Prologue
A WOMAN ALONE on the mountain at dusk.
An invisible boot pressed against my throat, making my breath labored and helpless, and yet I couldn’t go back and face my parents. Or my stifled future. Hidden behind a boulder, I hugged my knees and imagined my rage and pain whirling into a wildfire, burning down all the injustices.
Could my father have known what was going on? I wanted to tell him, to share this burden with him. My shoulders were already heavy beneath the daily cruelties of living as a woman in La’nat Awa, the damned place. This fatigue was incurable.
The sun had sauntered down, disappeared behind Lake Zrebar. A dozen shades of red burst open along the horizon.
Below, the narrow winding asphalt road was the hem around the hill’s green skirt, embroidered with clusters of red and yellow wildflowers. The shiler flowers stood elegant and tall, flourishing across the rough Kurdistan plateau, defying borders. I yearned to be a shiler, but I was a garden of anguish, of loathing, of torment; my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death.
I stood up, my breath now coming in pants. I wasn’t hiding anymore. “Basa bas,” I shouted. “It’s enough. Enough.”
I started down the hill in a tumbling run and found myself unable to stop. Despite the chill of the evening, I started sweating. The wind whipped my headscarf, and I gained speed. I flapped as if I had wings.
As I ran, a wail escaped my chest. I was headed toward the main road, toward the world of men. The streets belonged to them. Judgmental men. Hypocritical men. Their-honor-depended-on-women men. Cars hurtled around the curve, full of drunk drivers who honked as they spotted me sprinting down the hillside. They were going too fast for this road, too fast for their sluggish reflexes, and too fast for their old vehicles. A white late-model car careened down the winding road, kicking up dust. The wind roared in my ears.
The white car and whoever was driving seemed to seek me out as a fellow traveler. I stumbled on a stone, crushing the shiny red poppies in the grass. And as I lurched, my untold stories tumbled inside me like pages ripped from a book and tossed, crumpled, into the wastepaper bin. An overpowering urge to scream my story, to expel it from beginning to end, seized me. Suddenly I could see the heads of all those Kurds crushed beneath tanks.
Descending the slope at a breakneck pace, my shouts crescendoing, I was unable to stop myself, this crazed woman.
A final lunge and I was airborne.
Part I
Leila
Chapter One
MY FIVE-YEAR-OLD MIND could not identify the map drawn on my father’s back and neck from the lashed scars of his time in prison. Wrapped in a beige towel at the waist and indifferent to the water droplets sliding down across the hacked frontiers on his bare back, my father packed some of the new baby’s clothes and diapers and explained in a hoarse voice that he had to run back to the hospital.
Mama and my new baby brother, Chia, meaning “mountain,” had not come home yet, and I was impatient to meet him. The events of that day were etched in some persistent cell in my memory. Baba got dressed, absently shoved my pants and doll inside a plastic bag, and gathered me into his arms. Wrapping my arms around Baba’s neck, I saw tears in the corners of his eyes and the fresh drops of sweat on his receding hairline. It was stuffy in the house, the heater still blasting although it was well into March.
“Your head is crying,” I giggled and ran my palms over his sharp stubble. “Angry skin. Porcupine.” He carried me down the carpeted stairs that twisted in a perfect spiral from our hallway to the basement studio and knocked on Joanna’s door.
Joanna opened the door, wearing her face-wide smile. “Congratulations, brakam!” She wasn’t really my aunt, but she and my father called each other brother and sister. Joanna was dressed in a loose, green, ankle-length dress and a black vest, her hair tied up in a ponytail, her red lips the color of my father’s bloodshot eyes. Her golden belt jingled as she walked, its many dangling coins clinking mellifluously together. I loved that she was always nicely dressed, how it set her apart from most women in Mariwan.
“Healthy baby boy. We’ll be home tonight.” Baba handed me to Joanna. “Could you please take care of Leila?”
Squeezed between them, I inhaled my father’s signature smell of lavender soap, which mingled with Joanna’s jasmine perfume.
“Of course. Hello, big sister!” she said as she tickled me under my arms. Baba thanked her and set down my bag next to the edge of the wooden door.
“Did you hear the news?”
“Hana . . . ?” Joanna asked.
“No . . . have you turned on the radio today?”
His own radio was always on, its staticky broadcasts a familiar soundtrack. Joanna’s radio was usually on too, but hers played only mellow music, often Sayed Ali Asghar Kurdistani’s soothing voice. She waved a hand in the air, swatting away the unheard news. “Believe me, I can live a day without tragedy, Alan! You can too. Newroz is coming. Your son is born. And we deserve a break, brakam, don’t we?”
Baba’s face twitched in a futile attempt to dispel the tears that pooled in the corners of his eyes. He turned his face away and crossed the tidy room to the dim main entrance of the walkout basement without another word.
“Let me get you a jacket, Alan,” Joanna called out to Baba’s hunched shoulders. The chill crept in even after he shut the door behind him, deaf to her words.
“I’m mostly made from water,” I announced, repeating the little fact I had learned from Joanna the day before. She was the reason that, at age five, I could read. Her daughter, Shiler, could already spell too, and she was only twenty days older than me.
Joanna sat me in a chair next to Shiler, who was busy practicing the Kurdish alphabet her mother had taught her: a as in azadi (freedom), h as in hemni (peace), n as in nishtman (homeland)—everything the Kurds were deprived of.
Born and raised in her mother’s crowded prison ward, Shiler had learned to focus so intently on the task at hand that she completely disregarded the world around her, so she had only just now noticed my arrival.
When Joanna had been released from prison several months earlier, she and her daughter had moved into our basement while she looked for an inexpensive place to rent. My father had said they could stay in our house for free because he’d had a lot of respect for Joanna’s deceased husband—his former cellmate, a leftist activist who had been executed. Since she had moved in, Joanna had painted the basement studio a light shade of green, and the grass no longer grew long and unkempt in the yard outside the large, spotless window.
I was thrilled to have a new playmate, but Mama didn’t like having Joanna and Shiler downstairs; she was suspicious of how Joanna had secured her release from prison despite being sentenced to death for stabbing a man. Baba had explained to me that in Iranian law, a man’s life was worth twice as much as a woman’s, so Joanna was to be killed in retaliation for taking her rapist’s life. But the decision was eventually reversed.
“And God knows how!” Mama added.
Baba had stuttered when I asked what a rapist was.
“Go play with your dolls,” he’d responded. I longed to know why the government punished everyone I liked.
Joanna now held a candy before me. “Mostly from water, ha? But what is the rest of your body made of? Chocolate?”