A salesman’s hand stretched out towards the prospective buyer, cupped into a universal signifier. His fingers flexed slightly towards the palm, in case Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, the potential future owner of the AM/FM radio on display, had trouble understanding: money was to be exchanged.
Rafiq suspected that the anxiety suffusing the market had made any pickpockets unlikely to be scoping out potential shoppers. Still, he gave a quick glance around him before he pulled out his money from the inner pocket of his blazer. In his hand, it felt as though the stack he’d slid into his blazer that morning had somehow become smaller.
As Rafiq Hardi Kermanj’s life in exile had begun, so had the gradual transformation of his belongings from material objects – houses, furniture, cars – into immaterial wealth: dinars, dollars, toman. By the time he, his wife Xezal and his children illegally crossed the Iran–Iraq border at night, just about everything that they had once possessed had been replaced by a stack of crumpled bills, folded and taped to Xezal’s chest under the pouch that contained the items of jewellery that she had refused to part with. Gradually, as a new life was purchased for them in Tehran, the bills disappeared, in ever smaller increments. The first, largest stack had been given in Iraqi dinars to the smuggler who took them from the outskirts of their native city of Slemani across the mountains into the Kermanshah region where a car was waiting to drive them into Tehran. The second consisted of US dollars that had served as a deposit on a furnished two-bedroom house in the Doulat neighbourhood. Then there had been a car to buy, bribes to pay, a school uniform and supplies to purchase as Mohammed, the oldest child, began his education. The bills that he used to purchase the wood-panelled AM/FM radio in the Grand Bazaar were the last of that original stack.
*
Rafiq, having come to terms with the fact that he needed to reconsider his relationship with money, bartered with the salesman for longer than was his custom. Two bills returned into Rafiq’s hand upon his pointing out that the wood panelling on the side of the radio was scratched and that the knob felt rather flimsy. Neither assurance of German manufacture nor of superior sound quality sufficed to get the bills back into the salesman’s palm. It wasn’t until a hidden compartment in the radio’s back, perfect for stowing contraband, was demonstrated and explained with a conspiratorial whisper that Rafiq relented.
‘Something is happening, my friend,’ the salesman said, gesturing to the shop in front of them, its graffitied metal door still rolled down. ‘You will need a good hiding place.’
Rafiq handed over the bills and was left with nothing. New money would now have to be made.
The deal done, the money exchanged, the salesman began rapidly wrapping a rope around the radio for Rafiq to be able to carry it to his car. While the man performed his well-drilled ribbon dance, Rafiq lit a cigarette and looked out over the people milling around, buying soaps and sponges, sweets and spices, carrying their purchases in identical flimsy black plastic bags, bathed in the multi-colour glow of the light coming through the bazaar’s stained-glass windows. Though Rafiq knew the shopkeepers in the bazaar were prone to exaggeration and fear-mongering – for years they had claimed that the Shah’s desired technocracy would mean the end of traditional trade – he did sense that the people around him seemed particularly anxious that day.
In fact, the entire city of Tehran was in thrall to the notion that something was on the verge of happening, a rumour that had begun spreading earlier that day when several stalls at the bazaar were boarded up. A closed stall was always cause for suspicion: the owner’s entire family history would be reviewed in order to ascertain whether or not they could know something that most others wouldn’t. The youngest chewing-gum seller would adopt the conspiratorial tones of a seasoned Kremlinologist, seeing signs and premonitions in every event. The market was where you could sense a coming crisis before it even happened, where news was amplified, distorted and downright invented well before it ever made it into a newspaper. And so, when it was deduced that the four boarded-up stalls belonged to the same family, and that this family had an in-law who was a member of the Imperial Army, agitated rumours quickly began spreading across the city.
There had been a period of relative calm in Tehran, Rafiq felt, and so it was perhaps time for an attempted coup, for a demonstration, for a new crippling edict. It had been over a decade since Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini had objected to the new modernised dress that the Shah had ordered, an order that had led soldiers to stand outside bathing houses tearing off women’s headscarves, but the protests had lasted only a few days, after which Khomeini had been imprisoned then exiled, relegated to sending cryptic apocalyptic missives from a distance as though he were the returning Twelfth Imam himself. The Iranian Youth Movement in Europe were still chanting May ’68 slogans ten years on, but they were based in London and Paris and might as well have been on the moon for all the influence they had over Iranian society.
The fact remained, however: there were four closed stalls.
The shopkeeper announced that the radio was ready and Rafiq flicked his half-smoked cigarette towards the open sewer that ran through the bazaar corridor, jettisoning tiny explosions of ash as the bright orange of its tip followed its ballistic trajectory. Rafiq thanked the shopkeeper and hurried out of the bazaar’s maze-like structure to find his car.
*
While Rafiq was spending the remainder of the money he had been able to bring with him to Iran, his wife Xezal was leafing through dated magazines on her second-hand couch, the previous owner’s cigarette burns covered by a green fabric of hers that was now in turn covered in the plethora of stains children produce. She didn’t need to know the language to understand what the glossy photos of singers like Googoosh or Mahasti draped in jewels were intended to convey, daydreaming about times when she herself would not have looked out of place in these pages.
At the time the radio was purchased, in 1978, little separated Rafiq and his family from the rest of Tehran’s many Kurdish Marxist refugees, who enjoyed the freedom of being allowed to criticise the Iraqi government, as long as they avoided including in their criticism any mention of the Shah. Only ten years prior, however, before the 1968 coup that had brought the Baathists back into power, they had been one of the most influential Kurdish families in the whole of Iraq. In the years following the coup Rafiq threw away (Xezal’s words) a lucrative career in medicine to be able to participate in that most honourable of endeavours (Rafiq’s words): leading the Communist Party across the contentious political minefield that was the issue of Kurdish independence. To Xezal’s grand and vocal consternation, the only discernible accomplishment of the political party he founded was that all the drivers and servants were gradually given notice until it was deemed that the Baghdad house was too big for Rafiq and Xezal to manage on their own, which precipitated a move to a much smaller house in Slemani.
Xezal had long grown accustomed to her position in society and enjoyed the way her neighbours would ooh and aah over a new garment her dressmaker had sewn, a new bracelet that the goldsmith had made especially for her. Her silks were uniformly from the great French houses (though these were a few seasons old by the time they settled in Slemani), and her perfume – an extravagant blend of ylang-ylang, rose and jasmine – was purchased from Harrods in London and flown in first semi-annually, then annually, then not at all.
After they moved back from Baghdad, she found herself no longer spending nights at dinners aside brilliant men and their dazzling wives, but bringing bowls filled with pistachios to her husband, who would be sitting on the floor in a circle with a handful of moustachioed men, smoking cigarettes, drinking counterfeit whisky, and discussing the various exploits of Lenin and Marx. At night, at least one of the children would wake up from the sound of a drunk man reading aloud from Marx’s Capital as though it were juvenile love poetry, and if Xezal were to voice a complaint Rafiq would just smile, his eyes trembling with liquor, and tell her that it was important for the children to hear this too. So Xezal would bring either of her toddlers, the youngest having yet to speak her first word, to sit late into the night listening to Rafiq and his friends recite the effect of circulation time on the magnitude of capital advanced.
One day, to Xezal, completely without warning, her husband announced that he was rejecting his birth name, tied as it was to the Islamic conquering and subjugation of the Kurdish people, and that he was changing it from Mohammed to Rafiq (meaning comrade ), a name that better suited his newfound beliefs. Xezal knew then that this was not just some brief folly of his that she was to indulge as a loving and supporting wife. Nonetheless, she remained committed to the man who had shown her, a mere girl with neither wealth nor family name to speak of, the world and everything in it. And she did remain immensely proud of him when she saw how much the people of Slemani respected the work that he was doing. There wasn’t a house that wouldn’t be honoured to welcome them for dinner, and the pamphlets that Rafiq would print and distribute illegally became much sought-after totems of a revolution to come. So when she returned from the bazaar one day and found a printing press in what was little Mohammed’s room, she accepted it, just as she accepted Rafiq’s bizarre insistence on naming the third child Laika after that Soviet dog who was sent to space. Xezal, who had been raised from an early age to aspire to be a good wife, accepted all of this. She knew that her husband was a brilliant man, and that brilliant men were known to do stupid things.
It wasn’t until four months into their exile in Iran that she found that she did, in fact, have a limit. As she put the children in the back seat of their Paykan, she heard her husband – fighting the ignition of the car to get it to start, as he did every morning – casually mention that Xezal might have to sell some of her remaining jewellery. Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, the man who had once showered her with gifts so lavish that she was the envy of Baghdad’s entire Mansour district, now had the audacity to tell her to pawn it off. She shut the door to the back seat, went around the car to get in the passenger seat and steeled herself for the part that she realised she now would have to play. Any good wife knows that sometimes their husband needs to be guided back in line, so she ran through her options: a migraine that would render her bedridden for days, a cascade of tears, a barrage of threats. As the car’s engine finally sputtered into a purr and her safety belt clicked into place, she drew a deep breath. Guilt. Guilt would do. ‘Rafiq. Our homes have been taken away, all of our belongings you have sold, you take the food from our mouths, from the children’s mouths, to give to the people. And this we do not complain about, this we have accepted. But what have they ever done for us, the people? You tell me that, Rafiq. No, really: tell me. This ring,’ Xezal pointed her middle finger in his direction, ‘this ring was given to me by Faisal himself. You want me to sell a king’s ring to feed our children, I will do it, I will do it right this minute.’ She put the thumb and index of her other hand around the band, as if to demonstrate her willingness to rid herself of the ring. ‘But you don’t want to do that. You want me to sell my only remaining belongings so that you can print more pamphlets. It’s not enough that these damned machines take up half our house, stain our hands and clothes with their ink, now they need to be fed our possessions? Mohammed Hardi Kermanj, by God, this I simply will not do.’
The pouch that she had strapped to her chest as they crossed the border did indeed contain one ring given to her by Faisal II during the years of respite when Kurds and Arabs ever so briefly found an uneasy, fragile peace. The other bracelets, rings and necklaces, however, were often of far more humble origin, yet in future iterations of this quarrel – and there would be many in the years to come – it would be this one ring that she used as the core of her argumentation, as though suggesting to sell the flimsiest gold bangle found at a disreputable souq was tantamount to selling off Iraq’s crown jewels.
Rafiq, incensed by his wife’s use of his rejected name, swerved to the kerb and pulled the handbrake to a chorus of honking cars.
‘These jewels of yours, Xezal, they’re mere baubles, it pains my heart to see you so easily duped by shiny commodities.’ He used a more heightened register of Kurdish as he spoke to her, not so subtly indicating that whatever Xezal enjoyed pretending to be, she was still the plain-spoken peasant girl who had been lucky enough to marry him. ‘These items, they have no use-value to us. Capital that is not being used is dead capital. You hear this, children? Repeat after me: capital that is not being used is dead capital. Only exchange provides commodities with utility. We will not be hoarders of commodities, Xezal, I will not allow it. As Marx said: “Value does not have its description branded on its forehead, rather it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyph.” Your jewellery is the fruit of the labour of men slaving away in mines all over the world, the fruit which we have decided to accord an arbitrary value to. So: let us use the value! Let us use the gains against capitalism, against the feudal Arabists and western imperialists of this region who are striving every day to dispossess your children of their freedom.’
(Rafiq was not above invoking the plight of his children for the sake of winning an argument either.)
Now, as she went through the beats of this argument in her mind, riling herself up at her husband’s words once more, Xezal noticed Mohammed was standing next to her.
‘Story time?’ he asked, reminding her of their daily ritual. She banished her husband from her mind, slapped her magazine shut, and called the other children to join her.
She could no longer remember if it had originally been her idea or her children’s, but for the past few months she had found herself gathering them around her like dolls at playtime in order to imagine their glorious destinies. It was a way to pass the time, a way to make sense of the lives they found themselves living, to connect the strands of the chaotic events that had brought them there, and weave those strands into a cohesive narrative of their lives.
‘You, Hama,’ she said, licking her thumb, rubbing some imaginary dirt off Mohammed’s cheek, ‘you will be a famous, successful doctor, like your father was. Maybe you will be a beauty specialist and work with all of the world’s celebrities. I can tell by your hands, my dear, you have such good hands. You will go to the best universities and do so well; you will come first in the whole country. Maybe you will discover the cure to some disease . . . or a new medicine. You will have a beautiful, glamorous wife . . . but don’t you go forgetting your old mother then! No, you’ll be a good son, I know you will. I will intervene on behalf of our family to talk to the girl’s parents – your father will be useless at that, let me tell you. Yes, I’ll see to it so that even if we don’t have two fils to rub together, they will know that our family’s name echoes through the annals of Kurdish history.’
She then turned to Siver, who sat anxiously waiting her turn. ‘Siver, you will marry a rich, handsome man. Someone who is good to you, the kind of man who showers you with gifts. And you will love him and provide him with great joy. You’re going to be so, so beautiful, covered in jewels.’
Every so often the call to prayer would be heard from the nearby mosque. A loud, distorted wail that had initially led the children – who had not heard these sounds in their old neighbourhood in Slemani – scurrying under the kitchen table believing it was a siren announcing an upcoming airstrike. The sound would always momentarily stop Xezal from conjuring the fate of her children, her lips moving as she retraced the future she had described before the interruption.
‘Ah yes, jewels! And your children – you will have two children, a boy and a girl – will be beautiful, just like you, my dear.’ She smiled, patting her daughter on the head.
The only one she worried about, though she would never say this aloud, was Laika, little Laika with his ridiculous name insisted upon by his father, with his inability to string together the most meagre syllables hinting at ‘mother’ or ‘father’, even though he was almost three years old. Of course – for her own sake as much as for the child – she would concoct a glorious destiny for him as well, even though she felt he would be the most difficult to mould into happiness, to steer onto a productive path. Her efforts, however, would ultimately bring her joy, she knew, assisting him in his struggles, helping him navigate the path to a successful marriage.
Oh yes, her three children would be successful, and happy, and they would make their parents proud.
Soon, the demonstrations did indeed start, amplified echoes of the recent protests in Qom and Tabriz, which led Rafiq to pace the living room and proclaim ecstatically that this was it, this was the end of the Shah, that imperialist puppet of the West. The students were in the street, they were demanding their rights, a just socialist society; this would be the first communist enclave in the Middle East, freedom would spread, ring across the continent, remove the shackles of a people oppressed for far too long. ‘Come, bring that book,’ Rafiq said to Mohammed, who diligently carried a heavy tome from his father’s stacked shelves. ‘Children, this, this contains all of human history, here, in these pages. Today, these empty pages at the back are being filled. Remember today, children: a new chapter begins.’
Later, when their house went up in flames and they had to leave their second country in a decade before being granted asylum in Europe, they had to leave most of the books, which burned with the house. In the truck that took them across the border, Rafiq asked his children if they’d brought the concise encyclopaedia, then berated them for choosing to bring their toys and stuffed animals instead. ‘All of human history,’ he muttered as he counted the cash that his family was now left with. ‘All of human history.’ Until he died, poor and forgotten in a London suburb, he would keep referring to this one book. Even as they had to sell King Faisal II’s ring to pay the rent, as the children grew up traumatised and apprehensive, all that Rafiq ever would admit to regretting was having left the encyclopaedia behind.
But all of that was yet to come. When the protests began in 1978, he still had the book in his hands and looked at its final pages with a fervour that the children would never forget. ‘A whole new chapter,’ he said to himself, then, noticing his audience: ‘Can you hear that?’ he said to his three children sitting on the floor observing him the way they would a monkey at a zoo. ‘That is the sound of freedom marching this way. Listen!’
The children tried to hear the sound of freedom, but all they could hear was the corner grocer yelling out the low, low price of cantaloupes.
__________________________________
From Hyper by Agri Ismaïl. Used with permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press. Copyright © 2025 by Agri Ismaïl.
