The orange-flavored candy was inside my cheek before I could answer. “No,” I mumbled, mouth full.
“Honey?”
I shook my head.
“Why are you so sweet then?”
I laughed, holding onto the hem of my skirt. She kissed my cheeks. I wished Joanna had always been there, when Baba was too busy feeling bad for himself, Mama was too busy telling the world how wonderful she was, and Grandma was too busy praying for a grandson.
“Leila, have you had anything to eat?” Joanna asked with a hand on her hip.
“I found some yogurt. Ate it with sugar.”
On her single burner, Joanna warmed up her leftover shorabaw, a traditional soup of beef and beans, though I found no meat in it.
“When will Mama and the baby come home? Do you think they miss me?”
“The baby doesn’t even know you,” said Shiler, looking up from her finished letters.
“Yes, he does! My brother would recognize me among a hundred girls,” I declared. Joanna stirred some bread crumbs into the shorabaw. I slurped the delicious soup and went on: “He’ll recognize my voice, because I sang to him when he was in Mama’s belly.” Joanna confirmed that he certainly would.
“Joanna is sewing new dresses for you and me for Newroz.” Shiler was the only child I knew who called her mother by her first name.
“You ruined the surprise, avina min,” Joanna said.
Shiler took me to the sewing machine in the far corner of the studio, sitting by the cooler that acted as their fridge. On and around the hand-cranked machine, the fabric lay shapelessly, red printed with white flowers.
“Why don’t you explain to Shiler how you celebrate Newroz here?” Joanna said as she washed the empty bowls in her tiny sink.
It was Shiler’s first New Year’s celebration outside of a prison cell, and I excitedly told her all about the gifts we’d receive—usually a crisp note and perhaps a toy—and how thousands would gather in the city center, where there would be lots of pastries, dancing, and bonfires. The celebrations would stop only when the Revolutionary Guards showed up.
“Why was my Baba crying?” I went to Joanna. “He likes Newroz.”
She pressed my head against her chest. Her breasts were small, unlike Mama’s. “You’ll find out someday,” Joanna said.
“When?” I asked.
“When you’re an adult.” She gently stroked the back of my neck and kissed my cheeks.
I pulled away and used the hem of my blouse to rub her saliva off my face. “I am an adult!”
Joanna laughed, a laughter that bubbled up from her core and erupted like a geyser. The wrinkles around her kind black eyes and her narrow mouth made her look older than Mama, though Baba had said she was younger. Mama had smooth skin, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. No wonder people often assumed Shiler, with her straight black hair and beautiful eyes, was Mama’s daughter and I was Joanna’s.
“Tell me now,” I insisted.
“Something terrible happened when your father was a child . . . I suppose it still makes him sad, especially now that he has children of his own.” She straightened up, having said enough for one day. “I know—how about we pick some flowers to make a bouquet to welcome home Hana and baby Chia?”
Shiler and I whooped in eager agreement, and Joanna covered her hair with a white headscarf, grabbed her handbag, and led us outside. We combed the neighborhood for our bouquet, walking to the park to pick the first spring daffodils and poppies. When we picked the flowers, I felt their pain somewhere inside me; the hurt was very real. But I didn’t say anything to Joanna and Shiler. When we had an armful of flowers, we stopped at a fruit stand, where a toothless man sold us strawberries so fat I could hardly hold them in my fist.
“Strawberries are my favorite fruit,” Shiler said before stuffing her mouth.
“Well, you’re very lucky, darling. Kurdistan has the best strawberries.”
“Mine is pomegranate,” I said.
“It must be in your blood, Leila. Your father is from the pomegranate capital. Halabja.”
“I want to go there! I’d eat a hundred pomegranates.”
“He is planning on taking you when the war is over. Hopefully soon.”
I bit into a strawberry, its juices dripping down my chin, and asked Joanna, “What does your hometown have?”
“Olives. Kobani has delicious olives.” Joanna wiped the corner of my mouth with a handkerchief.
The three of us watched as several butterflies, the first of spring, fluttered haphazardly against a sudden gust of wind, their wings glistening like dew.
“Oh, where were you all these years?” Joanna pressed a hand to her chest, shaking her head in amazement, water glittering in her joyful eyes. “What did eight years of bombing do to you? And to the bees and the dragonflies?”
“I’m a butterfly.” Shiler sprouted imagined wings, her arms moving up and down in the air. “No, actually . . . I don’t want to be a butterfly. I want to be an eagle.”
“Though crows live a thousand years, I want to be an eagle.” Shiler and I both recited the poem Joanna had taught us, in which a crow reveals to an eagle the secret to longevity: Settle for flying low and feeding on debris, and you’ll live a hundred years. “Chon beji sharta nakou chanda beji,” the eagle refuses. How long you lived was irrelevant; what mattered was how you lived.
Joanna led us up the trail near the park, where we saw more and more butterflies. “Remember, girls, you can be anything you want to be. Don’t allow anyone to make you believe otherwise. See, these beauties were simple worms once.”
I thought I’d misheard that. “Worms? Worms can become butterflies?” I asked.
“Only caterpillars,” Shiler corrected her mother. “Not every worm.”
Among the things I did not understand that day was how right Shiler was. Neither of us knew if we were caterpillars or earthworms. Nor did we know if the tight, dark days of hanging upside down was the onset of death or a necessary part of an incredible transformation.
CHIA AND MY parents did not come home that night, so I stayed in the basement. Joanna tucked me in and crawled under the bedsheets, covering her eyes with a headscarf. Shiler snuggled against her. I lay down too, but my mind whirred with thoughts—of Baba’s tears and pomegranates, of whether my baby brother had a song in his heart.
“Can I play with the toys, Auntie?” I asked. Joanna was already softly snoring, so I slid from beneath the covers and played with the horses and elephants Joanna had arranged on a corner shelf. She’d made them in prison out of bread crumbs, beans, and newspaper strips to educate and entertain Shiler. Soon I grew bored and looked around, and my eyes landed on the fat TV set sitting on a chair across from the bed.
When he wasn’t watching the news, Baba sometimes let me sit and watch old films with him. Since I couldn’t understand the words, I invented dialogue in my mind. I pressed the power button on Joanna’s TV.
A nightmarish scene played in an endless loop: people with blistered faces lying on the ground, huddled bodies sheltering against walls. Birds, cows, sheep, cats, dogs—every animal had dropped dead, like they were flowers that had been plucked from the earth.
“—Saddam Hussein gassed Halabja this morning. Within a few minutes, five thousand Kurdish civilians died in an aerial bombardment of mustard gas and nerve agents.”