Despite the hour, al-Amriki ordered Navine and me to start cleaning. He liked things neat. Even his room, with his few belongings, was always carefully arranged.
But after our khimars were off, al-Amriki changed his mind.
“I want to go to sleep,” he said, nodding at me. “Clean yourself and come with me.”
He ordered Navine to accompany me to bathe while he took another phone call.
I let Navine lift up my dress and peel down my pants. There was no bathtub in the room, just a small shower with white tiles. The shower curtain was a pale yellow, hanging from a thin metal rod that I was sure would never hold my weight. A bright bulb dangled from the ceiling. That’s how I could do it: stick a metal spoon into that socket.
“I need to tell you something,” I said to Navine as the room filled up with steam.
She turned to face me.
“I’m lost without Eivan. I don’t want to live anymore.”
Navine leaned back against the door. “We will find Eivan. You have to trust.”
“No, we won’t.” My face burned. My chest felt tight. “The soldier al-Amriki wants to give you to will be coming soon. As soon as al-Amriki leaves for his next mission, you need to leave me alone long enough for me to die. Then find me, cause a commotion, and while the guard is trying to revive me, you slip out. Don’t ask anyone for help this time. Keep running, hiding, until you are out of this city—”
“I won’t go without you,” she cut in.
“I can’t face my family ever again,” I murmured. “I’ve lost everything.”
Al-Amriki’s voice rose and fell like the waves of the sea. He was in a nearby room talking in English.
“Get in,” Navine said, flicking her head toward the shower. When I was standing under the weak current, the water smelling of rotting garbage, Navine pulled the plastic shower curtain around me.
Usually, whenever al-Amriki took me to his room, he would attack me right away. On this night, though, he wanted to talk. Unlike the last house, this room had a bed with a box spring and mattress. He gestured for me to sit on top of it.
“I was not happy in the United States,” he started, leaning back on his arm. “Something was missing. I traveled to Syria and met people who explained Islam in a way I’d never known before. I went back to my country and started studying the Quran. I found Allah. I decided to return to Syria and become a Muslim. Then I found the way.” After a brief pause, he continued speaking. “My Syrian friends called me to say they were creating a worldwide caliphate, and they asked me to join them. Of course, I did. I wanted to join the Islamic State, and I want everyone to know Allah.”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” I said in Shingali. I smiled as I said it, so al-Amriki would think I was agreeing with him.
“We have so much suffering in the world,” he said, letting the curtain fall and looking around the room dreamily. “I don’t mean just poverty and wars. I mean the hate and greed that have become addictions. Especially in America, people are jealous and godless. I want to represent Allah to the whole world. You understand?”
I ground my teeth. Of course, I understood. I understood he was an egomaniac. “Yes, son of a bitch,” I replied again in Shingali.
Adlan, I wanted to tell him, had said to me once that the greatest misunderstanding is people’s belief that only what they can see is real. “What we imagine, we create,” she had told me. “We stop giving birth to beauty when we believe only the eyes have vision.” She had pointed a spot on her forehead, the spot where she said the mystics heard their celestial sounds. “What’s in there is real. That’s the place where love enters. If you create your world from that place, you create happiness.”
“. . . the poor getting poorer, the rich and powerful doing whatever they want,” al-Amriki was saying. “I hate my president.” He clenched his fists. “President Obama. If I ever got the chance, I would behead him. I hate America, and I hate everything American. Our leaders lie through their teeth, and the people just buy it.”
A fury bubbling deep inside me started to rise. I didn’t care that the American army might still be looking for us or that the helicopters and airplanes I heard in the distance might be them trying to end this war. No. I was angry at America: a nation that had so much but still created animals like al-Amriki.
“Who is the crazy one?” I asked al-Amriki in Shingali.
“Could you speak in Arabic?” he said, calmly for once.
I switched to Arabic. “Now that you are here, you have a choice not to do what you are doing. You have a choice not to oppress others. You have a choice not to kill people weaker than you. You have a choice to not take girls and women against their will.”
“We didn’t destroy your village,” he said defensively. “That was Daesh in Iraq.”
I looked at him straight on, something I had never done before, and continued. “We had a Yazidi female leader, Mayan Khatun, who realized that our oppression at the hands of our enemies had led us to oppress our own families. The regent said the Yazidi could not advance until the family and the balance of respect between males and females was restored. I don’t know a lot about Islam, but I am sure Allah is about love and respect, too. You’ve got it wrong.”
Al-Amriki breathed heavily. “Who are you? A spy? Why are you saying such things?”
I was sure he was going to beat me for talking back. But I didn’t look away or brace myself. For the first time with him, I experienced my power. Under my gaze, he seemed to cower, and I saw him as a lost little boy. What al-Amriki didn’t know was that I now had control. I didn’t care whether I lived or died.
There was a knock on the front door followed by a male voice calling, “Sheikh.”
Al-Amriki jumped up and left the room.
Moments later, he called out for me.
Halfway down the corridor, I stopped. I smelled peppermint and then caramel. I heard the unmistakable sound of crinkling candy wrappers.
My breathing grew labored, and my heart fluttered.
“Mama,” I heard a soft voice call. “Mama?”
I rushed to the front hallway to see Eivan standing beside al-Amriki. His hands were full of candies, and his mouth was covered in chocolate.
“I brought him back for you,” al-Amriki said.
Eivan ran to me, touching my face with his sticky hands.
Light had returned to my darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Reunion
“A horrible witch. Not like Falak in the story,” Eivan was telling me. “This witch made me sweep her house and all of outside.”
Al-Amriki had sold him to a fat old woman who treated him like a slave, according to Eivan.
It was the middle of the night. Al-Amriki had allowed me to sleep with Eivan in Navine’s room. Tomorrow I would have to go back to him.
Navine was sound asleep. The three of us were in a child’s bed—barely enough space for one person—on a foam mattress and with one rough wool blanket for us all to share. Our bodies molded together kept us warm.
The house was quiet except for the drip, drip of water from the leaky showerhead and Eivan recounting his tale. “She had black warts on her face and smelled like she never bathed. I had to get a bucket of water and soap and scrub the stones.”
“What did you eat?” I asked. After the initial shock of having Eivan returned, I noticed that he had shrunk. His pants slipped down when he walked. His rib cage jutted out underneath skin that was yellow from the lack of vitamins and proper nutrition. Even his chubby cheeks had wilted.
“She gave me an onion to eat,” he said, pretending to spit. “She hit me when I was hungry and asked for more.”
I winced. I was grateful there was no light. I didn’t want Eivan to see the horror on my face.
“But when the evil witch hit me, I didn’t cry,” Eivan said with pride.
I bit the flesh inside my cheek to stop myself from weeping. “I wasn’t going to be like Mir Meh. I remembered you and Mama,” he whispered in my ear.
Once he finally fell asleep, I lay on my back reciting the numbers Salwa had given me in my head: the phone number for our cousin Ameen.
I did everything I had promised al-Amriki I would do if he returned Eivan. I made his meals. I helped Navine clean. When al-Amriki was not at home, I continued to read the Quran. As I mulled over various passages, the anger inside me grew stronger. Al-Amriki had a very narrow reading of his holy book. He picked only the verses, sometimes parts of verses, that supported his selfish needs. I said nothing to him, fearing he would take Eivan again. But words were steaming inside me, ready to explode.
Day by day, the bombs and whirring helicopters crept closer. War was coming to us. I didn’t need to listen in on al-Amriki and his soldiers to know that.
One evening, after the men visiting him had left the house, al-Amriki made me come and sit beside him.
His laptop computer was open on his lap. On the screen was the blonde woman.
I kept my eyes lowered, having no idea how one wife was supposed to treat another, if she was indeed his wife. I’d never spoken to a Western woman before.
The blonde woman said something in English.
“Look at her,” Al-Amriki snapped at me.
I looked up. The woman was speaking to me, it seemed, but I couldn’t understand her. She wasn’t wearing a head covering, and her hair fell straight and thin to her shoulders. She had a long, oval face with high cheekbones, but she wasn’t beautiful. There was something severe about her. Even though she parted her thin lips in a smile, I couldn’t help but shudder, feeling she was full of hate.
I heard a baby cooing in the background. The woman shifted her body, disappeared from the screen, and then reappeared with a baby boy in her arms. He was maybe a year old.
The child had a shiny, bald head and pink, glowing skin. The woman poked her head out from behind the child and said more words in English as the boy blew air bubbles.
I started to knot the bottom of my dress and then untie it again. We were rotting away here, but this boy wasn’t just healthy, he was robust.
Al-Amriki had enslaved a child only a few years older than his own, I wanted to scream to this woman. Did she know that? Did she even care? What kind of woman was she?
Then, they were gone. The electricity in the house flickered on and off until it finally went out altogether.
That night, al-Amriki told me he had to go to Kobani, in northern Syria, for several days. There were problems, I could hear it in his voice, maybe more than he’d experienced before. Kobani, which al-Amriki boasted belonged to Daesh, was under attack. He would be leaving in the morning. He said that when he returned, he would take Navine as his second wife. His friend was not coming after all.
I protested on Navine’s behalf, saying that al-Amriki needed a slave, a cook, and a cleaner. He already had two wives. “I am your main wife,” I said to him. “I’m with you all the time. I won’t let you take another wife. It’s not right.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “If you stay here with me, we’ll have a nice life. I won’t sell you to anyone else.”
What he didn’t know was that I would never allow Navine to be hurt the way I was. I would find a way to kill him before it came to that.
“You’ve proven that I can trust you,” he continued. “I need all my guards to fight. I will lock you in the house with enough food when I go, but you’ll be alone.”
A wave of excitement pulsed through me. This time, I would find a phone and call Ameen. I would not wait for someone from Aleppo to help me.
“Besides,” he said, his voice drifting into sleep, “you won’t escape. I’ve heard that Yazidi girls like you, who have been married to Daesh men, are killed when they return to their people. Your own people don’t want you back.”
My pulse quickened. A heavy weight bore down on me. “What?”
“Yazidi men are killing their women,” he said. “Fathers are killing their own daughters.”
“I don’t understand.”
Al-Amriki was asleep. But my own eyes would not shut.
All that night, my thoughts tumbled and crashed into each another. I knew that the Yazidi were strict with their daughters. A few girls had even been murdered for falling in love with non-Yazidi boys. When I asked my mother why, she said the Yazidi control of girls was a dark shadow.
“Badeeah, our evolution is like an ocean tide. We progress, then retreat into our fears. This is what Mayan Khatun witnessed when the Yazidi were under Ottoman control. Men, alienated from themselves, living in fear and anger, in turn oppress those closest to them. Cities, cultures, religions, and people are the same. Until we’re whole, we move backward and forward.”
What if al-Amriki was telling the truth? What if our brothers and fathers, after years of being held down by Saddam Hussein and now Daesh, were killing us? What if I managed to make it back to Iraq with Eivan only to face my own death?
Chapter Nineteen
Escape
“Let’s go now,” Navine urged, snapping her fingers as I wiped Eivan’s face with the back of my sleeve.
Before leaving for the battle in Kobani, one of the house guards had fetched enough food for us from the market for three days. Eivan was shoving the rice I’d mashed with roasted tomatoes and eggplant into his mouth. When his plate was licked clean, he begged for more.
“You can’t eat too much,” I explained, “or you’ll get sick. I know you’re starving, Eivan.” I crouched down beside him. “But this is our chance to escape. You’ve been so good with our games so far. Can you be quiet for a little longer and just follow my orders?”
Eivan nodded.
“Go to the front of the house with Navine,” I said, forcing a smile as I helped him into the pink coat. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I grabbed my khimar, but instead of swaddling my body in it, I headed to al-Amriki’s room. My heart racing, I ran to the secret cupboard where he sometimes locked away his food, radios, guns, and, I hoped, his maps. It was locked. I kicked the door. I threw a chair against it over and over again, but the wood would not splinter. Frantically, I began pulling apart the cushions in the guest room. Nothing. I ran back to his bedroom and pulled apart his bedding, hurling it across the room. No maps, but underneath the mattress, I found his phone, the fancy one that looked like a small television.
I hurried to the front of the house. “How do you use this?” I asked, thrusting the phone toward Navine.
We punched buttons on the screen. Some pictures of al-Amriki’s American wife and son popped up. But we couldn’t get it to work as a telephone. The only phones we’d ever used were Nokias. Frustrated, I slipped the phone into my pocket. If we managed to get out of Aleppo, I could give it to the Peshmerga or the American army. Maybe al-Amriki also stored important Daesh information on it.
I put a niqab on and wrapped the khimar around me. “Okay, let’s go. We’ll have to find another phone.”
Navine had discovered a hammer buried under the cleaning supplies in the kitchen. She pounded at the lock on the front door until eventually it yielded. She turned the knob, and together the three of us stepped outside.
My eyes squinted against the winter sun. It was a bright, cloudless day. I could see my breath in the air.
I squeezed Eivan’s hand tight to steady my nerves.
We moved at a rapid pace down the street, hoping we looked like Muslim wives out shopping. We rounded one corner and then another, unsure of where we were going.
I looked down at Eivan. I could tell from his tense expression that he was scared, but he was doing what I had instructed him to do. His bravery touched me.
I trembled as we fell in behind a woman carrying a black plastic shopping bag.
; Soon I heard the din of a market: buyers and sellers heckling over prices, people shouting, and babies crying.
Despite the cool weather, I was perspiring under the weight of the khimar by the time we made it to the market. I knew we would be punished severely if we were discovered escaping a second time. I might even face the death penalty for lying under oath on the Quran.
“Over there,” Navine said, spinning my body around. I peered through the small crowd of shoppers, mostly other women in black khimars.
A nearby display case held electronic devices, including fancy cell phones like al-Amriki’s.
Navine pulled me toward the shop.
The older man behind the counter had a well-weathered face, and his black beard was short, not long like those of the Daesh men.
“What can I do for you?” the man asked. His voice was husky, as if he’d spent a lifetime smoking. Fighting every instinct to run away, I glanced at the display. I wondered if I should give him al-Amriki’s phone and ask him how to use it. Just as I was about to do so, I spied Nokia phones sitting in a bowl on top of the display case.
I swallowed. “We just need to make one call, on one of these,” I said to the man, pointing to the Nokia phones.
The man did not reply. His silence felt like a knife stabbing me. He was going to call Daesh and send us back to al-Amriki; I was sure of it. The man’s slender hands shook as he reached into the front pocket of his apron.
I kept talking. “My father left for Dayr Hafir,” I said. “He forgot to give my sister and me money for food. I need to call a relative to give us money.” As I spoke, I ran Ameen’s phone number over and over again in my head so I wouldn’t forget it. “I can’t pay you, not now,” I told the man. “But if you can let us make this call, I will bring you some money. Please help us.”
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