Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again (12 page)

He stood up and called out as one of the
men, and demanded out loud:

“Can we get something more to drink
here?”

“Hey, come and get it yourself, there
are no servants here!” someone yelled and Karma rose and went to the counter
that smelled of frying oil.  The man looked at him and pointed to the Finjan
that stood on the grill over smoldering embers and Karma embarrassedly flashed
his enchanting smile.

“Here are the glasses, here’s a tray and
here’s the teapot.  Pour and serve yourself and the others.”

That same day, towards nightfall, he had
served everyone with tea from the hot finjan. Hamis, the owner, called him with
a crooked finger and Karma approached him reverently.

“I need someone to work here. Are you
available?”

Karma nodded in embarrassment.

“So what are you waiting for?  Ya
'
llah
,
(come on) get to work!”

Later, the owner rebuked him for picking
his nose and even rapped the dirty fingers of his new employee and reprimanded
him:

“You had better learn how to behave,
brat!”

Afterward
, he went to the
other room, shoved a mop in Karma’s hand and added:

“Here, take the mop and make yourself
useful.”

He made a gesture to show him that he
should push the wet mop back and forth to wipe down the filthy floor.

“Bend down, don’t be lazy and clean
under the tables and chairs,”  he ordered.

Karma dipped the mop into the water in
the tin bucket he had brought, wet the floor and saw with pleasure how he left
clean paths behind him on the stained floor.  Hamis stood behind the counter
and Karma glanced at him and recognized the look of satisfaction on Hamis’ face
as he watched Karma’s first efforts at cleaning in his entire life.  To tell
the truth, he was delighted with the scent that rose from the floor.  He liked
to see how the floor was reappeared from under the layer of cigarette butts and
yellow spit stains from the tobacco people chewed during the day.

He learned to pour the bitter beer
slowly into a glass, tilting it at an angle to the side to prevent the frothy
head from overflowing.  The following day, one of the patrons stood up and
called out to him:

“Hey, come here, my young man!”

When Karma approached him, the man
pushed a cigarette between his lips and shouted at him:

“Inhale as deep as you can!  Be a man!”

Karma inhaled the cigarette smoke into
his lungs and began to cough.  He could hardly breathe and his eyes welled up
with tears at the sound of the laughter of the men surrounding him.  Afterward
he passed between the tables, collected crumpled papers, cleared away empty
glasses and served plates with snacks.  He was diligent and Hamis was delighted
with his choice.  With his unlimited industriousness, Karma deserved the bread
and spicy eggs he received and Hamis knew that Karma honestly earned the meals
he fed him.

By the second day of his employment,
everything looked different.  Apparently, the owner would not dismiss this
fine-looking, energetic lad that fate had brought to his door.  At the end of
the day, a pile of clothes awaited him on his bed in the backroom. The neatly
folded items included socks, trousers, a shirt, underpants and a vest.

“Hey, kid, go and take a shower,” Hamis
urged him and pushed a towel under his long arm.

It was the first time that Karma saw
water coming out of holes in an iron head fixed on the ceiling above him.  The
water was warm and pleasant and it was also the first time that he used soap. 
He dressed excitedly and straightened up to his full height that was increasing
from day to day.

Karma was slim and since he was also very
tall, he looked like a Macaroni Noodle.  One day one of the patrons called him:

“Hey, ‘Noodle,' could you come here and remove
these plates?”

From that day on the nickname, ‘Noodle’
stuck to him.  Karma smiled and mused that it was better than the nickname of
his childhood: “Orphan Bastard,” which was said to mock him and was accompanied
by painful kicks and shoves.

He took an interest in the patrons’
conversations all the time.  Especially interesting to him were the rumors from
the battlefields.  He noticed that groups of regulars arrived every day and
gathered in a corner of the bar.  At times, he heard them covertly singing
quiet songs of yearning and a word that was repeated, the ‘Pe-Ka-Ka,' (PKK),
would be whispered secretly.   He heard Abdullah Öcalan’s name murmured
behind closed doors, and anyone who dared to speak it, out loud, faced the danger
of trial and imprisonment.

“Who is Öcalan?” he inquired of
Hamis one day.

Hamis raised his hands to his head in
fright and quickly pulled Karma roughly behind the counter that was greasy with
food. There he stood and hit the back of Karma’s head as he whispered to him in
fright:

“Shut up, in the name of Allah!  Hey,
you little scoundrel.  Do you want to ruin my business, you brainless ‘Noodle’?”

Karma shook his head and kept silent.  He
stayed away from Hamis for the rest of the day. In the evening, Hamis called
Karma and explained, with lovingly whispered reverence, that Abdullah
Öcalan was the leader of the Kurds.

“Where is he?”  Karma asked in under his
breath.

“He’s been locked up in prison for more
than ten years now.”

“Why, what did the man do?”

Hamis
laughed and embraced
the skinny shoulders of Karma, who was already a head taller than him. Karma
bent his head down to be able to hear Hamis.

“The man leads the ‘Pe-Ka-Ka’” he
whispered, squinting to the sides to check whether anyone could understand
him.  Tears could be seen in Hamis’ black eyes.

“What’s that?” Karma asked, but was
careful not to repeat the words.  He sensed Hamis’ agitation and noticed his
tears.

“It’s our underground organization, the
Kurdish Liberation Movement, to which we all belong,” he stated, drawing a
circle in the air with his thick finger,

“I, you and everyone you see around
you.”  He added and Karma beamed with joy when he heard that he was included in
the same breath as everyone else.

Hamis pulled Karma into the kitchen
behind them, pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and began showing him the
photographs on it.

“Here are my two brothers, who were
killed in action against the army and here, come, look here, come!” 

He pressed on the back of Karma’s neck
and brought him closer to the telephone.

“This is our leader, you see? And, this
is his wife; see how beautiful she is.”  He said and ran his finger over the
pictures.  He began kissing the images that appeared on the small screen,
kissed them and wept. 

“Can I join this organization?”  Karma
inquired and was amazed at this because the words burst out of his lips without
him intending to say them.

“We all belong to it,” Hamis said,
“Don’t worry, someone will approach you, I promise,” he assured him.  He pulled
Karma’s face towards him, kissed him on both cheeks and immediately added a
loving slap on his slim shoulder.

Karma began noticing pictures of
Öcalan and saw that they covertly decorated living rooms of people’s homes
and the screens on computers and cell phones.

One day a group of unfamiliar people
arrived.  One by one, they entered a room on the side, at the end of the
corridor in the tavern, taking care to be quiet.  Karma noticed how they
glanced around and it was clear to him that this was a clandestine meeting. 
They welcomed each other with a unique greeting.  Shaking hands, they
interleaved their fingers and then pressed their forearms together up to the
elbow.  The youngster watched them and kept what he had seen to himself.

Each of the men had brought a package or
a bag and Karma was curious to know what they contained.  He couldn’t resist
finding out and a few minutes later went out to the corridor and stopped a few yards
before the entrance to the room.  He heard them speaking and listened.  One of
them talked about weapons and rifles and another answered that they were being
sent from the USA to their activists.

“It was clearly specified that these arms
and ammunition were not intended for our organization here.”

“So, where are they to be sent?”  He
heard someone ask.

“They were sent to our people in Iran,
Syria and especially Northern Iraq.”

Someone moved a chair and Karma hurried
to return to the bar and saw the people leave the room and disappear outside.

Hamis stopped beside him, patted him on
his shoulder with feigned anger and remarked:

“Why are you idle, eh?”

In response, Karma asked him:

“What’s going on in Iraq?”

“Shhhh…” He hushed him.  “Why here? 
Come to the kitchen where we can talk.”

When they retreated and returned to the
kitchen, Hamis hurried to explain to the curious youth:

“Our training camps and military are
there but, next time, keep your voice down, Noodle Brain.”

“Really?” Karma expressed his amazement.

He stopped to imagine himself joining
the Kurdish rebels and he was convinced that the stories Nana Kahit told him
when he was a child were precisely about men like them.

Men also arrived the following day and
Karma almost wept with excitement.  He wanted so much to be one of them, one of
the warriors of the ‘Pe-Ka-Ka’, who fired his wild imagination.

That was what he thought yesterday evening
when his world was upturned by the things he heard whispered between two men.

“I heard that the USA has wiped the
organization off its terror list.”

“What?  Our organization, the ‘Pe-Ka-Ka’?”

“No, idiot!  I’m talking about the ‘Mujahedin-e-Khalq’.”

Karma pretended he hadn’t heard anything
and continued passing the drinks around the tables as he tried to disappear
into the background.

One of the two, who had been whispering,
was a short man.  He placed a finger on his lips and his eyes darted around
suspiciously.  Suddenly, his gaze stopped on Karma for a few seconds but
immediately moved away.  He was convinced he had nothing to fear from him.

He was Dugar.

The day Dogar came to the bar, Karma was
sure he was a child because of his diminutive height and slender body.  Afterward,
when the light illuminated his facial features, he observed that he was an
adult, a kind of “little man.”  His energetic movements led people to
mistakenly believe that he was a dynamic young man, who behaved like a naughty
boy.

“What about them, those Mojahedin?”
Karma heard, but because he was far away from them he was unable to hear the
answer that so interested him.

The inquisitive boy could not resist
approaching them openly. He placed the tray on a nearby table and, with courage
and audacity he did not know he could muster, he went and stood beside their
table.

“Tell me, please let me in on this,” He
begged, looking at the two of them with wide open eyes.

“I want to know more about the Mojahedin. 
Like, how can I reach them?”

Dugar extended his arm and pushed Karma
and at that same moment Hamis appeared with a tiny teapot and crystal glasses
and Karma retreated.  His bottom lip trembled and tears welled up in his eyes. Through
his tears, he saw Dugar signaling something that wasn’t clear to him, but he
heard Hamis’ answer very clearly.

“Yes, you can trust him,”

He almost hollered for joy because he
knew they were referring to him.

They invited him to join them and
although nothing more was said on that occasion, Karma remembered the name of
the organization.  He didn’t give up and tried to learn more details. 

Late that night, after he finished
washing the last glass and switched off the light, he stood at the door to
Hamis’ room and peered inside.  Hamis looked up at him with his little eyes.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired angrily
but his face expressed his love for the boy.

“Where do the people who belong to the Mojahedin
Organization live?” And he saw Hamis’ mouth drop open in alarm.

“Come here, where did you hear their
name?

Karma approached him and Hamis slapped
the back of his neck, pretending to be angry, but Karma threw back his
shoulders and stared at Hamis with eyes wide open.

“Okay, you’re too smart to be a ‘Noodle.' 
Listen,” he began as he pulled Karma by the hand and made him sit on the side
of his bed.

“They are far away, in the Nevada Desert
in a secret training camp under the authority of the American Ministry of
Energy.”

“Why are they there?”

“They’re there because the Americans are
training them.”

Karma’s lips drooped.  He had no idea
where that desert was nor was he familiar with America but the details he had
just heard weakened his spirit and pinched at his heart.  He realized he had no
way of getting there and would never be able to join the Mojahedin.