If the man pulled out a gun, I told myself, I would step in front of Navine and Eivan to take the bullet. But when his shaky hand emerged from his apron pocket, he was holding a cell phone.
“Tell me the number,” he said, his eyes darting around the market. I realized then that he was just as afraid as we were.
As I whispered the number, he punched it into his phone. At the market stall beside us, a younger man, short and stocky, hawked lemons, oranges, and pomegranate juice.
“Here,” the older man said. I took the cell phone and a man’s voice came through the receiver.
“Who is this?” the voice asked in Shingali.
Tears fell, soaking my khimar.
“Badeeah Hassan Ahmed,” I said.
“Where are you?” he asked, breathing hard on the other end of the line. I didn’t need to tell him why I was calling. He already knew.
“Aleppo.”
“But where?”
Life drained out of me. I hadn’t thought about that. I didn’t know the address.
I looked up at the market seller. “Please,” I stammered, “my sister, my son . . . we’re from Turkey. I don’t know the address where we’re staying, and I need to give it to my relative so he can bring us money. Can you help?”
Another thick silence moved between us, drowning out the sounds of the market. For sure, I thought, this time we were dead.
“Tell the person you will call them back,” the seller finally said.
I did what he asked. I had no choice.
“Take me to where you’re staying,” he said as he slipped on a jacket.
I couldn’t breathe. What if this was a trap? What if this man knew al-Amriki? I suddenly thought I was going to pass out.
I felt Eivan tugging on my dress and glanced down into his sparkling eyes. I had to risk death to get him and Navine out of Aleppo.
“Follow me,” I said to the market seller. “Follow me.”
Out on the street again, I jumped at the sound of a car engine backfiring.
As we turned the corner and al-Amriki’s house came into view, I pulled Eivan in close to me.
When we were in front of the house, I pointed. “Here,” I told the market seller.
The man took out his phone and redialed Ameen’s number. After a short pause, he spoke the address of the house into the receiver, then passed me the phone.
“In a few hours,” I heard Ameen say. My eyes remained glued to the market seller. I was searching for any sign that he was about to betray us. But he was watching a group of young men who were making their way toward us.
“Yes,” I told my cousin. “In a few hours . . . what?”
“Get off the phone now,” the market seller snapped at me.
“Someone named Nezar will come for you,” Ameen said. “The password is his name. Do not open the door to anyone but him. Nezar is a human smuggler. He will get you out of Syria.”
“Go inside the house,” the market seller said sharply, his eyes still on the approaching youth. “It’s not safe for you out here.”
I hung up and gave the phone back.
“Thank you,” I said to the market seller. “As-salamu alaykum.” I bowed, then turned toward the house.
“Wait a minute,” the seller said. He motioned for me to draw near. “You don’t know me,” he said in a low voice. “If you’re caught, we never met. Promise me that?”
I nodded.
“And one other thing,” he said, before waving me off. “These men who are imprisoning you, they’re not Islam. When you’re free, remember that we’re still trapped in this city with them.”
As soon as we stepped through the front door, I smelled al-Amriki. His sweat. His odor.
My body seized.
Navine came up behind me, loosened my khimar, and smoothed down my hair.
“He’s not here,” she reassured me, taking my hand and leading me to the kitchen. As she got me a drink of water, I slipped down onto the floor beside Eivan, who had dug out his toy taxi from its hiding place in a cupboard.
“Let me tell you another story,” I said, struggling to stay calm as Eivan rolled the toy up my foot and down my leg.
“Once upon a time, there was a boy named Tasmasp who fell into a well after getting drowsy from eating too much honey. When he awoke at the bottom of the well, he was surrounded by snakes. One snake, who was named Samaran, had the head of a woman but the body of a reptile. Samaran took Tasmasp to her home deep under the ground, where she fed him dolma and kubbeh, all the foods he loved to eat.”
Eivan smiled. He liked those foods, too.
“Samaran was very wise, and she told the boy stories about the history of humankind,” I continued. “Then one day, she announced she had no more stories to tell. The young boy, now bored, wished to return to his parents. Samaran released him on one condition. He could not tell anyone where she lived. The boy agreed.
“Tasmasp grew into a man, and he kept his secret for many years. Then one day, the king of his country fell ill. The king called for Tasmasp and repeated a legend he had heard. If the king acquired the skin of Samaran, he would survive his illness and inherit all her wisdom. The king knew the boy had met Samaran, and he demanded to know where she could be found.”
The Adhan sounded, announcing midday prayer.
“I’ll tell you the ending when we reach Kocho,” I said, stroking Eivan’s forehead. “Because soon all of this will be over.”
“Wake up! Wake up!” I heard a voice say. I opened my eyes to see Navine. With a beaming smile, she passed me my khimar. “He’s here,” she said. “Your cousin’s friend.”
“How long did I sleep?” I asked.
“Nearly two hours,” Navine said. “I didn’t want to wake you. I knew you’d just be nervous waiting.”
“Where’s the man?”
“In the room where al-Amriki meets the other soldiers.”
In the guest room, I faced a young man with a mustache dressed in a brown jacket and jeans. When he looked up at me, my knees buckled. He had big eyes that reminded me of my brother Fallah.
“Hello,” he said in Shingali. “I’m Nezar.”
Nezar explained that we needed to walk out of the suburb where Daesh was keeping us toward east Aleppo, where he had parked his vehicle. We would pretend to be a Muslim family. We’d have to keep a brisk pace to get there before Asr, afternoon prayers.
Nezar’s movements were hurried as he opened the front door. He checked in both directions, then waved us out onto the street. “Walk behind me,” he ordered.
With every step, I cringed, expecting to be captured. With every step, I envisioned al-Amriki pulling up beside us in a white SUV. He’d shoot Nezar and take Eivan away, maybe this time making him one of their suicide bombers. Navine and I would surely be sentenced to death.
We passed khimar- and niqab-clad women on their way to visit friends, go to the bazaars, or run errands. Men smoked cigarettes. No one seemed to look our way.
At one point, a car horn blared, followed by men yelling and singing Daesh war songs. I glanced back to see a white Daesh truck creeping along behind us.
We were not going to make it.
We had been discovered.
Chapter Twenty
Return to Iraq
At the sound of gunshots, I braced myself.
The white truck was now beside us.
I kept my eyes lowered.
Men were shouting and firing their assault rifles into the air.
The truck moved in front of us. I swallowed hard as bile filled my throat.
And the truck moved away, turning off the road.
“Just some Daesh thugs. They’re showing off,” Nezar said over his shoulder when they were gone. But I could hear in his voice he had been afraid, too.
As we continued
on, I was shocked at the carnage around us: bombed-out buildings, boulder-sized chunks of cement. East Aleppo was the war zone, ground zero. The roads were full of rubble, carcasses of dead animals, children’s toys, and women’s scarves. Pages of discarded books flapped in the breeze. Nezar walked us carefully around a Daesh checkpoint monitored by several guards. I gritted my teeth, preparing to be discovered, but no one noticed us. The Daesh soldiers were too busy interrogating a family while war songs played from a car stereo.
An acrid smoke hung low around us: the charcoal remains of a once beautiful city.
The Adhan announcing Asr blanketed the street just as we reached Nezar’s car, a beat-up old black sedan he had parked on a side street.
Once we were settled in the car and driving, Nezar explained that we’d be traveling to a small outlying city, Manbij, about an hour and a half away.
We drove along grimy streets masked in soot. Dusk fell quickly at this time of year. But it was still light enough to see that every second house had been destroyed. Many of the houses still standing had been abandoned. Nezar explained that their former inhabitants had fled the country as refugees.
The civil war involved many combatants, Daesh being just one of them. “A war within a war,” Nezar called it. The Arab Spring movement that had swept North Africa and the Middle East, toppling the Tunisian and Egyptian governments, had reached Syria in 2011. Protesters wanted more economic freedoms and liberties. But Syrian president Bashar al-Assad attempted to quash the revolt, killing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Defectors from the Syrian military announced a new military, the Free Syrian Army, aimed at toppling al-Assad’s dictatorship. Minority groups continued to support al-Assad, while the country’s Sunni Muslims sought his overthrow. Factions upon factions fought each other, Nezar told us, some with the added support of foreign governments, including the United States and Russia.
It was eerily dark when we reached Manbij, a city that, like Aleppo, had housed people from many religions and cultures: Kurds, Christians, Arabs, and people who followed the mystical Islam, Sufism. Now, the city seemed deserted. “We all lived peacefully,” Nezar said, “until this bloody war. The prophet Muhammad entrusted his followers with neighbors of all faiths, and that included people not of the book.”
We entered the apartment Nezar shared with his two sisters and his father. Framed pictures of Quranic verses covered the walls. One showed hands belonging to people of different skin colors linked together above a Quranic verse: Good and evil deeds are not equal. Repel evil with what is better: then you will see that one who was once your enemy has become your dearest friend.
“We’re Muslim. But if you were confused by my Shingali, it’s because my family were originally Yazidi,” Nezar clarified.
We were shown to a guest room, where Nezar’s sisters served us black tea and vanilla biscuits.
But I couldn’t eat or drink.
One of Nezar’s sisters asked if we wanted to bathe.
Navine nodded. But a shiver ran through me. I thought of al-Amriki staring at me as I showered and shook my head quickly.
The tiny apartment was sparse. The rug was well worn. A Quran sat on one shelf, candles and kerosene lamps on another. The kitchen at the far end of the guest room contained only the necessities: metal pots of various sizes, bowls, a fridge, and a gas stove. The two women were preparing rice and vegetables.
When the lights flickered and then went off, Nezar’s sisters lit the kerosene lamps. At least they had had some electricity that day, they said. Daesh was trying to kick all the city’s residents out by siphoning off the electricity and water. “It’s getting harder and harder for us to stay in the city,” one of the sisters said in frustration.
Nezar’s father, sitting cross-legged and smoking the shisha pipe, said little, but I could tell he was listening intently.
“Why are you Muslim?” I asked Nezar as he lit up a cigarette.
“My great-great-grandfather was a Yazidi. We lived not far from Shingal in the early twentieth century,” he said. “The Armenians, who were Christian, were fleeing west from the Ottomans, who wanted their territory. The Yazidi harbored some of the people fleeing the genocide against them. As a result, we got targeted, too. Some Yazidi, including my great-great-grandfather, converted to Islam to avoid being killed. My mother and father longed to be back among the Yazidi in Iraq. They even tried to return to Shingal before I was born, but the Yazidi elders said that because they had become Muslim, they couldn’t. I mean, we could live there, but we were not welcome in the Yazidi community anymore. My parents raised me to speak Shingali and respect Yazidi traditions. But that is all.”
My heart sank. Al-Amriki was right. I would not be welcomed back, like Nezar’s family. “But your great-great-grandfather was forced to convert. He had no choice!”
Nezar sighed. “I’m telling you this because things are different now,” he said. “If there is any blessing in this recent genocide, it’s that the Yazidi are being forced to do things differently.”
Nezar took his phone out and started punching in numbers. “Here,” he said, passing me the phone. “Someone wants to speak to you.”
Majida’s voice, like a rose, blossomed on the other end. Both of us burst into tears. “We’re waiting for you in Kurdistan,” she said in a shaky voice. “I’m with Khudher.” The phone crackled, then my brother Khudher’s voice came on.
“Badeeah, are you safe?”
“Yes,” I said. My heart soared. It was like a sun above me was finally shining. “Eivan, too,” I said. “We’re alive and together.”
When Majida came back on the phone, I turned my head away from Nezar and his father. I didn’t want them to hear. “Majida, I was told Yazidi men . . .” I couldn’t finish. “Am I allowed back? Things happened to me.” My words came out jumbled, and Majida asked me to repeat what I was saying.
I swallowed through the lump in my throat. “I heard that if a girl was . . . you know . . .” I couldn’t get it out.
Majida spoke reassuringly. “Badeeah, no. Baba Sheikh and the Jevata Rohani have invoked a thousand-year-old ceremony for cleansing and welcoming girls and women kidnapped by Daesh back into the community. We all want you back. Every one of us, including the elders who survived.”
My eyes closed, thinking of the Jevata Rohani, the highest spiritual council in the Yazidi faith. Now I was truly happy.
Then I realized there was something odd in what Majida had said. “What do you mean survived?” I asked. “Who is not there with you?”
The phone fell silent.
“Majida,” I pleaded.
“Badeeah, just get here safely and we will talk more then.”
“Now,” I said, my voice raised. “I need to hear it all.”
Majida cleared her throat, then explained that when Daesh separated us in Solakh, she was taken to Mosul, along with Hadil and most of the other unmarried girls from Kocho. Daesh had tried to sell Majida at a market. When Majida wasn’t bought, Daesh moved her around, stopping in villages along the way, including Kocho. There, as Daesh pillaged the homes we had left behind, Majida crept off the bus and hid in a cupboard for days until she gained the courage to walk to the mountains at night.
“I got the idea of hiding from hearing you and Eivan talking,” she said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t pay attention that day. But Badeeah, if you and Eivan had hidden that day when Daesh came, they would have found you. Anyone left in the village, they killed.”
The two of us cried together, and Majida finally said what I feared most: Fallah, Adil, Hadil, Hassan, Adlan, two more of my brothers, and an older sister were still missing. I clung to the phone and wept.
Nezar woke us before dawn. Navine and Eivan put on new clothes, but I refused to change.
I didn’t want to part with the dress I had worn when I left Kocho or the sweater I had knit with Dake. But I
did accept an additional sweater, as well as new boots. Navine and I were also given new niqabs to wear.
Nezar explained that he was going to accompany us by bus to Turkey. He showed us Syrian identification papers belonging to his two sisters. If we were asked at checkpoints, he would say the papers were Navine’s and mine. For Eivan, Nezar had purchased a fake Syrian passport.
It was 9:00 a.m. when the bus stopped not far from Nezar’s apartment. The three of us followed him on board, standing well back as he gave the driver money for our tickets. We spread out on the bus for our safety. Nezar had explained that it was best to pretend we didn’t know each other. That way, if one of us were caught, there was a chance the others could still continue on. As I walked to the back with Eivan, I could see that many travelers were crammed into their seats, buried under suitcases, boxes, bags, and babies. Passports and travel documents poked out of the pockets of the men’s dishdashas and suits. Everyone, including the smallest of children, was carrying something.
I closed my eyes as the bus inched its way out of the city. I didn’t want to look at Syria anymore. I didn’t want any flashbacks of my earlier time on buses, drugged and floating across the desert, as the girls and women around me were sold as slaves.
At the checkpoints, I held my breath as the bus doors flew open. But Daesh never got on.
No one asked to buy us.
No one spat at us or called us sabaya.
Only when we reached Qamishli in the northeast did soldiers check our travel documents. But these soldiers were with another army. I didn’t know which one.
Just before the Turkish border, most of the passengers piled out of the bus. I woke Eivan and put him down to walk on his own so we could both stretch our legs.
A Cave in the Clouds Page 13