Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  ACROSS THE URBAN hive, church bells struck the hour and I counted the chimes from one to the end. Through those watery echoes, sirens blared, and the dull machinery of mankind hummed. Slowly, I rose from the deep, making my way up toward an opening window of consciousness. All the while, I heard Brownsword and Migone talking away in my ear.

  What’s going on with him? Brownsword said. This is not good. Maybe it’s the pictures—no one wants to know.

  Don’t tell him that, damn it. Get up, Mikey, Migone barked. What are you doing sleeping like a princess when there’s a war going on?

  I don’t think I’m well enough, sir, I said. I’ve had a crisis. Somehow, my mind and limbs had gone their separate ways again. And I wanted to stay and linger with Dil-Mir.

  Crisis? Migone said. Look at you, still got half your baby fat—time to move.

  Yes, sir. It is. I know it.

  Stirs of cool air whispered over my skin; bands of crimson shot through my lids, and I heard someone sigh. Slowly and still blind, I started hunting down parts: arms, hands, digits. Then eyes wide open—deep inside another sugar cube. Reborn from the shadows, I took in a huge gulp of air that tore open my lungs. Then I heaved, coughing up streaks of blood that spattered the sheets like cherry syrup.

  “Don’t worry about that, Mr. Jeffrey, you’re fine,” said a female nurse in soft German. “Glad to see you so awake. How do you feel?”

  “Tot,” I rasped. Dead. Then I asked her where the colonel was, where all of them were.

  “No one else here,” the nurse said. “But your phone kept buzzing. I had to shut it off.” Then she floated over, all honey-colored curls, offering the Android like treasure from her open palm. “So many calls from everywhere came in. Journalists. People in England. Lots of Americans. One English woman—now she was just relentless. We gave no information.”

  “That will be Anne,” I said. “They don’t like when I disappear.”

  “If I might ask—what is it you do?”

  Then I looked over at the nurse; antiseptic soap coming off her hands filled the bright space between us. She had a beatific smile that blended right into the walls; every perfect part of her seemed to effervesce a sure and carefree youth. My empty guts churned over themselves—God help me, I didn’t want anything to do with her.

  “Survive,” was all I could think of to say, and looked down at my phone.

  THE FIRST PERSON I heard from was Anne Norona, an English nurse living in Cornwall, whom I’d met online through the rescue grid while working the camps in Greece. Increasingly, Anne and I were joining our efforts, conducting countless virtual missions to help the most vulnerable Yazidis—but never once meeting in person. Anne was what techies refer to as a meta-administrator, a user who has been granted certain technical freedoms in order to safeguard their platform, of one of the largest Facebook communities in the online grassroots universe. Not to mention that she secured funds, medical personnel, and collaborators for the most severe cases, all at spellbinding speeds.

  When a group of fourteen Yazidis, including children under five, were stranded with thirty-two armed smugglers on the attack in the woods of Gevgelija, in Macedonia, it was Anne who’d coordinated over a thousand messages and mobilized a swift rescue. If there was a child needing a life-saving operation, a torture case requiring specialized treatment, or a last-minute nail-biting rescue to execute, we often called her first.

  During my time in Greece, our groups worked together seamlessly as a boy and his debilitated sister were making the treacherous crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos. I made contact with the siblings right on the shore, while the network set to work acquiring the terrified girl a visa from the German embassy, and a surgeon willing to operate on her fast. Nineteen-year-old Najwa, who was in end-stage glaucoma, had only 15 percent vision in one eye and 5 percent in the other. Time was now the main enemy; if Najwa did not have surgery within a few weeks she would go completely blind. In the end, every facet came together: Najwa’s sight restored, she was reunited with her family.

  “Shaker, where are you?” Anne said.

  “Berlin—busy.”

  Then she asked me to meet her the next week in Stuttgart.

  “Christina Lamb from the Sunday Times of London is coming to the shelters. Everyone has been trying to find you.”

  FROM THE STATION at Stuttgart in the high heat of August 2016, I made my way into the deep forests of Baden-Württemberg, where survivors and their children lived secreted in a series of quiet and isolated sanctuaries. All through the cities, triggers lay in wait like land mines: trucks, dark-haired men, the prying eyes of passersby, and sheer multitudes of refugees. For some girls, the very men who’d raped them now roamed the cobblestones, free among the displaced. Many of the survivors received death threats and lived in a constant state of terror. Reports to the police accomplished little—lately there were too many such incidents to keep track of. The sanctuary’s location was a well-guarded secret, and to prevent reprisals, the use of social media was not permitted.

  On foot, I walked up to the sterile medical compound as a warm breeze pushed past the soaring trees; shards of sunshine cut through the moving canopy and danced all over me. In that hidden place, the government and Yazidi elders ran the Special Quota Project, and so far, over a thousand survivors of sexual slavery had come through the program to heal through art, yoga classes, and intensive therapy sessions. So far, not one patient had taken her own life—a landmark among those for whom suicide was often the only escape from their eviscerating pain. How many times I’d imagined shepherding my Dil-Mir to that very haven.

  Meeting Anne Norona there was like discovering a long-lost, blue-eyed sister in the woods. Inside a swell of warm light, she was waiting. At first, we just took one another in—merging so many frantic words typed on a screen each day into an actual person. Immediately, a multitude of missions came to mind: like the night the Turkish coast guard sank a boat full of Yazidis, and people trapped on the doomed ship screamed over the lines as our rescue chat coolly organized aid from nearby vessels. Most of the time, in the great hub of thousands, you never encountered your cohorts in the flesh, and it was a privilege to meet this way. Together, Anne and I and all the others were waging a war against an abomination—and I struggled now not to betray recent events. The truth was, less than half of me stood there, breathing.

  Dark-haired Anne Norona was an uncommon woman. A single mother who ran a sideline Botox clinic to fund her brazen humanitarian efforts, she’d spent two years in Haiti, and had worked as the main medical recruiter in the squalid camps in Lesvos, where over two thousand refugees a day poured in—soaking wet, some with hypothermia, and all of them traumatized. It was there that Anne witnessed the profound plight of my people, who were persecuted and bullied even in the camps. Already, she had plans for a clandestine aid trip into Shingal and was raising funds to provide the most basic needs of Yazidis still hunkered inside the dark folds of the mountain, afraid to ever come down—rogue ISIS fighters still stalked the terrain.

  By now, Anne had developed a sixth sense for every form of human suffering. Even in my pressed suit and through my smiling banter, she saw me for what I was—a shattered man.

  “The girls are cooking for us in there,” she said at last, taking my arm. “Come eat, Shaker. You need their Yazidi food, and they need you.”

  And we went inside.

  EVERY TIME IRAQ or the Yazidis were in the news, journalists called on me, and I had grown accustomed to their indifferent successions of questions. Christina Lamb’s cool English poise betrayed very little, and neither did I. As we shook hands in the corridor, I knew I was looking at a woman who’d seen things—up close. She’d ventured right into the battle zones she wrote about, and it showed as clearly to me as the flaxen color of her hair. And so, I entrusted our fragile survivors to her mighty pen. Yazidis had to trust someone, or our stories would all be lost. So many of our people already were.

  “You didn’t answ
er our calls for a while,” Christina said. “The doctor who put us in touch mentioned a crisis. Tell only if you can. We know not to take your picture.”

  At first, I gave up only a few raw facts: Dil-Mir, an escape attempt, suicide—and no more. Somehow, I wanted her to hear the spoken name of my beloved, who belonged in that very place with us, but would never make it—never, no matter how I wished against the truth.

  “May I see a picture of her?” Christina said, looking right into me.

  Turning away, I held up a shot of my smiling Dil-Mir.

  “Ah,” Christina breathed, and her hand rose gently.

  Then we moved into the room.

  TOBACCO SMOKE SWIRLED and women sat around blank-faced; some rocked back and forth, others kept turning their hands over in their laps—I’d seen all of it, many times before. Every now and again, from some other part of the building, we could hear Yazidi children at play, voices high and sounding so carefree. Hard to imagine the horrors they knew: mothers raped, fathers slaughtered. ISIS had tortured many: cigarette burns and beatings—and yet the children giggled, tossed balls, drew pictures of flowers. The doctors there said it had taken some of the rescued a full year to speak again.

  In the large room, the group sat together over the floor. All the food eaten: the spiced perfume of home wandered like a ghost. I was against the wall, legs out; Christina next to me, pen in hand. For a moment, I thought of my family stuck back in the camp, waiting to get to Europe. They all thought I was going to the government-mandated German classes, charting a whole new life for us.

  As soon as we were all settled, one after the other, female voices rose in the warm room like currents of ice-cold air. From the first word uttered, we were all transported back to Shingal—August 3, 2014.

  ISIS took everyone to a school and put women and children on the ground floor. They took some men in cars and drove away, we heard gunshots.…

  They said: If you don’t convert, we will kill you. They wanted the most beautiful ones, so we started rubbing dirt in our hair to make us look nasty.…

  They took the virgins to Mosul.…

  I was sold for 350 American dollars.…

  He grabbed me by my hair, cuffed my arms to the bed, then forced himself on me.…

  Men came back to rape me every day, three or four times.…

  The day Mosul falls, I fear ISIS men will just shave off their beards and escape to the West.…

  And I thought: So many already have.

  Each time we took a break, I went to the washroom and vomited.

  “You all right, Shaker?” Anne asked. “Your translation is perfect.”

  I’d ventured outside to release a prayer for strength. Just then I had so little left, and it shamed me.

  “It’s hard,” I said. “We keep telling the world, and it closes its doors.”

  “We can do more,” Anne said. Money was the biggest obstacle—each soul cost, and there were so many of them reaching out.

  “What we do is all that keeps me going,” I told her. Between us, thousands of Yazidis and other terrorized refugees had found safety: on boats, in vans, the trunks of cars; on foot, or carried out on backs; into hospitals, safe houses, camps, and shelters like the one we were standing in.

  “What do you think of the name Mosquitos?” Anne said.

  Anne Norona had a proud reputation for always buzzing in ears: asking, cajoling, doing, saving lives; healing the sick, traumatized, and maimed; bringing torn families together. So did her two Yazidi cohorts. All of us were one and the same—never giving up. It was the perfect moniker.

  “I love it.” And I laughed for a fleeting easy moment, not recognizing the sound of my own unbound voice.

  Back in Greece, we’d merged networks, but Anne realized that the most severe Yazidi cases needed a specialized organism within the massive system. A secret Facebook group, the Mosquitos, would preserve those precious lives. Anne handled cases stemming in Iraq, while I continued to look after the German side.

  Standing in the Black Forest of Germany, we shook hands, forming a bridge between east and west, and the moment was not lost on me. At my end: legions of security personnel, police, border agents, coast guards, military and government officials; activists and volunteers in the Turkish, Syrian, and KRG camps. Journalists, ordinary Iraqis, Turks, and Syrians, smugglers, do-gooders, military vets, mercenaries, and private contractors. At Anne’s: medics, doctors, surgeons, nurses, members of parliament, benefactors, professors, bakers, blue-bloods, bankers, heads of NGOs, aid workers, masses of international volunteers, and all those she’d hounded for help or a bank draft. We connected galaxies of laptops and cell phones into a single universe, like a modern-day resistance movement from the Second World War.

  “Right,” Anne said. “We just carry on.”

  “And keep getting bigger—stronger,” I said. Warm blood transfused through my veins, every sinew in me awakened. “Yaho, Anne. It’s good.” Right then I felt there was nothing we could not accomplish together—all of us. And I was not alone; I was a Mosquito.

  “Yaho, Shaker. It really is—just be careful.”

  BACK IN BERLIN, I held the key to my small asylum flat and went up the iron staircase. Walking the narrow corridor over a stained patterned carpet, I stopped: the door was hanging open, right off one hinge. The soldier in me instantly roused, I checked for the folding knife I kept tucked in my pocket, and crept along. My small room stood ransacked: mattress slit down the middle. Drawers pulled out. Clothes and papers in heaps. Then I backed away from the wrecked threshold, checked the hall—and ran.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hunted

  ON A DARK DECEMBER AFTERNOON IN 2016, ANIS AMRI, A failed asylum seeker, surveyed the black tractor trailer parked at the ThyssenKrupp warehouse just outside of Berlin. Having made his scheduled delivery of steel, the Polish driver, Lukasz Urban, was at a nearby kebab shop, eating what would become his very last meal. Sometime later, the thirty-seven-year-old father of one called his wife and then returned to the truck, where Anis shot him in the head at point-blank range. As Lukasz slowly bled out over the passenger seat, his hijacked vehicle lumbered away from the lot.

  At 8:00 P.M., Anis drove the massive trailer at high speed down the center of the bustling Breitscheidplatz Christmas market. Before the crushing wheels, a multitude of merrymakers heaved forward in a wild rush. Some were sucked under the carriage—twelve people were killed on impact; fifty-six left with multiple fractures and severe internal injuries. The market was two blocks from my new room in the heart of Old Berlin, and I opened a window to a mortal uproar of screams and sirens.

  This had already been a year of terror across Europe: coordinated suicide bombings in Brussels; another truck massacre in Nice, on Bastille Day; a Syrian extremist who blew himself up at a music festival in Ansbach; people stabbed on a train near Würzburg; a priest murdered and parishioners attacked in a church in Normandy; more explosives found at a Christmas market in Ludwigshafen. Continued rapes and kidnappings in the camps.

  By the October 2016 publication of Christina Lamb’s article in the Sunday Times of London and The Australian, I’d been changing locations every few weeks, or even days. Inevitably, I had blown my own alias; social media accounts hacked. Undeterred and borderline irrational, I would only expand my efforts in earnest into and throughout 2017: joining Nadia Murad at conferences; organizing rallies and protests; speaking out against the Assayish and Muslim extremists on Sirius Radio and NPR, and at symposiums in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris—while continuing the daily life-saving missions with Anne, the Mosquitos, and the full network universe. The battle to get the better of my enemies consumed full days and nights like an overpowering amphetamine—no sleep, scrounging for scraps.

  In between, I somehow found my way, on and off, to the compulsory German classes required of all refugees. The trouble was time: every consumed minute could mean a life—another Dil-Mir—my whole existence. Without a word, the young female teacher to
ok a look at my haggard face and seemed to understand that I was part of some underworld that was much larger than myself. Often, I sat in the back of the classroom working out missions on my Android, and counting on my natural aptitude for language to get me a passing grade. When I finally explained to the instructor that I was part of a Yazidi rescue group, she nodded, looked down, and quietly excused my absences. In gratitude, I did learn German and only took on more and more cases with Anne at my virtual side from her Botox clinic in Cornwall; my American brothers regularly checked in from their hemisphere.

  “Keep your work confined to German soil from now on, brother,” Brownsword told me. “Just the humanitarian missions—got it?”

  In short order, he advised that I stop saying negative things about Barzani and his government on social media. Sometimes, caught in a vortex of fury, I railed against them on message boards, about how the Peshmerga were ordered away from Shingal, leaving us to certain slaughter. “Sooner or later, the Assayish will decide to join the party and come after your ass, Mikey, believe me.”

  It was too late. Their agents had eyes all over Europe and could hack their way right into Facebook. Every now and again they sent a thug to my flat, or a crew would follow me like a pack of dogs onto a commuter train or rough me up in an alley, utter threats. If President Barzani wanted me to shut up, he could start by letting my people out of the filthy camps and back onto their own land. Most Yazidis agreed that he wanted our people gone from Shingal—ISIS was a convenient way for him to acquire his own country. And I told as much to Brownsword.

  “OK, it’s high time to get you out of there. You need to get that visa to the United States right now. We filled out the paperwork while you were still a terp, for God’s sake. Two factions have targets on your back.”

  “They’ll have to catch me—that’s the thing.”

  “Brother, hearing you talk, it sounds to me like they caught you a long time ago.”