A Cave in the Clouds

by Badeeah Hassan Ahmed

  I watched Eivan for a bit, then retreated to my original spot and pushed my back up against the wall.

  “You’re new here?” the woman beside me asked.

  I looked over at her. She was lithe like Samira, Eivan’s mother, and tall, too, judging from the way her long legs stretched out in front of her. She had an elegant neck, smooth skin, and high cheekbones set in a wide, welcoming face. But dark circles surrounded her eyes. Her hair was tied back but not with an elastic band. It was snarled with mud. Her irises were amber colored, speckled with white dots.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m new here.”

  “I’m Navine,” the girl said. “I’m from Tel Qasab.”

  I watched as Navine licked the palms of her hands and then ran them along the floor, picking up dust. She grabbed handfuls of cloth from her dress, burgundy with small yellow and white flowers, and squeezed. She then wiped her hands over her collarbones, neck, and cheeks, smearing herself in dirt.

  “What are you doing?” I exclaimed, thinking she was crazy.

  Navine let out a weak laugh. “The uglier you look,” she said, “the less likely it is that the men will choose you.”

  “And the smell, too,” I said, squeezing my nostrils together. Navine stank of body odor and bad breath.

  Navine smiled, revealing dirty teeth.

  “Sit like this when Daesh comes,” she said, slumping. She dropped her head to one side and spread her legs open in front of her. She let her mouth hang slightly agape, then went cross-eyed.

  I giggled weakly.

  “They don’t put as much of the sedative in the food here,” Navine continued, sitting up straight again. “It’s in the beginning, while you travel, that they drug you the most, so you’re easier to transport. Like deadweight.

  “There’s a market they take the girls to,” she continued. “They also sell us over the Internet. Men come here and look around, take who they want. Daesh thinks they’re waging a war for Islam. They think they’re shahids and freedom fighters,” Navine scoffed. “They’re capitalists. They’re getting rich off kidnapping and selling us.”

  I stared at Navine, shocked at how calmly she could talk about what was happening to us.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” I finally asked, unsure what to make of this young woman.

  “Of course,” she said, leaning in close to me again. “But I try to push it away.”

  “My mother once said that fear is what ages us.” A flood of sadness washed over me again.

  Navine chuckled, then sighed. “I’m afraid all the time,” she admitted. “But I know it won’t help me. Whenever dark thoughts come to me, I try to remember something happy, like a brother’s wedding or seeing my baby sister being born. I dream of the children I’ll have one day, when I get out of here.”

  “What does Daesh do with the children?” I asked, my eyes floating to Eivan. “I mean, why have they taken the young ones?”

  “I heard a rumor that Daesh got a young Yazidi girl to attach the wires on their bombs. She had small, nimble fingers. They kidnapped the mother, telling the child that if she didn’t obey, slit.” Navine imitated slashing her throat. I shrank back in shock.

  I fell quiet. I wanted to protect Eivan. I wanted him to have a childhood. I wanted him to be far away from here.

  “I’ve also heard that Daesh abducts children to kill for them,” she continued, “to become suicide bombers. Child soldiers . . .”

  “Is there any way to escape?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know of any yet, but I’ll find one. In everything, there is a weakness, even these men. I’m being patient until I find out what it is. For now, I keep myself dirty, so when the buyers come, they don’t want me.”

  I closed my eyes to rest them. Maybe I wasn’t drugged anymore, but I was still very tired.

  “I would like a son one day,” Navine continued. I opened my eyes to see her gazing dreamily at Eivan. “When I get out of here, I will get married. I’m twenty-three, but when Daesh came around and asked my age, I told them I was thirty-one. They’ll keep someone older like me to be a domestic slave. The really old women, they kill.”

  Eivan got to his feet and scanned the room, searching for me.

  “I wanted to be a doctor,” I said to Navine as I waved. Eivan jogged over and plunked himself down on my lap.

  “Don’t say wanted,” Navine scolded, as a Daesh man in a dishdasha entered through a door not far from us, carrying a notebook. “Want!’”

  I looked at her questioningly.

  “You will be a doctor,” she said. “Tell him that, too,” she added, pointing to Eivan. “My advice to you: keep your dreams alive and separate from these men. The one thing they cannot take from you is your will to live. Only you can give that away.”

  The Daesh man, a leader the soldiers addressed as Sheikh, shouted across the room that he wanted the new arrivals to identify ourselves. “I need your mothers’ names and your ages and birthdays,” he called out. “After that, we’ll take your photographs.”

  I looked around nervously.

  No one put her hand up.

  Navine rolled her eyes. “When I first arrived, they said they wanted my mother’s name to help reunite me with my sisters,” she said in a low voice. “But I’m not so sure now. I think they want your mother’s name so they can separate you from your siblings. Tell him you’re older than you are. Tell him you’re twenty-eight.”

  I gasped. “But surely they can tell I’m a teenager!”

  “Just do it. Trust me. You look tired and bloated and much older than a teenager right now.”

  I kept my eyes glued to Navine as I slowly raised my arm. Sheikh moved through the bodies until he was in front of me.

  My mouth grew dry as I debated whether I should lie and give him another name. “I am Badeeah,” I finally told him. If there was a chance, even a glimmer of hope, that giving my real name would reunite me with my family, I wanted to be honest. He scribbled my name down in his book. “My father is Hassan.”

  “What is your mother’s name?”

  “Adlan,” I said. My mouth was so dry, I couldn’t swallow.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight,” I managed to get out. I felt faint being so close to this man. I was full of dread that he would discover my lies and take me away, like the men in Kocho took Manje.

  “How many children do you have?” he asked.

  “I am the daughter of Adlan,” I repeated instead. I closed my eyes, hoping to stop my head from swaying. “I have one child,” I finally said. “He’s not quite two.”

  “This is him?” Sheikh said, pointing to Eivan, who was sitting still on my lap.

  “Yes. His name is Eivan.”

  I averted my eyes quickly. Not only did I look like a teenager, Eivan most certainly looked older than two. He could form full sentences now, and his baby fat, except around the legs, was almost all gone.

  Sheikh continued to write in his book. Finally, he grunted and turned, pausing momentarily before bellowing for the next woman to come forward.

  Two girls stood up.

  “You go over there,” he said to me before moving toward them. He pointed at the door, where another Daesh soldier held a camera. I nodded.

  As Sheikh moved away, I rolled onto my side and vomited.

  Chapter Nine

  In Between Heaven and Earth

  After my photo was taken, I spent the afternoon staring at the ceiling.

  On the way to Raqqa, the drugs Daesh had given us had at least dulled the pain.

  Now, my rib cage was sore from vomiting. My right leg burned. My other leg ached from all the time I spent sleeping on buses or bare cement floors. Lifting my arms tired me. It hurt even to breathe. And that was just my physical body. My mind was tormented with doubts about whether I had done the right thing
by taking Eivan. I went back in time, reimagining a different outcome in Hatimiya: Viyan, Ghalya, and I directing the driver to Kurdistan, where we would have been safe and the driver, a child-soldier, could have been rehabilitated.

  Then I saw the faces of our Arab neighbors and of Abu Anwar. My family, my village, we had trusted those men. It made me feel even worse when I thought about Navine being from Tel Qasab, the very village where Khalil’s truck had been pulled over. She was taken by Daesh on August 3, she said, likely just hours before we arrived there on the way back from the mountains. I couldn’t help but think that Abu Anwar had let us return to Kocho, but had he stood by when she was taken and possibly even helped enslave Navine and the other Yazidi villagers?

  I listened to Eivan playing with the other children until Navine called him back. She didn’t want him leaving my side for long.

  I half listened to Navine as she told Eivan folk stories to keep him occupied. I was grateful for her help with him, which gave me time to think. I finally had silence and a clear enough head to figure out what to do. But my thoughts careened into each other, leaving me with piercing migraine headaches. My eyes caught sight of a spider on an exposed ceiling beam. As I watched it, a deep heaviness grew inside me. That spider had more freedom than I did.

  I heard Eivan tell Navine that he was building imaginary sandcastles, complete with moats, turrets, and drawbridges. I also overheard them playing a food game in which they each described their favorite meals. As they spoke, I imagined nibbling on Adlan’s pastries.

  When Eivan announced that he had to pee, Navine offered to take him, but I waved her away. I had promised Adlan I’d look after him. I wasn’t honoring that pledge by feeling sorry for myself. Navine pointed to the back of the room and handed me a hijab.

  “What’s this for?” I asked. Daesh made us wear the hijab all the time. I was already wearing mine.

  “You’ll need it for another reason.”

  I cautiously placed one foot in front of the other, fighting through crippling fatigue and wooziness. Eivan’s hand, locked inside mine, became slippery from my perspiration. I felt as if I had a fever. I wiped my fingers on my dress, reached down for Eivan’s hand again, then stopped. I bent down instead and dragged my sweaty palms along the floor. When my palms were caked in dirt, I patted my face and then my dress, mimicking what Navine had done.

  As we neared the urinal, I knew why Navine had advised me to bring the hijab: the smell. The toilet room, if you could call it that, had no door. The toilet itself, buried in the ground, had overflowed. Waste and urine spread out like a flooded riverbed. I coughed from the fumes and held one end of the hijab over my nose. Eivan put the other end up to his face. I was glad we still had our shoes on, though back in Kocho, we would never wear them inside. Leaving our shoes and boots at the door meant we were being conscious of cleanliness and keeping our prayer areas sacred. But Daesh didn’t seem interested in etiquette.

  By the time we made it back to Navine, the Isha, or the Muslim prayers for the night, had started. Many of the girls and women were now asleep.

  My mind floated to Lalish as I heard Daesh in the other room murmuring their prayers. I imagined myself carrying the Chira, the sacred fire. At one point, Lalish had been constructed out of diamonds, gold, and lapis lazuli that corresponded with the energy that was present at certain times in the history of the planet. This is why Yazidi don’t wear blue—it represents such a high spiritual color.

  We now were living in the cycle of moon, which symbolizes immortality, enlightenment, and the exposure of the dark side of nature. It is believed that the energies are so strong in the moon cycle that wicked people who receive these energies will do very bad things. But those who are good receive this holy energy for good. It is a polarized time, the moon period. And indeed, the 20th and 21st centuries have been marred with wars, conflicts, and genocides of greater magnitude than ever before experienced on the planet.

  In the moon period, the domes of our structures were made out of stone. The main building at Lalish had three structures, each representing a facet of the human experience: the body, the spirit, and the soul. “The soul is the center of life,” Adlan had explained. “The spirit translates the language of the soul and gives it to the body.” As I drifted in this dream state, I seemed to smell the dampness of the stones of the century-old building. I felt the energy of Khatuna Fakhra move through me, lifting me up. “Help me remain clear, so I can find a way to escape,” I pleaded silently. “Watch over all the Yazidi who have been captured. No matter how far away I am, please keep me connected to Lalish.”

  Suddenly, I saw myself walking down a dark tunnel with a soft, flickering light at the end.

  “Walk toward it,” I heard Adlan say. “You and Eivan will live, my sweet daughter. Just keep walking toward the light.”

  After morning prayers on day three, a young, fair-haired Daesh guard in a white dishdasha approached Eivan and got down on one knee.

  I was angry. I wanted to fall back into my semiconscious position, staring at the ceiling, which was how I had spent the previous days. Instead, I went on high alert; anxiety about what this man was doing shot through me. I watched his long fingers—which I imagined in another time playing a beautiful instrument, like the tambur—reaching into a box and pulling out chocolates. They were wrapped in crinkly yellow, green, and red cellophane, and I could see they had Arabic words on them. Eivan crept in close, and his eyes grew wide. The guard smiled as he passed him the sweets.

  I moved to swat the candies away, but Navine stopped me.

  The guard was helping Eivan unwrap one of the treats. As he did so, his hands trembled. I glanced at his face. The man’s cheeks were flushed, and he seemed spooked about something.

  When the guard got up to give chocolates to another child, Navine scolded me for looking directly at him. “Don’t make him notice you any more than he already has,” she snapped.

  I snatched the chocolate from Eivan, who stared up at me in shock. I slapped a hand over his mouth to stop him from screaming. “I don’t trust that man,” I said to him sharply. “Don’t touch it. It could be poison.”

  Navine pried my hand open, giving the chocolate back to Eivan. “Daesh doesn’t drug the sweets,” she said. “That’s not what they’re for. Let him enjoy something in these terrible times.”

  I ground my teeth as Navine wiped some chocolate from the wrapper over her face and her hair. She gestured for me to do the same.

  “So far, whenever Daesh gives the children chocolate, the buyers come not long after,” she explained. “The chocolate, I think, is to confuse the children so they think the men coming to look at their mothers are nice.”

  I spun Eivan around so his face was up against my chest. I told him to pretend to be sleeping. “In your head, work on your castle,” I said.

  “I’ll make a sky castle now,” he told me.

  I molded my face into a smile.

  The buyers came soon after, as Navine had predicted. “Do as I told you and they won’t even notice you,” she whispered. She spread her legs out in front of her and dipped her head to one side, staring out cross-eyed.

  Some of the buyers wore dishdashas. Others sported Western-style jackets and slacks. Some were dressed in kurtas in rich purples, sky blues, and saffron over black pants. Some men’s heads were adorned in turbans. As they moved along the floor, I picked up fragments of their Arabic, spoken in accents I didn’t recognize, as well as languages I’d never heard before. Some of the men were old. Others were young, Fallah’s age. Women, hoping like Navine and me to be unseen, shimmied their bodies away when the men approached them.

  When an older man with a bald head and a gray beard pointed at two Yazidi girls about my age who looked related, a Daesh soldier yelled at them to stand. He ordered them to open their mouths, and the older man studied their teeth. The Daesh soldier next demanded the girls hold out their h
ands. The older man, dressed in a black dishdasha, examined their fingernails. Then he pulled up their dresses and looked at their legs. The girls were asked to turn around as the potential buyer gazed at their hair. I watched as urine dripped down one of the girl’s legs, pooling on the floor.

  The buyer nodded. As another Daesh soldier grabbed their arms, pushing them from the room, the girls locked hands. “This is not Islam what you’re doing,” one of them called out in rusty Arabic. “Please have mercy . . .”

  The buyers and the Daesh soldiers snickered.

  Another buyer picked a girl even younger than me, almost still a child. His voice carried through the room as he boasted to the others that he had found the perfect Yazidi kafir, which I knew was a derogatory word for a non-Muslim. “Allah has been kind to me, Inshallah,” he called out. I cringed. I suddenly felt like I was going to be sick again.

  It was hard to gauge how many were taken. Maybe twenty. Girls and women cried as they were led from the room. Some screamed. Navine moved in close, covered Eivan’s ears with her hands, and mouthed to me that it wasn’t over yet.

  The wails came next from the floor above us. The terri­fying, gut-wrenching calls of women and girls being raped.

  I placed my hands on top of Navine’s to further stifle the noise for Eivan. But I could feel that he heard as his body shook. The cries stopped when the Adhan announced midday prayers.

  After prayers, the girls and women who had been taken away returned.

  Their clothing was ripped, their hair was messy, and their faces were swollen with bruises and stained with tears. Some were limping.

  I bled with them; parts of myself seeped out through my wounds. The only comforting thought I could muster was hope that the women and girls were hiding their dreams somewhere inside them. I wanted to tell them what Navine had told me: to safely tuck the best part of themselves somewhere far away.

  Every few days, the buyers came.