “What other option do I have?” I cried. “Wear makeup? Flirt with them for information? Fine, I’ll do whatever it takes. Whatever! This nightmare will end, Shiler. We just have to remain strong.”

  “Some nightmares only end with the grave,” she mumbled, but I heard her. “I have to leave.”

  “Where to?”

  “Out there. On the mountains.”

  “What? Isn’t that where you go every day anyway?”

  “I mean I want to become a Peshmerga, join the fight.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Look around you. You’re on a suicide mission. They’ll eventually catch you too. It’s all useless.”

  My lips moved inaudibly.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Leila. I can’t fucking stand the degradation anymore. If you are a leftist, they kill you; if you’re an activist, they kill you; even if you don’t believe in anything and just say ‘Yes, sir,’ they kill you. Maybe not physically, but they kill you inside. I am sick of it all—the laws from the dark ages, the denigration . . . everything, Leila. In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish. I need some dignity, something to hope for. I want to have a real impact. Real fight. Or the rage will turn against me and destroy me. Look at me. I am rotting. Faster than you.” Shiler waved her hands in the air and kept talking. “I’m going to die anyway, so why not do it with some pride and honor? Why not kill some of the occupiers first?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t understand you.”

  “What’s there not to understand, Leila? I cannot tilt my head every single day of my life, say ‘Please, sir’ to a government that killed my father for striving for equality, put my mother on death row for defending herself from a pervert, beat me up and smashed my kidney over nothing, and then kidnapped my boyfriend. Why would I stay in this dump? What are you hoping to achieve here? How long are you going to keep looking, borrowing to pay rent?”

  I held a hand to my chest. “Until I find Chia.”

  “Chia and I argued about this all the time. He is the idealist, the man of writing and analysis. But this is a dirty war, Leila. We are dealing with Iran and Turkey, not Switzerland and Canada. Do you understand that? We must be realistic. I would much rather get killed on a battlefield than slowly decompose in this morass.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’ll eventually join me. And maybe you will too. When you get as sick of it all as I am now. Where else would you go? To live with your parents and their curfews?”

  “You can’t bail on me now, Shiler. You have to stay with me.” I rubbed my temples, then steadied myself against the wall. “I need your help to find Chia first. Then maybe all of us will get out together.”

  She forked her fingers through her hair for the fifth time as she paced across the room. There was only the chirping of a cricket outside and the sound of our breaths. “You should join me, Leila. This is the only way we can avenge Chia’s life.”

  “Avenge what?” I snapped. “You’re talking as if . . . My brother is alive. We just need to find him. And I will.”

  Shiler placed both hands on my shoulders. “Calm down.”

  “Chia is alive!” I screamed. “I feel it. I know it. I am sure of it.”

  “You can’t be sure. You think the people buried in mass graves and La’nat Awa didn’t have family who loved them as fiercely as we love Chia? Do you think—”

  “Fuck off!” I shoved her. “Shut the fuck up. If you want to find another lover, go do it.”

  “You should save that aggressive tone for the bastards you beg every day.” She winced and brought her hand to her side as if calming a cramp. “I can’t even take a shit anymore. That’s how sick I am of everything, and not just this damn constipation and bleeding.”

  “Then we should see a doctor. I need to get a couple hours of sleep. I’m meeting a parliamentarian tomorrow who is going to help me find Chia.” I undressed, got into the shower, and vigorously massaged my scalp. Foam mingled with desperate tears that slipped down my face and body.

  “You’re a fool for cleaning yourself before going to wallow in filth again,” Shiler yelled.

  In whose hands was Chia’s life? Most families never got the corpses of their children returned. The lucky ones had to pay for the fifteen to twenty bullets that had cut through their loved one’s flesh.

  My knees gave way on the bathroom tiles. I felt I was being gagged by invisible hands.

  In a frenzy, I ran out of the shower, shampoo still dripping from my hair.

  “Shiler, please don’t leave, not now.” She was nowhere to be found. Her backpack was gone too. “Shiler!” I screamed, and my echoes screamed back at me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  My brother and Karo would be home soon, and we’d once again go hiking. That much was obvious to me, at least in the daytime before the sunset madness crept into my heart. I sipped my black cinnamon tea, marked day ninety-three of their absence on a calendar, lit a wood-scented candle, and started dusting the phone that had not rung in weeks. Shiler had never looked back. But the curtains, the dresser, the books, everything that Chia had ever touched was faithfully waiting for him to come back and animate the space.

  When I moved his mattress to wash his sheets, something fell under the bed. It was the diary he had shared with me, the one with the wrinkly edges and wavy pages, dampened by our tears, shed at different times. I’d read and reread his words when Chia first disappeared, but I later let Shiler immerse herself in them. I had assumed she’d taken the journal with her. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened the small volume to a random page.

  Boys were secretly learning the history of the Kurdistan Republic, of Peshawa, who lost his life after having made a dream come true, if only for eleven months in 1945. Ali was reading aloud for everyone. The students were silently listening and nodding, their eyes half-closed against the bright sunlight. Ali knew he must immediately switch to Persian and recite from his legal textbook when the principal came around.

  Students held hands, moving in a circle, singing. The news of Shirin’s death passed around like common gossip. She used to be a student in this school. Three months pregnant, she had set herself and her unborn child on fire. I walked to her empty seat and ran my fingers over the phrase carved into the desk that used to be hers: “I wish I were not born a woman.” I know she would have been collecting signatures for the Women’s Campaign had she not been born into poverty.

  “Mamosta.” Ali appeared behind me, right by Shirin’s desk, staring at the bitter sentence she had engraved with a knife. “Why did she burn herself?”

  I rolled around on the bed, at once pierced with pain and pride. I wanted to be more like my younger brother, detached from my personal problems and immersed in those of others. The sun shone brightly, warming the bedroom.

  I confess I feel ecstatic when my students call me Mamosta, making me believe I am a real teacher, not some student doing compulsory military service. But it breaks my heart that this young man did not ask why suicide. He asked why self-immolation. Did he think it was okay, or at least understandable, that she took her own life?

  “Are you finished reading?” I asked.

  “Someone else is reading. Why fire? Why?”

  The last time I saw Shirin’s face, she was wearing a white wedding gown––her shroud. Her eyes were full of pain and protest. Her father gave her to a rich man twenty-six years her senior in return for money he had no other way of paying back.

  “The groom is well off,” the people of the village said. He locked the door, not allowing anyone to see his beautiful property.

  Shirin sobbed, “I’m not a criminal to be held prisoner.”

  “Be grateful he loves you so much,” her parents respo
nded.

  “It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the men,” the husband justified as he drew the dark curtains tight. He could do that. The law had given him that right, and every other right.

  “You talk sense into her wayward head, Mr. Teacher,” her parents begged me. But her husband wouldn’t allow her a conversation with me.

  Gray strands of my hair had fallen on the rug like dead leaves from a tree. I’d dye my roots when I found Chia. For now, the headscarves didn’t let anyone know that at age twenty-six, I was two hundred years old.

  Ali kept moving his little palm up and down, demanding logic and justice—everything I wished I could offer him and the other children.

  Why fire? Why?

  Did you know that our region has the world’s highest rate of female self-immolation? There. We hold one international record. Despite our long tradition of having female rulers and governors, we’ve become a nation of burned women.

  I ask again, why fire?

  I could answer that question. Women who lost all reason to live wanted their internalized burning rage to manifest on the outside too. A dramatic death testified to an agonizing life.

  I squeezed my aching left arm and opened the window. Smog had created an impenetrable layer between the sky and the city now that the pleasant warmth of spring had given way to cruel heat. The sun was rising regardless. With grave difficulty, I swallowed some tea, unaware of its taste, wondering where else I could possibly go to look for Chia. Where was Shiler?

  “She was sending a message, bawanem.” I finally said it and looked away.

  Ali wouldn’t give up. “Message? What message?”

  My stomach turned.

  “What message?” Ali asked again. Typical of him to repeat his question until he got an answer, and I was at a loss for words. But I saw a gleam on his forehead and wanted to reach for it, to seek a cure.

  I kneeled before his small body and high mind and sang a lullaby for him instead. “Are wa fedai ballat bem aazizem rohze chowar jara . . .”