A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 10

About forty years ago, however, the wealthy started moving out of the Citadel. Many of their houses were too old to be updated, and city services were poor. As the old families abandoned their homes, villagers escaping the destroyed countryside moved in. Five or six impoverished families crowded into homes that had formerly belonged to one, and the upkeep of the Citadel declined. Today, the site is a hodgepodge of divided old homes, dilapidated newer ones, and piles of rubble. Only a handful of well-preserved historic buildings still stand, one a romantic turn-of-the-twentieth-century home, now holding a folklore museum.

WHILE VISITING THE Citadel, I was introduced to Ya.s.sim Muhammad Wossou, the keeper of a small vegetable shop. A burly, one-eyed man in his thirties, Ya.s.sim lived with his eight children and wife in a single room bordering a gra.s.sy plot near the edge of the Citadel-twenty-five yards straight down from their home honked and flowed city traffic. Three other rooms also bordered the plot, and in each lived other members of Ya.s.sim's family and their families: his brother and his wife and three children, his sister and her husband and seven children, his father and mother and four younger unmarried siblings.

The extended family numbered thirty in all, Ya.s.sim said, and on behalf of everyone, he would like to invite me to spend a night with them at their home. "Ser chaow," he said, and touched his eye in a lovely gesture that literally means "on my eyes," and figuratively means "I am at your service." It was a gesture that traditional Kurds used often, along with the even lovelier one of placing the right hand over the heart, meaning either "I am honored," or "I am honored, but no thank you," depending on the situation.

I accepted the invitation. I felt eager to escape the privileged circles in which I'd been moving and had been told that spending the night at the Citadel presented no security risk.

Invitations such as Ya.s.sim's greeted me everywhere I went in Kurdistan. Sometimes, they seemed pro forma, as it is the thing to do in Muslim society, but more often, they seemed genuine.

When I arrived at Ya.s.sim's home a few afternoons later, I found him and his younger brother, both dressed in khak with c.u.mmerbunds, and many of their children waiting for me. "B'kher-hati, b'kher-hati, " they cried. A Mr. Ibrahim, dressed in a jacket and yellow polo s.h.i.+rt, was also there. An educated man and friend of the family, he spoke some English and Persian, and had come to help with translation.

Ya.s.sim and Mr. Ibrahim gave me a tour through the four family rooms and up onto their rooftops. Two of the rooms were built of clay bricks perhaps eighty years old, another room was about twenty years old, and the fourth felt cool, dark, and ancient, with rounded corners, high ceilings, and uneven walls. All the rooms had the standard TV, clock, mirror, and framed photos that I'd come to expect in poorer Kurdish homes; one room was as brightly luxuriant as a sultana's jewelry box, enveloped with multicolored wall coverings, rugs, and cus.h.i.+ons. Birds had built nests in the rafters outside, and they swooped in and out of the rooms with equanimity.

Up on the roof, the sun was setting on one side and the moon rising on the other, while calls to prayer drifted up from the mosques below. Minarets, domes, and rusting water tanks dotted the flat-as-a-pancake cityscape all the way to its abrupt edge at a brown plain.

Descending again, we entered the gra.s.sy plot and sat on cus.h.i.+ons of bright orange, green, and purple. Other men, teenage boys, one elderly woman, and children of both s.e.xes joined us, but all the other women and teenage girls remained standing in the doorways, watching. From somewhere rasped a sweeping broom, and a few honks rose from the traffic below.

"I am a poor man, but I have a rich heart," Ya.s.sim said, and, indeed, it seemed to be so. His younger children lingered around him, waiting for him to grab them and smother them with kisses and tickles.

Ya.s.sim and his family had moved to the castle in 1979, after five years of exile in southern Iraq, he told me. They were of the Khoshnaw tribe, and they had originally lived in valleys to the north of Erbil. But they'd been forced to flee to Iran because of his father's peshmerga activities, and when they'd returned, they had been captured, s.h.i.+pped south, and placed in a camp with about fifty other Kurdish families. Not until the Iran-Iraq War were the families allowed to return north.

"Tell me more about the Khoshnaw," I said. "How are you different from other tribes?"

"The Khoshnaw know how to forgive," Ya.s.sim said. "If someone kills a member of our family and comes to ask for forgiveness, we will say okay. We also give safe haven to others. Even if a Turk has killed another Turk, if he comes to us, we will support him until his problem is solved. And if we make a promise, we don't break it- "Before the Anfal, the Khoshnaw had more than three hundred villages, and we were famous for our tobacco and fruits, especially apples and nuts. In the past, in the springtime, all the girls and boys went to the mountains to bring back vegetables. They stayed two, three weeks, and when they came back, they told their families who they wanted to marry. The boys went to the girls' families to ask for their hands, and in the autumn, they got married. We always got married in the autumn, because we sold our crops and had money. The wedding festival lasted three days. We had dancing and racing, and each village gave a gift to the bride. We don't do that anymore. Now we get married in the cities, and the wedding is just one day."

While we were speaking, my hosts took turns saying their evening prayers, each retreating to one side of the garden for a few minutes, where a prayer mat had been laid out. Then, as night descended, we retired into Ya.s.sim's room for dinner. About two dozen of us crowded around a plastic tablecloth on the floor covered with platters piled high with rice and wheat dishes, flat bread, yogurt, and mountain greens-no meat. Everything looked delicious, but the rice and wheat dishes were hard for me to eat, as they'd been prepared with generous helpings of the saturated oil that was part of the monthly U.N. food basket.

Ya.s.sim's peshmerga father arrived. A slight man dressed in olive green khak and a turban, he had a long, striking face crisscrossed with wrinkles and scars, and deeply expressive eyes-a face created by decades spent fighting, suffering, and dreaming in the mountains, I thought. B'kher-hati, he said again and again, his eyes s.h.i.+ning, every time our eyes met.

Mr. Ibrahim and Ya.s.sim left to visit a sick friend, and Ya.s.sim's father led me to his home to watch television. An American game show was on, and four teenage boys were playing dominoes. Ya.s.sim's mother, a round woman in a black-and-white traditional dress, was gossiping with a friend wearing a purple-and-gold dress, while both clicked prayer beads.

Ya.s.sim's mother and I spoke a little in Persian. She had been with her husband in the mountains when he'd been in Haj Omran, near the Iran border, she said. It had been a terrible time. She'd had four children then- all under age eight-and they'd had no shoes, few clothes, and little food. The bombs fell all the time-in the day, in the night. A family of seven living next door had been killed.

Canned laughter blasted out of the television, and Ya.s.sim's mother turned her attention away from me. Her husband had fallen asleep at her side, and as she stared, rapt, at the TV, prayer beads clicking, I longed to have been in Kurdistan fifty years earlier, in the age of storytelling, not electronics.

That night, I slept in a room with only Ya.s.sim's wife and oldest daughter, thereby displacing at least seven people, who must have been parceled out to the other rooms. I tried to convince the family that I wouldn't mind sleeping with more people, but they wouldn't hear of it, and I soon gave up, knowing it was hopeless.

The next morning, Ya.s.sim and I explored more of the Citadel. We pa.s.sed by turbaned men crouched on haunches in shop doorways and pushcarts piled high with vegetables and sundries. Bands of boys played soccer, and groups of younger children called out "h.e.l.lo" in English as I walked by, doubling over with giggles when I replied. Women and girls over the age of p.u.b.erty were nowhere in sight.

Turning off the main thoroughfare, we snaked back through narrow alleyways. Ya.s.sim seemed to know everyone, his kind, one-eyed face wreathing with smiles at every turn. Then we entered a small compound to visit Ya.s.sim's sick friend. Pa.s.sing through a listless garden, we walked into a dark room filled with several women, a person on a rickety bed, and metal basins on a cement floor. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, my stomach flip-flopped. The woman on the bed had almost no face. It had been eaten away, leaving only raw flesh and bone behind. Her eyes flashed in the darkness, and, although she made no sound, I could hear her screams, spiraling into the void that had opened up around us.

"Take a picture," Ya.s.sim said, but I couldn't.

We went back outside.

"What happened to her?" I asked, my heart pounding.

"It's from the chemical bombs," Ya.s.sim said. "Until two years ago, she had no trouble, but now she will die, I think."

"Is she seeing a doctor?" I felt appalled-by the woman's face, by her living conditions, by the isolation of the Citadel. At the same time, I thought-this is nothing for Kurdistan, perhaps Ya.s.sim has witnessed this sort of thing a hundred times.

"They took her to doctors in Erbil and Baghdad," Ya.s.sim said. "There is no cure, only a drug from Tehran for the pain."

Back at Ya.s.sim's garden, with Mr. Ibrahim to help with translation, I learned more. Like Ya.s.sim and his family, almost everyone on the Citadel was of the Khoshnaw tribe, whose Balisan Valley had been bombed with chemical weapons on April 16, 1987, nearly one year before the start of the Anfal. According to Human Rights Watch, the attack killed about 125 civilians outright, and scores of others disappeared after the Iraqi forces removed them at gunpoint from an Erbil hospital to which they'd fled for treatment.

Neither Ya.s.sim nor Mr. Ibrahim, nor anyone else I spoke with later, could tell me anything more about the woman with the disintegrating face. To be affected in such a way so many years after the attacks was highly unusual, one doctor told me, but he speculated that perhaps the woman's immune system had been weakened and that she suffered from a virulent infection left untreated for too long.

FAWZIA EZIDDIN RAs.h.i.+D, the woman representative who had shown me around the parliament building, invited me to spend a few days with her and her family. Fawzia's husband, Zahir Ali Mustafa Rozhbayani, was director of the Gulan Cultural Foundation, one of Kurdistan's foremost publis.h.i.+ng centers. A feminist, he strongly supported his wife's right to work. Neither Fawzia nor Zahir spoke English, but their two university-age sons, Zhila and Hozak, spoke well and were happy to serve as my translators. Rounding out the family was Kurdonia, age fourteen.

The family lived in one of Erbil's nicer and quieter neighborhoods, in a house that reflected their cultural and intellectual interests. Reproductions of Gustav Klimt and Vincent van Gogh hung on the walls, and their library was packed with a wide array of books by authors from around the world, as well as copies of the Bible, Torah, Quran, and Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians.

The family's clan, the Rozhbayanis, was known for its poets and intellectuals. Among them was Muhammad Jamil Bandi Rozhbayani, who had been murdered with an ax, screwdriver, and knife on March 26, 2001, in his home in Baghdad at age eighty-nine. A writer, journalist, and scholar, Rozhbayani had been visited by three men from Iraqi intelligence a few days before his death, who warned him about his recent critiques of the regime. Later, when his body was found, his finished but unpublished memoirs and other ma.n.u.scripts were missing. Muhammad Jamil Bandi Rozhbayani was just one of an estimated five hundred intellectuals murdered by the Baath regime between 1968 and 2003.

Despite my hosts' influential positions in Erbil, they were originally from Kirkuk, a city of about 1 million just outside the semiautonomous zone. As ancient as Erbil, Kirkuk presides over a vast oil field, with proven reserves of 10 billion barrels. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Kirkuk wells were pumping between five hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand barrels a day, and exporting over one-third of Iraq's highest-quality oil, despite a shortage of investment due to economic sanctions.

With oil has come suffering. Kirkuk has been the cause of bitter conflict between the Arabs, Kurds, a.s.syrians, and Turcomans ever since 1927, when its oil fields were first discovered. All four groups lay historical claim to the city, but during most of the twentieth century, Kirkuk was predominantly Kurdish and, thus, a violent flash point between the Kurds and the Iraqi government. It was largely Kirkuk that caused the failure of the 1970 March Manifesto, which in effect would have granted the Kurds a federated state, as Mulla Mustafa demanded that Kirkuk be included in the Kurds' territory and the Baath regime refused. And a similar scenario began after the 2003 Iraq war, as Kurds demanded that Kirkuk be included in a future federated Kurdish state, and Arabs heatedly disagreed.

During the 1970s, the Baathists began an "Arabization" process, initiated by earlier regimes, designed to transform the city's ethnic makeup. To force the Kurds and other minorities out of Kirkuk, the Baathists barred the ethnic groups from owning property-revoking their deeds of owners.h.i.+p- and from registering businesses, marriages, and births unless the children were given Arabic names. The teaching of Kurdish was banned and Kurdish teachers expelled. Arbitrary arrests became frequent. Streets and districts were renamed in Arabic, and Arabs from elsewhere were enticed to move into Kirkuk with offers of free housing and other rewards.

Most of the expelled Kurds and others resettled in the semiautonomous safe haven. Between 1991 and early 2003, an estimated 120,000 displaced Iraqis arrived in Kurdistan, many entering only with the clothes on their backs. Some had even been robbed of their ident.i.ty papers and U.N. ration cards, creating a humanitarian and bureaucratic nightmare.

My hosts had been driven out of Kirkuk after the 1991 uprising. Zahir, a towering and introspective man with a furrowed brow, told me the story over several consecutive evenings, while his handsome sons took turns translating, and Fawzia served multiple rounds of tea, cookies, and fruit. She also did most of the family's cooking and cleaning. Feminism in Kurdistan has yet to extend to housework.

In early March 1991, as the postGulf War uprising began, the Iraqis preemptively rounded up every male Kurd in Kirkuk between the ages of sixteen and sixty, eventually to arrest over five thousand. Zahir was caught at seven A.M. on March 11 by men in red masks and taken with hundreds of others to Maidan Amalah, or Workers' Square. Here Ali "Chemical" Ha.s.san al-Majid, the mastermind behind the Anfal, and his brother were waiting. Arbitrarily, the two selected thirty-four men from the crowd and shot them.

Back at the house, Fawzia and the children heard the shots. "Everyone in the neighborhood was crying," she said, "and later in the square, we saw fingers, money, parts of people stuck to the wall by blood. They'd been splattered all over by the machine guns."

Zahir and the other prisoners were herded into buses and taken to Topzawa, an army camp south of Kirkuk. There, they were packed into standing-room-only, eight-by-fifty-meter cells for forty-eight hours without food or water.

"On the third day, the soldiers released two hundred or three hundred mostly old and sick men," Zahir said. "And on the fourth day, the special security forces of Saddam's son Qusay put us on buses again. Each one called the other 'sir,' and they were all very young, under eighteen. They were like a gang, like the Khmer Rouge, and they commanded even the older Iraqi officers who first arrested us. . . . On the bus, they killed one epileptic because he was shaking. They said he was making trouble."

At two A.M., the buses arrived at a second prison, this one outside Tikrit and surrounded by barbed wire and mines. The men were divided into groups of about fifty each and shoved into pitch-black four-by-six-meter cells, with no windows and thick doors. Some of the men in Zahir's cell started crying, but he began talking, urging the others to introduce themselves.

"I was thinking of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque," he said, "and I said to them, it will be better if we know who we are, especially if some of us survive, to tell the others' families."

About twelve hours later, the prisoners convinced the guards to give them a lightbulb, which both eased and heightened their fears. Their cell walls were covered with graffiti and blood from the Kuwaiti prisoners who had been captured not long before them, during the Gulf War. Where were those prisoners now?

After one week in the prison, most of the men had dysentery. But Zahir was still healthy. He had not eaten the food provided, surviving only on the dried apricots that he had with him at the time of capture. The apricots had been given to him by his daughter Kurdonia, and he vowed not to eat them all until he saw his family again.

Finally, after twenty days of imprisonment, the men were taken to their third and last prison, Warrar, where they remained until May 20, when they were released, following post-uprising negotiations. During the men's imprisonment, no one had registered their names, and their families had had no idea whether they were alive or dead.

At this point, Fawzia and the rest of the family took up the story.

After Zahir's arrest, they stayed in Kirkuk at first, hoping for his return. But when the uprising reached the city on March 18, they fled to the safety of their relatives in Chemchemal. The peshmerga captured Kirkuk for a few days, but on March 21, the Iraqi forces bombed the city, and hundreds of civilians were killed.

The bombing spread to Chemchemal. Out picnicking, the family saw a helicopter circling overhead and knew that the Iraqi warplanes were coming. "We ran for our cars, with thirty-six people crowding into one Land Cruiser," Fawzia said. "We went to Suleimaniyah and stayed in a school overnight. There were explosions everywhere. And the next day, we ran to Iran, escaping over the border on foot."

The trek took five days, through much rain and mud. The children were ages thirteen, ten, and three. Hozak fainted, Kurdonia had allergy attacks, and they all slept on wet cus.h.i.+ons in the cold and often pouring rain. The worst danger were the land mines. But they crossed safely and, with the help of Iranian Kurds, found their way to a refugee camp.

Fourteen days later, through much searching and several lucky accidents, Zahir arrived. "We heard our names over the loudspeaker, and we ran and saw our father," Zhila said. "Up until then, we thought he was dead. He looked like another person. He had a beard and was thin and sunburned." And he still had dried apricots in his pocket.

NOT ALL OF my discussions with the Rozhbayani family were so serious. Thanks to the sons Hozak and Zhila, I finally learned a few Kurdish jokes that I could understand. Many of them concerned the citizens of Erbil, known as Hawler among Kurds, who have a reputation for simplemindedness.

"A man from Hawler buys a mobile telephone," said Hozak. "The phone rings and he answers it, very surprised. 'How did you know where I was?' he asks."

"A Kurd from Hawler and an Arab are friends," said Zhila. "They are visiting one day when someone writes a slogan on the wall below them. The Kurd lowers the Arab out the window by a rope to see what it says. 'It says, long live Mulla Mustafa,' the Arab says. The Kurd claps his hands and the Arab falls."

Other jokes concerned Saddam Hussein or the Arabs.

"Saddam's daughter is in an accident," said Zhila. "She calls her father and gives the phone to the man who hit her. 'Do you know who I am?' Saddam asks. 'Yes,' the man says. 'Do you know who I am?' 'No,' Saddam says. 'Thank G.o.d,' the man says, and hangs up."

"After an election, the Americans are very slow, they take twenty-four hours to count the votes. The British are better, they take only four hours. But the Arabs are the best-they know the results before the election!"

Another joke concerned one of Kurdistan's most popular singers, a heartthrob named Zakaria, whose face was plastered all over the CD shops in downtown Erbil. Zakaria had given a concert in Erbil the year before my visit, during which several young women had kissed him, much to the outrage of conservative Kurdistan.

"After the concert, a mullah gives a sermon," Hozak said. "He says, 'There is too much adoration of this man Zakaria, the one that sings, I can't remember exactly what-' And the whole mosque starts to sing one of Zakaria's most famous songs."

WHILE STAYING WITH the Rozhbayani family, I went to visit some less fortunate Kirkukis living in the Beneslawa refugee camp outside Erbil- one of many such camps all over the Kurdish countryside. Part bedraggled white tents, part mud huts with straw roofs, the makes.h.i.+ft settlement sat in a muddy field pushed up close to a road. Here and there stood outdoor beehive-shaped ovens and one or two satellite dishes. Even in their misery, the refugees knew about American sitcoms and the NBA.

One tiny lady with huge sorrowful eyes invited me into her home, a neatly kept, hobbitlike hut with a ceiling so low I could barely stand up, miniature yard, cement floor, pile of bedding, and baby asleep in a corner. Once happily married, the woman had divorced her husband after he took a second wife, even though she was pregnant at the time. But then she lost her job-cleaning floors for a school-and the Iraqi government told her that she must call herself Arab or leave. She left, and now survived only on her U.N. rations, some of which she sold.

A few yards away, in a flimsy tent with a dirt floor, plastic bags and raggedy clothes everywhere, lived a wiry man in his thirties with his pregnant wife, two young sons, and an older, dazed-looking woman relative who was missing her front teeth. They had left Kirkuk because the man refused to join the Baath Party and was afraid of being imprisoned. The older woman had been imprisoned, for allegedly planning to bomb a police station-at her age! the man said-and refusing to say she was Arab. I can't speak Arabic, so how can I say I am Arab? the woman mumbled. Good point, I thought.

Outside Erbil The third refugee home I entered was a well-kept, two-room, cement-block house with whitewashed walls, a neat fence of black sticks, a gate built from flattened tin containers fastened together, and a garden with flowers. Here, I met a refined lady in a tweed suit whose family had once been successful Kirkuk businesspeople. But she and her husband, both teachers, had been expelled in 1989 for teaching the Kurdish language and refusing to call themselves Arab. Upon arriving in Erbil, they rented a house, which they paid for by selling their possessions one by one, year by year. Then her husband became seriously ill, and they had nothing left to sell. She, her husband, and their teenager daughters were just sc.r.a.ping by on her teacher's salary.

To be forced to deny one's ethnicity is a strange thing. In some ways, it seems relatively benign, at least compared to imprisonment, torture, and death. But in other ways, it is the ultimate cruel act, to be fought against at all costs, as it denies not only one's existence but also one's right to exist.

I would learn much more about the practice, and its repercussions, in Turkey.

HIMDAD ABDUL-QAHHAR, an English professor at the University of Salahuddin, invited me to speak to some of his cla.s.ses. We had exchanged e-mails before I left New York, thanks to a mutual contact, and by the time we met one afternoon in a dimly lit university corridor, I found him br.i.m.m.i.n.g with plans for my visit.

It was through Himdad and others at the University of Salahuddin that the intense hunger of the Iraqi Kurds. .h.i.t home to me. This was a people desperate to learn more about the world, to devour knowledge that had so long been denied them. Every time I stepped foot on the campus, I was instantly besieged with throngs of students and teachers, all of whom wanted to talk. It had nothing to do with me personally, and everything to do with my foreignness: I represented a conduit to the wider world.

One popular topic of discussion among the students and teachers was how democracy was affecting Kurdistan.

"After the uprising, when people first were free, some threw litter on the street and said, 'I am free, I can do what I want!' " said a teacher. "They didn't understand what freedom is. They didn't understand that freedom means responsibility. We still need much education."

"Our society is changing too fast, and this is a danger," said a student. "Some who are younger than us have lost themselves. They don't care about Kurdistan. They only care about material things, like people in the West."

"We still have many problems," said another. "The parties have too much power. We don't have real democracy yet. But these problems seem like nothing to us because of our history."

Others wanted to discuss the role of the United States in the developing world.

"We like what America stands for-freedom and democracy-and the way that politics are run inside your country," said one student, whose beard gave away his political Islamic leanings. "And we hope to one day have a system like yours. But we don't like what America is doing to the rest of the world. You are trying to control everything, and make every society like you. But we are not Western, we are Muslim."

"Religion is a strength for us, and we must use it," said another student. "Islam is very important to our future."

"There are some who abuse our religion, like Iran-they say they are good Muslims but they are not," said a woman in a head scarf. "Others have lost their religion, like Turkey, and still not joined the West. We don't want to be like them."

The students' comments surprised me. I'd grown accustomed to speaking with Kurds who couldn't praise the United States highly enough, while often blaming political Islam for Kurdistan's woes. I wondered how much of the students' opinions were due to their more contemporary education, how much to the resurgent interest in Islam among the young everywhere, and how much to the fighting between the KDP and PUK, which had caused some disillusioned Kurds, and especially young Kurds, to give up on traditional Kurdish politics. I also thought, both then and after the 2003 Iraq war, that for all the pro-U.S. sentiment running rampant in Iraqi Kurdistan, it could not be taken for granted.

ONE DAY, HOZAK, the younger Rozhbayani son, took me on a tour of the College of Dentistry, at which he was a student. Only seven years old, the college was housed in one of the university's more run-down buildings -though a new home was in the works-and, like many faculties, had a shortage of instructors and up-to-date periodicals and books. Of the college's 170 students, over half were women.

As we toured the campus, Hozak pointed out that most of the university's male students "don't know how to dress." By this he meant that most were too formally attired, in dark suits and ties, or well-pressed pants and s.h.i.+rts. Only Hozak and a handful of others wore the Western uniform of jeans and sneakers. And as for the women, could I tell the difference in their hejab, or Islamic covering? he asked. I shook my head, though I was aware of a wide variety of clothing styles, including many in Western dress.

The women wearing the formal suits with calf-long skirts came from religious families and, though conservative, could usually be approached by male students, Hozak said. But the women in the ankle-length dresses and tight head scarves were more Islamic and couldn't be approached. Those attired in loose head scarves and Western-style clothes wore the hejab just for fas.h.i.+on, while those in tight pants, flattering coats, and loose head scarves were refugees from Iran. These last two groups could also be approached by men, but the students from Iran tended to stick to themselves.

Hozak's comments fascinated me. As I'd been told in Dohuk, gender relations did seem to be slightly less rigid in Erbil than they were farther north, but still, the whole area was a minefield through which both men and women moved with extraordinary caution. Many were also quite circ.u.mspect in what they said to me.

A few students at the University of Salahuddin, and at the University of Suleimaniyah, which I visited a few weeks later, did have a boyfriend or girl-friend. All the other students knew about these couples and watched them with what seemed to be a mix of jealousy and protective surveillance; the university felt like a hideaway apart from the harsher gaze of Kurdish society at large. However, even within the university, these young couples were bound to certain codes. Their relations.h.i.+ps were expected to be platonic and to lead to marriage. If a relations.h.i.+p did not lead to marriage, a girl might be able to escape condemnation the first time around, but not the second, and the boy's reputation could also suffer.

The year before my visit, a "great catastrophe" had occurred at the school, a medical student told me. A student caught a couple kissing and reported them to the dean, who wanted them expelled. Talk and protest erupted all over campus, until the issue was finally resolved with the suspension of the "guilty" students for three days.

"The whole thing was very stupid," the medical student said. "Our dean is very conservative. But even among married people in Kurdistan, there is no kissing or hugging in public. It is shameful. Only holding hands is okay. But if a boy and girl are not married, they cannot touch at all. Not even with the finger. It's something very bad. The boy will feel guilty and feel for the girl. So a boy will not approach a girl unless he thinks it is serious. It's too much trouble, and when he approaches, he approaches very slowly.

"In a relations.h.i.+p, a boy and girl can talk about everything, even s.e.xual things. But if they kiss, they must marry. If not, it's a disgrace, and the girl will not have another chance."

"There's much s.e.xual repression in Kurdish society," a well-educated thirty-something woman told me a week or so later, "but some of it comes out in talk-and in our songs, which are very s.e.xual, maybe the most s.e.xual in the Middle East. And once women are married, they talk about s.e.x a lot-they love to tell dirty jokes on the telephone and send dirty e-mails. It's as if they've joined a secret club."

One that men have undoubtedly entered at a far earlier age, I thought, wondering, as I often did, at all in Kurdish society that was hidden to me, and would remain hidden.

Yours is a pair of perfect pears;

Your bosom is a garden in Merivan.

Those two pears on your bosom, I am afraid of touching them.

I fervently wish I could be a b.u.t.ton on your dress

So that I could watch your bosom and breast.