Our church has been here for two thousand years. It was founded by Saint Thomas. We have survived the Sassanids, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Ottomans, and our own dictator. We will not survive our liberation.
Thousands have fled to the monasteries, to Arbil then Sweden and the Commonwealth, some even into the arms of our liberators. Half our population is gone. The extremists say they will kill us if we don’t flee or give them money. Only a few are wealthy enough to pay. Like the Jews before us.
I have not fled our village. I am the last. I am no longer young, with no living family, no heirs. Only their graves to tend. One day, my neighbors will kill me, too. In the way of both our martyrs, I almost welcome it.
The stones of our sanctuary were laid as a mountain refuge in the time of Tamerlane when our people were forced into hiding by the bloody locusts of his horde. Now, the doors stand open, their hinges broken, the cutout crosses of their handles scorched from within. The holy symbols have been burned, the sanctuary ransacked. The priest was abducted and the elders fled the across the mountains. To the south, the red patriarch sits in the capital, quietly murmuring his prayers in our oppressors’ tongue. Only the graves have gone unmarred. I am uncertain how long their soil will remain consecrated. Or if it ever was.
Each morning, I gather a bucket, a broom and the stiff-bristled brush my wife and daughters once used to scrub our kitchen. Each day I fill the bucket with clean water from the river and wend my way through the deserted village to the church.
For thirty-nine mornings I have scrubbed soot from its walls and bloodstains from its floor, stone by rough-cut stone. I work the brush until the water in the bucket becomes as murky as our river filled with snowmelt in the spring, as tinged reddish-brown as the Tigris after Tamerlane. Winter has come early this year. The water numbs my fingers until they creak with age and ice.
I rise as bent and sore as the old woman who used to perform this task for the priest each week, as village women had done for centuries. I don’t know why I do it. Perhaps I think I can lure our people home again. Perhaps I just want the church to be clean before our neighbors convert it to a mosque.
I keep hoping that one day I will sweep out the last of the tainted water, that the floor will come as clean as a newborn on the day he is baptized in the font. Today is the last day. Tomorrow, I rest whether the church is clean or not.
Since my release from the army a quarter-century ago, I no longer go to Mass. My wife and daughters were the religious ones. The church was their domain. They attended each Sunday with the rest of the village. I only accompanied them on Christmas and Easter, the two highest of our holy days. After surviving being drafted at the age of forty-two, I thought my life was such that I could afford to seek forgiveness only twice a year. Now, I don’t care that there is no priest to hear my confession or direct us in the service. Without my wife and daughters, without my grandchildren, how could I celebrate tomorrow as a holy day?
Three generations had disappeared in the time it took to dial a mobile phone.
I used to run the liquor shop in our village. My eldest daughter’s husband would have taken over soon. Today, the shelves are empty, the counter and floors swept clean of broken glass. The foreign aid workers have fled for the safety of Arbil. The foreign soldiers retreated months ago, waiting to see who will win before they begin their long journey home.
Years ago, our women dressed much as theirs and walked the streets unmolested. Then came our liberation, and with it returned oppression as a tyrannical majority insisted we conform to their more conservative ways. Now, our blood once again stains these streets as it did when my father and grandfather were young. Our own soldiers only watch, content as long as the violence points away from them.
My father was educated abroad, just after the English had liberated us from the Ottomans. I followed in his footsteps, spending a full year at university in England before the first coup called me home. At the time, many of our people thought a republic would free our country from the corruption of the Hashemite kingdom and foreign intervention. Until coup begot coup and war begot bloody war. The spirit of nationalism was repaid with dictatorship, though even he left our congregation mostly intact. Unlike the men and women to the north he wanted us to gas. Now, the Kurds offer us sanctuary as we flee our mutual enemy. But I know the enemy of our enemy will not forever remain our friend. A hundred years ago, we fled the other way.
Now, even the English are allies where once they, too, were enemies. When I was young, we wanted to be just like England. We filled their universities with young men like me eager to study science and engineering. At home, we modernized and improved our country, and hoped they would respect us. We thought we were building a secure future. We thought oil would be our salvation. Like children with their parents, we thought one day they would treat as equals. We were wrong.
That was a lifetime ago, back when my hair was unmarked by gray, my face unlined by fear. The cruelty of growing old is that I can recall the details of that one Christmas spent abroad better than I can remember the beauty of my wife’s face.
England was full of shiny new optimism that year, much like we were in the first days of liberation. Petrol rationing from the Suez crisis had ended a few months before I arrived. So many buildings were newly finished after being rebuilt from damage in the war. We still remember with shame that we tried to choose the wrong side in that global conflict. In our defense, we were uncertain at the time whether England meant to be our friend, our enemy or just our secret master. Much as today with her more powerful ally who occupies our land.
My roommate invited me home with him for Christmas that year. I remember how privileged I felt at spending the holiday with him and his family instead of alone in London. Christmas was a time for family, and I had none in his country. Just like here today.
His village was so distant from dismal, dreary London. As the train rolled west, the countryside glowed with life, so verdant, lush and fertile, even in winter, unlike the sparsely treed mountains near my home. England had an abundance of water, falling nearly daily from her leaden skies. If my country could be colored brown and blue, England would be captured best in greens and grays, now gently trimmed in white. I was used to snow in winter, but nothing quite like this. In our mountains, snow meant hardship. Here, it was like a warm, winter blanket tucked around the land, securing it till spring.
When we arrived at the station, we found the village decorated as though it had been beset by a thousand Persian fairies. Their Christmastide was more inviting than our own celebrations that remained discretely veiled from view. Each door displayed a woven evergreen circlet with tiny ornaments tied to it with bright red ribbons, like a cheery English marker to ward off Pharaoh’s final plague. Each shop and home was lighted as if by a thousand candles from within, their windows warm and welcoming despite the cold and snow outside. Like our church at Christmas bathed in light from the votive candles we burned in memory of the dead. It was the first time since arriving that I’d seen how welcoming this foreign land could be.
The family’s home was adorned with all manner of Christmas decorations. On the table, an arrangement of sharp-leafed winter greenery with red berries. In the front room, an evergreen draped with glass ornaments, electric fairy lights and shiny strips of metal, with a guardian angel perched on top. Friends and family sent each other special cards to mark the day that were then displayed on a hutch beside the fire. I marveled at the shear expense directed at this one of our major holidays, the least important of two. I was amazed that every home had electricity all day and night without interruption, a telephone, a television, most even a car. At home, my family was considered wealthy but we could afford none of these things.
They suspended bright stockings from the fireplace that were filled with gifts by Christmas morning that concealed the tangerine tucked in every toe. The children received mostly small toys and candies. The adults, things more utilitarian. There was even one for me with items I could use at school, pencils, ink, a pair of woolen socks, mittens and a scarf. And drinking straws, plus a little tea and chocolate.
Beneath the tree larger gifts were wrapped in brightly printed paper. When we each opened them in turn on Christmas day, I found my roommate had given me an umbrella for the unending London rain. I gave him several boxes of his favorite Turkish cigarettes that I had acquired from a family friend near school. The packages marked for his younger brother contained miniature racing cars, a building set and a jigsaw puzzle. The kind of gifts I wished I could have afforded for my grandsons to this day.
Christmas Eve, the family attended the village church, and I accompanied them. Outside was an ancient graveyard with the tomb of a patron-knight slumbering in chiseled stone. My roommate’s father tried to impress me with the church’s age, roughly the same as ours at home, not realizing that our sanctuary was considered young by the standards of our country. His village church had begun to show its age and lack of upkeep as his country slowly began to drift away from its traditions. My roommate told me it was only full a few times a year with people much like me, men and women who only attended for the festivals not the weekly sermons. I still wonder if it stands today?
Inside, the floor was polished wood instead of dusty cobbles. They sat on long, wooden benches with low backs where we sat in rows of high-backed chairs. Their doors were solid, their windows small with lead-latticed glass, their interior bright, white plaster offset by nearly black wooden beams. Our church had large, arched windows open to mountain sky. Our interior walls were all rough-cut stone.
The service was not our Mass, but very reminiscent. Their priests had divorced themselves from ours centuries ago, but kept many of the same traditions. The service was conducted by candlelight in English, a thought that would have brought a frown to our village priest. And where we recited a different liturgy, the English liked to sing, creating an odd mixture of reverence and communal celebration. One I could have gotten used to had I stayed.
That and the table full of food for Christmas dinner, all of it rare, exotic, and cornucopian in quantity. Until our wars decades later, I never suffered hunger, but have never seen so great a bounty. A great bird stuffed with spiced breadcrumbs served with a tart berry jelly, miniature cabbages from Belgium, potatoes soaked with butter, wine infused with spices, a special cake with snowy frosting and romping plastic deer, a special pudding with brandy sauce and cream, a mince pie finished off with sherry trifle.
After dinner, we listened to music on the radio, Handel’s Messiah I think, and a service of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College, near where we went to school. Then the family gathered around excitedly to watch the Queen’s first televised address. I remember her talking about the speed with which the world changes and the need to hold onto our religion to guide us in public and private life. I remember her welcoming Ghana and Malaya into their Commonwealth and longed for my country to be added one year soon. How I envied them that day.
I had always hoped to take my wife and daughters back with me one day so that they might finally believe my tales of that foreign Christmas. Now, I never will.
Each Christmas Eve, I recounted my story to them like a patriarch or a prophet, though last year only the grandchildren feigned interest. My daughters had grown as cynical as their husbands. Even Leyla only graced me with a tolerant, spousal smile.
But we still celebrated in the way I had imported from that foreign land, as much as our circumstance would allowed. For decades before liberation, everything was rationed, even petrol in our oil-soaked country. One year, my wife saved all her spare household money to buy a string of fairy lights that we hung around the doorway of the shop. Another year, she bought a plastic tree from China, its needles all silver, sparkly and new.
After the liberation, the foreigners whispered and snickered when they came to buy their holiday beer and wine. I pretended not to notice. Despite my English, I don’t think they knew I had been educated in their country. I would never go into their homes and insult their traditions, especially if they were patterned on my own. Like insulting a child for not being able to afford his distant cousins’ ways.
Now, the needles of that tree have tarnished and thinned. Many of the fairy lights have flashed and flickered out. Like our dreams quickly after liberation. Our holiday may now be recognized officially, but last year Mass was cancelled in Kirkuk.
There is a gift for my wife waiting beneath that tattered tree, wrapped in shiny blue paper sprinkled with little silver doves. Like prayers for the peace we did not have. Inside is box with a pendant on a gold chain like one she’d seen in an aid worker’s discarded magazine. She had mentioned it to our daughters as she’d thumbed through the pages one slow, sunny, autumn afternoon. My middle daughter pointed it out to me.
I bartered a week’s profit in the form of beer and brandy to a foreign soldier who purchased one just like it for me on his mobile phone. He delivered it, pre-wrapped from the company that sent it, the Saturday before my wife and daughters attended Mass that final time. Once he had loaded the cases in his truck and driven off, I delicately undid the tape to confirm what really lay inside, then carefully rewrapped it, refolding the paper like a military map. I placed the box beneath the tree after she left for church to tease her when she returned like I always did.
My wife would always wait until Christmas morning to reveal her gift to me. Even now, I haven’t discovered where she hid it. It would show up somewhere unexpected, wrapped in cloth or brightly-colored scraps of paper tied with simple yarn. Some years, it would appear beside my bed, or with my breakfast on the kitchen table, or in the cash box of the shop.
There is no box waiting when I arise on this Christmas morning. There were chores to attend before I performed my final duty at the church, wood to chop, water to carry. We no longer have intermittent electricity or sporadic running water. Even fuel for the generator is hard to find, though I’d rationed off enough to run the remaining fairy lights for an hour or two today.
My aging body protests at carrying through the new morning routine. Increasingly, it is not a matter of which joint aches as which doesn’t. I dress in layers of my best lambswool, like a Kurd, before pocketing Leyla’s gift at the last moment and setting off for center our village.
Overnight, the streets had been dusted with snow. Just like my year in England, though I find little comfort in that memory now. The wind is sharp and cold, the sky heavy and leaden. Clouds flow down the mountains, much like those winter mornings in the English countryside, only the air is dry and dusty, the scenery dun and sere, and none of the homes I pass are warmly lighted. They all stand deserted, their doors intermittently complaining at being abandoned to the wind. The village emptied when the army finally arrived and said they could no longer keep us safe. As if it were they and not the foreign soldiers who ever had.
By the time I arrive at the graveyard, the sun has risen high behind the clouds and casts a tarnished silver light. I wish I’d cut a wreath from the evergreens in the mountains above our village to lay beside my family’s graves. But that would have meant pilfering red ribbons from one of my granddaughter’s dresses, a prospect I could not bear. And I had no glass ornaments to make it sparkle anyway, only tears.
As I enter through the arched gate, I hope my girls will recognize me as I whisper my love before their graves. I hope Leyla would remember that I kissed each of our grandchildren’s markers in turn, like she did their foreheads each night before bed, if I saw her again one day soon. After the scenes I’d witnessed during the first of our unending wars, I’m not sure I believe the stories the priest told us of reunions in the afterlife. But I want to. I so badly want to.
Inside the church, I set upright the last of the intact chairs. Where the alter used to stand, I light all the votive candles I had salvaged, one for my wife, one for each of our three daughters, their husbands and all our grandchildren. For a moment, the interior glows like that English church at Christmas, the candlelight casting out the stains that stubbornly remained. Like a summer day blinding you to any ugliness with the brightness of the sun. I watch the candles burn like the bright future I once pictured for my grandchildren until they slowly flickered out.
The sun is low when I departed through the graveyard to say a final goodbye to Leyla. I remove her gift from my pocket and leave it on her gravestone. I know the box will go unopened, but can still imagine the joy lighting up her face as she discovers what I’ve done. I will need that imagined memory to bear me through the winter. I know I won’t return to this place before the flowers bloom at Easter, if even then. I am no longer young. Winter could easily claim me as it has many of our old each year. As I turn to leave, the wind slices through my coat like a Kurdish knife. The snow begins to fall again like softly frozen tears.
My feet crunch home through the echoing and deeply shadowed streets. At the threshold of my door, I spot a box wrapped in a bright red paper neatly tied with a silken bow waiting beneath a fine layer of snow. For a moment, I am confused, as if waking into a better dream where the past two months do not exist. Perhaps someone else had survived, someone who, unlike me, remains in hiding. I look around the snow-blown streets, but see no one, not even an eye peering from behind a shutter. I hear nothing but the stalking wind. Even our dogs have defected to our neighbors’ warmer homes.
Carefully, I pick up the package, weighing it in my hands. The box is heavy but doesn’t rattle when I gently shake it as if I am a child, my head cocked to listen for the slightest sound inside. I sniff it. It smells like new paper, with perhaps a trace of perfume, jasmine maybe, like Leyla sometimes wore. Could she have hidden my gift with a friend who now is passing it on to me? The wind stings my eyes, nearly freezing them shut. I miss her so, her and all our daughters. How I long to see them all one final time. To tell them that I love them before they trundle down the road to an unknown future.
I carry the box to the relative warmth inside, setting it on the table before I hang my coat on the peg behind the door. I settle in a chair and stare at it as the snow from my outer garments begins to drip like the tears rolling down my face. Even as I begin to untie the bow, I anticipate the gift that awaits me.
© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III
