A Cave in the Clouds

by Badeeah Hassan Ahmed

  A month passed, and the doctors felt Eivan and Samira finally needed to be together. Eivan screamed as his mother tugged at his wrist, clinging onto me even more tightly. I tucked my face into his hair and struggled to hold back my tears. We sat that way for a few minutes, but finally I could take no more of his cries.

  “Eivan,” I said. “I want to tell you a story. I need you to listen.”

  Startled, Eivan stopped squirming and looked at me intently.

  “The day my grandmother died, I got very sick,” I said. As I spoke, Dake’s funeral flashed through my mind: the wailing women in black and all the mourners. “As the day wore on, my fever rose. I broke out in a rash, and I started to see strange things.”

  I could feel Eivan’s body trembling. “Fallah, your father, was so worried about me that he called in sick to his police job, piled me into his truck, and drove me to Shingal to the hospital. I stayed there for days. No one could understand why I was sick.” My voice trailed off as I remembered Fallah pacing the hallway outside my room. “I heard him crying when the doctors said they couldn’t bring my fever down. He thought I was going to die.

  “I fought my way back, then,” I told Eivan. “I knew I had to live for him.”

  Eivan stayed quiet, but I knew he was listening.

  “After Fallah returned from the Iraqi army,” I continued, “he had lost a part of himself. But I saw the old Fallah return, that little spark in his eye and the warmth that spread out far and wide from his big, friendly heart. You and your mother were the light that helped him find his way home. Eivan, you need to go with your mother now because your father is in a dark place, like where we have just been. Do you understand?”

  “Like Mir Meh,” he eventually said, as he loosened his grip on my neck. “When he went down to earth and forgot about Falak?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You need to help your mother shine a bright light from your hearts so that Fallah can find his way back to you.”

  I wanted Eivan to stay with me. Like when Navine left, I felt as if a part of me was being cut away. But I needed to return him to his mother.

  After a minute, Eivan climbed down from my lap. When he was standing in front of me, he asked me to put my hands out. I started to weave my fingers together, thinking we were going to play the finger game. “No, hands flat,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

  I felt his little toy taxi being placed in my hand.

  I opened my eyes to see Eivan walking slowly over to Samira, who pulled him into her arms and smothered him in kisses.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Return to Love

  I had refused to go into Dohuk to be examined by the female doctor, making excuse after excuse when Sozan came. I didn’t bathe, either. The water in the caravan was too cold, I said. I’d wait for hot water. I gripped my stomach often and moaned that I didn’t feel well.

  Every day, Khudher and Majida would leave, often right after waking, to get food from the shops and to help around the camp, bandaging the wounded, handing out the supplies the international community had sent in, or talking with staff and other refugees about how to find those still in Daesh’s hands.

  I liked it when they were gone, since there was nobody to urge me out of bed, but at the same time, I found the quiet terrifying. I sat for hours on the Kurdish rug, my legs curled under me and a wool blanket, dotted with moth holes, draped over my shoulders. I thought about Navine. I wondered how she was adjusting to her new life. But most of the time, I thought about nothing at all. Remembering my family and my former life was too painful.

  I waited to be returned to al-Amriki, to be recaptured. I braced myself for the sound of gunshots. With every dog bark, raised voice, or crackle from a fire, I worried Daesh had invaded the camp. The whole time I was awake, I seemed to hear the dripping of a leaking shower faucet, as if I were back in Aleppo. And I hated my body. Whenever I got up and walked around, I felt wounded, judged, and shamed.

  Sozan came and sat with me from time to time. She’d talk in a gentle voice and I’d try to listen, but I’d eventually hear only white noise.

  I longed to see my mother, but her voice, which had guided me in Raqqa, was gone. I was stuck in a caravan in a dark, dank refugee camp in the throes of winter.

  One evening, at Sozan’s urging, Majida and I talked about Mayan Khatun and how Yazidi women had been oppressed when she became Amira, or princess, but with Queen responsibilities, of the Yazidi in 1913. At the time, women were forbidden to make decisions, either in public life or in the home. Mayan Khatun was surrounded by men who at first would not listen to her. But she studied oppression, including its root causes. She saw that hate only begat more hate and fear begat more fear, and she used her observations to empower the Yazidi. She was the first woman to address men at the Jevata Rohani, the Yazidi spiritual council. She persisted in the face of dismissal and ridicule until finally the Yazidi realized she was right. Male and female principles had to balance one another. Families had to be strong. People needed to build their lives not on fear or anger but on love and respect. Mayan Khatun became the voice of revolution among the Yazidi people, in which female energy, Khatuna Fakhra, was allowed to rise and bring balance to society.

  Majida took my hands in hers. “We are having a similar revolution now,” she said. “All of us who were captured by Daesh have seen the purest of evil. Do you know that when Baba Sheikh addressed the leaders of our tribes, he said this Daesh genocide is the biggest test the Yazidi have faced in learning not to hate? This is our chance to show the universe we are good people. Badeeah, I know it hurts. I know there is great rage inside of you. I feel it, too. But the first step to healing is to bring that rage out into the light.”

  “You need to shower,” Sozan said to me one day. Her voice was stern. Another woman was with her, a Yazidi social worker named Sara from the charity WADI.

  “Red Wednesday is coming,” Sozan continued. “We’re going to celebrate the New Year in the camps.”

  At the mention of celebration, I thought of Benyan and Nazma’s wedding. Nafaa and I had linked arms to dance. Nafaa, who was still missing, along with Hassan, Fallah, Adil, Hadil, Adlan . . . all of them had been at the wedding. The air had been filled with the sounds of laughter and conversation, our music and our dreams.

  I felt my stomach twisting. A fury buried deep inside of me began to rise. Like a demon, it flew up and took hold of my body.

  I leapt to my feet, growled, and raised my fist to hit Sozan.

  Instead of cowering, though, she held up a pillow. “Punch, kick, anything . . . just start getting it out,” she encouraged me.

  I looked away not knowing what to do.

  “Badeeah, we need to move your healing along now,” Sara said in a soft voice. “It’s time you came back to join the living.”

  The drip, drip, drip of al-Amriki’s shower filled my head. I smacked my hands over my ears to block it out.

  Suddenly, it all came rushing back. Every blow, every bruise, every abusive word from al-Amriki.

  “Please leave me alone,” I said to Sozan and Sara. My voice seemed to come from somewhere very far away.

  Sara shook her head. “No,” she said. “We need to make sure you’re safe.”

  I could take no more of these two. My patience had worn out. I bolted for the door of the caravan.

  When Sozan stepped in front of me, I let out a piercing scream. I began to spin around, with my eyes closed and my hands clawing at my arms and legs. I wanted to get rid of whatever evil was inside of me.

  “Let it all out,” Sozan said. “Don’t run away from what’s inside of you. Bring it into the light.”

  Finally, I crumbled to the ground, sobbing. “I curse you, al-Amriki,” I shouted. “You are the one without true faith, not me.”

  After a few minutes, I could hear myself breathing. But there was no more dripping sound. I no long
er heard the leaking shower faucet.

  I sat up, pulling my knees into my chest. “The man who took me said Yazidi men would hate me for what he did to me. The man said I would not be welcomed back.”

  Sara took my hand. “Baba Sheikh has welcomed everyone’s return. For us women and girls, he invoked a thousand-year-old prayer to ease our suffering. You’re safe now, Badeeah. Our people do not judge you for what you have been through. You are not as your captors defined you.”

  “But I became his wife. He tricked me to make me Muslim.” I pushed the words out as if they were stuck deep inside me. My eyes filled with tears as I thought of Nafaa. “I wanted to marry someone else one day, after I returned to school.”

  “Badeeah,” Sozan said. “It is a war crime, not love. Not a marriage. And he forced you to convert to Islam, so rest your fears. Your spiritual elders have already acknowledged that you and the others did nothing wrong.”

  In the shower room, I took off my sweater and folded it neatly. Next came my dress, my pants, and finally my undergarments. I set out a white towel before ducking underneath the running water. The water was finally hot. The soap I held in my hand smelled like vanilla.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Giving

  We celebrated New Year’s in the caravan, eating dolma and kubbeh that Majida, Samira, and I had prepared together. For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed buying ingredients and cooking. As we cooked, Majida talked about the all-female Yazidi battalion led by Khatoon Khider. One of the first women to publicly perform Yazidi music had formed a small army to fight Daesh and help rescue Yazidi girls and women. “We don’t have Mayan Khatun among us, but we all can be her,” Majida said. “We can lead a revolution like she did but this time make our voices heard so that women and girls don’t slip back into a cycle of oppression.”

  So many Yazidi women and girls were almost illiterate. What we needed was knowledge. A few days later, I told Sozan that I wanted to return to school. I still wanted to study medicine, but first I needed to get my high school diploma. Some governments, she told me, including Germany, were taking in girls like me, helping us with our psychological problems and offering education. I told her I’d have to think about that. I didn’t want to leave my family, not yet. A part of me knew my mother, father, and brothers had been killed. But another part of me needed to believe they were still alive. Eivan and Samira had moved in with us. Most of the time, I felt warm inside as I watched them cuddle and talk. But every now and then, something deeper and uglier tugged at me. In those moments, I missed being that close to Eivan. He had been my lifeline during our time in captivity, after all. But in Eivan’s eyes, I was his aunt again.

  I forced myself to keep busy, even though I still tired easily. I’d head out with Khudher and Majida to the shops and to visit with new arrivals. I volunteered with Sozan, sorting donated food items into bags and boxes that went to Khalsa Aid. Every week, the camp expanded as more Yazidi found their way to us. Every day, traumatized girls and women arrived.

  Green returned to the land as the trees gave birth to new leaves and grass started to sprout. Soon the scent of roses and orange blossoms filled the camp.

  I met often with Sozan and Sara, who taught me that healing was a journey of self-discovery. “Demons only scare us when they’re hidden,” Sara explained. “Healing is like peeling an onion, finding those demons that keep us stuck. Just when one is found and discarded, another one appears underneath. But eventually, for those brave and determined, what lies at the very bottom is love and light.”

  With every piece of my story I dug out for them, I felt chunks of darkness leaving me.

  One afternoon, Sozan asked if I would speak to the Yazidi girls and women who had come back. Many were like I had been when I first arrived: lost, full of shame, confused, and hurting. None of them wanted to speak about their ordeals at first.

  I said I wasn’t ready. I still felt hate and anger, I told her, and often asked myself why I had lived when so many others were missing or dead. Why did I deserve life more than them?

  “Maybe it’s time you visited Lalish and did the ceremony with Baba Sheikh to cleanse you of your suffering. You can honor your family, too,” Sara suggested. “Women and girls throughout our history have lived with pain, Badeeah. Go to Lalish and connect with them.”

  Despite Sara’s words, guilt churned inside me. Finally, after a day when negative thoughts plagued me, I prayed to Khatuna Fakhra.

  When I was done, the caravan was pitch-black. Night had fallen outside. I could still hear the voices of children playing, though, and a mother calling for her son to come eat. A newborn cried. Two women bickered over something I couldn’t make out.

  As I lay down to sleep, I heard my mother’s voice. “Dream again, Badeeah. Be wiser and fiercer than you ever were before. Love is the greatest weapon against hate.”

  The next morning, as I walked to my volunteer job in the clothing shop, I realized something had changed. Instead of seeing only sorrow and horror in the eyes of the children and women I passed, I now saw hope. I had been looking only at losses. Now I vowed to celebrate what we still had. “Our love is bigger than your hate,” I said, at first softly and then more strongly. People I passed stared, but I kept on repeating the phrase like a mantra. “Our love is bigger than your hate.”

  That very afternoon, I spoke to my first group of returning girls and women. I was nervous at first. The women and girls could not look me in the eye. They hunched their bodies tightly together. Their essence seemed to be elsewhere, adrift, on a vast sea. I knew what they had been through. I was determined to offer them the rope they needed to start coming back. That rope was reassuring them they were not alone, they were welcome back, and most of all, they were loved.

  After that, I met with the new arrivals every week, sharing my story and listening to theirs, although few were ready to share what they had been through, even with me.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Freedom

  After one of our meetings with a group of girls and women, Sozan told me that she had been acting as a translator for foreign media. CNN, BBC, and The New York Times wanted to interview women who had been abducted by Daesh. Other than my cousin Nadia, who was living at the same camp as me, few of the girls and women were willing to tell their stories. Was I ready to share mine? Sozan asked.

  At first, I hesitated. As Yazidi, we are raised to be private about our lives. Our elders believed the first genocides we faced came after we shared our spirituality and mysticism with non-Yazidi. Our enemies had become afraid or jealous of our power and control. Over time, the Yazidi began to share little to nothing about ourselves with the outside world. Our privacy was protection, or so we thought.

  Just a few days earlier, Helly Luv had released a new single called “Revolution.” Majida had dragged me out to an electronics shop so we could listen to it on the radio.

  As Sozan waited for my answer, I sang the chorus of the song silently to myself. After a few seconds, I knew I would do it. Being brave meant facing our fears, like Mayan Khatun had. The world needed to know what had happened to the Yazidi. The time had passed where keeping our culture secret gave us safety.

  The first journalist I spoke with was a Kurdish woman from a local newspaper. I could converse with her in Shingali. Her questions revolved around the massacre at Kocho. I cried as I recounted being driven out of town by the boy soldier, my eyes glued to the front door of my house. But she didn’t ask me about Aleppo.

  An interview with a Middle Eastern newspaper followed. I surprised myself by feeling comfortable as a spokesperson. My reservations about speaking publicly quickly disappeared.

  But then an English-speaking woman with straw-blonde hair and bright blue eyes came into the caravan where the interviews were taking place.

  My body stiffened, and my stomach started to churn. I fought the instinct to run out o
f the room.

  “Are you American?” I stammered.

  “Yes,” the woman replied.

  Her accent sounded the same as al-Amriki’s. My knees shook under the table.

  The American journalist started to ask me questions. I recited the answers as if on autopilot. Al-Amriki’s face and that of the blonde woman on the computer flashed in front of me every time the journalist spoke.

  “Can you tell me more about the man in Aleppo who bought you?” said Sozan, translating for the journalist. In Kurdish, Sozan added that I didn’t need to talk about my abductor if it distressed me.

  While I had told Sozan, Sara, and Majida almost everything about my abduction, I had left out one impor­tant detail: that my captor was an American. I’d never used the term al-Amriki to describe him. I didn’t know why. Maybe I was still finding it too hard to reconcile how a nation I had looked to as one who grants freedoms could also take them away.

  “He was like you,” I said to the journalist.

  Nightingale. I heard a nightingale singing.

  Day, however, didn’t turn to night, like it had on August 15 with that sandstorm. Outside, it was still bright summer.

  “He was one of you,” I repeated.

  The journalist said something to Sozan. “She doesn’t understand,” Sozan translated. “What do you mean when you say, ‘He was one of you’?”

  “He was American,” I said. “Al-Amriki. He was like her.” I pointed to the journalist. “He was white. He talked on the computer to a woman. She had a baby.”