The Beekeeper

by Dunya Mikhail

  I ended up spending a year confronting those beasts along with the other young female captives from my village, in a house in the Deir al-Zor area in Syria. They raped us, beat us; they forced us to cook and clean and wash their clothes. During the day, they would take their weapons and go out. At night, they would come back and gather together to take drugs and recite religious verses. When they told us it was time for “Quran lessons,” this also meant that they were also going to rape us, because they typically did that right after prayers. They would take naked pictures of us with their cell phones, and before starting each “Quran lesson,” they’d exchange pictures of us with one another to see whether there was anyone who wanted to swap with them.

  One day, three of them came home so exhausted — and one of them had been wounded in the leg — that they fell asleep without their “Quran lesson.” As we watched them sink into a deep sleep, we all ran out, barefoot, so that we wouldn’t make any noise. We were five girls walking alone at night. After about an hour of walking, we decided to knock on someone’s door. We agreed that only one of us would knock, while the others hid, just to be safe. The youngest girl with us, who was eleven years old, offered to be the one who knocked. She told them, “I’m Iraqi and I escaped from Daesh.” They invited her inside, and when she told them about the four of us still waiting outside, they let us in too. We stayed with that family for two days, meanwhile getting in touch with some Kurds and making a deal to smuggle us out for three thousand dollars each.

  When I crossed the border into Iraq, my fiancé wasn’t there with the rest of the people who’d come to greet me. I later learned that he’d joined the Peshmerga fighters. I was able to see him two weeks later when he came back from a mission in the mountains. He hugged me while I cried — he wanted me to tell him everything but he was upset when I told him how I’d tried to kill myself. “I went to fight those beasts for you, and you were about to kill yourself?” he asked. But then he seemed to understand when I told him more of the details of my suffering. “I would have probably done the same thing if I were you,” he said.

  Our wedding is going to be postponed until my mother gets back. She’s still missing, and I don’t want to get married without her there.

  * * *

  Oh, Muslim, come, there’s a virgin in heaven. That’s the beginning of the song that Abu Nasir sang for me every night before he raped me. He would take some drugs and get high to that song. One time I asked him what the song meant. “You’re a Yazidi infidel. It’s not your fault, you were born like that. When you die, you’ll become a houri to entertain us, we Muslims,” he replied. “Doesn’t that mean you have to wait until we die to do what you’re doing to us, since we are still alive?” I asked. “I bought you, making you my property. This marriage duty is part of the jihad,” he said. Of course, I couldn’t speak my mind freely with him. The main motivation for these Daesh men was sexual: they would kill anyone in order to rape women. In the end they would kill themselves to meet their houris in heaven.

  Whenever Abu Nasir needed money, he would give me to someone temporarily, loaning me and then taking me back later. All I could think about was escaping but it took seventy days before I was able to steal the key from Abu Nasir.

  I managed to escape but the terrible realization was that my family was all missing: my mother, my father, my three brothers, my sister-in-law, and her family. None of them ever came back. Now I live in a small tent with my aunt. In the next tent there is a girl who was my neighbor back in our village as well. We often meet, just like we used to do in the past, but not with that same sense of spontaneity. Five years ago, when my eldest brother left for Canada, I heard my mother say that he was in “exile,” that she wished he would come home because “life in exile is difficult.” The refugee camp is a kind of exile, too, then, and we are here as foreigners who can’t be sure of anything. Everything seems temporary. In the past, we used to walk down the street, meet people, and feel good about seeing them. Now it’s just the opposite. I don’t want to see anyone. I want to be alone — but I’m not very comfortable when I’m alone either. Inside of me there’s something enormous, something enormous but broken into pieces.

  * * *

  My wife Sawsan was expecting our baby any day, but Daesh paid no heed to that. They came with their black flags toward Wardia, our village that is next to Mount Sinjar. We saw a long caravan of people leaving the village, in cars, on donkeys, and on foot. But Sawsan wasn’t able to walk that long distance and we didn’t have a car or a donkey, so we stayed home. At night, looking through the window, Sawsan said, “Look, those are Daesh cars coming toward us.” Then she turned toward me and asked me to take our four kids and leave. I didn’t want to leave her there by herself. But she was so serious about it that she picked up a knife from the kitchen and threatened to cut her own belly if I didn’t save our kids. Sawsan became hysterical and I tried to calm her down. I agreed to leave on the one condition that she hide in the sheep pen in the back of the house. She said okay. I supported her back with a pile of forage and gave her a bottle of water. I kissed her goodbye and left with our kids. We walked with the caravan toward the top of Mount Sinjar. My fear for Sawsan grew until it was taller than the mountain. From above, I saw Daesh fighters circling around the area where our house was. I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went down the mountain but wasn’t able to get all the way there. On the seventh day, I burst into tears. My friend who was with me suggested we both go to the house. “She must be dead by now,” I told him. “We need a shovel to dig her grave and bury her.”

  It was after midnight and everything was quiet and desolate — it looked like Daesh wasn’t there anymore. We went down the mountain and continued walking toward the house. The moment we arrived, my friend said, “Wait, I hear voices in the house.” We waited for an hour and a half outside the house without going inside. Then I heard it. “I can hear someone humming,” I said, “and it sounds like Sawsan.”

  I went closer to the sheep pen and saw Sawsan humming to the baby who was in her lap. She was sitting with her back facing me so she didn’t see me. I whispered her name. She didn’t turn around — she didn’t move at all. “Sawsan, it’s me, Murad,” I said a little louder, but she still didn’t respond. I went closer and walked around in front of her. I saw there was still some water in her bottle. I kneeled down and kissed her. I kissed the hand of the baby who was four days old and who had come into the world like a miracle. I carried Sawsan on my back and my friend carried the baby. “You’ll get tired,” Sawsan said. “Let me get tired. It’s one tiny atom of your exhaustion,” I replied.

  We had to walk a little more than a mile to reach the others at the top of the mountain. Our four kids gathered around their baby brother. One of our neighbors donated his donkey to Sawsan so she could ride it on our way north with the other families. Now we’re staying in Zakho temporarily and the baby is walking. He’s seventeen months old.

  Narjis, Narjis

  I tried to imagine that birth, without a doctor or a nurse or a bed or any support from anyone; I tried to imagine how she’d suffered alone through that unbearable pain as she pushed the baby out of her body so that they both could be liberated.

  I sent Abdullah a picture of two candles I’d lit for the sake of the two families he said that he was worried about. After five days, he replied, “Thanks for the candles. The two families arrived, and one of them is staying at my house.”

  “Are they relatives of yours?” I asked.

  “Do you remember my niece Marwa?”

  “She was the first person you rescued, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. Her mother and her brothers made it here. Her two sisters and my brother, her father, are still missing. Please, please light more candles.”

  “How are the ones who made it back?”

  “My sister-in-law Mona is unwell. I’ll tell you about it some other time. Let’s just say she needs to see a female doctor. As fo
r her two sons, they’re no longer the boys I once knew. They’re a distorted version; their morals aren’t those that my brother had brought them up with. They’ve been raised by Daesh, especially the older one. Just imagine, I have to tie his feet down when he goes to sleep. Otherwise, he’ll try to beat my son when we all go to bed. He treats everyone like an enemy.”

  “Oh my God. He needs a psychiatrist.”

  “He was trained for violence day and night in the Daesh camp. I tried to win him over, I tried to bribe him — I offered to buy him a soccer ball or a new toy, but he said he’d rather have a gun. That’s Farhad, the same boy who called me when he escaped with his mother and his brother and another family, saying that they didn’t have any money to make it all the way back.”

  “So what did he think about running away after all that brainwashing?”

  “One time, in the camp, the trainer ordered the two brothers, Farhad and Sarhad, to fight each other. He told Farhad: In the jihad, there’s neither father nor mother, neither brother nor friend. There’s only God. Now you are Farhad the mujahid. Suppose that Sarhad is an infidel, suppose he’s your enemy, and you have to kill him — now, hit him as hard as you can. Farhad, who was fifteen years old, hit Sarhad, who was one year younger than him. He hit him so hard that he broke his front teeth. Sarhad fell to the ground, crying. The trainer grabbed a stick and broke it on Sarhad’s body, telling him, If you cry over your little teeth, how are you going to slaughter the unbelievers tomorrow?

  “Sarhad was moaning in pain. Farhad didn’t care about his brother’s teeth, and yet he was still upset that the trainer hit Sarhad — and he was moved by his mother’s tears when she saw them and learned what had happened. They were usually allowed to leave for a day or two once a month, to visit their mother who had been taken as a sex slave by a man from Chechnya. He already had two Syrian wives when he bought Mona and her two boys from a Syrian merchant for four hundred dollars. That was twice the price the merchant had paid when he bought them from ‘the market.’ They separated Mona and the boys from the three daughters who were sold at an auction in Mosul. Mona had to work as a servant for the other two wives, and she was a sabya for the Chechen man. As time passed, a friendship grew between Mona and the older wife. She complained to Mona about her husband, saying that she couldn’t stand him anymore. One day Mona and the wife came up with a secret plan to escape together.

  “The day Sarhad came home with broken teeth, Mona told Farhad that she was going to run away with her friend and that he and his brother must join them. Mona expected Farhad to refuse but he seemed excited about the plan. When Daesh took my brother’s family to Talafar, they called me and I told them to wrap my telephone number and the number of my son Mehdi in nylon so that they wouldn’t get ruined by water. Stash the piece of paper in your clothes, I told them. At that time I was with my family and hundreds of families on the mountain. I went crazy because I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even tell my mother and my family about them. We were eating and I pretended everything was fine, but after I took my first bite, I left them and threw the food away. You understand how hard it was to swallow it.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, imagining how the world would shake with every bite.

  “Farhad called me this time,” Abdullah continued, “and informed me that they had run away when Daesh went to prayer. They didn’t have much money, not enough to buy food or make another call, so I asked them to tell me where they were. Farhad said they were near a train station with some airplane debris in front of it. I told them to return to the same place the next morning — when everyone was at prayer — and that in the meantime I’d figure out where they were, and that there would be a car waiting for them, whose driver would be holding a bag.

  “Things went according to plan, but when they arrived in Aleppo, they were stopped by an inspection patrol. When they found that they didn’t have identity cards, they were detained, held in a building that used to be the Manbij post office. Farhad was able to make a quick call to tell me what had happened. I immediately headed out in their direction. On the way, I got in touch with the smugglers who work with me. One of them rushed over there on his motorcycle. It was time for evening prayer, so all the guards went to the mosque. Life completely stops during prayer because, as they say, the earth stops turning until prayer is over. This works to our advantage. In those few minutes that Daesh was away, the smuggler found the two families. As soon as he told them he’d been sent by me, Farhad clung to him and didn’t want to leave his side. Perhaps he was scared. I was on my way to meet them. The smuggler called me and said they were safe. Of course, I was jumping for joy. But they ran into another problem when they reached the border. The Turkish police prevented them from crossing. The police started beating them with cables. The driver who took them back to Manbij left them in the street because Daesh fighters were attacking the area. Farhad called me again, from a shopkeeper’s telephone.

  “Once again I left my food on the table and went out. I spoke with the shopkeeper on the phone: If you want to do a big favor, you can help us save this family. If you want money, you can have whatever you want. The shopkeeper asked what he could do to help. Lock them inside the store, and leave them there until I can send a driver for them, I replied. I can send the driver with as much money as you want in order to compensate you for closing your store. The shopkeeper replied: I’ll do it for the sake of God. I don’t want any money.

  “They survived thanks to that Muslim man who was nothing like the Daesh Muslims. But they still weren’t safe yet, the problem still wasn’t over. The new driver, who took them to a village near the Turkish border, called me, and said, The son of the Syrian woman wants to return to his Chechen father. He’s threatening to tell on us. What should I do?

  “Give him a sleeping pill unless his mother decides otherwise, I said.”

  Abdullah had an appointment with some French journalists so he had to go. But he called me an hour later, and said, “My guests were very nice. I asked them, What would you like to drink? They said, We’ll love trying everything. So I brought them all the drinks that I had. Then I understood that they meant ‘anything’ and not ‘everything.’ So I told them we drink special coffee made from pistachio. They said they’d love to try it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that kind of coffee. Is it different from Arabic or Turkish coffee?” I asked.

  “It’s our own coffee. We extract it from a small green tree on the mountain. It takes longer to make and its liquid is thicker.”

  “My students tried Arabic coffee. They thought it tasted like mud.”

  “Our coffee is even thicker mud.”

  We laughed, and then he suddenly whispered, “Glory be to God, glory be to God.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a plant here sprouting out of the wood. Just like that, without any soil,” he replied.

  “Where?”

  “Out in the open land.”

  “Take a picture of it for me. But what are you doing out there in the open land?”

  “I’m walking to the market — here’s the picture.”

  “It looks like a mushroom. I don’t remember seeing that kind of a plant in Kurdistan. I remember the white and yellow daffodils that used to fill the streets.”

  “We used to give bouquets of narjis — daffodils — as gifts. People have no time for it nowadays. By the way, they’ve started using that flower a lot in alternative medicine, as an herb that calms the nerves.”

  “How many daffodils would we need to soothe our nerves?” I asked.

  “I’d say that all of the daffodils in Kurdistan wouldn’t be enough.”

  “Narjis, Narjis was the only Kurdish song we knew in Baghdad. It was so popular that we used to repeat the lyrics without knowing what they meant.”

  “So you’ve visited Kurdistan?”

  “Yes, of course. Several times. Maybe
I’ll visit sometime to taste the pistachio coffee.”

  “I’ll just leave the door open for you,” he said.

  I searched online for a picture of narjis to remember those days when I went on trips to the north. Once, I visited the Sheikh Metti Monastery on top of the mountain — by the time you make it to the top you’re totally out of breath. But there you’re rewarded by drinking the cave’s fresh water, spending days in a world away from the rest of the world, where people become closer to one another, as if they have known each other since ancient times, sharing everything: food, beds, games, and prayers with the nuns. In the morning, there was always the smell of burnt milk . . .

  Once, I went to the north with my friends for fun. Another time I went to drink Erbil yogurt, and once to compete in Iraq’s national chess championship. Fermseek of Sulaymaniyah was the best player among us, and the final round was between her

  With the Iraqi chess team, I am playing Black

  and me. Our game lasted three hours. In the end she won, so I shook her hand. I stood up, and turned around to see a friend of mine standing behind me, who’d been watching the game. Right away she tried to lift my spirits by saying, “You were Black, that’s why you lost. White has the advantage.” In that moment, those words didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t aware of what it meant to have White’s privilege — that white always plays first, that it was easier to lose as Black than as White, that if you’re Black, losing is justified, if not expected. The first time I became aware of this issue was when I filled out my immigration form in America. I found a question about a person’s color — black or white, among other ethnic identities. I wasn’t sure which box I belonged to, so I chose “other.” One of my relatives who lives in Detroit told me, “my neighbors are all black but they’re not bad.” Did he assume that I thought they were bad? But I liked that he also added, “Just like us, they love to break the law.” The first black girl I met was in my sociolinguistics class at Wayne State University. When she learned that I was a poet, she offered to take me with her on a trip to one of the Michigan lakes where there were going to be poetry readings and jazz music. It was there that I read my poem “America,” which was my newest poem at the time — that was my first reading in my new country. The modest audience received me by beating on drums, which really surprised me. I took a picture of the lake, where lilies floated on the water like Ophelia.