JIYAN AND THE WHITE STONE

The rain began on the wrong side of the border.

That was how Jiyan thought of it—not because there is a right side for rain, but because that downpour carried the smell of gunpowder, boots, and oiled metal from weapons. The child, Berzan, slept with his thumb in his mouth and a small white stone clenched in his fist. Jiyan’s husband had picked it up years earlier, during an early walk along the hillside.

“It’s smooth like the truth,” he told her then, handing it to her.

Now Baran was buried in a roadside ditch, and the truth was a wet stone in her son’s hand.

There were no sirens, no speeches, no clear flags. Only the low noise of machinery coming from afar and the rumor that neighboring armies had finally decided to correct the map with kicks and shoves. The word independence became unpronounceable; the word peace, a residue; language itself, poison on the lips of anyone who dared to utter it. The market closed. Bread prices rose. Neighbors stopped greeting one another or did so with the speed of someone avoiding a mirror. The men who had not died turned into smoke, or shadow. Some joined the local militias, others hid in caves, others suddenly became saints, wrapped in wool socks and red-rimmed eyes.

Jiyan picked up Berzan, the notebook, and the tablecloth that had once been part of her trousseau, and she left.

There were no farewells. Whom do you say goodbye to when everything is coming absence?

The dirt road quickly turned to mud. A tall woman with her hair wrapped in a red scarf walked one step ahead.

“My name is Sirin,” she told Jiyan without turning around. “If we stop, they’ll eat us.”

No one asked who they were. Those who walk without papers speak little. Even names are a luxury: they are given in low voices, as if they were candles in a hospital corridor.

At the old crossroads, where oranges used to be sold, there was an improvised checkpoint. Jiyan clutched Berzan, who was no longer asleep and had switched the stone to his other hand. Two soldiers looked at them as if they were statistical possibilities.

“Documents,” said one, with that accent from nowhere that uniforms wear.

Jiyan held up her ID card; the photo looked back at another woman—twenty years old, long braid, straighter teeth. The soldier examined it as if consulting cheap fortune-telling.

“It’s no good,” he concluded, and yet handed it back.

Sirin, on the other hand, was pulled aside.

“It’s fine,” Sirin said—and it wasn’t an answer, it was a way of not crying.

They walked, kept walking, and walked again. The mud gave way to an unmarked road, which became stone, which became nothing. They entered towns with torn-down signs and silent dogs. Water was sold in bottles with labels in three languages. At the last shop still open, a pot-bellied man with a boss’s air offered them a ride in a pickup truck in exchange for wedding rings.

“It’s just a short stretch,” he promised, and his promise smelled of rotten onion. Jiyan looked at her ring: she had inherited it from her mother.

“The rain will get much worse,” the man added. “The boy will get sick.”

She took it off and placed it on the counter. The boss made it spin on the table and smiled.

“Is it enough?” Jiyan murmured.

“What a beautiful design in the silver!” he exclaimed, as if the ring were worth a palace.

He gave them water and hard bread. Seven people rode in the back of the truck. One cried without tears, another prayed so softly it sounded more like remembering than asking. Jiyan pressed the white stone into her son’s hand and whispered to him in her language, the way one speaks to animals to calm them.

“Azadî, azadî,” she said.

The word meant freedom, and it wasn’t a promise—it was a little warmth.

They reached the coast after four moonless nights. Calling it a coast was ambitious: it was the edge of the world. The traffickers herded them into a concrete house with boarded-up windows and a bare lightbulb hanging weakly from the ceiling.

“You board in Latakia. Tonight,” announced one of them with a smile meant for no one.

They told Jiyan the price in numbers—not in bills, in lives. There were no discounts for mothers or children.

“If you don’t pay, you wait another month.”

“Wait for what?” she asked, and the answer was the sound of the sea.

“It’s a big boat,” lied the youngest handler. He had postcard-green eyes and a tattoo that said Forever. Jiyan wanted to believe him—not out of naivety, but strategy. Always, she thought: the word that is not kept… never.

They boarded at midnight. The boat was neither big nor small: it was an insult. It smelled of fuel and fear. Men, women, two babies with improvised IVs in plastic bottles. Berzan insisted on bringing his stone.

“Should I throw it in the water, Mom? So it floats?”

She shook her head.

“It’s for remembering,” she said.

“Remember what?” the child asked.

What they want to take from us, she thought, but she could not find a way to say it that he would understand.

They set off. No one applauded. The engine purred with the shyness of something stolen. Two meters from shore, someone prayed aloud; at three, someone vomited; at five, everyone became clumsy sailors. Jiyan counted the rhythm of the waves as if they were contractions. Sirin was not there; she had stayed at the crossroads, or in the statistics.

On the third dawn, a distant light became a lighthouse.

“Crete, Greece,” said the man playing captain. Whether it was an altruistic lie or a consolation, no one knew. The darkness thinned.

“How do you say to live in the language of the sea?” the child asked, sitting between his mother’s legs.

Jiyan didn’t know. In her language, her name meant life, but it wasn’t enough: naming it didn’t always save you. She remembered the chant shouted in protests that had become a kind of Kurdish mantra: Jin, Jîyan, Azadî—Woman, Life, Freedom.

The boat scraped onto a pebble beach. Someone jumped with the agility of someone carrying nothing. Jiyan took longer: she had to calculate how to place her feet without falling while not letting go of her son. A Greek woman, wearing a jacket down to her knees and a face capable of indignation without witnesses, handed them a blanket.

“Kaliméra,” she said.

It wasn’t just a morning greeting: it was the beginning of something—but Jiyan didn’t know that yet.

Crete did not have blue seas in the first month. It had gray procedures, prefabricated modules, hands that pointed without touching. Jiyan learned that some words line up in front of others: permit, admission, waiting, quota. She also learned the camp’s minimal map: the white tent where Berzan’s weight was checked, the office where no one understood her surname, the bathroom with the longest line in the morning.

“You come in hordes,” she heard more than once; the word hit her like a stone—not her son’s white stone, but a heavy stone that crushes your head. She would have liked to answer with a perfect, definitive sentence, but she had no moral dictionary. She only carried her child and the habit of not asking.

The first job wasn’t a job. She performed a series of tasks in exchange for vouchers: sweeping, peeling potatoes, folding blankets. In the container that served as the communal kitchen, a Greek woman with gold rings looked at her the way one looks at a broken statue.

“The Turks hate us and we hate the Turks; the Turks hate you; the enemy of my enemy… you know.” She snatched the vouchers with two fingers so as not to brush Jiyan’s hand.

Jiyan wanted to believe that you know as a bridge, but it was a moat. Double-edged foreignness: useful for discourse, useless at the table.

One windy day, Jiyan sat on the harbor curb with Berzan. The boy offered her his stone.

“So, you’ll remember, Mom.”

She closed her fist.

“What do I have to remember?”

“That we are,” he said, and the grandeur of that grammar took her breath away. Are: a verb without borders.

A retired couple stopped looking at them. The man wore a cap with a club’s letters; the woman carried a bag of bread.

“You can’t sit here,” the woman said.

“Why?” Jiyan asked in the clumsy Greek she was beginning to understand, making an effort as great as carrying a prosthesis.

“Because…” The woman couldn’t finish her thought, as if searching for the exact clause in the manual of rejection. The man helped her.

“Because then they all come.”

The sentence was the polite sister of a much older one.

Jiyan stood up slowly and took her son’s hand.

“Let’s go,” she said in her language.

The old woman then, as if apologizing to her conscience, left a loaf of bread on the bench. The gesture had two meanings and the same result: eating.

She met Nikos at the supermarket entrance. He did a bit of everything: repaired bicycles, fixed shutters, changed pipes. He had a teenage daughter who drew horses.

“If you can sew, they’ll pay you,” he said, pointing to a discreet side door, almost clandestine.

Jiyan could sew. She could do anything that served to survive, to get food for her son. She had learned in her mother’s house, by the light of a lantern that turned the world into a circle of fabric.

The workshop owner was named Manolis, and he called all women “my love” without distinction. He paid per garment and never on time.

“This isn’t Syria,” Manolis snapped at her once—and she didn’t stay quiet.

“Nor is it heaven,” she replied.

Manolis laughed; he was sure she hadn’t understood him. She had. The laughter was one coin less.

She sewed. Cut. Threaded needles. Endured the loud music, the smell of glue, the dampness that crept into the bones. When her fingers hurt, she thought of Berzan’s stone: smooth like a truth.

The boy, meanwhile, attended a school improvised by volunteers. He learned to write his name with letters that seemed to dance. He learned songs. Above all, he learned that his language was a house no one could tear down.

One February afternoon, smelling of fish and gasoline, a group of young men waited outside the workshop.

“They’re taking our jobs,” they said loudly, so someone would hear and repeat it.

Manolis came out with his measuring tape hanging from his neck.

“No one takes anything from me,” he boasted, and looked at Jiyan as one calculates how much one loses if one loses her.

The young men left slowly, promising themselves courage for next time. A neighborhood woman followed them with her eyes and spat on the ground.

“It’s not racism, but…” That sentence is never completed; it’s a highway that ends in a garage with the door shut.

That night, on the way back to the tent, a different group confronted them. They wore clean Sunday clothes, carried a red flag with a symbol that looked like a labyrinth, their mouths twisted into hostile grimaces.

“Go back where you came from,” one said.

Jiyan didn’t stop.

“I don’t understand,” she lied, the way one defends oneself from a dog.

“We all understand you,” they said, and the truth of that all weighed more than any word.

She reached the module, counted her son’s breathing until he fell asleep. She thought of the road, of Sirin, of the stone. She thought, for the first time, of leaving the island.

Not all Greeks were hostile like those of Golden Dawn—someone told her that was their name. That would have been another comforting lie, but in reverse. Some—the silent majority—offered what they had and what they didn’t. Berzan’s teacher gave him a notebook with a blue cover showing a boat.

“So you can draw your maps,” he said.

The boy drew a triangle: his home; a line: the road; a rectangle: the sea. The island was a nameless dot.

Nikos invited them to eat once a week. His daughter, Eleni, braided Jiyan’s hair without asking permission, the way one braids a sister’s hair.

“You have strong hair,” she said. “It pulls toward the sky.”

In that house, for a while, pronouns stopped hurting. They weren’t them, those, these; they were names: Eleni, Nikos, Jiyan, Berzan. Difference stops burning when it’s pronounced properly.

One morning at the workshop, Manolis told the women he would start formalizing contracts—at first for two—because of inspections. He would choose based on productivity and presentation. Jiyan didn’t know whether her skirt counted as an argument. An Iraqi coworker told her:

“You sew better than I do.”

Jiyan shook her head.

“You speak better than I do.”

They laughed, shaded by the same roof, cut by different knives.

The selection happened as such things usually do without explanation, with bureaucratic gestures. Jiyan wasn’t chosen.

“She doesn’t meet the requirements,” said Manolis, leaning on an invisible board.

She didn’t protest. She thought of a moment in her life in the valley before the war, when she chose the fabric for her wedding dress. The shop assistant, a woman with bulging eyes, had treated her as if she already knew the dress was sewn for the photo, not for life.

“May it look pretty on you, sweetheart.”

Now what mattered was breathing.

The following month, a tourist filmed the camp with a drone. The video went viral. There were mobile homes, TV antennas, children chasing a ball.

“They live better than we do,” one comment said.

“Look how they take advantage of our taxes,” complained another.

The narrative wrote itself: invasion, usurpation, abuse. The mayor gave an interview hot as bread fresh from the oven.

“There are shadows on our island,” he announced. “Identity is in danger.”

He didn’t explain which identity or how danger is measured.

The next day there was an assembly in the square. Not many people came, but they made noise.

“It’s not hatred,” clarified a man who sold umbrellas. “It’s survival.”

The applause sounded like church bells.

That same night, a group entered the camp with torches—not because light was needed. They tore down two tents, set a trash bin on fire, shoved a child who fell onto a rusty sheet of metal and cut his foot. Jiyan shielded Berzan with her body. When silence returned, the men were gone. What remained was the echo.

“Go back where you came from! Go back where you came from!”

The next morning, Nikos appeared with a toolbox and three friends.

“We’ll fix what they broke,” he said, and the sentence was as close as anyone got that day—and in a long time—to justice.

The neighborhood’s Orthodox chaplain, who hadn’t spoken in months, brought them soup. A woman who always went to the same hairdresser left bags of clothes.

“They belonged to my grandchildren; they’re too small for them.”

Everything was contradictory and true: rejection and help, disgust and tenderness, bread and stones.

Jiyan decided then that she would speak.

Not the island’s languages, she was learning it word by word, but her own: she would speak with her hands. She went to the harbor with a bag of scraps and needles. She asked the owner of a small bar for permission to sit at a side table and sew. He agreed, in exchange for her cleaning the floor at closing time.

She sewed bags with colored straps, phone cases, soft dolls with X-stitched eyes like drunken sailors. Tourists passed by, looked, and asked where the fabrics came from.

“From many lives,” she answered—and it wasn’t a metaphor.

Sometimes they bought. Sometimes they haggled with the arrogance of those who believe they’re also buying the seamstress’s biography.

One afternoon, a group of Greek boys approached and laughed in her face.

“How ugly!” one exclaimed.

The leader, a blond boy smelling of cheap cologne, grabbed one of the dolls and threw it on the ground. Jiyan bent down and picked it up without looking at him. Berzan, who had quickly learned the language, spoke slowly.

“My mom makes things from what you throw away.”

The boy stopped, unsure whether that was an insult or an artistic statement.

“So what?” he replied at last, with courage that looked borrowed and fake.

“And she can also fix what you break,” said Eleni, who had arrived without warning and stood beside the mother and her son like a slender tree.

The boys left without a final line. They learned a silent defeat.

That night, Jiyan sewed a doll with a small white stone inside. She called it Son of the Sea. She gave it to her son.

“So we remember,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“That we go on,” she replied—and it was the adult version of that grammar: we are, we go on.

An official came from the mainland to count numbers and promise procedures. He visited Manolis’s workshop, the harbor, and the camp. He smiled for photos. He said “integration” without explaining what it consisted of. He used the word “diversity” without feeling it as anything more than seasoning for a bland meal. When leaving, he shook Jiyan’s hand.

“I’m with you,” he said—and the with dissolved like vapor on the ferry’s path.

A week later, it rained again.

It wasn’t the bad border rain; it was honest rain: it soaked everyone equally and left the same smell of damp clothes in every room. Nikos lent them a bucket; Eleni brought bread. At the harbor, an old woman who had always wrinkled her nose at the sight of them approached with two enormous lemons.

“For tea,” she said, and her effort not to smile was the day’s most tender gesture.

A woman from the workshop left a card with a number on the table.

“In case you need… to talk.”

She pronounced it awkwardly, like someone saying the word sorry for the first time.

Jiyan wrote a letter—not to an authority, nor a paper that grants rights, but to herself. She wrote it in her language, with that beauty words have when they refuse to surrender.

My name is Jiyan. My name means “life,” but sometimes it means to resist. I come from a place where there are stones that fit in the hand and truths that fit on no map. My son is named Berzan, a name that promises height and strength. Here we learned other music. They look at us as if we were the mirror of a fear, but they also hand us some bread. We are two things: the threat and the neighbor. I don’t know what we will be tomorrow. I want to be a neighbor. I want a key that breaks no door.

She folded the sheet and tucked it into the passport sleeve, which was a plastic sheet without a country.

Some time later, in the neighborhood of laundromats, life settled into its humble balance. Jiyan no longer looked at the ground when she entered the supermarket. She greeted people. Sometimes they returned the greeting. Manolis called her again; he offered to “regularize” her because the inspectors had come through. She accepted.

“One signature here,” he said, pointing.

She signed like someone sewing a hem: knowing it’s not enough, but it helps.

Berzan was invited to the birthday party of a Greek classmate. Jiyan bought him a T-shirt with a blue horse, having learned Eleni’s lesson. The children ran after the ball; no one asked for papers at the playground gate. A mother commented aloud, a remnant of the beginning.

“We’ll have to see if they don’t bring problems.”

Another replied:

“The problems are brought by men with torches—the ones from Golden Dawn—haven’t you heard yet?”

They didn’t look at each other. That, too, is coexistence: arguing without touching.

That night, on the way back, Jiyan found new graffiti on the wall near the harbor.

Our island for our people.

Someone, in smaller letters, had written underneath: And who are we?

The sea, as always, answered with its murmur.

Berzan, tired, fell asleep clutching the stone doll against his chest. Jiyan covered him and stepped out onto the pier for a moment. There were stars without a forecast. She remembered the smell of bread from her village and the color of Sirin’s scarf. She remembered the ditch, the ring, the truck, the boat, the blanket. She didn’t open the letter because she knew it by heart. She wrapped her arms around her waist, as if measuring a new size. She heard footsteps: it was Nikos, coming with two coffees.

“There’s a meeting at the school tomorrow,” he said. “They’re asking for ideas for integration.”

The word hung between them like laundry waiting for sun.

“I can teach sewing,” said Jiyan. “To girls and boys,” she clarified.

Nikos nodded.

“And I can teach bicycle repair.”

“Do you think it will help?” she asked.

“It helps if we see each other working together,” he replied—and the together was worth far more than the verb to bring together.

Jiyan looked at the water. She thought that her name, back there, meant life. Here, with luck, it could also mean neighborhood, wages, routine—humble and solid ways of being alive. She didn’t want to give thanks like someone paying an unpayable debt; she wanted to reciprocate, to balance, to belong without ceasing to be. She wanted the next day to be a fact, not a hypothesis.

Before returning to the module, she threw her husband’s little stone into the sea, not as renunciation, but as a messenger. Smooth like a truth, it traced a circle, then another, as if weaving.

“So we remember,” she whispered.

That we are.

That we go on.

That when they allow it, we also know how to arrive.

And the rain, at last, fell from the correct side: from above to below, on everyone.