From my father's rifle: a childhood in Kurdistan

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Hiner Saleem

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 qeume 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 wriggled 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 staved 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 with in 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.