Oversized pastel portraits of Hejar and Hemin dominated the Bahris' living room. And Mr. Bahri and two of his guests that evening-Mrs. Jaferi and Mr. Ashti-had been students of Hemin. Mrs. Jaferi, who had written a novel about the epic of Dem Dem from a woman narrator's point of view, was also Hemin's niece. Rounding out the party that evening was Mr. Khosrow, an Iraqi Kurd who had lived in Mahabad for years.

Each of the party was distinctive. Mr. Bahri, a small man in a three-piece green suit, was an expert in Kurdish folktales-especially rich in the Mahabad region, due to its historic isolation. Mahabad was home to the Mukrian people, a powerful tribal confederacy, and over the past twenty years, Mr. Bahri had recorded over two hundred ca.s.settes of folktales told and sung by storytellers and troubadours.

This is the kind of scholarly research that is desperately needed in Iraq, I thought as Mr. Bahri described his work, especially when he told me that, no, unfortunately, he couldn't take me to meet any traditional storytellers and troubadours. They had all died out.

One of Mr. Bahri's favorite folktales was the story of Khadje and Siyabend, a tale popular among many Kurds. Beautiful Khadje is the daughter of a wealthy family; handsome Siyabend, the son of a poor one. Loving each other against their family's wishes, they run away to the mountains, where they spend three happy days and nights together. On the fourth day, Siyabend falls asleep with his head in Khadje's lap. A herd of deer pa.s.ses by, and one, a big buck, seizes a pretty doe and runs away with her. Khadje weeps at the sight and one of her tears falls on Siyabend's cheek, awakening him.

Siyabend grabs his bow and chases the stag. As he takes aim, the buck attacks, flinging him into a deep ravine, where Khadje finds him mortally wounded. Weeping bitterly, she curses the beautiful forest around them for nurturing the evil buck and dies of heartbreak. A tree that is forever in bloom shoots up on the spot.

I could well understand why the tale was one of Mr. Bahri's favorites. It is so filled with contradiction.

We talked about Kurdish literature for a while. Modernism and post-modernism, and the dearth of both in Kurdish letters, seemed to be a favorite topic among my companions. They also lamented the limited number of Kurdish novels, as Kurdish literature has traditionally meant poetry- also the strongest literary form throughout Iran, where even illiterate villagers can recite long reams of poetry by heart.

Many of the writers' opinions were closer to those of the pessimist Mr. Valadbaigy's in Tehran than to the optimist Mr. Ghazi's in Urumieh. Publishing conditions were still a long, long ways from being satisfactory. "We all practice self-censorship in order to publish," Mr. Bahri said. The foursome also felt that the recent rise in the number of Kurdish magazines was misleading, as many were financed by the Islamic regime and so were perhaps being used to deflect the Kurds from more controversial goals.

"The life here is not good, not bad," Mrs. Jaferi said, summing up with a phrase that I heard often in Iranian Kurdistan, and one that contrasted in my mind with the Iraqi Kurdish expression, "This is the life," so often used after describing an atrocity. Both sentences implied endless suffering and stoic endurance, but one was muted in tone, the other an acute cry.

ONE AFTERNOON, MRS. JAFERI took me to a Kurdish wedding, only the third I'd attended in Kurdistan-a surprisingly low number considering how central weddings are to Kurdish culture. Since many weddings last two or three days, and involve hundreds of guests, I was constantly b.u.mping into someone who knew someone who was giving a wedding and wanted to invite me along. But for one reason or another, most invitations hadn't worked out.

The first wedding I'd attended had been with my host family in Dohuk. Held in a vast modern hall built expressly for weddings, the party was mobbed, with a hired band playing amplified music so loud that it hurt the ears. "Awful," my companions said as we hurried away after a rushed "Congratulations" to the family.

The second wedding had been in Suleimaniyah. This had been an unusual ma.s.s celebration held in a sports arena, with a professional troupe of dancers and band. Fifty couples from poor families had married at the same time in order to defray the wedding costs-a brilliant idea, I thought, as the traditional Kurdish wedding has become prohibitively expensive. The brides wore billowing Western white; the men, dark suits with flowers in their lapels. They made a handsome sight as they wove in and out, dancing in the long gilded rays of the late-afternoon sun. The PUK subsidized the event, even providing each couple with a small monetary gift.

For the wedding in Mahabad, I was asked to dress in traditional Kurdish clothes-a request to which I had become accustomed. Everywhere I went in Kurdistan, people liked to dress me up and take my picture, often chuckling with great glee whenever I self-consciously emerged from an impromptu dressing room. Some costumes I modeled were everyday attire, but usually I was handed an elaborate affair of bright colors, shiny fabrics, brocades, and sequins. I never minded posing for my hosts-it was a small price to pay for their generous hospitality-but I was always happy to take the garments off. Wearing a stranger's clothes is too close to another's shape and smells, to another's life.

The costume of Mahabad differed from those I'd worn earlier. This was a long one-piece dress, worn with a cowl-like piece of cloth around the neck, and a thick sash around the hips. The sash looked stunning on younger women, as it elongated their slim waists, but thickened the silhouettes of the middle-aged.

The wedding was given by Qazi Mohammed's descendants, still one of Mahabad's leading families, and when Mrs. Jaferi-Nasrin-and I arrived at the compound at about two P.M., it was already packed with people. The main building was divided in two-men sitting on the floor to one side, women to the other-with constant traffic through wide, open doorways in between. Most of the women dressed traditionally, in brilliant gowns and much gold jewelry, but some of the younger women wore T-shirts and jeans. About half the men wore dark Western suits; the other half shal u shapik. Only a few older men wore turbans, different from the ones I'd seen in Iraq, with bits of string framing their faces and a tail-like piece of cloth descending in back.

We had arrived just in time for lunch, and, after kissing us three times on alternate cheeks, as is the Kurdish custom, young women took our hands to lead us into the middle of the women's side, where the others somehow made room for us on the crowded floor. Men balancing huge silver-colored trays laden with dishes wove through the crowd, serving everyone kebabs, rice, vegetables, and a thick Iranian stew known as ash. I expected one of the men to lose his footing at any moment and rain plates and food down upon us, but there were no mishaps.

Most of the women around us were under thirty, heavily made up, and clad in brightly colored dresses, no head scarves. They eyed me with curiosity.

"Who do you think is the prettiest among us?" asked one dark-haired beauty in a fire-engine-red dress with a gauzy black cowl and matching sash. Next to her, and seemingly waiting with bated breath for my answer, sat an older blond woman resplendent in creamy white and dangling gold earrings.

I couldn't answer. Even if I could have, I would not have dared.

After lunch, we retired out front, where dozens of red plastic chairs had been set up under the trees, for an afternoon of socializing, drinking tea, and dancing. In the center of things sat two beaming middle-aged women from Qazi Mohammad's family, who effusively welcomed me. A small band was tuning up to one side, while servants rushed to and fro with tea trays and three-foot-long blocks of ice, which they plopped into metal water coolers. The bride and groom were not in attendance, although the bride would arrive later, at around eight P.M., by which time Nasrin and I would be gone. It was the second day of a traditional Kurdish wedding, the time at which the bride says good-bye to her family and goes to the home of the groom.

The music started, and the dancing began. The line was short at first but grew steadily longer as people grabbed hands, including mine. We fell into a popular dance called saypah, or "three step." I had learned it in Iraq, and had grown to appreciate its slow, simple rhythm, which has a hypnotic and comforting quality as the notes twine in and out, the dance line goes round and round, and lazy minute after lazy minute pa.s.ses, everyone moving closely together, all accepted, all protected, no one left out.

When I took a break, some men came up to me to talk about-what else?-politics. One day soon, the men predicted, the Iranian Kurds would have a semiautonomous state within a federated Iran. After Saddam Hussein was gone and Iraq set up such a system, it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened in Iran. And what about an independent Greater Kurdistan? The men shook their heads. The Iranian Kurds were too well integrated into Iran, for one thing; and the Kurds in general didn't have the economic or military might to support their own state, for another.

The youngest among the men, a medical student in shal u shapik, then said that he hoped the United States would soon bomb Iraq. All the other men disagreed, some vehemently. They wanted Saddam to go, but not if it meant the arrival of the United States. Like most Iranians, but unlike most Iraqi Kurds, most Iranian Kurds deeply distrust American foreign policy and intentions.

Writes the poet Hemin, in words that still resonate in Iranian Kurdistan today: Young ones! Peshmerga! Brave ones! Fearlessness!

You pick up the sword and we sharpen the pen!

With G.o.d's help we will take out of the hands of foreigners

The clean Kurdish homeland-

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Land of Lions THROUGH AN ODD SET OF CIRc.u.mSTANCES, I FOUND MYSELF attending the region's first environmental conference, held in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran's Kurdistan province. The two-day meeting had been organized by a Kurdish ecological society to address the growing problem of pollution in the Zagros Mountains. About a hundred men and women were in attendance, and most were professionals. Many were also hikers, a popular pastime in Iran.

The conference was held in a modern meeting center, complete with a hotel. The friend of a friend who suggested I attend the event-it would be a good way for me to meet Kurds from all over Iran, he said-deposited me in the cafeteria, where breakfast was being served, and then disappeared. Looking around, I wondered how exactly I was going to meet all these Kurds. But then the conference's young organizers discovered me. Thrilled to have a foreigner in their midst, they took me under their wings for what would prove to be the rest of my stay in Sanandaj, showing me around, inviting me to stay with their families, and introducing me to others. It was the same kind of charming, magnanimous hospitality that I remembered from my first trip to Iran, when people couldn't seem to do enough for me.

I could barely distinguish one organizer from another at first, as they ebbed and flowed around me, asking questions, making conversation. Later, though, two in particular took on a definite shape: Hiwa, a cameraman for a local television station, and Arash, a physics teacher.

I had no interest in attending the conference's actual lectures. After breakfast, I told my new friends that I would leave to explore the town for a while and return for the social part of the program. I had been in Sanandaj before-it had been my only stop in Iranian Kurdistan in 1998. But my new friends wouldn't dream of letting me go off by myself and insisted on helping me locate a contact name I'd been given-a middle-aged man who spoke good English and who was, in fact, expecting my call that morning.

About a half hour later, Mr. K arrived. Lean and balding, with a concave chest, he greeted me distantly, which I initially attributed to Iranian formality. But as the day wore on, I realized that his reserve went deeper than that. Although he treated me with great condescension at first, a.s.suming that I knew nothing about Iran, he became increasingly nervous and suspicious when he realized that I was already well informed. By early afternoon, he was trying to convince me to leave Sanandaj on the next bus. "Sanandaj has little to interest you, you should go farther south," he said. He also followed many of his statements, innocuous though most were, with, "You can't write that."

Mr. K was not the only nervous middle-aged Kurd I met in Iran. The man who had deposited me at the conference had been vastly relieved to get rid of me, and others later made it plain they wanted nothing to do with me. It wasn't personal. These men had lived through the violent, desperate years following the Islamic revolution, and knew the cruelty of the Islamic regime all too well. They'd seen friends and family mowed down in cold blood, and some had been imprisoned and tortured themselves. They were always alert to danger and being seen with an American could cause problems.

Or not. The reactions of the Islamic regime are unpredictable, and Iran today is a more tolerant place than it was in the 1980s. Most young Iranians have no memory of extreme repression and so flout all kinds of Islamic laws, for which they usually receive nothing more than a reprimand or fine. And certainly most Iranians I met, young or old, Kurd or non-Kurd, did not hesitate to be seen with me, were indeed eager to be seen with me.

Why Mr. K agreed to show me around Sanandaj in the first place remains a mystery, but I suspect it had something to do with the Iranians' great politeness and sense of hospitality. It was better to take a small risk than to insult a guest.

At any rate, Mr. K and I left the conference center to wander downtown, past the nineteenth-century Friday mosque with its lovely Qajar tiles and the closed Sanandaj Museum, through the busy bazaar, and down a side street crowded with shops in which artisans were tooling exquisite inlaid backgammon sets. Woodworking, along with hand-woven kilims, is an art for which the Sanandaj Kurds are well known, although both industries are dying out. The younger generation has no desire to learn their parents' crafts, preferring to obtain university degrees.

Sanandaj was much as I remembered it-bustling and s.p.a.cious, set high on a plateau, peaks soaring all around. The town had both an attractive devil-may-care air-young men defiantly strutting down the streets, as if they owned the world-and the feel of poverty. Sanandaj was neglected by the central Iranian government, which left its roads filled with potholes, its city services meager, while at the same time serving as a magnet for poverty-stricken villagers seeking work. Kurdistan was one of the poorest and least developed of Iran's provinces. Officially, its unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent, but unofficially it was at least twice and perhaps three times as high.

I did notice one significant change in Sanandaj since 1998, however: only a handful of Revolutionary Guards roamed the streets. Four years earlier, there had been many more. Though of course, a continuing steady presence of plainclothes intelligence agents could not be discounted. This was Iran.

Yet even Mr. K agreed with me-there were fewer guards on the streets. "We are going forward little by little," he said. "It's mostly related to changes in the world, not the government. We have the Internet now, we have satellite TV, we aren't so isolated."

Here and there in Sanandaj stood rectangular palaces made of a fine brown brick, built in the 1800s under the Qajar shahs. Constructed around overgrown courtyards, the romantic and largely abandoned buildings had a magnetic draw, seeming to hold within them dark secrets far removed from the modern world. Most were closed to the public, but one was being restored, and Mr. K and I ducked inside to wander through dust-filtered rooms, some adorned with intricate tiles and hand-carved wooden shutters. As we were leaving, a tall, bearded young worker addressed me in good English, startling me.

"Where did you learn your English?" I asked.

"In my town."

"Where is your town?"

"My town is Sanandaj and my country is Kurdistan," he said, proudly pulling back his shoulders and again startling me, this time with his Kurdish nationalism.

A handsome village couple walked by. The wife wore a long red dress with a heavy black headdress ringed with coins-once common among Kurdish women, but now increasingly rare-while her husband wore a shal u shapik and a black turban with a cloth tail in back. The couple was probably in town just for the day, to sell their wares in the market, and contrasted sharply with the manteau-clad women and men in Western clothes who dominated the streets.

Many of Sanandaj's brick palaces had once belonged to the Ardalan family, who governed the city during the Qajar period and all of Persian Kurdistan for centuries earlier. Still a powerful family, the Ardalan dynasty was founded in the early 1300s, and Sanandaj, then known as Senna, was their capital. Renowned for their love of culture and the arts, the Ardalans nurtured sophisticated courts filled with poets and musicians, and established Gorani as the Kurds' first literary language.

Prior to the rise of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, the Ardalans controlled vast areas of land on both sides of the Zagros Mountains, in both Iran and Iraq. After the dueling empires came to power, the Kurdish dynasty was forced to choose sides. With their capital to the east, they cast their loyalties with Persia. The Ardalans were the only Kurdish princes allowed extensive semiautonomous rule under the Safavids.

In the early nineteenth century, the Ardalan ruler Aman Allah Khan came to power. A pa.s.sionate builder, he greatly expanded Sanandaj, erecting a new mosque, public bathhouses, caravanserais, a bazaar, and other buildings, many of which still stand. But Aman Allah Khan was also a ruthless and pitiless man. Claudius Rich, an East India Company representative who traveled through Kurdistan in 1820, describes visiting him in the town of Baneh, where he found the khan "settling accounts"-i.e., pulling out the eyes of three men who'd displeased him and sending their wives and daughters to Sanandaj under guard.

One of Aman Allah Khan's projects was the palace of Khosrow Abad, built on a small hill. Rich describes coming upon it: "We were ushered up avenues of poplars of great height and beauty, to a magnificent garden-house of great elevation, with a fine square tank full of jets d'eau in front and at the back of it. . . . The pavilion was lofty, and elegantly painted and gilded in the Persian taste."

Khosrow Abad still stands. Although dilapidated, it is more magnificent in some ways now than ever. I went to visit it one evening, wandering through the empty, darkening streets of the quiet neighborhood that surrounds it, to arrive suddenly at its ma.s.sive front door, studded with iron nails. With me were two companions, and we had to plead long and hard with the caretaker to let us in, as shadows gathered, obscuring an overgrown garden and leaf-clogged reflecting pool, its jets d'eau long gone. The caretaker finally relented, and we climbed up a dark steep staircase to view the haunted courtyard into which Aman Allah Khan and his retinue had once galloped on their steeds, splattering splendor and suffering in their wake.

WHILE IN SANANDAJ, I stayed with Arash, the physics teacher, and his family. His parents were both retired teachers, while his sister, Darya, and brother, Askhan, were university students. The family lived in a multistory apartment complex on the edge of the city, where the paved roads petered out into dirt and there were few taxis and no buses-meaning we often had long waits before catching transportation into town.

Like those I'd met in Mahabad, Arash, his family, and various friends had little good to say about President George W. Bush. "We call him Mullah Bush, because he is not smart enough to be an ayatollah," Arash said, chuckling. To become a mullah takes only a year of religious study, to become an ayatollah takes twenty years or more.

Also like most Iranian Kurds I met, Arash's family had lost loved ones in the Kurdish struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, and endured much bombing and suffering during the Iran-Iraq War-one of the bloodiest conflicts of modern times, with an estimated five hundred thousand dead on each side. Three on Arash's mother's side of the family had died due to politics, while one uncle had lost his mind following a five-year stint in prison during the time of the shah.

Arash took me to meet his uncle one morning. A middle-aged man wearing a tall skinny hat, he was sitting on the floor behind a small desk when we arrived, his atrophied feet folded beneath him as he dipped pens into various colored inks. He was hard at work on an English lesson, writing out sentences in a child's copybook, "l's" and "f's" looping above and below lines in a neat, confident hand.

"Why are you studying English?" I asked as I sat down beside him.

"It is amusing to me," he said in clipped English. "It is my hobby. I have written many books." He opened the cabinet beside him, to reveal several shelves weighted down with copybooks filled with his lessons.

"Tell me about when you were in prison," I said.

"I went to Iraq to fight, but Barzani put me in prison," he said. "I stayed five years. They beat me very bad, and now I can't walk."

"Were you in prison in Iraq or Iran?" I was confused by the reference to Barzani.

"Both. Prison is a business."

"Why were you arrested?"

"I can't tell you. You must read my secret dossier."

"When were you arrested?"

"I can't remember. I have a headache." He bent more closely over his copybook, willing me to desist, and I did, trying not to imagine what he had once been through.

Later, I learned that Arash's uncle had been the victim of another turbulent period in inter-Kurdish affairs. Though relations between the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds have usually been good, such was not the case in the late 1960s, when the Iranian government played them off against each other. The Shah of Iran was then sending aid to the Iraqi Kurds in the hopes of destabilizing the Baath government, and in return Barzani agreed to evict the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) from Iraqi Kurdish territory, where some of its members were hiding. In 1968, he executed one Iranian Kurdish leader and handed his body over to the Iranian authorities, who paraded it triumphantly in Mahabad and elsewhere. Barzani then shipped others back across the border, to their death or imprisonment.

Two years later, alliances shifted again, as the Baath regime opened negotiations with Barzani, and the Iranian Kurds began operating out of Baghdad, with the support of the Iraqi government. But Barzani was still receiving aid from the shah, and despite everything, based on a long earlier history of cooperation, the Iranian Kurds did not feel they could attack the shah while he was still supporting Barzani. Thus, the Iranian Kurdish struggle was subjugated to the Iraqi Kurdish struggle until the Algiers Accord of 1975 when the shah withdrew his support of the Iraqi Kurds and the KDPI embarked on an armed revolt under its new leader, Abd al-Rahman Qa.s.semlou, a socialist intellectual educated in France.

Once again, just business as usual in the wild and woolly world of Kurdish politics.

WHEN THE IRANIAN revolution swept the authoritarian, out-of-touch Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi off his throne in 1979, Iranian Kurds seized control of their region, believing themselves to be on the cusp of achieving both democracy for Iran and self-rule for Kurdistan. They hadn't bargained on the installation of an Islamic regime, and a Shiite one at that, or on a government so insecure that it immediately clamped down on all minorities. The regime's new const.i.tution did not even acknowledge the Kurds' existence, leading them to boycott the referendum for its adoption. When the KDPI leader Qa.s.semlou won over 80 percent of the Kurdish vote in the March 1980 parliamentary elections, but decided not to go to Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly said, "It's too bad. We could have had him arrested and shot."

During the first years following the Islamic revolution, the Kurds found themselves in near constant battle with the newly formed Revolutionary Guards, who were aggressively imposing sharia on all of Iran. By as early as February 1981, an estimated ten thousand Kurds had died either at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards or in one of the many ma.s.s executions ordered by Ayatollah Sadiq Khalkhali, the "hanging judge." Attempts at negotiation were broached by both sides, but all failed.

When the Iran-Iraq War began, with Saddam Hussein invading Iran in September 1980, many Iranian Kurds initially viewed it as a way to distract the Iranians from the Kurdish struggle. But as the war escalated, with Kurdistan bearing the brunt of many battles, it proved disastrous. Thousands of civilians were caught between the Revolutionary Guards, the Iraqi army, the KDPI, Komala (a more left-wing Kurdish party), and the Iraqi Kurds, armed by Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the KDPI from escaping to Iraq. The year 1984 was especially devastating, as the Revolutionary Guards launched a huge offensive against the Iranian Kurds, capturing over seventy villages and towns. The KDPI fought back with aid from the Baathists, only to lose control of most of Iranian Kurdistan. By 1984, about 27,500 Iranian Kurds had died during the war. A mind-boggling 90 percent were civilians.

One Kurd I met, originally from Baneh near the Iran-Iraq border, told me that during the war, two thousand of his town's population of fifty thousand had been killed, with six hundred people, including seventy-six children, dying in a single Iraqi bombing attack. "Many border towns were attacked in this way," he said with a shrug. "Every morning, we went to the mountains for the day, when the Iraqis attacked, and came back at night. Except on cloudy days. It was safer on cloudy days."

After the war ended in 1988, over two hundred thousand Revolutionary Guards were stationed in Iranian Kurdistan, and Qa.s.semlou, a pa.s.sionate yet moderate leader who was always searching for peaceful solutions even while leading armed rebellions, decided to negotiate rather than continue fighting. In early July 1989, he flew to Vienna for a secret meeting with the Iranian authorities. On July 13, the Viennese police found his body crumpled in an armchair of a fifth-floor apartment, shot through the head. Two other prominent Kurds lay on the floor, also shot through the head. Many believe the killers were the very Iranians with whom Qa.s.semlou was negotiating.

Qa.s.semlou was regarded by many observers as the most capable of all modern Kurdish leaders, and his death decimated the Iranian Kurdish political movement. Three years later, his successor, Dr. Mohammed Saddeq Sharfkandi, was also a.s.sa.s.sinated, and under similar circ.u.mstances-while negotiating with members of opposition groups at a restaurant in Berlin. Today, the KDPI is largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan, where it is pushing for greater Iranian Kurdish rights through peaceful means, not separatism.

HIWA, THE CAMERAMAN I had met at the ecology conference, was a pale and serious young man with steady brown eyes. An artist and a dreamer, he aspired to become a filmmaker-his job as a TV cameraman was just a job. He had taken photographs for the conference's exhibit on pollution, and spent much of his time exploring the region's villages. Like other artists and scholars, he visited rural Iran as often as he could, to doc.u.ment the traditional life there before it faded away.

One afternoon, Hiwa took Arash, four other friends, and me into the countryside. We pa.s.sed several dilapidated-looking villages and more of the dry, elephant-skin mountains and tall, elegant poplars I knew from Iraq. I also spotted ten-foot-high cones made of round, flattened pieces of cow dung, which the Iranian Kurdish villagers used for fuel during the winter. I hadn't seen any such cones, or as many cattle, in Iraq.

We headed east because there were no immediate checkpoints in that direction. I had to worry about those. My taxi had been stopped twice en route to Sanandaj, and although the Revolutionary Guards had been cordial enough, simply checking my pa.s.sport, there was no telling when they might suddenly become suspicious about what I was doing in Iran, especially now that I was off the tourist path.

As we rolled over the wide brown hills, my companions talked about the September 11 attacks. With the exception of Arash, all believed that the attacks had been planned by the U.S. government, as a way to justify future American a.s.saults against the Muslim world. Nothing I could say would convince them otherwise. Many other Iranian and Turkish Kurds I met shared the same viewpoint.

From the roadside, the village of Kelana looked much like the others we'd pa.s.sed, but as Hiwa led us back into its winding maze of streets and alleyways, I realized that we had arrived in a small paradise, older and more settled than anything I'd seen in Iraq. Everywhere stood st.u.r.dy charming houses built of clay, stone, and brick, many with balconies br.i.m.m.i.n.g with flowers. The streets were spotless and the houses freshly plastered, some sporting nineteenth-century door knockers-round ones for female visitors, straight ones for male visitors; different tones alerted residents as to which gender was at the door. Women in brightly colored dresses gossiped on sod rooftops, amid sprouting gra.s.ses, and they called out an eager "Welcome to our village!" as we walked by.

"When my father was a boy in his village, they had a beautiful Newroz tradition," Hiwa said to me. "Groups of boys went up on the rooftops and lowered their belts"-i.e., the long c.u.mmerbunds-"through the holes for smoke, and the adults filled the belts with fruit and sugar. Then they tugged on the belts for the boys to pull up. And once, as a joke, they tied a big sheep to a belt. But my father's friend was very strong, and he pulled the sheep all the way to the ceiling!"

I loved hearing stories about the Kurdish past, which seemed so lush and magical.

"When my grandfather was a boy, and there was a wedding, the groom rode a beautiful horse into the bride's village," Hiwa went on. "He took a small boy with him, so they would have sons, and threw an apple or pomegranate hard, for good luck, which all the children tried to catch. And later they celebrated with horseracing and wrestling . . .

"Not all our lives are about suffering. Our pain is very deep, but our happiness is also very deep. We have suffered much, but we are rich."

I nodded. For all the horrific stories I'd been hearing in Kurdistan, there was a depth, an inner harmony, and a kind of buoyancy to the Kurdish world that made it seem fuller than many worlds I knew in the West-and not just because of its still-living traditions. Perhaps it came from living closer to the bone.

We had reached the edge of the village, bordered with fields as vibrant with color as the dresses of the rooftop women. Strawberries, apples, tomatoes, and sunflowers were all growing in abundance, along with poplar trees, walnut trees, and puffy purple-red bushes that when gathered and dried would be made into brooms. Irrigation ditches flowed between fields and a group of boys raced by, playing a Kurdish game resembling tag that involved a "stolen" hat. In the distance rose the purple-black Zagros peaks.

We stopped to talk to a farmer, who brought out his farm implements for show-and-tell-a scythe, a hoe, a primitive-looking plow. To create the small paradise around us involved endless, backbreaking work. And the villagers weren't as removed from the modern world as they at first seemed. The farmer had been to Sweden to visit a brother who'd been forced to flee Iran in the 1980s. Many of the villagers had relatives living in exile, he said.

Back in the village, we stopped to talk to a household of women. All wore deep-colored gowns with short black vests, and some flaunted near-iridescent orange hair, dyed from natural henna. One was working a drop spindle as we came up, while another told us stories about her trip to Sweden. The women invited us into their home, built around a courtyard with a grape arbor overhead, a clay oven to one side, and chickens to another. Traditional Kurdish homes often housed animals and humans in the same dwelling, with the animals usually on the ground floor or in front, humans up above or behind.

The women urged us to stay for tea, but some in our party were becoming restless. Village life was as foreign to them as it was to me-in fact, one of our companions had never been in a village before, she admitted as she checked her cell phone for messages.

Hiwa's mind was still in village life, reminding me of how unusual he was. "My grandmother is a very brave woman," he told me. "During the Iran-Iraq War, one of her sons and his wife escaped to Iraq because of politics. They had a baby in the mountains, but they were in a dangerous area, it wasn't safe, and the baby got sick. So my grandmother went by mule, took the baby, and brought him back to Iran. It took her three days to get back, and it was very cold. But they came back safe, through the snow and the mines, and she raised him until he was six. Now he's eighteen, and lives in London.

"I had a chance to go outside, too. Everything was ready for me to go to Sweden. But at the last minute I couldn't go. I couldn't leave Iran."

FROM SANANDAJ TO Kermanshah was a two-hour trip from the mountains to the plains, from an isolated all-Kurdish town to a crowded, trafficjammed crossroads inhabited by a mixed population of Kurdish Sunnis, Shiites, and Ahl-e Haqqs, and Lurs and Persians. I had read that Kermanshah boasted a beautiful setting, backing up against a mountain range capped with snow year-round. But although the mountains were there, the snow wasn't, and the city shimmered with an ugly brown dust, heat, exhaust, and refinery fumes, making me long to return to cool, clear Sanandaj.