The Beekeeper

by Dunya Mikhail

  I didn’t know where to go. My parents hadn’t spoken to me since 2003, when I got married against their will. I’m Christian and my husband is Muslim. His parents were angry at him for the same reason; he declared that he had become a Christian. My parents told me, “You’re not our daughter anymore.” His parents told him, “You’re no longer our son.” Our love was too strong to kill. Amir was romantic and kind. He wasn’t interested in religion, and he was totally open to others. When our son was born, he jokingly asked, “Should we baptize him or whisper Allahu Akbar in his ear?” We named him Hawar, after the Kurdish soccer player. He once joked that a single soccer game was more important than any religious ritual. He never imposed anything on me, so I always said my Christian prayers.

  When Mimi was born, I didn’t know what to name her. She was just two weeks old when they put the letter N on the houses. I didn’t have any particular names in mind. Instead of naming her, I decided to go in search of my husband, because it was said that some soldiers were being held captive by Daesh. I wondered if maybe he was just being held, that he wasn’t dead, even though his friend had said that they threw their bodies into the river . . .

  Some injuries we can’t really express, we can only feel . . .

  I asked Umm Ahmad if I could leave my son and daughter with her while I went to look for their father. She agreed, and advised me to wear a black veil to avoid harassment from Daesh, which I did. I took a taxi to his workplace in the Yarmouk Center in the Tanak District. It was the first time I’d ever been to his work. Two young men were standing at the door. “I’ve come to ask about my husband,” I said. One of them, who looked like he was seventeen years old, asked what my husband’s name was. “Amir,” I replied. “We didn’t kill or detain anyone,” he said. I was about to leave when a black Toyota pulled up in front of the building. Somebody stepped out of the car and walked toward me, asking the two others, “Who’s she?” The same person who’d spoken to me answered, “She came to ask about her husband. He used to work here.” Then the man said, “So he’s a traitor.” I felt nervous when I heard him say this, and I adjusted the veil on my head. When I did so, he saw the tattoo on my hand, a cross my mom had given me when I was a child. He yanked on my hand, and said, “So, you’re a Christian?” I didn’t know how to answer, so he added, “All the Christians left the city. Why are you still here? You must be a trap for us.” He dragged me inside and pulled the veil off my head. “How sweet. Where’s your family?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I answered. He didn’t believe me. Then he asked, “And who’s your husband’s family?” I said I didn’t know. Then he asked me, “Do you have any children?” I didn’t answer. They tied my hands behind my back and imprisoned me in a room all by myself. They left me there for two days without food or drink. After that, they came back and asked me, “So, are you going to confess now?” I asked, “Confess to what?” Then one of them approached me and said, “I know how to make her talk.” He untied my hands, which had become swollen. He put a needle under my nail and peeled it off — to this day, when my nail grows, it bends up on its own. Then he brought a box cutter to hack off my fingers. Seconds before doing so, the other man said, “Let her be. She’s beautiful. We can sell her, a beautiful sabya.” He shoved me so hard that my head hit the window. I lost consciousness, and didn’t feel anything until I found myself in a school filled with other captives. They were girls of all ages, from ten to sixty, and most of them were Yazidis. After three days there I saw a ten-year-old girl named Lalish. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her braid was still tied the way her mother had done it for her. They took her away at night, didn’t bring her back until morning. She came back with dried blood all over her feet. She was trying to walk but kept falling to the ground. She was naked, and they threw her clothes on top of her. I put her clothes on for her. At night, she fell ill with a high fever. The way she looked, I thought she might not see morning. I hugged her and made cold compresses for her. I felt attached to her because she was about Hawar’s age. Every minute she said, “Oh, Mom.” She was moaning like that for a full two months . . .

  Every day I remember her. I can’t forget about her . . .

  A week later, someone opened the door and troubled everyone — he said, “We want fresh girls.” He took me and Azab, a girl who was younger than me, twenty-eight years old. He raped us both. His name is Farouk al-Shammari. Then he took us to another room. Two men entered. They spoke a language I didn’t understand. They were partying — doing drugs and drinking — and they raped us, taking turns, one after another. Farouk raped me four times in one day. Azab was a virgin, and she got pregnant. She and I didn’t talk to each other, we only cried together. They married and divorced us eight times on the same day, and they made us wear porno outfits. We were too tired to resist. We didn’t say a word. Tears flowed down our cheeks. The last time I glanced at Azab, she looked at me and bit her finger . . .

  That bite comes to my mind every once in a while . . .

  The worst humiliation I ever felt was the morning that we were taken to the assembly hall outside the school. They didn’t let us wear our clothes. We came outside naked, and the guards harassed us and hit us. They raped us there in that assembly hall however they wished. One day they sold me to an ugly man named Sufyan. I screamed at him, “I hate you.” As revenge, he burned my chest with an ember, saying, “This is so you’ll remember me for your whole life.”

  (Claudia showed me the burn on her chest: “Whenever I take a shower and see this, I do remember him.”)

  I wasn’t the only one to attempt suicide. A lot of other captives did as well. A woman in her sixties prevented me from killing myself. I call her Mama Adhra. She always offered me hope and compassion. She even gave my daughter her name — she’s the one who named her Maryam. She would talk to me, and pray for me as if she were a saint of our time, even though she was sometimes being raped herself. Whenever she turned up crying I knew she had been raped. One time she left and didn’t come back for two days. I was beside myself, especially after Farouk came and said that they’d sold all of us to someone from Saudi Arabia named Khaldoun, and that he would come to pick us up in three days. I was so relieved when she returned safely before the sale. I didn’t want to be sold without Mama Adhra.

  The day after Mama Adhra returned, somebody shouted at me, “Auntie Claudia?” I turned around, and to my surprise, I saw Ahmad, the son of the neighbor that I’d left my kids with. I didn’t know he was with Daesh, but still I was happy to see him. My joy didn’t last more than a minute, though. He pushed me aside and walked away. Maybe he had killed my kids, I thought, maybe he thinks of me as an infidel — why else would he have shoved me like that? Mama Adhra tried to calm me. “Maybe he pushed you so that they don’t get suspicious about him, because he called you auntie in front of them,” she said. Ahmad actually came back that same day, and tossed a small scrap of paper my way. Mama Adhra picked it up before I could and quickly hid it in her clothes. “Come on, let’s go the bathroom,” she said. There she unfolded the paper: “Auntie Claudia, wait for me tonight by the window.”

  I waited by the window but he didn’t come before I fell asleep. Apparently Mama Adhra couldn’t sleep. She woke me up at dawn when Ahmad arrived. “I want to help you, but I need money for the smugglers,” he told me. “I have gold stored above the ceiling in the bathroom. The key is under the trash can out in front of the house,” I replied.

  I waited for Ahmad to come and tell me about the escape plan, or about anything at all. Five days passed and I lost hope once again because they’d decided to take us to Syria. They brought three buses — the girls were all weeping as they packed us inside, and when the bus started moving, I felt my hope drawing farther and farther away. They stopped the bus for an hour at the Syrian border because the merchants who’d bought us hadn’t arrived yet. While we were stopped there, a tall man came onto the bus and asked, “Which one of you is Claudia?” I said, “Leave me alon
e, please, may God protect you.” But he ordered me to follow him. We walked toward the valley, and I was terrified when I glimpsed four young men waiting for us. I thought they were going to rape me. As we approached, I saw that Ahmad was with them. I felt as if I were rising from the dead, or as if a second opinion of an X-ray showed that the first reading had been incorrect, and that the presumed disease didn’t exist after all. I ran to him.

  “Go down through this valley, they’ll help you in that Syrian village down there,” he said.

  “But where are my kids?” I asked him, “I want to see them.”

  “Do you know how dangerous this is?” he replied.

  “Why don’t we put her in the trunk of the car?” the boy standing next to Ahmad suggested.

  “I’m afraid we’ll get caught,” Ahmad said.

  I just stood there while they remained silent. Then I started walking toward the valley. After I’d gone a short distance, they pulled up to me in their car and opened the trunk. I got in. The car weaved into traffic with other cars and buses. I felt like I was going to suffocate. Every now and then they lifted the back seat to make sure I was still breathing. One of them said, “I’m scared to death — what if they find her in the car?” Then he got out of the car, and told Farouk, who was leading the group, “Our car is old, and I’m afraid we’ll be late, so why don’t we get out first?” Farouk gave him the okay, and they sped off. They said they’d drop me off in the Tammouz District in Mosul.

  They did that quickly, and then went away. My house was in the Yarmouk District, fifteen minutes away by car. In Mosul, it was dangerous for a woman to be on the street without a head scarf, so I flagged down a taxi, but didn’t have any money. I was in such bad shape that the driver asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know what to do. My son is missing. Maybe he’s with his grandfather?” I replied.

  “Why isn’t your head covered? Daesh is going to be upset with us,” he said.

  “There’s no time. I have to find my son,” I replied.

  A few minutes later, the Daesh police stopped him. I was about to die from fear. “She’s sick, poor thing,” he told them. They let us pass after advising me that I should cover my head.

  When I arrived at my house, I told the driver, “I’ll find you some money.”

  “The world isn’t that rotten. Go on, I don’t want anything,” he replied.

  I knocked on my neighbor’s door. My son Hawar opened it. He was shocked to see me as I hugged him.

  “I thought I didn’t have a father or a mother anymore,” he said.

  Ahmad’s mother greeted me with kisses. She told me that Hawar was taking good care of his sister, and that every time she cried he’d say, “She just wants her mother.”

  I told Umm Ahmad what had happened. She broke into tears, shocked to learn that Ahmad worked with Daesh. “He said he was very busy because he had found a new job,” she said.

  She wouldn’t let me leave her house. I stayed with her for a month. She lived with her husband and their two daughters. They bought me a cell phone. Umm Ahmad called her son but he didn’t answer. He later left her a voice message saying that he’d sold my gold for ten thousand dollars, and that he’d paid smugglers to get me out of Mosul because it was too dangerous for me to stay there, as a Christian. I dialed the number he left in his message, and the person who picked up told me when I should leave for Kurdistan, and also recommended that I take water and diapers with me. Hawar carried the water, and I carried Mimi. Just before leaving their home, I called Ahmad and asked him, “I have one last request for you. Please, tell me, where did they take those three buses? I want to know what happened to Lalish. She’s never far from my mind.”

  “Those buses were sold to Saudi Arabia. Some of the girls were used for service, others would be sold for their organs and body parts.” Umm Ahmad was staring at me, she could probably tell from the look on my face that Ahmad just told me something awful. But I didn’t say anything and just hugged her goodbye.

  We walked in a convoy of about a hundred people, most of them Muslims fleeing Mosul with their families to protect their daughters from Daesh. We walked toward Kirkuk without food for three days. The sound of gunshots was louder at night. Someone shouted, “Down on the ground, everyone!” We did just that.

  It was too dark to see anything. When the sound of gunfire subsided, people started walking in all directions. In that moment, I looked left and right without seeing Hawar — he’d refused to be held by the hand because he thought he was a big boy. I couldn’t believe that this could happen, that my son could disappear in a flash. I started screaming and crying, not knowing what to do when the caravan started moving again. My son was lost in the cold and darkness, so quietly and unbelievably. It was as if he knew something was going to happen. That day, he’d even kissed and hugged me — he didn’t usually do that. He even said, “I love you.”

  I can’t sleep. Whenever I flee to bed, Hawar appears in my dreams. When I wake up and don’t find him here, I go crazy . . .

  I waited there until I wound up at the back of the convoy. But I still couldn’t find Hawar. People were curling like waves and I was soaked in my own disaster. Their stream carried me along as I held Maryam and looked everywhere in hopes of finding Hawar. Later, in the camp, they took me to see Umm Raad, who reads fortunes out of the dictionary. She told me he was with an old woman who was taking care of him, and that he was looking for me. I could only hope that her intuition was correct.

  At the Erbil checkpoint, the policeman objected to my passing through. “Why don’t you have an identity card?” he asked me. “You can’t pass without one.”

  I collapsed in tears, saying, “I’m the one who gets to ask you: Why don’t I have an identity? Daesh rapes us, takes away our IDs, and you hold me accountable, not them?”

  I’m scared, I always feel that Daesh is lurking behind the door. I miss my father so desperately. One day he told me, “Never put your head down. Look at that bright star, and remember that I’m close to you, no matter how far away I go.” Answer me, Dad, with a hug just like every time, or even hit me, if you please. Just answer me.

  It was midnight, and the owner of the café wanted to close. In Claudia’s tearful eyes, I saw the world evaporating, and didn’t know what to do. She had to get back to the camp, so we left together, with Maryam in the middle holding our hands and still humming the song “Daddy Finger.”

  I woke up at dawn and couldn’t fall back asleep. I’d had a strange dream. A man was playing the piano. Suddenly he stood up in anger, bumped into the table as he turned around, scattering all the books that were on top of it. I was upset because I had arranged them there.

  In the morning Abdullah asked me how much longer I was going to stay in Iraq.

  “Only a couple more hours,” I told him.

  “No, that can’t be right. What a short visit.”

  “I know. How is it going today?”

  “Do you want to come to the market with me?”

  “Sure. I want to buy some gifts.”

  “Do you want to pass by the Office of Kidnapped Affairs first, or just go straight to the market?”

  “This would be a good opportunity to stop by the office.”

  “The director, Hussein Koro, is a very nice person and a friend of mine. You can ask him anything you want, he’ll be happy to meet with you.”

  There, Mr. Hussein shook my hand, smiling. There was a flag of Kurdistan behind him. “I heard from Abdullah that you visited Lalish and some of the camps,” he said.

  “That’s right. The people in the camps overwhelmed me with their spirit of hospitality,” I said.

  “Someone from a foreign humanitarian organization said, These people are weird: we came to help them, and yet they offer us water and food, insisting that we have some tea with them. Even during the Daesh invasion, some Muslims so
ught shelter in Sinjar, fleeing with the people of the region up to the mountains. After fifteen days of siege up on the mountain, a helicopter came and took the families to the Feshkhabur zone near the Iraqi-Syrian border. People in the area told the Muslims: You are guests, please, you go first into the helicopter. Customs of hospitality are deeply rooted in our area, you know.”

  “I guess this office didn’t exist before Daesh.”

  “It was established to facilitate the work of local rescuers (such as Abdullah), who were working out of their personal initiative and coordinating between families and external smugglers who were in Daesh areas. We opened a dossier of missing persons and their details. By the numbers: 6,386 persons are kidnapped or missing; 3,527 of them are females; 2,587 have returned so far, including 934 women and 325 men, 658 female children and 670 male children. That means 3,799 people are still in the hands of Daesh. These are the latest statistics dated May 15, 2016. Daesh calls our men prisoners of war and our women sabaya. After they rape the sabya, they call her jariya, or female servant. At that point it becomes their right to buy or sell her in the slave market, and the price ranges from one dollar to five hundred dollars. After that, if the seller wants her back, he can make a deal with the buyer to return her to him. But first he must sell her, at least once, before he can possess her. That’s their law. Those slave markets currently exist in the cities of Mosul, Talafar, and Raqqa. Some of these markets exist on the Internet, opening and closing at specific times, like any market. Some of them are purchased for personal whims, some for service, and some (by people like Abdullah) for the purpose of bringing them back to their families.”