Call Me Zebra(7)

There was a terrible silence as we stood there surveying the land surrounding us. I wondered if I would ever lay eyes on that land again. Then my father spat on the rocky ground, and said: “I spit on you, you bunch of patriarchal nepotists!” His face, ordinarily wafer-thin, puffed up with rage and grew red. It looked like a swelling pool of blood. I had never seen this side of him before. I felt an odd terror. The wind beat the taut sheet of my heart as if it were a drum. It hammered and beveled that sheet until it was in tatters. I felt indignation rise in wafts through the hollows. I felt my ears grow hot with fear and scorn.

We were near Lake Urmia along the Iranian-Turkish border when my father gave me the last literature lesson I would receive within the confines of our bludgeoned nation. The shallow, salty waters of the lake were full of bloated waterfowl, dead from Saddam’s waves of poison gas. Greater flamingos were languidly drifting across the saline surface. My father took one look at those dead birds, and said: “According to the illustrious poet Abū-Mansūr Qatrān al-Jili al-Azerbaijani, Those who perished were saved from misfortune and badness, while the living are plunged in a sea of deep sadness.” I stared ahead, thinking of my mother’s flattened face. My heart folded over itself like an envelope, but I said nothing.

After that, time warped. It slowed down and sped up at random. At some point, I remember my father removing the clothes of a dead Kurdish man, who, like many other borderland Kurds, had been fighting against Saddam alongside the Iranians. My father put the man’s clothes on himself and informed me of his twofold plan to avoid our being identified as Iranian deserters and intercepted by the border police. Since he had neglected to teach me Kurdish, I would have to pretend I was a deaf-mute about to go blind while he, who spoke impeccable Kurdish, would pretend to be a Kurdish father who was taking me to be seen by the only doctor in the world who had given us hope, a Berlin-educated Kurdish eye surgeon in Van. I had no idea how he had come up with all this. I had no idea what was going through his head.

“The Kurds are like us,” he said. “They are the kind of unlucky men who help their illfated brothers. They’ll help us get across the border into Van. You’ll see.”

But I saw nothing. He had tied a strip of black cloth, torn from the clothes of the dead man, around my eyes. I was blindfolded and mute. Like a good pickle, I was soaking in the brine of death.

The next thing I remember, my father and I were sitting in the back of an open-air truck, pressed tightly against other bodies. I could hear my father’s voice over the engine. I understood nothing except the following declaration, which he repeated with childish ebullience—“Kurdistan is like Hiroshima!” It was received with feverish enthusiasm by his fake compatriots. “Kurdistan is like Hiroshima!” they repeated with warmth and complicity, clapping, sighing, and patting one another on the shoulders. The sound of their laughter rushed at my ears as if from across a great distance. I felt lonely, cut off from my father, ugly, wretched, as pitiful as a soiled manuscript forgotten in a damp trench.

But upon arriving in Van, my father removed the black band he had placed over my eyes. He held my hand, and said, with a bucolic euphoria, “We made it across the border!” I looked at Van. The city lay on the eastern shores of an emerald green lake ringed by pleated mountains, where sheets of snow were starting to melt. It was spring, but there was still a chill in the air. We had survived, each of us one of the few who hadn’t been caught or killed, and the knowledge of it would estrange us from the world for good. We were perched on the edge of Van Castle, atop a steep bluff overlooking the craggy ruins of an old city. All that remained were the blunted edges of fallen homes.

“Look at the ancient city of Van,” my father said, pointing at that decimated land below us. “Here, the Armenians were wrenched by history, exterminated at the hands of the Ottomans. The first Holocaust!” he muttered, pitifully pulling on the ends of his stained mustache.

I leaned over the edge of the castle. My head was still spinning from the smell of the rotting corpses in that no-man’s-land, from my mother’s death. I looked at the leveled city, which is known as the Pearl of the East. No bigger lie has ever been uttered. Its remains shone like copper wires in the winter sun. The Pearl of the East! Let those who want to lie to themselves lie to themselves, I thought. I remembered the slimy pearl of truth: remorseless, monstrous, and full of a terrible stench.

Before we continued on, my father returned the black band to my eyes, and I was plunged once more into a deep lacuna. But over time, that black band heightened my senses. Deprived of sight, I saw the immense magnitude of the darkness that surrounds us more clearly than ever before; I smelled the eternal return of the residue of history; I heard the ringing void of the long exile that lay ahead of us, first in Turkey, then in Spain, and finally in the New World; the white noise of death—the past death of my mother, the future death of my father, the death of the Kurds, of Iranians, of Armenians, of Iraqis—booming in the margins of the universe. One day, I told myself, I will emerge from the void of exile, and I will drag the stench of death out with me. After all, I am the youngest of the Hosseinis, the last in a long lineage; it is my job to exhume the buried corpse of our deadly collective history—our truth.





NEW YORK CITY

The Story of My Father’s Death and Burial and the Consequent Formation of My Multiple Irregular Minds