by Ava Homa
Men in prison-blue smocks drag their white flip-flops on the ground. The stairs creak.
Remember not to turn your backs on your dreams, loves, music, poetry, and Kurdistan’s magical nature. Join together and recite folk songs as we used to do.
A lamp in a metal grating spreads dull light. The steel toilet in my solitary cell stinks. “In me there was a rough prisoner not used to the clanking of his chains,” I recite aloud, clinging to the door of my cell, a space that is only five paces wide, wall to wall.
Through the bars, Ali looks so dried up, so weak, but his voice is firm. “Shamlou’s poems again?”
I have not seen myself in months—mirrors do not exist in the prison—but I’m sure I don’t look much better than Ali.
“What could be more healing?” I ask.
“Not your own poetry then? I wondered.”
“I’m not a poet—only a teacher who loves poetry.” I try to turn my head toward him, the head that is stuck between iron rods. “Did I tell you I had a student with the name Ali?”
Ali mirrors me and winces. I know that under the prison gown, his body is a web of scars from all the wounds he’s sustained. Mine is too.
“What would you do to them, Chia?” Ali’s voice is shaking. His cheeks and eyes are bruised and his muscles still. “What would you do, if you could do anything you wanted to these sadists?”
I think about his question for a long time. “I’d send them to rehab.”
Ali forces a laugh. “Does your foot still hurt?”
“My entire body does, Ali gian. But this is the pain of a nation . . . and the cure too. So it’s not all that bad.”
“Make sure you don’t forget us, Mamosta, when you are freed.”
Ali calls me “teacher,” his voice growing fainter. Even though his body is stronger than mine, I know he is too frail to stand or speak much longer. I spent eighteen days in an emergency room after my open sores from the interrogation sessions became infected. I was barely allowed to sleep, not allowed to use the washroom more than twice in twenty-four hours, and was kept in cold lockdown. All I had to wrap around me was a once-white mat.
They must have played “football” with Ali too. The interrogators, the “players,” stand in the corners of the room, tell “the enemies of God” to strip, kick our bodies around, curse us and our ethnicity, kick our heads, kick us harder where we are already injured, threaten our families, threaten to rape us. We cannot stifle the screams that satisfy them so much.
Do not worry, Ali gian. Your cries are not a sign of weakness. I write down in the margin of a state-run newspaper what I cannot say to his face. I have seen a child’s birth. Cries and struggles are the first signs of life, not of weakness. “A mountain begins with its first rocks and a human with the first pain.”
“Are wa fedai do didai aazizem show bi khawt bem, ly-ly-ly-ly . . .” I sing the lullaby Ali used to sing for his daughters when they were babies. I wonder if he will see them this week or if he will have to wait until the bruises on his face, at least, heal a bit.
Ali weeps, and I sing louder. “Ly-ly-ly-ly . . .”
My lullaby passes through the concrete walls. Other prisoners, political and nonpolitical, are quiet. My lullaby soothes them even though not everyone speaks my language. Some sob like infants.
“Ly-ly-ly-ly . . . Kazhollei chaw kazhallem . . . ly-ly-ly . . .”
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty . . . I count the cracks in the ceiling. My lawyer is presenting documents to the judge. Here it is hard to breathe. The room reeks as if the walls were made of corpses. The judge leaves his seat and walks to the door that convicts cannot use. It is only for him. The attached light brown desks divide His Honor’s space from that of the non-honored ones.
“Chia Saman is absolutely innocent, Your Honor,” my lawyer says for the third time. “He is not a part of any political group, Your Honor, separatist or not. Nothing in Saman’s judicial files and records demonstrates any link to the charges of terrorism brought against him.”
There are only three of us in the room. Five minutes have passed, but the judge seems not to be listening. I wait for him to speak.
He tucks some papers under his arm and walks to the door only he is allowed to use. “I am going for my afternoon prayer.”
“Your afternoon prayer!” I shout. I cannot help myself.
He stops.
“I have been in prison for five hundred and forty-five days.” The words jump out of me. “For a hundred and twelve of those days I was not allowed to contact my family, seek legal counsel, or even know what my crime was supposed to be.”
The judge touches his gray beard. I imagine he houses dead mice there. Every step he takes toward the door makes me speak louder. My arms and legs tremble with pain as I lurch toward him, courtesy of the jolts of electricity.
“I was proven innocent of all the charges of terrorism. Why don’t they let me go? They haven’t bothered to make up a single document against me.”
The judge does not heed me. Worms wriggling in his ears must halt my words from getting through.
“Absolutely zero evidence has been presented against Saman, Your Honor. Zero,” the lawyer says.
The judge holds the door handle. He looks back, glances around the empty room, ends his search at the camera installed over his high chair. “Ettela’at ordered your death,” he whispers. “There is nothing I can do.”
And he turns his back, leaving the room abruptly through his private door. My lawyer gapes. I scream, “Ahhh!” and the scream bounces off the walls and back to me.
A security guard runs and presses my wrists against my back.
“I wasn’t speaking with my hands,” I say softly, feeling almost numb.
“Hush, brother, hush,” the young, sunburnt guard whispers with a heavy Azeri accent. He is short but sturdily built, and his tough look shows that he is a hardworking village boy, probably on obligatory military service.
The lawyer shakes his head and waves his hands in the air. “Only five minutes behind closed doors and not even a word of explanation?”
Hush, Chia, hush, I think, not because there isn’t much to say, but because speaking here is a threat to national security and enmity against God.
The door shuts behind us.
I finally see my sister in person, without cruel glass sitting between us. Leila, aged heavily now, stares at me. Fighting seemed right to me, but Leila’s accusing eyes tell a different story. Farhad’s sons are here again to perform their latest gymnastics moves for their father. Despite everyone else in the room and all the chairs, despite the bruises on their father’s face. “See, Leila, I realize now that these children are not just innocently entertaining their father. They are aware, you see?”
Leila is too quiet, and this kills me. I gambled with both of our lives, not only mine. I make silly jokes, sing an English children’s song for her, but nothing can diminish the elephant in the room. What will happen to her when I’m gone?
When the fifteen-minute visitation is over—fifteen minutes we have been counting down the days toward—I have to warn her. “If they do anything to you, Leila gian . . . Please stop protesting in front of the prison. Please.”
I want to repeat it a thousand times, but the lump in my throat stops me.
Leila bites her lips and chokes back tears. “Sitting by the other people makes me feel stronger, bawanem. I get to console families whose loved ones have been hanged.”
I repeat “hanged” aloud to hear it in my voice.
“Hey, don’t you worry,” she says. “Your letters are widely circulated, and national, even international, campaigns have been started to save you.”
The guard is unlocking the door for her to leave.
“You are different from other prisoners, Chia; you have a voice, an impact. Soon you’ll be free. Your lawyer has written letters to hundreds of members of parliament and other authorities saying he will resign if anyone finds any evidence to prove you’re a criminal.”
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br /> The door is waiting, open for only her.
She speaks louder. “I receive calls and letters from people that I don’t even know. Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq are supporting you.”
She runs to me, hugs me, and slides something into my pocket. She is taken out, but I hear her voice. “Don’t you ever give up. Don’t you ever give in. Together we can get through this.”
“Yes, we can. Yes, we can,” I shout back, hoping she hears me.
“Yes, we can. Yes, we can.” Other prisoners chant along. I am shoved back into my cell, but this grin that I have cannot be wiped away.
The number of cracks before my eyes is infinite today. The homemade chocolates Leila gave me are by my bed. She also smuggled in a mini pencil and paper. “Are wak bakhchei bi aw aazizem teshnei waranm . . .” I murmur the lullaby late at night.
I take a few deep breaths and write:
No, I will not let them kill me. Not inside. After all, the high walls here can’t stop me from seeing the moon and stars. Being enclosed behind bars cannot stop me from knowing that out there the Zagros Mountain dances slowly to the sound of the tambour. The cricket is my witness. She knows that, despite the injustice inside the prison, the day and night do not steal each other’s turn in their freedom.
When I am freed, I will dance. With Shiler, with Leila, with my students, without sharing the story of the walls, without counting cracks in every room I find myself in. Chocolate melts in my mouth. Delicious. Heavenly.
I continue scribbling despite my swollen fingers.
Sleep, Chia, sleep.
Not because it’s time to sleep, but because being awake is a sin here, and the punishment is beyond what human bones can stand. I should remember that words are sinful in this forgotten part of the world. Thinking is a “crime,” writing is “enmity against God,” and talking is “terrorism.” The newspapers are blank, the walls are spies, television is the greatest liar, and speaking out is off limits. I feel strongly that there is a mysterious, underground power that has recently given the poet the right words, the writers their subjects, the elderly bravery, and the youth hope. I need to remember what I am told when I am beaten: that in the Islamic Republic of Iran, there is no such thing as poverty, protest, oppression, discrimination, lies, or immorality. These are the enemies’ terms, part of their “plot.”
I will eventually escape this place. “The butterfly that flew away in the night told me my fortune.”
Heavy iron doors open and shut. Keys jingle. Footsteps. Heavy boots.
I am not shaking, and I smile at this victory, at the courage that writing gives into me. It’s too late for their usual visit. It must be dark outside. The pen and paper are quickly placed under the army blanket. The footsteps reach my wing. Hands up, I think, and almost say it out loud.
“Hands up,” the old guard says.
“After-hours interrogations?” I ask the old guard I have known since the early days of my imprisonment, exactly 454 days. I speak informally to him. He knows I have a pen here and pretends that he doesn’t. We have one thing in common: counting the days, the guard toward his retirement from a job he despises and me toward a future yet to be determined. We both try to keep our sanity by doing mathematics.
I look at the two huge men standing behind the familiar face.
“Number A-1332,” the old man says, “stand. Collect your things.”
I nod in recognition, turn my back, and shove my letters inside the pocket of the shirt Leila bought me. I place all of it in a plastic bag, vaguely hoping they will be given to my sister.
The usual shoves follow, the usual handcuffs and blindfold, but not the same path, not the same number of steps. I’m counting blind now.
When they remove the cloth covering my eyes, I see Shirin, Ali, Mahdi, and Farhad. We are in the prison yard, and dawn is breaking. Twenty-five armed guards stand together, surrounding five handcuffed prisoners. I peer at the sky.
“The sun is checking to make sure it’s not counterrevolutionary to rise today,” I say, and the four other handcuffed people laugh.
The guards push us toward the western corner of the yard, thrusting and kicking to urge us along. Farhad is also limping. We both lag behind.
I give him a half smile. “Were you a football too?”
When he was first arrested, Farhad did not have gray hairs in his mustache and eyebrows. Now he looks at me, not offering a word.
“Did you meet the Mongrel? Did he play football with you too?”
“That was your special treat. They were boxers with me.”
I laugh, and the guard hits me between the shoulder blades with the butt of his rifle.
“You know what?” I sense death, my guard’s rifle pointed at my chest. I become daring. I know what will happen to us soon. There is nothing left to be scared of. “The sun will rise regardless of what you do here today.”
The guards ignore me, waiting for an order, and we stand still. Chocolates. I reach into my pocket with difficulty, with cuffed hands, and take them out. “Have some,” I say to the tallest guard, the one on my right.
The bearded guard tries to hit me again, this time with his fist, but the tall one holds him back. Unable to move forward, he swears at me, at the other four prisoners, at all Kurds.
“Rise, sun. Rise and be our witness,” Shirin shouts and receives more blows and curses.
I’d like to tell her I had a student whose name was Shirin.
The sun is in no rush.
“What’s wrong with sharing chocolate?”
Nobody responds. The guards are too busy quarrelling among themselves.
I limp toward Shirin, whose guards watch us warily.
“Can I take two?” she asks.
“Please do, sister. No more dieting for you and me.” I wink, surprised at myself for being so calm.
Shirin holds a chocolate in her mouth and closes her eyes to better savor the taste. I smile.
“This is our graduation ceremony, you know,” she says.
“With honors.”
I hobble toward the other prisoners, passing the chocolates around, indefinably relieved that today ends the daily humiliation of being trapped in a place that tells you every single day that the world is better off without you. The other prisoners take chocolates from me, but the guards refuse. I still haven’t finished giving away all the pieces when we are pulled back so the soldiers can tie the four male prisoners’ handcuffs together from behind with short lengths of rope. They tell us to walk in a line. Around the corner in the main square, five chairs wait on a high stand.
Farhad is struggling. “You can’t murder us like this. Where are our lawyers? We haven’t even said goodbye to our families. Who ordered our dea—”
One of the guards kicks Farhad in the groin.
Everything seems familiar to me in a curious way. Even Farhad’s face, crimson with anger and pain.
When we are up on the platform and the guards are tying our feet, I see that Ali is silently crying and biting his lower lip. The fatigue I had not allowed myself to feel envelops my body, dulls my senses.
“Ey reqib . . .” I start singing the ancient anthem. “Kas nalle Kurd mirduwe; Kurd zinduwa/Zinduwa qet nanewe allakeman.”
The others join me. “Oh, foes, the Kurdish nation is alive and its flag will never fall. It cannot be defeated by makers of weapons of any time. Let no one say the Kurds are dead; the Kurds are alive.”
The angry executioners do not speak our language. Kas nalle Kurd mirduwe; Kurd zinduwa.
More ropes. These are placed around our necks. I know the media here will announce, “Five terrorists have been hanged.”
I also know that the sun will rise, that the cracks will one day bring the prison walls down, and that students will one day be allowed to learn the history of the Kurds openly. Leila will be strong.
The chairs are kicked away. Above the ropes, the chocolates melt in our mouths.
PART V
LEILA
CHAPT
ER TWENTY-SEVEN
The wind gusted through Chia’s bedroom, slamming the door. I pulled the vacuum out from under his bed, pried a pair of navy boxers from the hose, and turned off the machine. The radio I had turned on to relieve the silence was tuned to a London-based Kurdish station and was playing a Kurmanji song: “Men biria to kerie, bavar ka . . .” I miss you, believe me that I miss you. Ask the birds. Ask the flower. Ask the prison walls. I miss you.
The last piece of Scotch tape gave up, and a calendar page fell to the floor. I fetched the orchid spray from the living room.
“Iran hanged five prisoners today, four of whom were Kurdish, for the fictional crime of Moharebeh,” the radio announced when the song ended, then listed their names. My ears perked up upon hearing Shirin and Farhad identified. “Chia Saman.” I froze. My brother couldn’t be the only one with that name. In a daze I returned to Chia’s room—now spotless—and sprayed the fragrance. In the living room I heard the radio repeat Chia’s name, the most famous among the list of the executed.
Suddenly my ribs tightened. I found balance by pressing them and sitting at the edge of the bed.
A stinging terror crept in under my skin, deep inside my bones. But Chia lifted my chin, smiled, and kissed my forehead. When I raised my eyes to look into his, he disappeared.
I got up, twirled and sprayed the orchid scent, twirled and sprayed until I coughed so hard I had to stop. With a nimble flick, I shut the radio off.
Joanna called. I told her the Kurdish media must have gotten the news from the government, which was obviously lying. “When have they ever told people the truth?” I asked.
She said she believed me but asked if she should visit anyway, or if I wanted to visit her.
