A Cave in the Clouds

by Badeeah Hassan Ahmed

  Quickly, Navine and I wrapped the khimars around us. At the front door, we found our shoes and I put the pink coat on Eivan.

  Outside, the cool air hit me hard. Autumn was well underway. Back in Kocho, we’d have been met with the scent of smoky chimney fires, wet leaves, and the rich aromas of cinnamon and roasted fruits from Adlan’s jam making.

  I cautiously poked my head out of the gate and caught sight of the guard disappearing into a store. I pulled Navine and Eivan in the opposite direction toward the building where I had seen the woman on the balcony.

  My heart beat fast as we ran down an alleyway.

  With every step, pain from al-Amriki’s assault spiked through me. But we had to press on. This might be our only chance to get away.

  As we rounded a bend, I stopped dead in my tracks, pulling Navine and Eivan in behind me.

  A woman was swaying down the alley ahead of us. She carried a large tray covered in tea towels, and I could smell fresh-baked bread and savory spices. She didn’t notice us at first, but when she realized she was no longer alone, she turned, looking startled, and asked us what we wanted.

  My mouth was dry, and I fumbled to find the words. Before I could speak, a door slid open and a tall, older man in a dishdasha emerged.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. The woman slipped in behind him and disappeared.

  “We need a hospital,” I managed to get out.

  “Why?” he said with a snarl.

  My heart raced, and my head spun. The man crossed his arms and tapped his foot.

  “My sister is pregnant,” I finally spluttered. “She needs a woman to help as she’s in pain.” I thought hard. “Her husband is gone to Dayr Hafir. There is something wrong with the baby.”

  The woman who had been carrying the food reappeared. Up close, her face looked younger than her humped frame would suggest. Her eyes were lined in dark kohl that made them look hauntingly yellow, like snakeskins.

  “Take care of these two,” the man hissed at her.

  The woman glared at us before grumbling that we should follow her.

  “You’re having a baby?” she asked Navine as we moved back down the road toward al-Amriki’s house. Suddenly, I was very afraid.

  “Yes,” I replied. “My sister is so distressed she can’t speak.”

  “We need to get off the street,” the woman said, speeding up. “The Adhan will sound soon. You can’t be outside during prayers.”

  We were now back on the main road. I wrapped the khimar around my face so that only my eyes were showing and nudged Navine to do the same.

  “They round up anyone who is on the streets during prayers and imprison and torture them. One time, a woman went out without her khimar. Daesh killed her husband and put her in prison,” the woman elaborated. “We can’t go to the hospital until prayers are finished.”

  The woman turned into a courtyard, and the house she led us into was low, bungalow style, with a partial second floor in the back. The place was eerily quiet.

  When the woman took off her khimar and niqab, her silky dark hair reminded me of Hadil’s and Majida’s. She gestured for Navine and me to remove our outer clothes as well.

  I took a deep breath. “Please,” I said, “you need to help us. Just lend us a phone . . . anything . . . to get us out of here. We will give you money, lots of it.”

  The woman’s eyes grew wide. “She’s not pregnant, then?” She pointed at Navine.

  I shook my head. “We’ve been kidnapped.” I reached out and clasped her arm. “We were taken from our village in Iraq. Our mothers and fathers are looking for us. We have to go home. Whatever you want, I will find a way to reward you.”

  The woman spoke sharply. “That building where the man talked to you? It’s Daesh’s office. You don’t know what you are asking me!”

  I fell to my knees. “Please,” I begged. “You’re a woman. You must understand.” Eivan, seeing my distress, began to whimper. He scrambled out of Navine’s arms and threw himself against me.

  The woman motioned for me to stand up. “You need to leave when prayers are over,” she said, looking away.

  I started to sob. The woman turned and went into another room where we could hear her saying her prayers.

  When she returned, she put on her khimar and niqab set. “Wait here,” she said, her voice sounding much kinder. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  For half an hour, I paced, Eivan on my heels, Navine wringing her hands and jumping at every sound from outside.

  When we finally heard a key in the lock, all three of us stood up straight. The floor underneath us fell away as al-Amriki entered the room. I heard the old man jinni laughing again. We were trapped.

  Al-Amriki drove us to a building a few miles away. He was taking us to the courthouse, he said, where judges would decide whether we should be sent to prison or executed.

  Behind a long table in a big room sat three men. The bearded man in the middle, who seemed to be in charge, asked over and over again in Arabic why we had run away. He quoted the hadith—instructions from the prophet Muhammad—on the role of women obeying their husbands, including not leaving the house without the man’s permission.

  “I thought my son was very ill. It was an emergency. I had no choice but to leave the house,” I pleaded. “That woman is the liar! I wanted a hospital for my son.”

  Navine joined in, speaking in Shingali. The main judge frowned. Finally, he raised his large hands, bellowed for Navine to stop talking, and ordered me to translate what she had said. I knew some Islamic law from school. “In the Quran, is it not permissible for a wife to leave her house without her husband’s consent if it is an emergency? She is telling you that my son is sick. We were looking for medicine.”

  The judge motioned for a small, thin man to approach me. In his hand, he held a leather-bound copy of the Quran. “Hold your right hand on the Quran and say three times that you were not running away,” the main judge told me.

  I stared at the book, unable to move. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see al-Amriki lean forward, his piercing eyes following my every move.

  I swallowed hard. Guilt moved through me. It was one thing to tell small lies to save us. This would be lying to God. I thought of Lalish and our temples, our gentle faith that encourages tolerance and love, and the mysticism that moves through me—but that has been the source of our persecution for centuries. I was proud to be Yazidi. I was about to answer that I would never abandon my faith when I heard my mother’s voice. “Do it. If you don’t, you might lose Eivan.” My mother was right. The Islam this man and the other Daesh jihadis practiced was no religion in my books. I was sure Allah would forgive me.

  “Swear on the Quran you were not running away,” the main judge said again in a loud voice.

  The spindly man held the Quran up in front of me. I put my right hand on the book. “I swear by Allah, I was not running away,” I said. “I was asking the woman for help to find medicine and for a hospital for my son.”

  The judge may have believed me, but al-Amriki didn’t. Back at his house, he beat Navine and me. He kicked us both in the rib cage. Slapped our cheeks. Spat in our faces.

  When he finally left the house, he locked us inside with a guard and took a squealing Eivan with him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Death

  When al-Amriki returned, he announced that he had sold Eivan.

  I wailed as if I were at a funeral, rolling on the kitchen floor and digging my nails into my legs until I bled. I pulled out chunks of my hair.

  But al-Amriki didn’t care.

  That night, when he ordered me to bathe before going to his room, I clutched his legs tight. “Please,” I begged. “Please bring my son back. I will do whatever you say. I will be your bride forever.”

  “You can fool the judge, but you can’t fool me,” al-Amriki
snarled.

  I let go of him and leapt to my feet. I started bowing, raising my arms and lowering them the way Daesh did in Muslim prayer. As I did so, I recalled aloud some things I knew from overhearing the Muslim men who visited my father: “Allah does not love the oppressor. You holding us here is like oppression. Allah will be angry with you.”

  Al-Amriki just stared at me.

  “As I am your wife, my son and any children I have and any nieces or nephews are part of the family, too.”

  Al-Amriki shook his head and pushed me away from him. “In ten minutes, I will watch you bathe. Ten minutes. Be in the shower room.”

  I listened as a closet door opened in the hallway and al-Amriki rummaged around. He returned to the kitchen with some goat meat, enough for one person. He ordered Navine to start cooking it. When he was done with me, he said, he would eat.

  “There is something you can do,” he said to me as he turned to leave.

  “Anything to get my son back,” I promised. “Anything you ask.”

  “Start praying,” he grunted. “Pray tonight. And tomor­row, five times a day. And teach her,” he said, waving a hand at Navine. “You will soon learn that Islam is the way. Yours is a false God.”

  The days that followed passed slowly, like melting ice. Navine did all the cooking because I had no energy to help. I sat silently, my back up against the wall.

  I heard the voices of men coming and going as they met with al-Amriki. Navine made them their Lipton tea and served them nuts, figs, and candies that al-Amriki hid in another part of the house.

  When the sound of the Adhan from a nearby mosque floated through the kitchen, I stood, motioning for Navine to follow me. As I recited the Muslim prayers, I thought about Khatuna Fakhra. I wanted to reach out to her, but I felt she had abandoned me. I had been tricked at Raqqa when I was reunited with Eivan. Now Eivan was gone for good. I had failed him. I had failed my family.

  I thought of ways to kill myself. Once, in Kocho, a young man had shown up at the doctor’s with a wound to his neck. The man had bled out before the doctor could see him. If I could hang onto a sharp knife after the cooking was done, I could stab myself. But a guard always collected the knife once Navine was through with it.

  I fingered the hijab I wore except when I was alone with al-Amriki. Maybe I could hang myself from the shower curtain rod. One afternoon, while al-Amriki was away, I hurried to the shower room, but Navine was right behind me. She had guessed that I wanted to harm myself, and she wasn’t going to give me the chance.

  I seemed trapped in a time that was bleak and endless.

  It was November, I estimated, maybe December. That meant we’d been in captivity for nearly four months.

  I stopped fighting al-Amriki. Whenever he wanted me, I went without a struggle. Whenever I mentioned Eivan’s name, though, al-Amriki insisted he had been sold.

  At Navine’s urging, I resumed helping her make food for the men who visited. As I placed the trays by the door of the guest room, I tried to overhear their conversations.

  One time, I heard the men speaking about new recruits. Apparently, ten foreigners—a few from Germany, some from Great Britain—had just arrived in Aleppo and they were being interrogated to make sure they were not Western spies.

  One of the men said the foreigners should be used to make propaganda videos to attract more Western Muslims to become part of the nation of Islam.

  “You should be on camera, too,” I heard the man say to al-Amriki. I could tell from his voice that the man was young, maybe just a teenager.

  Al-Amriki was his usual belligerent self, yelling that he would never be photographed. Another man agreed, asserting that al-Amriki was too high up to have his picture taken, that it would draw the attention of the Americans, who would then want to hunt him down.

  The following day, the men left the door to the room wide open. I could see them looking at a map pinned up on the wall. Al-Amriki held a pointing stick, and he was issuing instructions. When he was finished, he took the map down and tucked it in the sofa.

  One afternoon, when al-Amriki was gone, I pulled the map out from its hiding place. But I was too afraid to open it because a guard was nearby.

  On other days, a Daesh soldier would arrive with a long box. Al-Amriki would open the box and pull out a weapon. Usually, they were AK-47s, but sometimes they were shoulder-held missiles. Every day, it seemed, a new weapon was delivered for our captor to examine and explain to the others. I gathered from the conversations that it was his decision whether or not Daesh would invest in the weapon.

  Eavesdropping on the men gave me something to do. I had nothing left inside me with Eivan gone. I had no hope of leaving this city, where even the women had been brainwashed to abuse other women and girls. I fought crippling fatigue and increasing thoughts of suicide. But I had to listen because I had fleeting thoughts of finding a way to tell the Peshmerga or the Americans what Daesh was doing. If I could get them the map somehow, my death would be worth it.

  I also memorized passages from the Quran to use on al-Amriki. “Allah is ever pardoning and all powerful,” I said to him one night. “If Allah can forgive, so can you. Please forgive me and bring Eivan back.”

  Al-Amriki didn’t sleep much. He’d pace and talk on his phone and his computer, speaking loudly as if the whole world were awake with him. I would lie motionless after his abuse and listen to his conversations. Often, I’d hear a woman’s voice on the other end. A few times, when he thought I was sleeping, al-Amriki set up his computer in the corner of the room. Then I could see her, the woman he spoke to. Her hair was the color of straw. She sometimes wore a headscarf, but it was tied loosely, so strands of her hair fell onto her face.

  The way he spoke to her was gentle and soft, like she was his real wife.

  I was heartsick. What little I knew about love and marriage was now muddled with additional wives and wives that were spoils of war. Some Yazidi men had more than one wife. But my father and older brothers had shown me, through their love for my mother and their wives, what a marriage was supposed to be. Their marriages were built on respect, loyalty, kindness, and an honoring of each other’s strengths. Marriage in my culture was a bond celebrated with rituals and a ceremony, not just a man saying, “I take you as my wife.”

  On the night of day nine without Eivan, some Daesh soldiers arrived to tell al-Amriki that we had to leave for another location. As I set out the trays of tea, Turkish pastries, olives, and cheese, I overheard that our move would be at midnight. “In the dead of the night, when nothing moves,” said one of the men in a deep squawk.

  Other voices explained that airplanes were coming.

  Despite the hope that some army might be looking for us, a dark shadow passed over me. Moving meant even if we could escape, I would never be able to find Eivan. At least from this house, I had a starting point.

  Back in the kitchen, I studied the electrical socket the fridge was plugged into. It gave me an idea. I decided I’d start washing dishes at the time I knew the men would want refills of their tea. I’d ask Navine to serve them. With her gone, even if only for a few seconds, I’d stick a piece of cutlery into the socket with my wet fingers.

  But on that evening, a guard didn’t come to say the men wanted refills. Instead, he ordered us to help al-Amriki pack. We couldn’t wait until midnight to leave, he said. Dusk had cloaked the city. We had to go now.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Houses

  I was ordered to put al-Amriki’s clothes in boxes while he packed his computers. He had a stash of phones, too, along with radios, guns, and ammunition that two guards loaded into a waiting truck. When we were ready to go, I begged al-Amriki to let me take one item: the pink little girl’s coat. It reminded me of Eivan. It was my last piece of him.

  We got into a minivan, with al-Amriki climbing into the front seat beside the driver. Navine and I
sat together behind the men, clutching each other’s hands under our khimars.

  Behind and in front of us were pickup trucks filled with weapons and heavily armed soldiers.

  As we crept through Aleppo’s haunted streets, I could see the silhouettes of unlit apartment buildings. Aleppo, like Kocho, seemed to have power for only a few hours a day. Light from candles or kerosene lamps flickered from some of the windows.

  Overhead, the sky was clear. There were occasional flashes of light, which I knew must come from bombs or heavy fighting in another part of the city.

  The house we headed to was not far away. The courtyard was filled with potholes and weeds. The front door, made of flimsy wood, had a dent that looked as if it had been made by a fist.

  I choked on the air inside the house: stale but with an overlay of something else. Like a dead dog. I breathed into my hijab.

  Al-Amriki was shaking his head and talking wildly in English to another Daesh man. I didn’t need to know English to understand the house was no good. A few Arabic words were thrown around, too: the house smelled of almawt: “death.” It was muqassis: “disgusting.” It dawned on me that Daesh was taking over the homes of dead people or refugees who had fled.

  Back in the car, al-Amriki rolled the back windows down partway so that we could breathe in the fresher night air. We didn’t drive off right away.

  “Important man . . . the house is for the Sheikh of Aleppo,” the guard in the driver’s seat yelled into his phone.

  We drove farther this time along streets lined with tall, ornate buildings. They, too, were dark, creeping with ghosts that made my skin crawl.

  As we passed abandoned churches and mosques, I gazed at the buildings. For some strange reason, they comforted me. The crosses and minarets on top were like beacons, reminding all of us that Aleppo was better than its Daesh invaders. For the first time since Eivan was taken, I felt a stirring of hope.

  Finally, the driver stopped in front of a two-story house. From the outside, it looked like a small, stone palace. Inside, though, the paint was peeling, the ceramic tiles were cracked, and the ceiling was falling down in places. This was a house of war, I could see. In the main room, the scent of soldiers still lingered. In the kitchen, ashtrays overflowed with cigarette butts. Tea glasses had been abandoned, some half full. Pots with burnt rice stuck to them had been left in the sink.