My Father's Rifle Read online

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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 sarwel3 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.

  His name was Rezgar and we became good friends. We went to fetch water. I didn’t know where the well was, but Rezgar told me we would go to the river, to the banks of the Zab. We meandered through the alleyways of the village, and had just passed the last house when I stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Before me was another woman as tall as Rezgar’s mother, with the same hair color, skin, and blue eyes. She too dressed like a Kurd, but her clothes seemed to me even more beautiful than my mother’s.

  Rezgar had kept walking. I ran to catch up with him, and soon we reached the banks of the Zab. It was a wide river, with a strong current. The water was clear. On the other side, there were Iraqi soldiers. It was the frontier.

  Bill was a tiny village compared to my town of Aqra, but here there was no government official and everything was under the control of General Barzani, the leader of the Kurds. Ever since we had arrived, men had come to fetch my father, and he would disappear for several days with them. He was summoned by the general to intercept and decode Iraqi messages and send instructions in Morse code to our fighters. My father was General Barzani’s Morse code operator. He often used to say to my mother, “Haybet, I’m the general’s personal operator,” smoothing his mustache between his thumb and his index finger.

  We owned two partridges, a wardrobe, and an old Soviet radio that my father listened to all day long. And me, I went back to school, where the teaching was in Kurdish. For my father, my schooling was essential; he wanted me to become a judge or a lawyer. I learned our national anthem: “Ey Raquib, her maye qeumé kurd ziman … Oh my friends, be assured the Kurdish people are alive and nothing can bring down their flag …”

  Thanks to my teacher, Abdul Rahman, and his magic violin, I learned other songs. He was the teacher, headmaster, and janitor of the school.

  Abdul Rahman was a bachelor and he came from Erbil. We students helped him with the cleaning, and in the winter we brought him firewood and cleared the snow from the roof. When there was a good meal at home, we invited him. He was a simple and discreet man.

  On a day when the sun was hot, I came home from school, put down my books, took off my clothes, and ran straight down to the river completely naked with Rezgar. Intoxicated by our race, we behaved like lunatics and jumped in the river. I felt living things lightly touching my skin. All my senses were alert. I popped my head out of the water, eyes wide open. Everything around me was brown and stirring. My head, my hair, my ears, my entire body was covered with wriggling worms: I was bathing in a river of worms. Panicked, I swam for the bank with my eyes closed and came out of the water waving my arms in every direction to get rid of the creatures. Suddenly I heard a big laugh: it was my mother. This was the first time I’d seen her smile since the day my cousin’s body was dragged behind the jeep.

  She looked at me but didn’t come to help me, and went on laughing hysterically. It was April and in the spring worms wiggled up to the topsoil. When the snow thawed, little streams of water rose, loosening clumps of earth filled with worms and carrying them down to the river.

  On the way home we passed another woman with blond hair and blue eyes, and I forgot about the worms. I turned to my mother and asked, “How many are there?”

  “They’re Russian,” she said. She told me that in 1946, when the Kurdish Republic in Iran fell, our leader, Mustafa Barzani, who had been appointed general, had held out against the Iranians to the end, refusing to surrender. But the Iranian army, aided by the Turks and Iraqis, had broken his resistance. He and a few hundred men had no choice but to take refuge in the USSR. They stayed there for many years, and then came to Iraq when the royal family was deposed in 1958. Some of Barzani’s partisans had married Russian women who had been widowed during the Second World War. And so the mystery was solved.

  In early summer 1968, my father spent his days listening to Radio Baghdad. I couldn’t understand Arabic at all, but I could sense that something was happening. In the village, all the men kept their weapons within reach. Two names kept being mentioned on the radio; I knew them by heart: Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein al-Takriti, the two putsch leaders. Word went out that the government was going to attack us. Everyone waited for instructions from our leader, General Barzani. One word, one sign from him, and my father’s Brno was ready to be fired. When the order came, he stood up immediately and grabbed the old Czech rifle. A horse was waiting for him. My father turned to my mother and said, “I’m leaving.” My mother replied, “OK.” I never heard her say any other word when he left.

  Several days went by and nothing happened. Little by little, life returned to normal. As for my father, he came home on a new horse the general had given him, and he had a new Brno. He claimed that his rifle was so precise he could hit a cigarette butt from a distance of eleven hundred yards. He was very proud of his Brno and often said to my mother that with this kind of weapon, he could take on a thousand soldiers and Omar Akha’s entire clan. It was the perfect gun with which to avenge the deaths of seven members of our family.

  I realized that whenever my father was home, General Barzani was absent from his Raizan headquarters; he was visiting his fighters. He didn’t need my father.

  Having cleaned his new rifle, my father started listening to the radio again,
moving around in the one room to get the best reception for the latest news. He was relieved; he heard that the new government did not intend to attack us. The radio even said that the two putsch leaders were not hostile to Kurds.

  Yet one detail worried my father: the name of the new party—the Baath Party, the party of the Arab Socialist Resurrection.

  We still couldn’t go home to our town of Aqra. We were homesick for our town, our house, our relatives, our family graves. As for me, I missed my cousin Cheto and his stunt pigeons, the pomegranates from our orchard, and the bulb that lit up our evenings. When could we retrieve our memories? We believed our leader, General Barzani, when he told us that freedom was close at hand. But as we waited for freedom, a lot of time went by.

  Late one night my father heard a noise behind the door. He pulled out his Brno from under the mattress, got up, and cocked the gun. All of us were awake. The door opened slowly. My father was in firing position, his finger on the trigger. A young man with a wisp of a mustache on his upper lip came through the door. It was Dilovan, my eighteen-year-old brother. The rifle fell from my father’s hands and he threw himself into his son’s arms, overcome with joy. My mother and the rest of us followed suit. We were all crying tears of happiness. We hadn’t seen him in three years.

  We turned up the flame in the oil lamp, and we all sat around him. My mother sought her son’s odor on his neck. He took off his jacket; she took it and raised it to her face. If my father hadn’t reminded her, she would have forgotten to prepare tea.

  When she returned with the tea, she picked up my brother’s jacket again and placed it on her knees. We devoured my brother with our eyes, drank in his every word. He told us about his life as a peshmerga. Like my father, he was convinced that after one more year of struggle and sacrifice we would obtain independence. A sweet thrill ran through our bodies. One more year, and Kurdistan would be ours.