Kiss the Dust Read online

  I wish I’d said goodbye to Granny properly, she thought, and a few minutes later, I wish I’d packed my new red sweater. Then she was asleep.

  She didn’t wake up until quite late. Kak Soran was coughing. He still hadn’t really got over his virus. Teriska Khan was up and dressed already, and fumbling through one of the bags.

  ‘You’re awake, are you?’ she said to Tara. ‘You’d better give me what you were wearing yesterday to pack away. You can’t wear town clothes here. Put these on.’

  She tossed over a pair of long loose trousers, a light green, long-sleeved underdress, and an overdress in a bright shimmering material.

  Tara stood up, yawned, stretched and began to get dressed in her Kurdish clothes, modestly wriggling into her trousers and underdress before she took her nightdress right off.

  It was still almost dark in the room. There were heavy wooden shutters over the windows which blocked out most of the early-morning light. As Tara groped about, feeling for the fringed scarf she was supposed to wear over her hair, her fingers touched a belt. She picked it up. It was extraordinarily heavy.

  ‘What on earth’s this, Daya?’

  Teriska Khan almost snatched it out of her hand.

  ‘Just my old belt. Why?’

  ‘It feels so heavy.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  Teriska Khan put the belt round her own waist, and did up the buckle. Then she stepped over Hero, who was still fast asleep, and went to the door, which led directly out on to the courtyard. She unbolted and opened it. Sunlight streamed into the room. Hero mumbled something, then rolled over, reached out for her rabbit, and went on sleeping.

  Tara could see now what Daya was wearing. She looked completely different from the smart western-style woman she was at home, where she usually wore elegant designer dresses and well-cut suits. If her skin had been all weatherbeaten instead of properly moisturized, and her hands had been chapped and calloused with rough work instead of nicely manicured, she could almost, at first sight, have been taken for a woman of the village.

  Her long underdress was made of bright scarlet cotton, with a pattern of gaudy flowers printed on it. The bodice was tight, but the gathered skirt was full. The sleeves were slit halfway down to allow her hands out, and they were so long that they would have trailed on the ground if they hadn’t been tied together with a knot behind her back. On top she wore a flimsy, gauzy overdress, which did up with a single button at the waist so that the skirt and bodice of the underdress peeped through. The finishing touch was a scarf which she was putting round her head and tying at the back. It had a pretty fringe which dangled over her eyes.

  Kurdish clothes are great, Tara thought. Much nicer than all those boring old city clothes. The funny thing was that you could spend a fortune on just one dress imported from London or Paris, and look really dull, while Kurdish country women, who never had a penny to spare, dressed in lovely bright colours and shiny materials and looked like princesses every day of the week.

  The small square room had been closed up all night, and it had been really stuffy with the four of them sleeping in it. Tara went outside, slipped her feet into her shoes which she’d left at the door, and almost gasped as the cold air of a spring morning hit her face. She looked over at the peaks of the high Zagros that soared up on the far side of the valley into the few fluffy clouds, still tipped with dawn pink. On the other side of those mountains was Iran. She’d always wondered what it was like over there.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice behind her. Tara turned round. A girl was coming out of the second house in the compound, with a baby perched on her hip.

  ‘Are you Kak Soran’s daughter?’ she said shyly.

  Tara thought for a moment, then she smiled.

  ‘Ghazal!’ she said. She remembered this girl, a distant cousin Daya had said, from visits years ago. She’d never imagined that Ghazal would be married already, and with a baby too. It seemed only a couple of years ago that they’d been playing houses together. She went up and tickled the baby’s feet.

  ‘He’s sweet,’ she said admiringly. ‘How old is he? What’s his name?’

  ‘His name’s Naman,’ said Ghazal proudly. ‘He’s just six months.’

  ‘Ghazal!’ a hoarse, bossy voice called from the kitchen at the back of the house.

  ‘My mother-in-law wants her breakfast,’ said Ghazal, pulling a face. ‘Are you staying for long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tara. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She wished Ghazal hadn’t asked. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about. She wanted to pretend for a bit longer that she was only there on holiday, like in the old days. It was fun doing without electric lights and cooking over a fire, and fetching water from the spring for a week or two. She wouldn’t even try to imagine what it would be like living here for ever, never having a proper bath again, never watching TV, or sitting in a comfortable armchair. She’d end up like Ghazal, married to a man who was away from home most of the time, and having to obey her mother-in-law.

  She watched Ghazal go, then heard Teriska Khan clattering around in the dark little kitchen that was no more than a lean-to tacked on to the rear wall of the house. She came out with a water pot in her hand.

  ‘Run up to the spring, Tara, and fill this,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the fire going. It’ll take hours for the samovar to heat up.’

  Tara remembered the spring. It bubbled out of a mossy crack in the rock above the village, and cascaded down a well-worn channel to the pool several hundred yards below. The pool was a lovely place, with willows and oleander trees all round it. The village women always met there. It was the only place where you could wash yourself and your clothes and properly clean pots and pans. In the summer it was lovely at the pool, when the water felt cool and refreshing, but Tara shivered at the idea of washing in it at this time of year.

  She picked up the water pot and set off up the stony path. I suppose Leila will be going to school by herself around now, she thought. I wonder if she’s thinking of me?

  There was a sudden awful screech above her head. A jay was perched in the old walnut tree, whose branches hung down low across the path. He was scolding her angrily.

  He looked so indignant that Tara laughed. He bobbed his head, and with a flash of his brilliantly coloured wings, he soared away across the hillside and settled in a blossom-laden apricot tree.

  Tara turned to watch him go, and then she gasped. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life before. The earth on that part of the hillside, which she’d only ever seen when it was baked hard and brown in the hot summer months, was now a patchwork of brilliant colours. Through the shoots of fresh green grass, a vast carpet of spring flowers shimmered in the breeze, as rich as the silk Persian rug in which she used to wriggle her feet into at home. Clumps of wild scarlet tulips and white narcissus stood highest, and in between were violets and anenomes. Budding spikes showed where, in a month or two, hollyhocks and teazels would burst into flower.

  Tara felt suddenly full of energy. Kurdistan! she thought. This is Kurdistan! And she bounded up the last steep stretch of path to the spring. It had always been a favourite place of hers.

  Just below the place where it gushed out of the rock, where the woman came to fetch their drinking water, the villagers had built what they called a gazino, a sort of comfortable summerhouse. They’d cut some strong branches and laid them over the stream a few yards below the spring, and built a rather rough and ready roof of leafy branches overhead. On a boiling summer’s day, it was a heavenly place to sit after a hot climb. The cold water running beneath it kept it beautifully cool.

  Tara could see the gazino now, just above her head. She looked at it, trying to remember. Surely it hadn’t been quite like this? The walls hadn’t been so thick, she was sure, and there’d only been a light screen of twigs and leaves through which the slightest breeze could filter. She came up level with it. On this side there’d been a low entrance. You’d had to bend your head to get inside. Now there w
as a heavy wall of sandbags, completely blocking a view of the inside.

  Tara was about to stand on tiptoe to peer in when she heard low voices and movements coming from behind the sandbag wall. She stepped back, trying not to make the loose stones on the path rattle under her feet, and hurried on up the last ten yards to the spring. Whoever was using the gazino now, they obviously weren’t ordinary village people. Nobody would be resting and chatting at this time of day. Everyone was hard at work.

  Tara filled her pot, tiptoed back past the sandbags and hurried down the rest of the path home. Kak Soran met her halfway down.

  ‘Your mother told me you’d gone for water,’ he said. ‘I came up to warn you. There’s a pesh murga lookout up there, guarding the spring. They won’t do anything to you, but don’t talk to them or take any notice of them if you have to go up there again.’

  ‘All right, Baba,’ said Tara. She followed him back down the path. She wasn’t very used to being with him on her own. She wanted to point out the flowers, and talk about Kurdistan, only she felt too embarrassed. But when they got to the place where she’d stopped to watch the jay earlier, he stopped too and turned round.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said.

  ‘I am a wild rose, a rose of the mountains,

  Far, far away.

  O careful gardener, who loves the rose,

  Come and pick me.

  Carry me over the mountain.

  If you do not touch me

  I shall not flower.

  If you do not touch me

  I shall shed no fragrance.’

  She’d never heard him recite poetry before. She was so happy she felt six inches taller, and light on her feet.

  ‘I was thinking too,’ she said, ‘about that story in the Koran where Satan comes to the Prophet Adam in Paradise, and he makes him eat the fruit from the tree.’

  Kak Soran looked amused.

  ‘I have got a well-educated daughter,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Tara shyly, ‘it’s just that the flowers and the nice old gazino up by the spring made me think of Paradise, but the war, and being frightened, and the guns – they’re sort of like Satan coming into Paradise.’

  She was afraid he was going to laugh, but he didn’t.

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ he said, and they walked back down into the village together.

  9

  At first Tara felt safe in the mountains. She might hate having nothing to do all day, and she missed school and Leila with an awful kind of ache, but at least there were no watchers in sinister cars and no danger that the secret police would suddenly knock on the door and take Baba away.

  The mountains were a no-go area as far as the government, the army and the police were concerned. The pesh murgas were in control.

  But it didn’t take long for that comfortable safe feeling to go. You couldn’t spend much time in the village without noticing that everyone was waiting for some kind of showdown. You couldn’t help noticing the ruins either, some inside and some outside the village, where bombs and shells from the last battle between the government troops and the pesh murgas had ripped gaping holes in walls and roofs and blasted out deep craters in the ground.

  Down at the washing pool the village women all had a different opinion about when and where the next big action would be, and how it would turn out.

  The optimists had a cheerful faith in their mountains and their fighters. Kurdistan was a natural fortress. The Kurds had always seen off armies from the plains through thousands of years of history. As they soaped and scrubbed and rubbed at their mounds of dirty washing the women swapped stories of the daring of the pesh murgas, who could appear from nowhere, carry out a raid or an ambush and melt away as if by magic up the rough mountainsides they knew so well.

  The pessimists didn’t say much. They didn’t have to. They just pointed at the sky. There wasn’t a lot that even pesh murgas could do against jet fighters and bombs.

  Ghazal’s mother-in-law, Baji Rezan, was the most talkative of them all. She always had the latest news with all the details. She was down at the washing pool when Tara and Teriska Khan took down their first week’s load of laundry the morning after they’d heard the screams of low flying jets and the crump of distant explosions some way off to the north.

  ‘Baji Rezan’ll know all about it, you wait and see,’ whispered Teriska Khan as she and Tara came out through the screen of willows and joined the group of women at the edge of the pool. She was right.

  ‘Over on the other side, it was,’ Baji Rezan was saying, pointing with her chin across the valley. She had big muscular arms and they bulged as she wrung out a course cotton sheet between her strong hands. ‘Three planes, and they came in so low you’d have thought they’d scrape the rooftops. The mosque was hit, and several houses. My brother-in-law was over that way yesterday. He didn’t say how many people were killed but it must have been a good many. I know Hesho Khan’s daughter was badly hurt.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ll come here next do you?’ said Tara anxiously to Ghazal, who was scrubbing away at a pile of grubby baby clothes.

  ‘That’s what we’d all like to know!’ Baji Rezan overheard and answered for her. She was squatting down, working at a stain on a dress.

  She looked up at Teriska Khan and smiled, showing two gold teeth in the front of her mouth. ‘Can’t you tell us? Your husband’s supposed to have contacts everywhere. He must be in the know.’

  A look that Tara knew very well crossed Teriska Khan’s face. It meant she didn’t like the question and wasn’t going to answer it. She had learned to be as discreet about Kak Soran’s political activities as he was himself.

  ‘He never talks about things like that to me,’ she said, sounding rather prim. Baji Rezan tossed her head, and looked round the circle of women.

  ‘No need to be stand-offish,’ she said touchily. ‘We’re not like your smart ladies in Sulaimaniya.’

  Teriska Khan smiled, to show she wasn’t offended, and picked up another shirt. Baji Rezan seemed to feel she’d gone too far.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said with a raucous laugh. ‘Everyone knows me. I always speak my mind. Take no notice of me.’ She dug Tara painfully in the ribs with her powerful elbow. Tara nearly toppled over into the pool. ‘When are you going to find a husband for this pretty girl, then? She must be nearly the right age. Got anyone in mind? Why don’t you get Kak Soran to get on with it? It’d be nice to have a wedding in the village. Cheer us all up a bit. Take our minds off the war. Better choose the right night, though. My sister’s daughter was married a few weeks ago, in a village up north. They chose that very night for a bombardment! The bride and groom had only had five minutes alone together when bombs started falling all round them. What a way to start your married life!’

  The others all seemed to find this story funny, but Tara didn’t. She blushed and felt embarrassed and miserable. She couldn’t understand what she was doing here, washing clothes with people like this. None of these women were like her. None of them had been to a proper school, or travelled anywhere. Half of them had never even been out of the village, and only a few had been as far as Sulaimaniya.

  They’re so rough, she thought, and ignorant, and tactless. I can’t spend the rest of my life with people like that! I can’t!

  After that, Tara tried not to go to the pool when all the other women were there. She didn’t care how stuck up they thought her.

  It wasn’t hard to avoid them. Now that spring had well and truly come to the mountains, most of the women were hard at work in the fields in their vegetable patches, breaking their backs as they bent over their weeding and planting, and coming home exhausted to cook their husbands’ dinners. Tara hadn’t got much to do. Kak Soran didn’t have any farm land of his own, and in any case, she told herself, she couldn’t possibly have done farm labouring like the others.

  She helped Daya, of course, but it didn’t take long to finish her home chores, to fold up the beds and sweep t
he floor of the house in the morning, and help with the cooking and clearing up. She didn’t even have to look after Hero much. Hero was perfectly happy. She was out of doors all day, playing with two other little girls who lived nearby. They spent hours and hours chasing a little flock of newly hatched goslings round the courtyard, and pretending to cook and keep house in an old empty store room built against the courtyard wall.

  The worst thing about living in the mountains was that it got so boring. Being bored was worse than being uncomfortable. Tara even stopped seeing the nice things after a while. She still went up to fetch water from the spring every morning but now she didn’t bother to stop and look at the fields of wild flowers. She hardly even noticed when the tulips began to lose their scarlet petals.

  She was noticing other things though. She noticed that strings of visitors were coming to see Kak Soran, just like they used to in Sulaimaniya, only these men didn’t wear smart suits and highly polished shoes like the town visitors had. They came in baggy hand-woven trousers, belts stuffed with cartridges, and turbans bound round their heads. And when they came into the room (which Tara and Teriska Khan would quickly leave) they’d kick their shoes off at the door, put their rifles down on the floor, and sit cross-legged with their backs against the wall.

  Tara never spoke to them, but she sometimes caught sight of their faces as she passed the open door when the lamp was lit after dark, and several times she thought she recognized someone. She was sure that some of these men, in the dress of pesh murgas, were the very same well-off businessmen who’d so often sipped coffee with Baba in his own guest sitting room at home.

  The visitors weren’t the only mystery. Tara had spent a bit of time wandering about near the village, looking out for the old places she’d played in years ago. One day she went to look for a rock where she and some of the other little girls used to play jumping games. There was a tangle of brambles over it now, but under them, beside the rock, she could plainly see a pile of wooden boxes. She went back the next day to take another look but the boxes had gone.