Ali Ashiq (Ali the Lover)

Ali sat in the shade of the only tree on the lower mountainside. Glancing up at the unbroken blueness of the sky, he marveled at his life. His sheep grazed peacefully on the rich grasses, which were deep green and lush after the spring rains. This was Ali’s favourite time of year. The mountains were waking up, peeling away the previous years’ dried grasses, like old skin from the bottom of his foot. Winter’s rains and the thin layer of snow that had come and gone had softened the earth. The new grass pushed against the remnants and the spring rain washed it down to the river to be carried away.

Ali laid down his wax cloth and slowly began the ritual of folding back each corner to reveal his lunch. Since he was a small boy of ten until then, nine years later, Ali enjoyed this ritual. His sister would prepare his lunch and not tell him what it was. So that he could have a surprise, she said. So that he would know she loved him and thought about him, out there, all alone. Of course, Ali was not alone. He had his sheep and his two dogs. He had grass and rocks, mountains and rivers. The sun was his friend and the rain was his close cousin.

The tin pot was still slightly warm and Ali’s mouth watered. He took his time, savouring the moment. Dolma or Kofta? Maybe Doina. No, not Doina, the special tang of warm sheep yoghurt was missing. He unfolded his mother’s bread, thin and delicate, slightly scorched in patches where it had stayed too long on the sér. Just as he liked it. The slight sharpness, the change in texture from pale to dark excited his mouth. 

Closing his eyes, Ali lifted the lid and sniffed deeply. The hint of sumac, dil, tomato. The distinctive and subtle smell of garlic that his sister put in just for him. To keep him warm inside, to protect him. So lost in the poetry of the moment, Ali missed the ripple of breeze that passed through the meadow. Opening his eyes slowly, he relished the Dolma with them before tasting it. Tearing a piece of bread, he plunged it into the pot, his fingers deftly scooping and rolling a perfect formation.

Since childhood, Ali had appreciated the small things in life. Sitting with aunties and sisters, he had enjoyed the sounds of their voices as they chitter-chattered stories he didn’t quite understand. He was fascinated by the busy-ness of their arms and hands as they scrubbed, kneaded, picked and plucked. All the time their voices rising and falling. He liked the way his sisters’ hair caught the sunlight and shimmered so that it looked like the far away mirage of grass on a hot summer’s day. His favourite times were sitting with his mother while she stirred large pots over open fires. Songs would whisper their way from her lips and drop into whatever she was cooking. Although too young to understand what she sang, he would know instinctively whether they were sad songs or love songs when she lifted the spoon and blew on it before pressing it to his lips for him to taste. Sometimes it was bitter and he would screw up his face, other times the sweetness would make him choke.

As he began to grow older, six or seven, Ali spent less time with the women in his house and more time with his father. Roaming the mountains, finding the best place for the sheep and goats to graze. Listening to his father’s wistful voice telling him of conquests old and new. Teaching him the ways of the Kurdish man who was fearless in battle. The protector of the land, the gladiator. The man. Ali listened dutifully, but his heart remained with the gentle cadence of his mother’s songs. With the fierce gentleness of his aunties and sisters. Ali knew there was poetry in life. Words that fit together in such a way that only beauty could come from them. So while he listened to his father like a dutiful son in his heart and mind he dreamed of beauty.

The year Ali reached ten years he understood that his father had been chosen for something special. The call had come from deep inside his heart, in the place that lived for freedom and hope and belief in a nation. It’s enough, he had said. What can a man do? This is the second uprising, this time I must go. Ali pictured him marching over hills and through valleys. Strong and heroic. Stopping the regime and single handedly saving villages and women and children not old enough to understand.

The women sang songs from the past, old songs that did not hold the gentle poetry that Ali was used to. Songs to march to, songs to die to. His father never returned and the songs changed to lamentations. His mother no longer smiled and his sisters lost their shimmer. Aunties came and went bringing food and stories. Urging his mother to spoon the rice they brought into her downturned mouth and to drink chai with added spices to warm her heart. In other rooms, uncles sat and talked in solemn voices about the sacrifice and their own martyr, they discussed all degrees of loss and decided their own was worthy. Ali moved from kitchen to lounge, in between the men and the women. Carrying water and chai on dented trays, eyes dry.

Ali had been born with the low hum of aeroplanes as background noise, like a constant generator in the next street. Black dots waving on the horizon like eagles riding an air stream. Growing up he had heard the ack-ack-ack of machine guns the sound coming and going depending on which way the wind blew. He had heard the pa-boom of bombs dropped in tandem, muffled when they missed targets and sank into soft earth, sharp and splintered when ripping the roofs from houses or flesh from bones. It was the unconscious soundtrack to his life. Always out there, over the next ridge or the other side of the valley. But never in Ali’s village, which was cocooned in the lyrical sweetness his ears were attuned to, in the way his favourite dog nuzzled his side and in the broken bleating of a newborn lamb. 

When neighbours whispered deep into the night about uprisings, about villages disappearing overnight, brick by brick dismantled in haphazard ways. When their lips uttered about the locals who had been moved ‘down South’ and yet their eyes told a different story that was too terrible to be spoken, Ali would deliberately turn his mind elsewhere. He would watch the way an invisible gust of wind could cause the dry earth to raise up and twirl like a dervish, faster and faster, higher and higher, with such abandon he would want to run and join in. 

Ali took to the hills in his role as the man of the house. Each day calling the dogs, leading a donkey, running the sheep and the goats. Now, each time aeroplanes passed overhead, Ali ducked down low, the hum had become a roar, ears sensitized by grief. Two years passed and his village remained and slowly the light came back into his sisters’ eyes. One by one they left and went to their husbands homes until only Ali and his oldest sister remained with their mother. Again aunties came by and music once more filled his ears. Lighter this time, less rich with variety, but enough for him. Each day, he carried it to the mountains with his sheep and his dogs.

The year Ali turned eighteen was when the two sides of him met. The feminine and the masculine combined and brought about something new, wild and wonderful. She was beautiful. She was more than beautiful. She was Zozg Mountain on a clear day, standing out against an azure sky. She was Gali Ali Beg waterfall pulsing in March. She was almond blossom, dazzling against a craggy backdrop. When she smiled at him, her head turned slightly to one side, a small wrinkle in her brow as though trying to remember him, Ali knew that she would be his. For one year he had dreamed of the day they would be married. He planned each detail so carefully that sometimes he thought it was real and would be surprised to look around and see not the walls of their small home but mountains and sheep.

Ali was mopping up the last of the rice, his fingers smooth with red oil, a slight smile of satisfaction on his face. The sheep were still. Like monuments from the past. Waiting. Aware. At first, Ali did not notice anything, his mind still focused on the life he would spend with his beloved. As he began to tidy away, he wiped his fingers on the grass and noticed the line of ants next to him for the first time. They scurried with determination, carrying crumbs of bread, old leaves and twigs.

Something caught in Ali’s mind. He wasn’t sure what, but somehow he felt something marching through his mind like a well-defined army. Something carrying crumbs and fragments that were indecipherable to him. This time, he felt the breeze that blew through the field. It reached inside him and scattered his peace. The sheep began to bleat and Ali heard whispers. As though somehow the sheep were telling him a secret. In the distance he could hear drums. Faint. Beats missing as the sound bounced off the breeze. There was a whistling and shrilling moving in and out of the air around him.

The sounds of a wedding in the village. Ali knew these sounds. He heard them almost every Friday. Soon, he murmured, they will be for me. But he didn’t feel the extra beat in his heart that usually accompanied that thought. Looking down he noticed the ants had begun to walk over his outstretched leg. As though he wasn’t there. As though he was part of the landscape.

The sheep were silent now. All turned towards him. Their sweet faces blank as usual but their eyes dripping tears. Above him the leaves began to rub together, straining on their branches as a fierce wind shook them. She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone. Ali felt chilled, the taste in his mouth turned rancid and he spat on the floor, swishing water around his gums he tried to clear them. He wanted to run home and he wanted to stay where he was. There was a sense of loss digging so deeply down inside of him that he couldn’t breathe. He lay back on the rocky grass and gasped. The world turned upside down, the mountaintops bowed over him casting shadows, the tree branches became roots, flailing in the sky, looking for purchase. 

He didn’t know how long he lay there, losing his senses, losing time. But Ali knew his life was over. Grief deeper and more solid than the loss of his father, his martyr, made his bones ache. There was no part of him that he could touch that did not cry out with anguish. This then was his fate. To lose poetry, to lose his life, to lose his love. Ali crawled to standing, the weight heavy on his broken shoulders. Walking away from his sheep, his dogs and his home he began to wander. Never again could he step foot inside his village. 

His dogs, heads held low, whined deep in their throats. Watching Ali walk away they were torn between duty and desire. Moved by an invisible force they rounded the sheep and together they set out in the direction they had come that morning. In the field the ants covered Ali’s discarded lunch tin and carried away rice, grain by grain.

by Muli Amaye