Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again (10 page)

            “I will beseech, beg and
pray to Allah that this child will have a long life,” he said without looking
at her.  “I will ask that he grows up to be a hero among heroes and honor the
name of Sallah that you will bestow on him.”

            He had glanced at her again
before he departed.

            Naziah gathered up her new
clothes and moved back into her parents’ home to await the birth of her child.

            When she gave birth to the
child, she called him Sallah, as his respected father requested.

She could not have known how Sallah’s words had
reached the heavens or the extent to which his prayers would be answered but
not in her lifetime.

            Tough times befell the
region where they lived.

The thunder of cannon fire echoed
endlessly, together with the war cries of the Kurds that were heard everywhere
and reverberated in their houses.  The battles spread to the cities around Wan
and the warriors could be seen in the distance as they descended from the
surrounding mountains and clashed with the forces of the Turkish army.

            One day, Naziah and her
mother traveled to the big city, to Teheran, to purchase equipment for the
infant.  The double decker bus reached the station and they climbed to the top
deck.  Naziah wrapped her infant Sallah and held him close to her heart.

            They rode for about ten
minutes in silence when the driver suddenly stopped the bus in the middle of
the road.

            Naziah pointed at places
where fire and smoke could be seen and they heard the cries of enraged crowds. 
All around, the rioters chanted as they torched everything in sight.

            Groups of people, waving
smoldering rags and burning sticks could be seen through the bus windows.  They
yelled slogans about the Kurds’ right to independence and against the Turkish
army and crowded in front of them on the road and surrounded their bus.  The
driver opened the door and fled, leaving his passengers at the mercy of the
Kurdish rebels.

            The terrified passengers
began to escape, some of them jumped off the top deck of the bus and fled in
all directions, screaming in fear and within two minutes the bus was empty. 
Naziah climbed down the interior stairs clutching her baby in one arm and Andar,
her mother, with the other.  Their legs trembling, they ran through the open
spaces, to the fields in front of them, among the masses of people fleeing for
their lives.

            Two huge trucks suddenly
arrived and stopped near the empty bus. Turkish soldiers, wearing military
fatigues,  jumped off the trucks and, some standing and others kneeling, began
firing indiscriminately at the backs of the fleeing crowd.

            The shots echoed for a few
minutes until all at once there was dead silence.  Only smoke and fire and the
sickly sweet smell of burning flesh rose above the many corpses.

            Night
fell on the fields, roads and paths that were covered with thousands of bodies.

* * * 

The first two front teeth appeared in
Karma’s mouth.  Nana Kahit tapped them with a spoon and ululated joyously.  She
held him up lovingly and laughed with happiness out of her toothless mouth.

            Karma grew up on the knees
of his Nana in the meager tent, one of tens of thousands of Kurdish tents. 

When he learned to talk, she would
embrace him in her skinny arms and tell him her life story.  She chattered away
in her language and told him about heroic people, who struggled and were killed
to gain independence for the millions of Kurds who were dispersed all around.

            “Where do they live?” he
asked and she sucked her lips and threw her arms in the air excitedly.  The flabby
skin that shook on her arms told of her advancing age, but her mind was sharp
and clear.

            “The ancient country where
we all lived together was called Kurdistan, which means “The Land of the Kurds,”
she explained lovingly to the child.  “Now, the Kurds are dispersed among four
countries.”

            He looked at her with
adoration and she continued telling him the story of her tormented people.

            “People invented borders and
cut us in four.  They divided Kurdish homeland between several countries and
never recognized it as an independent state.”

            The child did not understand
why his Nana was crying, but he grasped that there was something important in
what she was saying.

            When
Karma grew up, he learned that Kurds were divided into more than four parts. 
Millions of Kurds lived in North Iraq, many others dwelt in the mountainous
region of Western Iran and millions more were to be found in Northern Syria and
Armenia.  After many years, he discovered that the vast majority of his people
lived in the Eastern Mountains of Turkey.  Here, in Turkey, young Karma also
lived a neglected and meager existence in the tents of his adopted family,
among thousands of other shabby tents.

            No one could have known or
seen where the vast sea of tents ended.  They were spread out over tracts of
barren rocky wasteland.  The tents began from a flat plain, crossed mountain
ranges then rose and fell according to the valleys
and hills in the
terrain as far as the eye could see.

            The orphaned boy grew up to
become a tall and handsome youth. His eyes glowed with the amber hue he
inherited from his mother Naziah, a mother he would never know. All the
dwellers of the land of the tents were familiar with the story of how he had
been found in the mass killing field. 

Even the children knew and almost every
day they would encircle his Nana Kahit’s tent and the regular ceremony would
commence.  The children would begin clapping their hands rhythmically, wordlessly
at first, with their fingers spread out.  Then they distance themselves by
several tents and from there they would peep out and sing on top of their
voices to the beat of their clapping.  They sang a song that a ten-year-old
boy, Alai, had composed.

Here lives the tit sucker of Naziah
the whore

Left abandoned, neglected and wanted
no more,

Karma is the devil you must always
ignore,

He’s the orphan bastard of Naziah, the whore.

In
time, this song and the hand-clapping ritual became a really offensive ceremony
and Karma despised it.  When the children would assemble outside the tent, clap
hands and sing that disgusting song, Karma would draw open the tent flap and
stand opposite them in a threatening pose, with his hands on his hips.  They
would disperse with squeals of enjoyment, watching how Alai remained facing him
courageously before running up to him to kick him, push him and then run off to
join the fleeing children.

            It
carried on like that till the day Karma decided to outwit them.

            That day, he heard the
loathsome song but, he did not approach the opening of the tent.  The song grew
louder outside and the clapping hands beat their rhythm while Karma waited,
held himself back and then slowly moved the tent flap aside and, as usual,
stood at the entrance.  All at once, he burst out and shoved Alai hard and saw
him fall backward on the ground.  Alai got up, joined the fleeing children as
he ran with a limp and Karma knew he was weeping.

            This was followed by several
peaceful days without the song, the clapping of hands or mocking laughter. 
When Karma went out of the tent, he looked at the children, who kept their
distance from him, and he enjoyed seeing the awe and respect, reflected in their
eyes.  The experience taught him a powerful lesson. 

The muddy waters of the river in which
fish raced around flowed a short way from there.  Karma would run there every
day, early in the morning, when the sun had only just risen, hesitantly.  He
bathed in the water and played happily, trying to grab hold of the fish around
him.  In time, he learned how to catch them in his hands and throw them on to
the river bank with a quick flick of his wrist.  He watched them flapping
around, flipping back on the reeds and gasping for air until they stopped convulsing
and lay still.  He gathered the fish and brought them to Nazim, his adopted
mother, to prepare a meal for all of them.

            In the afternoons, he would
sit on the mat, lean on Nana Kahit and listen to her tales.  He would relax at
the sound of her voice and grow languid from her caresses.

            “Many years ago,” his Nana
told him, “we did not live in one place.  We would wander from place to place
with our donkeys and camel and would only stop in a place where we found some
grass or a well to water our herds.”

            “Did you never remain in one
place?” he inquired.

            “Yes, when I was almost your
age, I heard my parents discussing the fact that people had created political
borders and concentrated us in the exact place we had reached.  And there, we
remained.”

            She hummed a song from her
toothless mouth and stroked his silky hair.

            “My Dear Karma, I saw Kurds
who live in mud huts and not tents.”

            “What are mud huts?”

            “They build walls from clay
soil and they protect people from the wind and the rain.  Many people, who
lived in adobe huts, created permanent communities.”

            “We’re called “Mountain
People,” she told him, “we are always surrounded by mountains, sand
,
and
desert.”

            Karma understood very well
that the nickname referred to their homeland.  All he ever saw around him were rocks,
mountain ranges, and endless barren drylands.  He was accustomed to places
where nothing grows out of the earth and he silently observed how they dug
trenches in the sand and buried people they brought from other locations in
them.  He never noticed any inscriptions marked on the graves and took it for
granted that this was the norm.

            Scrawny cattle grazed close
by and between the tents. Their pelvic bones stuck out
under their emaciated and dirty skin. 
They would roam around, grazing on meager bushes that managed to survive and
push up stalks and leaves from the blighted soil or crouched down and chewed
the cud.  Karma stared at the saliva dripping from their mouths and recoiled in
disgust.

            Three wasted cows like these
were attached to their tent and his father urged him to herd them to pastures
where broad-bladed tender leaves grew that were easier to chew.  The father
knew that these greener leaves would fill their udders and they would produce
fatty yellow milk for the babies that were added to the family each year.  Nana
Kahit noticed how much Karma despised those animals and she came to his aid.  She
would have him join her, asking that he come and help her with her daily
chores.

            There, in the distance, in some
space cleared amid the sea of tents, Nana and other women of her age cultivated
tracts of land. They planted seedlings of wheat and barley over the length and
breadth of many dunams. Karma loved going there.  Fascinated, he would watch
the vast sea of ears of wheat undulating in the wind.

On another tract of land, there were scraggy
fruit trees and broad-leaved tobacco bushes.  Karma would join his mother,
Nazim, there.  She taught him how to thread the green leaves on long thin wires
to dry.  Later, they would come and observe how the green leaves changed their
color to orange, yellow, then to brown.

            No one knew Nana Kahit’s age
and it was likely that even she did not know the date of her birth.  So, when
she did not get up one morning, his mother Nazim knew that she had lived fifty
or perhaps fifty-five years.

            “She lived long enough.”
Karma heard her remark and understood later that his grandmother had outlived
many women in his village and had actually reached a ripe old age.

            Karma was almost fourteen
when they buried his beloved grandmother, but her stories were deeply ingrained
in his adolescent soul.  It was she, who gave him the will to join in the
struggle for his people’s independence a few years later.  Nevertheless, he
remembered, as if sharing a secret, she had added something that became an
integral part of his personality:

            “Always outwit them, my
child.  Don’t confront the enemy directly, rather surprise him.  Hide and be
furtive because that is the only way you will succeed.”

            They lived in the constant shadow
of war and Karma noticed the absence of many men who went out to join the rebel
groups and never returned to the tents.  Later, he would see their children
wandering around the other tents where the men had returned to their families.

At night, when he lay beside his siblings,
there were times when he saw the bent figure of his father entering the tent
and heard sounds from his mother’s bed.  Before he fell asleep, he heard the
moans and grunts and saw the dark shape moving over the figure of his submissive
mother.  He was angry with him but said nothing.

            Once, after too many days,
Abdul, his father, did not return and Karma found he was longing for the shadow
of his slim figure.  Karma looked at the other men, who had left with his
father but later returned to the tents.  He thought how much he would have preferred
to continue hearing the nightly cries, the sighs, and the groans, that he had once
detested so much.

            Many days later he saw his
mother crying.  At first she only cried at night, in secret and he knew that
she was holding back and swallowing her sobs.  Then he found her wiping her
face openly.  He knew that perhaps she didn’t miss his father and afterward
understood that she was crying because she couldn’t get enough wheat to grind
into flour to feed her nine children.

            Karma was the third child
and was already sufficiently mature to come to terms with hunger and the
rumblings of his empty stomach.  He looked at his hungry little brothers, whose
stomachs were swollen because of their never ending malnutrition and whose legs
were like thin sticks.

            His heart went out to his
emaciated little five-year-old sister, Kahil.  Too weak to stand, she was at
death’s door for many days.  He looked at her helplessly and all he could do
was to wave his hand all the time to drive away the flies that bothered her.

            Like Nana Kahit, Kahil also
did not get up one day.

            “Come here, Karma,” his
mother requested, “Get some cloth to cover her.”

            He went outside, searched
around and found a large section torn from an abandoned tent and pulled it
after him to the tent.  Together, they rolled her in the canvas he brought and
Karma swung her up onto his shoulder. 

It
was mid-day and they proceeded slowly as he bore her wasted body to the distant
fields, behind the cultivated tracts.  Here, they laid her wrapped body on the
ground and using sticks and broken branches, he and his two brothers dug her
grave.  They buried her and covered her tiny body with sand.

            Karma knelt on his scrawny
knees beside the mound of sand and stones that covered Kahil’s grave and did
not rise.  His mother turned to go back to the tents, pulling the hands of her
two little daughters.  His brothers and sisters moved to join her and he stared
silently at them till the last of his siblings disappeared behind the distant
rows of tents.

            According to his sense of
logic, Karma believed that what he was about to do would be the greatest help
he could offer his mother. Without him, it would be easier for her to feed his
brothers and younger sisters.  He was sure that she would come to terms with
his absence and understand the considerations that led to his decision.

            When they were all out of
sight, Karma lay down on his back.  He gazed at the mound of sand and stones on
top of little Kahil’s grave and noticed that their color was different from
those in the area.  A thin stalk pushed its way up beside a small mound and
Karma picked it and absent-mindedly began chewing it.  It was bitter and he twisted
his lips and spat it out.  He glanced around at the blue skies, the distant
brown mountains and then got up, shook the sand from his clothes and began to
walk.  After a few paces, he stopped again and looked back, wondering and
somewhat hesitant and finally decided.  He spat on the sand again and continued
on his way.