My Father's Rifle

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Authors: Hiner Saleem

BOOK: My Father's Rifle
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My name is Azad Shero Selim. I am Selim Malay's grandson. My grandfather had a good sense of humor. He used to say he was born a Kurd, in a free country. Then the Ottomans arrived and said to my grandfather, “You're Ottoman,” so he became Ottoman. At the fall of the Ottoman Empire, he became Turkish. The Turks left and he became a Kurd again in the kingdom of Sheikh Mahmoud, king of the Kurds. Then the British arrived, so my grandfather became a subject of His Gracious Majesty and even learned a few words of English.
The British invented Iraq, so my grandfather became Iraqi, but this new word,
Iraq
, always remained an enigma to him, and to his dying breath he was never proud of being Iraqi; nor was his son, my father, Shero Selim Malay. But I, Azad, I was still a kid.
 
 
Seated under the big mulberry tree in the garden of our beautiful old house, my mother was seeding pomegranates. I could see only the tip of her flowery scarf. The pulp from the seeds colored her hands and her face was stained with the red juice of the autumn fruit.
Me, I was squatting on my heels, stuffing myself. My mother handed me the best seeds and kept repeating, “My son, go change your shirt,” for I was wearing my white school shirt. Having eaten my fill, I stood up when I heard the fluttering of wings in the sky. It was my cousin Cheto's stunt pigeons. I went down to our orchard and slipped under the barbed wire that ran around it. I climbed up the ladder to the rooftop of my cousin's house, the rooftop where we were in the habit of sleeping during the summer. There I joined Cheto and his three cages of trained pigeons. My cousin proudly showed me the pigeon he was holding in his hands, then he tossed it toward the sky. The bird took flight, soared up into the blue sky, then plummeted like a deadweight in the void and began whirling about itself. We were fascinated and we watched the pigeon, spellbound. When the performance ended, he flew in a wide circle over our heads, then landed next to us. This was my cousin's champion stunt pigeon, and he called it Lion. Cheto took a second pigeon and tossed it toward the sky. The spectacle was just as beautiful but at the end the pigeon didn't come back and we lost sight of it. We went down into the orchard and each walked in an opposite direction to look for the pigeon. I was sure the pigeon hadn't landed in a cherry tree, but I scanned the treetops just in case. Suddenly I heard very agitated voices, right next to our house, in back of the orchard. This was not normal.
I started running to see what was happening. I inched my way under the barbed wire and my shirt got caught. While I was trying to free myself, I heard the cries of terrified women. Perhaps someone had died? I lunged forward and my white school shirt ripped.
When I reached the back of the house, I saw my mother come out, distraught, grasping the Koran wrapped in its green cloth. She held it out toward tense armed men. In a shaken voice, she screamed at them, “For the love of the
Koran, don't touch my house.” Right before my eyes, she was hit with the butt of a rifle and collapsed to the ground. My mother was on her knees, trying to get to her feet. When she saw me, she shouted to me, terrified, to go hide—for a male, whether a child or a grown-up, could be killed. I rushed toward her, but she pushed me away as she stood up and I ran to the orchard to hide behind a tree. I heard gunshots everywhere in our neighborhood. People were screaming. Smoke and fire rose from our house. I was aghast and fascinated. From behind my tree, I saw other armed men arrive. They were looking for Mamou, a cousin. His house had already been reduced to ashes.
Mamou was thirty years old and a schoolteacher. Every Friday, at prayer hour, Mamou minded his father's dry-goods store while his father, a prominent Aqra shopkeeper, was at the mosque. On that day, about ten men from Omar Akha's pro-government militia entered the shop. Mamou was a sympathizer of General Barzani, leader of the Kurdish patriots.
1
The militiamen began taunting my cousin, who remained calm until their leader called him a coward and a Barzanist cuckold. At that point, without saying a word, Mamou went to the back of the store and pulled out a 9 mm revolver buried under rolls of fabric; then, returning to face the militiamen, he said just one word, “
djache
,” collaborator, and fired three shots straight into the militia leader's head. After that, he killed two other militiamen and managed to escape. It was clear they had come to kill him, and he wanted to die like a man.
When he got to the front of his house, he didn't go inside, to avoid being trapped. Keeping an eye on the street, he called out to his mother and asked her to bring him his rifle. The militiamen were getting closer while my cousin
waited for his rifle and all his bullets. But my aunt, panic-stricken, had misunderstood and thought she was supposed to hide the rifle, so she didn't come out of the house. My cousin could do nothing but run away, his pistol his only weapon. In passing through our neighborhood, the militiamen had killed my uncle Rasul, Cheto's father. Mamou headed for the nearby hills with the militiamen hot on his heels. He hid behind a rock to try to bandage a wound. Then he was surrounded, and shots were fired on all sides. My cousin defended himself to the last bullet. When his magazine was empty, he was caught alive. But they didn't execute him. They came down from the hills, tied his feet to the back of a jeep with a rope, and dragged him to the town. Three times they drove him around the town center, as a warning to the other patriots. By then my cousin was a lifeless rag streaked with blood.
That day, we lost seven men in our family. We fled.
I was still a kid.
 
 
My family arrived in Bill
filled with a tremendous desire for revenge. Bill
was a small village of about a hundred homes not far from Raizan, the town where the leader of our people, Mustafa Barzani, had his headquarters. This was the second time I had left my hometown of Aqra. The first time, my mother had taken me far away to pay my father a visit. He had just been released from jail and was living under house arrest in the middle of the desert, on Iraq's southern border with Saudi Arabia. My father was accused of having stolen a Morse code transmitter for the Kurdish movement.
Bill
was located on the bank of the Zab River, a large tributary of the Tigris. The entire right bank was controlled by the
peshmergas
,
2
Kurdish fighters. From the first day we
arrived, a one-room house was put at our disposal by order of General Barzani himself.
Our neighbors brought us large trays laden with food. When we had eaten, we spread blankets on the ground to sleep and huddled against one another like sheep in a barn. I heard the rolling of thunder. I was frightened. The night became chilly and we didn't have enough blankets.
It started to rain. I couldn't fall asleep. A drop of water seeped through the earthen ceiling and fell on my lips. I licked it. It tasted of earth and I spat it out. Then a second drop fell, and a third, and this went on without stopping. I called my mother. She got up and pushed me closer to my brother, put a plate to catch the raindrops where my lips had been, and went back to bed.
I stayed awake, listening to the tinkle of raindrops falling on the plate, and I curled into a tiny ball to get warm. My sister Ziné woke with a start from raindrops falling on her, but she went back to sleep right away. Between two raindrops, my mother got up, pushed my sister aside, and put down a second plate to collect rain. In a corner of the room we could hear other leaks. My mother got up and brought over a third plate. When drops fell on another of my sisters, our supply of plates was exhausted and my mother used a saucepan.
My father, whom I thought was asleep, pulled his tobacco pouch from under his pillow. Without opening his eyes, he rolled a cigarette for himself and started to smoke. I was delighted; there was someone else, like me, who wasn't sleeping. But his mind was on revenge. A raindrop fell on his chest yet he barely opened his eyes. On his blanket a moist stain slowly grew larger, but he didn't react. Then drops fell on his neck, on his forehead, but he went on smoking.
Only after five drops had fallen on his face and nine on his chest did he decide to get up. He took the oil lamp, went outside, and climbed up on the earthen roof to smooth it
with the stone roller we used to fill up holes. In our room everything became wet. Just one small corner was still dry and the whole family took refuge there. We all glued our eyes to the ceiling.
My father's work on the roof had only made matters worse. He returned to the room with his shoes full of mud. He shook a foot to get rid of the earth and his shoe flew across the room. Then he came and collapsed next to us in his soaking clothes. We were all inert and silent. My mother got up and took a big pomegranate out of her bundle and divided it among us. It was a pomegranate from our orchard, and it sweetened our mouths.
I woke up. I was warm and dry. When I opened my eyes, my family was having breakfast and the spoons tinkled in the teacups. Sunbeams shone through the wide-open door and the little window, lighting up the room. I stretched out like a snake. Cheerful, I joined my family for breakfast. The silhouette of a man appeared at the door; he coughed to announce his presence and asked my father if he was ready. My father gulped down his glass of tea. He was already completely dressed, in his
sarwel
3
and the long black belt printed with small white tulips wound around his waist. He made sure his red-checked white turban was well adjusted on his head, then he turned to my mother and said, “I'm leaving.” My mother answered, “OK.”
My mother's face had lost its smile; she mourned her brother and the six other members of the family who had been killed.
But I was still a kid.
 
 
In front of the house, I saw little puddles left by the night storm. In the distance, the mountain and the chestnut groves
were bathed in a beautiful morning light. The blankets drying in the sun were the only unpleasant reminder of the night before. Curious, I walked around our house and approached a large cement building. I looked through the doorway and was astonished to see a huge woman, at least six feet tall, with straight blond hair, skin as white as cheese, and big blue eyes. She was dressed like a Kurd, the same as my mother, in a long, very colorful dress that fell to her ankles and a close-fitting vest. She smiled at me and asked if I was a child from the newly arrived family. Timid as a young calf, I nodded, yes. She called to her son to come play with me. I waited for this son with great curiosity, wondering what he would look like. He came out of the house and came toward me. I was disappointed: he was like me, dark eyes, black hair, olive skin. We were the same age. I looked at the mother and son and I wondered how such a woman could have produced a child like that; how this fair blond angel, this extraterrestrial being, could have given birth to this swarthy boy with a gypsy face like mine.

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