Read My Father's Rifle for Free Online

exams, to my father’s great satisfaction. With his ear glued to the radio, he was following the putsch leader Saddam Hussein’s trip to Moscow. And to his great disappointment, Radio Moscow made no mention of the Kurds. I went to town to look at Sami’s paintings. Many shops showed his paintings now. Sami wasn’t just painting young Kurdish girls anymore. One of his paintings showed four partridges on a snowy mountaintop, symbolizing our homeland split up among four countries. One of my favorites was a portrait of the charismatic General Barzani, head held high, in traditional dress, a dagger tucked in his belt, a pistol at his left side, the end of his rifle jutting out behind his shoulder. What a great man. A rumor had been going around for some time that the general wasn’t coming down from his mountains anymore. He no longer believed that the accords signed with the putsch leaders would be respected. We had seen policemen gradually reappear in town. That was not in the accords. And on the hill with the cave,
directly facing our house, the Iraqi soldiers’ little blockhouses had been converted into barracks. I knew that had it been possible, my father would have turned his house around to face the town.
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    My cousin Cheto used to sell blackberries to the soldiers, and I would go with him. We sold them for ten cents a cup. We never went farther than the barracks door. At first, the soldiers distrusted us. They would ask us to eat some of the berries in their presence so they could be sure they weren’t poisoned. The trade became unprofitable: we had to eat a cup of blackberries for every few cups we sold. But little by little, they began to trust us, and the soldiers going on leave to their families asked us for whole baskets of apricots, apples, grapes, figs …
    It was marvelous; we were beginning to earn money and I was building a small nest egg. My mother, though, was afraid for us because of the soldiers and the land mines in the area. With money from the blackberries I went to see Sami in his newly opened studio, where he also sold tubes of paint. He taught me how to stretch canvas on a frame. When I came back home, I climbed up to the second floor with a white canvas and the fat book of poetry by Malaye Djeziri under my arm. I studied every illustration in the book over and over again, inch by inch. I read through the poems, trying to understand which words had inspired the colors, the shape of a mouth, the black eyes with long lashes, the hair, or the round breast, plump as the pomegranates in our orchard. Yes, there were even bare-breasted girls. I remained indecisive in front of my white canvas for the longest time, unable to pick up the paintbrushes. Suddenly I heard my brother Rostam arrive and I went downstairs to the garden.
    He had a new weapon and was examining it with my
father. It was a Plimout. The weapon was the size of his forearm, unlike my father’s long Brno. Besides, it was an automatic, and the magazine held thirty-six bullets. It was a short-range combat weapon. I was fascinated. My father placed the Plimout in my hands. “Be careful, it’s loaded. With the slightest jolt, a hail of bullets can go off.” I was dying to shoot a little, and my father added, “You’re not a kid anymore, you’re a man. Take it and fire as many bullets as you like.” For the first time, thanks to the Plimout, my father called me a man. I seized the weapon and I darted off, running through the orchard toward the hills. I was proud—I had a weapon and I wasn’t a kid anymore. I felt like a man, as my father had said. I looked all around me for a target. There was a flock of birds, but they were flying too high in the sky. I tried to find a rabbit or a snake, but no luck. Finally I aimed my weapon up at the sky, in the direction of God, and I fired a hail of bullets. I was like a madman, a drunk. At that moment, I could have killed a man, I