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

My father climbed out of the truck and told the driver to continue on with us. I saw him disappear, his old Brno on his shoulder, with his friend. It began to rain.
    There was unimaginable chaos in the village of Bijil. The peasants, returning from their pastures with sheep, goats, cows, horses, mingled with countless cars crammed with passengers on their way to the great revolutionary picnic. People and animals were wading through mud, and the rain kept coming down. We were somehow privileged, so my mother, my sisters, my two sisters-in-law—Dijla the villager and Salma the dancer—their children, and I were put up in a room in the house of an acquaintance of my father. My
two brothers had gone to join the fighters in the mountains. In spite of all the commotion around me, I felt lonely. The village made me sad. I decided to join my father at the police station, where I found him surrounded by armed men. Facing them were six Iraqi policemen, unarmed and wearing no belts. My father was trying to repair the Morse transmitter; it was connected to a battery, but there were none of the characteristic beeps coming out of the machine. This was the first time I’d seen a transmitter. My father rolled a cigarette and offered it to one of the Iraqis. I was surprised. Then he rolled another one, for himself. He lit it and, looking the policeman straight in the eye, asked, “Tell me … What did you do to the machine so that I can’t fix it?” The policeman held his head up high. “How could you possibly imagine I sabotaged it?”
    I saw my father as a judge. He went on, “If you tell me what you did to this machine, I’ll let you and your friends go, unharmed.” The policeman shrugged his shoulders and said, “I swear by Allah I didn’t touch that machine. I don’t know why it doesn’t want to work …” And to show his goodwill, he tried to help my father repair it. Standing around them, we followed their every gesture very attentively. Rajab, who greatly mistrusted the Iraqis, asked, “What are we going to do with the prisoners if the machine doesn’t work?” My father didn’t reply; he went outside to smoke a cigarette and calm his nerves, and Rajab followed him. Back inside, my father bent down over the machine again, helped by the policeman, but with no greater success. Rajab marched back into the room like a madman and, aiming his rifle at the policeman’s chest, made it clear to him, in broken Arabic, that he was giving him one hour to repair the transmitter, or else he and his companions would be buried along with it. Panicked, the policeman turned to my father and pleaded with him. My father calmed down Rajab, who stepped away, cursing the devil. My father returned to the
policeman. “Listen, my brother, I know you sabotaged the machine. Either you repair it immediately or we execute you right away.”
    The policeman went back to work on the machine, invoking Allah. I saw him tinker with a part. When my father saw that the policeman had started the transmitter going again, he pushed him aside and made a show of repairing the apparatus himself. It started sending out the Morse code again, and my father straightened up, puffing out his chest. “We’re proud of you, Shero, the general’s operator,” Rajab said to him. Then they picked up the secret codes transmitted by the Iraqis and let the policemen go unharmed, advising them to tell our Arab “brothers” that the Kurds weren’t enemies of the Iraqis but were simply struggling for their freedom. Our fighters would have liked to keep my father there as their operator, but he declined, declaring, “The general is waiting for me …”
    When we were back with our family, my father described in great detail how he had fixed the transmitter. I said nothing.
    Â 
    Â 
    We spent three nights in Bijil, whose population swelled with each new day. Fear of