He let go of my face, and I looked down again. “You will soon discover that everything you believe about your religion is wrong. That angel of yours, he is Iblis, the devil. You have been misled.”
“Who is this?” al-Amriki asked, tapping the top of Eivan’s head. I flinched. I didn’t want him to touch Eivan.
“My son,” I whispered.
“I have decided to take you as my wife.”
He moved in so close to me I could feel the heat rising from his body.
“We’re slaves,” I stammered. “Not wives.”
“She’s a Muslim now, like you asked, and young,” al-Amriki’s translator cut in. “Maybe sixteen, although, like the others, she lied. She told them in Raqqa she was twenty-eight.” Al-Amriki and the translator laughed.
I began to perspire.
“I am twenty-eight,” I said in a low voice.
“I will sell you to my friend,” al-Amriki continued. I glanced up to see him pointing at Navine. “And the pregnant woman, I’ll sell her to an old man. Once the baby is born, he can take her as his wife.”
A car door slammed outside. I heard gunshots far away, then the distant whirring of a helicopter.
“I’m married,” I said quickly. “You can’t marry me. I’m married to another man.”
The room fell silent. This time I could hear water running in the shower room down the hall and women speaking to each other in Shingali.
“It’s haram,” I said hesitantly, struggling to remember what I knew about Islam. From school and from overhearing Hassan’s friends, I knew haram meant forbidden. It was haram for the Muslim men visiting my father to drink alcohol, which Yazidi do at parties. I also knew it was haram to marry a girl married to another man.
He scowled and then leaned in close. “I’m not stupid like the Mujahdeen in Iraq and Raqqa,” he said in a low voice so no one else could hear. “I can tell your age, and I can tell you’re a virgin. That child isn’t even your son.”
My head started to spin. To steady myself, I silently recited the number that Salwa had given me in Raqqa, 07500851411.
“Come with me,” al-Amriki said, grabbing Eivan and heaving him over his shoulder. “You come with me, too,” he ordered, grabbing my wrist.
The shower room had a bathtub and a sink with a mirror. One wall was covered in beige ceramic tiles. Even though there was mold in the cracks, the tiles twinkled under the light of an ornate ceiling fixture. I could hear dripping from the leaky showerhead.
Al-Amriki yanked my niqab off and ordered me to look at him.
He had wavy, black hair and muddy brown eyes. Thick lips and high cheekbones. His beard ran down the sides of his face and met under his chin. His skin was blotchy white, not brown, as if it had never seen the sun before.
Hassan, when he was canvassing to become a politician, had said that a great leader was not one who dictated and used force but someone who made others believe in themselves. Al-Amriki struck me as someone who made everyone around him afraid.
Chapter Fourteen
A Cave in the Clouds
I was wedged on the kitchen floor with Navine on one side and Eivan on the other. The other women were preparing food and tea for al-Amriki and two male guests, who even at this late hour were no doubt talking about war.
I felt the weight of the entire city of Aleppo on top of me.
Al-Amriki had said he would come for me once his meeting was over. I had a sudden urge to tell Navine about my life, as if I might not be coming back.
“I started school when I was five,” I began. “I followed my sisters Hadil and Majida to the schoolhouse. They wouldn’t let me walk with them at first, saying I would be sent away as soon as the teacher found out my age.” My mind drifted back to Kocho, and my eyes swelled. Navine reached over to take my hand.
“The headmaster, who was a friend of my father’s, studied me and then my identity papers. Finally, he let out a laugh. ‘You can stay and watch,’ he told me. ‘But you can’t pass any subjects. Not until next year.’”
Eivan had pushed his body in close to mine, listening intently.
“I loved learning to read and write,” I said. “At home, at night, I would study and study. Somehow, I managed to convince my teacher to let me write the first test. I got a perfect score, so he allowed me to write another and then another. Most of all, I liked learning Arabic. At home, I would watch Arabic programs on the television to help me study.”
Navine squeezed my hand tightly. “I may need to leave the room for a while,” I murmured to Eivan. “But Navine will look after you. When I was little like you, my toys were made from dirt. Until Adlan made me a doll, I’d mold dolls from mud using leaves for hair, nuts for eyes, flower petals for shaping into mouths. Promise me you will use your imagination and never stop playing. Whenever you need to, you can go somewhere in your mind and you will be safe.”
“Tell me a story?” Eivan pleaded. “Please . . . story.”
“Well, let’s see. Mir Meh was a man who tried to run away from death,” I began. “When he was very young, he left his family in a village much like Kocho to live with a woman named Falak.”
“Mir Meh means prince,” Eivan whispered.
“That’s right. Falak was a witch, and she promised to make Mir Meh immortal, which means he would live forever. Falak and Mir Meh spent a long time living in a cave high up in the Shingal Mountains, close to the clouds, where no one could see them. They were very happy, so happy that Mir Meh didn’t realize how much time had passed. One day, feeling heaviness in his heart, he told Falak he wanted to visit his family. He missed them.”
Tears trickled down my cheeks as I thought of Adlan, wishing she were here to guide me. Eivan didn’t belong here, none of us did, in this place of guns and bombs and men who stank of hatred. I thought of gurgling streams, soft grasses, ferns, mosses, and the butterfly that had led me to safety when I was small.
“Falak let Mir Meh know that it had been five hundred years since he’d left his family, and that even if he went in search of them, he wouldn’t find anyone still alive. Mir Meh wanted to go anyway, so Falak gave him three apples and a horse. ‘Keep these apples,’ she told him. ‘Eat them or save them, but don’t give them away.’ Mir Meh promised Falak he would do as she said.
“Mir Meh arrived at his old village, but there was no one he recognized, just like Falak had warned. A man who introduced himself as Bako greeted him. Bako washed down Mir Meh’s horse and listened to Mir Meh’s story about living in the mountains with a witch who had made him immortal. When Mir Meh mentioned the apples, Bako secretly wondered if they would make him immortal, too. He begged to be given one of the apples to cure his sick brother. Mir Meh, having forgotten Falak’s words and his promise to her, agreed. Within seconds of Bako taking his leave with the apple, Mir Meh and his white stallion weakened.
“Not long after, Bako returned. This time he approached Mir Meh disguised as an old beggar woman and convinced Mir Meh to give him the second apple. As Bako took his leave, Mir Meh and his horse became frail.
“Bako returned a third time, this time disguised as a beautiful young woman. She told Mir Meh her mother was dying from a terrible disease. Mir Meh, still failing to remember Falak’s words, gave his last apple to Bako.
“Shortly after that, Mir Meh and his horse died. And Bako, who had eaten all three apples, became immortal.”
Eivan stayed quiet.
I could hear gunshots in the distance again. If only we could magically pass through the wall, we’d be free, I thought. Someone was fighting these men. If we could find them, we could go home.
I continued talking over the lump in my throat. “Mir Meh was my favorite story when I was your age. Your aunts and I would roll our mats out on the floor and lie close together to keep warm as we listened. Each time Adlan told the story, we would help her come up with a different ending. One version
was that when Mir Meh descended from the top of the mountain, he passed through a dark cloud that made him forget the cave and his promise to Falak. But Falak’s cave in the mountain is always there, and if you close your eyes tightly, you can go there, too. It’s where we’re all from, a place of endless calm and light. We just forget. Don’t forget, Eivan.”
Eivan was sucking his thumb now, his eyelids drooping then bobbing up as he fought against sleep. I wanted to slip into sleep with him. What I wouldn’t do to be back in Kocho under my blanket, Hassan whistling as he fixed the wires on a broken radio, Adlan banging pots as she made kubbeh, and my sisters’ breaths warm on my neck.
The floorboards in the hallway creaked suddenly.
Al-Amriki’s guests were leaving.
A wave of terror moved through me.
“As-salamu alaykum,” I heard al-Amriki say.
“Wa alaykumu s-salam,” said another man.
Arabic was a language that had once reminded me of a love poem. I hated the sound of it now.
“Eivan,” I said quickly, jolting him from his slumber. He wiped his face and stared up at me. “I want you to always remember that place up in the caves. Think of it now: that safe place that is only full of love. Think of your mother and Fallah, your father. Think of all the things that make you happy. This is part of the game I told you about. Remember? When you are calm and still, even when there is a lot of noise around you, you’ll be guided to a safe place. Be calm by remembering your mother’s kisses and your father’s hugs.”
Eivan nodded as al-Amriki pushed open the kitchen door.
Eivan screamed.
Al-Amriki slapped him across the face.
Then he moved toward me. He reached out and grabbed my hair and started dragging me along the floor. I winced from the pain. Then suddenly, I was no longer there. I was floating up toward the clouds, holding Eivan and Adlan’s hands.
I heard someone screaming, and for a fleeting moment, I knew it was me. But she was very far away as I slipped up into the cave of white light and pretty music where Falak granted immortality.
Chapter Fifteen
Jinn
It was after my grandmother died that I began to see jinn.
At first, I told no one.
One of the jinn was an old man. He never allowed me to see his face full-on. He’d always talk to me in profile. He wore black clothes, and he was dark skinned, that much I could tell. He wasn’t very tall. But he wasn’t short either.
There were more of them, younger men, one of which was not much older than a boy.
Jinn, my mother had told me when I was little, were made from fire. They were part spirit, part human, able to possess people and trick them. Jinn live in the shadows in dark, dank places.
Jinn could be either good or bad. The jinn I saw weren’t nice. They would tell me I was dirty. They would order me to laugh or cry on the spot, punching me if I refused their demands. They would scream at me to throw my plate of food to the floor. I did it because, otherwise, they threatened to beat my legs and back with sticks. Adlan got cross with me for breaking so many dishes. The jinn would tail me as I walked to and from school. They’d hide behind trees and throw bruised apples at my legs. They took my shampoo and hid it right when I needed it.
They warned me that if I told anyone about them, I would be sorry.
But one day, when they were right on my heels as I came home from the shops and the old man jinni was blathering about how ugly I was, I decided I’d had enough. I marched right into our house and got my brother Fallah, who was back in Kocho from his police job in Shingal preparing for his wedding. I took him outside, into a grove of Dake’s fruit trees, and pointed to the jinn. They were laughing and pointing back at us.
Fallah scratched his head and then looked at me questioningly. “I can’t see anything, Badeeah,” he said, drawing out the syllables in my name. “Are you sure this isn’t just your imagination? You fell very ill after Dake died. Maybe you’re still suffering from fever?”
The old man jinni hacked the back of my legs with a wet towel. I screamed. But Fallah didn’t see a thing. Instead, he laughed and said I should go see Bahar. Bahar was a local woman who could speak to the spirit world.
Bahar received me in a shed attached to her house. Once inside, I sat on a pillow on her Turkish carpet while she explained that my problem was difficult. Taking away spirits was challenging. I would have to visit her once a week for a month.
My father agreed to pay for my sessions with Bahar. She told me to make squiggly lines and diagrams on paper that she then had me burn. I had to recite phrases in a language I’d never heard before. Bahar said she was connecting to the jinn world through what I was doing, asking the jinn to leave.
In my last session with Bahar, she went into some kind of trance. When she emerged, she looked at me with cloudy eyes.
“Two hundred years ago, a Yazidi man named Mam Isso predicted there would be bad times coming for us,” she said. Her hands shook as she spoke. “He said the whole world would hear about the Yazidi through Kocho. Everyone was surprised he would say such a thing. At that time, because of the genocides, the Kocho villagers had dispersed and were living close to Shingal. I am seeing this man now.” Her words made me shudder.
“I don’t know why,” she continued. “But I hear him now, giving this warning again.”
I was too shocked to believe her. Fallah had to be right. His explanation that jinn weren’t real, that they were just in my imagination, made more sense. From that day on, I never saw the jinn again.
But in Aleppo that morning, just before I came to in the foggy place between sleep and wakefulness, I saw the old man jinni. “We finally have you,” he gloated. “We have you in our lair.”
I sat up with a jolt.
Breathing heavily, I looked around. The jinni had disappeared.
I was lying on a floor with a cream-colored carpet. A rumpled, bloodied white sheet was wrapped around my legs. The room smelled of deodorant and mildew.
I rolled onto my side and threw up. With every heave, pain pulsed through me.
As my body started to relax, I saw the bruises on my wrists and ankles. I touched my cheeks. The skin where al-Amriki had slapped me was rough and raw. I groaned as I tried to stand.
My clothes were strewn around the room. I put them on slowly, breathing deeply, in an attempt to lessen the pain shooting through me.
The door was slightly ajar, and I could hear al-Amriki in another part of the house murmuring his prayers. I wanted to be dressed and back in the kitchen by the time he was done. I wanted to get as far away as possible from this man.
And then I remembered that he had threatened me with a gun. My eyes darted around the room, looking for the weapon. But everything, including the Quran and prayer beads he had laid out the night before, was gone. My heart sank. I’d had a vision where I saw myself grabbing his weapon, filling the chamber with bullets, the way I had seen Hassan fill his, and shooting al-Amriki.
I had always avoided the men’s talk of war and murder. I wanted to be a doctor, to save lives. Now something new and terrible flowed through me: an anger so strong I could kill. I saw myself, for the first time ever, taking someone else’s life. I had opened the door to hate.
I was putting on my headscarf when al-Amriki came to tell me he was leaving. He would be home at nightfall, he said, and he was stationing a guard in the house to keep an eye on us.
I was to teach Navine the Fatiha, the opening of the Quran, he said. At midday, the guard would show us how to pray.
“What about the others?” I asked.
“They’re gone,” he said with a wicked smile.
“What?”
“This morning. I sold them. All of them, except the boy. The remaining girl, Navine, she’s a gift for a friend. She stays until he gets back.”
Al-Amr
iki grunted as he strapped on the ammunition belt he was carrying. His bare feet made slapping sounds on the wooden tiles.
When I heard the front door open and then close, I bent at the waist and vomited again.
“We need to escape,” I told Navine that morning. The house was silent except for an occasional cough from the guard and the dripping of the showerhead. Eivan was playing with his taxi while Navine and I huddled in close together. A few times, I thought I could hear the old man jinni laughing.
Navine shook her head. “He’ll kill us if we try to leave,” she said. “And where would we go? How would we get out of Aleppo? We don’t even know how to find Iraq from here.”
In Raqqa, Navine had been the confident, strong one, the one not afraid of death. Now it was me.
“The translator said to ask if we needed anything, and he or a guard would get it. I’ll say we need things . . .”
“More rice,” Navine suggested, her shoulders lifting. She slid over on her knees to show me the bag. It was half full, but she got up and poured some of the rice down the sink. That way, when the guard looked, the bag would be nearly empty.
“When the guard leaves for the market,” I continued, “we’ll go, too, but in the opposite direction.”
We would have to leave in the clothes we were wearing despite the chill in the air. I wanted to find something warm for Eivan, though. In the room where Navine had slept, I spied a small pink coat and grabbed it. One of the other mothers must have left it behind. Navine discovered two khimars in the closet. The capelike garments would shield us a bit from the cold.
Summoning up my courage, I told the guard what we needed: rice and tomatoes, as well as some shampoo and some medicine for Eivan. The more items he had to collect, the longer he would be gone, I hoped.
We held our breath as the front door and then the wrought-iron gate creaked open and closed again. The guard hadn’t locked either of them. He must have been confident we would be too afraid to escape.
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