Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

“I gave two sons and a wife for God, and so I said I will give one for school,” Bajh’s father ended up saying, melodramatically and without elaboration, sucking his teeth at the table where Araz was making a final attempt to tutor his friend. So Bajh would not be a famed scholar after all; he would not be a leader of men. Instead, he would be a farmer for his father and would supplement his primary job of herding their sheep with the odd shift at the brick kilns. Both duties had increased that spring, and Araz and Asti usually went after school to find Bajh high in the rising plateau of the fields upriver, where his silhouette slanted unmistakably against the sky as it pearled with rain.

This is what they were doing on an overcast day that spring, their last one all together in the town. The sky was furrowed with restless clouds that moved along on a steady, vernal breeze. The air was cool on Araz’s face, and the wind made Asti’s dress billow and gesture over her jeans in front of him. The irrigation levee they walked along was surrounded by the crops’ waxy green leaves, which fluttered or showed their undersides in the occasional gusts. Together they worked their way up toward where the tiny figure of Bajh was grazing his little dots of gray on a grassy hill.

Araz enjoyed watching Bajh from a distance. There was something about the remove that allowed him to take in Bajh entirely, in one thrilling breath. Sometimes Araz even skipped school, coming out to the grazing grounds and sitting with his workbook in his lap, looking up after each problem to see Bajh whipping at one of the animals with a thin switch or calling to a ewe about the punishments that would surely befall her if she disappeared over the ridge she was presently considering.

Asti was a different matter, though. She seemed only able to believe Bajh was real by evidence of physical proximity. This made some sense to Araz, for whom Asti herself never seemed so real as when she was up close, her vague figure only resolving into calm green-brown eyes and black, lustrous, half-tangling hair at the last minute, when one was close enough to embrace her. To Araz this also felt true of her history in general, from her birth to an unwed mother of unknown origin to the subsequent death of that mother, supposedly in Sulaymaniyah, and through to the improbable adoption by the aunt who’d followed her husband to this town (Asti herself rendered in higher and higher definition out of the soft focus of her baby fat with each passing year). All of which seemed almost purposefully engineered to deliver Asti, with her thin limbs and angular body and high cheekbones, to this spring afternoon, to the space of light and color that was Bajh’s grazing hill, where Araz now watched him receive her. The effect — that of a bodily vision coming suddenly into focus — was the same now, as both Bajh and Araz looked at her and as Bajh laughed and grasped first the back of Asti’s neck and then the back of Araz’s, their old greeting. Araz thought of his own face in his house’s dusky mirror, the puffy flesh of it, as if there were no bones in it at all.

These trips were a sort of retrieval, signaling the end of Bajh’s workday (at least on those days when he did not have a shift at the kilns), and he was almost always in a good mood as they walked with him back toward his father’s compound on the edge of town. Even the sheep seemed to acquiesce, traveling with relief after a day’s heavy business of grazing. Bajh allowed some of them to wade the river at a narrow point, after which they streamed thinly along either bank, occasionally pausing and looking across, calling to each other before trundling ahead, only to stop again and look.

On these trips back, Bajh and Araz often took up a game they sometimes used to play at night, when Asti could not be sprung from the watchful, nervous sleep of her aunt. They did not call it anything, not even “the game,” only ever referring to it via the question “Do you want to play?” as if the final word could mean anything, though Araz knew it only meant one thing, and sometimes, the question was wordless.

That spring they’d begun to play the game, or to attempt to play it, almost every day, testing the still-frigid water with their shins and feet. So far the season had not reached its hidden tipping point, but today Bajh had grown tired of waiting and, as Araz watched, he plunged into the cold water with a shout. He’d left his clothes in a small pile on the bank as they always did, and Araz turned from where Bajh’s pale buttocks had disappeared into the river, already unbuttoning his own shirt and stepping out of his shoes. Asti had begun picking up the clothes and stuffing them into her knapsack and she crouched, facing away, until Araz plunged in after Bajh, letting out an involuntary cry at the shock of the cold.

The game was this: one boy would float on his back as motionless as possible, simulating lifelessness, as the river’s swift current whisked him along. The other would bridge the distance between them with heavy, strong strokes and attempt to support the first boy’s body from beneath, making a sort of double-deckered raft. There was no goal, or sometimes Araz guessed the goal was to keep the other’s body as high out of the water as possible; the test was to avoid all that might impede them: deadfalls, snags, small bars of sand or mud and whatever fleeting, rough fish sometimes glanced briefly against their feet. When they got to a calm stretch of the river or when the obstacles became insufficiently challenging, they switched. They traveled this way when they were playing, covering most of the distance to the town on the river’s current.

Araz thought the game seemed for Bajh a natural extension of the playful feats of athleticism that his friend often displayed in the trio’s boredom: vaulting over crippled fences or scrambling up the exterior of a small building and grinning down at Araz and Asti below. But for Araz, the game was different: a burst of sensation, a quickening of his pulse and breath — the basic state of being exhilaratingly present, alive.

Today, as Araz floated in the freezing water, his body numb, he watched the roiling clouds above the river, heavy and knuckling lower with the promise of rain. Their speed and course matched his own in the current and so gave the illusion of stillness. There was the suddenness then of Bajh’s splashing, the surprise of his lithe body drawing up against Araz’s own from below, and then the delicate weight of Bajh’s long forearm over Araz’s chest, the tense knot of his penis (made small and dense by the cold) against the back of Araz’s thigh, the warmth of Bajh’s breath just past his ear. They moved like that, with the river, chest to back, chest to air. Bajh occasionally lifted his head to see an obstacle or, in an attempt to steer, waggled his free arm and feet, his breathing in the calm air something like laughter.

From his position, Araz could not see Bajh, only feel him, curiously stilled below, and so he watched the sky or the series of black faces of the sheep as they looked across the water, or he turned his head away, toward the bank, where Asti was walking as she always did: placid, arms folded with whatever neatly creased articles of clothing could not fit in her bag, keeping pace easily. She was quiet, wind flipping at her hair, and she looked either down at her path or ahead at the river or over to where Araz floated, meeting his eyes impassively.

•

That night the three were to make one of the long clothing runs up to Dahuk. There was a man there, a night watchman at an airplane hangar that had been converted by the Americans into a storage warehouse for the pallets of aid materials that now came over the Turkish border. As a toddler Araz had been adopted, taken from a religious orphanage by the widower Bertrand Baradost, a lawyer years ago returned from Beirut; the night watchman had once been a client of his, and it was understood that the clothing arrangement was in service of his fee. Bajh drove his father’s rickety old flatbed pickup while Araz and Asti sat between the squares of stale hay in the back. By this time they knew what would be waiting for them after the two-hour chugging ride along the throughway into Dahuk: the gray canyons of buildings; Bajh’s craning neck as he carefully backed the truck up to the side of the hangar; the watchman, rousing himself from sleep to sip at a thermos of tea, watching them roll up the loading-bay door with a series of metal clangs. And inside, the dark labyrinth of shrink-wrapped pallets, stacked higher than their heads.