Another night, Navine and I stayed awake talking, keeping one another’s spirits up by imagining the future. She was curious about why I wanted to be a doctor, so I explained it to her.
“You remember the 2007 bombings?”
Of course, she did. Everyone remembered those bombings. Extremists had driven fuel tankers and cars packed with explosives into the center of two Yazidi towns not far from Kocho, killing hundreds. The attack had started when Muslim gunmen, possibly the Islamic State, stopped a bus in Mosul. They ordered the Christians and Muslims off, then killed the remaining twenty-three Yazidi passengers.
“Some of the wounded from the bombings,” I said, “streamed into Kocho, seeking the help of our one overworked doctor, Elias Salih. Like I often did as a child, I was sitting on the side of the road, keeping an eye on his office. Sometimes I read a book while I sat there, but this time I just watched the injured men, women, and children waiting outside, their blood dripping on the dusty road. People were quiet, cradling their broken arms, as if they accepted that they might die before the doctor could see them. I finally couldn’t take any more. I ran home and brought back sheets and towels, buckets and soap. I helped clean dirt off people’s wounds while the patients with more serious injuries went in first. My father later told me that many people died who could have lived if only Kocho and the other Yazidi villages had more doctors. That was the day I knew I wanted to care for others.”
“You’ll be a doctor,” Navine said in a quiet voice. “Just like I will be a mother to a son one day.”
Chapter Twelve
The Dark Room
Then one day, the guard who had taken me outside the compound was back.
Everything inside me told me to look away, to run away, to abandon my plan. But when the guard knelt to give Eivan chocolates, I shuffled up close beside him. “I’ll go with you,” I croaked.
His body stiffened.
“I want to go with you,” I repeated. “Get me out, and my son and my sister, and I will do whatever you ask. But you need to take us all.”
The guard scanned the room, then let the contents of the candy box fall. Chocolates and sweets scattered everywhere. I realized he had dropped them on purpose to give us a cover for talking.
“I didn’t know if I could trust you,” I told him. “Now I do. I want to be with you. But we don’t have a lot of time. Emir says he wants the buyers to see me when they next come.”
“I understand,” he said.
When the guard moved on to the next child, I tore open the wrappers on Eivan’s chocolates. Navine and I rubbed the wrappers all over us. We even smeared chocolate on our teeth to make them look stained.
Neither of us heard the footsteps approach.
From out of nowhere, someone yanked my hair. I screamed as I felt myself being hauled up off the ground and then dragged along the floor.
Pain pulsated across my head and down my neck. Even my teeth hurt, as if they were being ripped from my body. I twisted from side to side, trying to break free, but the attacker’s grip was too strong.
I heard Eivan chasing after me. “Hide!” I tried to shout to him. But my throat was too sore for words to come out.
In a second-floor room, I was beaten and called names.
Afterward, I curled myself up in a ball on the dirty floor.
“In a few days you will leave,” Emir shouted down at me. He twisted my arm behind my back until the pain was so searing that I couldn’t see. The words “Yazidi whore” were the last things I heard before I passed out.
When my eyes flickered open again, there was nothing but darkness around me. I was lying on my back and I could hear myself breathing.
My scalp tingled. As I tried to sit up, pain ricocheted through me. My legs and chest were on fire.
I felt my lips. Swollen. I patted my face. My cheeks and eyes were puffy, too.
I lay back down, staring up at the darkness.
Then I sensed a body beside me. I heard a moan. It was Navine.
“Are you all right?” I called to her quietly. My mouth felt stiff, and I could taste blood.
“Yes,” she said. I could hear her coughing. “They beat us both.”
“Eivan,” I said. “Where?”
“I don’t know.”
Despite the pain that throbbed in every part of my body, I pulled myself to my feet, bracing myself against the concrete wall. I felt my way to a metal door and pulled on the knob, but the door was locked.
I banged my fists against the metal, screaming for someone to come.
“Where is my son?” I yelled.
No answer.
No footsteps or voices.
“Where are we?” I called to Navine. “Did you see where they were taking us?”
“No.”
It was somewhere dank. The air was full of moisture as if we were underground. Walking stiffly, I felt my way around the room: buckets, brooms, sponges, and a mop. I found a towel and knelt to place it under Navine’s head.
“They said they had been watching us. They knew we were making ourselves ugly,” Navine said. “I should have warned you.”
“About what?”
“The guard. He might have wanted you for himself, but he was angry after the soldiers beat him. He felt you had betrayed him. I should have known that he would never trust you again. But I guess I wanted to believe in him, too.”
For the first time since I had met Navine, I heard her crying. Softly, I sang her a lullaby Adlan had sung to me as a child.
When I could hear that she was asleep, I lay back and listened to the silence.
No words. No sounds coming from the other side of the door.
No water to drink. No cold pasta. No rice. No chocolates. No buyers.
No Eivan.
I slept, then paced. I wasn’t sure for how long. Hours? Days?
I banged on the door.
I tugged at the knob from time to time, hoping it would eventually yield.
I screamed for Eivan. I begged Adlan to appear and tell me what to do. But she never came nor did I hear her voice.
The silence was deafening.
I shielded my eyes with my hands as light flooded into the tiny room.
“Get up. You’re leaving,” a man ordered. I recognized the guard’s voice.
“Where is Eivan?” I demanded.
No response.
“Where is my son?” I repeated, pulling myself up from the damp floor.
Still nothing.
The guard threw khimars and niqabs at Navine and me and told us to put them on.
The guard was angry, like Navine had said. I had wounded his ego. Now he’d rather see me dead than consider helping us.
When we stepped outside, I could see that we had been locked in a basement, probably a cellar for storing crops.
Outside, the air was drier, cool, and biting. I wrapped my sweater around me. Autumn had come. In a few weeks, in my old life, my Kocho life, my family would have been going on pilgrimage to Lalish. I imagined roasting apples and pears from the orchards.
Finally, I could hear sounds again: men talking, birds, dogs barking.
I racked my brain for something I could say to get the guard back on my side.
But then I heard a small voice call out, “Mama.” I turned in one direction and then the other. The niqab covered my entire face except for my eyes. I had never put one on before, so, as I fumbled to adjust it on my face, I couldn’t see.
“Mama!” the voice called again.
A hand slipped under my armpit, and I felt myself being hoisted up through the open door of a small bus or minivan. I smelled stale cigarette smoke as the same hand guided me to sit on the floor.
Then I felt a tiny, warm hand slip into mine.
I pulled the niqab away from my eyes to see Eivan
beside me. A bruise pulsed purple and red on his cheek.
I pulled him in close as tears welled up, tears I didn’t even know I’d stored away. Tears of love.
Chapter Thirteen
The American
“Where are we going?” I asked as the minivan lurched forward.
“Aleppo,” said the Daesh man in the passenger seat.
There were ten Yazidi in the vehicle, six women and four small children, including Navine, Eivan, and me, as well as a Daesh driver and a guard.
It was dusk, maybe 5:00 p.m. Our driver, from what I could make out, was another teenager. He had a sparse beard, like the fur of a baby goat, and pimpled cheeks. A boy, I thought, who if he lived in another place might have been at school or at football practice.
The Daesh guard had light eyes, maybe blue or green, though it was hard to tell in the light. His eyelids drooped at the corners.
There were no seats in back. The ten of us sat on the metal floor of the minivan surrounded by empty cigarette packages, crumpled papers, and candy bar wrappers.
The vehicle was from the 1970s and had been shipped to Syria from Europe for its final years of life. “We’re a giant charity shop, us and other war zones in the world,” Adil had said one day after the Americans came to Iraq. “The world dumps its garbage here and calls it ‘aid.’ What we need is peace, not their old running shoes.” In Kocho, it had been a big deal for my father to be able to drive an old BMW. It meant he was important. In North America, his vehicle would have been discarded as junk.
“What will happen to us in Aleppo?” I asked the guard.
He kept chewing his gum, ignoring me.
About fifteen minutes into the drive, the minivan pulled into a long tunnel and stopped.
The men in the van rolled the windows down. A large Daesh man, wielding a knife like the ones the elders used to slaughter our goats at festivals, materialized from the tunnel and moved in close.
“Yazidi sabaya?” he snarled. His accent was unfamiliar, maybe North African.
The Daesh guard in the front seat grunted.
“Good! I’ll behead them all right now!”
“What did they say?” Navine whispered. The other women looked at me in terror. I swallowed the lump in my throat. None of them understood Arabic.
“I don’t know,” I stammered, unable to tell them that we were about to die.
The guard in front began to argue with the knife carrier, telling him we were meant for someone named The Commander. We had been sold to an emir. The large man took a few steps back, waving his knife around. I could tell by the way it swooshed that it was sharp.
Finally, another Daesh man in a white dishdasha arrived. He cocked his hand pistol and waved it at the man with the knife, shouting at him that the sabaya were not to be touched.
Within minutes, our minivan was moving forward. Once the van was safely through the tunnel, it sped up quickly, as if we were running away.
About an hour into the drive, we reached a checkpoint. I managed to read one of the signs I saw through the window: Dayr Hafir. Cars, trucks, minibuses, and large transport buses lined both sides of the road like fences. We watched as Daesh soldiers swarmed some of the vehicles, ripping open suitcases, boxes, and bags. Clothing flew up in the wind, caught in the daze of the headlights, then somersaulted along the road like tumbleweeds. Syrian families stood off to the side, watching, stone-faced and shivering. They were refugees, fleeing a country diseased by civil war. Aleppo was spitting out its own people. The city was a battlefield.
Long before we reached Aleppo, we could see the pollution hugging the city. Smoke from burning buildings and particles from explosions sifted their way into the vents in the van, making us cough. Our driver had to skirt the debris littering the roads. For many miles, we moved at a crawl.
Finally, our minivan entered a residential area. Some of the houses were mansions with gated fences, gardens, and fountains. Most of all, I noticed the trees.
My thoughts drifted to the oak, linden, elm, and ash trees that grew densely around the Shingal Mountains and Lalish. Hassan would hunt for the Zagros oak tree with the widest branches, for shelter from the rains, and my brothers would set up our food and tents there. Afterwards, Hassan rolled his cigarettes, humming folk songs. Adlan would make flatbread over a bonfire. When Dake was still alive, she would sit with her legs curled underneath her, sucking on pomegranate seeds, telling Khudher and me stories. “This part of the world, Mesopotamia, is the cradle of civilization,” she would say. “But that isn’t just because this is where civilization began. It is also because, in the silence of nature, the spiritual could become part of the world. Every river leads to the sea, and the sea leads to every river.”
The minivan pulled up in front of a mansion flanked by tall, white pillars.
The Daesh guard in the passenger seat snapped at us to straighten our headscarves.
When we got out, the street was empty. The air was thick, like it had been in Raqqa. I could see lots of alleyways along the street. Many people’s windows were open despite the cooler air. I caught sight of a black-veiled woman on a second-floor balcony.
I picked up Eivan, who wrapped his legs around my torso.
A wrought-iron fence surrounded the house, an open padlock dangling from one of the bars. We entered a courtyard full of dead, crackling bushes.
Inside, the house smelled of camphor, cinnamon, mint, and cardamom, as if someone had just finished cooking. The Daesh guard instructed us to keep our headscarves on. Once we had taken off our shoes, he led us down a hallway lit dimly by a fluorescent light bulb. Navine wrung her hands together, and Eivan tightened his hold on me. The other women crept in close, asking me in Shingali what was going on. I had no answers for them.
The dusty furniture was made of heavy wood. The place had not been cleaned in a long time. The carpets were scuffed. On the walls hung framed posters featuring quotes from the Quran.
A new man with a slight build appeared, taking over for the guard from Raqqa.
“I’m al-Amriki’s translator,” the man said, leading us into the kitchen. I translated for the others, stumbling briefly over the words al-Amriki.
I knew these words.
They meant “the American.”
I cleared my throat. “Are you the man who bought us?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is the man we’ve been sold to American?”
“Yes,” the new man said. “He is the Sheikh of Aleppo.”
I stood in stunned silence.
Americans were supposed to free us. If America was part of Daesh, how would we ever be rescued?
“Tell the others,” the translator said, “that they need to wash. Sheikh wants everyone clean, even the children.”
As al-Amriki’s translator led the other women and children to the shower room, Navine found a pot and began to boil water for tea. I watched the flame on the gas stove rise. Beside the stove was a sink with running water. Pots and pans dangled from a circular hanger attached to the ceiling.
In a half-opened drawer, I spied spoons but no knives. I put Eivan down on the floor just as al-Amriki’s translator returned carrying a small cutting knife. He pointed to a brown bag of rice and some overripe tomatoes and eggplants sitting on the table. “I will watch while you cut the vegetables,” he said to me. “Sheikh is an important man. You need to wear headscarves in the house because there are many meetings here. You women will make food for the men. But you will not serve it. The food gets left at the door of the guest room.”
“Is this important man really from America?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the translator. “He saw that in America, people have lost their way. He came to us knowing we were the answer. He is an emir, one of the greatest and most beloved. Hamdulilah.” Praise be to God.
My head was swimming with quest
ions I knew better than to ask. Instead, I listened as the translator outlined the house rules.
We were to do all the cooking and cleaning. Eivan was supposed to help, too. If we needed supplies, we were to tell the translator or one of the guards, and they would get them at the market. We were supposed to bathe every day. Before prayers we were to wash our hands and feet. At all times in the house, Navine and I had to wear the hijab. The translator passed me a Quran. “You’re to pray when you hear the Adhan. You must stop what you are doing and pray.”
I stared at the book wide-eyed. It was bound in black leather that was cracked in places.
“What is it? Didn’t they show you in Raqqa how to be a Muslim?”
I shook my head.
“Ahhh, they were keeping you to be a slave. A Muslim can’t have another Muslim as a slave,” the translator explained. “In this house, you will be free. Repeat after me. ‘There is no God but Allah. Muhammad is His messenger.’”
I stared at the man.
“Say it,” he barked. Slowly, I repeated it, knowing full well I was repeating Islamic words. I was saying the Shahada, what people say when they convert to Islam.
“Good,” he said when I was done. “You are a Muslim now.”
“I don’t want to be a Muslim,” I started to say. But before I could get the words out, the kitchen door flew open so fast and hard it banged against the wall.
The man who entered the kitchen spoke choppy Arabic, informing the translator that the women were not yet bathing.
“Go tell them to wash or they will not be fed,” the translator ordered me. I had taken a few steps toward the door when the new man put his hand up for me to stop.
“I am al-Amriki,” he said.
I kept my eyes on the floor. He spoke Arabic from the front of his mouth, not his throat like a native speaker.
The man tilted my face up toward him until our eyes locked.
“What is your name?” al-Amriki asked.
“Badeeah,” I mumbled.
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