The morning Arman left, there was no wind.
That was what he would remember years later. Not the distant thunder beyond the hills, nor the hurried voices in the neighbouring houses, nor even the old blue suitcase waiting beside the door.
He would remember the stillness.
It was as if the village itself were holding its breath.
His mother stood before him in the doorway, winding a dark woollen scarf around his neck for the third time.
“Enough, Mama,” Arman said softly. “I can hardly breathe.”
“You’ll breathe.”
She tucked the loose end beneath his coat.
“It’s colder there than you think.”
Arman smiled, or tried to.
He was twenty-one years old and had spent almost every night of his life beneath that roof. He knew the crack above his bed that looked like a river on a map. He knew which floorboard complained outside his parents’ room. He knew that every morning his father would light his pipe before speaking to anyone, and that his mother would open the kitchen window even in winter because, she said, a house needed to breathe too.
Now the walls were almost bare.
His mother had packed bread, dried fruit and a little cheese into his bag. His father had slipped some folded notes into the inside pocket of his coat when he thought Arman wasn’t looking.
Everything necessary for abandoning a life seemed surprisingly small.
His father stood beside the doorway.
He had always been a large man in Arman’s memory—broad-shouldered, loud when he laughed, seemingly capable of repairing anything with his hands. That morning he appeared smaller.
Older.
He placed a hand on Arman’s shoulder.
“Be strong.”
Arman waited for something more.
His father looked toward the road.
“For us,” he finally said. “And for yourself.”
Three nights earlier an explosion had shaken the cups in the kitchen cupboard.
The following morning, the bakery at the end of the road did not open.
Nobody knew exactly what had happened to the baker.
There were stories.
There were always stories now.
Soldiers on the northern road. Houses searched in the neighbouring town. Young men disappearing. Families leaving after sunset with whatever they could carry.
For months, Arman’s parents had refused to discuss leaving.
This was their home.
His grandfather was buried on the hill overlooking the village. His father had planted the fig tree in the courtyard when Arman was born. His mother knew every family within walking distance.
Where would they go?
But eventually the question changed.
It was no longer Where would we go?
It became How long can Arman stay?
People said there was safety beyond the mountains.
Others said there was safety beyond the sea.
Nobody seemed to know anyone who had actually found it.
Still, hope travelled quickly among frightened people.
“I’ll send for you,” Arman said.
His father looked at him then.
They both knew Arman had no idea how.
“I will,” Arman repeated.
His mother pulled him against her.
For a moment he became a child again.
He could smell rosewater on her skin and the onions she had fried for breakfast. Her cheek was warm against his. He felt her crying before he heard it.
“Don’t forget us.”
“Mama…”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She held him tighter.
Then his father said quietly, “Let him go.”
His mother released him.
Arman picked up his bag.
He walked down the road without turning around.
Ten steps.
Twenty.
Thirty.
At the bend, he stopped.
He looked back.
His parents were still standing in the doorway.
His father had one arm around his mother.
Neither waved.
Arman raised his hand.
His mother raised hers.
Then he turned the corner, and the house disappeared.
Only then did the wind begin.
The mountains taught him what cold really meant.
There were eleven of them travelling together at first, led by a man who claimed to know the route. Nobody asked many questions. Questions required trust, and trust had become expensive.
They walked mostly at night.
The mountains rose around them like enormous black walls. Snow filled their shoes. Stones shifted beneath their feet. Sometimes the path became so narrow that Arman could hear loose rocks falling into darkness for several seconds before they struck anything below.
On the third night, an older man fell.
Not far.
Only a few metres down the slope.
But his ankle twisted beneath him.
The guide looked back.
“We cannot stop.”
The old man said nothing.
Neither did anyone else.
Arman remembered his father’s hand on his shoulder.
Be strong.
He climbed down.
Another man followed.
Together they pulled the injured traveller back onto the path and took turns supporting him until dawn.
They lost three hours.
Nobody complained.
That night, Arman slept beneath an overhang of rock with his knees against his chest. He wrapped his mother’s scarf across his mouth and nose.
It still smelled faintly of home.
He closed his eyes.
For a few minutes he was back in the courtyard beneath the fig tree, listening to his father arguing with a neighbour about football.
His mother was calling from the kitchen.
Arman!
The food is getting cold.
He opened his eyes.
There was only snow.
By the time he reached the sea, he had stopped counting the days.
The first sight of it frightened him.
He had imagined the sea as something beautiful.
Instead it seemed enormous and indifferent.
Black water moved beneath a moonless sky, rising and collapsing against the rocks. Salt hung in the air.
A small inflatable boat waited near the shore.
Arman stared at it.
“That?”
A man beside him laughed without humour.
“That.”
There were too many people.
Everyone knew it.
Still they climbed aboard.
Mothers held children against their chests. Men balanced bags between their knees. Someone prayed quietly. Someone else kept asking whether the boat had enough fuel.
The engine coughed into life.
The shore began to move away.
Arman watched the land recede into darkness.
He wondered whether somewhere beyond those mountains his mother was awake.
He wondered whether she could feel him leaving.
He touched the scarf around his neck.
“I’ll come back,” he whispered.
He wasn’t sure whether he meant it.
Hours later, the engine stopped.
At first nobody moved.
The sudden silence was worse than the noise.
Then someone said, “Why have we stopped?”
The man steering pulled at the engine.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
The boat rose on a wave and dropped heavily.
A child began crying.
“Quiet,” someone said.
The child cried harder.
Water gathered around their shoes.
People began speaking at once.
Arman could hear panic moving through them like electricity.
The little girl beside him was perhaps five years old. Her lips were blue, and she shook so violently that her teeth clicked together.
Her mother held her close but had nothing dry to cover her with.
Arman looked at the scarf.
For one irrational second, he couldn’t move.
His mother had wrapped it around him.
It was the last thing she had touched.
Then he unwound it from his neck.
He wrapped it around the little girl.
Her mother stared at him.
“No,” she said. “You’ll be cold.”
“So will she.”
The woman pulled the scarf around her daughter.
“Thank you.”
The engine started again forty minutes later.
Or perhaps it was ten.
Or two hours.
Time had stopped meaning anything.
When lights finally appeared on the horizon, nobody cheered.
They simply stared.
Before they reached shore, the woman beside Arman removed the scarf from her sleeping daughter and held it out to him.
“Keep it.”
Arman shook his head.
“She needs it.”
The woman pushed it into his hands.
“Someone is waiting for you too.”
Safety, Arman discovered, did not feel like safety.
It felt like waiting.
Waiting beneath fluorescent lights.
Waiting in queues.
Waiting for numbers to be called.
Waiting for people behind glass to pronounce his name incorrectly.
Waiting to discover whether a piece of paper would allow him to remain in a country whose language he barely understood.
He learned new words.
Application.
Temporary.
Pending.
Rejected.
Appeal.
He learned that a human life could fit inside a reference number.
He lived first in a crowded shelter, then in a room with three other men. The radiator worked when it wanted to. The window faced a brick wall.
At night, the wind found its way through the frame.
His mother had been right.
It was colder there than he had imagined.
But not because of the weather.
There were days when Arman could walk through streets crowded with hundreds of people and feel as though he had ceased to exist.
Nobody knew his father’s laugh.
Nobody knew his mother made too much food whenever she was worried.
Nobody knew about the fig tree.
Nobody knew the boy he had been.
Sometimes he wondered whether that boy still existed at all.
He called home whenever he could.
The connection was poor.
“Are you eating?” his mother always asked.
“Yes.”
“Properly?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“You sound thin.”
“How can someone sound thin?”
“A mother knows.”
He laughed.
She laughed.
And for a few seconds the distance disappeared.
His father rarely spoke for long.
“How is everything?” Arman would ask.
“Fine.”
“And you?”
“Fine.”
“The village?”
A pause.
“Fine.”
They both became skilled at lying out of love.
One evening, several months after his arrival, Arman sat alone in the communal kitchen.
Rain scratched against the windows.
On the table before him was an orange.
He had been saving it.
He wasn’t sure why.
Across the room sat a young woman he had seen many times but never spoken to. She was from somewhere else. Another war, perhaps. Another border.
She was trying to understand a letter.
She read the first line, frowned, turned the page over, then turned it back again.
Finally she looked at Arman.
“You understand?”
He shook his head.
She laughed.
He laughed too.
Neither knew why.
Arman peeled the orange.
He separated it into two halves and held one toward her.
She looked at it, then at him.
“For me?”
He nodded.
She took it.
For several minutes they sat without speaking, eating the orange while rain ran down the glass.
It was nothing.
And somehow it was not nothing.
That night, lying beneath his thin blanket, Arman realized it was the first time he had laughed with another person since leaving home.
He touched the scarf hanging from the bedpost.
For the first time, he allowed himself to imagine that perhaps survival was not the only thing waiting for him.
Perhaps there could be friendship.
Perhaps love.
Perhaps mornings when he woke without fear.
Perhaps one day he would have a kitchen of his own, with a window he could open.
Perhaps there would be someone sitting across from him.
Perhaps laughter would live there.
Perhaps his mother would complain that the kitchen was too small.
Perhaps his father would stand at the window smoking his pipe until someone told him to take it outside.
Arman smiled in the darkness.
Years passed.
Not easily.
Nothing about exile happened easily.
Arman learned the language.
He found work.
He moved from the shelter to a room, from the room to a small flat.
He learned which buses ran late and where to buy bread that almost tasted like the bread from home.
He learned to answer the question “Where are you from?” in several different ways.
Sometimes he gave the name of his birthplace.
Sometimes he gave the name of the city where he now lived.
Sometimes he simply said, “It’s complicated.”
The scarf moved with him from room to room.
Over the years, its wool became thin.
The edges frayed.
His mother’s scent disappeared from it long before he was ready.
Still, every winter, Arman wore it.
One evening the first snow of the year began to fall.
Arman stood at the window of his flat watching white flakes settle on parked cars and rooftops.
His phone rang.
His mother.
Her face appeared on the screen.
Older now.
His father’s face leaned awkwardly into the picture beside hers.
“You have snow!” his mother said.
“A little.”
“Wear your scarf.”
Arman laughed.
“I still have it.”
“You still have that old thing?”
“You told me it was colder here than I thought.”
His mother smiled.
For a moment nobody spoke.
Then Arman looked around his small flat.
At the table.
At the books.
At the lamp beside the window.
At the secondhand sofa he had carried up three flights of stairs with a friend.
A life.
Not the life he had imagined.
Not the life he had left.
But a life nevertheless.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
His parents waited.
Arman took a breath.
“I think I may have found a way.”
His mother’s smile disappeared.
“A way for what?”
He looked at them.
“To bring you here.”
Nobody spoke.
His father turned his face away from the camera.
His mother covered her mouth with both hands.
Outside, the snow continued falling.
Arman walked to the window.
For years he had believed home was behind him, somewhere beyond mountains and checkpoints and a black, unforgiving sea.
Later he had believed home was somewhere ahead—a destination he had simply not reached yet.
Now he wondered if he had misunderstood.
Perhaps home was not a place waiting to be found.
Perhaps it was something you carried.
Something you protected.
Something you rebuilt from whatever remained.
A memory.
A voice on the telephone.
Half an orange shared with a stranger.
An old scarf around your neck.
And sometimes, if you were fortunate, a light left burning beside a window for the people still trying to find their way to you.
Arman touched the glass.
It was cold beneath his fingers.
But behind him, the room was warm.
He left the light on.
In a small town where dreams were born,
A young boy faced the coming storm,
Forced to leave his home so dear,
Chasing freedom, fighting fear.
His mama’s tears, his father’s pride,
“I’ll return,” he softly lied,
With a suitcase full of broken dreams,
On the road where silence screams.
Cold winds blow in a foreign land,
Lonely nights, no guiding hand,
Still he dreams of warm country days,
Hoping love will find its way.
Snowflakes kiss his weathered face,
Searching for a warm embrace,
Memories of fields so green,
Fade like whispers in between.
Strangers’ faces, distant eyes,
Languages that cloud the skies,
But the hope inside remains,
Lighting paths through sleepless pains.
Cold winds blow in a foreign land,
Lonely nights, no guiding hand,
Still he dreams of warm country days,
Hoping love will find its way.
