He had completed the third term and passed his examinations when he was disciplined for dancing on the campus at Nawroz and suspended for a term. Then the military officer at the campus, who had taken a dislike to him for some reason, had filed a complaint against him and the other members of the student culture club saying they had sung Kurdish songs and staged a silent liberation play. As a result, he was suspended for another two terms. Otherwise he would have continued his education and become a doctor. It didn’t matter if it were in the state clinics or small-town health institutions; he would still be serving the people of this country. And what was wrong with a civil servant’s salary. Your money was in the bank at the beginning of every month.
It didn’t work out. He did not have the chance to carry on to the fourth term. If he had had the means or been able to find a part-time job he could have waited for the suspension to be lifted and continued from where he had left off, although it would have been difficult. He had no means, no job or money from his father. When he was handed the disciplinary order he became so distressed that an electric dart had passed through his brain and burst a blood vessel in his eye.
In our region, if you are in trouble, if lightning flashes through your brain and stress makes a blood vessel burst in your eye, the places you go to, the places you take refuge in, are the mountains that surround your land and your heart. To see a free horizon you look at the mountains, and then you climb them. You heed the mountains, and you listen to their sounds before singing a song in your language. At the beginning, when the mountains were merely mountains, there was no war, treason, guerrilla forces or Kurdish separatism. In our region, where all exits and doors are sealed, where all screams and voices are smothered, where your voice is silent however hard you scream and is never heard even if it does emerge, the mountains represent hope; they are liberty, the high podium from which you can make your voice heard, where your scream will echo.
Bleeding, he tumbles down the hill, surprised at the speed of thought and remembrance, with a pleasant drowsiness in his brain as though he has smoked grass.
The night their village was raided, the doors of the huts and barns were broken open with rifle butts and the people inside lined against the walls. His mother, grandmother and aunts were forced to lie face down on the ground while boots pressed on their necks and the house was searched. The grown men were taken from their homes — some in their underwear, some naked — and herded together in the village square amid Turkish-Kurdish curses, slaps and kicks. He was only a small boy cowering under the only window of their flat-roofed yellow-grey mudbrick house that stank of dung. He remembers — how could one forget? — seeing his old limping grandfather, his father in his long johns, his cousin and his big brother as they were frogmarched away. He remembers watching the armed men in snow masks and motley uniforms that blended into the night, as they goaded the grandfathers, fathers, uncles and brothers crawling along the ground with sticks and rifle butts. He remembers that some of his people were pushed and prodded into trucks amid shouts of ‘Spawn of Armenians and Kurds!’ ‘Traitors!’ ‘Criminals!’ and were taken away and that his father and grandfather were considered lucky to have returned home, even if bruised and broken. He also remembers that for three days his father didn’t get out of bed, not from pain or sickness but from grief and shame, that for three days he lay facing the wall on the cushions in the corner.
‘We must leave this place,’ he said when he eventually got up. ‘We must go far away to a place where houses are not raided at night. Don’t anyone dare say to me that this is our homeland. What sort of a homeland is this? The guerrilla attacks, demanding food, shelter and sons to fight in the mountains; the state attacks and wants you to forsake yourself, your life, your honour. We must go to the city, a big city where nobody knows one another. It’s too late for the others, but this poor boy must go to school, get an education and become a responsible member of society. The mountains are no longer safe. Death lurks there. Brother shoots brother in the mountains.’
The day the village was evacuated and burnt down and they were trying to reach the plain below with their loads on their backs, women and children, everyone totally wretched, when they stopped to look back something incredible happened, his father had wept; he went down on his knees facing the village, as if prostrating himself in prayer, and talked to himself as he cried. Seeing him like that, the women crouched next to him and bade farewell to the village, sobbing and wailing, ‘Şin û şivan’, as if praying for the dead. He heard his father muttering, so that he wouldn’t be heard by the soldiers accompanying the migrating group and hissing under his breath like a wounded animal, as though whistling through his teeth, ‘Ma li serê çîyan mirin ne ji rezilbûyina li vir başir bu?’ Wouldn’t it have been better to die on the mountain rather than suffer this disgrace? The home of our ancestors is ablaze. What good is living if you’re not strong enough to put out the fire in your homeland? ‘Ger mirov ji boy tefandina şevata welat xwedi hêz ne be, jîyan çi re di be?’ They had cried together, silently this time, grandfather, grandmother, mother, daughter-in-law, grandchildren, everyone. Their homeland remained as the smell of burnt grass and dung in their nostrils, the colour of embers in their eyes, salty teardrops on their lips, pain in their hearts and longing in their minds. Burnt villages, burnt hills, burnt mountains … Was that all that was burnt?
He is not rolling any more. He slides down the steep slope on his behind putting his wounded shoulder forwards. Only the sound of the crushed grass and the rolling pebbles … And the silence … He can’t decide whether he should consider it peaceful or ominous. And just in front — about 100–150 metres away — the dense clump of trees that looks like a tuft of hair on a bald head…
He slides in the opposite direction for a while to cover his tracks. He must go on a little more, a little further. There is a cave. He must leave some traces there. He tries to smear blood on the grass and the pebbles. His shoulder is bleeding badly. It won’t stop. However, the bullet is not inside; it must have just winged him. He knew he would have been in a worse state if the bullet was lodged inside. After all, he had studied medicine. He had heard in secret conversations that this was why so many wounded fugitives confessed. What can you do if you are a badly wounded fugitive? You will knock at the door of the state. And if you don’t want to stay in prison all your life you will surrender.
I can cope with this wound. The barking dog doesn’t bite; a profusely bleeding wound doesn’t kill. But if the bone is shattered that means trouble. He will go into the cave and leave a torn piece from his shirt and one or two bullets from his cartridge belt. He will bind up his shoulder and try to stop the bleeding, and then he will get up and make a dash for the woods.