Darkmans. Nicola Barker
a little more secure.
Gaffar’s mother was a devout woman (especially since his father’s passing. You might almost think – Gaffar sometimes thought – that she was ‘making up’ for something). She was a follower of the Alexi Sect (Alexi was Mohammed’s brother-in-law; they were Shi’i, and persecuted – for radicalism – by the Sunni majority). Gaffar gave every appearance of conforming to this belief system. He had an actual, a palpable genius for pretending. Pretence was an essential part of his inheritance, of his pathology. He was proud of his duplicity (he didn’t have much, but at least he had this; he owned it. It was his).
There was a secret, you see, about his father – something shameful and unspeakable – which, even when he was alive, they only talked about in whispers. And now that he was gone, it was either never mentioned or hotly denied. But it was still true, nonetheless.
His father had been a Dawasin, one of the Yezidis; the oldest and most singular of all the Kurdish tribes; a reclusive, secretive, clannish people who worshiped Malik Taus, the Peacock Angel. They believed that they were the last remaining direct descendants of Adam’s line, that their race (and their race alone) was unbesmirched by the sins of Eve. They were pure (this was part of their patrimony), but they were not ‘of the Book’ (at least, not formally), and so, even amongst Kurds, they were both feared and despised.
Gaffar’s father had been born in Sinjar, on the Syrian/Iraqi border (it was the Kurdish lot to be born on the edge of things, the perimeter; to be squeezed into the outer reaches; at worst to be persecuted, at best loathed and ignored). In 1975 the Dawasin in that area had been forcibly evicted from their land and placed into collectives.
Times were hard. He had drifted to Baghdad, searching for work. He’d left a wife and a daughter behind him, staying away – out of desperation (or so he claimed) – for many months in conjunction. In Yezidi culture absence was a crime of excommunicable proportions. And there was no coming back from it. So after a while, he didn’t even try. His soul was lost from that point onward.
As if to underline this fact, categorically, he journeyed north, to Irbil, and became a denizen of the legendary Sheikhallah Bazaar, where he hired himself out as muscle in the trade of drugs, fake passports and illegal arms. He moved to Turkey on the back of his successes, changed his name (stole ‘Celik’ from a local mayor), converted to Islam and married Gaffar’s mother.
He’d wanted (he claimed) to leave his former life behind. He even said he’d seen Jonah (Yunus) in a vision, where the whale was not a sea creature, but an enormous tent (a living thing, somehow, with ribs and teeth and organs), and it was crammed – full-to-bursting – with people he’d known in the past (his old friends, his enemies, his compatriots), and they were all slowly suffocating. But his own chest was full of air (like he was the whale, or the lungs, or something), and Jonah, on observing this fact, reached out his hand to him, and they walked clear – clear of the tent, of the bazaar – into a world beyond, into a promised land.
An epiphany.
Or this was the mythology. The truth was much simpler. Things didn’t actually change all that much in Turkey (I mean the Kurds were persecuted everywhere, weren’t they?). The fabric of his life remained virtually identical. He’d simply crossed over (or turned inside out, like a polythene bag). He was on the other side, now, but the leap he’d made wasn’t gargantuan (like Jonah’s whale), and it wasn’t so much moral (or spiritual) as geographical.
He remained a soldier (but now paid by the state). The Guard were universally loathed. They were cruel and merciless. Some were just desperate, others, crass opportunists. Gaffar’s father was ruthless, but not actively sadistic. He dispatched his duties efficiently. He took the occasional back-hander. He still thought like a traitor. And when he died (suddenly, on a landmine) his reputation was a distinguished one. He’d been fearless and brave and single-minded. He’d conformed. He’d fitted in. He was remembered by his compadres as an honourable man.
Gaffar sometimes wondered where his soul had gone (I mean which of the deities he’d served was the more forgiving, the more powerful?). It was a telling thought: but weren’t all true nomads at their happiest in limbo?
Was God actually aware of that fact?
As he grew older it became increasingly apparent that Gaffar had fighting in his genes (in his bones, which he broke, then re-set, then broke again). It wasn’t that he was angry (quite the opposite). His strength was rooted in his curious implacability.
From the tender age of twelve he fought for money. He was a gambler. He could win or take a beating – he didn’t care which, particularly – so long as he was paid for it. He loved his family but he despised their life of grinding penury. He wasn’t political (and in Diyarbakir it was difficult not to be) and he did not actively support the PKK (let’s face it: when Ocalan was arrested, things actually got better: schools were opened, they could speak in their own tongue again…Ocalan was certainly a hero, but he was also a spitfire; didn’t really care where his stray bullets landed, just so long as he satisfied his overall agenda. He was single-minded – heroes often were – and matched the Turkish armed forces, blow for blow, in his ceaseless promulgation of violence and terror).
Politics were all well and good, Gaffar reasoned – ideals and such – but money was the language of progress. Money actually got you out of there; into the colourful world which flickered on the screens of the cable tvs in local cafes. Into freedom. Into Eden.
Gaffar was a bare-knuckle boxer, all over the region (developed quite a reputation, as he grew older, although eventually, inevitably, this began to work against him). The trick was in his stature. He was small, looked wiry. But underneath he was impregnable. His will was the iron rod in his spine which kept him standing (or told him the precise moment at which to fall). His will was indomitable. He was the God of his own insides.
But the whole world (alas) didn’t start and end upon his skin’s smooth surfaces. There was an outside (he could smell it, he could taste it. Sometimes it kicked or bit or bruised him). Outside all was chaos. And this chaotic outside – if it really wanted to – could suck you in.
There was no point resisting.
He got caught up (the hook went straight through his cheek) aged fourteen, fifteen, in the opposing currents of politics and corruption (dragged back and forth, aimlessly, between them). He hadn’t tried, it’d simply happened; he’d attracted attention, had become almost a talisman.
He hung around in the backwash for a while (rejected by family, embraced by the local mafia, imprisoned for a year), then finally – out of sheer desperation – he struck a deal (it was the gambler in him). He risked everything (made promises to God, crossed his fingers, held his breath, you name it). And it worked.
Six long hours in customs and he was spat out, with due ceremony, into the United Kingdom (thirty neat little bags of heroin killing time inside his colon).
King-dom?
They had a queen, they spoke English, they ate beefburgers and drank beer.
London. North London. Wood Green (no woods, not much greenery, but who cared? He was here. This was his big chance. His break for freedom…).
Hmmn
It’d looked better on the telly. And there was dubbing, too, in Turkey (or subtitles; hell, he wasn’t fussy).
When people spoke it sounded utterly foreign. He couldn’t react. He couldn’t respond. He was rendered dumb. It terrified him.
Language (not just violence, or poverty) was now his determinator. The people he needed to get away from were the only people he could communicate with (everybody important spoke Kurdish here).
It was a different world – he could certainly vouch for that – but it was still run by the same rules (the sky the same colour, the ground just as hard, his belly just as hungry, the same battles for territory). So he chugged on. Became