by Jan Coffey
How can they survive like this? But what choice do they have?
They take the money I give them, and I turn away, feeling ashamed. What I do isn’t enough. But I have to keep going, for a lot of reasons.
Only a couple of blocks away from the hotel, the Hagia Sophia again comes into view. Across a wide plaza, the Blue Mosque, with its domes and minarets, glistens in the morning sunlight. I can see more lost souls scattered across the open space, sitting on benches or against low walls.
It’s too early for the assault of tourists. A smattering of souvenir and food vendors are wheeling their hand trucks in and setting up, just as they have for generations. The smell of sesame-covered bread wafts from a red cart. Everywhere, stray dogs are sleeping on the paving stones and on grassy areas protected by short, white border fences. I pass and they raise their heads hopefully, tails thumping, looking for a handout.
At the corner, a signpost with a dozen arrows pointing toward different cities in the world looms over me. London 2502 km. Lyon 2015 km. Athena, Moskva, Mecca, Tehran, Baki, Pekin, and others.
It reminds me of another time. I got not one but three copies of the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You'll Go! as gifts at a baby shower for Autumn. I remember thinking then that the universe was telling me something. I guess it was.
I stop, take a picture of the sign, and post it.
Elizabeth says I traveled to five continents when I was little. I don’t remember any of it.
During the early days of our relationship, Kyle and I talked a lot about going places. At least, I talked and he listened. But we never did anything about it. To him, getting on a plane and flying nine hours here, twelve hours there, sixteen hours somewhere else, is just part of his normal work week. His idea of a vacation is doing nothing and going nowhere. Backpacking through Moscow, Athens, Mecca, Tehran, Baku, Beijing isn’t him, either. Maybe someday I’ll go on that journey myself.
That’s when I see her, and my heart immediately speeds up. She’s moving slowly up a slight incline on the street. She’s coming directly toward me, toward the hotel. The surgical mask is covering her mouth and nose. Today, she’s wearing a navy blue headscarf and a matching raincoat. A large purse hangs from her shoulder, and she has yet to see me.
A teenager brushes past her, staggering her for a moment. She pauses and presses a hand against the vendor’s cart, struggling to take a breath. A thin, ragged child approaches and holds out a hand. She takes a coin from her pocket and places it in his palm.
We’re a couple of steps apart when she finally sees me. Her eyes widen. I pause and we both stare. People are moving around us.
“Do we know each other?”
She’s frozen in time and slowly she pulls down the mask. “We do.”
“How?”
She casts a glance over my shoulder and then looks back into my eyes. “I am you. And you are me.”
Part II
Joseph, the lost, will return to Canaan; grieve not.
This house of sorrow will become a rose garden again; grieve not.
Oh grieving heart, you will mend, do not despair.
This scattered mind of yours will return to calm; grieve not.
When the spring of life sets again in the meadows,
A crown of flowers you will bear, singing bird; grieve not.
— Ḥafeẓ
8
Zari
Then
Distant lightning flashed over Ankara, and Zari held the child’s half-folded jumper to her chest as she looked out the kitchen window. The skies were gray above the tall, modern buildings of the neighborhood, and the thunder rolled in, low and ominous.
“Maman?” Tiam appeared in the doorway, clutching a doll to her chest.
“It’s all right, little one. Go and play. I’m right here.”
The toddler ran off, and Zari glanced out the window again, drawn back to another time, another summer storm.
Lightning had lit the sky over Qalat Dizah the July night when two middle-aged brothers from a village far to the east stumbled into the masjid. The men had been traveling on foot all night and day. Zari learned what happened the next morning from her neighbor, who had stopped at the door to see if she needed anything before heading to the market.
“Three days ago, trucks carrying Saddam’s men rolled into their town,” the woman told her. “The soldiers broke down doors, raided homes, collected every man between the age of fifteen and fifty.”
Stories similar to this had been circulating for months, but no one had arrived in their town. The danger had never seemed quite so real. Zari’s stomach clenched with fear for her own husband.
The night before, she and Yahya had lain wrapped in each other’s arms. With her head on his chest, she’d listened to the solid, steady beat of his heart as he slept. She’d breathed in the scent of jasmine from the white and yellow star-shaped flowers he’d placed on her pillow. Before he slept, they’d talked about where they would put the crib when the baby was born, about whether they should think about finding a house with a second bedroom.
Now, all those plans slipped away on the summer breeze.
“Those arrested were taken in trucks to a makeshift detention center,” her neighbor continued. “The soldiers made them get out and stand in a fenced-in parking lot. The younger men—the ones who might carry a rifle for Kurdistan—were shoved at gunpoint into a warehouse. They were beaten and tortured in there. The men said they could hear the screams through the broken windows.”
“How did they get away?”
“I don’t know, but somehow they escaped.”
Her neighbor told her that one of the elders of the masjid arranged for a message to be sent to their family. That morning, they would be driven through the mountains to a town near the Turkish border.
“I only pray they never come for our men,” the woman had said, pressing Zari’s hand before going off down the lane.
What she heard that day was nothing compared to what followed. A month passed before two others—a woman and her daughter-in-law—arrived at the house of Zari’s mother with their own account of horror.
“All the men of our town were taken by soldiers. My husband and son among them.” The older one’s face took on a wild look as she remembered. “We followed the trucks on foot. They didn’t go far. Just a few kilometers from our town, we saw dust rising in the distance. Tracks led through the fields. We went up a hill and saw them.”
Zari spread her palms over her stomach, wishing she could stop her unborn child from hearing these terrors.
“A bulldozer with a backhoe waited at the end of a long trench. Piles of dirt lined the hole. Our men were forced to stand shoulder to shoulder. The soldiers fired their guns, and our people, men we have known our whole lives—my doctor, our imam, the teachers from the school, every one of them—tumbled forward, filling the trenches. I saw my husband and my son fall together.”
Tears streamed down Zari’s cheeks. They sat silently for a long time. There was nothing she could say, nothing to do to console them.
“Afterwards, the soldiers climbed into the trucks and went away, and the bulldozer covered the bodies of our loved ones.”
By September, every Kurdish militia group had been pushed back into the mountains. The stories of mass arrests and executions came from every direction. Iraqi troops were spotted approaching Qalat Dizah.
She would never forget the night before Yahya left.
They sat against the wall in their garden. The sun was resting on the mountain peaks to the west, and the neighbors were spraying the lane with water from their hoses. The smell rising with the steam from the packed dirt mingled with the scent of jasmine.
“You have to go.” Zari pleaded.
He said nothing at first but watched the sun set, lighting the sky with streaks of gold.
“How can I leave you and our baby?”
“Nothing is happening to the women. Other men in town have gone. Into the mountains. To Turkey even. When
the baby comes, I’ll follow you.”
He took her hand in his. “How can I leave you?”
“You have to. I can’t lose you.”
That night, a few hours before dawn, the Iraqi army’s trucks rolled into Qalat Dizah.
The city immediately erupted with the sound of bullhorns and screaming and sporadic shooting. The shouts of soldiers could be heard, coming closer. They were going from house to house.
Zari pushed Yahya and begged and argued. Finally, when a truck stopped at the bottom of the lane, he gave in. Even then, he tarried, holding her in his arms.
“I promise you,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I’ll send word to you as soon as I reach Turkey. If things are not better here, I’ll get a job there. I’ll make a life for us.”
“And I’ll join you,” Zari swore, “with our baby.”
The night was giving way to the graying dawn as she watched Yahya standing at the top of the lane, stamping his feet defiantly on the packed dirt. Death was coming for him, and still he remained. He bitterly resented going. This was his home, his life. He didn’t want to leave his wife, his unborn child.
A few weeks later, she received his first letter. He’d made it to a crowded tent encampment at Ibrahim Khalil at the border of Turkey. Zari read the words again and again. She read it to her mother and to his mother. She shared the news with jinên pîr, the old women puffing at their pipes on the doorsteps along the lane.
Eventually, Yahya made his way to Ankara. He had no papers. No family. No one to offer a roof over his head. No one to share a meal with at the sofreh. His science degree from the university meant nothing. He was a refugee. An outsider. Finally, he was able to find a job as a handyman in an apartment complex. Very little money, but he received a private room of his own in the building’s basement.
Yahya was safe, but as winter dragged on, Zari’s body and heart grew heavier.
“First-time pregnancy jitters,” the doctor called it, tucking her stethoscope into her lab coat.
It was only ten days before Norooz, the celebration of spring. Zari had gone to the new hospital in the outskirts of the city when cramping and pain came on fiercely and suddenly.
“Everything appears to be fine. But to be safe, we’ll keep you overnight.”
That night, the sound of explosions awakened Zari. Planes and jets screamed overhead. When the bombs and the shells began to fall on the city, chaos erupted. From the window, she saw fires burning in the distance. By morning, the hospital was inundated with the injured.
Zari left the hospital, determined to go home and find her family. The streets were packed with cars and trucks bringing the wounded or trying to escape the city. The noise was deafening, competing with the sounds of artillery. Death itself had come to Qalat Dizah.
She stepped into the crowded street, and an ambulance driver, an older woman, caved in to her pleas and agreed to take her into the city. With Zari sitting beside her and siren blaring, she edged through the madness.
“Saddam has issued new orders,” she said grimly. “All of Kurdistan is now designated as a forbidden area. The soldiers are to kill any human being or animal they find here.”
They pushed against a river of people trying to flee. Panicked faces surrounded them.
By the time she reached her mother’s house, it was empty. So, too, was the house of Yahya’s family. The phones were dead.
A shell screamed low over the rooftops and exploded only a few streets over, close enough to make the house shake.
Zari left and stumbled through smoke-filled lanes. The streets were now nearly empty, and eventually she reached her own home. She glanced around her, trying to decide what to take.
But what does one choose with only minutes to decide?
Ten things? Five things? Did she have the luxury of time to be sentimental or practical? Could she pause to reflect what her life would be like if she never again sat on the chair that once belonged to her father? If she never gathered warmth from the quilt sewn so affectionately by the women in Yahya’s family? The clock on the wall. The rug under her feet. The rows of jars filled with jams and torshi, the relishes lovingly prepared by her mother. Her wedding picture went into the bag; And so did her dowry gold. She had no car. No friends left to call.
As she slogged toward the end of town, the peaks of the Qandil Mountains, imposing and magnificent, loomed ahead. Even as she walked, Zari knew that the life she had been born into, and blessed with, ended that day. But she no longer thought about herself, for she wasn’t alone. She carried a life in her womb.
Lightning flashed again over the buildings of Ankara, drawing Zari back to the present.
Even after all that had happened, she continued praying that her family had survived. Fifty thousand fled her city during those attacks, making their way toward Khabat, Bazyan, Kawergosk, Daratoo, Jadida. Refugee camps. In the weeks that followed, Qalat Dizah was completely flattened by bombs and tanks and bulldozers. Her history was eradicated. Soldiers killed every living thing left behind. Her history was eradicated. There was nothing to go back to.
Tiam was born on a cold night in a roadside village. The heavy snow on the ground denied that spring had arrived. Strange women took Zari into a nearby home and cared for her. For the week that she stayed with them, she was not a Kurd, not a refugee, not a stranger trespassing in their village. Zari was their sister. Their daughter.
A month later, when she finally arrived in Ankara, she found that Yahya was gone. Disappeared. No one knew where he’d gone or what happened to him. She was on her own, a mother struggling to survive.
The sound of children’s laughter cut through her memories.
“My Tiam,” she murmured, returning to the kitchen table and the unfolded laundry. “You saved me and I saved you.”
The childish laughter suddenly became angry cries, and Zari went to the doorway.
“Mine.”
“No.”
Two sets of hands were playing tug-of-war. Two stubborn children, both wanting the same doll. One pulled a little harder, and the other fell backward, crying. Zari crossed the room.
“No, Tiam. No, honey. That’s too rough.”
She gathered the other child into her arms and sat down, wiping the tears with the edge of her scarf. The toddler was already wheezing. The bronchitis was back, and Zari considered calling the doctor. Tiam looked on, her eyes round.
“My maman.” She tried to push her friend off Zari’s lap and take her place. “Down. My maman.”
“I am your maman, Tiam. But you have to be nice to her. Christina is sick.”
Part III
The sun’s light looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall,
and a lot different on this other one,
but it’s still the same light.
We have borrowed these clothes,
these time and place personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we’re pouring them back in.
— Rumi
9
Elizabeth
Now
Istanbul was always a place of evocative smells. New leather in the shops at the Grand Bazaar. Turkish coffee and warm simit from the red carts and the bakeries. The intoxicating blend of exotic spices and herbs at the Mısır Çarşısı. Freshly prepared apple tea in sidewalk cafes. The cool, salty smell of the Bosphorus. Grilled fish sandwiches on the pier by the Galata Bridge.
A part of Elizabeth looked forward to walking through the streets and experiencing all these things once again. Istanbul was the gateway to so many memories. It was at the city’s airport that she arrived in Turkey for the first time. And thirty years ago, it was from here that she left for what she thought would be the last time.
She rolled onto her side in the bed and stretched. The window was open, and she watched the gauzy curtains rise and fall. The breeze brought to life moments from the past…
* * *
“Tebr
ikler. Congratulations. You have a daughter.”
The doctor immediately disappeared from her bedside. She’d delivered the baby after ten hours of labor and two hours of pushing. He’d warned her of the risks. Because of her age and her medical history, it might be safer to opt for a C-section. But Elizabeth wanted to try. She wanted to experience it all. She guessed this would be her last pregnancy.
Why didn’t they give her the baby to hold? She lifted herself on her elbows and watched the doctor and the nurses working frantically on a tiny infant lying on a table across the room. The baby was silent and motionless.
“What’s wrong with her?”
No one answered.
“Why isn’t she crying?” Her heart raced and panic set in. This couldn’t be happening to her. During her first three pregnancies, she’d lost the babies in the first trimester. But this time, her child held on, and Elizabeth did everything she was told to do to go full term.
“You have to save her. Do something.”
A weak cry emerged from the infant. Elizabeth sank back against the pillows unable to control the tears. They said it was only seconds, but to her it felt like an hour before Christina took that first breath. Eventually, a blanket-wrapped bundle was placed in her arms.
“She’s two kilos, three hundred grams,” someone told her. “A tiny one.”
Elizabeth converted the numbers in her head. The baby was around five pounds. The scrunched-up face was red and blotchy, and her skin flaky. But no baby looked beautiful when it first emerged from the womb. She had ten fingers, a little nose. A rose bud for lips.
“She’s perfect.” She placed a kiss on the infant’s forehead. “Why does she taste salty?”
* * *
