Rojava: A Novel of Kurdish Freedom

CHAPTER 1

I HAVE BEEN curled up on the ground for a long time. My whole existence feels cramped. The pain is wrapping around my body. This is my first time being in such a situation, but the entire group is stupefied by its sudden appearance in the sky. This time, we were not informed in advance and our fast-moving life has been paralyzed by an invisible bird buzzing in the distance. A sound that has signaled danger and a need for patience since my first days here. Patience? Until when? I pose this question to a person whom I feel has been petrified behind me, without turning my head to him.

No one knows. They stay up there for a few hours. Sometimes all day. These unmanned drones have unlimited stamina and also enough fuel for eighteen working hours, the man replied.

Can I turn my head or is that dangerous too?

It depends on whether its camera is focused on us at this moment or not. But you can turn your head slowly. It seems very far away from us, probably about ten thousand meters high.

I slowly turned my head to the right towards his face. He had brown hair and was lying face down on the ground.

Ten thousand meters! How do you know that?

You see only a black dot from here and also from its buzzing.

Can I stretch my legs?

That is too risky. Such drones are equipped with a high-resolution camera, a GPS antenna, devices for satellite communications, and also laser-guided rockets.

He talked about it like an expert.

What’s your name, comrade?

Saro.

What part of Kurdistan are you from?

"Rojhilat.* What is your name?"

I have not chosen a nickname yet.

And what have the comrades called you so far? You’re supposed to have been here for a few days.

"They call me hevala† German. I am here temporarily."

Interesting, no one comes to visit here in the beginning of autumn. The snow will begin to fall soon.

I will leave here in the next few days. I was surprised by my resolute and spontaneous answer. Am I really here as a guest, or should I stay for the next eight months? Although returning has remained an option for me, I had thrown it out of my life calendar for the upcoming year before I voluntarily came to this dangerous place in Bakûr.‡ I turn my eyes from Saro to the little black dot in the sky. If the drone continues to fly to the left, after a few hours it will disappear behind the top of that mountain. But what will happen if it flies to the right side and ambushes us after waiting above our heads for us to make a mistake over the next fourteen hours? Again, I felt another annoying pain in my back and my head started burning beneath the early-autumn sun.

"Hevalê§ Saro, how do you spend your summertime here? Does this scheißflug appear incessantly?"

It depends on the weather. The worse the weather, the better our chances. We always have these uninvited guests in good weather. We’d prefer the storms of a mythic deluge to clear skies and shining sun. What did you call that drone in German? A scheiße-something?

Have you ever been to Germany?

Yes, I’ve been there a few times in my civilian life. And where did you learn Kurdish?

My father was Êzdî.

Amazing! And did he get married to a German?

Strange, isn’t it?

Very much so. Say more German profanities. Make a storm of profanities until the drone disappears.

I burst out laughing. Can this tin shit hear my words?

Don’t worry, you can even sing.

That sounds very romantic, to sing and dance with it. My body is cramped like I’m in a telephone booth. How can you go about your everyday life if these drones appear so often?

Something must have gone wrong today. We are usually informed by wireless seven minutes before the drone arrives. Maybe the Turkish secret service found our informant. Tomorrow another one will keep us in the loop.

I carefully turned my head to the left and looked at the other comrades higher up. Four hours ago, all twelve of them were busy digging into the ground like ants, until someone shouted loudly Fifty!, three times. Instinctively, everyone plunged down to the ground when they heard the code number. I did not expect everyone to camouflage themselves so perfectly. Not only did all the comrades disappear, but also the grave that had required a week’s hard work to convert into an underground winter bunker. The entire group and any trace of the last eleven days’ worth of hard work were swallowed up by the ground. Over the past few days, I did not have a chance to talk to anyone. We were in constant motion, digging like ants amidst the early onset of cold weather. Where did this guy, Saro, suddenly come from today? I turned my head to him carelessly. I was shocked and petrified by my own action. I waited a few seconds but nothing happened. The drone was not aware of my carelessness. I opened my eyes and took a few quick breaths. Only then did I noticed Saro again.

What happens if the drone gets one of us?

That means certain death for him and great peril for others.

"Why didn’t you say a single word to me in the last four hours? I

almost let myself roll down to the valley in helplessness."

I did not know you could understand Kurdish. Your hair color suggests otherwise.

But you could have talked to me in English.

Why do you think I can speak English?

Do I not have something like brains in my big head?

Pardon, heval. I was afraid that it might shock you and make the drone aware of us. Besides, I was thinking of my project the whole time.

"Can I ask what plan you are dealing with? Or is it also confidential information from your party?

But you have not yet introduced yourself to me. Do you believe that pseudonyms are not enough for anonymity?

I did not find a proper nickname yet. What do you think of ‘Jînçin’?

Viva! A woman who picks up and weaves life. Where did you get this name from?

I have a friend who calls me that. He was teaching me Kurdish profanities online. I can turn my head and hurl some Kurdish profanities at them.

Or shut one of your eyes and fire some bullets.

Oh! Can I learn to shoot here? I asked enthusiastically.

How can you learn it when you want to return home in the next few days?

How long does it take to learn to shoot? Is shooting more difficult than shitting?

I haven’t fired any rounds yet myself.

What? You’re really a weird guerrilla. So, what are you doing in this guerrilla’s uniform?

I came from Rojava to put a project into action.

Your confidential plan? A sarcastic smile appears on my lips when I ask this question. He could see it clearly from ten meters away.

Before I leave here I will explain it to you. I am your guest tonight.

Guest? You’ve arrived rather early, sir. Our seven-star hotel is still under construction. We’ve been digging like moles for eleven days. I almost see you now like a pile of soil.

I will help you when I get back.

And when will you return?

In the next ten days.

We will have finished all floors and even the air conditioning system in the next ten days. Nobody has smart ideas like you about running away. You should have been called hevalê Fox. What does your name mean?

Saro means ‘bright day.’

Right! Very fitting. Something perfectly useless to us here. The only things of use to us are cloudy days and people who dig with the efficiency of a burrowing rodent.

Saro starts to laugh. I look at him in bewilderment, failing to grasp the cause for his amusement, as if he did not understand what I meant by my taunts. He might see me as just a female clown brought in from faraway for his entertainment. Everything in this abandoned place is ridiculous; this unarmed guy even more so. I traveled over three thousand kilometers from my hometown to offer my skills as a professional to this so-called emancipatory movement, but what have I done in the meantime? In the last three months they have taken me through different cities, villages, peaks and valleys, and we have finally settled on an abandoned mountain. Could be worse. There are no modern laboratories here for scientific experiments, but at least I was lucky enough to find a longterm location. And what should you do now, Jînçin? Bury your degrees beneath all this dirt, I guess. With a hoe or a shovel? Which one is your new specialization? What am I actually looking for in this place?

I look at my cracked hands. In all my life up until now, the most difficult job I ever did was watering my flowers. What would my mother and my colleagues say if they could see me in this situation, with a shovel in my hands and a sack full of soil on my shoulder? The image makes me laugh. Eh, I don’t care about their opinions anyway. I look over Saro’s head at the spring in which I washed my face this morning and realize I did not drink enough of its cool, pure water. I listen to the murmur of the rivulet flowing down the valley in front of me and the roaring of the invisible river further away. The nape of my neck is aching. I turn my head and look at the white cliffs reflecting the bright sunlight. The sky is perfectly clear. If only I could undress and lay down on this cool yellow meadow, taking deep breaths of the crisp air and marveling at the great blue sky as I drifted into sleep. But sleep means death here. I ignore my neck pain and turn my head to Saro. It seems he’s gazing at the drone.

Do you have water with you, heval?

Yeah, I have a little water from yesterday. But how can I hand it over to you?

Does this devil’s toy even notice a bottle of water?

I am not sure. But a plastic bottle reflects light.

Then this damn thing doesn’t need to shoot us. It can stay up there and surveil us until we all die of thirst.

"Do not worry, heval. No guerrilla has died of thirst yet. Fresh water is everywhere in these mountains.

What relation is there between thirst and abundance of water? You can’t even pull a bottle of water out of your backpack.

I can drink myself. I said I could not hand it over to you.

Fine, drink. Let me see what it looks like for an unarmed guerrilla to get blown into the air by a drone missile.

Saro bursts out with laughter and says, You remind me of Meursault in one of Camus’ stories. The guy who’s driven mad by the hot weather.

Why don’t you just call me Antoshka? I’m already a clown!

My harsh words silenced Saro for a few minutes. Then he said, Can I tell you my prediction, hevala Jînçin?

I do not believe in predictions.

I’m not talking about fortune telling. There is a possibility that we could get rid of the drone soon.

How?

It will go behind a cloud for a little while.

And why would this drone hide behind that little cloud?

It will not stay there. The cloud will just stand between us. If we don’t see it, then it doesn’t see us, either.

Seriously? Were you out looking for the loo while God was distributing reason?

What’s the issue?

It would be feasible if you could mix up the laws of physics as you wished. If you see someone standing near a mirror then he will see you, too. What happens if you hold your palms in front of your eyes? You will not see me, but I can still see your long ears.

But the situation up there is different. There must be a distance of over a thousand meters between us and the cloud.

And over six thousand meters between the drone and clouds. Did you forget that or are you trying to trick me?

Why would I do that?

Have you tried to spread this stupid idea to others before?

No. Why did you pretend not to understand in the beginning?

I wanted to teach you . . forget it. I overestimated that stupid tin can. It’s a toy, really. You can hit it with the simplest air missiles.

That’s our problem; they don’t permit us to have even very simple defense missiles. That’s why these drones have turned into fearsome monsters for us.

I asked Saro, What kinds of search capabilities are the drones equipped with?

Optic and thermal.

Are they not equipped with high-frequency or sound-searching capabilities?

Not yet, our situation isn’t that miserable right now. We can even move with an umbrella at night.

But you have to find a definitive solution to this problem. These drones will be optimized with HD-quality recording systems and equipped with other capabilities. Then even our means of camouflage won’t work anymore.

What do you propose we do?

You must have either air defense systems or anti-drone hackers.

You have seen our existing equipment and resources. Which one of your solutions is feasible?

You can only dig the ground with a hoe and shovel.

Did you ever think so much about these garden tools in your entire life?

Garden tools or burial tools? I hate both of them more than the ‘Little Boy’ they dropped on Hiroshima.

A sudden pain rises from the back of my neck. I can no longer hold my head in a rotated position. I turn my face and watch the drone. It seems to be nailed onto that point. The pain, the cramping, and the desperation are unbearable to me. Nothing upsets me more than being held captive. When I was a child, my mother locked me up in a room whenever she wanted to punish me. It did not matter for me how big the room was: broom closet, my bedroom, or the whole house. Now I’m being held captive by my own voluntary actions. I almost made the stupid decision to stay here. I’d have to live with the moles in a catacomb for the next eight months. When the molehills in the garden are high, a long, bitter winter is nigh. The best-case scenario is that the next eight months are the same bullshit the past eleven days have been. I will have to get up at five o’clock in the morning and gaze at the same plastic walls and people until dusk. We have no electricity, internet, phones, or even bathrooms. Everything is the same as it was in the Stone Age. It’ll be annoying to have the same two types of simple food every day for eight months, too. We eat lentil soup for breakfast, rice and a meatless bean stew for lunch, and again lentil soup for dinner. And it’s not for a few days. So much monotony is just shitty. The Gebietsführer will be back in the next few days, then I can get back to civilization. Back to Germany or maybe over to Rojava. But the difficult days that I spent here won’t have been pointless. How else could I know for sure that Turkey uses drones for warfare? It’s not just the US, UK, and Israel that use artificial intelligence to hunt people down and kill them. I call out to Saro in the opposite position, Heval, since when has the Turkish government been using these drones against you?

For the past eleven years. In the beginning, the American drones watched us; then, the Turkish army purchased a lot of them.

Do you know how many people have been murdered by these drones?

No idea, heval.

Estimated?

I cannot say that either. The human victims were numerous in the beginning. But now they kill animals and destroy nature.

For eleven years! And it has not been reported in the European media. All this tormenting thirst, bothersome cramping, and screaming pain have brought me to my wits’ end. I would gladly let myself drop and roll down deep into the valley. Saro called me for the first time, Look up, hevala Jînçin. What do you think?

The black dot had moved closer to us and some distant clouds had mixed together, turning into a big dark cloud.

Theoretically, there is a better chance. The problem is we’re not just being watched by the drone. What can we do about the operators in the air control centers who are now looking at this shot directly? Do you think they won’t notice fourteen people suddenly disappearing? Even if they see us as stones, won’t they ask how the stones ran away after a few seconds? What would happen if they knew that we had escaped?

They’ll send fighter jets here and throw bombs down for a few hours. Is there a safe place nearby where we can protect ourselves in case of bombardment?

There’s a small and solid cave near our camp. I already thought about that, but what do we do after that? Can we return to our place after the bombers have gone?

No, we have to leave this area.

And then we’ll have to clench our teeth and dig another 165 cubic meters of stony ground. Didn’t you say that you were leaving tomorrow? Only to return when the work is done, right?

If we encounter the worst possible luck and have to leave this place, then I promise I will stay and dig with you.

And what about your important plan?

This experiment can also be a part of my project. How about that?

And how should we do that?

I’ll run toward our comrades when the drone disappears behind the cloud. If nothing happens then you can run to the cave.

I don’t let anyone pull chestnuts out of the fire for me. We will try it together.

No way. A guerrilla mustn’t play games with her life.

But I’m not a guerrilla.

Well, you wear a guerilla’s uniform.

Would you like me to strip naked before we continue?

He laughs. "One single person would be enough for the experiment.

Is hevala Rûken* your commander?"

Yes, she is.

I haven’t seen or talked to her in five years. Call her and explain our plan.

While I am a stubborn adventurer of a woman, I would have rejected his suggestion if I weren’t completely screwed. Our little experiment would have no connection at all with real science. I did not know the height of the drone or the clouds, nor even the distance between us and both of them. We don’t know other necessary parameters such as wind speed, the light’s radius of curvature, the existing angles, and even the distance between us and the other comrades. Our decision was merely based on an ignorant and unscientific gut feeling. I looked at the black cloud near the drone and calculated something in my head. Saro asked me, Why aren’t you calling hevala Rûken?

I remembered a simple technique. Rule of thumb. This allows us to estimate the distance between the drone and the clouds, as well as determine their size. It doesn’t hurt to be more reasonable with our adventure. Do you know what the dimensions of these drones are?

Eleven meters long and twenty meters wide.

Alright. I should do some calculations. Look in the direction of that cloud. Let me know if you see a bird near it.

By rule of thumb I found out the drone was only six thousand meters away from us and was flying at nine thousand meters above sea level. After calculating the drone’s distance from the clouds and their size, I made the call.

Hevala Rûken! Hevalê Saro is with me.

Saro?

You’ve disappointed me, heval. You shouldn’t forget your comrades so easily, Saro declared out loud.

Pardon heval, the dragon up there has disturbed me, Rûken replied with great enthusiasm.

Never mind, heval. We want to do a revolutionary experiment. Listen carefully to what hevala Jînçin says.

Who is hevala Jînçin?

That German lady.

A nice name. Congratulations.

I thanked Rûken and asked how far they are from the hawthorn trees.

Very close. One of us is even sleeping under the trees, Rûken replied.

Where is hevala Rojano?* I asked.

Oh, that lucky devil? Out of everyone, it’s Rojano. She’s been spoiled enough today. She snores even when she’s in a deep sleep.

Heval is lying. I cannot sleep peacefully when my comrades are under the scorching sun. I am highly tenderhearted, Rojano responded to Rûken. Rojano was a comrade from Serdeşt. She was as tall as me and had studied civil engineering. I tried to explain to her how she could find the angles between herself, the right side of the cloud, and the drone. But I couldn’t find the right technical terms in Kurdish that she could also understand. I explained it all to Saro in English and he translated it into Kurdish for Rojano.

That was the most difficult and riskiest calculation of my whole life. I had gathered a few possibilities and wrote my calculation with a stick on the ground. We needed at least twenty-five seconds to reach the cave safely. Right at that time, I saw an eagle next to the cloud. Saro also noticed it, but we did not have enough time to redo the calculation. The group was ready to run away. I was the closest person to the destination. The cave’s location was fifty meters up on my left side. I’d have to run fifty meters in twenty-five seconds uphill. It didn’t appear too difficult. Saro had to run over sixty meters uphill at the same time. Other comrades had to overcome seventy meters of distance, but they were further up, on nearly flat ground. Saro became the advance guard and I took command, even though I was not a member of the party. They had entrusted their lives to me without hesitation. I waited until the drone reached a certain point behind the cloud, then I gave my stupid command and it worked.

I was running as fast as I could, but when I reached the cave there were already some comrades there. Gulbehar,* an ever-smiling twenty-one-year-old girl from a village near Kobanî, grabbed my arm and pulled me down close to Rûnahî,† to enable the other comrades to immediately find a safe place. Rûnahî was a Êzdî girl from Şingal, who grew up in Baghdad. Besides her duties, she was responsible for the group’s health care. At the same moment, a couple of comrades leisurely approached the mouth of the cave as if they were strolling on a city sidewalk. One of them had a big sack on his shoulder and the other, with a thick black beard and mustache on his face, had a big black pot in his hands. They were our group jokesters, Zinar‡ from Colemêrg and Satyar§ from Xaneqîn. Then Saro arrived and sat down in front of me. The last one who came in was our commander. She sat down in front of Satyar and everyone cheered. From the jubilation of these experienced guerrillas, I could glean what devastating effect these drones have had on their lives.

The cave was small but deep enough to protect us from the drone and bombers. Zinar pulled out a bottle of water from his sack and handed it over to Rûken. She gave it to Gulbehar then went to sit by Saro, hugged him and said, Hevalê Saro, you just got here, yet you’ve already taken over my command. We were already close friends.

Saro squeezed her left arm with his hand and replied.

If I were the commander, we would all be dead now, and without Erdoğan personally handing me a thank-you prize for it. Any mistake that I could have made was prevented by hevala Jînçin.

Arjîn* gave me a handshake and said, Thanks, hevala Jînçin. Lovely name you have; I wish I had it myself.

I would gladly exchange my name for your beauty, I replied.

Thanks for the compliment, but every heval here thinks we look as similar as two sisters, just in slightly different colors.

I thought they had been deliberately ignoring me these past few days. I could not understand the extraordinary circumstances they lived in until today, even though this drone was always flying over us somewhere. Prior to today we would dig under a truck tarp in the daytime and would not notice the presence of the drone. Then at sundown we would slip into our individual sleeping tents. But tonight they were thinking about me and pointed out something that I had never noticed: my Middle Eastern eyes! Arjîn really resembled me. Everyone would think she was my own daughter if I took a sun bath, used amber-colored contact lenses, and colored my hair brown and tightly curled it. The daughter of a woman who was a young mother.

Two bottles of water passed hand to hand, but nobody drank until a bottle reached Tewar from Amed. She bore no resemblance to a female eagle; she was more like a black raven. She gulped down half of a bottle then gave it to me. I handed it to Zinar without drinking and waited for another bottle to reach me from the other side. A very long arm twirled over our heads like a crane. It belonged to Serhelldan† from Cîzrê, the one whom the comrades call the tallest guerilla in the world. He is about two meters tall, which is too much to be a partisan. The water was warm but I relished it anyway. I wanted to drink the whole bottle but I handed it over to the crane.

I asked for water again once I had seen that all my comrades had drunk enough. I drank quietly. Once I put the bottle down, Saro asked me, Ten minutes have passed, heval. Do you think they will dispatch jets to bombard us?

I’m not an air traffic expert. I don’t know the capabilities of Turkish controllers and observers in their air traffic controls. Are they even comparing the photos taken ten minutes ago with the current ones? It’s too easy to recognize the differences between various photos with today’s improved technology. Fourteen objects suddenly disappeared from the screen within a few seconds. Unless the observers were snoozing, but. . .

Or underestimated us, Saro said. This statement brought about a jestful mood in the room.

Do not worry, heval. They thought we were abandoned sheep that ran away suddenly, Arjîn said.

Your theory works for thirteen of us, but they thought hevalê Serhelldan was a fallen plantain tree. How can a plantain tree run away without legs? Rojano playfully retorted.

You make the facts too complicated. A naughty buck kicked the plantain tree and it began to roll down deep into the valley. All the sheep panicked and ran away. Satyar declared, solving the problem.

The atmosphere of the group became unexpectedly silly, but it was even funnier when Nadîr asked seriously, When’s dinner, heval?

Even I couldn’t stop laughing. Nadîr was a strong, handsome young man with big black eyes and a suntanned face. He was from Xaneqîn, just like Satyar. His question was appropriate: we had eaten nothing since last night. Gulbehar got up, brought the pot, and put it down in the middle of the group. Once she picked up the lid of the pot and Nadîr saw the lentil soup, he asked even more seriously than before, Should we call this breakfast or lunch right now?

Laughter poured out of the cave. Nadîr was looking at us calmly, unaware that in that moment he had been renamed. Everyone in the PKK* has the right to pick whatever nickname they would like for themselves, but because of his questions Nadîr’s close friend, Satyar, gave him a different one. Nadîr had no complaints about it. Zinar opened his bag and pulled out two pans, laid them in front of the pot, and then gave everyone a spoon. Satyar gave his spoon to Nadîr and said, Take it, Natêr.† Eat your breakfast with this one and lunch with another.

We all liked these two guys. Satyar always had new jokes and Zinar had all the necessities a heval could want. Every so often his hands would burrow into his bag and emerge with some new variety of items.

Here it is, heval. Bread . . . salt and . . . oh, cover your ears, hevala Gulbehar . . . lemon essence!

Gulbehar abhors anything sour or citrus-flavored. She gets nauseous just hearing the word lemon. Zinar then took some tobacco out from his magic bag. Rojano was still dissatisfied. Well! How can we smoke without cigarette paper, heval?

Zinar’s right hand went into his vest pocket and pulled out a few packets of cigarette paper.

This heval is unique. A magic box! He’s got everything you need. If you tell him you want five kilos of tomatoes, he’ll put his hand in his pocket and produce what you desire in various types and different colors. Tell him it’s hot and you wish you had a fan; he’ll disappear behind a stone and reappear after twenty minutes with a couple of fans, a stand, and a ceiling fan. I’m not kidding, I swear to Erdoğan, Arjîn announced.

Yeah, look in your pockets, heval. Maybe you’ll find an anti-aircraft missile to take care of these buzzing drones, Saro told Zinar.

No, heval. That’s illegal contraband. I don’t like to get myself into trouble.

But we’re already illegal, Rojano replied.

Yes, heval. But why should I thicken my criminal file even more?

As a terrorist, you’ll already get a minimum sentence of a hundred years in prison.

Yes heval, maybe you are right. But a hundred years of punishment is much better than two hundred years.

You mean that you want to live for the next hundred years?

Why not, heval. Noah lived for a thousand years.

But you are not a prophet.

You mustn’t underestimate your comrades. What prophetic features is he missing? Satyar spoke in his defense.

I want to drink tea now. I will recognize you as a prophet if you make some tea in this bear den. Arjîn looked at him with her big, amber eyes and said, Yes heval, tea is not a problem.

Zinar half rose and went to the left corner of the cave, where the oldest comrade, hevalê Ferhad, was sitting. He was from Erzirom. We all respected him in a special way. When he was a young man, he had been imprisoned in Amed’s dreadful prison for ten years. You could feel the unbearable torture in his eyes, in his limping, and much more in his profound silence twenty-eight years after his release. Zinar sat down opposite hevalê Ferhad and started talking to him politely, as if he had not been there all along.

Pardon, heval, unfortunately I hid the kettle behind you. Could you please move to let me get it out?

Yeah, sure, heval.

Hevalê Ferhad came over and sat beside me. That made me happy. At that moment the chit-chat ended. From his hidden place Zinar took out a kettle, two bottles of water, and some tea and sugar. He made a small smokeless fire at a corner of the cave and poured water into the kettle. Meanwhile, we were eating lentils in two huddled groups, each group with their own pan. Tea was drunk and cigarettes were masterfully rolled and smoked one after another. Apart from me and Arjîn, everyone else had a smoke and nobody cared about the drone up in the sky. Although no one was making jokes anymore, the atmosphere of the group was quite pleasant compared to the previous days. Saro had the group’s attention. Everyone was asking him questions about Rojava. For the first time, I had the opportunity to really notice how handsome this man was. He had straight dark hair and light brown eyes. I was attracted to his warm gaze. I asked him about hevala Jiyan,* a comrade whom I met two years ago and whose personality impressed me greatly. Saro did not know her and there was no reason for me to ask another question. Our wireless contacted us after the second round of tea drinking and smoking; the drone was gone.

Nobody was happier than me to hear this news. When I was a little girl, I always promised myself that one day I would get revenge on my mother for putting me under house arrest. She must have suffered terribly when I decided to live with my father two years ago and when I set off for Rojava against her will. I returned to Germany, but after a year I left her. Left without a trace. I do not know what reasons there are for my behavior or what names I should use to describe it. Masochism, sadism, or a revolutionary self-removal from the problematic structuring of the modern nuclear family.

I left the cave. The sky was bright and blue and I could hear the murmur of the stream again. I went downhill towards the spring. By noon I had run this path within twenty seconds. A trace of my crumpled body was visible on the dried grass. I laid down in the same place, sat up and stretched my legs, wriggled around, and gazed at the sky. It is pure blue with no trace or trail of aircrafts, something that cannot be seen in Frankfurt for even an hour of the year. I get up and go to the spring. Clearer than a crab’s eyes, as my father always said. I put my palms in front of the spring and let cold water flow into them. I am not thirsty but I drink and also wash my face. Then I sit on a rock and look at the valley opposite me. I did not have the opportunity to see this virgin nature these past few days. Virgin or abandoned? The trickle that comes from our well flows about thirty meters down into a stream that continues to the left, up to a river that is invisible from here. But it separates the mountain from the high black rocks opposite us. No trace of animals can be seen. I would like to lie down naked on this rock in front of the setting sun, but freedom is limited here, of course.

I’m struggling to make a final decision. If I return to Germany, I will forever lose the opportunity to experience this strange lifestyle, yet if I stay here I will have to throw away my identity as a free woman and submit myself to a life full of clichés and rules that fell out of some fool’s mind one day. Today was a different day, just because an unordinary commander had been replaced with an ordinary one. The party claims to act through collective decision-making, so why has a fundamental change occurred just by replacing one of the four administrative members for a day? The fighters went from programmed automata to humorous and emotional humans in the blink of an eye. I turn around; nobody to be seen. They have certainly gone back to the bunker and will try to compensate for today’s lost time through even stricter work.

I get up and go to them. They have stopped digging and have already started construction. They reply warmly to my greeting. Hevalê Ferhad now works as a master mason and everyone works under his command. They have already made room walls with hemp sacks full of soil and are busy constructing the room’s ceiling. Serhelldan’s height is quite useful for the task. Saro gives him the wooden beams, then he lays them over the sack wall and tightens the structure with ropes and stones. I look around to find where I could somehow be useful. Saro looks at me with a smile and says, It’s ok, heval. The work is advancing well. We will also take a break for dinner soon anyway.

We went to the adjoining room, which was constructed as a kitchen. Rûnahî and Akam* were there cooking. Akam, from Merîwan, was the second oldest comrade of our group and the only one who always wrote in his diary. He was standing next to two pots standing on a two-burner gas stove. You could guess without smelling or looking into the pots that one pot contained rice and the other beans. That means our lunch shifts to dinner.

Since the women’s room was lower, in consideration of their height, Arjîn and Rojano served as ladders for the others. We helped them until all four walls were constructed. After dinner, Saro told me that he wanted to talk to me. We took two umbrellas and a blanket and went toward the mouth of the cave. I thought Saro wanted to talk to me about his project, but he brought up another topic. He wanted to get to know me. I took up the conversation thread.

I am sure that you are well informed about me. You know who I am, that I was in Rojava, and that I asked the party to dispatch me here to stay with this group for the upcoming autumn and winter.

And why do you suddenly want to go back to Germany?

You don’t think that I can change my decision and correct my mistake?

Certainly you can. You came here of your own free will and you can always leave us. We are not happy about your departure, but we respect your decision. I just want to know why you changed your mind so suddenly.

I see a lot of structural issues in your party.

What, for example? I would like to hear.

What really gets on my nerves is your arts-and-crafts apotheosis. Abdullah Öcalan is worshiped here as a God. This is antimaterialist, antidialectical, and insulting to the Kurdish nation, even to Abdullah Öcalan himself. He is not a sheikh. You’re repeating the same mistakes that the communists made towards Karl Marx. Your clichés also torment me. I don’t understand why a party that claims to be fighting for women’s equality and freedom for humanity is, in fact, still involved with trifling things. Actually no, that term is too innocuous, better to say involved with displays of vain emptiness. It’s just a contradiction to talk about freedom while it’s forbidden to put your legs on other party members. Why is the party interfering with people’s private lives?

These are little problems. We have much bigger ones in the party.

Yes I know, but these are symbols of oppression. It shows this party does not want to change and cannot develop properly beyond it.

When I say that it’s trivial, I mean that I find this behavior small, even absurd. There are much deeper problems anchored in the history of the Kurds and of humanity in general. You cannot imagine what problems the party’s reactionary fundamentalists have caused for me here. Fifteen years ago, no one was allowed to even talk about such topics. I asked you to tell me your criticisms because comrades told me some points.

And I came to know about your plan. You promised it yourself this morning.

I’ll explain it to you later, but first I want to get to know you better.

That’s exactly what I want. I want to know who you really are, hevalê Saro! And why you suddenly came here today.

Like everyone else here I have a long history behind myself. It’s too complicated to tell you my story, but you can ask me any question you want.

Two years ago, when I wanted to go to Rojava, the party asked me to write my story. At that time it was difficult for me to write in Kurdish, but I wrote sixty pages about myself. I don’t know if you read it or not . .

"I understand. I hope I don’t bore you. I am . . let me start with my father. He had a tragic fate. His brothers saw him as a bad luck charm. His father died two months before his birth and his mother died on delivery. That’s why they hated him. They would always beat him and call him wretched and unlucky. They forced him to do all of the hard work. When he was twelve, they had him mow a large wheat field all alone with a broken sickle. He worked for three days, but reached the end of his rope on the fourth day and fled to Sine.* He stayed for a while in the mosques and Dervish monasteries. His village was already known for its famous mullahs. That’s why he could eventually find a permanent place in a mosque. He learned Islamic theology, enrolled in university, and then found a good job at the registry office. In the meantime, he met my mother. My mother comes from a rich and reputed family. Her family let my dad teach her as a tutor in some subjects that she was weak in. They fell in love and decided to marry. After a few years, the Islamic Revolution began in Iran. The Kurds saw this revolution stolen by the mullahs, so they started an uprising against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This uprising was crushed after a bloody battle. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrested my father, accusing him of abetting the uprising. My mother served as a surgeon and they also arrested her for treating anti-Islamic forces in houses that they turned into makeshift hospitals. Maybe it was an irony of fate, a continuation of his bitter destiny. My father was arrested a few days before I was born and my mother three days after. I was alone without food or water for three days, until a woman found me in that terrible situation. She was a relative of my father’s. Her brother wanted her to marry an old mullah, but she fled to Sine. She found our house, opened the door by force after knocking on it a dozen times, and found me in great distress. She told me she searched the whole city to find milk for me. The city would be destroyed after twenty-four days of house-to-house combat and countless bombardments. People left the city. She couldn’t find anyone to buy a cup of milk from, so in the end she fed me with tea and moldy bread. Thus, my bones are poorly formed. You have surely seen my bowed shoulders, hevala Jînçin."

How many days were you in that condition?

I do not know. My parents never talked to me about these topics. They wanted to keep me away from politics and Kurdish matters.

It’s very important to me. Please give me an estimate. One year or more?

No, a shorter amount of time, maybe two or three weeks. But then I grew up well. When I was a kid I had a lot of enthusiasm for electronic devices. Already at thirteen I had invented an eavesdropping device and placed first with the device in a scientific competition in Kurdistan province. I sent my invention to a national contest. All of the inventors received a receipt for the shipping costs, but I didn’t get one. Next year, I saw that a couple of students on television won second place for presenting my invention. My parents knew they had stolen my invention, but they didn’t support me. From then on, I rarely attended school. I stayed at home and worked on electrical appliances. At the end of the year, I took the final exam and successfully completed my compulsory education. When I was fifteen, I started to work so that I wouldn’t have to take any money from my parents. During the day I worked in the wastewater treatment plant and repaired computers at home in the evenings. I was the only one in the city who could fix computers, so I managed to save up a lot of money. Then, when I was eighteen, I ran the first internet cafe in Sine. I furtively installed a satellite antenna in a house near my cafe and sold fast and cheap internet. Let me tell you something funny. I advertised in the city that the internet cafe would give customers a couple of hours for free if they enrolled there. A long queue formed in front of my cafe. It was longer than the funeral procession for Michael Jackson. You could count on your fingers the months it would take until all the enrolled people could access my free internet. Briefly, I was raking in money. Other internet cafes couldn’t compete with my fast and cheap service.

Wasn’t that illegal? I asked Saro.

Of course it was.

But how could you do that? Why didn’t they shut your cafe down?

"It was locked and reopened several times. The officials of the Public Surveillance Authority even became my special customers. I did some smart things, but also some stupid things. I recruited two so-called fanatic Muslims and trusted them. I often left them alone with all my possessions when I was on a trip. I spent money like water, traveled like Marco Polo, and entertained myself like a king. I didn’t know that the Islamists confiscated my shop legally. I was a little annoyed but immediately found an even greater source of moneymaking. I established an internet services company and made contracts with some big legal companies to sell them a mix of legal-but-slow state internet and my own ultra-high-speed illegal internet. I threw money out the window but it was piling up constantly.