Elegy on Kinderklavier (15 page)

The stretch of highway they'd stopped on was deserted and dark, the asphalt wending its way between the face of a rising bluff on one side and a drop-off on the other, below which the matte-faced waters of a large lake sat low and still in the dark beyond a pale, thin beach of mineral flats. The bulky matatu was angled directly across the narrow road, missing a rear wheel, a single dark figure sitting against its front bumper and smoking.

Sambul began to walk toward him and could feel Soren a few feet behind him. Neither heard what must've been the sound of the other men hefting themselves up over the ridge of the shoulder on the lakeside until their footsteps were right behind them. Sambul turned, looking from their blank faces and weapons to the man who'd been sitting on the matatu, the man who now stood and smiled widely, his eyes flashing in the weak light of the Land Rover.

They marched Sambul and Soren down to the mineral flats, which were stiff and crumbly underfoot. As they walked the tiny crystals of the useless chemicals caught the last light of the moon and seemed to lead their way in a shining path. The small band of men stopped them a hundred yards from the water and pushed the prisoners to their knees. Sambul and Soren were about thirty feet apart and Sambul heard Soren overbalance and fall forward, trying and failing to catch himself with his hands.

The leader of the band came and stood in front of Sambul. He had a thick, old machete in his hand and the steel was greasy and ill kept, the metal revealing itself only at the sharpened edge. They all had guns, but these would not do for what they wanted. The man paced a little, mumbling to himself. Sambul closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose. As if by peristalsis, the furrows of
the night and the water and the far tree line delivered a small, gentle breeze, and on it Sambul could smell the sweet rot of decaying fish. He opened his eyes.

The scrabbling sound of Soren's would-be scramble, of his lunging motion, so weak and slow it seemed not like a lunge at all, was strange in the quiet. Everyone watched him try to grab at the machete-wielding arm of the man who stood in front of Sambul, Soren's grasp so tenuous that it just kept slipping off as he again and again lost balance. The other men were laughing, one of them very loudly, but the man with the machete just seemed confused and annoyed. Every time he raised his arm to do anything, now stepping sideways away from Sambul, Soren grabbed at it with his skeletal fingers. The man shrugged him off easily a few times. Once, Soren got a good enough grasp to pull himself upright and, bizarrely, just for a few seconds, it seemed that the two were dancing. The man threw him down again violently. No one was talking now. As he rasped and rasped at the man's arm, the air filled with the sound of Soren's desperate, labored breathing.

Neither man would ever speak of this incident; not to the passing motorist who, at daybreak, let them use a cell phone, and not to Benny when he picked them up. The Land Rover was gone and they had been spared, without knowing why, and they were silent. Neither did either man speak when they arrived back at the estate, when Soren retired to his room and Sambul filled a jeep with split wood and gasoline, and set to work preparing a funeral pyre for the body, making sure to set it up within sight of the great house. Benny helped Sambul bring the body out and tilt more wood over it.

As it burned, Sambul retreated to the house and watched from the windows with Soren, who was laid up on a daybed. They watched it flare in the distance. Soren was just beginning a new course of
infection and sat gingerly, leaning forward awkwardly to breathe, lifting his eyes to the window. After a few hours it was clear Sambul had made some kind of mistake and he had to go with Benny to put more wood and gasoline on the pyre. As they approached, Sambul could see the dark shape enveloped in light, the body unmade into a skeleton, bits of liquefied fat that had dripped down now viscid among the coals, almost nacreous in the light. It took a long time after that. Eventually, Soren turned away from the window and went to lie still on his bed. In late afternoon, a billow of dark, distended clouds swept over the land, and Sambul waited until he could barely see the outline of the pyre in the rain before going out to stir the ashes, and see what was left.

In the Mosque of Imam Alwani

1.

This was when they lived in the eternal city. It seemed possible that the trio's little corner of the Kurdish spring—the square chimneys of the brick kilns unfurling their columns of black smoke high into the clear light; the sloped red sides of the river, seething with insects in the lambent dawn before the air filled with the clattering gossip of the washerwomen and the collisions of the silver-voiced children worrying its shallows—had, since the beginning of time, continued in just this way, relying on no allegiance other than the residents' curious sense of their own perpetuity. This was when Bajh and Asti and Araz all lived there together, when they were young and the fields and herds still seemed born entirely anew each spring. This was when it was still their city to have.

Bajh, Asti, and Araz were all born at almost exactly the same time, though this was a fact only Araz cared enough to note. Bajh Barzani had been born on his family's long, retreating descent back down from the mountains after the Baathists' Anfal campaign. When the family Barzani turned back, they removed themselves from the hundred thousand others who neither reached Turkey nor made it
back over the Iraqi border, the hundred thousand Kurds who disappeared into the Toros mountain winter or the big pit graves or the pocking of the mortar craters. The Barzanis paused long enough in their defeated return for Bajh to be delivered, and one night a few weeks after he was born and they were on the move again, Bajh's mother went down to the river for water and never came back. When he was a child, Bajh often said the wrong parent had been taken, that a widowed father was unnatural. He also claimed, at least when the three friends were still small, that he dreamed of his mother on the coldest nights of the winter, but neither Araz nor Asti believed him. After their mother's death, Bajh's two older brothers also disappeared, presumably to the ranks of the PPK. Bajh's father took his only remaining son back across the Iraqi border and down through Kurdish territory, skirting the slums outside Dahuk and Erbil before turning west and following a calm, flat little river into farming country and to the hem of the town, where he could see the green fields, riven only by the coruscating face of the river, offered like two upturned palms to the spring light.

Bajh eventually grew into a set of bold, clear features, a face that Araz, only many years later, on a rainy, nostalgic day of university classes, would think to call Romanesque. When he was younger, Araz only had the distinct feeling that Bajh was the twin of a nameless movie star from a bygone era, his well-defined brow and high cheekbones seeming to have come to life straight off one of the ancient cinema posters that had once been pinned to the walls of Uncle Nuri's shop when they were toddlers. Bajh was taller than Araz and Asti, and his providential history was the best known of the three. Araz felt electric in his presence, as if in meeting up on the walk to school or going down to bother Nuri for Cokes or sneaking past the baying herds at night, Araz was merely joining Bajh's ongoing story. But there were other times, walking back from where Bajh and Asti led
their midnight amblings, when Araz felt it was almost celestial the way Bajh, always and ever there with them, was also so often somehow elsewhere, as if romanced by his own occluded future.

It was a surprise, then, when Bajh proved to be particularly inept at school. By the time the three should have together reached the upper levels of the city's grammar school, Bajh had been held back twice and seemed destined to be stuck forever with the “babies” in the first level. Even more distressing, Bajh's academic failure (which seemed also to extend to the hours of after-school religious instruction) was not for lack of effort—if anything, Bajh was the most eager student in class. Araz often watched him from across the large, open room—Bajh's robust brow comically serious, crumpled with concentration, his hand waving high above those of the kids several years his junior—until the ache in Araz's chest got to be too much (Bajh's clear voice, so avid in its incorrect answer, an inexplicable heartbreak) and he had to look away. For Araz, whose great love was knowledge of all kinds, the world seemed to untwine itself everywhere before him, equations or words or poetry or ideas stepping down out of thin air, and he wanted more than anything to be able to give this vision to Bajh, for whom the world in their fourteenth year had only proven itself to be a more opaque mystery than he'd ever imagined. But Araz couldn't give it to him; there was nothing he could do, and they were out of time anyway.

“I gave two sons and a wife for God, and so I said I will give one for school,” Bajh's father ended up saying, melodramatically and without elaboration, sucking his teeth at the table where Araz was making a final attempt to tutor his friend. So Bajh would not be a famed scholar after all; he would not be a leader of men. Instead, he would be a farmer for his father and would supplement his primary job of herding their sheep with the odd shift at the brick kilns. Both duties had increased that spring, and Araz and Asti usually
went after school to find Bajh high in the rising plateau of the fields upriver, where his silhouette slanted unmistakably against the sky as it pearled with rain.

This is what they were doing on an overcast day that spring, their last one all together in the town. The sky was furrowed with restless clouds that moved along on a steady, vernal breeze. The air was cool on Araz's face, and the wind made Asti's dress billow and gesture over her jeans in front of him. The irrigation levee they walked along was surrounded by the crops' waxy green leaves, which fluttered or showed their undersides in the occasional gusts. Together they worked their way up toward where the tiny figure of Bajh was grazing his little dots of gray on a grassy hill.

Araz enjoyed watching Bajh from a distance. There was something about the remove that allowed him to take in Bajh entirely, in one thrilling breath. Sometimes Araz even skipped school, coming out to the grazing grounds and sitting with his workbook in his lap, looking up after each problem to see Bajh whipping at one of the animals with a thin switch or calling to a ewe about the punishments that would surely befall her if she disappeared over the ridge she was presently considering.

Asti was a different matter, though. She seemed only able to believe Bajh was real by evidence of physical proximity. This made some sense to Araz, for whom Asti herself never seemed so real as when she was up close, her vague figure only resolving into calm green-brown eyes and black, lustrous, half-tangling hair at the last minute, when one was close enough to embrace her. To Araz this also felt true of her history in general, from her birth to an unwed mother of unknown origin to the subsequent death of that mother, supposedly in Sulaymaniyah, and through to the improbable adoption by the aunt who'd followed her husband to this town (Asti herself rendered in higher and higher definition out of the soft focus of
her baby fat with each passing year). All of which seemed almost purposefully engineered to deliver Asti, with her thin limbs and angular body and high cheekbones, to this spring afternoon, to the space of light and color that was Bajh's grazing hill, where Araz now watched him receive her. The effect—that of a bodily vision coming suddenly into focus—was the same now, as both Bajh and Araz looked at her and as Bajh laughed and grasped first the back of Asti's neck and then the back of Araz's, their old greeting. Araz thought of his own face in his house's dusky mirror, the puffy flesh of it, as if there were no bones in it at all.

These trips were a sort of retrieval, signaling the end of Bajh's workday (at least on those days when he did not have a shift at the kilns), and he was almost always in a good mood as they walked with him back toward his father's compound on the edge of town. Even the sheep seemed to acquiesce, traveling with relief after a day's heavy business of grazing. Bajh allowed some of them to wade the river at a narrow point, after which they streamed thinly along either bank, occasionally pausing and looking across, calling to each other before trundling ahead, only to stop again and look.

On these trips back, Bajh and Araz often took up a game they sometimes used to play at night, when Asti could not be sprung from the watchful, nervous sleep of her aunt. They did not call it anything, not even “the game,” only ever referring to it via the question “Do you want to play?” as if the final word could mean anything, though Araz knew it only meant one thing, and sometimes, the question was wordless.