Sersale

Sere sale bine sale xade qurki bide jina male. The children could be heard roaming the streets, going from house to house knocking on the front door, ready to singsong the same phrase over and over. It was a New Year’s Eve tradition in the streets of Midyat, Northern Kurdistan, to have the kids go around wishing for a son to be born to whichever home they visited. End of year, beginning of year, give a son to the woman of the home. That was all they said, house after house, year after year, and, had things been different that day, Melike wouldn’t have paid much attention, she never did. Superstition was haram, forbidden in her belief, even though superstitions were weaved into the very fabric of everything in the village, if not the entire region.

“If Allah doesn’t give you a boy,” her mother-in-law would tell her year after year, “what are these little rascals gonna do about it?”

That night, Melike looked down at Arya, who was cooing against her chest. She had just fallen asleep, oblivious that a whole new year would start for them in a matter of hours. Arya was the youngest of seven daughters, and she was starting to weigh heavy on her mother’s arms.

“People are talking, Melike,” her mother-in-law would tell her whenever she was around. “‘Who is this broken daughter-in-law of yours who cannot birth a son?’ You have to do something, this looks bad on Ahmet.”

But there was little Melike could do other than what she was already doing, praying to Allah every day that her next child would be a boy. Well, that and crying long hours as she breastfed the daughter she felt nobody wanted.

“You’re crying for nothing,” Ahmet would tell her whenever he came back from work and found her staring into the abyss, tears endlessly rolling down her cheeks, “if they gave me seven boys, I wouldn’t take them for one of my girls. Girls bring blessings to their fathers’ homes, boys only bring problems.”

“Of course, he’d tell you that,” her mother-in-law would then tell her. “He doesn’t want to make you feel bad, but every man wants a son. At least one.”

Only years and years later would Melike, and everyone for that matter, realize how honest Ahmet was in his words. He didn’t want a son, if it were up to him, he’d keep welcoming daughters, as many as Allah would send him. Girls had no problem making a father love them with their sweet and tender hearts. It was boys who were hard to love and he, as the youngest of six brothers, and the one to always clean up after the older ones, understood that better than anyone. But Melike didn’t know that that cold night of December, as she heard the soft knock. So, instead of waiting for the children to leave, she rested Arya on the floor, close enough to the soba, and ran to get the door.

“Sere sale bine sale xade qurki bide jina male,” four kids said in unison, and Melike dug in the deep of her pockets for a couple of coins.

“There you go,” she told three of them, handing them 5 kuruç each. Then, she looked at the other boy, with big green eyes and light blonde hair. He reminded her of her father, what he looked like in the few pictures she had left of him; the pictures taken before the occupation killed him. She gave him one lira and smiled, “And this is for you, maybe Allah will give me a son just like you.”

The kids left, teasing each other about how they should split the money, and Melike patted her belly, still fluffy from birth just a few months earlier. If your mother-in-law could see you, she scolded herself, she’d think you lost your mind. And maybe she had, but after seven girls, there was nothing else left for her to lose.

Breastfeeding had helped her space her daughters almost two years apart, but this time she didn’t want to wait that much, so not long after New Year’s she started taking herbal teas to dry her milk. Arya was a trooper and seemed to do well with goat milk. The feeling of a new pregnancy arrived quickly after, around the beginning of the summer. This time it was a boy, Melike could feel it, it had to be. And as the shadow of a new year came creeping in, so did the contractions and the imminence of a new life arriving earth-side. Melike was pushing in pain, in her room, with the midwife between her spread-open legs guiding her through contractions, and her mother-in-law to her left.

“I don’t understand, you’ve done this before, seven times,” the midwife said. “It shouldn’t take this long.”

It was then that Melike heard the soft knock on the door. The kids were here.

“Quick,” she said to her mother-in-law as she gasped for breath, “there are coins over the dresser. Give them to the children.”

“Have you lost your mind?” The woman cried, furious.

“Do it!” Melike snipped back in such a way, that her mother-in-law didn’t say one more word, and instead went to find the coins.

Soon enough everybody would understand why it took Melike so long to give birth, her, who had already birthed seven times before. This birth was a new one, a different one, because Melike was birthing her first boy, and it was like she was giving birth for the first time. The midwife rejoiced as she cleaned the baby up, and Melike’s mother-in-law couldn’t wait for her to finish so she just snatched the baby, inspecting him, making sure it was, indeed, a boy, her eyes sparkling with joy. As for Melike, her reaction was that of every woman who had brought life forth—the incessant weeping, big, wet tears of happiness, the inability to feel pain once the boy was put in her chest, once he started suckling from her nipple. The pride. It was exactly as she had imagined. What Melike wouldn’t know, ever, was the disappointment on Ahmet’s face as the midwife met him outside the room and told him that he was finally the father to a boy. “Had I told him the baby was born dead,” she’d tell over a cup of tea or coffee to whoever would want to hear it, “his face would’ve lit up at least a little.”

But Firat would earn the love of his father in a way that his six younger brothers wouldn’t. Because, yes, it turned out that Melike had given quite a bit of change to the neighborhood children, and she’d never given birth to a girl after that. Firat turned out to be a beautiful baby, too and later turned into a beautiful boy. Big green eyes, olive skin, dusty blonde hair—very similar to the kid who had knocked on Melike’s door on the first night ever she’d allowed herself to be superstitious.

“Your son is wasting himself in this village,” his teachers would tell Ahmet. “You should think about sending him to Istanbul. We have some brothers there, they can help him. He can go to college, make a future for himself.”

Ahmet and Melike then started dreaming about what it would mean to have their son move to Istanbul. Go to university. Become a lawyer or even a doctor. And then, maybe, his life would be different, the course of the family changed for the better. But everything went to hell when his friend Vatan was killed during one of the many military operations the Turkish army would conduct from time to time, pretexting guerrilla activity. They would raid the villages, set them on fire, kill people indiscriminately. Vatan was one of those people killed just because. His name was Vatan, but everybody called him Welat. The meaning was the same, Homeland, but Welat was in Kurdish, and Vatan was what the registrar had written down in the birth certificate, not without having his father jailed and beaten up for attempted separatism. Welat was a good kid who liked to sing, play his bağlama, and play Okey in the cafés—his only crime was being Kurdish. Firat was never the same after that. Long gone were the days when he dreamt of leaving the village, encouraged by his parents. He didn’t dream of being a lawyer or a doctor or even a teacher—he wanted his people to be free. It was then that he had decided to leave for the mountains, dağda çikmak, as they would say in Turkish. One night, after kissing his parents’ hands, he left along with other youngsters, who like him carried nothing in their bags but their yearning for freedom.

Every so often, Firat would come down to the village. He’d play with his younger brothers, kiss the hands of his elder sisters, toss his nieces and nephews in the air as they giggled. Then there was Zeynep, a girl that he liked in high school and that liked him back. During one of his visits, she’d told him that her parents were talking about marrying her off to someone else. “You have to come back,” she’d told him. “Please, come to talk to my parents so that we can be together.” But he’d told her he couldn’t, the commitment to the freedom of their people preceded any other commitment he could ever make, and so she cried as arrangements were made and dresses were sown for her to marry someone else. Firat cried, too, but no one would ever know. His tears would dry faster than his blood as it ran down the battlefield.

The news of Firat’s death came early in December when Heval Cemil knocked on the door to tell Ahmet and Melike that their eldest son was gone. Firat was now a martyr, and his love for the homeland and its freedom would give him a place in the hearts of his people forever. Şehîd namirin. Martyrs don’t die. Heval Cemil said they had the body, but they wanted to wait until it was safe for them to bring it. “It’ll probably be for the new year,” he said. “People are in the streets, it’s really busy, and it’s going to make it easier for us to bring the body without the village guards seeing.”

On New Year’s Eve, Ahmet decided to leave for his brother’s house and spend the night there, drinking tea and chain-smoking—a habit he had kicked years ago but that had come back the morning he learned Firat had laid his life for his people. Melike, she, decided to wait. The streets were boiling with people, and as the giggles of the kids outside reached Melike, she remembered the night it all started. Sere sale bine sale xade qurki bide jina male. And then, she heard the soft knock on the door. But there wouldn’t be any coins this time, any superstition, any laughter, any kids. Yet this time, she knew for sure the woman of the home would get her boy.