Seeds of Kirkuk

Chapter One: The Tree in the Courtyard

The wind came up out of the oil fields every afternoon at four, and it always smelled faintly of burning.

Soraya Tabari had breathed that smell since the day she was born, and she no longer thought of it as unpleasant. It was simply the smell of Kirkuk in April: hot brick, dust off the citadel mound, diesel from the buses on the main road, and underneath everything the sweetish tang of naphtha from the flares that had burned north of the city for longer than anyone's grandmother could remember. When she was small, her father had told her that the flames out there had been burning since before the Prophet, since before the Persians, since before anyone had bothered to write things down. She had believed him then. She still half believed him now, at fourteen, sitting cross-legged on a straw mat in her own courtyard with her geometry book open on her knees and her attention nowhere near it.

The courtyard was small — nine paces by seven, she had measured it once — with a brick floor worn smooth in a path from the door to the water tap. A grape vine went along the north wall on a frame her father had built badly and repaired twice. And in the corner, in a square of bare earth that everyone in the family stepped around without thinking, stood the pomegranate tree.

It was not a large tree. It was older than her mother and shorter than her father, twisted at the base, with bark like grey rope and a habit of throwing out one enormous branch toward the kitchen window as if it wanted to see inside. In April it flowered. The blossoms were the exact red of a wound, small and waxy, and they dropped onto the bricks and stained them, and every year Grandmother Nazdar refused to let anyone sweep them up until they had turned brown.

"Because," she said, whenever she was asked, "it is not dirt. It is the tree talking."

Soraya had heard that answer perhaps a hundred times. She was at an age where she had begun to notice which of her family's sayings were wisdom and which were only habit, and she had not yet decided about this one.

Across the mat from her, Leila Karimi was chewing the end of her pencil and pretending to work. Leila lived four doors down, in the tall narrow house with the blue shutters, where her father sold cloth and her mother spoke Persian to the neighbors in a soft, apologetic voice that made everyone like her instantly. Leila had been Soraya's friend since they were six years old and had fought over a wooden spinning top in the alley, and their friendship had the settled, unquestioned quality of a wall.

"You've written four words," Soraya said.

"They're good words."

"Read them."

"No." Leila closed the notebook against her chest. It was a cheap thing, cardboard covers, blue-lined pages, bought from the stationer's near the bridge, and she guarded it like a bank. "They're not finished. When a poem isn't finished it's like a person with no skin."

"That's disgusting."

"That's poetry."

Soraya laughed and lay back on the mat with her arms behind her head. Above her the branches made a net against a sky the color of weak tea. "When I'm a doctor," she said, "I'm going to have a room with a proper desk in it. Not a mat. And a lamp with a green glass shade."

"You've decided about the lamp before you've decided about the medicine."

"I've decided about the medicine. I decided when I was nine." She had, too. She could still remember it exactly: the neighbor's baby with the fever, the frantic night, the doctor arriving from the hospital in a grey jacket with his sleeves rolled, and the astonishing calm that had come into the room with him. Not magic. Knowledge. She had wanted it the way other girls wanted gold bracelets. "Dr. Soraya Tabari. Pediatrics. And you will come to my clinic and read your poems to the children while they wait."

"I'll be in Beirut," Leila said serenely. "Or Paris."

"You'll be here, reading to snotty children."

"Beirut."

From the kitchen doorway came the steady clack and thump of the loom.

Soraya's mother, Farah, worked at it four or five hours a day, more in winter. The loom took up a third of the back room, a great upright frame of poplar wood that had come from Farah's own mother's house, its side beams polished dark by two generations of hands. Farah wove kilims — flat, tight, hard-wearing rugs in madder red and walnut brown and the deep indigo she bought from a man who came through twice a year from the east. Traders bought them. Sometimes they went to Baghdad, sometimes further. Once, a Frenchman had bought two and Farah had spoken of it for a month.

What the traders did not always notice, and what Soraya had known since she was old enough to be trusted, was that her mother's rugs were not only rugs.

"Come here," Farah said one evening that spring, when the light was going amber and the call to prayer had just finished. She had a length of the new kilim spread over her knees. "What is this?"

"A ram's horn."

"And this?"

"Running water."

"And this, here, this little figure with her hands on her hips?"

"A woman."

"A mother," Farah corrected. "Fertility, protection. And this?" Her finger, roughened at the tip from thirty years of wool, stopped on a small hooked shape that Soraya had never asked about.

"I don't know that one."

"No. You wouldn't. My mother's mother put it in her rugs, and her village is not there anymore." Farah said it without any weight at all, the way she might have said the shop had run out of sugar. "It means: we were here. That is all. It is a small word. But if you write a small word ten thousand times in wool, it becomes a book, and nobody can burn a book they can't read."

Soraya looked at the hook. It was nothing. It was a bump in a border pattern, the sort of thing your eye slid over.

"Does Baba know?" she asked.

"Your father," said Farah, "reads Kurdish out loud to thirty boys a day. He does not need my hooks."

Nazar Tabari came home at half past five with his jacket over his arm and chalk dust on his cuff, as he did six days a week. He taught literature at the boys' secondary school two streets from the market, and he taught it, in those years, in two languages, because that was still permitted, though it was permitted the way a man is permitted to walk on ice.

He was a tall, soft-voiced man with a moustache he trimmed too carefully and a hairline in retreat. His great extravagance was books. They were stacked on the stairs, under the bed, in a cupboard in the courtyard that had been built for onions. He brought home two more that evening, tied with string, and he put them on the table with the air of a man setting down a sleeping child.

"Ahmad Khani," he told Soraya, unwrapping them. "Printed in Beirut. Do you know how long I have waited?"

"You have that one."

"I have a bad copy. This one has notes." He turned the pages with his thumb, quick and greedy. "When you are older you will read it and you will tell me it is old-fashioned, and I will be too dead to argue with you."

"Baba."

"It is a love story," he said, "and also it is not. He wrote it three hundred years ago and he was complaining about exactly the things I complain about. That is either very comforting or very depressing. I have never decided."

Grandmother Nazdar snorted from her cushion by the wall. She was seventy-three that year, small and dry and upright as a nail, and she had opinions about books, which were that they were fine for men who did not have to cook.

"Read it to me later," she said. "Slowly. Your voice runs downhill."

That was the house. Six rooms around a courtyard, a tap that ran brown for the first ten seconds every morning, a kitchen with a blackened ceiling, a flat roof where the family slept in July and August under damp sheets, and above the street door, carved into a lintel of pale stone by a mason whose name nobody now remembered, seven words in Kurdish.

Soraya had read them every day of her life without reading them, the way you do not hear your own name in your own house.

A tree remembers the hand that planted it.

Nazdar had chosen it. Nazdar had also planted the tree, in 1936, three weeks after she arrived in Kirkuk with a bundle and a husband and no shoes worth the name. Soraya knew the outline of that story — a village in the north, soldiers, a march, a winter — but only the outline, because the old woman told it the way she told everything, in fragments, when she felt like it, and usually to make a point about something else entirely.

"Why a pomegranate?" Soraya asked her once. "You could have planted anything."

"Because it is stubborn," Nazdar said. "You can cut it to the ground and it comes up from the root. And because it takes years to fruit." She looked at her granddaughter with her flat black eyes. "When you plant a pomegranate you are saying: I am staying. I will be here when it gives. That is not a small thing to say, in this country."

In the April of 1975 the tree was thirty-nine years old and heavy with red flowers, and the whole family expected to eat its fruit in October, as they had done every October anyone could remember.

They did not.