People had fallen on the spot while trying in vain to run away from the chemical attack, trying to protect a loved one, now also dead: a baby, a child, a spouse. They had died with open eyes, open mouths. Flies had nested on their lips and burned cheeks. Their flesh had turned black. There had been no protection from the murky yellow clouds of nerve gas and deadly toxins, not for the civilians.
A tremor of fear sprang up inside my belly, making me shiver uncontrollably, but I was rooted to the spot, staring at the screen. A woman had choked to death while fixing a helicopter toy for a small boy. A girl had died grinning, as if cut off in the middle of a mischievous joke. Some seemed to have perished slowly. A woman was twisted like a rope, vomit and blood on her clothes, her face crumpled with anguish. Thousands and thousands of bodies. Others had collapsed on the outskirts of town, trying to cross the mountains, running to imagined safety.
“Everybody’s dead!” I shook Joanna, my tears soaking her blanket. She startled awake, squinted at the television for a few seconds, jumped up to turn it off, and held me tight under the bedsheets. Shiler still slept soundly beside her.
“Are we going to die, Auntie?”
“Hush, my darling. You’re safe. You are safe with me.” Joanna patted my hair, dried my tears.
“Baba said TVs are liars.”
“Yes, they are. Yes, they are.” She gently rubbed my back, singing a lullaby: Ly-ly-ly . . . Her velvety voice gradually soothed me to sleep.
That night I dreamed that the butterflies I had seen earlier arrived in Halabja, only to be gassed to death. Millions of them lay dead on top of each other, a hill of multicolored wings.
Chapter Two
THE STARS GLITTERED on the long skirt of the sky, indifferent to the knots that snarled inside Chia and me as we waited on the staircase outside the kindergarten, waited to be missed, to be remembered, to be picked up. We remained in the yard, bored and cold, bundled up, peering at the asphalt, leaning against each other’s arms. Chia was in the glorious kingdom that four-year-olds saunter in, drumming on a paper cup and muttering a song. I smiled to myself at the silly lyrics, but they couldn’t ease the deep pit in my stomach.
Shiler stuck her tongue out at me when her mother arrived to take her home. I held my fists before my face, pretending they were gripping prison bars and that I was crying behind them. Shiler whipped her head away to feign indifference, but I knew that being called a prison child needled her. Kids also mocked her for her chubbiness, but she didn’t care about that. Shiler wiggled her bum at me in revenge.
A week after Chia was born and Mama came home from the hospital, she had forced Joanna and Shiler to leave our basement because she said she couldn’t trust the “ghahba”—whore. They’d left quietly, despite my father’s attempt to placate Mama and to get Joanna to ignore “the bitch.” I had decided it was better to be a whore like Joanna than a bitch, if I had to be one or the other when I grew up. I’d begged Mama to reverse her decision, but she had banned me from speaking to Shiler or her mother ever again. When we began school, Mama couldn’t keep me from sitting with Shiler in class, but I had to steal small moments to remind Joanna that I still loved her, that it wasn’t my fault Mama had cast them out.
I played with the spotted green ribbon tied on my short pigtail beneath my headscarf. Now that my corkscrew-curly hair, which grew upward instead of down toward my shoulders, had finally grown long enough to be tied back, I was told that I had to hide it under a headscarf. God would monitor my every move from now on, because I had turned nine, and He would hang me by my hair in hell if I failed to cover it.
“Chia, if God doesn’t start punishing girls until grade three, why did I have to wear hijab starting in grade one?” The manteau—the loose, long coat I’d been wearing for two years already—was heavy and uncomfortable, making it hard to run around and play. The compulsory hijab was a shackle on my childhood. “Why can’t our headscarves at least be a happy color? Like green?” We girls got into trouble if we wore colorful shoes or socks, if our ponytails made bumps under our scarves, or if our headscarves were not long enough to cover the bosoms we hadn’t developed yet.
“Five, six, nine . . .” My brother’s almond-shaped hazel eyes—everybody called him Chawkal, “Bright Eyes,” and loved him because of them—looked up toward the twilit sky as he counted the stars.
“And what’s wrong with laughing, Chia? Why shouldn’t good girls laugh?”
My brother didn’t have to cover his hair or body—not when he turned nine, not ever. During the day, every chance I got, I peeked into Chia’s kindergarten, which was attached to my school. I made sure that he was happy, that no one was picking on him, because if someone did, I’d hit them later. All the kids knew this.
It grew colder and darker, and there was still no sign of my parents. The school’s hallways had emptied; it was the first time I’d seen them without their usual bustle of students and teachers. The principal beckoned us inside to wait in her office. We sat beside the alphabetized filing cabinet while she balanced on the edge of her plastic chair and shuffled the papers in our file. She made a noise of exasperation. “Strange! No home phone number, and there’s no answer at the emergency phone number either.” She turned to hide her half-pitying glance.
“I know their father, Dr. Alan Saman.” The janitor emerged in the doorway of the principal’s office from the half-lit hallway, carrying a large bin of wastepaper. He was a short, skinny man with a large eagle nose; an enormous black mustache obscured nearly the rest of his face. “I can drive them home.”
After a moment’s consideration, the principal, also eager to leave, agreed. We followed the janitor out to the parking lot, and he hoisted us into the bed of his small gray truck that was missing its front bumper. “Barkholakan, don’t forget to knock on the window when you recognize your house or the neighborhood. Sit tight.” I liked that he called us little lambs.
But that night every dark narrow street we went down, paved or cobbled, seemed unfamiliar. The windows of nearly every house we passed were illuminated, and silhouettes moved behind curtains as families ate dinner together or watched television. I held Chia’s cold hand in mine and made up stories for him, visualizing scenes and directing actors in my head.
“There was a girl whose wishes would come true. Instantly. And she wished her younger brother would be very strong, and all of a sudden he became super-gigantic.” Chia looked at me eagerly. “Another time, she saw a wolf creeping up on her brother from behind. ‘Die, bastard!’ she cried. When she and her brother went to check the wolf’s corpse, they saw their father lying on his stomach beneath the wolf.”
“Nooo!”
I was now reporting one of my recurrent nightmares. “His back had scratches from the wolf’s claws all over it, and—”
Chia peeled his pudgy little hand out of mine and hid his eyes behind it.
“—and he was unconscious, and the wolf’s blood was dripping over his face and running down his nose, and his mouth was open wide, and—”
“Leila!” he called, his eyes still covered.
“What?”
“Don’t kill Baba, Leila! Please don’t kill him.” The car lurched suddenly as it hit a pothole, shoving us forward in our makeshift seats.