Adlan waved, and I looked up to see Hadil and Majida moving through the crowd toward us.
Behind my sisters walked a Daesh soldier handing out candies to the children. I shuddered as I recognized the wrapping. The words were in Kurdish. Our language, Shingali, is a dialect of Kurmanji, which is one of the Kurdish languages. Shingali is a mix of Kurdish and Aramaic words, a very old language of the Middle East. I recognized the candy labels, not just the lettering but also the shiny packaging. These were the candies Nafaa sold at his shop. Daesh hadn’t just taken our money, cell phones, and jewels. They’d raided our stores.
Eivan grabbed two, tore off the wrapping, and popped them into his mouth. Adlan motioned for us all to sit. Another Daesh soldier was handing out headscarves, black and brown. He barked at us to put them on.
“Did you tell them anything?” my mother whispered to us when the soldiers had moved away.
“Like what?” Majida asked.
“I don’t know. Something that would single you out? Make them remember you?”
I froze. The boy soldier would know who I was. He’d remember me talking back to him, asking questions.
“I told Daesh Eivan was my son,” I said, my voice quivering. “The big man, directing things, from the classroom. I told him. I was afraid that the man was going to take Eivan so I picked him up.”
“Good,” Adlan cut in. “Good,” she repeated. I relaxed a bit.
I couldn’t take my eyes off my mother. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time. Dake had told me that Adlan was one of the most sought-after women in our tribe, the Mandki, when she reached marriage age. She hadn’t been just physically beautiful with her long, brown hair and black eyes. She also had a quiet yet powerful presence. “Every man was in awe of her,” Dake had said. “Men can be both afraid of and attracted to the power in women. And your mother allowed her power to move through her more than most. She was very close to the energy of Khatuna Fakhra.”
“What will Daesh do if they find out about my lie?” I asked her.
“You can’t let them know,” Adlan replied sharply. “But don’t worry,” she added, her tone softening. “They won’t ask. They can’t see properly. You and Eivan are safer together.” She looked around the garden to make sure there were no Daesh listening nearby. “I don’t think we’re going to Kurdistan,” she said quietly.
“What about Hassan, Adil, Fallah?” Hadil asked, her voice trailing off. Adlan’s spirits may have been rising, but Hadil’s were sinking fast. Her shoulders were collapsed and she seemed smaller, almost like a child. She kept tying and untying a knot in the fabric of her dress.
Adlan shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you.” We shimmied our bodies in closer. “I think,” she started and then stopped. “I think we are . . . you are being sold.” I could hear it in her voice: she was resigned to her own fate, but in whatever time she had left, she was going to give all she could to those around her, starting with us. Adlan was going to fight the darkness with light, sharing all the knowledge she had.
Eivan was lying on his back, happily playing a finger game, one that Adlan had taught my siblings and me when we were little.
“What are they selling us for?” I was trembling. I needed the answer, but part of me still didn’t want to know.
Majida and my mother exchanged a look. Majida took over. “They’ll sell the virgins . . . the girls . . . first,” she said, shaking her head and wiping tears from her face. “Badeeah, what will happen to you is not love or marriage. It is abuse and violence and war . . . remember that.”
Marriage. Marriage. I wanted to marry Nafaa. “Adlan,” I interrupted, “I never told you, but I want to marry . . .” I was crying now, too.
“I know about you and Nafaa,” my mother said. She stroked my face. “Hassan and I support your marriage to him when you’re old enough. But for now, you will be walking down a dark tunnel. It’s always darkest just below the light. You will be tested. Everyone in the world is tested in some way or another. This is your schooling now, Badeeah. You will emerge from this. That is a certainty. But what is not certain is when and how.”
That’s when I remembered Hassan’s words from our trip to Shingal when I was five. “Your purpose in life is to hold onto love, so that darkness will eventually be succeeded by morning,” my father had told me. I’d gotten my identification card, my Jinsiya, on that trip. I went to school that fall.
Daesh soldiers were now circling the garden, doling out rice and potato soup.
“Promise me,” Adlan whispered, clutching my arm.
I nodded. “Anything. I promise you anything.”
“Bring Eivan back safe.”
Chapter Seven
Adrift
I awoke on a bus.
If you could call it being awake.
My eyes flickered open, then shut again. My head pulsed. It was a strain to remember anything. All I saw in my mind were images of men in black, the school at Kocho, the sandstorm that turned day into night, the guns . . . the man with the knife. I remembered promising Adlan I would keep Eivan safe.
Eivan was with me on the bus. But he, too, was waxing and waning, like the moon, awake and then asleep again.
I held him in my arms, rocking him like a baby, pretending he was younger than he was so Daesh wouldn’t take him away from me. From what I had seen in Kocho and Solakh, the youngest children were allowed to stay with their mothers. Older children they separated.
“My baby,” I cooed whenever the men were near. “My baby boy.”
My memory returned slowly, starting with Solakh. After the meal of rice and potato soup, Daesh had ordered us back inside the building, warning that bombers were coming. If they saw us, the airplanes would kill us all, claimed a Daesh man. There were maybe four hundred of us. Women, girls, and young children scrambled in from the garden, finding places along the cool corridors. Before sleep came rushing at me, I recalled asking Adlan, If the bombers were after Daesh, why would they bomb us? Were the Peshmerga, the Iraqi army, or the Americans coming to save us?
When I awoke next, I remembered Hadil and Majida being taken away. I had tried to sit up, but I was too weak to run after them. Adlan, however, found the strength. She rushed to her feet, screamed out their names, and scurried behind them.
They disappeared around a corner.
I heard gunshots, like I had back in Kocho. Rapid-fire, semiautomatic weapons.
Then silence.
Viyan, with her baby, had moved in close beside me, whispering that she thought Daesh was drugging our food. “They don’t want us to fight back,” she murmured.
“So that’s why I am drifting,” I said to her. “That’s why I have no energy.”
Then the long buses came.
Two or three of us were sharing each seat. We leaned into each other, floating in and out of each other’s dreams and nightmares.
From time to time, I’d catch some of the Daesh men’s words. “We’re leaving fifteen women in Tal Afar. Forty from this bus to stay in Mosul.”
The bus swayed like a boat as it slowed and stopped in the villages we passed. Men got on, walked around, and stared at us. If they pointed at a particular Yazidi girl or woman, she would be taken off the bus. One elderly man beamed with a toothless grin. “Who is going to marry me?”
One girl growled at him. “Who’d want to go with you, old man? You’re older than our fathers!”
As I saw shame wash over his face, I realized a few men could still be reminded that what the Daesh men were doing was wrong. But they were too cowardly to protect us.
At the next stop, a boy wearing sports clothes hopped on the bus, jeering that we Yazidi were slaves now. “You’re sabaya!” he crowed. The boy was even younger than the driver who had taken us from Kocho to Solakh.
The bus traveled by night. In the mornings, what I remember o
f them, we were led off the vehicle and corralled into schools in cities I had heard of but never visited. There, we were fed, usually plain white rice, sometimes noodles or biscuits. As the days wore on, the labels on the candies handed out to the children changed from Kurdish to Arabic. We drank water from the taps in the toilet rooms, which were overflowing with our waste, or from the buckets that Daesh left out for us. There were so many of us that often no spots were left on the floor to lie down. When that happened, we slept upright, our backs propping each other up.
At some point, I don’t know when, Viyan and Ghalya and their babies were taken.
Eivan, when he was awake, didn’t want me to sleep. He pleaded with me to keep my eyes open, maybe afraid that if I closed them, I wouldn’t wake up. As my head drooped toward sleep, he’d prod and punch me, crying out for me to sit up and talk to him. “Tell me a story!” he’d demand. I was so exhausted, but I did what he asked, keeping the stories as short as I could. Sometimes I repeated the story of the founding of Lalish.
“After forty thousand years of sailing on wild seas, the angels came ashore, at Lalish . . .”
As Eivan and I moved across the desert, zigzagging like his football from one Iraqi town or city to another, I recognized the faces of girls and women I knew from Kocho and other nearby villages—girls and women I had seen at weddings, funerals, and picnics and while on pilgrimage at Lalish. But we were never together for long.
When I was awake, my head and my burned leg seared like the hottest noon-hour sun during Chilé Haviné.
But even worse than the physical pain was the jolting, piercing knowledge that I was alone with Eivan. I didn’t know whether my family were alive or dead.
On about day twenty-two, I began to see my mother—not in physical form, but I knew she was there. I felt her presence beside me. The first time she appeared, I recited in my head my promise that I would get Eivan safely back to Fallah and Samira.
After that, Adlan started to talk to me. Her voice was just a whisper at first. With a gentle nudge, she’d tell me, “Feed Eivan.”
I began taking extra food for my nephew, and I’d give him some of mine, too. Adlan also told me things about the Yazidi. Maybe she’d told me those things when I was little, and I had forgotten. Or maybe she was really there. “Our people lived in Kocho for a thousand years,” she said. “But we faced many genocides, so we moved to Shingal to be with other Yazidi. There is strength in numbers. In the 1970s, there were enough of us Mandki again to return to Kocho.”
“Maybe your brothers were right,” my mother told me another time. “Maybe we were too willing to accept our Arab neighbors. Maybe this is why we are suffering now. It is our punishment for not raising our voices. The Arabs under Saddam Hussein rewrote history, claiming they were the first inhabitants of the region. But the Yazidi, the Assyrians, the Christians, and the Jews lived in this area of Iraq long before Islam and the Arabs. The Arabs had their own land, Badeeah; they didn’t need ours. It was Saddam’s attempt to Arabize the country, so that he would be president for life, ruling over them and all the oil.”
“Badeeah,” I heard Adlan say on about day thirty. “Always move to the light. Don’t let the darkness in. Remember the purpose of life. Hold onto love, so that darkness will eventually be banished.”
One afternoon I awoke on the bus, my head surprisingly clear.
I was sweating in the heat. The air stank from so many unbathed bodies nestled in tight together.
By the sun, I could tell it was about five and mid or late September. Eivan and I had been moving from town to town for at least a month. My body was awash with whatever drugs Daesh had been slipping in our food and water.
I looked down. Eivan’s head was on my lap, his unwashed, oily hair sticking to his forehead. His breathing was raspy, as if he had a cold. I stroked his back and leaned my head against the window.
We were stopped on the road in front of a gas station, one large enough to fill up the oil tankers parked around it. In and among the cars and trucks, civilians in Muslim dishdashas, hijabs, khimars, and niqabs had set up roadside shacks where they hawked fresh fruits, juices, vegetables, secondhand electronics, and soaps. I was so thirsty, I could almost taste my favorite drink from the Shingal market: lemon ice water. There were so many Daesh mingling about. If the Americans are going to bomb anywhere, this would be the place, I thought to myself. It’s as if this is the Daesh barracks. Destroy their gas supply and destroy Daesh.
I was sitting near the front of the bus. A Daesh guard a few seats ahead of me got on his cell phone, talking low and deep. “Yes. We’re in Syria now,” I heard him say.
My pulse quickened.
I looked out the window again, my eyes darting back and forth. The Daesh men walked with long strides and held their heads high.
They didn’t feel threatened here. These men knew they had won the war. Whatever hopes I had had that the Peshmerga, the Americans, or even the Iraqi army were coming to rescue us vanished. Adlan had been right when she said I would be entering a dark tunnel. What I had never expected was that the darkness would be Syria, which was in the throes of its own civil war. How would I ever find the way home now?
If I had had more energy, I would have encouraged the girls and women on the bus to rise up against our captors. As we moved into Syria, only the driver and one guard were with us on the bus. We weren’t part of a convoy. Many times, our bus was the only vehicle on the road. The checkpoints we stopped at were manned by boys wearing Daesh-like clothing but carrying fake wooden guns. It hit me hard then that Daesh’s numbers were not large. They were using children and model weapons to make their army look stronger and larger than it actually was.
As the bus moved into Raqqa, I couldn’t help but notice that the colors were different than in Kocho, where just before Chilé Haviné, the region was green; then everything burned and turned to ash. Raqqa’s buildings were white. They shone amidst sand that was bright yellow and gold. The sky was azure blue, like the seas I’d seen on nature programs. The roads were made of smooth black asphalt, not stones and dirt.
It was a Saturday, maybe, because the shops we passed were bustling. Women wearing niqabs and khimars hurried back and forth, weighed down by shopping baskets and bags. Children followed behind them, solemn-faced or skittish. The girls all wore headscarves, even the really young ones, and they stayed very close to their mothers. Men glanced at the bus and then quickly away.
In the only other large city I knew, Shingal, a gentleness wound its way around people. Even when it was busy, and even in the presence of soldiers, there was still order and calm.
Raqqa was nervous, as if it were surrounded by a wall people dared not step outside of, at least not for long. It was as if the city itself were trying to hide.
Chapter Eight
On the Other Side
Soft light warmed my face. I heard children laughing, followed by the chirping song of the nightingale.
I awoke thinking for a moment I was back in Kocho.
I sat up quickly, believing I was home.
Then my heart sank. I wasn’t on a bus anymore, but I was far from Kocho.
I was in some sort of long building. For as far as I could see, there were bodies.
I was still a prisoner.
Some of the girls and women were awake. Most were asleep. As I looked at them, the floor felt as if it were falling out from underneath me.
My head began to spin.
I lay back down, steadying myself by scanning the metal beams that crisscrossed the ceiling.
From the way the light streamed in through a large window set high in the wall, I suspected it was midday. That baffled me. When Eivan and I were led off the bus into this building, it had still been light. I had heard the late afternoon Adhan, the Muslim call to prayer.
I estimated that I had been asleep for close to eighteen hours. Even when
I was on the bus and drugged, the longest I had slept before waking was a few hours. Back in Kocho, I had been the first to sleep and the first to rise. I had an internal clock that saw me get exactly eight hours of sleep a night. I was up with the roosters. In the evening, if I had a test for school, I’d study until I drifted off, my head dipping down until it landed on the pages of the textbook I was reading. Adlan would poke my arm to wake me up. She’d hold my shoulders and guide me to the bedroom, where she had already laid out my mat and bedding.
Adlan. Sadness and longing rolled over me.
I curled myself into a tight ball, stuffed my fist inside my mouth, and, for the first time since my abduction, cried.
Hands stroked my back. Soft fingers wiped my hair from my face. I heard a female voice softly singing.
I relaxed a bit, thinking of Khatuna Fakhra.
Then I remembered Eivan. I pushed the hands away and lurched up. Despite still feeling lightheaded, I forced myself to stand, then walk.
Panic gripped me as I called out his name. I craned my neck across the sea of bodies.
“Eivan,” I whisper-shouted.
Women looked up at me with defeated eyes.
Some began calling out Eivan’s name, too.
Then I stopped cold in my tracks. Children were laughing at the very far end of the room. Tiny hands were clapping. I crept toward the sound, eventually seeing a group of small children playing patty-cake. Eivan was sitting in the middle of them, wearing a big smile.
“I thought you had disappeared,” I said, falling down beside him. He looked at me, surprised.
Eivan and the other children were dirty. Their hair was tangled. They were all thin. But their eyes shone. It hit me that none of them knew what was happening.
A Cave in the Clouds Page 6