Pine and oak trees surrounded us. The air was fresh. I took off my khimar and niqab like some of the female refugees had done, closed my eyes, and tilted my bare face up toward the sun.
“We’re still in Syria,” I heard Nezar say after a minute. “We have to walk into Turkey from here through these woods.”
I nodded. Nezar had warned us that if we were caught on the Syrian side of the border, we could be sent back to Aleppo. If we were caught in Turkey, we might be sent to jail. Turkey was not our final destination. But hundreds of thousands of Syrians were streaming into Turkey escaping the war, and the country had warned it couldn’t handle all the refugees.
Some of the people who had been on the bus with us were already moving into the forest to make the perilous crossing. A light drizzle started to fall, dampening our clothes and sending a chill through me.
“Follow me,” Nezar said, taking Eivan’s hand. “I will lead you to the crossing. When I say go, we must run.”
My feet crunched on dead twigs and thin pools of ice. The soft rain soon grew into a downfall.
The path through the trees was littered with discarded clothes, boxes, books, furniture, and even appliances. One by one, I watched as people let slip from their grasp everything but the essentials. I slowed my pace as we passed a doll with pink plastic skin, tangled hair, and coal-black eyes.
When we reached the crossing, one of the older refugee men took command, allowing only a few people to cross at a time. If we crossed all together, the noise might attract the border guards on either side.
Small children were to be carried, and everyone was to run as fast as they could.
“Have you done this before?” I asked Nezar nervously.
“Too many times,” he replied.
We huddled together and waited our turn, soaked by the rain.
“Go,” the man in charge finally directed us.
With Eivan’s arms wrapped around my neck, I ran.
The mud beneath my feet was slippery. Down the incline I flew, losing sight of Navine and Nezar in the trees. I was running faster than I could control, but it was too dangerous to stop.
My left foot got caught on a root hidden underneath dead leaves. I twisted through the air, still clutching Eivan, my body landing on the ground with a thump. As I skidded, my head hit a rock.
Nezar, breathless, rushed to my side. He helped Eivan up, then me. I felt dizzy, but Nezar hoisted Eivan into his arms and told me to keep running. I did what he said, willing my legs to keep up with Nezar.
When we reached the other side, we continued running down a dirt road. My chest hurt. My vision was blurred from the pain bolting through me.
The doors of a waiting truck flew open. Two men dressed in Yazidi-style clothing got out and waved for us to hurry. Nezar handed Eivan to one of the men. When I caught up to them, I was whisked into the back seat.
As the truck lurched forward, I passed out.
I awoke to find myself on a sofa in a small apartment. Nezar was kneeling over me, applying a cold compress to my pulsing head. I reached up and felt a bump the size of a duck egg.
I tried to sit up, but Nezar pushed me gently back down, saying we were at his aunt and uncle’s place. “We’re safe here. Rest.”
“Where’s Eivan?”
“In the other room, sleeping by the fire,” he said.
Nezar’s aunt shooed Nezar out of the room and helped me take a drink of water through a straw. She encouraged me to eat some naan. I would need the energy, she insisted. But I couldn’t.
I lay back down and closed my eyes, listening to Nezar and his relatives talk. His uncle and aunt’s house was small and sparsely furnished. It had been given to them, I heard Nezar tell Navine, by a kind person in their Turkish village. Like so many others, Nezar’s relatives had had to abandon their jobs and their lives due to the Syrian civil war, fleeing with little to nothing.
I drifted off again, waking to find Navine asleep beside me. In the other room, Nezar was still talking to his uncle, telling him that he would be returning to Aleppo in the morning. I groggily pulled myself up and went to join them.
Nezar smiled when he saw me.
Nezar’s uncle called out for his wife to bring us some tea and food.
Nezar was returning to Aleppo to rescue another Yazidi girl, I had heard him say.
“Are you safe doing this work?” I asked him.
He looked away and shook his head.
“Why do you do it, then?”
He shrugged. “I used to run a shop in Manbij. Then Daesh came, and my family faced a choice: Should we stay or leave? Some of us chose to stay and fight our own way, by rescuing Yazidi and helping refugees leave. The evil in this world can never be destroyed by the hatred that created it. Every person is a sister or a brother. When we really believe that, we’re free.”
Nezar’s uncle stirred the chimney fire, tossing in some kindling to feed the flame. Nezar’s aunt, the pleats of her long skirt dusting the floor the way Adlan’s would, came into the room with a tray of tea, biscuits, fruit, honey, and bread.
Eivan stirred and called out for me. I crept over and pulled him into my arms.
Navine, awake now, entered the room to join us.
“I have good news,” Nezar said as Navine sat down, curling her legs underneath her. “Eivan’s mother is alive and in a refugee camp. I’m sure she’s aching to see her son.”
Navine turned to me. “Badeeah, what is Nezar saying? Eivan . . . he’s not yours?”
I shook my head, realizing I had never told her. “I’m just an unmarried girl,” I said.
“Who is he, then?” she asked, her face awash with surprise.
“My nephew. I’m just a teenager. I’m still a girl,” I repeated as my eyes filled with tears. At least I had been a girl before al-Amriki. For the hundredth time since my abduction from Kocho, I thought about Nafaa.
“But you risked everything for Eivan!” Navine exclaimed.
Nezar smiled. “Now you know, Badeeah, why I do what I do. Life really begins when we start living for others.”
The others had gone to bed, but I found it hard to sleep.
Images of Kocho, of Dake’s fruit trees and garden, of my mother cooking, of my father in our guest room rolling cigarettes and talking politics, of my school years and my cousins dancing came to me as sharp, painful images.
Eivan and I would not be going home, that much I knew. We would be joining Majida and Khudher at a refugee camp in Dohuk, Kurdistan. Kocho had been destroyed, I’d learned from Nezar, and anyway, it was still in Daesh hands.
Chapter Twenty-One
We’re Not Afraid of Darkness
The next morning was cold. Frost lined the inside of the windowpanes. Outside, ice coated the brown grass and the boughs of the evergreen trees. The village was quiet except for a barking dog as we said goodbye to Nezar. A Yazidi man named Murad was taking us to Kurdistan. He arrived in an old car, silver and rusted along the bottom. I was wearing my own dress and sweater again, which had been cleaned.
The day turned bright as the car made its way up into the roads snaking through the mountains, capped in snow, that separated Turkey from Iraq.
My head still hurt from my fall the day before. By noon, I had a blinding headache. But I didn’t mind the pain. It meant I was still alive.
Eivan remained awake throughout the journey. Navine and Murad filled the quiet by humming folk songs. For long stretches, all of us were quiet, wondering what was to come next.
We stopped high on the Iraqi side of the mountains for tea, bread, tomatoes, and yogurt. I still could not eat, so I left the others to walk. The sky was clear, the sun warm on my face. For a moment, I felt peace move through me. I was back in my own country: a place I had feared I would never see again.
A heaviness fell over us as the car slowed and
merged into traffic in the city of Dohuk, nestled in a large valley beside the Tigris River.
I peered out over Kurdistan. Modern buildings stood tall beside age-old stone complexes. Dohuk had been inhabited over the years not only by the Kurds but also Jews and Christians. Some people said Dohuk was a Yazidi name. The city had weathered many conflicts, Murad told us. Even the Ottomans had once laid claim to it.
Outside of the city, Murad turned the car onto a road muddy from the winter rains and full of potholes.
“Rwanga refugee camp,” he said in a quiet voice.
I gazed out at the rows upon rows of trailers that Murad explained had been purchased by the Kurdish Rwanga Foundation.
Blankets stretched across windows, acting as curtains. Clotheslines drooped from the weight of frozen shirts, pants, and dresses. Dented metal pots hung from horizontal poles balanced atop outdoor fires. Tired-looking women, some young, some old, sat waiting for the flatbread they were frying to sizzle.
The camp housed many of the survivors from Kocho, Murad told us. There were now camps across Kurdistan for Syrian as well as Yazidi refugees. I shuddered. Rwanga might have been Kocho transplanted, but this was a place waiting for life to be breathed back into it.
As our sedan crawled through the maze of caravans, I searched for any faces I might recognize.
Most of the adults I could see were women. A dark shadow passed over me as I realized the men were still missing.
Children moved skittishly, traumatized by whatever they had lived through. I recognized trauma from the times I had helped out at the doctor’s office. It was like a demon that burned inside its victims. None of us would ever be the same again.
Murad parked his vehicle near a brick building that housed the offices of the United Nations. Beside the building was a caravan that had been converted into a traveling medical clinic. “We’re going in there first,” Murad said, pointing.
Warm air from a heater swept over us when we stepped inside, along with the pungent odors of disinfectant and medicines.
A woman in a black coat and pants and hair tied back into a loose, messy braid moved toward us. Her smile was wide and welcoming.
“I’m Sozan,” she said, stopping in front of me. “You’ve come from Aleppo?”
I recognized Sozan’s choppier and more guttural Kurdish dialect. Shingali is soft and also uses Aramaic words. Originally, the Yazidi spoke Akkadian. Sozan, I could tell right away, was not Yazidi. She was Kurdish, but our languages have much in common, so I could understand her.
Sozan was nearly half a foot taller than me.
“I’m Badeeah Hassan Ahmed,” I said.
“Where are you from?” Sozan asked.
“Kocho.”
A man and another woman appeared from a back room, both wearing white doctors’ coats.
The man asked if he could examine Eivan. I didn’t want anyone other than me touching him even though I knew he needed to be examined. But my permission was just a courtesy. The doctor took an unhappy Eivan. Sozan explained that the doctors weren’t going to hurt him. “They will make sure he’s healthy. Give him antibiotics for dysentery and any other infections he might have.” My eyes floated across the caravan. There were first aid bags, boxes of bandages, and shelves of medicines.
“Badeeah,” Sozan asked, “what have you been told about Kocho?”
“Nothing,” I replied in a barely audible voice.
As I looked at Sozan, Majida came into my mind. My sister had told us many times that Kurdish women had more freedoms than Yazidi girls, especially after the Americans came. Sozan looked close to my age and she was already working at the refugee camp. In another time, when I had dreams, I had wanted to help people, too.
“Kocho was hard hit,” Sozan said quietly. “Of the 1,700 villagers, more than two-thirds are unaccounted for. We want to believe they’re just trapped somewhere, unable to get out yet.”
I could hear Eivan crying. A darkness swept over me. I heard Sozan say that someone had gone to get Majida and Khudher.
All of a sudden, though, I didn’t feel like I was in the room anymore.
I lifted my right hand. I stared at it. I knew it was mine. I could see the tiny blue veins in my wrist pulsing through my pale skin. But nothing seemed real.
I hear shuffling feet. Hands are touching me, leading me to a cot. I am being asked to lie down. Someone unties my boots. My socks are pulled off. My feet are swollen, I hear someone say, and blisters are popping. My body twitches under the sting of anesthetic. I hear the ripping apart of plastic bandages.
My sweater is unbuttoned. I feel a cool metal stethoscope sneaking down my chest.
My eyelids are pried open. A light is shone into them.
“Open your mouth?” someone asks. A flat wooden stick is placed on my tongue. I say “Ah.”
“I was touched down there,” I hear myself say.
“Tomorrow,” the female doctor says. “There is a female doctor in Dohuk who will do a full examination, but it won't be until tomorrow or the next day.”
Al-Amriki, I keep thinking. Where is he? Will he come and get me?
And then I remembered al-Aamriki’s phone. I sat up with a jolt. The doctor reached to pull me back down, but I leapt off the cot so fast she couldn’t catch me. In the outer room, I found Murad. “I have something,” I told him in a hoarse voice.
I pulled the cell phone from my pocket.
“I couldn’t get it to work in Aleppo,” I said, pushing the phone into Murad’s hand. “It’s his, the man who held us in captivity. He had other phones, too. Take it to the Peshmerga or the Americans, whoever is helping us. The man who took me, tell them, they called him the Sheikh of Aleppo. He was an emir.”
Khudher and Majida got to the caravan just as Murad was putting the phone in his pocket. My brother and sister barreled into me. We wet each other’s hair and cheeks with our tears. We touched each other’s faces and shoulders, confirming that we were really there, that we were not dreaming anymore. We wept, too, for all the members of our family who were not with us.
Khudher and Majida spoke like a team, excited to have me home and to have an audience. I gathered that it had just been the two of them for a long time. Our married older sisters who had managed to escape Daesh lived in other camps with their husbands’ families.
Navine’s uncle had arrived to pick her up to live at a camp inhabited by survivors from her village. It seemed strange to be separated from her. We had been one beating heart for so long, I felt a part of me was being torn off when I watched her leave. As I watched the vehicle with Navine and her uncle slowly exit the camp, I heard Sozan say that Eivan would be staying with us until his mother, Samira, could arrange transportation to our camp.
Majida was open to talking about what had happened to her. But Khudher grew sober when I asked him. “I walked to Kurdistan,” was all he would say. “I walked here.”
The caravan Majida and Khudher were given was small. A worn Kurdish carpet that Majida had bought in a secondhand market in Dohuk covered part of the floor. The caravan had a small gas cooker and a tiny fridge. There was a shower, too, but the water, when it ran, was cold. Their pots, dishes, utensils, clothing, and bedding had either been donated or bought used in Dohuk, Majida told me. Anything we had owned in Kocho was still in Kocho or in Daesh’s hands.
Once a month, the charity Khalsa Aid doled out sugar, vegetable oil, rice, and tomato paste to every household in the camp. The Yazidi there had also started to set up businesses, realizing they would not be returning to Kocho anytime soon. When she had arrived, there was nothing, Majida said. Now the road leading into the camp had shops selling clothes and mobile phones, vegetable and fruit shops, bakeries, butchers, and even a candy store. My heart fluttered, wondering if it was Nafaa’s candy shop. But even if it was, he would not want me. Not anymore.
Khudher had appli
ed for our father’s pension from his job with the Kurdistan Democratic Party. With that money, Majida bought food Khalsa Aid didn’t provide. What was left over, the two of them saved in the hope that the rest of our family would find their way to us.
On my first night in the camp, before I could even settle in, Kocho visitors had streamed into our caravan to welcome me back. Women cried and pulled me into their arms. As I felt their tears washing over me, a floodgate of emotions was unleashed inside of me: joy at being reunited, fear that I would be taken again, and sadness, deep and painful, that so many Yazidi from Kocho were still missing. Always, the shame of what had happened to me twisted beneath the surface. I noticed I could not look at people the way I used to. When my eyes caught someone else’s, I blushed and looked quickly away, as if all my secrets had been revealed. A part of me feared, despite being assured otherwise, I would be sent away if anyone discovered what al-Amriki had done to me.
Eivan’s mother, Samira, arrived a few days later. She had evaded capture by hiding in the mountains, like she had told Fallah she was going to do. She had been living in a refugee camp with family and people from her village, Tal Banat.
She rushed into the caravan, her arms reaching for Eivan. But he clung to me, hiding behind my skirt. Samira shrunk back, stunned. Her only child was still calling me Mama.
The doctor who had examined us said Eivan was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It could take months for him to heal, maybe longer, the doctor explained, since the camps’ few psychologists were exhausted and were helping thousands of refugees in other camps as well. Almost everyone had experienced great loss. Samira, her face awash in sadness, was advised that Eivan should remain with me for another few weeks.
I was worried about Khudher, too. Majida had shown me a photograph of him when he first arrived at the camp. He was bare chested, his shoulder covered in bloody bandages. He claimed he had fallen in the hills when he was walking. But I didn’t believe him. The more I was around my brother, the more I saw how sour he had turned. He was critical of the armies fighting Daesh, arguing they were not doing enough. “Daesh took our honor,” he would huff. “They killed many Yazidi. They took our houses. We’re in Kurdistan now, but Peshmerga didn’t protect us. Our Arabic neighbors betrayed us. No one is helping us, not even America.”
A Cave in the Clouds Page 14