My Father's Rifle by Hiner Saleem Read Free Book Online Page A

to escape, Mushir was brought to a halt by a bullet fired by my uncle. He fell from the roof, among the women, right near his coffin.
    Later it was discovered that Mushir had kept a mistress in Mosul. He had not been a traitor.
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    The situation was deteriorating from day to day. The number of security officers grew steadily, and the tension kept rising. Trenches were dug around our town and everyone got ready to defend their neighborhood. My father and seven other men mounted guard in a trench opposite the barracks that dominated the town on the little hill behind our orchard. They expected an imminent attack. At the
slightest signal from General Barzani, they were ready to launch an assault against the Iraqi barracks. The women and children were to be grouped together in a shelter. My father immediately offered our fortress-house. “I had it built especially for a time like this.” No one questioned the sturdiness of the walls in our house, but the problem was its orientation. When it was built, my father had wanted all the windows to face away from the town in the direction of the orchard and the hill overlooking the house. It was a beautiful view. He couldn’t have foreseen that within a few months barracks would go up on that hill, a few hundred yards in front of our windows. This was why, to his great sorrow, it was decided that the women and children would go to stay at my uncle Avdal Khan’s house.
    I didn’t want the happiness of this recent period—the joy in the freedom, the concerts, the painting—to disappear. But it was obvious the putsch leaders no longer respected Kurdish rights and Kurdish autonomy. This being the case, I wanted a gun and I wanted to join the men in the trenches. But since there weren’t enough weapons to go around, I was put in charge of supplying the fighters. My father and his men were very confident. Their morale was boosted by Voice of America, which referred to us as heroes and freedom fighters. It was truly reassuring to have an ally as important as America. My father kept repeating, “We’re Indo-Europeans, like the Americans!” And to reassure himself even more, he added, as his father had, “We’re British.” Radio Moscow was now treating us as rebels, but we couldn’t have cared less: let them “march to socialism” with the Baath Party! Even kids younger than I knew the names Nixon and Kissinger, and we loved them. We stayed in our trenches for several days without anything happening. Then we were given orders to move out of the town because our tanks and airplanes were going to rid the town of all the Iraqi forces and allow us very shortly to return, victorious.
When my mother asked, “Where are the tanks and planes the Americans gave us?” my father said with conviction, “They’re hidden in our mountains, and the planes are sheltered in clandestine airports.” All of us waited for a sign from the general to march on Kurdistan and liberate it.
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    That was how we left for the north, for the mountains, convinced we would return, victorious, a month later. It was as though we were leaving on vacation. The roads were congested with vehicles heading north. We stopped for a picnic along the way and arrived in Bijil in the afternoon. Perched on top of our possessions, in the back of the pickup my father had rented, I saw Iraqi policemen captured by our men. As he passed them, my father honked his horn to greet his friend Rajab, from Bill, among the fighters. Rajab returned his greeting, raising his gun in the air. I heard my father, radiant, say to my mother, “You see, we’re going to capture all of them, without even firing a shot.” Our friend Rajab ran after the pickup and called out to my father, “Shero, we need you desperately. We’ve retrieved a Morse transmitter at the police station, but those sons of bitches sabotaged it. Come help us repair it!”