From The Last Pomegranate Tree, which was published this month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the Kurdish.

One evening, Muhammad the Glass-Hearted sets off for a meeting with an antique dealer. It is rainy, and the sky is full of unusual and fantastical cloud formations. He walks calmly south, singing. He has a glass pomegranate in his pocket and is tossing a key ring into the air. Attached to the ring are glass keys that open imaginary doors. It’s a happy evening for Muhammad the Glass-Hearted—after all, he believes that one of his keys will only open doors when it’s raining.

The streets begin to flood. People head into the tall buildings. Only Muhammad the Glass-Hearted is swept away. He floats on the water, grinning at the onlookers. Everyone sees the miracle, everyone sees Muhammad the Glass-Hearted playing among the dead.

He gives himself over to the flood. It sweeps him away from the bazaars, alleyways, and streets to quieter places. Finally, as the rain begins to let up and darkness falls, the water pushes him outside the gate of a two-story house in a cul-de-sac. He wants to turn back but cannot. An unknown force from within the waves propels him toward the gate. The clouds disperse; the moon emerges quietly.

He reaches into his pocket and takes out his keys. One of them is the key of unrequited love. He opens the gate with trepidation. The water carries him into the large courtyard of an old and stately home. In one of the windows, two girls appear, both wearing white, both letting their long hair down into the water. One of them is Lawlaw-i Spi, the other her elder sister, Shadarya-i Spi.

“Good evening. My name is Muhammad the Glass-Hearted. The flood has brought me here. Can you let me in through the window?”

Lawlaw opens it, saying, “Please, come in.” The two sisters can see that he is an innocent and jovial young man. But Lawlaw-i Spi tells him, “Don’t forget that you didn’t come in through the door.” The two sisters look after him with great devotion, drying his hair and his clothes and making him tea. “Consider us your own sisters. We are your sisters.”

Muhammad the Glass-Hearted protests, “No way. You’re not my sisters. The rain has sent me here to fall in love with Lawlaw.”

“Muhammad the Glass-Hearted, we don’t know you,” Shadarya-i Spi says.

“My heart is made of glass,” he tells her, “a very delicate glass. I am made of glass. If I break, I’ll be shattered, and leave behind shards, and my death and these shards will bring nothing but bad luck. No one will know that it’s my shards small as dust that are the cause of all the misfortune.”

He leaves their house late, in great distress, more afraid than ever before. Outside, the icy air stings his lungs, and he understands that he has not survived the flood. No, his death has only been postponed.

That night, Muhammad the Glass-Hearted dreams he is swept away by a white flood, a milk-white flood, seething with white boats and white creatures. Everyone can cross the water but him. He is carried away by a storm. He goes to the doorstep of a white palace, surrounded by a white sea. He takes out his key to open the gate, but unlike the previous evening he cannot open it. He tries all the keys, one by one, but he still cannot open it. His hands begin to shake. The water gradually pulls him into its white depths. He starts shouting. When he wakes up, he feels an excruciating pain. That dream is the first crack in the young man’s glass heart.

Muhammad the Glass-Hearted lives in his fantasies with the many keys he has made: keys to life and death, love and solitude, secrets and silence, friendship and hatred, dreams and truth.

Muhammad grew up like an orphan in the city after his father went off to join the Kurdish freedom fighters in the mountains. It was a time when everything happened covertly. He was born in the dark years of the revolution: the era of walls, sandbags, fortified basements, and closed doors. The state beheaded its opponents in secret, and its opponents lived and moved around in secret. Everyone was busy building walls between houses, alleyways, and people, between people and the sky, people and flowers, people and the moon, people and the night, people and the morning sparrows.

A year after the Kurds rebelled against Saddam, Muhammad’s father, Sulaiman the Great, returned and became a mighty political baron. To make up for their long years of separation, he wanted to reward his son generously, to do something that would make him happy forever. One night, he said, “Ask for something, anything a man can do. Say it and I will treat it as an order.”

Upon lengthy reflection, Muhammad the Glass-Hearted went to Sulaiman the Great one sunny afternoon and told him, “I have one wish, a small wish. I want a house made of glass. It must be built in such a way that you can see all the other sides when looking at just one.” That night, the design for a small and unusual house was born.

It was to be built in one of the city’s quiet northern neighborhoods. From whichever angle you looked at it, you could see all its nooks and crannies. You could see Muhammad sitting on his chair, the partridges’ empty cage, the painting of a wild dance, flowers in bowls of water, vases of colorful sand, a blue silk carpet teeming with underwater images so that, from a distance, the house looked like a pond. In the mornings everyone could see Muhammad preparing breakfast, singing aloud, leading a transparent life.

His deep desire to see and understand everything led him to seek out and examine people’s inner lives. He wanted to learn their deepest secrets. And yet, apart from his friends, no one considered him a seeker of truth, but merely a young man greedy for knowledge. He did not understand that some things always remained unexplained, that there would always be secrets he could never fathom.

Four years before the storms delivered Muhammad the Glass-Hearted to the sisters in white, Shadarya-i Spi fell ill with a sickness that took her to the brink of death. Only Lawlaw-i Spi knew why she was dying: unrequited love. Shadarya was placed on a stretcher to undergo major surgery. The morning before she went into the operating room with doctors who could promise her neither life nor death, Lawlaw went to see her. Weeping and sobbing, the two sisters vowed to live together until death came between them, to wear matching clothes, never to cut their hair, and whenever they sang, to do so together. Before Shadarya went to submit to the surgeon’s knife, she said to Lawlaw, “Swear to me that you won’t go back on your vows, ever.”

Lawlaw said tearfully, “I hereby swear to you that I shall never ever get married, nor sing without you, nor cut my hair, nor wear anything but white.”

Once Shadarya was discharged from the hospital, they renewed their vows during a summer night’s sandstorm. They made an eternal pledge the way the lovers of the time did, signing the sheet of paper with their blood, placing it inside a black glass bottle, and hiding it under a pomegranate tree known only to them.

The day after the flood, Muhammad wakes up with an ache in his chest. He feels as if bright blood is dripping from a small hole in his heart. He decides to go back to the two sisters’ house. They are both waiting at the window. “Lawlaw-i Spi, I would like to ask for your hand in marriage . . . Do you accept?” he shouts from outside the door.

The sisters look on with cold stares. They close the windows and draw the curtains. Without a word, they look at Muhammad the Glass-Hearted from behind their thick curtains as he shows them the bloodstain on his heart, and says, “This wound is your doing.”

Back home, Muhammad can feel that yet another crack has appeared in his heart. He can feel more blood seeping from the small wounds. He soon realizes that time and death are fighting over his life. So, hand on heart, he goes once more to the sisters’ house. He stands outside the gate, blood dripping from his fingers as it mixes with the rain. He can see their shadows behind the curtain. He says, “Lawlaw-i Spi, I will die if you don’t love me.”

The two girls do nothing. Muhammad the Glass-Hearted wants to open the doors. He tries all of his keys in the rain but none of them work.

One day, he dreams of a pomegranate tree on top of a distant peak. When he wakes up, he wants to understand everything before his death. He wants to unlock the secret of his unrequited love.

Like a pale ghost, he goes again to see the sisters in white. He begs them to open the window. This time, they do. Lawlaw says in a sad voice, “Muhammad the Glass-Hearted, forgive me. There’s a piece of paper under that pomegranate tree. Take it and go. Take it. Leave us alone and go away.”

Muhammad goes to the tree and raises his head. In the moonlight, he realizes that he is standing under the tree from his dream. There he finds the letter, a copy of the ancient vows between the sisters—hellish vows, vows that no force can break. Muhammad collapses, the cracks in his heart widening with each word, his glass world turning to dust.

He bleeds more and more as he walks through the alleyways. With each step, his glass house falls apart, pane by pane. When he arrives home, the keys in his hand turn into a soft white powder. He gets into bed and holds his heart. Above him he sees the branches of a pomegranate tree. He hears the shattering of his home.

He reaches out and touches the imaginary branches of the pomegranate tree, the one under which he had wanted to die. In the distance, an angel descends from the sky. He touches the blood gushing from Muhammad’s heart. In the ruin of his house, the vows fall from his hand. The smiling angel takes his hand and says, “How are you, Muhammad the Glass-Hearted? It’s all over. It’s all over now. Stand up. Let’s go.”

He stands up quietly and says, “Yes, it’s all over . . . Let’s go.” They fly through the dust of a glass death toward the unknown, a death in whose cold dust we shall all be lost.