Chia looked up at me. I knew my hands hadn’t blocked the sounds, but I didn’t know what else to do.
“Where do I go? You really don’t know where I go, do you? Eight years. Eight damn years of war.” Mama’s voice came up through the door. “I had to stand in long lines for hours to get a few kilos of rice or sugar for you and your children. Stood there and fought with fuckers who cut in the line. See these blue veins in my leg? See?” I imagined her pulling up the hem of her housedress. “That’s the result. If I don’t go to physiotherapy every evening, I can’t walk. What the hell do you do out all day, sucking dicks and making no money?”
Baba roared. “Shut that fat mouth of yours, you filthy bitch. I’ll set those shelves on fire and burn this entire house to the ground.”
The image of our house engulfed in flames shook me with terror. I found some headphones and with trembling hands put them over Chia’s ears, plugged them into the old black radio, and turned it on. I turned up the volume, held my hands over my own ears, and pressed tightly. Chia laughed. I wasn’t sure what he found so hilarious—my face or something on the radio.
I giggled with Chia to distract myself. Something hit the wall. A glass or some china shattered. Odd cramps panged in my belly. Chia looked cuter than ever in his blue-and-white-striped shirt and pants. My laughs were loud and ugly, but my mouth did not look too big to him, so I grinned freely when we were alone together. I loved him even more because of those giggles, but when I pinched his cheeks, chubby and red, I realized his temperature was too high. I knew he hadn’t sat with his head near the heater that evening. Rising alarm made me pinch harder, thinking that maybe I could just squeeze the fever away. But tears formed in his eyes. I bit my lip. I was a terrible sister, leaving red marks on his cheeks.
Oh, God, please don’t make me vomit blood in punishment.
I put my index fingers in the corners of my mouth and drew my lips wide, squinting and sticking out my tongue, making a dreadful face. Chia laughed, and the tears rolled down. I kissed his wet cheeks, then got down on all fours and told him to hold the radio in his hands and jump on my back. “I’m too big for you,” he said.
“Don’t worry. Come on.”
Baba roared in fury. Mama screamed words of hatred and contempt. I neighed and barked and crawled around for Chia, who felt heavy. The headphones were still over his ears. He fell off my back and rolled onto the floor, laughing uncontrollably.
Between my legs was unusually wet. I touched my pants and gaped at the rust-colored blood that had seeped through my panties, at my shaking fingers and sweaty palm.
I colored the flowers in my drawing with my red fingertip.
Chapter Four
FLOWERS WERE BLOOMING; green shoots that had appeared in April and May sprang up, straightening, opening. Walking toward Mama’s office on my last day of high school, I daydreamed about attending university, having my own job, buying my first camera, making films. I gulped lungfuls of aromatic black locust and stuffed my mouth with fresh white mulberries picked by boys who freely climbed the trees and shared with passersby. The trees grew indiscriminately in front of most houses, grand and dilapidated alike.
Mama was still busy with her last client, and I had to wait in the counseling office. The walls were painted gray, and the window faced the main downtown intersection where the sidewalks were too narrow for the rush of pedestrians. I perched on the swivel chair by the brown desk where a stack of papers sat beneath a dove-shaped paperweight. Sketching whirling dervishes, I thought about what Shiler had shown me the week before. I rarely saw Shiler since she had dropped out of school—Joanna, now the most sought-after tailor in town, frequently took her on road trips across Kurdistan, visiting ancient sites, listening to folk myths from the various parts of the region, watching all different kinds of rituals, and on nice days, climbing hills to see red-legged partridges—so I’d jumped at the chance to go with her to the khaneqa, the Sufi’s lodge. I could still feel the rhythm of the daf, see the dervishes in a circle, arms locked, until one of them broke the human chain and began to spin in ecstasy.
Mama tucked a bunch of files under her arm after she led her unusually big client out of the office. She wanted to walk despite her arthritis, using my body as a crutch.
“We should get you a cane.” I took the files from her as we pushed through streets buzzing with people.
“I’m not that old.” She winced and panted.
“Your client looked like a man in hijab,” I said.
“She’s a hermaphrodite, the most amazing person. Completely unique.”
I was about to ask what a hermaphrodite was when a familiar voice rose above the noise of the crowded street. I recognized his husky timbre before turning to see his face. Baba was leaning against a pole, the sole of one foot flat against it, wearing a black cap two sizes too big for him, rows of prayer beads hanging from his arm, calling out, “Only twenty tomans.”
Instinctively I called out to him, but when he quickly turned his back to me, I shut up. Mama kept walking as if she were oblivious to his presence.
“These files are heavy. My schoolbag is heavy. You are heavy. I can’t walk anymore,” I barked. We got on a bus and sat next to each other on torn synthetic leather in uncomfortable silence.
“How’s your leg?” I finally asked.
She looked at me sideways. “Since when are you interested in me?”
It was a fair question, but it didn’t soften the blow of her accusation.
“Mama, I’d like to know. There’s so much I want to understand about you.”
“Really?” She turned to me. “What do you want to know?”
I knew she and Baba had met at Tehran University when they were both students and that being among the few Kurds there meant they shared a common historical pain. But it was hard to imagine what had drawn them together. “What did you like about Baba when you first met him?”
Mama said she had found Baba charismatic and intelligent, a knowledgable man of few words, passionate about justice, charming in his down-to-earth manner. She had liked his warm hands, deep dark eyes, his cherubic face that betrayed little emotion.
Baba’s mother had come to live with the newlyweds in Tehran, and Mama had thought it was his mother’s fault that he soon lost interest in his new bride. Mama had come to understand that his mother was an anchor in his life only after the woman passed away and he became unmoored. It had gotten worse still after Baba was released from prison; Mama had felt neglected, merely another piece of furniture in their home. “He would worship my eyes one moment, and in the next moment, he’d act as if I were invisible.”
Perhaps that’s why she picked fights, I thought; she needed to be seen. The bus had grown crowded and noisy, the evening commute at its height, so I stopped asking questions.
When we got home, Mama propped up her swollen legs against the wall, which was stained with footprints from years of this ritual.
“But you two loved each other at one point. What happened? Or do you think it wasn’t love from the start?”
“You’re too young to understand.” Her mouth twisted out of shape.
“Mama, I’m eighteen.”
She closed her eyes. Her chest heaved up. “He liked to kiss my eyes. Only my eyes. I couldn’t understand why.” A tear rolled down. “Turns out the love of his life had hazel eyes like mine. She had died before we met, but he could never get over her. But I was in love. Do you know what that means?”