A Cave in the Clouds

by Badeeah Hassan Ahmed

  As we neared the road to the mountain, the truck slowed.

  Cars and trucks from other Yazidi villages were vying for spots on the road. Car after car, truck after truck, were piled high like ours, with bedding, boxes, bags, suitcases, and people. It was hot, a stifling heat, so everybody’s windows were down. People called out to one another. Men shared cigarettes, talked politics, and passed on news of what they had heard and seen. Women asked after each other’s families, hoping everyone was safe.

  For about a mile, Khalil’s truck moved at a crawl.

  Then, as we got to the road that led up the mountain, the traffic stopped moving.

  Khalil honked his horn, swore, and pounded his fists on the dashboard. Eivan fidgeted in my arms. “He is scared,” he said.

  “No, he’s just angry,” I assured him. The little boy tucked his head into my neck.

  For as far as we could see, there were vehicles, a parade of Yazidi residents trying to escape.

  Adlan asked Khalil to turn on some music, but Kurdish news came on the radio instead. The newscaster was talking about Daesh moving into Shingal.

  Khalil’s phone rang. “What is it?” he spat into the receiver. Everyone was on edge. Through the tiny window in the cargo bed, I could see Fallah’s temples throbbing.

  The Nokia phones we used were cheap, and the acous­tics were terrible. I could hear the person on the other end as if he were in the truck with us. It was my father, saying that Ahmed Jasso had made an agreement with Daesh. If the Yazidi converted to Islam, we could stay in Kocho. If we didn’t, Daesh would move us to Kurdistan. Either way, they didn’t want to hurt us. Ahmed Jasso had bought us some time, I heard my father explaining, by saying he needed a few days to ask people if they wanted to convert. Our mukhtar’s request was actually a ruse to give everyone time to pack up their belongings. Hassan wanted us home so we could do that together.

  It was dark by the time we were able to turn the truck around and start heading back to Kocho.

  Khalil no longer spoke. Silence cut into us all like a knife as we brooded on the latest developments. I knew from Adlan’s history lessons that the Yazidi people had been pressured to convert to Islam since the thirteenth century. Many did because the alternative was death. Adlan would be sad to leave Kocho, where she had built up a life for herself. But Hassan had been talking to my brothers about moving anyway, building a second home in Shingal to be closer to his work.

  My initial shock soon turned to optimism. In Kurdistan, there would be schools with a secular curriculum. I could look into finishing high school and then study nursing or medicine at a college. I imagined Nafaa, who had been selling chocolates and other sweets since finishing primary school. In Kurdistan, he could study to be a lawyer, which was his dream. In a few years, I would tell Adlan and Hassan about us. Maybe Nafaa and I would never leave Kurdistan, building a home there. These thoughts made me feel so upbeat that, at first, I didn’t notice the truck slowing.

  Then I looked over at Adlan’s face, which was pinched.

  We were passing through the Yazidi village of Tel Qasab, about fifteen minutes from Kocho. Darkness cloaked us. The village was black. Not a single light from any of the houses.

  Then I spied dancing lights from torches approaching our truck. A roadblock. Nothing new. There were check­points everywhere in Iraq, usually armed by Iraqi or Peshmerga soldiers asking to see ID and checking to make sure vehicles weren’t carrying weapons or terrorists.

  This time, though, my heart began to thump. The men guarding the roadblock weren’t dressed in the Iraqi army uniform or in the Peshmerga green and khaki. They were in black.

  Fallah cursed.

  Adlan took Eivan from me and held him tight. My mouth went dry.

  Two Daesh soldiers walked up to the driver’s side and pointed their weapons into the car. One waved his AK-47 at Khalil, shouting at him to get out.

  Khalil’s door creaked open. I held my breath as my uncle raised his shaking hands and stepped outside.

  Standing behind the two Daesh soldiers was a group of men dressed in dishdashas. They were the ones carrying the torches. As they inched their way forward, I heard one call out, “Khalil? Khalil Ahmed from Kocho?”

  Khalil’s face had turned white.

  “Khalil from Kocho?” I heard the voice call again. A smiling older man stepped in front of my uncle and said something to the Daesh men holding the weapons.

  “It’s Abu Anwar,” muttered my cousin Brahim, who was sitting close to me. “He’s my Kiriv.”

  I could hear my mother exhale. Like me, she had been holding her breath.

  Abu Anwar and the other Arab men moved in to surround Khalil. They talked for a while in muffled voices, and then Khalil gestured for Brahim to join him. The rest of us sat in the truck swatting away the night flies.

  Finally, Khalil and Brahim returned, climbing silently into the truck. With my uncle behind the wheel again, we drove slowly through the checkpoint. We were nearly in Kocho before they explained what had happened. Abu Anwar, Brahim’s Kiriv, had told Daesh that our two families were close. We were allowed to return home, but Abu Anwar had warned my uncle that we were not to leave Kocho on our own again. The next time, he might not be there to secure our safety.

  Chapter Four

  August 15, 2014

  Invasion

  The walls of our house shook.

  Trucks roared down the road. Some were sparkling white, with missile launchers in the cargo beds. Some were armored trucks with long gun barrels.

  I ran.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t in Kocho anymore but in a thick forest of Zagros oak trees. I seemed to be in the hills near the Turkish border. A man was chasing me, calling out in a language I recognized from BBC news reports as English.

  Then it was no longer day. The only light came from a half-moon behind a thin veil of clouds. I tripped and fell, hitting my head on a rock. My head throbbed with pain, but I scrambled to get up. The man was approaching fast.

  I called out for help, but all that came back to me was my own voice bouncing off the rocks.

  Soon I was running again, until I spotted Eivan. He was slumped beside a stream, as if leaning into the water to play. I was so happy to see him. But as I neared, I realized that he wasn’t playing at all but was asleep, with one hand in the stream. The other was twisted behind his back, as if it was broken. I screamed.

  I woke from the nightmare, panting. After I steadied myself, I looked around. The gray light of dawn was meandering its way between the window and the curtains in the bedroom. I could hear the familiar sounds of morning: nightingales singing, pigeons cooing, and chickens squabbling. I breathed in the scent of camphor oil, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice—spices used so often by my mother in her recipes that they had become one with our house, along with the bitter incense from Lalish that she burned every Tuesday evening. The Yazidi consider sunset to be the start of the day so Tuesday evening is actually Wednesday morning. Wednesday is our rest day. We believe it is the day the world was made.

  Since our return on the night of August 3, I’d barely left the house. The farthest I dared go was the outhouse or the garden, where Eivan and I kicked the football back and forth and played sneak-and-hide. Even though I hadn’t seen them, I knew Daesh had come to our village with Abu Hamza as he negotiated our move to Kurdistan with Ahmed Jasso. I knew through listening to the men’s conversations that Yazidi were flocking to Kocho from other villages and from Shingal, trying to escape Daesh. Daesh was also directing Yazidi from other towns and even Shingal to Kocho.

  There was no electricity at all now, and we used the generator sparingly. The nights were long and dark, with the Yazidi men staying up to guard the house, do patrols, and argue about what to do next. Adlan and my sisters rarely talked. Like me, they didn’t go out. The house filled with our fear and tension as we waited.

 
I pulled on a dress and a pair of pants, ran a brush through my hair, and grabbed an off-white sweater I had knit with my grandmother’s help just before she died. I opened the door slowly, making sure not to wake Majida and Hadil. Their long, dark hair was spread out across their sleeping mats. Their blankets and sheets were wound tightly around them, as if they, too, had had fitful dreams.

  I moved to the hallway to pray but stopped dead in my tracks. The Berat was missing.

  I cried out for my mother to come.

  “What happened?” she stammered, kneeling in front of me.

  “Where is the Berat?” I asked, pointing a trembling finger at the empty space where it had been.

  “Hassan scattered the soil outside,” Adlan said, sitting down on the floor beside me. Terror gripped me as my mother explained that Daesh wanted our money, jewelry, and homes.

  When Yazidi people moved houses, we always left the Berat behind. As was customary, it didn’t travel with us. At the same time, if a house was destroyed or burned down with the Berat inside, it was considered a terrible spiritual blow. That my father had scattered the soil meant he feared the worst was coming.

  “He prayed at the same time for God to protect us and our land,” my mother was saying. “He says Daesh are thieves, not freedom fighters.”

  “But I thought he said there was nothing to worry about.”

  Adlan looked away. “Badeeah, give me your earrings,” she said, her voice barely a murmur. With shaking hands, I unclipped the gold earrings my father had given me when I was twelve, stars attached to three dangling pillars. They were the only jewelry I owned.

  “I’ve been having such bad dreams,” I confessed as I handed her the earrings. I watched as she wrapped them in some tissue and tucked them into her orange belt. I could see wads of dinar tied with an elastic band, and I noticed that Adlan had put her gold earrings and necklaces there, too.

  She tried to hide it but I could see that my mother was crying. Tears dripped down her cheeks.

  “We are all having bad dreams,” she said.

  We spent the morning continuing to pack for our move to Kurdistan. I was folding some sheets when Adlan called for me to turn the generator on. “We need some air conditioning,” she yelled.

  It was smoldering outside, a dry heat that charred anything left out in it for too long. As I slipped on my shoes, Khudher rushed up beside me, offering to help. “It needs gas,” Adlan called as Khudher and I stepped out the front door.

  The generator was tucked in around the back of our house, near the outhouse.

  When we reached the generator, I bent over to hold the funnel so Khudher could pour the gas.

  As he lit the match to start the generator, a fiery blue, yellow, and green cloud leapt out at me, biting into my leg. I fell back screaming as pain shot through me. I looked down and saw that a hole had been burned through my dress and pant leg.

  Where the fire had singed my leg, the skin was red and already bubbling. Crying with pain, I fled back into the house, where Adlan helped me change into another dress and then put yogurt on my skin to cool the burn. To calm me, she sang a lullaby. But my crying didn’t stop. Shaking, I reached out and grabbed Adlan and Khudher by their arms. The accident was a bad omen. I just knew it. “Something terrible is going to happen,” I choked out. “I’m so scared.”

  Seconds later, our house began to shake, just like in my nightmare. Adlan’s metal pots and tea glasses clanked. Hot air and dust blew in through the open windows. My mother tossed me a pair of brown cotton pants to put on.

  In the other room, I could hear Eivan starting to cry.

  I limped to the front window behind Khudher, only to step back in shock. White trucks, some with missile launchers in the cargo beds, rumbled past our house, followed by huge army tanks.

  When I felt Eivan tugging at the hem of my dress, I looked down. In his other hand, he clutched his toy taxi. “Can I see?” he begged. He was too short to look out the window himself. But I couldn’t move to lift him. I stood frozen as one after the other, the white trucks zoomed past, carrying men dressed head to toe in black.

  Finally, the roar of the vehicles dimmed.

  As the dust settled, a hush fell over us.

  “They’re gone,” I said.

  Eivan’s eyes darted back and forth, and he made puffing sounds like when he was pretending to be a monster. But this time, he wasn’t pretending. “We have to hide,” he whimpered. “Baba told me, when they came, we should hide.”

  “Hide where?”

  “In the outhouse!”

  “But . . . we’re safe,” I stammered. “We’re just going to Kurdistan.” I could speak, but my body still felt stuck.

  “Baba said it would be like sneak-and-hide.” Eivan reached out and took my hand. “Come with me. We need to get nuts and fruit,” he said, pulling me. “Small things that will fit in our pockets . . .”

  Paralyzed by fear, I watched Eivan head on his wobbly legs to the kitchen. “Baba says wear an extra layer of clothes because the nights are cold,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Hadil, Khudher, Majida, and Adlan had rolled up our bedding and were loading the car with our supplies. They seemed calm. Maybe they viewed the trucks as a sign we were finally moving to Kurdistan.

  A phone rang.

  I jumped.

  Adlan answered. It was my brother Adil saying that Daesh wanted everybody in our village to come to the middle school. We were supposed to bring all of our things, including our money and our jewels. It was time. We were leaving Kocho.

  Eivan, back from the kitchen with his pockets bulging with food, slipped his sweaty palm into mine. “We should hide,” he insisted. Adil flew in through the front door, yelling at us to hurry up. Both Hassan’s used BMW, which he had bought when he was elected into politics, and Adil’s car were idling outside.

  A part of me left my body then. I was back in my nightmare. The white trucks storming the village. The forest of Zagros oak trees. Eivan sliding into the water. As my dream flashed across my mind, I knew Eivan was right. We had to hide.

  “Let’s go!” I turned to find him.

  But he wasn’t there.

  My sister Majida had him. Eivan was flailing around as she carried him out the door. He stretched his arms out toward me. But Majida wouldn’t let him go.

  I grabbed my sweater and shoes and headed outside.

  Majida was putting Eivan into the back seat of Adil’s car.

  “Majida,” I yelled, as she crouched beside him. “Majida, I need to take Eivan.”

  “What for?” she snapped.

  “I don’t trust Daesh,” I said, stuttering. “We need to hide.”

  “No.” She slammed the car door shut.

  Eivan glared at me from the other side of the car window, angry I hadn’t listened to him. I hopped from foot to foot putting on my shoes. The burn on my leg pulsed with pain, but there was no time to think about it.

  Reluctantly, I climbed into the back of Hassan’s BMW with my mother and Hadil. I could see our neighbors getting into their vehicles, too. As we waited for our father, who was still loading up the car, Hadil jabbered that everything was okay, that the soldiers didn’t want to harm us. “We’ve done this before, Adlan, remember?” she said. “Remember?”

  I could feel Adlan’s back stiffen. Hadil had a bad habit of always saying the wrong thing. She was referring to the time the Iraqi army had taken Fallah. Our father had held my mother’s arms behind her back as she tried to run after the truck with her son inside it. For nearly a month after that, my sisters and I did all the cooking and the planting at the farm because Adlan wouldn’t get out of bed. Hassan told us her heart was broken.

  I wished Hadil would be quiet.

  “We’re going to Kurdistan to start a new life,” she prattled on.

  My mother fidgeted with her
hair. As always, strands were falling out of her kufi. I reached over to help. Adlan, I knew, wanted to make herself presentable. Even if the men who had come to our village were enemies, she would greet them the Yazidi way: politely. “Bring in the stranger and they become your brother or sister,” she would always say.

  As Hassan drove, I looked around the village. Almost everyone had already left to meet Daesh. I realized with a jolt that I couldn’t see or hear any animals: no chickens, goats, or donkeys . . . even the dogs in the village seemed to be gone.

  And birdsong. There was none.

  A shiver ran through me as I remembered a television program I had seen when I was a child. At the time, Hassan had just been elected as the representative for the Kurdistan Democratic Party. He had used his first paycheck to buy a color TV from the secondhand market in Mosul. I liked the moving images on the screen and would sneak into the living room to watch TV when no one else was around. The world came to me that way: places and people and especially the oceans, which I had never seen because we lived in the middle of the desert. The colors of the water came alive for me—lapis lazuli blues, glimmering emerald greens. I imagined what it would be like to travel by boat and see the Rockies of North America, the sprawling cities of Europe, and the beaches of the Far East. One program I caught was about a tsunami that had hit India and parts of the Middle East in 2004. The Kurdish narrator talked about how birds and animals have a built-in sense that tells them danger is imminent. Before the tsunami, many dogs, cats, and birds escaped to higher ground, as if their radar had given them advance warning.

  I watched Eivan’s head bobbing up and down in the back seat of Adil’s car directly in front of us. Guilt moved through me in waves. I should have listened to Eivan. The two of us should have run away.

  Chapter Five

  Sabaya

  Daesh’s white pickup trucks and armored tanks circled the school. Daesh men lumbered back and forth, many of them wearing black clothes with ammunition draped around their torsos. A wave of dizziness washed over me as I watched them. My burned leg throbbed. I gritted my teeth and linked my arm through my mother’s.