The Canal

In the summer, when the skies were clear, Ahmedo’s radio would pick up the stations from across the border, in Rojava, and they’d listen to Kurdish music, the music that the Turkish state had banned. There was one song that Seyfo liked more than the others, and he’d go around with his father’s radio, waiting for it to play. It was a song about the homeland, about the love for Kurdistan, about how the heart beats faster and feels deeper when it’s about the land you were born without, yet you would die for.

“Okay, you listened to your song,” Harun said that day, once the song was over. “Now let’s go to the canal.”

Harun’s brother, Celil, was married to Seyfo’s sister, Berçem, and even though Harun lived two villages over, he never missed an opportunity to tag along when Berçem went back to visit her family. They had bonded with Seyfo mainly over the fact that they were the same age and liked the same stuff—playing soccer, watching scary movies, and eating Etti Puff. But, whenever Harun came around in the summer, there was only one thing he wanted to do: go swimming in the canal. It was a little canal that ran down the village, and to beat the heat of Nusaybin’s summer, most kids met there and spent hours playing. Seyfo liked it, too, the cold water soothed him, and he’d imagine that he was one of those professional swimmers that they’d see on TV on Sundays when Ahmedo insisted on having the whole family sit down in the living room in front of that artifact that he had seen when visiting his brother in Istanbul and that he had wanted for themselves, too.

“I don’t think this is appropriate for the girls,” Yade’d said, her hands over her eyes to avoid looking at the men in nothing but their speedos, ready to jump in the water.

“Nonsense,” Ahmedo’d said. “It’s a sport. They should be exposed to it, it’s good for the soul.”

And for the years to come Seyfo would remember the day that Ahmedo, that man who would always say that no daughter of his would go about with her head uncovered, had chosen sports over modesty. It was like that that swimming became one of his favorite things, and the canal was the only place where he could practice.

“Hadi, Seyfo,” Harun started. “Let’s go. You listened to the song already, we can go now.”

“It’s not about the song and you know it,” Seyfo said.

“Oh,” Harun let out. “It’s about your mom, huh?”

“Of course it’s about my mom, Harun. Who else would it be about? I don’t wanna get whooped again.”

“Oh, c’mon, it’s just a few little blows and then it’ll pass.”

“Easy for you to say it, my mom never hits you because you’re the guest.”

Harun rolled his eyes so aggressively that, for a second, Seyfo thought that they’d stay stuck to his upper eyelid. Seyfo knew, though, that Harun’s silence was an admission that he was right.

“Hadi, let’s go,” Harun insisted again after a couple of minutes. “We’ll think of something later. I’ve been dreaming of that canal for days now.”

This time it was Seyfo who rolled his eyes as he stood up to bring Ahmedo’s radio back inside. Be as it may, he could still take Yade’s beatings, but Ahmedo would kill him if something were to happen to his precious radio.

“Let’s go,” Seyfo said, and seeing the spark of joy in his friend’s eyes made him almost forget the beating that would certainly come once they made it back home. Yade was very strict when it came to the canal. She hated the idea of Seyfo and Harun spending time there, if not for anything other than the mess that came with two soaking-wet kids entering the house. At least in the beginning, that was the reason. As they grew up, they started getting smarter, too, and they would take off their clothes and leave them on the riverbank to wear them once they had dried a little under the sun. But then, the mark of their still-wet underwear on their dry shorts and the dampness of their hair would betray them. And it was then that Seyfo understood that it wasn’t about mess anymore, but rather about what happened when you had the audacity to try to play your mom for a fool.

That summer they were fourteen, though, finally into their teenage years, but the canal was the one thing that kept them feeling like kids. When they got there and started taking their t-shirts off, Seyfo told himself that maybe this feeling of freedom, of complete carelessness, was the meaning of summer and, by extension, the meaning of life.

They were amongst the older kids there, which made sense. As they grew up, more and more teens would ditch the canal to go to the cafés to drink tea, play Okey, and think about how to pick up girls without the elders finding out. Seyfo knew they were almost there, but as he swam from side to side, cannonball after cannonball, he realized that it was okay to wait just a little longer.

They stayed until the call for sunset prayer, and then in one last attempt to hide the evidence of their deceit, they started walking the long road back, a road usually lonelier and a bit more hidden—a road less populated than the one they usually took. It shouldn’t have been a problem, it never was, but that day it was clear that something wasn’t right. Seyfo was the first one to notice, maybe because he knew the village better. For a summer night, hot like that one, there were almost no people in the streets. Yeah, that road was supposed to be a little emptier, but not like that, and Seyfo couldn’t shake that eerily familiar feeling, the one he hadn’t had since he was little and he’d see from the window of the kitchen as three men emerged from a white van and took Ahmedo just to drop him off a week later or so, broken as a man could be.

“It’s a bit quiet around here, isn’t it?” Harun finally said, looking around. “I didn’t remember it like this.”

“I was thinking the same,” Seyfo agreed, but not wanting to worry his friend, he decided the best option was to sing a song—that would make their fears go away, even if for a moment.

Firat used to play that game when they were walking back home from somewhere and Seyfo would get scared. He’d come up with a song about the things that they were seeing on the road—a tree, a bird, the grass, the unpaved road. At first, Seyfo thought that it was the song that took the fear away, but it turned out it was walking next to his big brother, one of the bravest people he’d ever met. Losing him was the one thing he’d never get over., that morning when Heval Cemil had knocked on the door bearing the horrible news. Ahmedo sent Seyfo to the store to get cigarettes, after more than ten years without smoking—and he would never again see his dad without a cigarette between his lips, except maybe during Ramadan. Yade, she, would never again have the spark in her eyes that she once did, almost as if the tears had extinguished it.

“Look at that tree,” Seyfo started, in Kurdish, as if to honor the struggle his brother had given his life for. “It’s tall and green.”

“Look at the bird,” Harun continued. “It has a worm on its beak.”

As they walked, singing together, it was as if Firat was walking with them, like he used to before he left for the mountains. Maybe that was the reason why Seyfo didn’t hear the steps behind them at first, or maybe his brain had really wanted to believe it was Firat walking by their side, but the next thing they knew, they were against the wall of a lone house face first, their arms held behind their backs.

“Spread your legs and show me your documentation.”

Seyfo could tell without a shadow of a doubt that those were soldiers.

“Our kimliks are at home,” Seyfo heard Harun say. “We’re just walking back from the canal.”

“What is that that you’re singing?” A soldier appeared right behind them.

“It’s just a song that we made up with my brother when we were little.”

“Who’s your brother?” The soldier barked. “And give me your kimlik number.”

Seyfo knew right then and there that it was over. He didn’t say a word, and with that gave them the answer they so needed. Suddenly, they were on the floor, being kicked left and right. He just closed his eyes and let it play out. Only moments ago, he still thought he was standing at the threshold of manhood, caught between the canal and the cafés. But as he took yet another kick to his flank, he understood that there was nothing to choose; to them, he was already an adult.

“Well, that was a close one,” Harun said, pressing his hand against his lower lip, blood still pouring from between his fingers.

By the time they had left them alone, tossed on the side of a dirt road, it was already dark. Seyfo told himself that they’d only wanted to send a message—had they wanted to kill them, they would’ve done so without hesitation. Seyfo looked at Harun, silently agreeing with him. He never thought it could get worse than Yade’s spankings, but he was wrong, and by the time they made it back home and she opened the door, horrified at the scene in front of her, he had decided to leave Nusaybin. But not for Istanbul, like Ahmedo had been planning for the last couple of years. Instead, he’d go to France to live with Matike Gizem, Ahmedo’s sister. He had a cousin who had done the same thing, and by all accounts things for him seemed to be going well. As Yade pressed some damp rag on the side of his face, and as he felt the sting, he told himself that he wanted a new life, from scratch, and Istanbul just wouldn’t do it. The only option was to leave Turkey for good.

Seyfo left before the summer was over and the last thing he saw as the bus was leaving the station to take him to the coast from where he’d take a boat to Greece, was Yade waving him goodbye, tears flooding her eyes. Ahmedo, though, was nowhere to be found; feeling defied, he had chosen to stay at home, denying his son one last goodbye. That wasn’t the plan he had for Seyfo. Seyfo had to stay, go to religious school, and become an imam; he had to become Mela Seyfo, like the elderly imam he had been named after. Ahmedo had never seen such defiance from any of his other thirteen children—even before leaving for the mountains Firat had asked for his blessing—and he wouldn’t stand for it.

Seyfo made it to France and his aunt’s place in Paris, with two days of summer to spare. There was no canal, and the neighborhood that was to become his was kilometers away from the closest river. As much as he missed it, he told himself that the easiest way to move forward was to forget about those memories. There would be many more summers filled with new adventures, maybe even better ones.

And he wasn’t wrong. In less time than he thought that summer gave way to many others and his new life. And although little by little the memories of that last summer in the village faded to make way for new ones, no new memory would ever erase the feeling of his body touching the water, the joy of not having any responsibilities, of just being. Seyfo would talk to Harun on occasion, increasing the frequency of their contact as new technology would allow. Harun, too, had left Nusaybin behind, moving to Antalya, in the West of Turkey, and building a life there. Seyfo wouldn’t step back in Turkey, let alone in his village, for a long, long time.

“You won’t believe where I went the other day,” Harun said that day on the phone after they were done with their usual check-in. Harun was visiting the village and he wanted to tell Seyfo about it. By then, Seyfo had been in France for close to ten years but, even if it had been that long since they’d last seen each other, their bond remained intact. Seyfo wouldn’t know until much later that the reason Harun was in the village was to visit a sick Ahmedo, already on his deathbed. Not wanting to burden him, no one would tell Seyfo about it until after he passed.

“The village hasn’t changed much,” Harun said, stating what Seyfo felt was evident. A village like that, disconnected from most things, was expected to remain the same somehow. Harun continued, “I took some pictures. I’ll send them in a bit.”

“Nice. Thank you.”

“And you know where else I went?” He asked, but didn’t allow Seyfo to reply before saying, “To the canal.”

“Really? Is it still there?” Of course it was still there, Seyfo knew it as he asked, it was just one of those things that would remain there forever.

“It is,” Harun said, a wave of nostalgia washing over his voice. “But you know what? I can’t believe that we used to make such a big fuss over it.”

You used to make a big fuss over it, he thought, and a big smile drew on his face. But he couldn’t tell him that, it wouldn’t be fair. So, instead, he asked, “Really, how so?”

“Well, I realized it’s actually quite small.”

When Harun said that, Seyfo couldn’t help but laugh and say, “Bro, it’s not that it was small, it’s that, since then, we’ve grown.”