Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

“Yes, I do. Yes.”

  “You look good. Start tomorrow? Tomorrow at two. Afternoon.”

  I looked down at my striped green shirt and black tight skirt, feeling unworthy of being hired. “Really? Yes, I can. Of course I can.” I didn’t jump, but my voice did.

  “Trial. Two days. Okay?”

  I didn’t know what “trial” meant. “Okay. See you tomorrow. Thank you!” I left but then came right back. “You will train me, right?”

  “Yes. Must learn fast.”

  I took a photo of the menu with my cell phone and by evening, I’d memorized it. After my English class, I went home and checked the pronunciation of the words on the menu, watched videos on YouTube about how to make each of the special coffees, and searched for tips on how to be a good barista. I was walking around in the bedroom with an empty tray, smiling at my imaginary customers, when I remembered my days of studying for the national exam. Fear of failure crippled me. I sat down at the edge of the bed. Karo’s mother called me from upstairs.

  “I brewed fresh tea.”

  “I don’t want any. Thanks,” I said.

  “Come up for a minute,” she commanded.

  “Okay.” I instantly regretted my tone, how quickly I’d acquiesced. There was such a delicate line between politeness and cowardice.

  She had poured tea and sliced some blueberry pie, her eyes scrutinizing me. “How’s your family?”

  I thought she was my family. “Pretty good.” I leaned back on the love seat and clutched my fingers around a kneecap.

  “We like the Kurds,” she said.

  Sure, I thought.

  “My brother, Amin, had to leave Iran in hiding, and some Kurds safely smuggled him past the border. They saved him and many others. Many exiled Iranians owe their lives to the Kurds.”

  “And yet when we’re mentioned, we are only smugglers? Even when the world itself relies on the Kurdish army to defeat the Islamic State?” I asked in a barely audible voice.

  She pretended not to hear. “Will you get those photos from the kitchen counter?” She crossed one bare leg over the other.

  The silver picture frame was made up of five flowers, each holding a meticulously placed tiny photograph. The top one was of her wedding, with a black-and-white photo of her parents in the center, one of Karo on the right, and one of her daughter, Awin, on the left. Karo had inherited his high cheekbones and bright eyes from his father. The man in the bottom picture must have been her brother. On the marble counter lay a check made out to her for $1,500 for “June rent and groceries,” signed by Karo. It was unheard of for an Iranian family to charge their child rent, especially for a crappy basement. And groceries too, when we barely ate at home?

  “Amin and I were very close.”

  I sat back on the love seat. The home phone rang.

  She waved her hand as if sending the ringtone away. “Karo has mentioned that you were close to your brother too. Chia.”

  I flinched. It was wrong, his name on her shiny red lips.

  She went on. “My brother lives here in Mississauga. I don’t see him because his wife doesn’t allow it. She’s never liked me, you see.” She looked down. “So they act as if I don’t exist.” She examined the backs of her hands, her nails perfectly shaped and painted, three big diamond rings glittering.

  She searched my face for sympathy. To my surprise, I recognized the loneliness in her eyes.

  I stared at the pictures to stop myself from feeling sorry for the person who had hurt me only the day before. When it came to the Olympics of misery, I was the reigning champion. “Your brother is alive and well.” I put the frame on the glass coffee table, the base of which was a statue of a lion.

  “I wish I knew if he was well and happy,” she said pointedly. “I was ten when Amin was born. I raised him. He’s like my own son. And now he’s been taken away from me.” She bent forward toward me, the exotic perfume she wore nearly causing me to cough. “I’d certainly die if someone took my son away from me too.”

  I stood. She sat back and stared at me, checking the effect of her prepared speech, tapping the arm of the sofa. She was not threatening me; she was manipulating, trying to provoke pity.

  “One can’t offer contempt and expect kindness in return.” I headed to the basement.

  Unconsciously—perhaps something I had learned from Baba and Chia—I opened the laptop and started reading the news: “Several hundred Kurdish prisoners have begun a hunger strike in dozens of prisons across Turkey. Among their demands is the use of their language in Turkish courts. President Erdogan plays down the hunger strikes, calling it a ‘show.’”

  Was engaging with world issues a defense mechanism to trivialize personal pain, or was I doing it to be aware and responsible?

  The sound of a key turning in the lock put an end to my dilemma. I flopped onto Karo’s uncomfortable mattress on the floor, assuming this would force him to sleep on his bed and rid me of my guilt.

  With his jacket hanging from his index finger, Karo winked and lay down next to me. “Welcome to my bed!”

  Embarrassed, I got up and slid between the blue sheets of the queen bed.

  Karo pressed the remote. A familiar show appeared on the screen: the story of a New York comedian, his pathetic friend, and an intrusive neighbor. Nothing about it seemed funny to me, and I couldn’t believe people in real life slept around so mindlessly, as if having sex were no more intimate than a handshake. Karo, however, found the show hilarious, and I ended up smiling and even laughing along with his thunderous guffaws. As the episode came to an end, I watched Karo clutching his belly and gasping for air. His unrestrained laughter filled me with envy.

  “Come.” I tapped the sheet. “Come sit on the bed for now. You’re not comfortable there.”

  He surfed the channels, quickly skipping CNN, CBC, and other news stations, the opposite of what my father or brother would do. I wanted to tell him that I could be fully employed if the next two days went well, wanted to explain why I had left in the middle of the picnic yesterday. But Karo poured himself some Johnnie Walker, joined me on the bed, and started laughing at almost every line of a sitcom, sometimes throwing his head back and slapping his knee. The smell of alcohol mingled with the pleasant scent of his hair or his aftershave. His aroma was mild, like the distant whiff of faraway wildflowers when you drive by a field with the windows down. It was alluring.

  After some more channel surfing, Karo closed his eyes and leaned his head against mine. The touch of our temples created a shudder of discovery. This was how he coped with his grief: Denial. Comedy. Whiskey.

  “Good night.” He kissed the crown of my head and crawled into his makeshift bed, pulling the blue duvet up until it nearly covered his head.

  I lay on the edge of the bed and watched Karo in peaceful slumber. His serene outward form camouflaged an agonized inner life. I stretched out a hand and lightly ran my finger along his profile, the line of his cheeks, nose, lips. His warm exhalations caressed my palm.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  At the coffee shop, I learned to prepare every item on the list, work the cash register, and communicate with customers in Hollywood-derived English. I nodded awkwardly at chatty customers, trailing behind in one-sided conversations full of phrases and slang words that I couldn’t decode. It wasn’t unusual for me to misuse common expressions, like saying “no headache” when I should have said “no worries.” “Thank you, and have a good day,” the boss made me yell after each customer, and after a while I did it automatically, desensitized to my ineptness.

  Because of the evening and weekend shifts at work, I rarely saw Karo. My mother-in-law and I avoided each other and exchanged nothing more than a few clipped greetings. Torontonians discussed the weather, the traffic jams, or the reduced size of the Tim Hortons cups.

  One July morning I read on Facebook that Turkey had shelled the Kurds who fought the Islamic State. Several were killed. On the bus to work I searched Canadian media to learn more about the butchery, but
not a single word was mentioned about the attack. I’d noticed that when the culprit was an ally, the news would go unacknowledged—even when a NATO member brutally killed a vital anti-terrorism partner. The beginnings of a headache drilled my skull. I had a premonition but lacked the courage to check my email, afraid that it would bear bad news, more anxious that there would be no news.

  My boss surprised me that day by giving me an extra twenty-dollar bill. “You’re a good employee. Save it to buy warm shoes later. Winter in Canada is very bad.” He left me by myself for the first time. The café was slow then. I sneaked a look at my email.

  Shiler’s letter was there: “Loss is an inevitable part of a Peshmerga’s life. Death confronts you often, smirks and takes away a friend, a relative, some new Peshmerga who hasn’t had a chance to practice fighting. The woman or man you’ve been having tea with every day . . . one day, they are no longer there.”

  Something collapsed inside me. In her previous emails, Shiler often talked about the fun on the mountain, the ball games, bonfires, camaraderie.

  “Leila, my friend Shaima is gone. The cluster bombs killed her. One moment she was there laughing, singing a folk song while I played the ancient keyboard I told you about—the one that’s held together by so much glue. I played, and we sang together, and then the next day, they stuffed what was left of her body into a bag to be buried under a tree.”

  Shiler’s stretched arms—imagined wings—appeared before my eyes, her unmatched stamina and piercing black eyes. I was relieved she hadn’t been the target and yet was all the more afraid that one day I would no longer hear from her and would be forced to sizzle in a new purgatory of waiting.

  “After two years of fighting, of seeing decomposing bodies, of digging graves . . . you’d think so many casualties would make death routine. But I see Death Almighty everywhere, casting his eyes on me, carting off a part of me with each friend taken, aging me every time.”

  Unable to conceive a response, I mopped the floor, wiped the counter, and cleaned the bathroom. A dozen students entered, and I rushed to brew more coffee, offer larger smiles to mask the heartache. Young customers sat all day in the café over cold cups of coffee, tapping away on laptops.

  I sent what I could recall of Abdulla Pashew’s poem to Shiler later that day: “I say, sir/Place your wreath under any tree/Near any stone/Beside any collapsed wall/By any riverbank/Bow your head and place your wreath/They are all my unknown soldiers’ graves.”

  A gray-eyed man came in and asked for a latte. “Out of curiosity,” he asked when I returned his change, “are you Portuguese?”

  “For here or to go?” I made myself busy selecting a cup.

  “Spanish?” He kept scrutinizing my face.

  I wanted to yell, “I’m one of the people your government’s NATO ally kills in daylight and your media ignores.” I said, “Your coffee will be ready in a minute.”

  The heaviness in my head transferred to my limbs. I weighed a thousand kilos. The tears I did not allow to run down made me nauseated, as if threatening to come out of my throat any second.

  An older man with a lovely smile came in and asked for green tea without reminding me that I sounded or looked different. When I delivered it to his table, I told him I loved his long white beard. He said he was a writer from Manitoba. I said I was a dreamer from Kurdistan. He didn’t ask me to repeat myself, didn’t ask where Kurdistan was. Instead he got up from his seat, stared into my eyes, and hugged me. “You’re the first Kurd I have met in my life.”

  I wanted to tell him my friend was a freedom fighter, but he kept talking about everything he knew about the Kurds—the genocide.

  “Yes, Saddam Hussein put cemen in the springs so people would die of dehydration.”

  He asked with wide eyes open, “Semen?”

  “Sement?” I tried to correct myself.

  “Oh, cement!” He sounded relieved but wouldn’t explain. I checked the dictionary and blushed. We laughed.

  Earning a small but steady paycheck and scoring high on the TOEFL enabled me to apply to the film departments at the University of McMaster and the University of Western Ontario, relying on government loans to underwrite this expensive undertaking. I clipped the classified pages of rooms for rent and searched online.

  My mother-in-law wouldn’t even return my greetings anymore. I couldn’t make sense of her. If she was afraid that I would take Karo away from her, as her sister-in-law had done with her brother, surely she didn’t think this hostile behavior would prevent that, did she? Or did it somehow appeal to her to be the victim, the deceived woman abandoned by her husband and children? Whatever her reasons, I needed to live without friction, already dizzied by my new life as it was. But she made me feel I was dirt to her as much as I was to the government she disliked. I barely saw Karo, and when I did, I was always tired, always preoccupied with work or studying.

  A good-looking woman who had straight hair that curled gently at the ends started coming to the café every day around three, making special requests for the preparation of her macchiato. Her nasal voice and haughty attitude made understanding her orders a challenge. I had no choice but to ask her to repeat herself and then ask for another confirmation to make sure I got her order right. While this was going on, she’d ostentatiously look at her huge designer rose-gold watch, never bothering to enunciate clearly.

  She would then settle into the middle of a couch, claiming it all for herself, take her Cosmo out of her Gucci bag, put her feet on the table, and smack her gum. Every other day at about two, my heart palpitations began. She made me remake her drink every single time.

  You’re such a moran, she wrote on a napkin one day and placed it on the counter before she left. I did not let any customers see my tears.

  “When your best is no longer enough, when your name is no longer pronounceable, when your identity becomes an obstacle to human connections, you know you are an immigrant,” I wrote to Shiler that night. “Nowhere on this planet is there a place willing to embrace you and me, but maybe we can find a peaceful corner? When will you put down your gun as you keep promising, build the safe Jinwar village, and bring Joanna? I am tired, Shiler. I am scared for you. For Joanna’s loneliness with you so far away.”

  The next day before two o’clock I corrected the customer’s misspelled word to moron and, before taping the napkin to the counter, wrote beneath her sentence, You’re so smart you can’t spell in the only language you speak. “How can I help you?” I asked when she appeared. She exhaled loudly when she noticed the napkin and left, never to return.

  On a crisp September day in Toronto, I visited some available apartments, walking for hours from one side street to another, checking out house numbers. I finally found a room in a basement I could afford for 65 percent of my pay. The kitchen and bathroom had to be shared with two guys and another girl, but that was okay. I needed a space of my own.

  I was drying my hair when Karo got home. He held up an envelope in one hand, untying his shoelaces with the other. “Happy birthday!”

  “Oh, gosh. I’m so old I forgot my birthday!”

  He held a tiny gift before my face and then moved his cheek forward, expecting a kiss. I almost turned away. Karo felt my hesitation, and his disappointed eyes shamed me into placing a splashy kiss on his cheek. I accepted the gift and tore open the envelope. Under his anxious gaze, I tried to make sense out of the words written on two pieces of paper: TIFF, Visa Screening Room (Elgin). I was about to confess my confusion when a familiar name popped up before my eyes: Mehmet Aksoy, Kurdish filmmaker. With a burst of recognition I remembered what TIFF was: the Toronto International Film Festival.

  I screamed with excitement and hugged Karo. “How thoughtful!”

  “The director will most likely be there too.”

  I held the ticket to my chest. “Thank you, thank you! This is such a thoughtful gift.”

  “You’re welcome, Leila gian.” He put his hands on my shoulders and looked down toward my mouth.


  I leaned in. Our noses almost touched, his breath brushed my cheeks, and suddenly my lips pressed against his: soft, warm, and gentle. It felt as if a butterfly had landed on my face. A glacier melted within me.

  When the kiss was over, neither of us knew what to do with it. I busied myself with the computer. He leafed absentmindedly through a comic book.

  In the morning I pretended to be asleep until Karo had dressed and left. Slowly and meticulously, I combed through the room in the basement and packed my life back into two suitcases, one of which now had a tear in its covering from being tossed around by baggage handlers.

  At work, the regular customers commented on my tired appearance. I waved my hand in the air. “No, never better.” I needed to believe I was excited about this new chapter and push away the incommunicable grief and guilt tugging at my heart.

  I was allowed to end my shift at four, and on the subway ride, I wrote the letter I’d been drafting in my head:

  Karo, I’ve found a small place of my own. This was our plan, right?

  See, I’ve always been scanning the horizon for a savior. I don’t know who I really am or who I am going to be in this wild world, but I can see now that I could have been my own rescuer, that I shouldn’t have become so dependent on Chia either.

  I used to believe that something was fundamentally wrong with me and that’s why I went through what I did in life. But now I see that suffering is not unique to me and my people. Also, I am not going to allow ANYONE, your mom included, to put me down for things that are not my fault.

  I can see my weaknesses, Karo. I nurse wounds and won’t let go of longings and disappointments. That’s why I collapse. I have to find my own way. You will be happier without me. I see you have in abundance what I lack—tranquility and ease.

  Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I’ve taken notes on how much I owe you and will gradually pay you back, with much gratitude.

  Farewell,

  Leila

  I resisted the urge to revise the note and tucked it under his pillow. Before closing the door, I looked around at the room, at the bed I had occupied for months, at Karo’s stack of books.