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CHAPTER ONE

My five-year-old mind could not identify the map drawn on my father’s back and neck from the lashed scars of his time in prison. Wrapped in a beige towel at the waist and indifferent to the water droplets sliding down across the hacked frontiers on his bare back, my father packed some of the new baby’s clothes and diapers and explained in a hoarse voice that he had to run back to the hospital.

Mama and my new baby brother, Chia, meaning “mountain,” had not come home yet, and I was impatient to meet him. The events of that day were etched in some persistent cell in my memory. Baba got dressed, absently shoved my pants and doll inside a plastic bag, and gathered me into his arms. Wrapping my arms around Baba’s neck, I saw tears in the corners of his eyes and the fresh drops of sweat on his receding hairline. It was stuffy in the house, the heater still blasting although it was well into March.

“Your head is crying,” I giggled and ran my palms over his sharp stubble. “Angry skin. Porcupine.” He carried me down the carpeted stairs that twisted in a perfect spiral from our hallway to the basement studio and knocked on Joanna’s door.

Joanna opened the door, wearing her face-wide smile. “Congratulations, brakam!” She wasn’t really my aunt, but she and my father called each other brother and sister. Joanna was dressed in a loose, green, ankle-length dress and a black vest, her hair tied up in a ponytail, her red lips the color of my father’s bloodshot eyes. Her golden belt jingled as she walked, its many dangling coins clinking mellifluously together. I loved that she was always nicely dressed, how it set her apart from most women in Mariwan.

“Healthy baby boy. We’ll be home tonight.” Baba handed me to Joanna. “Could you please take care of Leila?”

Squeezed between them, I inhaled my father’s signature smell of lavender soap, which mingled with Joanna’s jasmine perfume.

“Of course. Hello, big sister!” she said as she tickled me under my arms. Baba thanked her and set down my bag next to the edge of the wooden door.

“Did you hear the news?”

“Hana . . . ?” Joanna asked.

“No . . . have you turned on the radio today?”

His own radio was always on, its staticky broadcasts a familiar soundtrack. Joanna’s radio was usually on too, but hers played only mellow music, often Sayed Ali Asghar Kurdistani’s soothing voice. She waved a hand in the air, swatting away the unheard news. “Believe me, I can live a day without tragedy, Alan! You can too. Newroz is coming. Your son is born. And we deserve a break, brakam, don’t we?”

Baba’s face twitched in a futile attempt to dispel the tears that pooled in the corners of his eyes. He turned his face away and crossed the tidy room to the dim main entrance of the walkout basement without another word.

“Let me get you a jacket, Alan,” Joanna called out to Baba’s hunched shoulders. The chill crept in even after he shut the door behind him, deaf to her words.

“I’m mostly made from water,” I announced, repeating the little fact I had learned from Joanna the day before. She was the reason that, at age five, I could read. Her daughter, Shiler, could already spell too, and she was only twenty days older than me.

Joanna sat me in a chair next to Shiler, who was busy practicing the Kurdish alphabet her mother had taught her: a as in azadi (freedom), h as in hemni (peace), n as in nishtman (homeland)—everything the Kurds were deprived of.

Born and raised in her mother’s crowded prison ward, Shiler had learned to focus so intently on the task at hand that she completely disregarded the world around her, so she had only just now noticed my arrival.

When Joanna had been released from prison several months earlier, she and her daughter had moved into our basement while she looked for an inexpensive place to rent. My father had said they could stay in our house for free because he’d had a lot of respect for Joanna’s deceased husband—his former cellmate, a leftist activist who had been executed. Since she had moved in, Joanna had painted the basement studio a light shade of green, and the grass no longer grew long and unkempt in the yard outside the large, spotless window.

I was thrilled to have a new playmate, but Mama didn’t like having Joanna and Shiler downstairs; she was suspicious of how Joanna had secured her release from prison despite being sentenced to death for stabbing a man. Baba had explained to me that in Iranian law, a man’s life was worth twice as much as a woman’s, so Joanna was to be killed in retaliation for taking her rapist’s life. But the decision was eventually reversed.

“And God knows how!” Mama added.

Baba had stuttered when I asked what a rapist was.

“Go play with your dolls,” he’d responded. I longed to know why the government punished everyone I liked.

Joanna now held a candy before me. “Mostly from water, ha? But what is the rest of your body made of? Chocolate?”

The orange-flavored candy was inside my cheek before I could answer. “No,” I mumbled, mouth full.

“Honey?”

I shook my head.

“Why are you so sweet then?”

I laughed, holding onto the hem of my skirt. She kissed my cheeks. I wished Joanna had always been there, when Baba was too busy feeling bad for himself, Mama was too busy telling the world how wonderful she was, and Grandma was too busy praying for a grandson.

“Leila, have you had anything to eat?” Joanna asked with a hand on her hip.

“I found some yogurt. Ate it with sugar.”

On her single burner, Joanna warmed up her leftover shorabaw, a traditional soup of beef and beans, though I found no meat in it.

“When will Mama and the baby come home? Do you think they miss me?”

“The baby doesn’t even know you,” said Shiler, looking up from her finished letters.

“Yes, he does! My brother would recognize me among a hundred girls,” I declared. Joanna stirred some bread crumbs into the shorabaw. I slurped the delicious soup and went on: “He’ll recognize my voice, because I sang to him when he was in Mama’s belly.” Joanna confirmed that he certainly would.

“Joanna is sewing new dresses for you and me for Newroz.” Shiler was the only child I knew who called her mother by her first name.

“You ruined the surprise, avina min,” Joanna said.

Shiler took me to the sewing machine in the far corner of the studio, sitting by the cooler that acted as their fridge. On and around the hand-cranked machine, the fabric lay shapelessly, red printed with white flowers.

“Why don’t you explain to Shiler how you celebrate Newroz here?” Joanna said as she washed the empty bowls in her tiny sink.

It was Shiler’s first New Year’s celebration outside of a prison cell, and I excitedly told her all about the gifts we’d receive—usually a crisp note and perhaps a toy—and how thousands would gather in the city center, where there would be lots of pastries, dancing, and bonfires. The celebrations would stop only when the Revolutionary Guards showed up.

“Why was my Baba crying?” I went to Joanna. “He likes Newroz.”

She pressed my head against her chest. Her breasts were small, unlike Mama’s. “You’ll find out someday,” Joanna said.

“When?” I asked.

“When you’re an adult.” She gently stroked the back of my neck and kissed my cheeks.

I pulled away and used the hem of my blouse to rub her saliva off my face. “I am an adult!”

Joanna laughed, a laughter that bubbled up from her core and erupted like a geyser. The wrinkles around her kind black eyes and her narrow mouth made her look older than Mama, though Baba had said she was younger. Mama had smooth skin, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. No wonder people often assumed Shiler, with her straight black hair and beautiful eyes, was Mama’s daughter and I was Joanna’s.

“Tell me now,” I insisted.

“Something terrible happened when your father was a child . . . I suppose it still makes him sad, especially now that he has children of his own.” She straightened up, having said enough for one day. “I know—how about we pick some flowers to make a bouquet to welcome home Hana and baby Chia?”

Shiler and I whooped in eager agreement, and Joanna covered her hair with a white headscarf, grabbed her handbag, and led us outside. We combed the neighborhood for our bouquet, walking to the park to pick the first spring daffodils and poppies. When we picked the flowers, I felt their pain somewhere inside me; the hurt was very real. But I didn’t say anything to Joanna and Shiler. When we had an armful of flowers, we stopped at a fruit stand, where a toothless man sold us strawberries so fat I could hardly hold them in my fist.

“Strawberries are my favorite fruit,” Shiler said before stuffing her mouth.

“Well, you’re very lucky, darling. Kurdistan has the best strawberries.”

“Mine is pomegranate,” I said.

“It must be in your blood, Leila. Your father is from the pomegranate capital. Halabja.”

“I want to go there! I’d eat a hundred pomegranates.”

“He is planning on taking you when the war is over. Hopefully soon.”

I bit into a strawberry, its juices dripping down my chin, and asked Joanna, “What does your hometown have?”

“Olives. Kobani has delicious olives.” Joanna wiped the corner of my mouth with a handkerchief.

The three of us watched as several butterflies, the first of spring, fluttered haphazardly against a sudden gust of wind, their wings glistening like dew.

“Oh, where were you all these years?” Joanna pressed a hand to her chest, shaking her head in amazement, water glittering in her joyful eyes. “What did eight years of bombing do to you? And to the bees and the dragonflies?”

“I’m a butterfly.” Shiler sprouted imagined wings, her arms moving up and down in the air. “No, actually . . . I don’t want to be a butterfly. I want to be an eagle.”

“Though crows live a thousand years, I want to be an eagle.” Shiler and I both recited the poem Joanna had taught us, in which a crow reveals to an eagle the secret to longevity: Settle for flying low and feeding on debris, and you’ll live a hundred years. “Chon beji sharta nakou chanda beji,” the eagle refuses. How long you lived was irrelevant; what mattered was how you lived.

Joanna led us up the trail near the park, where we saw more and more butterflies. “Remember, girls, you can be anything you want to be. Don’t allow anyone to make you believe otherwise. See, these beauties were simple worms once.”

I thought I’d misheard that. “Worms? Worms can become butterflies?” I asked.

“Only caterpillars,” Shiler corrected her mother. “Not every worm.”

Among the things I did not understand that day was how right Shiler was. Neither of us knew if we were caterpillars or earthworms. Nor did we know if the tight, dark days of hanging upside down was the onset of death or a necessary part of an incredible transformation.

Chia and my parents did not come home that night, so I stayed in the basement. Joanna tucked me in and crawled under the bedsheets, covering her eyes with a headscarf. Shiler snuggled against her. I lay down too, but my mind whirred with thoughts—of Baba’s tears and pomegranates, of whether my baby brother had a song in his heart.

“Can I play with the toys, Auntie?” I asked. Joanna was already softly snoring, so I slid from beneath the covers and played with the horses and elephants Joanna had arranged on a corner shelf. She’d made them in prison out of bread crumbs, beans, and newspaper strips to educate and entertain Shiler. Soon I grew bored and looked around, and my eyes landed on the fat TV set sitting on a chair across from the bed.

When he wasn’t watching the news, Baba sometimes let me sit and watch old films with him. Since I couldn’t understand the words, I invented dialogue in my mind. I pressed the power button on Joanna’s TV.

A nightmarish scene played in an endless loop: people with blistered faces lying on the ground, huddled bodies sheltering against walls. Birds, cows, sheep, cats, dogs—every animal had dropped dead, like they were flowers that had been plucked from the earth.

“—Saddam Hussein gassed Halabja this morning. Within a few minutes, five thousand Kurdish civilians died in an aerial bombardment of mustard gas and nerve agents.”

People had fallen on the spot while trying in vain to run away from the chemical attack, trying to protect a loved one, now also dead: a baby, a child, a spouse. They had died with open eyes, open mouths. Flies had nested on their lips and burned cheeks. Their flesh had turned black. There had been no protection from the murky yellow clouds of nerve gas and deadly toxins, not for the civilians.

A tremor of fear sprang up inside my belly, making me shiver uncontrollably, but I was rooted to the spot, staring at the screen. A woman had choked to death while fixing a helicopter toy for a small boy. A girl had died grinning, as if cut off in the middle of a mischievous joke. Some seemed to have perished slowly. A woman was twisted like a rope, vomit and blood on her clothes, her face crumpled with anguish. Thousands and thousands of bodies. Others had collapsed on the outskirts of town, trying to cross the mountains, running to imagined safety.

“Everybody’s dead!” I shook Joanna, my tears soaking her blanket. She startled awake, squinted at the television for a few seconds, jumped up to turn it off, and held me tight under the bedsheets. Shiler still slept soundly beside her.

“Are we going to die, Auntie?”

“Hush, my darling. You’re safe. You are safe with me.” Joanna patted my hair, dried my tears.

“Baba said TVs are liars.”

“Yes, they are. Yes, they are.” She gently rubbed my back, singing a lullaby: Ly-ly-ly . . . Her velvety voice gradually soothed me to sleep.

That night I dreamed that the butterflies I had seen earlier arrived in Halabja, only to be gassed to death. Millions of them lay dead on top of each other, a hill of multicolored wings.

CHAPTER TWO

The stars glittered on the long skirt of the sky, indifferent to the knots that snarled inside Chia and me as we waited on the staircase outside the kindergarten, waited to be missed, to be remembered, to be picked up. We remained in the yard, bored and cold, bundled up, peering at the asphalt, leaning against each other’s arms. Chia was in the glorious kingdom that four-year-olds saunter in, drumming on a paper cup and muttering a song. I smiled to myself at the silly lyrics, but they couldn’t ease the deep pit in my stomach.

Shiler stuck her tongue out at me when her mother arrived to take her home. I held my fists before my face, pretending they were gripping prison bars and that I was crying behind them. Shiler whipped her head away to feign indifference, but I knew that being called a prison child needled her. Kids also mocked her for her chubbiness, but she didn’t care about that. Shiler wiggled her bum at me in revenge.

A week after Chia was born and Mama came home from the hospital, she had forced Joanna and Shiler to leave our basement because she said she couldn’t trust the “ghahba”—whore. They’d left quietly, despite my father’s attempt to placate Mama and to get Joanna to ignore “the bitch.” I had decided it was better to be a whore like Joanna than a bitch, if I had to be one or the other when I grew up. I’d begged Mama to reverse her decision, but she had banned me from speaking to Shiler or her mother ever again. When we began school, Mama couldn’t keep me from sitting with Shiler in class, but I had to steal small moments to remind Joanna that I still loved her, that it wasn’t my fault Mama had cast them out.

I played with the spotted green ribbon tied on my short pigtail beneath my headscarf. Now that my corkscrew-curly hair, which grew upward instead of down toward my shoulders, had finally grown long enough to be tied back, I was told that I had to hide it under a headscarf. God would monitor my every move from now on, because I had turned nine, and He would hang me by my hair in hell if I failed to cover it.

“Chia, if God doesn’t start punishing girls until grade three, why did I have to wear hijab starting in grade one?” The manteau—the loose, long coat I’d been wearing for two years already—was heavy and uncomfortable, making it hard to run around and play. The compulsory hijab was a shackle on my childhood. “Why can’t our headscarves at least be a happy color? Like green?” We girls got into trouble if we wore colorful shoes or socks, if our ponytails made bumps under our scarves, or if our headscarves were not long enough to cover the bosoms we hadn’t developed yet.

“Five, six, nine . . .” My brother’s almond-shaped hazel eyes—everybody called him Chawkal, “Bright Eyes,” and loved him because of them—looked up toward the twilit sky as he counted the stars.

“And what’s wrong with laughing, Chia? Why shouldn’t good girls laugh?”

My brother didn’t have to cover his hair or body—not when he turned nine, not ever. During the day, every chance I got, I peeked into Chia’s kindergarten, which was attached to my school. I made sure that he was happy, that no one was picking on him, because if someone did, I’d hit them later. All the kids knew this.

It grew colder and darker, and there was still no sign of my parents. The school’s hallways had emptied; it was the first time I’d seen them without their usual bustle of students and teachers. The principal beckoned us inside to wait in her office. We sat beside the alphabetized filing cabinet while she balanced on the edge of her plastic chair and shuffled the papers in our file. She made a noise of exasperation. “Strange! No home phone number, and there’s no answer at the emergency phone number either.” She turned to hide her half-pitying glance.

“I know their father, Dr. Alan Saman.” The janitor emerged in the doorway of the principal’s office from the half-lit hallway, carrying a large bin of wastepaper. He was a short, skinny man with a large eagle nose; an enormous black mustache obscured nearly the rest of his face. “I can drive them home.”

After a moment’s consideration, the principal, also eager to leave, agreed. We followed the janitor out to the parking lot, and he hoisted us into the bed of his small gray truck that was missing its front bumper. “Barkholakan, don’t forget to knock on the window when you recognize your house or the neighborhood. Sit tight.” I liked that he called us little lambs.

But that night every dark narrow street we went down, paved or cobbled, seemed unfamiliar. The windows of nearly every house we passed were illuminated, and silhouettes moved behind curtains as families ate dinner together or watched television. I held Chia’s cold hand in mine and made up stories for him, visualizing scenes and directing actors in my head.

“There was a girl whose wishes would come true. Instantly. And she wished her younger brother would be very strong, and all of a sudden he became super-gigantic.” Chia looked at me eagerly. “Another time, she saw a wolf creeping up on her brother from behind. ‘Die, bastard!’ she cried. When she and her brother went to check the wolf’s corpse, they saw their father lying on his stomach beneath the wolf.”

“Nooo!”

I was now reporting one of my recurrent nightmares. “His back had scratches from the wolf’s claws all over it, and—”

Chia peeled his pudgy little hand out of mine and hid his eyes behind it.

“—and he was unconscious, and the wolf’s blood was dripping over his face and running down his nose, and his mouth was open wide, and—”

“Leila!” he called, his eyes still covered.

“What?”

“Don’t kill Baba, Leila! Please don’t kill him.” The car lurched suddenly as it hit a pothole, shoving us forward in our makeshift seats.

“I didn’t kill Baba, idiot. I saved your little butt.” I looked deeper into a silent alleyway that twisted and turned back on itself. It felt as if the houses were huddled closer together here. I heard the call to night prayer from a nearby mosque and wished the truck would drive us toward that voice. I liked the calls, because five times a day they reminded me that God was the greatest—greater than Baba and Mama, or me and Chia, or the principal and janitor. In my head, God was a smiling moon who loved Chia and me.

The truck, to my astonishment, obeyed my wish, and finally I glimpsed the elaborate blue dome that rose above the roofs across from our house. I banged on the window behind the driver’s seat, and the truck came to a sudden halt, jolting us forward. The mustachioed man hopped out of the cab and slammed the door in his excitement. “Which one?”

I pointed, and he rang the bell. No answer. He pounded on the rusty metal gate flanked by cement walls too tall for us to climb. Nobody responded to his repeated knocks either. He paced back and forth, muttering to himself. “Man! What type of parents . . . Who could forget their kids like that? I swear they’d be better off in an orphanage.” He kicked the gate of our brick house.

He scratched his stubble, deliberating. “I have to run. My wife needs her shot. She has diabetes. I have to run to the pharmacy before they close.”

I turned my back on him and wished that he would just leave.

“Forgive me, barkholakan. Sit tight by the gate, all right? Your parents should be home soon. I will check back in a little bit, and if they’re not home yet, I will take you to my home.” He patted Chia’s head and stalked back to his truck, muttering, “And my wife says I’m a bad father.”

I sat down, my back against the wall. Chia did the same. We were cold and hungry, hugging our knees, staring at the pebbles on the ground. The truck’s exhaust filled my nostrils. My stomach made strange hee-haw noises. “I’ve got a donkey in my tummy.”

We chuckled.

Out of the blue, Chia said, “Save Baba.”

“You’re a fool, Chia.”

He was quiet for a while and then asked, “Will you save me next time the wolf attacks?”

“I already killed it.”

“Tell me one of your funny stories,” he demanded.

“I don’t feel funny right now.” I laid my index finger across the top of my upper lip and mimicked the janitor. “They’d be better off in an orphanage.”

“What’s an orphanage?”

“Hey.” I pointed to the smiling moon in the sky, and he followed the direction of my finger.

“How about some of Rumi’s instead?” I offered. Chia loved those stories. I told him the tale of the parrot that broke the oil jar. Her owner beat her over the head for it, and old Polly lost her feathers as a result. The parrot sulked for seven days. When a bald man came into her sight, she shouted out to him, “So, whose oil jar did you break?”

Chia chuckled and rested his little head on my bony shoulder. Even I was finding it hard to keep my eyes open. I’d told him I had killed the wolf, but what about thieves? What if my wishes didn’t come true and I couldn’t defeat anyone because I had turned nine, the age when girls must start covering themselves up?

“What are you doing out here?” Mama was panting, coming up the hill from the bus stop.

“We . . . um.”

“Inside. Now.” She picked up our bags and unlocked the iron gate. It still had traces of the janitor’s shoe print on its flaking burgundy paint. We ran through the front yard and the dim garage and mounted the stairs two at a time, but we found we could go no farther, because Baba was passed out across the hallway.

“Alan. Alan.” Mama called out. Our satchels looked heavy in her hands.

Baba cracked an eyelid and rolled over a bit, making a narrow pathway for us. “Just like that,” he slurred. “Bang.”

I kicked over one of the arak bottles on the floor, pretending it was an accident. The strong scent of anise-flavored liquor had become all too familiar in our home since my uncle, Baba’s oldest brother, had been killed in the uprising last year.

Mama hugged Chia, carrying him to the bedroom on the right side of the entrance. Our main floor had two adjoining bedrooms: one that I shared with Chia, and one for our parents, though Baba had taken to sleeping alone in the attic.

“What the hell is going on here?” Mama asked me when she returned to the living room. I couldn’t answer. “What were you doing outside at this time of night?”

Then she turned to my father, still lying in the hallway. “First my mother is rushed to the hospital, then my kids are out this late, and now you. Why did you let them out? Why are they still in their uniforms?” Then back to me: “Why didn’t you two change after school?” She removed her headscarf and fanned herself with it, then turned back to Baba. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Tah . . . teror,” Baba groaned softly—assassinated. His forehead was pressed to the floor, his arms and knees curled under him like an infant.

Mama sighed and collapsed on her knees. “Mother’s dementia is getting worse. She ran into the street today. Three cars crashed because of her, and one struck her.”

“In the daylight. They shot him. Baaang,” Baba mumbled.

“Who? Who’re you talking about? Did you hear what I said? My mother was hit by a car. Who was shot?” Mama heaved herself up and crossed the hall to the kitchen. “You know what? Don’t even tell me. I know what it is. Politics again, I bet. Some Kurdish leader got assassinated—another one.” She opened the fridge; I was pretty sure she wouldn’t find anything in it. “Because that’s all you care about. And you care more about that than your kids and your wife.” She slammed the fridge shut, gave me a withering look, and retreated to her bedroom.

I felt as though the events of the night had sliced me open and my organs had dropped out of my gut. I deserved all the bad things that were happening to me, because I never completely covered my hair and body. Sometimes my wrists showed. Sometimes hair sprouted out from beneath my headscarf.

Baba tried to get up but crumpled again. Mama’s room was dark, but I could hear the low murmur of her voice, whispers that had no audience.

I stole quietly into the kitchen and groped behind the dish cabinet, where I’d hidden a bag of dried apricots I’d purchased with all the cash I’d saved up from my birthday and Newroz. I quietly soaked the apricots and added a teaspoon of salt. There was only the noisy hum of the fridge and the chirping of crickets in the backyard. I covered the bowl with one of the stained tea towels and hid it inside the grimy cabinet.

Noiseless, I then snuck into the bedroom, where Chia was already sound asleep, and climbed into the upper bunk. Baba still babbled away in the hall. My doll was tucked carefully under my blanket. Baba had wanted to name me Nishtman, Kurdish for homeland, except it had turned out to be on the long list of forbidden names the government had compiled. Nobody could prevent me from calling my doll Nishtman though. I brushed her woven hair with my fingers and whispered that Fatima’s father had brought a camera to school, and I badly wanted a camera too. She didn’t need to worry though; I had a plan to earn some money to buy one.

“Do you know what ‘assassinated’ means?” I asked her. My doll listened to my whispers, her black-bean eyes attentive. “Listen, you must make sure men don’t see your ribboned pigtail.” Nishtman fell asleep in the middle of my lecture.

There was no school the next day, so Chia and I were allowed to sleep in. Mama boiled potatoes for breakfast and lunch and left for work early, stepping over Baba, who was still snoring in the hallway. After I woke, I checked on my treasure in the cabinet. The grease on the countertop glistened in the daylight, and cobwebs clung to the corners where the ceiling met the wall. My apricot potion, however, tasted just perfect. All I needed to do was to wait for Baba to leave the house. I started doodling in the living room across from the kitchen, where I could keep an eye on my stash. Soon Chia was up too, playing with his toys.

“Ehhhhhh!” he shrieked as one of his toy cars braked to avoid an accident, but then: “Boooom!”

“Your cars sound like horses.” I started drawing what looked like a horse, at least to me.

“Your holse looks like a chicken!” he announced, unable to pronounce his r’s.

“Roll your tongue,” I said. “Say ‘rrrrrrrr.’”

“Llllll.”

“So cute!” I splashed a kiss on his chubby cheek.

Around noon, Baba finally dragged himself up off the floor and showered. The aroma of lavender soap, which masked the strong scent of his body, filled my nostrils as he went to the kitchen to make tea, boil an egg, and gulp down an aspirin. His beige towel covered only his lower body, putting the map on his back on display yet again. I stared at the network of scars from repeated lashings. The sight of them pierced my gut like the point of a sliver blade. I looked into Chia’s eyes, and he into mine, but we never talked about the lines cut into Baba’s flesh.

He went up to the attic and came down a few minutes later, changed into his loose-fitting gray trousers and a brown sleeveless undershirt. I’d noticed that fewer of Baba’s things remained inside the bedroom he used to share with Mama. Positioning a pillow behind his back, he sat down with a steaming cup of tea in his favorite spot in the house: on the handmade rug, one of the few things of his mother’s he still had. Firm and finely woven, it was made of symmetrical knots of crimson, white, and blue thread over a wool foundation; its many hues tied together our otherwise mismatched cast-off furniture.

Baba spread a tablecloth over the rug and fed us potato salad. His face was drawn and pale, but otherwise he looked recuperated from the night before.

“Have you had any more nightmares?” he asked me absentmindedly as he chewed. I nodded and started to reply, but he raised the old radio to his ear and turned the dial. It emitted a harsh buzz of static that bored into my eardrums. The government jammed foreign radio signals.

“Baba’s radio sounds like a flock of cicadas with sore throats,” I whispered.

Chia burst into loud laughter.

“Hush!” Baba warned.

“—Sadegh Sharafkandi, the secretary general of a Kurdish-Iranian opposition party, was assassinated yesterday in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, Germany,” a cold voice recited. Baba covered his eyes with his hairy hands; his veins stood out. “This comes just three years after his predecessor was killed in Vienna in 1989. The gunmen are believed to be working for the Iranian government . . .”

The radio droned on. I hummed a lullaby, wanting to drown out the broadcast and protect Baba from the news. He didn’t hear me, just sat motionless, jaw clenched and face ashen. I motioned to Chia, and we ran out into the backyard. The skinny cherry trees were turning orange and yellow. We wanted to get to the fruit before the birds and worms did, to bite into the cherries without washing them first and snigger at our little act of defiance. But there was no fruit left on the branches.

“Is Baba okay?” Chia asked, kicking the dust.

“I don’t know.”

“Why do they want to kill us, Leila?”

“I think they want our land.”

“But where do we go if we give them our land?” He shook his tiny fists.

“Maybe the underworld?”

“If we lived under the earth, Baba wouldn’t be sad?” Chia tilted his head, his brows rising.

“I want to empty Baba’s bottles and fill them up with water,” I whispered, and we giggled. “Hey, be careful never to mention the bottles at school, okay?”

Children were initiated into an Iranian double life starting as young as kindergarten, when teachers and government agents began questioning students about possible non-Islamic activities that may happen at home. Chia nodded.

“Let’s water the trees so they give us cherries again,” I offered.

His chubby legs, arms, and cheeks jiggled as he ran to fetch me the water hose. I corroborated what everyone else used to say: “You are bitable.”

He frowned. “Biting’s bad.”

I grabbed the hose and started telling Chia the movie I was directing in my head. “Once upon a time, there was a king who said to his son, ‘You should go and kill your sister. She is a bad girl.’”

Chia tilted his head and frowned. “She’s a bad girl?”

“She wasn’t, but the vizier wanted to cut her head off.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he had Alzheimer’s.”

His hazel eyes darkened in puzzlement. “What’s Alzheimer’s?”

“Like Grandma. Now she doesn’t even like you.”

I was too lazy to recite all the details of the story, and I didn’t want the girl in my version of this tale to endure so many tests before she could prove her innocence, but I still wanted her to meet the prince.

“So the daughter told her father . . .” I let go of the hose and held onto the trunk of the only cherry tree that the water had not yet reached, turning in slow circles around it. “She told her Baba, ‘I will let you kill me, but you should listen to me first.’ When she spoke before the court, she showed them all what a hypocrite the vizier was. So her brave words defeated the evil man, her father loved her, and a prince who was present as a reporter fell in love with her courage.”

I stopped circling the tree and laughed at the thought of a prince as a journalist and at Chia’s confused expression. I ran around the yard, and he chased after me. We laughed.

“Don’t soak the trees.” Baba’s hoarse voice announced his presence before he appeared in the yard, carrying a light jacket over his arm.

Chia explained, “We’re watering the trees to make the cherries grow.”

Baba turned off the tap. “Chawshin gian, you’re drowning the trees with the water and me with the utility bill.”

I wanted to reply, “At least we didn’t forget about them,” but my nerve failed me. I was nothing like the girls in my stories.

“Leila, watch your brother, and stay in the yard.” Baba shut the gate behind him. Chia pouted and looked to me to gauge my reaction.

I didn’t speak, didn’t cry, didn’t sulk. I jumped on my bicycle. Shrieking like a banshee, I pedaled around the water faucet in the middle of the tiled backyard hundreds of times. Chia cycled after me.

Once I was sure Baba was far enough away, I told Chia about my plans to earn enough money to buy a camera. He could be my model when I became an award-winning photographer, if he helped me. We fetched the bowl of soaked apricots from the kitchen along with an assortment of chipped and cracked mugs, neatly arranged them on top of two boxes, and waited in front of our door for passersby.

Chia, with his big bright eyes and his little speech impediment, turned out to be incredible for business. He boldly accosted people, saying, “Only three tomans for a bowl of malisaw.” Unable to resist him, our customers patted him on the head and dropped their coins into my bag.

Even with Chia’s salesmanship, our location was quiet, and business was slow. The town center was full of peddlers, shoeshine boys, young and old men spreading blankets in crowded streets and selling clothing, accessories, fruit, and cigarettes openly—and playing cards, alcohol, and pop song audiocassettes secretly—but the side streets were mostly quiet.

A mother of three who purchased some malisaw and tipped us too advised that we walk down the street to the mosque that was fronted by rosebushes and stocky mulberry trees. We collected our things and headed down the block, leaving the door unlocked behind us.

As we walked, we passed a group of women sitting on the front steps of a rather big house. They were laughing as they cleaned a large bin of parsley, dill, and some other herbs, bantering and gossiping. Some reclined in the shade; others allowed the mellow sun of early fall on their backs. I tried to picture Mama as a member of their group, but couldn’t.

We set up shop across from the mosque, and I admired its architecture: the magnificent blue dome, splendid minaret, brick walls, and stained glass windows. The men in folk dress who were leaving the mosque after their evening prayer purchased our product and told Chia just how cute he was. I washed the mugs after each use at the fountain in the mosque’s courtyard. The mosque was a man’s world, and it was my first time stepping inside one. The high-ceilinged interior was covered with rows and rows of spotless, beautiful rugs, mostly burgundy. A niche inside indicated the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, before which dozens of men prostrated in humility. Books were arranged neatly on shelves, and there was a box for donations, which I believed had lost its daily share to Chia’s magnetism. By the time we had only six apricots left in our big bowl, the change in my pocket was weighing me down.

“Why does the sky turn so red and beautiful at sunset?” Chia asked as we walked home.

“Hmmm . . . I think the sky blushes when the sun kisses her good night.”

Chia tossed his head back and showed the little space between his two front bottom teeth.

“Catch me if you can. You are the police, and I am a thief,” I said, and ran back toward home.

The out-of-breath policeman whose face was covered in beads of sweat came close to arresting me, but I was an uncatchable criminal.

At home I found some old sour yogurt in the fridge and mixed it with sugar. We ate it with bread to stop our tummies from nagging as we counted our money, coins rolling off the table like marbles. I did the math. If we set aside a portion of our profit to invest in more apricots, and if we were as lucky every day as we’d been today, it would take five years to earn enough money to buy a camera. That felt like an eternity.

“We should work harder.” I decided, and we headed back outside to sell the remaining apricots. But the bright vibrant alleyway of the daytime had become a dark tunnel. There was not a customer to be found. Chia and I sank down in silent defeat against the gate, feeling too tired to talk or move. My head rested on his, eyes closed. We must have drifted off to sleep, because we awoke to Mama’s furious face, silhouetted by the light of the moon high in the sky.

Mama was hysterical. “Out this time of night again? Are you out of your minds? Where’s your useless father? What are these bowls and mugs about? Where did you get apricots from? Oh, God, oh God, oh God!” I sprang up at her shouts. Beads of sweat dripped down her brow. Before I could answer, she swatted me on my bottom.

She went inside, leaving the door open for us to follow. I didn’t know how to get out of trouble, and took a deep, ragged breath before entering the house. I rubbed my behind absently; her smack hadn’t hurt, not really, but I was worried it was merely a taste of what was to come. Mama had gone straight into the shower. Chia pretended to play quietly with his toy bear, then leaned his forehead near the coal heater when he heard the squeak of the shower tap.

“You have some explaining to do, miss!” Mama was wrapped in a robe, her hair spreading a wide, wet stain over her shoulders, and she sank onto the divan and massaged her swollen legs that always hurt. Chia crawled onto her lap. “Chawkal gian.” She kissed his red cheeks. “You have a fever again.”

“He’s faking it,” I declared. “He had his head near the heater to—”

“And you only know how to make a mess for me?” She winced as her eyes traced the trail of yogurt along the kitchen floor. “What kind of daughter are you?”

“He doesn’t have a fever.”

She touched Chia’s forehead again. “Tell me what crazy thing have you been up to?” She sighed.

How could I explain to Mama? She’d never understand my desire for a camera; she’d just call me selfish, tell me there were so many other things we needed.

But before I could answer, the phone rang. She snatched it from the receiver immediately and spoke in a soft voice so unlike her usual tone.

“Just go to bed.” She then unplugged the brown rotary phone, clutched it to her bosom, and rushed to her room, shutting the door behind her.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART I

LEILA

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO