From my father's rifle: a childhood in Kurdistan

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Hiner Saleem

My father felt more and more ashamed, and my mother moistened the dry bread and divided the pieces among us. My father broke his bread into six pieces and gave each of us a piece, claiming he had a stomachache and would just drink a cup of tea and smoke a cigarette. After this meal, he started fishing again, with his line a few yards away from his feet. "Cast it farther out," said my mother. "Very good, but if the hook gets caught in the rocks, who'll go fetch it?" "Me," I said, raising my head. He looked at me, surprised: he didn't know I had learned to swim with my pal Rezgar. He wanted me to demonstrate my swimming skills at the edge of the river. I undressed and threw myself into the stream, stark naked. "Come back!" cried my father. It was dangerous, but I was cocksure.

Then I heard them all scream. The world collapsed around us; the planes were bombing the river with napalm, and huge columns of water soared up into the sky wherever the bombs fell. I started swimming like a maniac toward the riverbank, where I could see my whole family, looking panicked, reaching out their arms to me. My father unwound his long belt, put one end in my mother's hand, threw the other out to me, and jumped into the water. The bombs went on falling and I came out without his help. My mother, tugging on the belt, now tried to pull my father to the riverbank, but the powerful current made it hard. We all set about helping her, hauling our father out of the water like a big dead fish. We looked at him standing on the riverbank, dripping wet. In tears, we burst out laughing and retreated to our cave.

Before long we heard only the sound of the river, so my father went out to look at the sky and dry himself off in the sun. Moments later he came back, completely naked, his arms loaded with fish, which he threw down on the ground. Incredulous, we rushed to look at them. They were all mangled. We could easily imagine that we had been within a hairsbreadth of suffering the same fate as the fish. "Fix them, Haybet," said my father, turning to go out. My father's thin silhouette was outlined against the light at the entrance to the cave. This was the first time I'd seen my father naked. We set about preparing the fish. We all realized that if we wanted to eat, the airplanes would have to return every day.

My father always kept telling us, "In a year, our country will be liberated." And the years went by. Then we began to believe it. The two putsch leaders in Baghdad, al-Bakr and Saddam, spoke of peace, and the planes stopped coming. My brother Dilovan returned from the hills. My mother had found him a wife--Dijla, Barakat's daughter. My brother had never set eyes on Dijla. Barakat had agreed to the marriage on one condition: that we give our sister Taman to his son Goran. My sister had never set eyes on Goran. This was of no consequence--my mother had seen all four, and the marriages were celebrated.

My parents were proud of their new daughter-in law. She had an uncle who had followed General Barzani to the Soviet Union in 1946, and that was enough for them. My parents gave the young bride a gift of gold earrings. My mother had a small jewelry case in which she hoarded our entire treasure: several rings, necklaces, a solid gold bracelet, and a cake of soap, the last one purchased in our town of Aqra. It was a deluxe soap called Asfanik. Dijla, our young sister-in-law, couldn't pronounce Asfanik; she'd say Afsanik. Whenever she annoyed us, my little sister and me, we'd tease her by asking, "What soap is it?" She'd mispronounce it and we'd make fun of her, the village girl. But Dijla had a great deal of personality. She was intelligent, even though she didn't know how to read and write, which very much bothered my brother. The day after their marriage, my brother came home with some paper and a pencil. He closeted himself with his wife in the one room of our house and taught her the alphabet. Alphabet or no, we had to stay outside; the young married couple was not to be disturbed. When he left for the mountains again, he gave her a pile of homework as an assignment, and that was how my sister-in-law learned to read. And we children, we thought about our sister Taman, whom we had exchanged for Dijla: she knew how to read and write.